London Noir Read online

  This collection is comprised of works of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors’ imaginations. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Series concept by Tim McLoughlin and Johnny Temple

  London map by Sohrab Habibion

  Published by Akashic Books

  ©2006 Akashic Books

  ePUB ISBN-13: 978-1-936-07036-7

  ISBN-13: 978-1-888451-98-6

  ISBN-10: 1-888451-98-X

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2005934828

  All rights reserved

  Akashic Books

  PO Box 1456

  New York, NY 10009

  [email protected]

  www.akashicbooks.com

  ALSO IN THE AKASHIC NOIR SERIES:

  Brooklyn Noir, edited by Tim McLoughlin

  D.C. Noir, edited by George Pelecanos

  Manhattan Noir, edited by Lawrence Block

  Baltimore Noir, edited by Laura Lippman

  Dublin Noir, edited by Ken Bruen

  Chicago Noir, edited by Neal Pollack

  San Francisco Noir, edited by Peter Maravelis

  Brooklyn Noir 2: The Classics, edited by Tim McLoughlin

  Twin Cities Noir, edited by Julie Schaper & Steven Horwitz

  FORTHCOMING:

  Los Angeles Noir, edited by Denise Hamilton

  Wall Street Noir, edited by Peter Spiegelman

  Miami Noir, edited by Les Standiford

  Havana Noir, edited by Achy Obejas

  Bronx Noir, edited by S.J. Rozan

  New Orleans Noir, edited by Julie Smith

  Detroit Noir, edited by Eric Olsen & Chris Hocking

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  PART I: POLICE & THIEVES

  DESMOND BARRY Soho

  Backgammon

  KEN BRUEN Brixton

  Loaded

  STEWART HOME Ladbroke Grove

  Rigor Mortis

  BARRY ADAMSON Maida Hill

  Maida Hell

  PART II: I FOUGHT THE LAW

  MICHAEL WARD Mayfair

  I Fought the Lawyer

  SYLVIE SIMMONS Kentish Town

  I Hate His Fingers

  DAN BENNETT Clissold Park

  Park Rites

  CATHI UNSWORTH King’s Cross

  Trouble Is a Lonesome Town

  MAX DÉCHARNÉ King’s Road

  Chelsea Three, Scotland Yard Nil

  PART III: GUNS ON THE ROOF

  MARTYN WAITES Dagenham

  Love

  JOOLZ DENBY Bradford

  Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

  JOHN WILLIAMS New Cross

  New Rose

  JERRY SYKES Camden Town

  Penguin Island

  PART IV: LONDON CALLING

  MARK PILKINGTON Dalston

  She’ll Ride a White Horse

  JOE MCNALLY Elephant & Castle

  South

  PATRICK MCCABE Aldgate

  Who Do You Know in Heaven?

  KEN HOLLINGS Canary Wharf

  Betamax

  Acknowledgments

  About the Contributors

  Sic gorgiamus illos subiectatos

  INTRODUCTION

  CRIME AND ESTABLISHMENT

  What you have in your hands is not a collection of crime stories set in London. This is rather a collection of crime stories that are London. The things that happen within these pages would not be unfamiliar to those who have come before to render the city’s psyche in words, art, music, theater, or magic. It’s not that this was the city of William Blake, Charles Dickens, Dr. Johnson, Samuel Pepys, Daniel Dafoe, Oscar Wilde, George Orwell, Dylan Thomas, Francis Bacon, Joe Strummer, or Johnny Rotten. It’s that it still very much is.

  London needs illumination from its own darkness, from its perpetual cycle of crimes. This is also the city of Newgate Prison, Bedlam, Amen Corner, Tyburn Cross, the London Monster, Spring-heeled Jack, Jack the Ripper, Jack the Hat, the Blind Beggar, the Baltic Exchange, and 10 Rillington Place. The most famous detective in the world, Sherlock Holmes, stepped out of the smog of a London night, shouted, “The game’s afoot!” and conspired to send his creator Arthur Conan Doyle, along with every actor who tried to make him flesh, mad.

  London always extracts its price.

