Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

Heady drenches infect the woods. Martin and Vivi Gale (in their tea-stall) are ‘plagued by predatory homosexuals’. Squelchy paths are strewn with hardcore magazines. It’s too convenient: lay-bys on either side of the A3, resinous paths, filtered light; a rapid escape route to the M25 (the ribbon connecting nowhere with everywhere).

A lorry driver called David Smith picked up Amanda Walker, a known prostitute, in Paddington. He drove her to Wisley, where he ‘mummified’ her with cling-film, before raping her. While she was still alive, he stuffed her mouth with leaves. And then he stabbed her. Her naked body was recovered from a shallow grave, found within yards of the Royal Horticultural Society gardens.

Smith, who is thought to have used the motorway system to identify and secure women for ritualistic sexual practices, was a Wisley regular. He liked to see what other couples got up to in their cars. An enterprising white-van owner used to charge drifters for watching while he had sex with underage girls. And, being a favoured resort for cruising men, the park also attracted homophobe gangs.

A vicious attack on a couple in a parked car in a quiet Surrey lane (an Austin Princess with a brown top) launched the night of violence that resulted in the unsafe conviction of the men known as the ‘M25 Three’. One of the victims, Peter Hurburgh, kicked and beaten (by machete), drenched in petrol, died. The other, Alun Ely, survived: to offer a number of contradictory accounts of his ordeal.

The orbital motorway was still a novelty, operative for two years, when the assault, burglary and murder occurred in December 1988. The road solicited crime. The accused men lived in Sydenham, an easy-going culture of amateur drug dealing, car theft, fencing and serial fatherhood. It didn’t seem like crime, the life. It was what everybody did. Everybody lied, everybody informed. Everybody was fitted up. Short spells on the Isle of Sheppey got your head together.

The new motorway was a route into previously inaccessible territories; you could spin Surrey, explore Kent. The expedition for which the M25 Three went down began with the theft of a Triumph Sprite — abandoned when Alun Ely’s Austin Princess was commandeered. And so on, car for car, through Leatherhead and Oxted. When the police started to get heavy, the surviving motors were torched. None of the witnesses can remember their assailants: white becomes black, dreadlocks and long greasy hair are confused. Stories are subject to infinite revision, adjustments of time and place. The cars are never forgotten. A woman coming home late remarks the Union Flag logo on the Sprite. The pub musician at the White Hart, William ‘Budgie’ Robins, who vaguely noticed a gay man in white, paid far more attention to the motor in the car park. That yellow/brown combo, he reckoned, was ‘a bit special’.

With the advent of this bright new motorway, a support belt beneath South London’s sagging suburbs, criminal imagination was booted into a higher register. Street crims became upwardly mobile; they were soon thieving beyond their capacity to fence, dishing out grief where it was least appreciated. With substantial rewards from insurance companies and tabloids on the table, with the constabulary ready as ever to customise a fiction, the comfortable laissez-faire, live-and-let-live of the Sydenham, Catford, Croydon lowlife imploded.

Like a powerful magnetic field, the west/east pull of the M25 affected old alignments, the familiar runs towards Brighton and the coast. Narrative fractured. Verbals didn’t stand up. Confessions wouldn’t cohere. The motorway was loud with Chinese whispers. When dusk fell, villains took to their (borrowed-without-the-owner’s-consent) cars. On the cruise. Tooled up with hand guns, machetes, petrol cans, monkey wrenches.

Nothing in ‘The Case of the M25 Three’ makes sense. Alun Ely, who admitted in court to ‘careless handling of the truth’, drops off his girl friend and then drives aimlessly around Croydon for hours, down to a Fina petrol station on the Brighton road — before parking up for sex with Peter Hurburgh. A man walking a dog remembers the car but doesn’t know what day of the week it was. Girl friends of the accused men (Raphael Rowe, Michael Davis, Randolph Johnson) receive stolen jewellery and forget the donors. The grey sprawl of South London subtopia bleeds into Croydon: nothing is fixed, journeys overlap. Speed chilled with puff. None of the men packed into the stolen car wears a watch. Time is crosschecked by hallucinating a petrol tanker refuelling a set of red-and-green pumps in an oasis of yellow-white light, in the middle of nowhere.

