Dining on Stones Read online

  Take that Kaporal. The geezer looked genuine when you met him, a face. Thick skin hanging on a skull that seemed to have shrunk overnight; scarlet earflaps (straps dangling from flying helmet), beaky snout poking through wet pastry. The scars, the wrong side of a shattered windscreen, were shallow and nonspecific, giving the appearance of a character who’d seen it all. And kept it to himself. Kaporal had the walk, shoulder roll, sucked-in belly. The man could put it away, no question. He knew the story. You could talk to him. It was only later, much later, you realised Mr K wasn’t on the nod, that bulge was a tape-recorder hidden under his shapeless jacket.

  Kaporal used his contact with Alby’s little brother, Reo, to get into the back room with the CCTV monitors at Tuesdays. Reo was a throwback with a couple of O levels, he’d been to college (for a week). He ponced off Alby, was into martial arts, John Woo, David Carradine, harmless exotica: steroids, speed, girls from art school. Black stockings and too much mascara: Reo borrowed them when he could, to go clubbing down Hoxton. He was dangerous, hair trigger, as Kaporal realised, when Alby asked him, as the kind of favour he couldn’t refuse, to detach the boy from the posh bird who was leading him astray. Reo was losing it. Talking about employment, moving up west (to Poplar), living with the bint, sharing a futon. Bad habits like books were sure to follow.

  It was an awkward position in which Kaporal found himself. Alby was an arm-breaker who took his calling very seriously. Reo was a nasty little psycho (just smart enough to enjoy the panic chemicals he provoked in the women he slapped around). The student in question might, Kaporal couldn’t remember, have been one of his own mislaid fiancées. A photographer, definitely. He’d rather gone in for those, back in the Nineties. But now, the Sleeman tapes transcribed, he was on the verge of a real scoop: the M25 conspiracy theory.

  Here’s how it went.

  Maggie’s orbital motorway changed everything; amen, goodbye and good riddance to Ron and Reg. Adios neighbourhood heavies, blaggers of Bethnal Green. The old firms were good for nothing except heritage TV: suits and wreaths at Chingford Mount, gravel-voiced killers schmoozing the camera. How we butchered Jack, blasted the Axeman (heart of a lion, brain of a budgie), buried Ginger. Lady Thatcher’s superhighway dried those crocodile tears. Instant access to everywhere: South Ockendon connected to rockstar Weybridge, dodgy Dartford to dormitory Radlett. New motorway and mobile phone: the perfect marriage. Leading, immediately, to rave culture, ecstasy franchises, the apotheosis of the humble doorman. Gold bars, laundered after a bullion robbery at Heathrow, funded pill manufacture and distribution in Essex. Chancers like Mickey O’Driscoll started with a pick and shovel, digging the road in Surrey, then moved to transporting smiley tablets in their Y-fronts (Basildon to Canning Town), hauling human landfill (Kurds and Afghans in sealed containers). Onwards and upwards to respectable middle-management: waste distribution (small fleets dumping black bags on Rainham Marshes). Nouveaux businessmen and chemical entrepreneurs of Tower Hamlets, Deptford and the Old Kent Road, transplanted themselves into the suburbs, crossed the motorway: all roads led to the Epping Country Club. Gay TV comics, footballers, bodybuilders, ponytails who fronted lap-dancing establishments, celebrity cooks and page-3 crumpet. Muscle: on the piss. Larging it. Hawaiian shirt, medallion, clenched fist, bottle. Eyes, all pupil, flaring red in the photoflash as someone (Kaporal) frames the group, thick arms around temporary best mate’s shoulder, the ghosted memoir.

  Only a ghost would want to remember what Kaporal knew, what he had found out. Every story, every crime, every unsolved hit (used-car dealers, video distributors) played back to one man: Mr Mocatta. Non-playing golfer, Freemason, property developer. Mocatta was working his way downriver. ‘Thames Gateway’, the politicians called it (formerly: Grays, West Tilbury, Greenhithe, Northfleet). The last wilderness. Like a Brazilian robber baron, Mocatta was clearing the jungle; his minions taking on local labour to spoil what was left of their undervalued inheritance.

  Associates who crossed Mocatta disappeared. Blown away in the car park of the B & Q in Dartford. Buried in a shallow grave, bloody but breathing. Butchered at the foot of the stairs in a New Georgian estate on the fringes of Croydon.

