Fogarty: A City of London Thriller (3 page)

Patrick Fogarty paused the video feed on the still picture of a middle-aged man whose scarf had slipped down as he kicked a policewoman lying defenceless on the ground. His hard face seemed to be looking directly at the camera.

“I don’t understand, Dad,” Ben said, frowning in puzzlement. “What has this guy got to do with anything?”

Patrick reached into his desk and withdrew a manila folder filled with papers. The front flap was entitled Vastrick Security Consultants UK. Ben was familiar with the company, as the firm had used the Australian branch of Vastrick on a number of occasions.

“Ben, I offered you this file when you were twenty one and you turned it down. Since then, Vastrick have kept it up to date for me and I think you need to read it.”

Ben’s mouth was set in a firm straight line, suggesting he was no more interested in the file now that he had been ten years ago.

“Dad, I have vague recollections of my mother and my early years, but as far as I’m concerned my life started when I came to you. You are t
he only parent I have ever known and loved. You are the only parent I need. I don’t need to hear about the sordid past. I’m perfectly happy as I am.”

As if he was not listening to a word his son said, the MP flicked through the file, extracting a sheet of A4 paper printed with a picture of a man
between forty and fifty years old. He handed it to Ben, who took a cursory glance and then looked up at the frozen picture on the TV screen.

“It’s him!” Ben blurted out
, a perplexed expression creasing his brow.

“Ben, meet Dennis Baines Grierson, also known as Psycho. He’s your biological father.”

Trafalgar House Flats, Broadwater Farm Estate, Tottenham, London. 13
th
May 1981, 4pm; Thirty Years Ago.

A young Mikey Bateman stood guard at the door of the Fogartys’ flat and tried to ignore their poor daughter’s screaming, but without success. People had gathered on the deck to see what the noise was all about, but they knew better than to ask one of Psycho’s gang of thugs, and so they satisfied themselves by guessing and spreading rumours.

The facts were simple enough and most of the neighbours knew the truth, had they been brave enough to voice it in public, which they correctly assumed
would be unwise, if not fatal.

***

May Finnegan was a first generation Irish woman who had married Roy Fogarty, whose own Irish roots were only a generation behind hers. The nuptials were held in Liverpool in 1961, just a few months after she had arrived in England. The young couple moved to London when May qualified as a midwife and found a job at St Thomas’ Hospital. Roy was besotted by his fiery red headed wife, and was himself a hard working steel worker who spent his life erecting tower blocks in Greater London, both then and now. In 1969 they had moved out of their two-up two-down terraced house in East London when May Finnegan transferred to the North London Maternity Unit. As a key worker she was offered a brand new flat, with central heating, in the recently constructed Broadwater Farm Estate, an experimental high-density social housing project. The estate, soon to become known to locals as ‘The Farm’, straddled the River Moselle and was close to the Lordship Recreation ground. With brand new accommodation and so much green space, the area seemed idyllic after living in an old and seriously deteriorating East End terraced house. The flat wasn’t much to look at from the outside, but with a proper bathroom, central heating and plenty of space it seemed like a palace to the Fogartys.

The problems for the Trafalgar House Flats residents began when houses in the other crime-ridden parts of the capital were demolished wholesale and the tenants were decanted to the burgeoning new tower blocks springing up in the suburbs. Before long the whole estate
had been controlled by Morris ‘the nail’ Gibson, one of the Kray twins’ former enforcers who shared the Krays’ love of violence. His nickname derived from the time he, notoriously, nailed a police informer to the floor of a warehouse as punishment for grassing. He had been out of jail for only two years and was allegedly reformed when he joined his wife in their new home in the flats. By 1975 he oversaw most of the crime in North London from his fiefdom on the ‘estate’. By 1981, half of the men from Trafalgar House were in jail and so most of the flats were occupied by old lags’ wives who spent their weekends trudging the kids across London to Wormwood Scrubs, Brixton or Wandsworth prisons to visit their dads.

