Jog On Fat Barry (12 page)

DogEatDog
flourished. Articles featuring Madden and Sugar and their mysterious meat appeared regularly in
Gourmet
,
House & Garden
, and
Bon Appetit
. They did guest appearances on TV with Keith Floyd, and The Roux Brothers. Richard Branson, John Major, and Madonna waxed on about their sausages. The
News of the World
ran an exposé, telling their readers that Madden and Sugar were murderers: which was true, but it was also something they wanted to keep private. Still, everyone would soon learn that Madden had thrown a boy out of a train window, and that Sugar had stabbed a man to death in a butcher shop.
The Sun
called them “The Casing Twins” and they sexed-up missing person reports in North London. According to
The Sun
, numbers had been increasing since we opened our doors for business. Then the other tabloids joined in, demanding we come clean and confess what it was we were up to. The MP for Hampstead & Highgate, Glenda Jackson, went on the record to say any suggestion of foul play was completely absurd: she’d been eating our sausages from the off and happened to be particularly fond of the “Nelson Mandelas.”

Of course, everything went wild after that. We opened a second shop in Richmond in ‘94, and then a third in Primrose Hill in ‘95. Maurice and Charles launched a new agency after being removed from Saatchi & Saatchi, and bought the delivery van that Banksy had painted for 147 times what we paid for it. We invested that money in a six-bedroom villa just south of Torremolinos, and Maurice and Charles put the van into the lobby of their new building. Business was booming; Sugar was made full partner, and we began to enjoy the jollifications of our success.

I’ll never know why the rules of engagement changed for us when they did. Perhaps it was Rwanda, or the massacre in Srebrenica, or the Oklahoma bombing. Whatever the reasons were, operations took a new twist. The war on terrorism would now be waged under a new set of rules, and we got our new orders on the 22nd of July 1995. The following day, 720 soldiers from the Devon and Dorsets joined French Legionnaires based on Mount Igman overlooking Sarajevo. Pencil, Madden and me were airlifted in on the 24th with a simple objective: we were to execute a Serb named Vuk Bulat.

Pencil, Madden and me entered Vuk Bulat’s house just after five that morning. We startled a dog that barked twice before Madden snapped its neck. The house fell silent again. Pencil and me entered the bedroom where Bulat slept with his wife. Madden went on down the hall. Pencil held a silencer against the woman’s head and fired. Bulat opened his eyes. He tried to yell, but I knocked the wind out of him. Pencil duct-taped Bulat’s mouth, wrists, and ankles as I straddled him on the bed. Madden dragged the bodies of his two children into the room. When Bulat saw the kids his eyes widened in horror but luckily the duct tape muffled his howls. Madden pulled the woman off the bed and dragged her body to where the children were. I slapped Bulat across the face to get his attention. He glared up at me. Pencil leant down and whispered in his ear.

“We can’t hang about,” he said. “Have to get to Turbe and Tilava. Still got your mum, your dad, your auntie, your uncles, your sisters, your brother, your nieces, and your nephew to do before breakfast.”

“Time to die,” I said.

I clamped my thumb and forefinger over his nose. He struggled for maybe a minute, and then his soul, or whatever you want to call it, left his body and the light went out in his eyes.

The light went out in Ronny Kray’s eyes too. He died in Wexham Park Hospital that same year. The same year OJ Simpson was found not guilty, and that Rosemary West got life imprisonment for the murder of ten young women and girls, and that Princess Diana admitted she’d committed adultery with James Hewitt. It was an unfortunate year for the entire Bulat family line, because Pencil, Madden and me wiped it out.

“I ain’t doing kids again,” Madden had said.

The C-130 Hercules was over the Channel; I could see the white cliffs of Dover.

“I ain’t never doing kids.”

Other ops followed. We’d get a call every six months or so, and do as we were told. For the most part they took place in the Middle East, but there were also a few in Ireland, one in Spain, and another in Holland. Everything was set up so we’d never be away for more than forty-eight hours. Sugar took the wheel at
DogEatDog
, and if anyone asked where we were, he’d say in France buying truffles, or Italy buying donkey. We had a perfect record for three years. Then our wires got crossed in Syria and six civilians died. But it was an honest mistake that anyone could have made. There was also a one-off in London in August 1998. The Real IRA had detonated a car bomb in Omagh killing twenty-nine people: nine children and a woman pregnant with twins were amongst the dead. They did it on a Saturday. Early the following morning, Pencil, Madden and me garrotted three paddies in Cricklewood. We put their bodies through a grinder, and then fed them to forty-two dogs in an animal welfare shelter near Barnet. Pencil married Marlene in December, and Madden, true to his word, never executed another child.

Murtagh Oisín Madden threw a thirteen-year-old boy out the window of a train bound for the West Midlands in 1975. The boy had died instantly, and Madden was forced to spend his fifteenth birthday in police custody. He was held on remand at HMP Brixton, awaiting trial, and the case was due to be heard in Crown Court.

“It was the drink,” Mr. Madden kept saying over and over again.