  The most recent biography of Mocatta (‘The inside story of Britain’s Public Enemy No. 1’) was unusual in not being written (gummed together) by James Morton. But what sent Kaporal diving for the porcelain halo was the list that vintage hack James Colvin (author of The Deep Fix – ‘Drugs took him into a nightmare world where logic ceased to exist’) appended to his final chapter. The obituary roll-call. Twenty-seven names with a timid rider: There is absolutely no suggestion on the part of the author that Declan Mocatta played any part whatsoever in the deaths of the following persons.’ The detonated Range Rover in Sydenham. The Bromley doorstep. The Brighton firebomb. The investigative journalist run down in Lewisham High Street. Mocatta was elsewhere. A charity bash with Denis Thatcher, Shirley Bassey at the Festival Hall, Whitstable Oyster Festival with Janet Street-Porter.

  Colvin didn’t live to enjoy his royalties. Drink taken, he fell off the Portsmouth-Fishbourne (Isle of Wight) ferry. That was when Kaporal decided his paranoia was justified, when he stopped reading newspapers, taking calls, watching TV. The one drawback with retirement to the south coast was the fact that minimarts run by Bangladeshis stocked the London Evening Standard. Cornershops didn’t bother, a dozen video boxes (tapes under the counter), a shelf of stale Eccles cakes and the weekly fright-sheet comprised their working stock. NO CASH KEPT ON PREMISES. PREMISES PROTECTED BY CCTV.

  The final story Kaporal transcribed, verbatim, before he left Streatham for the coast, concerned a small-time hustler by the name of Sid Rawnce. Rawnce had been in Chelmsford, later HMP Hollesley Bay, with Phil Tock and Alby Sleeman (‘built like Beckton Alp and half as bright’). Rawnce came out first, boasting of his connections, hanging around the door at Tuesdays in Basildon, cautioned for affray, a bun fight in a drive-through McDonald’s.

  Rawnce started seeing Tock’s wife, Debs. Totally out of order. Tock wasn’t bothered, he was looking at another five. And happy with it. ‘Tick’ Tock, they called him, when he palled up with a pretty boy from Eltham, a semi-pro racist. Phil was a fatalist, Debs had never been much of a housekeeper. But Alby, he went mental. He lay on his bunk rehearsing scenarios of revenge, involving jackhammers, shower units, car batteries and drums of bad chemicals.

  The debriefing – with Kaporal (car to car, window to window) -took place at Thurrock Service Station. Rawnce, giggling in terror, ranted, riffed. His teeth shipwrecked but very white. Despite the cigarettes, the American sticks.

  Kaporal was shocked by the sight of Rawnce’s motor, scrapyard reject, Vauxhall Astra held together with mismatched paint and black-taped Cellophane. Three sessions, cash in hand, more promised, and still no lead to Mocatta. Rawnce couldn’t be persuaded to use that word, the name. He outlined, in tedious detail, cross-Channel runs to Belgium and Holland, the travellers’-cheque scam in Silvertown. Nights when the filth pulled them on the A13 ramp, Junction 31 of the M25: deal done, product transferred. Divvy up or jump sixty feet over the parapet.

  Rawnce sniggered nose juice. Knuckled it.

  It was always next time. Tomorrow. Dirt on Mocatta, photographs, files. Data that would finally resolve Kaporal’s unified field theory of everything: oil, blood, arms, property. M25. M for Mocatta. M for Murder.

  Two Thursdays in succession, Kaporal slept in his motor. Waited all day at Thurrock Services (where every minute is a week anywhere else). Rawnce didn’t show. Seven months later the story made p. 20 of the Standard, five terse paras. MAN FOUND DEAD AT BEAUTY SPOT. July to February, he hadn’t budged. The A3, near Wisley (woodland favoured by sex cruisers, peepers, gays, suburban Satanists), he went off-road and into a ditch, ‘yards from a busy dual carriageway’. Headlights, full-beam, sweeping through the undergrowth, launched a Surrey myth: ‘Phantom Lights in Forest’.

  The body was discovered by a green-lane hiker who had wandered a
long way from the nearest pilgrim track. Rawnce was reduced to essence: a fat watch ticking on a skeletal wrist. He was like one of those Battle of Britain pilots dug out of a Kentish hop field. Bone-man lolling on red leatherette. Devoured by rodents, flies, picked clean: grin was in place, the fine strong teeth by which he was identified. Cheap trainers and rags of leisurewear. St Christopher medallion, the gilt gone from the holy man’s staff. Six cans of extra-strong lager, four drunk. In the glove compartment, Kaporal’s card stuck into a copy of the 50 Miles around London map. Along with a lump of something nasty – later identified as the indestructible plastic element from a cheeseburger. ‘I’ve seen more appetising mummies,’ said the DS from Guildford.