  The keys to the city are contained in a line you’ll find in Patrick McCabe’s story “Who Do You Know in Heaven?” “Consciousness,” his know-it-all café-owner spouts, “prompts you to hypothesize that the story you’re creating from a given set of memories is a consistent history, justified by a consistent narrative voice …”

  London’s stories seep out of its walls, rise up from the foundations laid by the Romans two thousand years ago, up through its sewers, buried rivers, and tube tunnels, and out through the pavements. They wind their way through twisting alleyways that formed themselves so long ago, before the order of the grid system could be placed upon them. They whisper their secrets through the marketplaces where every language on earth is and has been spoken; every measure of trade haggled over, from fruit and veg to children’s lives. They drift up at night from the currents of Old Father Thames, through the temples of commerce that form the Square Mile, across the halls of Parliament, the Cathedrals laid by Norman kings, the tunnels dug by Victorian engineers.

  Listen to London for long enough and the city will impart in you your own notion; your own form of navigation through the maps laid down over centuries; your own heart’s topography of the metropolis. Your soul blends with the walls and pavements, the tunnels and spires, the street markets and the stock exchanges. But is that notion really your own, or has the suggestion been planted, the story already written long ago?

  The stories in this collection form maps of the city you will not find in the A-Z. Already, the city has exerted its collective subconscious over this creation without the authors being aware of it, so that the bohemian West, the iconic East, the melancholy North, and the wild South are linked. By lines of songs from the same jukebox; angles in the heads of priests, coppers, witchdoctors, lawyers, pornographers, psychopaths, con men, and terrorists; even the trajectory of a skein of wild geese.

  Every kind of crime has been committed here; most of them never solved. London is responsible for all of them. London confuses the mind: Pat McCabe’s IRA man comes to the mainland on a mission and gets seduced by a black-and-white photo of a London only felt in his blood, of a haunted ’40s dancehall. Jerry Sykes’s lonely pensioner dreams of ’50s Camden Town even as he is mugged by its twenty-first-century offspring. Sylvie Simmons’s psychiatrist talks to a ventriloquist’s doll. Joe McNally sees London’s ectoplasm form into grotesque, mythological shapes as he traverses the labyrinth of Elephant & Castle.

  Some can see through the veils more clearly than others. For Joolz Denby, the Great Wen is an even Greater Con, a gray eternity without a soul, beckoning you into its clip-joint belly for more addictions you can never beat, more itches you can never scratch. For Barry Adamson’s Father Donaghue, the Maida Hill community of losers and bruisers he serves are all souls worth fighting for, so that he may even redeem his own. But for Stewart Home’s dead-eyed policeman, the souls of the neighboring parish of Ladbroke Grove are mere commodities, investments for his pension scheme.

  London favors the entrepreneur. London thrives on the violence it incites. London built its Parliament on a bramble-riddled mire known as Thorney Island a thousand years ago. It is policed by villains, ministered to by the damned, carved up by Masonic market traders.

  London’s perennial themes rise to the surface in relentless waves. Martyn Waites stirs up the mob mentality in the mean
estates of Dagenham, the traditional dumping ground of the city’s poor, manipulated and united by self-destructive hatred. Daniel Bennett places a Ripper in Hackney’s Clissold Park, just slightly north of his old stomping grounds. The city’s most infamous bogeyman takes on a new shape here, no longer an eminent Victorian surgeon or the wayward offspring of the Queen but a disturbed adolescent, pulsing with the red rage of the city’s demented heat. Mark Pilkington gets down among the traders of lost souls to record human trafficking and child sacrifice in Dalston, where John Dee reincarnates himself as a Nigerian sangoma, in the opposite end of the city from where he started in the reign of Elizabeth I. Michael Ward reminds us of the Establishment, those bewigged members of the Temple, and the closet of the Cabinet: They Who Are Really Pulling the Strings, and always have been.

  London’s Burning, London Calling, Waterloo Sunset, the Guns of Brixton. London pulses to the music of the world, each district retelling its own folk legends through bhangra, reggae, ska, blues, jazz, fado, flamenco, electronica, hip hop, punk—pick your own soundtrack. John Williams’s ageing punk rocker finds the man he could have been, lying wasted and dribbling at a gig in a New Cross bar. Like the lines from a song, the past comes back to haunt Desmond Barry’s would-be filmmaker, through a wormhole in time and out in the middle of Soho.

