The Vengeance Man (20 page)

Brixton

The mugging gangs weren't quite as easy to spot as I thought. 

Over a long lunch break next day I took one of the firm's Q cars down to Atlantic Road and parked up for a preliminary reconnaissance. Sitting in the car looking down Railton Road was like looking at any other High Street; a bustling, busy press of pedestrians scuttled and pushed and shopped, weaving in and out of the dense traffic. While there were lots of idle youths hanging around, they didn’t look any different from the usual bunch of truants, layabouts, hoodies and wasters who make up the products of our educational system. Most of them were over-weight loudmouths and show-offs, anyway. But after a while a pattern became clear. Either slowly cruising through the throng or too-casually propped against doorways, there little knots of two or three youths who began to stand out. Girls too. I waited for an hour before leaving but the tight little groups didn't alter, merely cruised up and down or remained lazily watching.

The phrase 'loitering with intent' didn't begin to describe their relaxed menace. I was reminded of shark swimming idly through and around busy schools of fish that seem to ignore their dangerous hunters but watch them just the same.

On my way back, I doubled through the back streets. Here there were no crowds, but occasionally the same uninterested, bored groups of youths hung around, usually with one or two loud mouthed ladettes in attendance, egging them on. All watched my car's passing with unconcealed calculation. It wasn't an area I'd have liked to walk alone at night in a smart suit with a Rolex on my wrist. Assuming I could ever afford one.

That evening I went to the stories on the internet and began to select my targets. The gutter trash I was most interested in seemed to work the area between Brixton, Camberwell and Lewisham, and the worst ones were not only dangerous but mindlessly vicious with it too. There was one particular little gang who seemed to be the nastiest group, and the newspapers gave good descriptions of both their appearance and their methods. By the time I had finished putting it all together I was surprised that the police hadn't had better results. It was easy enough to highlight and describe the three ring leaders, even from published material. They would be recognisable to any copper on the beat – if today’s trendy police bothered with such realistic solutions. They’d all got cautions, ASBOs and God knows how many inches of newspaper coverage, even if the press couldn’t name them, as minors. Little darlings…..

This particular team seemed to be led by a tall coffee
-
coloured youth on roller skates, with some kind of tribal scars, wearing a grey track suit. Tall and nasty. The middle member was bullet headed and had a tattoo on his neck, with a round sallow face and prominent lips, while the third one was a white girl who had worn bright red trainers on all four reported crimes.

The attacks had
grown
progre
s
sively
worse
. Once they’d gravitated from beating up Pakistani shopkeepers and stealing from the local shops, they’d moved on to bigger things. The first  had been a bag snatch from behind on a pensioner, accompanied by a heavy blow to the kidneys that had put the old dear into hospital for a month. She’d died in hospital two months later. Three kids, one tall, grey track suit, roller skates, one with red trainers were blamed.  The second attack was
by a bigger gang,
accompanied by a broken bottle waved in a toddler's face as a mother and her two under fives were held up for a week's housekeeping by what sounded like a pack of wild animals. Two of the boys had then a gang bang up the alley with the mother, while the girl laughed and kept watch with the rest of the gang. I shook my head in disbelief.  The mother had managed to give a good description of the three ringleaders, and the police had hauled them in. The three kids the Met dragged in had been fourteen, fifteen and sixteen, and they weren't admitting anything. You could sense the frustration of the police spokesman. I found myself asking whatever happened to DNA testing.

Four days later the gang had struck again. A seventeen year old black mother pushing a pram had been seized from behind and her baby threatened in his pram with a broken bottle. She'd handed over her bag then, but they'd still gashed the baby's legs. The great British press hadn't like that. The anguished mother remembered the youth with the tribal scars only too well. He'd used the bottle. Most of all she remembered the girl and the tattoo. “I couldn’t believe it,” she’d repeated over and over. “They must have been on drugs…they were out of it. The girl was like an animal….”

A week later the trio had pulled their nastiest stunt. They'd attacked another mother and baby who were accompanying their grandmother to a post office. After grabbing the women's bags, some kind of savage frenzy seemed to have gripped the gang. They'd squirted bleach into the baby's face, blinding it in one eye for life and then slashed the mother and grandmother with a bottle and knife. As an ugly, vicious, stupid crime, it was as nasty and pointless as you could imagine.  The newspapers were full of it, and the police hauled in the same three juveniles they'd interviewed last time, but, like Brer Rabbit, no-one knew nuffin’. Some local lawyer had screamed
harassment
, and the police had backed off, smartish.  A neighbour who offered to help the
police was att
a
cked in the
street
and had her car trashed and her flat set on fire. Suddenly no-one could help.  Certainly not the police. They talked, somewhat pathetically, of stepping up their efforts in the area.

"What kind of people are we?" wailed the
SUN
.  But that hadn't caught the muggers either, so we still didn't know what sort of people we were all supposed to be. It would need more than a few extra
police
Panda car patrols and plaintive
wails from the popular press to nail hoods like the little wild animals I had my eye on. What was needed, I thought grimly as I read the press stories, was something more positive altogether; a little bit of what the Americans call 'affirmative action'.

I pored over a map of the area and plotted the attacks precisely. They were all close together and in a straight line. In two of the four attacks, the gang had fled east, downhill towards a parallel road that drained a series of gloomy, run-down avenues with decaying Victorian villas. I drew the escape lines and thought hard. Then I drew a tight circle on the map: they had to come from within that patch.
 
The next chance I got, I took the car and took a prowl around the area. It was a mugger's paradise all right. I parked at the junction of two of the decaying roads and watched. I soon knew I'd been spotted. A grubby curtain twitched on the house opposite; the house alongside couldn't twitch its curtains - they had nailed up sacking at their windows. There I sat for hour after hour, until dusk fell and the street lamps gleamed, making the rubbish strewn streets sinister and Dickensian.