  Kaporal drove straight to the coast, dumped his hire car, found a room. A good decision to quit the A13, the Sleemans, O’Driscoll, their crazed vendettas. Sooner or later the Essex boys would implode, destroy each other in a frenzy of steroid-induced rage. Ecstasy binges, with vodka chasers, didn’t do much for your short-term memory. Where better to hide than Mocatta’s backyard? The rarely seen dandy was rumoured to be building a grotesque mansion, ‘bigger than Blenheim’, somewhere near Paul Merton’s place on the Pett Levels. Mocatta had a marine property empire, ‘slums for bums’, that ran from Seaford to Hastings. Given his start by Rachman, he’d recognised, very early, that asylum-seekers and urban unfortunates (banished from the Smoke) were a major asset, the coming commodity. Better than oil. Better than – or twinned with – drugs. The coast would have died without his vision. A couple of dim heavies and a filing cabinet, two dogs, that’s all it took. To keep Declan Mocatta, dandy and aesthete, in crushed-velvet suits, snakeskin waistcoats, elastic-sided Chelsea boots. In gold-topped canes and car coats. Silly hats. Leave out Chris Eubank and Mocatta was the best-dressed male south of Croydon.

  The view from the high window, on the semi-formal gardens, was soothing; no people. A town at the edge of Europe, in dim weather, container ships and oil spills just over the horizon. Or – it was that time already – small groups of bareheaded men in bright leather jackets, jeans, white trainers, being turned out of crumbling Victorian buildings (salt-eaten facades, loose window frames); turned loose to slouch on broad pavements. Knowing better than to occupy dew-damp park benches, or to hang about the bowling green. Unwelcome in seafront cafés. Suspect in post offices and charity shops. Pissing in doorways.

  The council operated a regime of benevolent social control: keep out of the way of the paying punters and do what you like. We’ll put a roof over your heads and supply you with vouchers. You won’t starve. Want to work a number, off the books, with the builders who are patching up Mocatta’s ruined hotels and mid-Victorian terraces? Fine. No insurance claims, no additional benefits. Keep quiet, keep clear of the public streets and make your own sandwiches.

  Melancholy men from the Balkans watched the waves. Kurds followed young women, silently, hungrily, at a respectful distance, never quite becoming a nuisance. Glaswegians and third-generation Paddies (expelled from Kilburn and Kentish Town) staked out the lower promenade and took it on themselves to get the drink in, to act as informal social secretaries, keeping the scene lively and open to all-comers (bring your own carrier).

  Survival, the economic migrants had cracked it – why couldn’t Kaporal? Wrapped in a long scarf, letting rainwater seep through cracked shoes, he mooched among the naked beds of the out-of-season gardens. Cashmoney, where was it to come from? As he reached the seafront, he looked west towards the pale outline of Beachy Head, the double cliffs of Bexhill; no light shone from the A13 author’s kitchen. The building in which this man lived, trellised in scaffolding, roosted by predatory gulls, was a tribute to misplaced sentiment. Ugly as it was, a sort of marine cousin to Jack London’s ‘Monster Doss House’ in Fieldgate Street, Whitechapel, nobody had the bottle to pull it down. The exiled writer might, yet, prove a lifeline. Kaporal was to meet him outside the optician on London Road, ostensibly to give him the tour (actually to pitch the Mocatta book, to get someone else’s name on the cover).

  Only the dead can help the dead. The writer was a back number. And the A13 book, Estuarial Lives, was ancient history. Transient fame, no royalty statements. London lost. You wouldn’t find a copy of the hardback in a year of combing through the charity shops that clustered around the station, preying on incomers. (It went out of print, modest expectations surpassed, shortly after J.G. Ballard gave it a plug as a Christmas selection.)

  Drin and Achmed, the Albanians, were in the usual place. Kaporal had an hour to kill. They greeted him warmly, shaking him by the hand, individually, then together, slapping him on the back, pummelling his shoulder. One of the Scotch boys was off on a fugue: Yus a grafter, grafter. Mmmah reet, Jimmy?’

  This Jimmy, the universal Jimmy, smiled. A lovely man with one white eye. He spoke no English, less even than the Scot. The whole bunch of them, misfits and tolerated outlaws, women with kids in plastic-covered prams, gathered at beachside, above the shingle, under the promenade, in a sort of open-sided temple or viewing platform. They started drinking early, chucked their cans over the parapet, keeping their spirits up until darkness fell. Then they dissolved into the shadows. In half-decent weather, this side of hurricane, they made fires, cooked something, gull or scavenged meat, and slept on the beach.