  London is a siren, calling you to the rocks of your own destruction, taunting and teasing and offering you a flash of its flesh as you teeter drunkenly in the doorway. Ken Bruen’s gangster finds her on a Brixton dancefloor. My own creation, private eye Dougie, tries to spirit her out of the city through the portal of King’s Cross.

  That London has survived so long comes down to its foundation in the root of all evil. The river, as the Romans knew, meant the riches of the world could be shipped directly to its ravenous mouth. London has controlled the world for many of the years of its existence. London is the Grand Wizard. It’s no coincidence that Ken Hollings writes a future projection for the city from the gleaming towers of Canary Wharf, the monument to capitalism laid down on the ashes of the working class East End by the Wicked Witch of Westminster, Margaret Thatcher.

  So again, this is not really a collection of crime stories. This is a compass for the reader to chart their own path through the dark streets of London, to take whatever part chimes most closely with their soul and use it as a talisman.

  London is shadows and fog. London is haunted. London is the definitive noir.

  Cathi Unsworth

  May 2006

  London

  PART I

  Police & Thieves

  BACKGAMMON

  BY DESMOND BARRY

  Soho

  At three o’clock, on Thursday, September 5, I was supposed to be at Soho House on Greek Street to meet with Jon Powell, the film director. Jon was interested in a script I’d written called Rough House about nasty goings-on in Soho in the late ’70s. He’d had a top-ten box office success with his last film, Anxiety—a horror flick with reality TV overtones—so sitting on the tube train from Kilburn down to Piccadilly Circus, I don’t mind admitting that I was well gassed up and a bit nervous because I really wanted it all to go well. The thing is, I had to eat something fast, both to silence the juices gurgling away in my stomach and to deal with the lack of blood sugar making me more nervous and edgy by the second. I was lucky. I still had an hour and a half to kill before the meeting, and the Ristorante Il Pollo, which serves the best lasagne in Soho, was close to the corner of Greek Street where the meeting would take place. The Pollo was definitely going to be my first stop.

  I jostled up the packed escalator of the tube station, pushed my way up the stairs, and I was out onto the Dilly—Eros, lights, action. I dodged a couple of taxis and ducked up Great Windmill Street. It could have been a scene from the film script: beautiful girls on the doors of the strip joints, all with flashes of cleavage, coy smiles, or lewd words to tempt me inside. But I wasn’t biting, was I? I had work to do. I turned right onto Brewer Street and then jagged right and left onto Old Compton Street, where I got the eye from the pretty boys sitting at the tables of the cafés and leaning in the doorways of the hip gay boutiques. Everybody wants something in Soho. I wanted lasagne.

  I pushed through the glass door into Ristorante Il Pollo and breathed in the rich meat and tomato smells oozing out of the kitchen and the whiff of coffee from the Gaggia machine that roared behind the counter. The Pollo had been selling the same lasagne in steel dishes for at least thirty years and probably longer, and I was really counting on that béchamel and meat sauce and a nice glass of wine to sort me out before the meeting with Jon. The waitress seated me at a little table in the front.

  That’s why I didn’t see Magsy at first. Not until after I’d dug my way through the crusty cheese and into the soft green pasta and scraped the brown and crispy bits off the edge of the steel dish. It was a shock to see the old bastard come walking down between the booths from the back of the café. Twenty-six years ago. How did he happen to be in here right at this moment when I hadn’t seen him in twenty-six years? We had a bit of a history, me and Magsy, I got to admit. I pushed the steel dish back and smiled at him, but my shoulder muscles got tight and my knee started bouncing as if somewhere inside me I was all ready to run for it. Like a lot of people who’d gone bald these days, Magsy had shaved his head

  But then there was that old Mickey-taking smirk on Magsy’s face when he saw me. He wasn’t a tall bloke, about 5'8 , still five inches taller than me though. He looked well enough off in his cord jacket, checked shirt, and jeans. I’d heard he’d gone to live in Spain after he’d come out of prison. Twenty-two years back that must have been. But he didn’t look at all tanned. He’d been through some real damage, I reckoned: the tiredness around the eyes, the deep wrinkles, the grayness of the skin of a longtime smoker.

  “What are you doing here?” he said.