Madden had given a blood alcohol reading of .16 when the police arrested him.

“And I blame myself for it, I do,” Mr. Madden said. “Was never much of a father, and most times half mad with the drink myself.”

West Ham won the FA Cup and Madden was found guilty. He was detained at Her Majesty’s Pleasure. Did some short, sharp, shock, in Chelmsford, Reading, and Kidlington, where he worked in the kitchens, did weights, and boxed. In 1978, Madden was integrated into the Adult Prison System. Did bird in the Scrubs, Camp Hill, and Pentonville, where he worked in the kitchens, did weights, and boxed. His sister and her husband immigrated to Australia in 1980. His mum followed them a year later. Mr. Madden had remained in London. He wanted to be there when his son was released but he died in 1982. Madden was released in 1983. He had served eight-and-a-half years and was twenty-three. He enlisted in the Royal Marines, 3 Commando Brigade. Joined the French Foreign Legion two years later, 2nd Parachute Regiment. He returned to the Royal Marines in 1987, four-five commando. He joined the SBS in 1988, and the SAS in 1989. Killed for the second time in Belfast, a year out of Pentonville. He lost count of how many lives he’d taken by the time he was thirty. Madden was officially decommissioned in 1991.

When James Alvin Christmas, or Pencil, was eight years old, he told the headmaster of St. Dominics Primary School that the first thing he was going to do when he became a paratrooper was come back and poke a “fucking pencil” up his “dirty stinking shitbox!” The headmaster had caned James for the second time that week and was making him write, “Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God” 500 times on the blackboard for thumping another boy named Darragh. But no matter how often the Headmaster caned him, or how many lines he was made to write, James would continue to punch any boy
or girl
who told lies about his mum. And lies they were: at least they were to James. His mother never abandoned him.

“And if you don’t believe me,” he would shout tearfully, “just ask Lionel, he knows everything, that’s why the blooming council put him in charge, and I know ten other boys at The Lodge what will tell you the exact same thing.”

And ten years later, true to his word, James did just as he said he would, he poked a Faber Castell 2B pencil right up the headmaster’s “dirty stinking shitbox.” James Alvin Christmas was home on furlough: a proud member of Parachute Regiment’s 2nd Battalion. The headmaster threatened to call in the police, but quickly changed his mind when he was told there were twenty-seven different ways to kill someone with a pencil, and James knew each and every one of them.

James did four tours in Northern Ireland; got to Goose Green in the Falklands without a scratch, but was shot at Wireless Ridge and had to wait seven hours for a medic. Doctors later said he would have died from his injuries had it not been so cold. He then joined the SAS, taking part in subduing rebellious inmates in a high-security prison in Scotland, before further sorties took him to Gibraltar, the Gulf War, Beirut, and Somalia. He was officially decommissioned in 1993.

Nothing could have prepared me for the shock I got when I was standing in the dock and the Magistrate said I had to choose between him giving me a custodial sentence, or me doing a stint in the army.

“He’s having a fucking laugh,” I said, glancing at my mum and my dad.

But the army officer sitting in the gallery in his fancy uniform all starched and gleaming seemed to be saying the joke was on me. I tried to tell the judge what was on my mind.

“You can stick the fucking army right up your fucking—”

But the police sergeant sitting beside me cut me off in mid-sentence by stamping on one of my shoes with his big black boots.

“You mind your fucking manners,” he hissed. “You horrible little cunt!”

I had to bite my lip to stop myself crying out in pain, and I felt the shame of tears welling in my eyes. There was no justice in the world, and I wanted to smash that magistrate, because even if I had been rampaging down Fulham Road—something I never admitted I was—kicking shit out of everything and everybody, well, so was everyone else. It was only a bit of football violence, after all. But that magistrate saw it differently. He said that I’d been failing at school, and that I’d been letting my mum and my dad down. I tried to explain that that was only because of my problems with words and numbers.

“It’s not that they’re not there,” I told him, “it’s just, I can’t see ‘em, not like everyone else. To me they’re not—”

“You shut your filthy stinking hole, you miserable, grubby toe-rag!” the police sergeant hissed again.

I opted for the army, to which my mum and my dad willingly consented. And in the car later, that Coldstream Guards officer told me, “You made the right choice, son. In the army you can kick the shit out of whoever you want, and you’ll never end up standing in the dock for it.”

I was in the Lilywhites until 1980. Then I transferred to 3 Para. Joined the SAS in ‘85. I saw a lot of different places and I killed a lot of different people. Don’t really see much point in elaborating on it now. The long and the short of it all was my official decommission in 1991.

Madden lit another cigarette, filled the electric kettle and switched it on again. Another gust of wind rattled the window. Wind always rattled the window and Madden always said he was going to fix it. He glanced at the yellowing curtains his mum had made all those years ago, and it called to mind the whirling sound her sewing machine had always made. Pencil was still leafing through
Penthouse
but his thoughts were elsewhere. Marlene had started showing, and he was wondering how life might be once the baby came. The kettle boiled, Madden filled the pot, and when I walked into the room, they both glanced at me questioningly.