Revenger (6 page)

‘I’ve got to do some business at a pub tonight, as it happens – the Dutchman’s Head, down Clapham way. We can go there, get a couple of pints in first. You getting here by cab?’

‘Most likely, yeah.’

‘Tell the cabbie it’s just behind Clapham North station. What do you reckon, half seven?’

‘Sounds good to me.’

‘And boss, keep your eyes open, yeah? There’s always kids off the estates, playing at being gangbangers. They’re just a bunch of chavvy little toerags, but they’re all tooled up with knives and that, so watch yourself, yeah?’

‘Understood. I’ll see you at seven thirty. And if you get there before me, mine’s a pint of London Pride.’

8

BETWEEN THE SOUTH
London districts of Battersea Park and Vauxhall nine sets of elevated train tracks run side-by-side, like a coronary artery of wood and steel twenty-five feet above the streets. Many of the buildings on either side of the tracks are council blocks, erected after the Second World War to replace the Victorian terraces that had been flattened in the Blitz.

Donny Bakunin lived in a fourth-floor council flat in one of these blocks, though his name was not on any of the rental papers, nor the utility bills that lay unpaid on the mat beneath the front door. Bakunin was fifty-two years old. He had short, grey hair that ringed a bald spot that seemed to get wider by the day. He would never have admitted to being vain enough to have noticed, any more than he would have given any reason for the choice of his plain, metal-framed spectacles other than their extreme cheapness. His face was so lacking in flesh, the skin so tightly wrapped around his nose and cheeks and his surprisingly strong, forceful jaw that the contours of his skull were clearly visible beneath the skin. His body, too, was severely underweight.

Bakunin was no more interested in the pleasure of good food than he was in elegant clothes, comfortable furniture or agreeable surroundings. In his mind all were trivial fripperies. So were intimate relationships of anything more than the most fleeting, functional kind. All he cared about was his own personal faith of anarchic revolution. Much like the Americans who had invaded Iraq without the slightest idea of what they would do once they had conquered it, so Bakunin had spent his entire adult life plotting the downfall of capitalism and no time whatever in planning its replacement. It was destruction that interested him, not the creation of a better world.

Now, after more than thirty years of frustrating, even futile, activism he could finally see his end in sight. It was no longer a matter of insanely optimistic ideology to say that the West was falling apart. It was a simple statement of fact. And that, too, explained why he was not eating. He did not have time. There were so many better, more profoundly nourishing things to do.

A phone rang on the cheap MDF desk at which he was sitting, one of half a dozen prepaid mobiles lined up in front of him.

There were no introductions, and there was no social chit-chat. Just a voice that said, ‘You got everything sorted for tonight, yeah? Eight-fifteen, Netherton Street, SW4. Now remember: what we want is maximum damage. They can loot the shops, rip the shit out of the curry house and the Chinky takeaway, take all the money and gold from the cash converters, all that good stuff. But we’re not looking for bodies all over the place. GBH yes, murders, no. Capeesh?’

‘Yes,’ said Bakunin with an oddly clipped, middle-class accent.

‘And remember, tell your people that pub’s off-limits. No one goes near it.’

‘Already done it. How much time have we got before the police arrive?’

‘Plenty. They’ll all be at that rally down the O2 trying to keep order.’

‘How about media coverage?’

‘Same thing: all at the O2 as well. Just make your own video. Stick it on YouTube. Have someone tweeting live as you go in. That’ll get us all the attention we need.’

‘Right, yeah, we need to break the hegemony of state-controlled media and corporate mind-control. This is a much more authentic way of communicating to the masses.’

‘For fuck’s sake, Bakunin. Save us the political lecture. Just go and fuck some stuff up.’

Well, he was always happy to do that. In that respect, nothing had changed since the boyhood days when he’d still been called Donald Blantyre, and grown up in Tunbridge Wells, acquiring an impressive set of O- and A-Levels at Tunbridge Wells Grammar School for Boys, and a First in English literature at King’s College, Cambridge.