Surrey declines to acknowledge these incursions. Surrey celebrates private estates, notable gardens, the E.M. Forster movie franchise. Bandits who motor through leafy lanes sussing properties, preying on deviants, wired to the eyeballs, don’t register. They are as invisible as scuttling things in the long grass of the central reservation. Landscape artists of the Highways Agency have made access tunnels for badgers, there is no human equivalent. Ratepayers see the M25 as a barrier to be defended, villains know it as a job opportunity.

The Whiteley Village golf course, unlike the striped sward on St George’s Hill, is in use. Early. Old chaps greet us with a wave. They’re happy to debate a path to carry us over the Mole, the A3, and into Cobham. THIS SPACE COULD BE PROMOTING YOUR COMPANY LOGO: IS the message on a green hydrant.

The Mole is reedy, nettles and willowherb and field pansies in profusion; there’s no way we can wade across, we hear traffic on the far side. A Pre-Raphaelite stream and a functional dual-carriageway running in parallel. A neat bridge with harp-shaped wings. A path that burrows under the road.

We pause, resting on the crash barrier, for the usual roadside photo session. Renchi abandons his sweater. Marc’s belly is rumbling; as a vegetarian he needs to graze at regular intervals. In several hours, hacking through estates, woodland, golf courses, roads and rivers, we haven’t seen anywhere to get a cup of tea. No cafés, no coffee stalls, not even a petrol station: a green desert. If we don’t find somewhere fast, Marc will keel over and posterity will be denied his Surrey pastoral portfolio.

The effect of the road, the A3 and its Cobham junction (with spiral-shaped cochlea and semicircular canals, a diagram of the inner ear), is to deafen pedestrians. The underpass sucks out country sounds and replaces them with traffic-stream percussion; blimps and creaks and soft bombs. Then, hitting sunlight, there is no sound. We’re in it, in the band — adjusting to speed, torn air, sticking fingers in our ears; we march, single file, through an unresolved, town-edge landscape. Development is on hold. We feel the volume displacement of power drills and JCBs, even when they’re not operative. Avenues of red cones, red-and-white detour boards, make walking difficult.

SAINSBURY’S THIS WAY.

The others aren’t convinced but I have a notion that you can eat in these places. We follow the arrow down a white fence that is just tall enough to mask the new estate (sand-coloured housing units with red tile roofs). Naked trees. CCTV masts. The superstore, demographics run through the computer, anticipates the coming, off-road expansion. The map is decorated with heaths and commons that aren’t common: pony-exercising paths, discretion suitable for American Community Schools. You walk these areas under sufferance, under observation.

Our breakfast is excellent and modestly priced, on a par with a transport caff. This is what Sainsbury’s has become: a place to which you can drive, to which you must drive. A warehouse in which to bulk buy (card-and-carry) foodstuffs that haven’t quite gone off. In Surrey, the picture-window superstore is also an all-day breakfast facility. They give you a numbered flag to place on your table, so that the eating area, when it’s busy, looks like a pitch-and-putt course. Nobody else has walked here, or come just for the breakfast. Fast food is a loss leader. Hugging the A3, this branch of Salisbury’s could outperform the Little Chef; a motorway pit stop attached to a larger than average impulse-shop. If you aren’t shopping, if you don’t have to do the consumerist assault course, the Cobham Sainsbury’s is an oasis of quiet conversation, unemphatic service, managed light. English hash-jocks have never been able to work the corporate grin of retail fundamentalism. ‘Have a nice day’, in their shipwrecked mouths, sounds like a threat. Employment, with its funny uniforms and patronising name badges, is a form of probation; a way of demonstrating that another small town, another strip of countryside, has been captured.