by Paul Finch
I pursued the team who’d done this job with a coldness born of extreme anger. I’d been due to go off duty half an hour later, but instead of taking the car back to the nick, I carried on driving, prowling the streets for that ‘better class of criminal’ who doesn’t trip alarm systems and beats the crap out of guard dogs.
It might have been a thankless task, but luckily I had that age-old and now so unfashionable police device, a hunch. I went and parked close to the lock-up of a certain fence I knew, whose speciality was antiques. It was a long shot, but it was about the only chance I had of catching someone red-handed. About half an hour later, and a full hour into unofficial overtime, with the CAD operators screaming for an ETA back to the nick as the next relief needed the car, I watched a scruffy old lorry, with tarpaulins tied haphazardly over whatever cargo it was carrying, come shuddering up and stop. As the driver got out, I got out too and approached him. He bolted on foot down a narrow alley between the flats. Almost certainly, ten grand’s worth of lifted ‘olde worlde’ gear was on the back of that wagon, but I wasn’t about to stand guard over it. That wasn’t the purpose of my intervention.
I caught the bastard two streets later, when his jacket caught on a rusty nail and yanked him off his feet. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to take full advantage of his incapacitated state. Firstly, because this had turned into a good collar, probably with more to follow, and I didn’t want to risk mucking it up; secondly, because he was black – believe me, that would’ve meant big trouble. So I had to content myself with clouting him in the face a couple of times, and even then I had to answer a few questions when I got him back to the nick. I explained to the custody officer that the prisoner had proved difficult and that I’d had to get on top of the situation. I’d been smart enough to head-butt a brick wall before going in, thus splitting one of my own eyebrows open. In the event, when we processed him, we found that his form extended to violence and that he had PNC warnings for weapons, firearms and attempting to escape. Nobody asked any more questions after that, not even his brief.
When the rest of the crew were brought in, and a dozen high-end burglaries were declared solved by the specialist OIC who took over, I had some satisfaction in seeing them all go down for eight-to-ten years each. I’d even managed to stick an extra two years onto the sentence of the bastard I collared on account of his ‘resisting arrest and his unprovoked assault on a police officer’.
Hardly justice for those two dogs, though.
*
On August 10th 1989, a 20-year-old barmaid returning home late to her flat in Hag Fold, was pulled into a side alley, where she was battered unconscious with a house brick. She was then dragged forty yards to an abandoned house, wherein she was stripped, bound and raped. Whether she ever regained consciousness is unknown, but it is to be hoped that she didn’t, for the killer drenched her in petrol and set her alight. Her charred remains were only found several weeks later.
At St Margaret’s Catholic High, Hag Fold, canings were usually held on Monday mornings after assembly.
When the service was finished, the headmaster would perambulate onto the stage, and read out in his wooden, nasal voice the names of all those boys he would be having a meeting with in his office during the first break. These miscreants had usually been booked for the appointment during the previous week. The headmaster felt it instructive that they should spend their entire weekend contemplating the oncoming punishment.
The offences could be varied, though most often they weren’t. Ordinarily, people were waiting outside the headmaster’s office at ten o’clock on Monday mornings for smoking, fighting, playing truant or vandalising school property (classroom desks and toilet walls were there to be drawn on, after all – generations of others had done it before, so why shouldn’t you do the same?). Occasionally, other malefactors were hauled in as well. One morning, for example, Tim figured in the assembly roll-call because the previous Friday he’d skipped lunchtime detention, while classmate Danny Tattersall, was in there because his form teacher had finally decided that one too many Daleks, Tardises and Starship Enterprises were scribbled all over his exercise books. Tattersall was something of a dreamer for a 13-year-old. He drifted in and out of fantasy and sci-fi on a minute-to-minute basis, especially during school-time. This morning was a case in point. The seven delinquents were eventually called in to the headmaster’s study, lined up and given the obligatory pre-beating speech. This rarely varied. Stock phrases like “the usual rat-like faces, I see”, “wallowing in your own ignorance”, or, “in one ear, out the other” were banded about, while the head strode up and down and wafted at the air with his stick.
