Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

Toast. Number 12. Number 12, your toast’s done.’

Something was dripping into my coffee, staining it. The plipplipplip of raindrops from the overhanging greenery. I rubbed my chin, blood coursed and spouted. I stared into the steamed mirror with the Coca-Cola logo. A small shaving-nick was pumping out absurd quantities of very red blood. And this on a morning when I hadn’t shaved. I couldn’t accept the evidence of my own eyes. I took off my glasses to get a closer look. When I tried to stretch the sockets, achieve sharp focus, clear this milky softness, I succeeded in smearing more blood across my cheeks. Turning an everyday, slightly bemused, slightly weary expression into urban werewolf, cornered sex criminal. The Beast of the Marshes. They saw his glasses melt into his eyes .

At the high window, above Warrior Square, Kaporal shut one eye and then the other. The statue of Queen Victoria with the red traffic cone perched on her head slid left to right and back again. He was the director. The grey, sea-facing monarch looked like a Hobbit. Kaporal approved: surreal contrivances tempering anomie. This was the first time, in twenty years, that he’d lived in a room without a phone. A mobile. He had a TV but never switched it on. The view from the window was better than electricity. He had to believe that if he kept clear of the Old Town, the Stade, the beachfront winkle bars, arcades, clubs, he wouldn’t run into O’Driscoll, the Sleeman brothers or Phil Tock.

Basildon villains weren’t troubled by Mafia memories. They never crossed water: Southend, not Margate. Canvey before Sheppey. If they couldn’t sort it, pliers and industrial meat-mincer, within forty-eight hours of the original insult, the supposed absence of respect was history. ‘Me bruwer, ‘e wouldn’t hurt a sparrer.’ Maybe. Good news for Bill Oddie and the twitchers of Rainham Marshes. But Alby Sleeman, with the fat neck, musculature overdeveloped to the point of deformity, buttonhole eyes drilled into a snowman, had plenty of harm, discriminations of dentistry, on offer for those who badmouthed his family and associates. His sponsors. Alby was old school: not merely illiterate but anti-literate, books were suspect (school, Borstal, greenpaint office of psychiatric assessor). Writers were worse. He’d top the lot of them, mincing ponces. Grasses. Weasels who bent the truth, stole the words out of your mouth and twisted them.

Take that Kaporal. The geezer looked genuine when you met him, a face. Thick skin hanging on a skull that seemed to have shrunk overnight; scarlet earflaps (straps dangling from flying helmet), beaky snout poking through wet pastry. The scars, the wrong side of a shattered windscreen, were shallow and nonspecific, giving the appearance of a character who’d seen it all. And kept it to himself. Kaporal had the walk, shoulder roll, sucked-in belly. The man could put it away, no question. He knew the story. You could talk to him. It was only later, much later, you realised Mr K wasn’t on the nod, that bulge was a tape-recorder hidden under his shapeless jacket.

Kaporal used his contact with Alby’s little brother, Reo, to get into the back room with the CCTV monitors at Tuesdays. Reo was a throwback with a couple of O levels, he’d been to college (for a week). He ponced off Alby, was into martial arts, John Woo, David Carradine, harmless exotica: steroids, speed, girls from art school. Black stockings and too much mascara: Reo borrowed them when he could, to go clubbing down Hoxton. He was dangerous, hair trigger, as Kaporal realised, when Alby asked him, as the kind of favour he couldn’t refuse, to detach the boy from the posh bird who was leading him astray. Reo was losing it. Talking about employment, moving up west (to Poplar), living with the bint, sharing a futon. Bad habits like books were sure to follow.

It was an awkward position in which Kaporal found himself. Alby was an arm-breaker who took his calling very seriously. Reo was a nasty little psycho (just smart enough to enjoy the panic chemicals he provoked in the women he slapped around). The student in question might , Kaporal couldn’t remember, have been one of his own mislaid fiancées. A photographer, definitely. He’d rather gone in for those, back in the Nineties. But now, the Sleeman tapes transcribed, he was on the verge of a real scoop: the M25 conspiracy theory.

Here’s how it went.

Maggie’s orbital motorway changed everything; amen, goodbye and good riddance to Ron and Reg. Adios neighbourhood heavies, blaggers of Bethnal Green. The old firms were good for nothing except heritage TV: suits and wreaths at Chingford Mount, gravel-voiced killers schmoozing the camera. How we butchered Jack, blasted the Axeman (heart of a lion, brain of a budgie), buried Ginger. Lady Thatcher’s superhighway dried those crocodile tears. Instant access to everywhere: South Ockendon connected to rockstar Weybridge, dodgy Dartford to dormitory Radlett. New motorway and mobile phone: the perfect marriage. Leading, immediately, to rave culture, ecstasy franchises, the apotheosis of the humble doorman. Gold bars, laundered after a bullion robbery at Heathrow, funded pill manufacture and distribution in Essex. Chancers like Mickey O’Driscoll started with a pick and shovel, digging the road in Surrey, then moved to transporting smiley tablets in their Y-fronts (Basildon to Canning Town), hauling human landfill (Kurds and Afghans in sealed containers). Onwards and upwards to respectable middle-management: waste distribution (small fleets dumping black bags on Rainham Marshes). Nouveaux businessmen and chemical entrepreneurs of Tower Hamlets, Deptford and the Old Kent Road, transplanted themselves into the suburbs, crossed the motorway: all roads led to the Epping Country Club. Gay TV comics, footballers, bodybuilders, ponytails who fronted lap-dancing establishments, celebrity cooks and page-3 crumpet. Muscle: on the piss. Larging it. Hawaiian shirt, medallion, clenched fist, bottle. Eyes, all pupil, flaring red in the photoflash as someone (Kaporal) frames the group, thick arms around temporary best mate’s shoulder, the ghosted memoir.

Only a ghost would want to remember what Kaporal knew, what he had found out. Every story, every crime, every unsolved hit (used-car dealers, video distributors) played back to one man: Mr Mocatta. Non-playing golfer, Freemason, property developer. Mocatta was working his way downriver. ‘Thames Gateway’, the politicians called it (formerly: Grays, West Tilbury, Greenhithe, Northfleet). The last wilderness. Like a Brazilian robber baron, Mocatta was clearing the jungle; his minions taking on local labour to spoil what was left of their undervalued inheritance.

Associates who crossed Mocatta disappeared. Blown away in the car park of the B & Q in Dartford. Buried in a shallow grave, bloody but breathing. Butchered at the foot of the stairs in a New Georgian estate on the fringes of Croydon.

The most recent biography of Mocatta (‘The inside story of Britain’s Public Enemy No. 1’) was unusual in not being written (gummed together) by James Morton. But what sent Kaporal diving for the porcelain halo was the list that vintage hack James Colvin (author of The Deep Fix — ‘Drugs took him into a nightmare world where logic ceased to exist’) appended to his final chapter. The obituary roll-call. Twenty-seven names with a timid rider: There is absolutely no suggestion on the part of the author that Declan Mocatta played any part whatsoever in the deaths of the following persons.’ The detonated Range Rover in Sydenham. The Bromley doorstep. The Brighton firebomb. The investigative journalist run down in Lewisham High Street. Mocatta was elsewhere. A charity bash with Denis Thatcher, Shirley Bassey at the Festival Hall, Whitstable Oyster Festival with Janet Street-Porter.