London Large: Blood on the Streets

by Robson, Roy

  ‘They said “tell Dragusha get fuck out of London, or everyone dies”. Simples.’

  Dragusha stood unfazed and implacable as he processed the news. He rubbed the sides of his thick black moustache and contemplated the situation.

  ‘Shkodran and Shpend are good men. Will say nothing of our plans. By now will probably be dead.’

  Dragusha snatched the rakia from Fatos and took a hit. He was angry and disappointed. Angry and disappointed that Fatos had allowed himself to be followed and taken out so easily. Angrier still that he had lost three good men. But he knew how to hold his anger in check and when to use it to devastating effect. He didn’t care if revenge was a dish served cold, warm or piping hot, just as long as it was served as a generous portion. His vengeance, when it came, would be something to behold; but now was a time for thinking.

  His thoughts were interrupted by a knock on the door. He opened it and surveyed the wider scene before paying attention to the small man who had interrupted him.

  The caravan site was shaped like a triangle, surrounded by three major roads. A kind of nowhere place passed by and ignored by the heavy and relentless London traffic that swarmed around it day after day. It had been there now for almost twenty years. The older inhabitants had remained insulated from the surrounding community in a state of ever-present suspicion of the outside world. The outside world had dubbed it ‘The Island’ and kept its distance, in a similar state of suspicion of its inhabitants. Although some of the children now attended local schools they never, ever brought outsiders back. This secrecy suited Dragusha right down to the ground. A tailor-made community into which the police rarely ventured, a tiny isolated hamlet at the heart of the city: zone 1, ten minutes from the Tower of London.

  A group of his enforcers mingled with the travellers, standing in constant guard. He was safe here; it would take a small army to get through to him.

  His attention turned to the visitor. A small man with thick milk bottle glasses and a black leather case looked up at him. Dragusha beckoned the doctor in. The Doctor wasn’t a real doctor with seven years training and a certificate. In fact he had hardly ever seen the inside of a hospital. But they called him The Doctor anyway: he was the closest thing they had to one.

  The Doctor entered to attend to his latest patient. He rinsed through a fresh cloth, cleaned Fatos’ face wounds and took out a needle from inside his case. He went about his work meticulously, sewing the wounds with considerable care and skill. Fatos didn’t flinch as the stitches were pulled slowly through the tears in his flesh, and the two sides of the open gash reacquainted themselves.

  The Doctor enjoyed his work, which was just as well, as lately he’d had plenty of it. ‘All done’, he said as he tied and then cut the end of the thread with a pair of scissors. He handed over a small mirror so Fatos could admire the handiwork. The scar on the left side of his face started just under the eye, snaked its way down past his nose and mouth, and came to a halt just by the edge of his jaw bone. He nodded to The Doctor in appreciation of a job well done.

  Dragusha handed The Doctor a wedge of twenties, ushered him out of the caravan and returned to Fatos.

  ‘So they want us to get fuck out of London. Who they think they are dealing with? I wonder what next move will be?’

  16

  He didn’t have to wonder for very long. The next move came on top straight away. Dragusha and Fatos threw themselves to the floor of the caravan as the sound of automatic rifle fire peppered everything on the site. The Russians had arrived, and they were not here to party.

  Bullets were flying everywhere. It seemed to the populace of this most clandestine of camps like they’d been dropped onto the set of a 1930s B movie, in which a carload of gangsters pulls up and opens fire in a battle for control of the alcohol trade in uptown Chicago. But this was no Hollywood production. This was for real; this was modern London in the here and now and the battle was not for alcohol but for control of drugs, prostitution and the modern slave trade.

  Dragusha reached for the handgun in his drawer and peeped over the window above his kitchen sink. As he did so two packages were thrown into the site amidst all the mayhem. He watched as his men dived for cover, fearing the imminent explosion that would blow everything to smithereens. But, as the black van that had transported the bringers of mayhem sped off, an explosion never came.