“What are you smiling at?” he suddenly roared, with such force that the boys felt the hair blow back from their ears. “You! Are you stupid or something?”
A long, quivering finger was fixed on Tattersall, who did indeed have an inane, rather foolish grin on his face.
“Come on, let’s hear it!” the head demanded. “Obviously something’s tickled you, boy! Spit it out! What’s on your mind?”
Tattersall, apparently still in a surreal and sublime state, replied, in the most serious voice possible: “We must absorb the humans.”
There was a disbelieving silence for a moment, as this sunk in. Then smirks began to appear, followed quickly by snorts and stifled sniggers. Even the daftest of the lads there had caught the latest episode of Doctor Who the previous Saturday night. The quote was a straight lift, which wasn’t unusual for Tattersall, though rarely were such gems aired in circumstances like these.
“We must absorb the humans?” the head repeated in a cracking voice.
By now, tears were streaming down crimson cheeks, and courageous efforts being made to staunch bellows of hysterical laughter (though, not being individuals of great self-discipline, the majority of the boys failed at this), as a direct result of which, the customary stroke on the palm of each hand was supplemented with an additional two, and in the case of Tattersall, with several hard slaps to the face. But even then it was a waste of time. The roars of mirth didn’t falter, never mind halt. This was a signal moment. A headmaster who doesn’t inspire terror is like a gunman without a gun, or a tiger without its teeth. All he can do is stand there, helpless, purple-faced and stuttering.
They were still bawling with laughter even when he threw them forcibly out into the corridor, which caused wondering heads to pop out of doorways in both directions. Rarely did sounds like this issue from the headmaster’s study on Monday morning. And even then it didn’t stop. As the desperados tottered away, hands gripped in armpits but voices hoarse with laughing, people passing – both teachers and pupils alike – could only gaze at them agog.
From the jaws of defeat, a remarkable triumph had been snatched.
Though it was even more of a triumph for Tim – because Erika was there, wearing her prefect’s badge, delivering a letter to the secretary’s office. She could only stop and stare as the outlaws swaggered by, still chuckling, still repeating that gloriously meaningless slogan of revolt: “We … must … absorb … the … humans.”
For the one and only time in his short and trivial life, Danny Tattersall was a hero. But he wasn’t the one Erika noticed. Because, for all his daydreams, he lacked the imagination to swagger all the more and laugh all the louder, and make absolutely sure that she saw him.
*
Don’t be under the impression that traditional London hoodlums are any more honourable than the Mafia or the Triads or the Eastern Europeans, or any other of the foreign filth currently trying to muscle in on the British crime scene.
They’ve done a good PR job on themselves over the years, that’s all; aided, I have to say, by film, TV and theatre personalities, by juvenile rock stars, left wing journalists and members of their own sordid cliques who serve a bit of time, get much publicity on the strength of it, and then, for some unfathomable reason, re-emerge on documentaries as ‘criminologist’ or ‘crime writer’.
Let me
assure you, the archetypical London gangster would cut your throat as soon as look at you. A Deptford dealer who refused to pay his dues to the racketeers was executed by being hung upside down in barbed wire. His slit wrists were tied in front of his face so that he could watch his life drain away over a period of hours. Another bunch of East End charmers once spent Christmas Eve in an Isle of Dogs warehouse singing their little hearts out – ‘God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen’, ‘Ding Dong Merrily On High’, ‘Good King Wenceslas’ – you name it, they sang it, or rather, caterwauled it. They were covering up the screams. In the back room, an underworld grass was having his head crushed in a vice.
I’ll tell you, Reagan and Carter got it right way back in the politically incorrect 1970s. The bastards want a good twatting. And that’s what they got in June 1991, in South Woodford, an incident that would later be referred to in a certain libertarian broadsheet as the ‘Snareswood Massacre’.
There’d been four well-known targets that day.
