Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

Bernard O’Mahoney is uninterested, incapable of registering surprise. The immediate arrival of a carload of security uniforms is another non-event: O’Mahoney is a proscribed exile. ‘I left Essex because the police banned me from every licensed premises in Basildon. They banned me from the Festival Leisure Park (which includes McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, and the cinema). They put it in writing: I’m banned for life. They just said: “Take a hike.” ’

O’Mahoney’s career curve is the best account I’ve come across of M25 psychosis. He got his start working on the crew building the road, evolved into a courier and e-rep at the height of rave culture, and is now in landfill. Labourer, middle management, independent businessman. The living embodiment of the public/private partnership.

I’ve always been involved in the haulage industry. Although I don’t fear members of the underworld who are after me, what I did in those days might worry your readers — ’cause I actually helped build the M25. I worked on it in the south-eastern section when it was first being built. There was a lot of car dealers and scrap dealers and the like. They got involved with drugs in Essex, because they had lots of money they wanted to wash. You know, they deal a lot in cash. There’s a lot of money sloshing around that’s not accountable. You know what I mean?

Thatcher’s orbital motorway was welcomed by ambitious villains. Access to the wide world. Avoid the Thurrock ramp and it was peachy. ‘Stolen lorryload of coffee beans to Liverpool for a relative of deceased train robber Buster Edwards… Down to Bristol, doing debts. Bash people up in Birmingham. We were always on the move. The more people you reach, the more money you make. Know what I mean?’

Landfill was a sound career move. A lot of the boys were working the old golf course number. A few of them made enough to retire to Spain, play charity events with Sean Connery.

‘Every landfill site in the country is dodgy. Except for the one I work on, obviously. The haulage I’m involved with is not running parcels up and down the country, it’s tipper lorries which run muck or waste to landfill sites. There’ll always be a problem with landfill because you see lorries running in and out, full of black bin liners. Nobody knows what’s in the bin liners and nobody’s going to take the trouble of going through them. So, inevitably, you will get all sorts of things ending up on the tips. Including people. Particularly in this area.’

There is no break in the stream of lorries, rattling and lurching over the marsh road. Behind the security gate is an apocalyptic landscape; shifting dunes of rubbish. With more being added every minute. That’s why the crows maintain their surveillance. That’s why flocks of gulls turn an escarpment of black bags into a snowfield.

From the summit of the new mountain range, hot landfill, you can gaze back on Dagenham; what’s left of the Ford empire. Bad management, race tension, outdated work practices. The holding pens, which once gleamed with multiples, waiting to be taken away by road and rail, are deserted. Lakes of petrol in Purfleet and nothing to use it on. Dagenham is the off-highway destination at which nobody wants to stop. A picturesque mess to drive through.

Satellite operations keep the docks ticking over. You can buy a container unit for your garden. Or you could go looking for your missing Peugeot 505. All over London, Islington to Dulwich, Peugeot 505s were vanishing: an unauthorised recall. When police, acting on a tip, swooped on a breakers’ yard in Dagenham, they discovered the disassembled sections of numerous Peugeot family cars. Cars with a nickname: the ‘African taxi’. Cars that had been ‘labelled and packed like sardines’ were waiting on two vast articulated trailers. Three hundred and fifty-five Peugeots, taken without permission, were ready to be shipped out to Zambia — where there is an insatiable lust for the brand. The immortality of the Zambian taxi, which can carry up to seven people in relative comfort, is guaranteed by a constant supply of spare parts exported from the East London deadlands.

As the journalist David Williams, investigating this trade, wrote: ‘If you look at any TV news bulletin from Sierra Leone or Zimbabwe, you will see these veterans of suburban commuter runs belting along dusty pot-holed streets, sometimes chauffeuring a passenger, sometimes overcrowded with local militia.’

So Dagenham is doing its bit for the export trade. Behind padlocked gates, DI Stephen Balding discovered ‘the biggest Peugeot flatpack in the world’. The machine-cannibalism operation kept the spirit of enterprise alive, using docks that the Ford Motor Company no longer required. That’s the nature of twenty-first-century capitalism, small and smart, lean and mean: steal to order. Target the Third World. Just like Thatcher and Ken Clarke, roving ambassadors of the carcinogenic combines, peddling fags from a suitcase to poverty-stricken backwaters. Who aren’t too fussy about planning permission for those nice new factories. Just like the moralist of the right, Dr Roger Scruton, paid a retainer to place pro-smoking propaganda in his broadsheet polemics.

John Whomes shows a lot of arm. You can’t read his eyes behind the tinted glasses. The head is razored. But the hands are articulate. An open-necked polo shirt. He’s happy to see O’Mahoney, their differences have been forgotten. They both put the Range Rover killings down to the Canning Town mob. They are cynical about the operations of the police and the judiciary. They know how the world works. But Whomes is determined that his brother’s story will be told: it’s a miscarriage of justice — and occupying a gantry on the M25 was the best way of getting media attention. CCTV road footage of jams, accidents, could be overlaid with a message: JACK WHOMES. INNOCENT OF RETTENDEN MURDERS.

Everything comes back to the motorway. Hauliers, landfill cowboys, minicabbers, doormen: they all have an M25 story, they all know Kenny Noye.

Whomes and O’Mahoney start yarning. The Rettenden Murders and the road-rage stabbing at the Swanley Interchange, myths of the road, are linked. Nothing was ever as simple as the black and white versions the tabloids peddled. Kenny Noye’s victim, the lad in the van, Stephen Cameron — according to O’Mahoney — was often seen at Raquels in Basildon. ‘The feller who died was coming back to us quite regularly. The club where Leah Betts’s pill was obtained. His girl friend is from the Grays area. I thought he was a bit leery, to be honest.’

The stabbing at the roadside, O’Mahoney insisted, was ‘an everyday thing on the M25’. The necessary consequence of travelling in circles in overheated metal pods. ‘People are screaming, jumping and boiling. He’s jumped out and Noye’s jumped out and Noye’s not a spring chicken and he’s probably getting a hiding, know what I mean? And unfortunately he lashed out with a knife, but he’s paying the price now, ain’t he? The papers and the police made a meal of it. No disrespect to the kid who’s dead, but if it was anyone else but Noye I doubt if it would have made the papers.’

Did O’Mahoney know Noye?

I only met Noye twice. Noye was a very good friend of Pat Tate, he met Pat in prison. Pat was working in the gym and Kenny had a fair bit of money he wanted to invest because he had too much around him at the time, gold.

Pat came out of prison and wanted a bit of capital to get going again and he asked Kenny for thirty grand, which isn’t a lot for Kenny. I went down with Pat to meet Ken in a pub near the raceway in Kent, Brands Hatch. He gave Pat the thirty grand and I think Pat never paid him back, true to form. Noye seemed an all right feller to me.

A mild, warm afternoon. An empty car park. Overlooking the A13. Starlings mass on telegraph wires. Whomes and O’Mahoney are in total agreement: the Rettenden killings, as described, are a convenient fiction.