  The film director Stephen Frears can’t have taken an awayday to the coast when he said – of a lowlife romance he was promoting – that asylum-seekers and economic immigrants were ‘invisible’, the unseen of the city. If this lot had been any more visible you’d have to stick a preservation order on them; they made indigenous scroungers and petty crims feel good about themselves. Keep your eyes open and there is always someone to look down on, scapegoats for hire, giving a dull resort a touch of colour. Beach Boys, locals called them. Their timing was all wrong, they were asylum-seekers at a period when there were no asylums left. The Victorian and Edwardian mental colonies at the fringes of London had been made over into Barratt estates and gated oases for the upwardly mobile. But the tide was turning, forward-planners had decided to grant the supplicants their wish, access to the biggest asylum of them all. A great V-shaped barrack on the Dartford Salt Marshes was being converted into a holding centre, a place of detention for the men from Sangatte.

  Achmed, short in the gum and long in the tooth (garlic chewer), gave Kaporal, who no longer smoked, a cigarette.

  ‘My friend, English friend, you come always at good time. We decide. To go. Of course to go back. What we are knowing. Tradition, you understand? Be again bandit.’

  Drin nodded, stroked his moustache. He didn’t speak. He left that to his brother, his patron.

  ‘You also, Mr Joseph,’ Achmed continued. ‘With us. Take thing for money. Take thing, keep thing, sell thing.’

  Kidnapping? Why not? Kaporal had tried everything else, as instructed, except Morris dancing and incest.

  ‘You mean kidnap someone, hold them for ransom?’

  ‘Kidnap – who is this?’ said Achmed. ‘We honourable men, banditti.’

  ‘Who? Who will you kidnap?’

  By now Achmed was on his feet, affronted, patting his knife pocket. Drin put his arm around his brother’s shoulder. He too was disappointed in Kaporal, the Englishman’s obtuseness.

  ‘Dog. Take dog, find dog. For money. You love dog, more dog than woman, sons. Take dog.’

  So this was the great scheme. The drinkers were unimpressed, they listened to such boasts by the hour, fantasies of revenge, sudden wealth. But the communality of the underdeck was powerful. Post-terror families clung to their small span of allotted territory. Steaming, piss-soaked men with boiled faces. Women dropping ash into prams. Salt-scoured, wobbly on their feet, the tribe wouldn’t hear of any exploitation of canine dependants. If there was a barbecue going on the beach, a sausage to burn, stray curs took first bite.

  Drin and Achmed hadn’t wasted their months on the coast. They made a careful study of local customs, how the English emerged from their h
ouses and pinched flats to walk their animals – in all weathers, bent against the wind, clinging to the leash, shovelling warm faeces into a plastic bag (with a trowel they kept for the purpose). The Albanians were fascinated by this obsessive behaviour. They tracked one family for miles, west, till the promenade ran out, along with any attempt at civic revival; this was a savage landscape, as the bandits recognised. Broken metal pillars, cancelled cafés, broad concrete steps that led to nothing. Threadbare grass, a railway cutting, gulls congregated around the sewage outflow.

  It was the dog that held their interest, a shaggy, spindle-legged, toast-rack-ribbed beast, part greyhound, part lurcher, taller than the kids. The dog galloped, ahead of its owners, zigzagging over the shingle path, scratching for dirt, straining unsuccessfully at stool, battering against the chainlink fence, returning to check on his tardy masters, and away again. Painful to watch. The costive animal had nothing to excrete, one heave and its intestines would be coiled on the path.

  Dogs and Englishmen. The obvious career until something better came along, a move to the city. Kaporal, needing to shake off the Albanians, before his meet with the A13 writer, improvised a better plan. Kidnap a celebrity.

  The White Queen Theatre, across the road from the pier, under which the drinking school passed the day, played host to a glittering roster of TV names. All dead. Or worse. Every Albanian from Dover to Margate had descended on the town when they thought Sir Norman Wisdom was going to do a turn. Kaporal had to explain, the White Queen featured tribute bands, fame Xeroxes, animate waxworks. Think Floyd in Concert. The Beatroots: ‘All You Need Is Lurve’ The Maori Elvis. The Yowling Stones. With a leavening of sharkskin spooks from Limboland, the once notorious, the Undead of Hello! (misremembered for the tabloid scandals that brought them down: Freddie Starr, Michael Barrymore). The White Queen showcased glove-puppets with replacement hands up their backsides. Impressionists, no sense of self, offering hit-and-miss caricatures of politicians nobody recognised. Some acts were compulsory, like National Service (but not as much fun). They appeared everywhere at the same time – Brighton, Blackpool, Cromer -sweat-soaked in frilly shirts. Yellow eyes frantic for cue cards. Panstick ghosts with a road-kill rictus. Caught in the headlights of involuntary amnesia: Jim Davidson, Chas and Dave, Mike Reid (‘Adults Only, Plus Support’). Slippage from soap operas, pensioners of the rubber chicken circuit. And one real star, Bermondsey’s own: Max Bygraves.