  The calm that comes after the storm enveloped the camp. The screaming stopped. For a moment all was still and silent, as a collective holding of breath united the camp in silence, in expectation of another round of gunfire. But the onslaught was over. The Russians had come to send a message, not to finish the job.

  Dragusha left his caravan and looked around to assess the damage.

  He picked up the first of the packages. It was still warm and moist as he opened it to reveal the contents. The lifeless eyes of Shpend had been left open and now peered out at him, the crazed stare reflecting the awful moment of terror before death had come to him.

  He threw his glance to the other package with a full understanding of its contents.

  Both dead. My brothers.

  A desolate mother emerged from one of the shoddier caravans with the lifeless form of her young daughter in her arms. Her weeping and wailing reverberated around the camp, the pain and the torment they expressed drawing the crowd together. Dragusha, ever alive to unfolding events, tossed down the heads and took his opportunity.

  ‘Look, look my brothers, my sisters. We try to live our lives in peace. We just want to be left alone to live our lives. We do nothing to harm anyone. And how we get repaid? They attack us. They come to our home. They murder our sons and daughters. Where are police to protect us? No police. Now we protect ourselves, in way of our ancestors.’

  As the crowd came together and encircled the grieving mother with her child Dragusha acted quickly. He returned to his caravan and gave his weapon to Fatos.

  ‘Leave site now. Take men and all weapons with you. Police will be here in five minutes. I will call.’

  Dragusha was a patient man, always ready to play the long game. At heart he was a strategist who understood the rules of urban warfare and the importance of propaganda - the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the experience of Kosovo had taught him hard lessons. His eyes remained on the bigger prize. He picked up the bottle of rakia, took another slug and relaxed into the narrow sofa, there to reflect calmly on the situation.

  His enemies had raised the bar. They were well entrenched in a number of locations across the capital and their small army of gunmen and contacts in high places made them formidable foes. But they had made a tactical error with the scary heads routine that he could exploit both with the British media and the bosses back home, who would be prepared for additional investment in search of the retribution they would be duty bound to pursue. That was the easy part, but it would not get him to where he wanted to be. He knew the Russians had more men, more guns, more of everything. He knew, in the long run, he couldn’t defeat them, drive them out of London and take the major prize.

  But he wanted in. He wanted a slice of the action that London offered, and everything that went with it. The wealth, the power. He wanted to go large - London large. And that, for now at least, meant plenty. He understood that superior force would only ever negotiate when faced with a force it knew it could not defeat. His enemies, it was clear to him, had become over-confident. Where all those around him saw chaos and mayhem he saw an opportunity.

  A wry smile took hold of his face as he heard the sound of multiple sirens getting ever closer. It was a sound he liked. It reassured him things were in motion, and that he was at the centre of events, where he liked to be, where he needed to be. As hordes of police cars encircled the camp and cordoned off the surrounding area he called Fatos: ‘Contact all leaders for conference call tomorrow. We make plans. We make them pay.’

  17

  ‘Guv’, said Amisha as the car moved on, back to New Scotland Yard for the debrief, ‘I feel that Ch
ief Inspector Stone is not going to be a very happy bunny. To say the least. Have you thought about what you’re going to say to her?’

  ‘The truth, I suppose’, said H.

  ‘And that is?’

  ‘I’ve lost my way, Ames. Even before I saw who had been killed I was wobbling. It’s just…all got to me. I saw Tara...and then this Jupiter fucker trying to wind me up. I’d just seen the butchered remains of my best friend’s wife, and…’

  ‘That’s it, guv. We’ll just say you were overwhelmed by grief. Even the famous ‘H’ is human after all. This could even go in your favour.’

  ‘I doubt that, Ames. I doubt that very much.’

  The car pulled up; Amisha led H into the lobby through a babbling swarm of journos and happy snappers. She felt like a mother leading her wayward son to the headmaster’s office for a major bollocking.

  H was lost and disoriented but there was something he had to do. It couldn’t wait, and only he could do it.