As he approached his sixtieth birthday, Morris’ health began to fail him
, and a few of his lieutenants began jostling for position so that they would be well placed to take over the manor when he passed. Dennis Grierson was one such lieutenant, perhaps the most violent. When he was only fifteen, Dennis Grierson had attacked a fifty year-old man who had just left the betting shop, stealing his one hundred and fifty pounds in winnings. Long after the man fell into unconsciousness Grierson kept laying into him in a mad frenzy, a crime which had earned him a place in a secure hospital for four years. Luckily for Grierson the man didn’t die, and his temporary insanity plea was accepted, and so he avoided a life sentence. His mother went to her grave pleading his innocence and expressing disbelief that her lovely son could be convicted by the court when her boy had so “...obviously been set up by the filth...”, her less than complimentary reference to the police. When Grierson was released he went straight back to Trafalgar House, where he took over his old dad’s flat and married sixteen year old Patricia Mooney, a skinny girl who looked no older than twelve. Proudly bearing the nickname ‘Psycho’, he maintained a low profile and ran the girls and drugs for Morris Gibson.

Now, aged twenty-seven, he was about to become a father, but not with his wife Pat. A year earlier, Psycho had taken a fancy to a young schoolgirl by the name of Siobhan Fogarty. She was barely fourteen
, but she reminded him of his wife before she had become ‘old and fat’. His wife was a size fourteen and only twenty two years old, but she had fleshed out in the six years they had been married and now had the shape of a well developed woman, and that didn’t satisfy Den’s deviant tastes. From the day she turned thirteen, Psycho plied the innocent Siobhan with drink and drugs, despite empty threats of retribution from her father, and forced the girl into unprotected sex on a regular basis.

Now here she was, barely fifteen and hugely pregnant, trying to deliver new life on her old single bed covered in fresh linen sheets. Den watched her struggles without emotion, his face unchanged as she cried out with each contraction, screamed with each push.

“She needs a hospital, Dennis, we can’t do this alone.” May Finnegan was a good midwife and she was being ably assisted by Mary Akuta, a nurse trained in the Caribbean and now working in London, but this was a difficult birth. Mary and her family lived two floors down in flat 28 and she, too, complained that this was a complex delivery. She was worried for May’s slightly built daughter. Dennis Grierson snarled his reply.

“
Just get on with it! I’m not having nosy paramedics poking around the Farm. If she needs help I’ll send her in a car to the North London, but only after the delivery, understood?”

The look May Finnegan shot at Dennis Grierson was so malevolent that even the man known as Psycho shivered.

***

Three hours later Ambrose Be
njamin Fogarty lay in a transparent baby crib at the foot of his mother’s bed in the busy North London maternity ward. May sat at the bedside of her sickly looking daughter. The girl was not yet fully grown; she was still less than five feet tall and weighed under six stones. She had been skin and bone before the pregnancy started to show, and she was skin and bone again.

Whilst May fully understood that her daughter had been the unwilling victim of a cruel and vicious man, she still felt guilt and shame for allowing this to happen to her little girl. They needed to get Siobhan away from the estate as soon as possible and away from the psychotic Dennis Grierson. But more than that, May needed to protect little Ambrose and protect him she would, even if it meant killing Den herself.

Homebush Ranch, Masterton, Near Wellington. NZ.

Thursday 11
th
August 2011; 11am.

Ihaka Nga Hiwi looked every day of the hundred years old he claimed to be, albeit the reality was that he was closer to seventy. The tribal elder of the local Maori tribe, he had spent the last twenty years at Homebush Ranch, not doing too much hard labour himself but ensuring that the younger men worked hard for their beloved boss. Ihaka was very frail now, and to Ben Fogarty it seemed impossible that this was the man who had taught him everything he knew about Maori culture and how they fought and loved. This was the man who, at nearly sixty years of age, had run for twenty miles across a wicked terrain without a stop for breath whilst a young, and allegedly fit, Ben trailed behind in the distance.