  I got up from the table and I even gave him a hug. It was a bit stiff to tell the truth, but he still had that pleased-to-see-me grin on his face when we stepped back.

  “I got a meeting,” I said. “Business thing in about …” I jerked my sleeve so the watch showed on my wrist, “ten minutes.”

  “What business you in then?”

  “I’ll tell you about it later, if you like, if you gonna be around.”

  “Half past 4 in Steiner’s,” he said.

  “Right,” I said.

  Steiner’s, yeah. One of our old haunts.

  We came out of the Pollo and into the sunshine on Old Compton Street, walked the few yards to Greek Street in the glare, and then crossed the road to the shady opposite corner.

  “You working down here again?” I said.

  I hoped he wasn’t.

  “Nah, I live in Bridgwater now.”

  “Bridgwater?” I said. “What you doing in Soho then?”

  “Meeting Richie when he gets off his shift.”

  Richie was one of Magsy’s oldest mates, though I didn’t know him that well myself.

  “He still work here?” I said.

  “Yeah. Manager of about four Harmony shops.”

  “Corporate porno.”

  “Fully licensed and legit,” Magsy said. “New Labour, son. As long as it makes money, it’s all right. Liberal attitude, innit?”

  “Fair play,” I said.

  “So I will catch you in Steiner’s?” Magsy asked.

  “Yeah, right,” I said.

  He just walked off then. I watched him as he headed west. Weird that I ran into him in the Pollo after all those years. It gave me the wobblies a bit. But I checked my watch. I was bang on time for the meeting. I had to get Magsy out of my head for now. I rang the bell on the door of the club and then went up the stairs to meet Jon Powell.

  On the roof of Soho House, in the bright sunshine, over a couple of bottles of sparkling mineral water, the meeting went okay. Not great, but okay. It would appear that trying to get a film made is a process that requires a lot of patience. I told Jon that I wasn’t
sure how the producers who’d got the soft money for me to write the script planned on coming up with the hard cash to get this thing into production but they did have some serious coproduction interest. That’s filmspeak for a lot of hot air that might one day float a balloon. Jon said that he really liked the script and promised he would pass it on to someone he knew with Pierce Brosnan’s company who might well be interested in the project, and that Jon would do that as soon as he came back from the Toronto Film Festival and a trip to L.A. This was all very positive. But no one had, as yet, signed on the line, or was eating a bacon sandwich on the set of the first shoot. This was either a great way to make a living, or I was chasing a total mirage. Still, I’d been paid for the script and I’d get more money if the film got made, and the sun was shining. It was not a bad way to make a living. I swallowed the last of the mineral water and we went down about five flights of stairs to the street. Mineral water? Christ, I’m losing my identity. I can’t even drink much coffee these days.

  I shook hands with Jon and he set off north toward Soho Square while I went west along Old Compton Street toward Steiner’s. I was going to meet Magsy—if he was there. Me and Magsy had been mates together in the mid-’70s and I’d spent long hours back then in his flat, just lying around and listening to music. He’d lived there with his girlfriend, Penelope. I was in their flat in Camden so often that I practically lived there. I did live there when the lease ran out on my own little gaff in Chalk Farm. Then, after I’d crashed there for six months, him and his girlfriend found a place for me in Dalston, “through a mate of Penelope’s,” they said.

  So they didn’t have to officially throw me out. We had some times, me and Magsy. Incredible times. Like … just before I was due to move into the new gaff on a hot July afternoon in 1975 … me and Magsy decided we’d celebrate my last night in the flat. We bought a 100-gram bag of salt and half a dozen lemons from a corner shop, and three bottles of tequila from the offy on Camden High Street. Then we picked up Penelope from her job at the Royal Free Hospital. She was standing outside the gate with this petite longhaired girl, Angela. We hadn’t expected this at all—we had just planned on going back to the flat and getting blasted on the tequila—but Angela invited us all to dinner at her place on Cornwall Gardens, just off the Gloucester Road. Cornwall Gardens—now that is a class-A address, mate. And it was a bright and lovely summer’s day, and we had the salt and lemons and tequila to donate to the proceedings, so I felt okay. We drove down Haverstock Hill and through the West End and into Kensington in Angela’s car, and Angela said that her boyfriend, Ted, owned the flat that I was just about to move into in Dalston.