CHAPTER 18
Perhaps gut feelings are like ears that burn.
With gut feelings, though, you feel and hear something so strongly that it’s been given a more meaningful name. “Instinct tells me,” we say. I feel it in my bones. It’s intuition.
At the time, Roger didn’t tell Kevin that he thought an old grey-haired white man called Greg didn’t quite match the sort of person Mr. Khan might choose as a business partner. Roger’s gut feeling proved to be very accurate.
Grzegorz Samoszewski had been known as Greg for as long as he could remember. He didn’t mind. After all, Greg was a lot easier for fellow workers at Bywater Design & Printing Works on Meadow Lane to pronounce.
Charlie Bywater had eventually tired of Bywater Design & Printing Works but refused to discuss investments in digital printing or other new technology. He’d then accepted the first decent offer for the land and the building where the business stood on and walked away. By then, Greg had been running it for fifteen years, while Charlie mostly took exotic overseas holidays and attended as many horse-racing events as he could fit in.
Greg was a quiet man who preferred to keep himself to himself and look after Dalia, his wife of forty years. One of Dalia’s historic complaints was that he was a social misfit, a view with which Greg agreed wholeheartedly. But what he lacked in social graces, he more than made up for in technical ingenuity. Greg was a natural and quite brilliant engineer who had studied printing technology from its origins as Chinese woodblock printing two thousand years ago right up to modern 3D printing technology. If Charlie Bywater had seen sense, he’d have made Greg a full partner in the firm and let him run it, drag it into the twenty-first century, and learned to specialise. That’s what Greg had always hoped for and why he’d never moved on.
Instead, Charlie, the miserable fool, had made everyone, including Greg, redundant. Was Greg miffed? Of course. Extremely. But the good thing was that he’d bought a few of the smaller pieces of printing equipment at a discount with his redundancy money and retired.
They hadn’t moved away, though. Moving away was difficult with Dalia’s health problems. So they still lived in the detached sixties house on Lansdowne Road that they’d bought thirty years ago. From the outside, it looked as it always had: white window frames, black front door, and rendered external walls that Greg painted every three years in Dulux exterior magnolia.
Being on the corner, 18 Lansdowne Road was the only house with a double garage and a decent driveway to park Greg’s twenty-year-old Peugeot people carrier. Greg had always found other uses for the garage, but how long he could keep operating the workshop he’d built in it often kept Greg awake at night.
Greg’s printing workshop was not entirely in the garage. Some of it was beneath it. Realising he needed more space, he’d hired a skip and a mini excavator, removed his jacket, tie, and pullover, and sweated to create a sort of cellar beneath it. He’d lined it and covered it in concrete slabs and made an entrance through a door inside Dalia’s greenhouse where she’d once grown herbs. Heat was extracted with a fan linked to a pipe connected to the downstairs toilet vent. When he’d finished constructing it, he would have loved Dalia to see it.
“Dalia, my flower, what do you think? Wonderful, isn’t it?”
But Dalia, Greg’s flower, never ventured far these days, and because he knew she’d never manage the steps into his subterranean printing works, he’d fixed a wedding photograph and a large wooden picture frame containing a collection of old photos of his mother, Eva, and his father, Isaac, on the wall next to his lathe.
Whilst drinking his morning mug of tea, Greg often looked at those photos and thought how similar he now looked to his father when his father was sixty-five. He had the grey ring of hair around the bald patch, the same lines on his forehead, and because he was similarly short-sighted, the same glasses with the thick lenses. Greg, too, always dressed for work in grey trousers, a white shirt, a plain, navy-blue tie, and unless it was too warm, a grey knitted pullover. But Greg never made his mug of tea last long for he had work to do.
If Greg’s printing workshop had been a business, then “quality, not quantity” would have been its simple philosophy, but it was not a business. It was Greg’s hobby. And, because Greg was an engineer and not a businessman, simple technology was not enough. He’d laboured happily and unseen to perfect a machine that stitched booklets and then, having closely examined the design of his own driving licence and Visa card, managed to print onto plastic and to produce a hologram of a yellow rose in the garden. Another challenge came when he applied for a new passport in order to check the government’s claims of new high-security technology. He experimented with new paper, special inks detectable only in infrared or ultraviolet light or by touch and with watermarks, perforated numbers, and embedded security fibres.