  ‘Give me five minutes’, he said, as he disappeared to the gents. His hand shook as he searched for the name on his phone and pressed the call icon.

  When he returned she saw the tears in his eyes and understood immediately who he had been speaking to. Despite the impending storm, the mayhem and the meltdown he had found the courage and presence of mind to make what must have been the hardest phone call of his life.

  Where does character like that come from?

  On the way up to the seventh floor in the lift she straightened his tie and brushed his jacket down. She looked him in the eye, and saw with relief that someone was home.

  ‘Ready?’

  ‘As I’ll ever be’, said H.

  Fuck this for a game of soldiers.

  They emerged into a scene of barely controlled chaos. A blur of frenzied activity, of comings and goings, of gadgets buzzing and pinging, of barked commands.

  Not much different from that load of bollocks in the park then.

  ‘Not one word, H?’ One voice was emerging, loud and clear, from the squall - and silencing it.

  ‘Not one word? Do you have any way at all of explaining what just happened in the park? In the full glare of the global media? With four butchered, mangled bodies still warm and oozing their blood into the ground just out of camera shot? At a time when we are being accused of losing control of the city, and with panic beginning to grip - I mean really grip - the streets? You cannot find one single word of reassurance, of authority, of… ’

  Amisha had been right; Hilary Stone had already binned H’s old arsehole, and was now furiously tearing him a new one in front of colleagues new and old, some of whom he had known for thirty years.

  The room fell silent.

  ‘Not like you to be lost for words, Detective Inspector Hawkins. My office. Now.’

  It was to be the inner sanctum, then. Stone, H and Amisha in procession, with Graham Miller-Marchant - known variously around the office as ‘the drone’, ‘the little manbot’ and, in H’s formulation, ‘that utter, utter wanker’ - following on.

  Stone closed the door behind them. She seemed to have regained something of her composure.

  ‘Talk me through it H. Please, just talk me through it.’

  ‘Um…I lost the plot maam’, said H.

  ‘You lost the plot’, said Stone.

  ‘You. Lost. The. Plot’ she repeated, seeming to savour the words. ‘And this is what, an explanation? A justification? For failing entirely to discharge your normal duties in the most basic manner?’

  H said nothing.

  ‘H’, Stone continued, ‘work with me here, please. I need to understand what just happened. We’ve got you shambling around the park looking like you’ve just fallen out of an all-nighter at Ronnie Scott’s, a crime scene that looks like a chimp’s tea party gone wrong and an encounter with the media about which…I’m lost for words. Much like you were.’

  H stared into space.

  ‘Maam’, said Amisha, ‘perhaps I can shed a little light on the matter.’

  ‘I wish someone would’, said Stone.

  ‘Detective Inspector Hawkins was acting under considerable duress this morning, maam. Two of the victims in the park were known to him; one a former colleague, one an old and close personal friend. I would suggest that this was not a normal crime scene, nor a normal morning’s work. I think Inspector Hawkins was, for a time, in shock. Or in a temporary dissociative state, to be more precise.’

  ‘Interesting. Am I correct in understanding that you are now, Ms. Bhanushali, an accredited police psychologist?’ said Miller-Marchant.

  At this H stirred. He straightened up and began to move towards Miller-Marchant; his fists were clenched and his jaw was working. Miller-Marchant backed up, until the door of the office left him with nowhere to go.

  The speed and ferocity of H’s next movement astonished Stone and Amisha alike. How could that bulk be moved with such speed, such precision?

  H’s hands were around Miller-Marchant’s throat, and were forcing him down, down…

  ‘H!’, cried Assistant Commissioner Stone, ‘Inspector Hawkins!’

  18

  While he waited out the five-minute silence imposed by Hilary Stone following the release of his grip on the throat of Miller-Marchant, H mused on his contempt for this man, this opposite of himself. The two had never liked one another. That much was obvious to anyone who’d had to endure two minutes in a room with them.

  But it went deeper than that.

