John Eider - Not a Very Nice Woman

‘No, but I think the moment Esther did that Stella did too; could work out what Esther had from the letter she’d snatched.’

‘Perhaps they’d always known, just needed the facts to tell them?’

Grey liked the sound of that.

But Rachel was still thinking of Derek,

‘You really can’t take him away. He’s our last original resident now. We’ve lost too many people — you know the Carstairs aren’t coming back either, he needs specialist care.’

Grey was sad to hear that, Rachel going on,

‘We need weight on the Committee, people who can help me run it. I’ve already had Raine on the phone asking what we’re going to do. I’ve called a meeting for next month, but I haven’t even thought about it yet.’

Grey could see the mantel of Stella’s leadership had fallen on Rachel’s shoulders, whether she wished it or not.

‘Of course we’ll give up Charlie’s flat, properly this time. And if the state takes it then the state takes it, their choice of who they sell it to. And then there’s Stella’s flat to sell, and Mrs Cuthbert’s next door; and the Carstairs’ eventually — so much change, it will be good to have the lot of it put to bed.’

During that late afternoon Grey thought he had learnt more about architecture then he would from a late night up with the Open University; though given his teacher’s idiosyncrasies, current state of mind and years out of the game, he wasn’t sure how much of it would have held as current thinking. Thus far on their jaunt Derek Waldron had waxed lyrical on the merits or otherwise of an infants school, a row of large detached houses, and most memorably on a just-put-up fast food restaurant whose front and sides were made entirely of glass:

‘Imagine it at night lit like a beacon: you’d be drawn to it like a moth to a lightbulb, wanting to be inside the glow.’

Derek’s injuries seemed wholly superficial, he walking and talking with boundless energy. They approached the Hills estate, which was always going to be their destination, not along a main road but rather a side street of older, terraced homes, so as to contrast with the newer development ahead.

‘Note how straight the road is we’ve just walked along, and those around it, how simple to know where you are and where you want to get to, how easy to offer directions to a stranger that would keep them going for miles. Yet compare that with this.’

Before them across the main road and in sharp contrast with the terraces’ clean lines was an apparently randomised mess of grass and path and untended hedge, surrounding houses squat like cinder-blocks. The men were stood on slightly higher ground this side of the main road, and so it gave the slight impression of being on a viewing platform, able to take a large chunk of the Hills estates in en masse.

‘When I come this way, Inspector, it reminds me of my nephew with his LEGO blocks, as if the architect had thrown a bunch of them up in the air and set the position of the buildings on where each block fell. You see the architects wanted to break up the Victorian streetplan, as Modernists in painting had broken up the sweeping brushstroke and in music had made melody atonal. These were the Cubists of their field, and they saw themselves that seriously.

‘And so you can take in a view like this and see no house in line with any other, no street squarely joining with another.’ Waldron paused at this favourite spot a moment longer, before leading the Inspector toward the main road to cross it.

‘Indeed a lot aren’t even Streets — note all the Walks and Groves and Avenues.’ They were entering the estate proper now. ‘You see, it was another aspect of the planners’ idealism that large parts of the estate were built without spaces for parking — see where the Council have had to lower the kerbstones, where lawns have been slabbed over, where fences on strips of public land are pulled up and cars are parked in the mud. All this because the designers believed in the dream of clean and fast and safe state-subsidised public transport, servicing the public to the degree that people wouldn’t want cars.’

Grey’s guide pointed to a concrete space lined with graffiti’d garages, obscured by a fence and some odd-shaped maisonettes,

‘And where there was parking, like here, it was in collective plots and banks of garages tucked away behind trees or houses — the naivete of these designers that they so believed in the social spirit they wished to foster in their estates that they didn’t think crime would fester in such hidden spaces, or that people wouldn’t want the simple reassurance of being able to keep an eye on their own car from out of their own window.

‘Come on, we need to get somewhere in this direction — if we can figure out our way!’

Grey felt a strong inclination not to follow, and not only because of the recent death and dramas he had been involved in along the route they were taking. The fact was that for all the bright hazy atmosphere of the afternoon this was still the Hills, and that for his being in plain clothes a policeman still stood out a mile here. He began to wonder if the charm of taking such a walk wasn’t wearing off? He was also aware that for all Derek’s apparent energy, his aged guide was only one day out of hospital, and that by the time they got back the round trip would have been a long one.

It was after school hours, and at the corners of buildings already gangs of youths were forming, watching only with curiosity for now the copper and the old guy with his patchwork of injuries passing through their borough. Derek didn’t even seem to notice them — perhaps he often came this way, though this time able to voice the theories usually kept inside? He was evidently still concerned with the mindset of those town planners nearly forty years ago,

‘Without intending it they made a haven for crime and despondency. I saw your reticence back there just now, Inspector, your unwillingness to follow this way. You’ll know yourself how unpoliceable such places are, the spaces they offer for vice to dwell, for vandalism, for the mugger to lay in wait along these pathways or hide from the police if being chased.

‘And what of the other crime? An even worse one if possible, the true offense such estates commit against their population: the psychological effect on people of being stranded in a place where you literally cannot see a way out: where you can’t see a main road or a bus route even from the end of your street; where it’s hard to direct a taxi or visitor to within half a mile of your house or flat; where those who’ve lived here all their lives can still get lost; where what you see around you is the collapse into squalor of a built environment not maintained and a planted environment literally gone to seed.

‘To live here is to have an address you keep a secret for fear of how people judge your area; to feel yourself abandoned by life and holding the belief that you’ve been left to rot, that you’ve been told by your nation that you aren’t worth any better and that they have no other use for you. To live here is to feel left in a maze that you can never get above roof-level to see your way out of, a place where the ground seems to rise in all directions, where there’s no horizon line.

‘The planners thought the simple application of modern social principles could make a better world, when all they did was make a more confusing one. With best intentions they consigned a generation to a lesser life than they might otherwise have had. People were buried in these estates, Inspector, literally buried — lost in the mire and never scrambling out.’

The relentlessness of Waldron’s argument began to grate on Grey, the way a conversation can when you want to go quiet awhile yet someone else is on a favourite topic: it wasn’t always healthy to offer free reign.