Within six months, Greg had produced a nicely stitched copy of his own passport that he felt was quite passable. What he needed now was to test out some of his new-found skills, and so, because he’d never taken a holiday before, he decided it would be a good excuse to visit Poland, to Wroclaw, and see his old aunt who was now in her nineties. In his heart, though, Greg knew he’d never go because of Dalia. Nevertheless, he phoned his cousin Boris and told him he might arrive one day, some time, when he could.
A week later, though, Greg’s front doorbell rang, and thinking it was a delivery of some new inks, he wiped his hands, straightened his tie, made his way upstairs, and opened the door. Standing there was a middle-aged Asian with a white prayer cap and one of those long straggly beards of the sort Dalia used to call pepper and salt. In the man’s hand was a brown envelope. Greg scratched his head, removed his glasses, wiped them with his handkerchief, and looked again.
“Good morning, Mr. Greg. Remember me?”
Greg had frowned.
“It is Akram. I used to see you at Mr. Bywater’s printing works on Meadow Lane,” he said in a Pakistani-English accent. Greg nodded out of politeness. “Is it so that you are still in the printing business, Mr. Greg?”
Greg had always sought quiet anonymity, not publicity, so how did the man know? He stared but said nothing.
“It is with good news that we hear you are still in the printing trade,” the man said.
Greg said nothing but looked up and down Lansdowne Road. There was an unknown white Ford, a tiny car parked opposite with someone sitting in the driving seat.
“That is good. We are needing some things to be printed. Industrial certificates, international driving licences, health and safety, and so on. I have examples here. Can I come in?”
Greg had shaken his head defiantly.
“I see. In that case, I will show you.” From the envelope, he pulled a small bundle of papers, and his black eyes looked up at Greg from the lower level of the door step and then past him into the hallway and up the stairs. He handed the bundle to him. “We need documents like this.”
Greg, out of politeness, had taken the papers and flipped through them. Amongst them were university degrees and diplomas from universities in Karachi, Istanbul, and Cairo; marriage certificates and death certificates in Arabic and English; and college industrial skills certificates with watermarks. Greg held one up to the grey light of morning out of curiosity and habit.
“You can do?”
Greg had shaken his head.
“What is your price, Mr. Greg?”
“No, no. This is not something I can do,” Greg said. But Akram had only smiled and nodded. His cheeks were perhaps breaking into wrinkles beneath the beard.
“Please think about it, Mr. Greg. It is urgent. Meanwhile, I will leave you the samples. Good morning.”
The man turned and scuffed his way to the gate. Greg watched him go—a shortish man with dark jacket and baggy white trousers, which were tighter above his black lace-up shoes. At the gate, though, he turned and walked back to the doorstep and again looked up at Greg.
“Ah, Mr. Greg,” he said. “you mustn’t tell anyone. It is a—what shall I say?—a secret. And because it is a small order, we won’t tell the police, the council, or the tax people about your printing business.” He paused. “And how is your wife, Mr. Greg?”
Greg watched the man walk a few steps away and turn yet again. “Shalom is it, Mr. Greg? And lehitraot. See you later. Do I speak your Jewish language well?”
And then he left in the white car, leaving the gate wide open. Greg went to shut it and then returned to the kitchen to sit beside Dalia who was in a wheelchair, staring at birds pecking at breadcrumbs on the patio.
Who was the man who looked like many of the Moslems he saw near the city mosque on his way to the hospital or to the supermarket? And why did the man try speaking in Hebrew? And how did he know about Dalia?
And then the full horror began to sink in.
What had started as a hobby in his garage where he had once dabbled at weekends with the old Triumph motorbike he never rode and fixed the washing machine and lawn mower and dismantled and reassembled things to find out how they worked had, since he’d been made redundant, grown into something quite different. All he had meant to do was prove to himself he would have made a far better job of running Bywater Printing than Charlie Bywater.
What Greg had learned to do was top quality, but what he’d created beneath his garage suddenly felt illegal. Was it illegal to make a reasonable copy of pages of his own passport just for the challenge? Was it illegal to print a passable copy of a driving licence onto plastic as an experiment? Was it illegal to adapt a simple inkjet printer to perform different functions? Greg understood printing and was adept at designing and making small tools, but he didn’t know about tax, VAT, business rates, and making major alterations to a property without permission.
Of course, when Kevin made deliveries or collections from Mr. Greg, he knew none of this.