It was at that august, yet self-consciously radical seat of learning that the eighteen-year-old Blantyre first found an ideological voice with which to express the vast, poisonous well of indiscriminate fury that had lived within his apparently perfectly placid exterior for as long as he could remember. To his Tory-voting parents’ horrified surprise he’d returned from his first term at university in December 1978 with his hair dyed jet black and sprayed into short, scruffy spikes. He had, he informed them with a defiant snarl that begged for an argument, changed his name to Bakunin and joined the Socialist Workers’ Party, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and an anarcho-punk band called The Spartacist League. The Blantyres told one another that this was just a passing phase. They were wrong.

After leaving Cambridge Bakunin went into teaching, but unlike most members of his profession his ambition was not to give his pupils the best and most enriching education; quite the reverse, in fact. He wanted to ensure that they learned as little as possible. His aim – one shared by a small, but influential hard core of extremists – was to create an embittered underclass, whose members would be lacking in skills, motivation or self-discipline. They would be shut out of the labour market and bitterly aware that they had no
hope
and no future. This would fill them with hatred for anyone better off than themselves, and make them ripe for recruitment as the foot soldiers of the revolution.

In the past few years he had abandoned his teaching career for a life of full-time political agitation, and as the fabric of law and order had begun first to fray, then fall to shreds, Donny Bakunin had become a sort of twenty-first-century Fagin. His gangs of urchins were not chirpy Artful Dodgers and innocent Oliver Twists. They were precisely the kind of young men he had always intended to recruit: functionally illiterate and innumerate, unqualified for any well-paid job but greedy for the gaudiest designer brands, and only too happy to seize by force that which they could never hope to earn by hard work. They came from every one of the myriad ethnic groups of South London, their perennial hostilities temporarily set aside in favour of a joint assault on society. And when the calls went out from Bakunin’s flat to others just like it on a dozen nearby estates, the gangs began to gather and an army of the night was formed.

9

THE CROWDS STREAMING
out of the exit to North Greenwich underground station were overwhelmingly white, middle-aged, middle-income, middle-class. They looked on themselves as the law-abiding, hard-working, tax-paying backbone of the country, and they represented both the single biggest demographic group in the British population and the one that felt itself to be the most unjustly ignored and even despised by the political and media elite. As they made their way through the cold, persistent drizzle towards the O2 Arena they were greeted by giant advertising hoardings that screamed out, ‘THE ONLY WAY IS UPP!’ and ‘BRITAIN IS MOVING UPP IN THE WORLD!’ and ‘IT’S TIME TO GET UPP!’

In smaller letters, below these slogans, ran the words: ‘Vote for a new start. Vote United People’s Party.’

The only illustration on the posters was a photograph of a man’s face. He looked handsome, but not too handsome. His hair was as grey as George Clooney’s and his eyes could grab a camera lens as well as any movie star’s, but there was no attempt to hide the lines
around
his eyes, nor the slight thickening around his jaw and chin. And although he possessed a dazzling smile his mouth was now fixed in a look of grim determination. This was the face of a leader who took action, not an actor who performed. This was Mark Adams.

The route to the huge white dome was lined by policemen holding back protesters who were waving banners and placards that bore very different slogans to those on the posters: ‘DOWN WITH UPP!’ and ‘UNITE AGAINST FASCIST SCUM!’ The protesters were shouting the same slogan again and again, ‘Mark Adams, Little Hitler! . . . Mark Adams, Little Hitler!’

From time to time people would break away from the steady stream heading from the station to the O2 and start shouting back at the protesters. One group of about thirty shaven-headed men – all in the standard uniform of Doc Martens, jeans, white T-shirts and green nylon flight-jackets that had been associated with the Far Right for the past forty-odd years – had formed up on the other side of the police line, opposite the greatest concentration of their opponents. They started up a chant of ‘England for the English’, and then another, like a football crowd: ‘United!’
Clap-clap-clap
. ‘United!’
Clap-clap-clap
.

TV crews were gathering in the area, sensing that there was about to be serious trouble. Passers-by were holding up telephones to take photos and video footage. A black-suited man wearing a telephone headset was deep in conversation with the most senior police officer on the scene, a uniformed chief inspector. He was pointing at the skinheads and shouting angrily in a Geordie accent, ‘You’ve got to get them out of here.’