Errol Flood was a six-foot-six enforcer who’d already done fifteen years inside without a single day’s remission. Extreme violence was his forte. Aside from braining people with coshes and brass knuckles in day-to-day gangland thuggery, he was also known to have cropped fingers with bolt-cutters, to have pulled teeth with pliers, and to have sterilised guys by snapping crocodile clips to their bollocks and pumping high voltage through them. He was also a suspect in two fatal assaults, including one where a chainsaw had been used. Nice bloke.
Jimmy Onnery dated from the Krays’ era. He’d been small-time then, a street-hood for the most part, making his living demanding readies from cockles-and-eels vendors on the Old Kent Road, and slugging them if they wouldn’t pay up. By the time this job came along, he’d spread and stooped a little, but had served ten for aggravated burglary with a machete and, though he now ought to have been retiring, still felt he could run with the best. Besides that, his gambling debts were piling up; Onnery couldn’t afford to walk away with anything less than a sack of money.
Marty Goodman might have sounded like a variety show entertainer, but there weren’t many laughs when he was around. In fact, he was probably the worst of them. An experienced blagger, the Flying Squad had been trying to nail him for several years for a string of raids, including a post office attack in Wood Green, during which an unarmed security guard had been shot to death. By this stage Goodman had become a heroin addict and was regarded even by his own associates as highly unstable. Unusual, therefore, to see him involved in a job as big as this, but that was some indication of the lethal level of incompetence we were dealing with.
Ted Crawley was the driver. He’d been a getaway man for quite a while by this time, courtesy of a youth misspent at the wheels of stolen motors. As far as we knew, he didn’t have form for violence, though once, while being interviewed for theft, he’d admitted to some detectives who were chasing TICs that he’d been convicted for wounding a girlfriend while drunk – he’d pushed her in front of a bus.
According to divisional snouts, the entire team was supposed to be tooled-up, which is why we’d been called in. There was talk of Magnum and Beretta pistols, of pump-action shotguns, even an AK-47 assault rifle. They were after a Securi-Guard van delivering cash-in-transit to a building society office on Chigwell Road. As robberies went, this one was due to follow a classic pattern. There was a small car park to the rear of the building, where the delivery van was expected to pull up. This was accessible only by a narrow side street connecting with the main road. Naturally, the ambush would take place there. The getaway car would barricade the entrance to the car park once the security van was inside it. The bandits would then attack, probably in standard two-by-two. They wouldn’t expect the guards to resist, especially as the firearms threat would be terrifyingly visible. Neither, however, would they expect the guards to co-operate in opening the portable safety-boxes for the cash: firstly, because they wouldn’t have the keys; secondly, because the locks would be on timers. All the thieves would need to do was haul those boxes away to a safehouse, where technicians could open them properly. All the guards would need to do was make sure those boxes were handed over promptly. If they refused to comply, they’d be shot. Probably fatally, which had a twofold purpose: big blaggings usually resulted in near-life sentences anyway, so if pulling the trigger helped, it got pulled; at the same time a sinister lesson would yet again be taught to the cash-carrying community – stand and deliver, or meet the Bank Manager Invisible.
The haul was expected to be seventy or eighty grand.
Our response was similarly textbook. First of all, a sniper armed with a .223, was perched on the parapet of the nearby M11 motorway – he’d shoot without hesitation if the situation required it. Secondly, the Securi-Guard guards weren’t Securi-Guard. They were SO19 men, wearing undershirt body-armour beneath their phony uniforms, and equipped with Glock 17s. Thirdly, in a drive which backed onto the side street about thirty yards down from the plot, we’d secreted our ‘horse’ as we liked to call it, an ordinary Bedford van containing five fully-armoured assaulters. In addition to this, three other guys – all chosen for their close-quarter battle experience, and therefore ex-military, myself included – were located behind the personnel door to the rear of the building society. We would be first across-the-pavement, so each one of us had his own specific job to do. Mine was to nobble the getaway car by throwing a multi-burst inside it, then to back up and assist in the arrests.