During the day I had seen few people; just shoppers laden with plastic bags, or school kids. As the darkness settled, I spotted grey shapes flitting down the drab avenue. Raucous bellows of laughter wafted back. The boyos had emerged for their evening's fun. Through the image intensifier I'd 'borrowed' from the firm, I studied them: four schoolboys, not more than fifteen, off  searching for mischief. A couple of girls. Drinking lager from a can and throwing down a bottle in the street to shatter in the gutter. Shrieks of laughter and a
fog of
obscenities
hung in
the air. No sign of my three baddies though. With a grunt of disappointment, I let them go.

I cruised the whole area that evening, stopping at dimly lit corners to study the shadows. I saw the occasional
group in shimmery electronic
green through the I.I. binoculars - but never my bunch.

I kept it up for seventeen consecutive evenings.  I never used my own car. I knew I’d be logged on the local CCTV.  Most evenings I used a hire car. To the accompaniment of  almost all my best baroque music, I saw absolutely nothing. Oh sure, I saw tarts, and pimps and druggies. I saw couples screwing up the alley ways, even a goat in a garden and once an enraged drunk with his trousers round his ankles
unsuccessfully
chasing his woman up the street, waving what looked like a genuine butcher's cleaver. I tell you, as street theatre, the backstreets of South London are an education. 

But of my special little group of nasties, I saw not a hair. Maybe they’d given up. Maybe they were all at home watching the telly. After two weeks I reckoned I knew as much about German baroque as I could reasonably take in, and enough about the area as the local beat policeman;  but I still hadn't found my muggers.

To add insult to my own vain searching, they struck again.  On the morning of my last day the gang attacked an elderly man, clubbed him to the ground and ran off with his wallet containing eleven pounds. The fall, and the kicking they gave him, broke his hip, his nose, two ribs and ripped off half an ear. But he was an old naval pensioner who had been on the Arctic convoys, and he was tough enough to tell the police that he had broken his stick on one of his assailants who had been a girl wearing red trainers, and that another had been on roller skates and wearing a grey track suit. The rest had fled.  It was my three all right.  Again, the police hauled them in, and again the three had alibis.

I studied the map again, and tried to think clearly. The attack was slightly to the north of the line I had originally drawn. Then I double checked all the times of the attacks. I was an idiot. They had all taken place before noon. Whatever it was that brought my three beauties together was a thing of the morning.  That's when I'd find them.

*
             
*
             
*

Getting a weekday morning off wasn't easy.  Eventually I was able to get away on a delivery run to a garage in Croydon that fronted up for our Security Division.  We had to collect a van that they had been rigging up on a contract for the Security Service. As the deal was so sensitive, I offered to drive it back to the Box's delivery address, much to Mallalieu's relief. He hadn't wanted to give it to a Bull Pen man, but it was too sensitive a job really to farm it out to one of the drivers. I muttered something about 'keeping my hand in', and next morning took off for the delights of South London.

Once I'd collected the van, I phoned the Box's
address,
and told
them I'd be delivering it later than planned. They didn't mind. Then I moved into what I had begun to think of as 'my patch'.

It was a dull day and the pavements had the oily sheen of last night's rain, littered with broken glass, beer cans and old hamburger boxes. I started out by driving every street, looking for a good place to park. I wanted to see as much of the area as possible in the few hours I had. By the time I'd found a good pitch it was after ten o'clock.

An hour's fruitless wait didn't improve my temper, although it gave me the chance to try out the van's fittings in the back. It had a superb comms fit, good observation devices, including remoted periscopic binoculars and even a rest bunk for the weary surveillance operator who'd seen it all. Box 500 were certainly getting their money's worth. Countering terrorism was obviously making good business for the Security Service’s budget.

At eleven I drifted round the area again, this time very slowly. Again I saw nothing. I began to despair. It really was like looking for a needle in a haystack. By ten past twelve I admitted defeat. The whole idea was stupid anyway, and my chances of finding my three muggers almost nil with police resources or talking to the local people, neither of which I dared to do.   I folded my map one last time, and turned the ignition key, ready to leave.

There they were.

About thirty metres away, standing close together in a little knot at the bottom of some crumbling brick steps. About five young people: track suits, trainer; hoods. They huddled together conspiratorially, the tall one making emphatic gestures with his hands.  He was standing firmly in baseball boots, without a roller skate in sight, but the one with the back to me was wearing what looked like expensive red trainers. That would be the ladette. Another one looked small and sallow, and seemed to have a mark on his neck. He kept glancing up and down the dingy street. It had to be them.

I held my breath and moved as carefully as I could into the back of the van. I left the velvet curtain slightly apart to watch them as I scrabbled with the directional microphone and the observation fittings.  Fortunately the electronics were still warm from my earlier fiddling, and the shotgun microphone hissed gently in my ears as it traversed smoothly inside the false roof.  I aimed the marker at the group, pulling the earphones on with one hand at the same time. Nothing but clicks and bangs and static came through at first, and I swung the mike control sharply to sweep across the three. Suddenly they boomed in, then faded. I returned to the strongest signal. The voices were clear and urgent.

" ... ah doan' care. We gotta do it rearl cairful or we gonna get ourselves cot ..." It was the grey topped leader haranguing the one with the white one with red shoes.

"I don' give a shit." The female voice was nasal South London.  "We're  always takin' a risk, but we ain' nevah bin cort, we're  too fast. I'm still sain', go for sumfin' decent. The post office'll have lotsa money...  Anyway, no-one can do nuffin abart us…"