As they sat in the traditional pitched roof hut with elaborately decorated timbering, the old man reminisced about Ben’s childhood, taking all of the cr
edit for the fine young man who stood before him now. He explained how his Maori training in listening, watching, stealthy movement and battle tactics had made Ben a world class rugby player. It seemed that the coaches for Wellington and the All Blacks had simply benefitted from the finished product sent to them by Ihaka.

Ben took the old man’s hand. The flesh hung loose over b
rittle bones and visible veins.

“I will honour the ol
d ways and venerate the animals. I will tread lightly and leave no footprint on this delicate land,” he promised the old man, repeating and paraphrasing, in English, the old Maori pledge of manhood.

The old man smiled and reached over to a small leather bag on the table beside him. Ben knew very well what the bag contained. It held Ihaka Nga Hiwi’s most treasured possession, perhaps the most treasured possession of any Maori warrior, his greenstone Mere or Patu. Made from highly prized nephrite, the simple unthreatening looking weapon could cut through bone better than the finest steel. Ben knew very well the damage and devastation the weapon could cause to animals; he had been trained in its use since childhood. Just a month earlier
, Ben saw the short striking Patu being tested on the History Channel, where men, who were still secretly boys, tried to find out who would win if a Maori fought a Roman. The results were surprising. The Patu excelled in every test, beating some of the most advanced steel weaponry available. Ihaka held his treasured Patu in front of him, the weapon nestling in his two uplifted palms.

“Hehu, this is for you. Keep it with you always. Your destiny is to fight and so this mu
st be your constant companion.”

Ihaka had used Ben’s adopted Maori name ‘Hehu’
, which means saved by God. He had been given that name on his arrival at the ranch because the Maori ranch hands all believed that Ben had been saved by God from a terrible life in a dirty city called London. When Ben looked around at the landscape that surrounded them, he had known immediately what they meant.

“I will take the Patu, grandfather.” Ben knew that it was both pointless and insulting to refuse the gift. He placed his right fist over his heart and then placed it over the heart of the old man. “My heart is your he
art; your family is my family.”

The old man was tiring quickly and so Ben took his gift and returned to the ranch house, where the dining table was groaning under the weight of sweet smelling meats and pulses of every kind. The buffet was a mix of traditional food and western food, all prepared by the housekeeper
, Mrs Himbaka, who only ever answered to the name Nanni.

***

Later, with most of his farewells out of the way, his t
hree Maori brothers, Hirini Matiu and Tane, crushed him in their meaty arms before they departed. Ben Fogarty was almost six feet four, toned like an athlete and around sixteen stones in weight, and yet his Maori brothers could have crushed him to dust, such was the power of their grip, such was their heritage as warriors. Pushing his floppy dark hair out of his eyes, he realised he needed a haircut. His unruly locks were now a step beyond fashionably long. Alone with his adopted son, the older man examined the young traveller. None of his Irish heritage showed through in either his swarthy complexion or his steel blue eyes; Patrick concluded that he was crafted more by his geography than his genes.

“This is the complete portfolio on your background,” his adoptive father said,
handing Ben a thick folder. “Everything you need to know is in there - reports, records, document scans, photos, everything Vastrick have produced for me over the years. But be prepared; it makes uncomfortable reading.”

Ben took the
file and placed the accompanying USB drive in his pocket. He looked at the tough but gentle man who had been his father for twenty years; Patrick Vernon Fogarty, second generation New Zealander, rancher and politician, beloved of all who knew him. Widowed at thirty when his Maori wife died in childbirth, Patrick had done everything he could to rescue Ben from his torrid existence in England. The MP was actually Siobhan Fogarty’s cousin, and so Ben was, in biological terms, his first cousin once removed, but in every sense that mattered he was his father. To everyone that knew them, and even to the rugby following public, Ben was Patrick’s son and heir. Not that Patrick was thinking of passing on any time soon, but now, in his mid fifties, he did not relish being apart from the boy who meant so much to him, the boy who was his life.