Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

Most of the violence took place at a coffee stall, in the street outside Raquels, after chucking-out time. Or in Barratt homes: victims jumping from windows, forcible injections, limbs amputated with electric carving-knives. (‘Another feller, they decided they were going to cut off his left hand and left foot. I don’t know why it was his left hand, maybe they were being kind. All because he made a remark about one of their girlfriends.’ Bernard O’Mahoney reminiscing. ‘There was a DJ, unfortunately called Bernie, and he was married to a girl and they separated and he kept pestering the ex-wife who was now going with another feller, and they told him to leave her alone. “You’re separated, just let it be.” But he wouldn’t. So they invited him to a flat in Ilford, strangled him and separated him from his head, his hands and his feet. They cut his head, hands and feet off. They’ve never found his head, his hands and his feet. They dumped him, buried him.’)

Off-highway. On the marshes. Anywhere within easy reach of the A13. The Disney Corporation was supposed to be interested in the site, London’s last wilderness. Bill Oddie and the Twitchers, the Rainham ornithologists, fought the plan. The Ministry of Defence hoped to do a deal for £ 1.1 million. ‘Its destruction,’ said Oddie, ‘would have been like knocking down St Paul’s and building a multistorey car park.’ The marshes survive as big sky wetlands, much loved by avian migrants, scrap dealers, freelance morticians.

When the pressure was on — cops, journos, ripped-off confederates (all confederates) — O’Mahoney took to the road. Bristol, Birmingham, Liverpool. The coast. And always, above all, the A13 into the M25. (‘Three more of the firm’s couriers were taken out by police as they were on their way from Basildon to make a drop at a London club. They were stopped by the police at Purfleet. Each had a bag tucked inside his boxer shorts containing 100 ecstasy pills.’)

The place where we were standing, admiring John Whomes’s gantry at Junction 30, gave us an overview of spectacularly corrupted territory. Everyone wanted a piece of it: Lakeside developers, civil engineers, motorway missionaries, global pharmacists, smalltime pill hustlers, doormen deputed to bury heads and hands and feet.

The Essex police, in pursuit, used the motorway ramp as their top spot for pulling dubious vehicles.

‘The M25 is an asset for everybody,’ O’Mahoney said. ‘There is a stretch of elevated road at Thurrock which is a favourite for the police to arrest people on. I got arrested on there myself with a drug dealer — because when they pull you up on that side of the road, unless you’re prepared to jump sixty feet over the side, into a field, they know you’re not going anywhere. The M25 is useful for all sorts of people. Essex is surrounded by ports, motorways. Essex is well connected for getting stuff shifted around, do you know what I mean?’

I think, by now, we do. The story is visible in the scars on the landscape. The crossing of roads. Recurring vampire imagery. I’m never going to drive through Thurrock again without a garlic necklace.

O’Mahoney recalls a man named Darren Kerr.

Kerr had been in a telephone box in Purfleet when a car had pulled up. He had acid thrown in his face. Then he was bundled into the boot and dumped in Dagenham… He was blinded in one eye and the whole side of his face was a mass of angry scars. His injuries were so bad he had to undergo surgery in the specialist burns unit at Billericay Hospital… While recovering in hospital he was paid another visit. A man turned up dressed as a clown. He had Dracula teeth, a clown’s wig… and he was carrying a bunch of flowers… When he saw Darren he whipped away the plastic flowers to reveal a shotgun.

Life happens. First as gothic romance, then as dark comedy: plastic fangs and a sawn-off shotgun. I wasn’t sure that the meeting we’d arranged with Bernard O’Mahoney was a good idea. O’Mahoney followed by John Whomes. At a quiet railway station that looked over Rainham Marshes. Early on, Whomes thought O’Mahoney was implicated in the Rettenden killings. The former doorman, a business associate of Tony Tucker and Pat Tate, should have gone down instead of his brother Jack. O’Mahoney wasn’t the only one in the frame, the victims were about as popular as flesh-eating bugs; but the supposed ill-will between our potential interviewees gave the afternoon a certain edge.

Former villains (ghosted) never turn up unaccompanied for a meet with a journalist. If you can’t bring a minder (a witness), dress an unemployed relative as your driver (dark suit, white shirt, sunglasses). Lean on a mate. We’re talking status, respect. The media vermin (jumpy) will be mob handed. They’ll have cameras and tape-recorders. You need the reassurance, one of your own at your shoulder; a bent brief to give you the nod. To steer you away from self-incrimination.

We’re meeting at a station nobody uses in the day, but we’ve all arrived by car. The researcher who set this up, a man called John Sergeant, likes his grub. He doesn’t mind staying on the road for weeks, confirming conspiracies he’s dowsed on the Net, but he needs a burger in his hand, a pork pie, a packet of peanuts. Sergeant has shot off to locate a fast-food outlet in Rainham. I’m waiting, alone, on the steps outside the station.

A man in a dark shirt and black jacket is also hanging about. Tight, thinning hair. Ruddy complexion. Deepset eyes. Solid. The short coat is a leisurewear version of a donkey jacket; a nudge towards the haulage industry. You’d guess: former driver with his own fleet, three or four rigs, concerned about fuel tax. There are two small silver badges on his lapel.

‘Bernard O’Mahoney?’ It can’t be him, this person hasn’t brought a minder. Before he answers, he signals to a previously unnoticed partner (waiting in the motor). His son. A young lad. Inconspicuous, well behaved.

Mr O’Mahoney is civil, slightly reserved; he frowns and grins. He laughs readily, but not always in synch with circumstance. You’d say, not having read the book: decent fellow, family man. When Sergeant skids in, elbow on wheel, bun in mouth, O’Mahoney cheers up. ‘I know you from somewhere.’

Everybody does. Sergeant has that kind of face, reassuring; wide smile, genuine sympathy for the person he’s interrogating. They know that he knows the story, all of it, no point in holding anything back. Sergeant is the best kind of spoiled priest, a confessor in a leather jacket. An On the Waterfront hybrid of pre-inflatable Brando and Karl Maiden. He’s a shape-shifter. Put him one-to-one with a Basildon hardman, up against the perimeter fence of a station car park, and he slouches, uses his hands like a New Jersey mafioso. He leans in, narrows his eyes against the sun. Turn him loose on a speedfreak conspiracy theorist in Lakeside and he’ll rap, nod, lick his lips — and be invited to the next monster rave at North Woolwich. Have him debate landfill scams with a Green Peace flake and he’ll radiate concern, grow invisible tattoos and talk very, very slowly in a stage whisper. He’ll lisp on demand.

We drive in two cars, over the railway line, through caverns of brightly coloured containers, under the A13, past breakers’ yards and out on to the marshes. Unlisted, this is one of Europe’s great roads. Drainage channel on one side, landfill on the other. Filthy lorries, trucks, vans trying to shove you into the ditch. A stench of unbelievable complexity: necrotic, polluted, maggoty, piscine. Magnificent. London, animal vegetable and mineral, rotting in the ground.

We pull up at the gates of the landfill site. Motorway. Bridge. River. Scrawny crows in a dead tree. A phone kiosk. A location so resonant that you’ve already been there, without knowing it, in dramas about autopsy detectives in unbuttoned Byronic overcoats.