  H was sitting - he knew this because Olivia had spent years telling him, and even Amisha was now beginning to pipe up - on a seething mass of anger, resentment and frustration ‘of volcanic proportions’. Olivia had even tried, back in the days before she really grasped what kind of man he was, to get him into some sort of counselling.

  But Harry Hawkins didn’t need counselling; he understood very well where his rage came from.

  From seeing good friends and comrades blown to pieces in a bleak, windswept shithole. From risking life and limb in the service of his country and getting little thanks for it on his return.

  From being the Met’s Golden Boy, with an unequalled homicide clear up rate, to yesterday’s man in twenty years. Because he wouldn’t play by the new rules. But he hadn’t changed, the world around him had.

  He understood bad men, wanted to prevent them from making good people suffer, and he had an old school moral compass: capture-convict-punish, and punish hard. Force must be met with force. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Leopards do not change their spots. Somebody has to wield uncompromising authority, or things will fall apart and the law of the jungle will prevail. That was what he’d learned coming up on the streets of South London.

  H remained what the first couple of decades of his life had made him: independent, self-directed and nobody’s yes-man. You can take the boy out of Bermondsey...As far as he could tell the constant parade of young graduate coppers too scared of villains to be of any actual use on the street was destroying the police force.

  His career had bottomed - or ceilinged - out. He was kept on because nobody could deal with villains like he could, and his clear up rate was off the charts, but he was not and would never be part of the new regime. His path up the greasy pole was well and truly blocked. And it was blocked by men like Graham Miller-Marchant.

  H loathed Miller-Marchant’s smarmy Oxbridge tones and double-barrelled name; he loathed his sharp suit, pointy shoes and immaculate hair; he loathed his phones, his tablets and his Powerpoint presentations; he loathed his team meetings and workshops, conducted in a babbled code that no normal person over forty could understand; he loathed his fast-track rise and his oily ‘yes maam’ routine; he loathed his ignorance of the street and real people and his habit of bringing in sushi for lunch every other fucking day; he loathed, when it came to it, everything about him.

  H snapped out of his reverie and looked across the room at the object of his loathing, still slumped in a heap against the door.

&nbs
p; ‘It’s not him you hate, really, guv’, the increasingly bold Amisha had ventured to tell him recently in the car, ‘you’re projecting your own bad emotions and issues onto him. That’s what it’s called: projection.’

  ‘Yes, well I’ll project him out of a fucking window one day soon if he keeps on… He’s doing my nut.’

  And here they were, now, in this becalmed room. Himself, Amisha sitting quietly, Miller-Marchant still regulating his breath and trying not to meet H’s eye and Hilary Stone, glowering at all and sundry like a school governess from a 1930s film.

  ‘OK, Ladies and gentlemen, are we ready to resume?’, she said, ‘There is, you may all remember, the small matter of London burning down around our ears to contend with.’

  ‘I suggest we…’

  Bang! The door flew open, no knock. An underling surged in, wildly excited and breathless.

  ‘Excuse me, maam’, he shouted, almost out of control, ‘but you need to see this. Something’s happened south of the river. Something big.’

  19

  This time they were not getting it second hand from social media. They had an officer on the ground, streaming images from his experimental lapel camera to the incident room in which they were now huddled. Images of what looked like more bad news.

  The call had come in about ten minutes before. Shots fired in Bermondsey, in and around the illegal caravan site known locally as ‘The Island’. Not much was clear at the moment, except that shots had been fired into the caravans, apparently from automatic weapons, and that the wire fence around the site had largely caved in.

  ‘Get an armed response unit down there, now’, barked Stone at the room.

  ‘Constable, hang back outside the fence and set up a perimeter, wait until the armed guys arrive. Are there any witnesses?’

  ‘Yes maam. We’ve got three people saying a black van drove up and smashed through the fence. Whoever was inside threw something out and sprayed the whole place with bullets as they backed out and drove away. They were shouting something, but the eye witnesses didn’t recognise the language.’