‘They’re your people. You tell them,’
the
Chief Inspector replied.

The suit was Adams’s campaign manager, Robbie Bell, and he was getting nervous. This would all be on Twitter within seconds and on the rolling TV news shows not long afterwards. ‘They’re not our people,’ he insisted. ‘They’re not the people we want. Move them!’

The Chief Inspector looked around. It was all his men could do simply to maintain the pedestrian corridor. ‘How, exactly?’ he asked.

Amidst all the noise and the steadily escalating atmosphere of tension and incipient violence one man walked quietly towards the main entrance. His name was Kieron Sproles and he was everything the face on the posters was not: inconspicuous, unimpressive and eminently forgettable. As he passed the group of threatening, shouting men he hunched his shoulders and walked a little faster. He did not like them at all. They reminded him of the boys who had bullied and beaten him at school. He could practically smell the sweat and testosterone they exuded, and the brute physicality of their presence reawakened feelings of helplessness and humiliation that had haunted him all his life.

Sproles was born to be one of nature’s victims, the runt of any litter he was in. He stood no more than five feet, five inches tall and was skinny with it. His eyes were a watery grey and their drabness was a match for his clothes – crumpled, charcoal woollen trousers, a maroon crew-neck jumper and a beige winter jacket with elasticated cuffs. He wore shoes like Cornish pasties. He carried no bag of any kind, so bypassed the security bag-check. His ticket was perfectly in order. Detailed examination of the kind he never seemed to attract might have revealed that he was nervous, edgy and perspiring heavily. But what would that have proved? The whole event was charged with an atmosphere of adrenalized over-excitement. Kieron Sproles was by no means alone in that.

Once he was inside, he made his way to the nearest men’s room and locked himself in a cubicle. Then he pulled his shirt out of his waistband, ran his right hand up the small of his back, and found the edge of the tape that was fixed right across it, in a broad strip from his lower ribs to his hips. Sproles worked his hand down between the tape and his skin, grimacing as the hairs on his back were tweaked. Almost immediately his fingers came into contact with the edge of the Glock semi-automatic pistol that was wedged against his body.

Sproles gradually loosened the tape until the gun could be
pulled
free. He looked at it, checked the magazine for the umpteenth time and then placed it in one of the pockets of his jacket.

Sproles pulled the tape off his back and crumpled it into a tight ball. He tucked his shirt back in, left the cubicle and stood at a basin to wash his hands. The reflection that looked back at him from the mirror appeared no different than usual. He did not look like an assassin, whatever an assassin looked like. He put the ball of tape into the bin where the paper towels went. Moments later he was out of the men’s room and making his way to his seat. It was located in the front row of the crowd, less than ten metres from the edge of the stage.

10

MANINDER SINGH PANU
had spent an hour that evening in a hospital ward, making his daily visit to his father Lakhbir’s hospital bed. Once an energetic, ambitious man, determined to improve his family’s place in the world, the older Panu now lay motionless and silent, still trapped in the coma that had held him since the night six months ago when he had been attacked by a gang of teenagers outside the Lion Market, the family’s twenty-four-hour store in Netherton Street. A flying brick had caught him on the side of his head. A fifteen-year-old boy called Jaden Crabbe had thrown it. Jaden had been coming to the shop since he was knee-high, buying sweets for himself or running errands for his mum. Now he was at one of the new high-security young offenders’ units the government had recently set up, the doctors were threatening to turn off Lakhbir Panu’s life support, and Maninder was ready to start fighting back.

He’d got together with some of the other local traders and restaurateurs to form the Netherton Street Self-Help Association. Since the law was no longer willing or able to guarantee their safety,
they
were going to have to do it themselves. They’d borrowed a motto from
The Three Musketeers
: ‘All for one and one for all.’ From now on, an attack on any one of their businesses would be treated like an attack on them all, and everyone would respond. The couple that ran the pub had a regular who knew some old-school villains who were no happier with the riots than anyone else. Proper professionals knocking off a posh jeweller’s shop or a Securicor van was one thing. Gobby little knobs going round wrecking local people’s lives, that was quite another. They’d handed out pump-action shotguns, guaranteed untraceable, to anyone that wanted them.