Despite all this preparation, initially it was a complete fuck-up. That was mainly due to the stupidity of the bandits. We’d given them more credit than they deserved. My memory of the following events – at least, this was what I told the Police Complaints Authority when they investigated, and later the jury when the surviving members of the gang were all in the dock – goes roughly as follows.
Our final jumping-off point was not good. To begin with, there was only a tiny space between the personnel door and an internal door with a stiff hinge, and that was a tight squeeze for three big blokes clad in black coveralls, full heavyweight armour and helmets, and carrying Heckler and Koch MP5s. It was also in pitch darkness, so the moment we received the call-sign, and the usual “Go! Go! Go! Go!” came hammering through our ear-pieces, we all exploded outside and found ourselves in dazzling midday sunlight. Bear in mind that we’d been lying up for nearly an hour. Even with tinted visors, there was a second of total blindness.
I remember hearing someone shout “armed police!”, then I went blundering towards the getaway car, which was a stolen Citroën, its engine already revving hard. I heard a crackle of gunfire and, for a second, thought Crawley, the driver, was shooting at me. So I dived, rolled, whacked the car’s rear nearside window with the butt of my MP5, and pitched not just one stun-grenade inside, but two.
The Citroën jerked away from me down the side street. There really is no honour among thieves. Crawley had had enough already and was getting away, but the two bombs flashed and roared, and rocked his stolen motor, blowing out all its other windows. I remember the car throwing out gouts of black smoke, going wildly off course and hitting a garden wall. Almost immediately, the ‘horse’ slid out from its LUP directly in front of it. The rest of the team unloaded and encircled the target vehicle. In the final assessment, Ted Crawley was half-blinded, badly burned, and rendered partially deaf. He also drew a twelve-year prison sentence. But he was the lucky one.
My blood was up and pounding, so when I turned back to the actual scene of the robbery, I was stunned to find nobody in my sights, though the Securi-Guard van was bouncing on its suspension as if some violent activity was occurring on the other side of it. There was another crackle of gunfire, and I registered the booted feet of one of our guys protruding around the front of the vehicle – in a spreading pool of blood. I later found out that this was Sergeant John Courage, who’d been inside the building with me.
As soon as we’d gone across-the-pavement, he too had been surprised to find no blaggers in front of hi
m. The amateurish bastards, instead of doing it the proper way and surrounding the cash van, had all gone for the driver’s window. Unfortunately, Courage had already called out a challenge. He and PC Doug Snelling had then had to cover more pavement than expected, and rounded the vehicle by its front end, walking into a volley of gunfire from Goodman and Onnery, who’d both panicked. Courage went down like a sack of spuds, dead before he hit the concrete; Snelling was struck on the shoulder and forced to take cover under the engine.
In response, the SO19 man in the driver’s cab, Inspector Tony Wolfe, who’d so far been protected by the bulletproof glass, kicked the door open and fired twice with his Glock, hitting Onnery both times in the neck, almost shearing his head off. Miraculously, the aged hoodlum survived, but was paralysed for the rest of his life.
That left Flood and Goodman, who were now retreating towards the getaway car.
At which point they ran into me.
I stopped short at the sight of the two men who’d seemingly appeared from nowhere. Both were clad in parkas and ski masks. The taller of the two, Flood, was carrying a Winchester pump: an evil looking twelve-bore, complete with folding stock. The other, Goodman, was armed with the Kalashnikov, its muzzle still smoking.
Instinctively, before they even threatened me, I got two quick rounds off with my MP5. It was a double-tap to Goodman, the more dangerous of the two. The first slug ripped clean through his chest, a hot, red spray bursting out. The second walloped him between the eyes, knocking his head back as if it was on a spring. More blood spurted as he fell. I swung the MP5 onto Flood before he had time to blink. For a split-second he stared at me, eyes bulging through the holes in his knitted mask, a sodden patch over his mouth. I saw his gloved finger relax on the trigger. He was going to drop his weapon; he’d had enough.