Full of Money

by Bill James

  Apparently, the idea first came to Poignard – previous notable exposés on the box, Drying Out and A Taste For Children – two years ago in the winter of 1998 when she began trying to badger her bosses into allowing her to start building a film ready for the explosion of full-scale drug gang warfare between the estates, which she so rightly foresaw. An investigative journalist had already been murdered, and a Whitsun dealer shot dead in a turf battle for the resonantly named but continually fought over William Walton Avenue.

  But it was the killing in 1998 of small-time pusher, Gordon Basil Hodge, that finally compelled Poignard’s chiefs to give the OK. She began to collect and store what has turned out to be a magnificent, sensitive, eloquent series of glimpses into the two massive estates. She and her crew caught with marvellous skill, doggedness and, perhaps, danger the feel of these streets, the nature of the hatreds, plus the despair and suppressed anger of ordinary folk who live there and who find their existence constantly diminished and even threatened by the violence around them: this anger suppressed because of a constant fear of reprisals.

  Among several dozen gripping scenes was the discovery on Temperate waste ground of Hodge’s body, with the voice-over explanation that he had been on a frantic vengeance campaign, trying to compensate for offending an unnamed drugs baron on Whitsun. But, instead, Hodge himself became the target. Police presence had been increased on the estate following a tip-off, and the shooting was actually witnessed by a special patrol detective, who could not prevent it, but who arrested the gunman, Joel Jeremy North, later convicted and jailed for life.

  By some fluke, or some astonishing intuition, Poignard and her camera and sound people had arrived just after the police and were able to catch the appalling misery of the death scene and interview other shaken, sickened witnesses immediately following the event. A sequence filmed at the conclusion of North’s trial in 2001 showed Detective Chief Superintendent Esther Davidson announcing that police would not be looking for anyone else in connection with the murders of the reporter and Gladstone Milo Naunton, the Whitsun dealer killed in a territorial dispute. This gave a kind of completeness to the Poignard essay, though not necessarily a comforting one.

  Some of the coverage of the outright open warfare between Whitsun and Temperate when it erupted as she had predicted, was on a par with anything we have seen from Vietnam or Northern Ireland. No, this was not a reassuring programme, but it had the resounding ring of continuous authenticity and, oddly, perhaps, of caring.

  Nineteen

  Karen Tyne likes to have a talk now and then with Dean Feston about things in general. Very regularly, so far, she, Dione, Rupert Bale, plus Dione’s mother, Olive, when not abroad, go out to Marlborough Road Cemetery to tidy up the graves of Adrian Pellotte and Dean. Pellotte’s other daughter, Clarissa-Mercedes, occasionally joins them, but she lives a long way off and can’t always make it. In any case, Karen heard she married a Church of England rector, who probably disapproves of the visits, given the kind of special career followed by Pellotte and Dean. The graves lie not far from each other, reflecting the men’s relationship in life. The women always place new flowers.

  Karen enjoys briefing Feston via the white masonry chippings above him, invariably congratulating Dean on what happened to Dr Rex Ince. This morning she says: ‘Nobody’s been caught for that. The police keep trying to tie it on you. They want to close the file, don’t they, and get their success rate up? How? Accuse someone who’s not around to make denials. Easy.’

  Today, Karen has brought with her a copy of Abel Vagrain’s new novel, On the Frontier. She has pink-highlighted some passages in it which she feels would have interested Dean. ‘The book’s a mix of fact and fiction,’ she says, ‘known as “faction” – very fashionable. We’re all in it, but disguised a bit and under different monikers, naturally. The estates are there, too, also with made-up names. He’s done a very nice chapter describing how you and Adrian eventually died. There’s honour in it, Dean. Well, I should hope so. He shows you and Adrian out there on the streets in person, fighting nobly for your territory around what the novel calls Thackeray Crescent, but which is really William Walton Avenue, of course. Although a business tycoon, the Adrian figure – Vince Caldrake, in the story – has to get to where the bullets are flying, to show he’s still a worthy leader. Some have doubted this, because he had failed to avenge the death of one of his foot soldiers. And where the Adrian figure has to go, his bodyguard must go, too. That’s you, Dean, but rechristened Grenville Lampoda. You get bopped when selflessly trying to protect your boss – which is really how it happened, isn’t it?

  ‘This next bit will really amuse you, Dean,’ she said. ‘In On the Frontier a university don, Norbert Gale-Hive is found murdered, apparently as punishment for a public slur on Adrian – Vince Caldrake, that is, and Gren Lampoda – you, that is – to do with a television awards incident. This is sure to make the reader think of the way that creep Rex Ince got slaughtered in reality, isn’t it? The Hodge death is in the book, too, and there’s a girl who might be me, giving pillow-talk tips during a one-night stand. Plus, we have a woman who makes a stir in a television arts show and then goes on to turn out art-house films that dispense with central characters. True name Sandine? I think so. At the end of the book, Dione and Rupert – or Angela and Cedric – are married and their house in Wandsworth is featured in a Home and Gardens three-page article. More near fact! It should be St John’s Wood.

  ‘And still more near fact? In chapter twenty-two, Lampoda and Caldrake go to a literary meeting where Lampoda is to give a keynote address. They are both loaded with money because they’ve collected from a pusher en route. Lampoda leans forward at one point and almost goes off balance because his suit is so full of cash. A nine mm pistol falls from his shoulder holster on to the lectern. Remind you of anything?

  ‘There’ve been changes. Dione tells me the woman top detective has left London to take an even grander law and order job in Wales. You’ll probably remember her reputation soared and stayed high after she schemed the arrest of a multi-killer on the estate where Rupe Bale lived. Dione thinks this officer somehow devised the battle in which her dad and you were so conveniently taken out by the other crew. I can’t believe it. People’s minds may be pushed off balance by grief. This might have happened to Dione, I fear. Admittedly, though, to choreograph such a smart, cleansing shoot-out is possibly the kind of ploy a big rank gendarme would get promoted to staff level for.

  ‘Anyway, whether or not you sweetly nemesized Ince, dear Dean, I hope you appreciate that I’m the one who sent you unmistakably into a probably best-seller book, although he called you Grenville Lampoda. Vagrain changed the object of your literary fandom from Anthony Powell to Dylan Thomas, I don’t know why. More disguise? The last-but-one book in the Powell Dance to the Music of Time series is called Temporary Kings, isn’t it? That’s how Whitsun and I will for ever remember you and Adrian.

  ‘The estates are quietish without you, still a bit stunned by all that happened. There were such big losses on both sides, weren’t there, Dean? No conquerors. No colonizers. The Olympics people are chuffed.’