The episode becomes another discontinued detective story. I stalk him. Where will he go? Can he sustain this pace? He seems to be heading for a silent-comedy collision with every lamppost, but swerves away at the last moment. A religious dancer gone in the knees, he crosses Queensbridge Road, unmolested by traffic. I am outside the gated Adelaide Quay flats, watching a range of international Londoners emerge and plug themselves in, before heading off towards the City. Listen for the clang of the gates.
I am still hoping for the tranquillity of the park, when I decide that I have to turn back, to catch this man’s slipstream. He might be one of the Lamed-Vav Tzadikim, the thirty-six righteous ones of mystical Judaism. Here presented in its gentile and bastardised form. The thirty-six are unknown to each other, hidden within the city, unknown even to themselves. They serve a higher purpose. If one of them goes missing, falls away or is struck down, the world ends. Sodom is destroyed when a quorum cannot be found. They are Nistarim, the concealed ones. Their identities must never be made public. By the Gematria of the numerical value of their given names, our ignorance is kept in balance.
Now the walled garden of Haggerston Park, and my contemplation of the man on the bench, made numbers dance. Six exiled stained-glass window, six lost saints: 6 × 6 = 36. Will London be spared for their sake? ‘Death waves from the other side of the abyss,’ cautioned Sebald.
At the bus shelter on Pownall Road, school-kids ignore the vagrant’s advance. He walks straight through them like a sneeze of dust. Without warning, he veers away to the right, towards the door of a flat that seems to have been left open. It is done so abruptly that I almost miss his disappearance.
He goes inside, emerging in seconds clutching a sheaf of white papers. Evidence to be destroyed? Opportunist theft? Necessary documentation left behind in his own property? A life to be reclaimed. He feints towards Queensbridge Road, whirls around, and back once more into the unprotected flat. Looking through the open door, after he has stormed off for the second time, I register a hallway heaped with chairs, black bags, rolled mattresses. Eviction?
I have passed this way many times over the years, taking in the memorial to the murdered policeman, Laurence Brown, who was patrolling outside Orwell Court when an unemployed 20-year-old, Mark Gaynor, pulled out a shotgun and discharged it into his chest. Recent renovations and the rebranding of the Regent’s Canal as a tributary of Olympicopolis have not obliterated aboriginal Hackney attitudes to rubbish. When you squeeze through one of the access tunnels from Pownall Road, you cannot miss the messengers of entropy: collapsed garden fences, wild nature asserting its unyielding authority.
The tall man in the belted black coat, with the swagger of Shakespeare’s lowlife Pistol, rolled south. He was a beam of wild light radiating from the eye of the man on the bench. A long-strider, sticking to his preordained course (as I had on my expedition to Munster Square), he came abreast of the convent of St Saviour’s Priory. One of a pair of synchronised young Chinese women made a grotesque pinched face and held her nose. None of the other digital walkers – calling mum, dragging the office with them, arguing with lovers – paid him any attention. They belonged in a different universe, a different species: the fixed and the provisional.
And again, like Pistol in the stews of Eastcheap, our discharged seafarer had his crew about him: attendant waifs and strays he chose to ignore. They were waiting beyond Sainsbury’s Local on Hackney Road, acting very much like the cheery gang of pensioners who gather on the pavement in Broadway Market, an hour before the post office opens.
Established cash-machine squatters were hoping for a dole. There was a blind man with a blinder dog. A combat casualty in an electrified chariot draped with battle flags. A red-haired woman splayed on the pavement, skirts spread to catch any windfall from the ATM hutch.
The man from Pownall Road hit the cashpoint like a favourite bar. He rammed his card down its throat and had the notes tucked in his coat pocket, and away, before any of the crew could lift a tin cup. I had stopped for a moment to read a new inscription on the wall. When I turned round, he was gone. I sidestepped the immobile security guard and checked the aisles of the shop. My man wasn’t there. He was not to be found among the vegetables, frozen dinners or shelves of booze. Walking faster now, I investigated the neighbouring streets and shady cul de sacs. He had vanished into the contaminated air. I entered his details in my notebook and plodded back up Queensbridge Road to resume the suspended constitutional by taking the ramp to the canal. A commissioned artwork in the form of a rusted docker’s hook had been adapted as a shelf for cans, cartons and silver wraps. The peloton swept past in a yowl of ironised insults and snarling put-downs.
Within a week, like a recurring dream, the man in the black coat was back, and our paths crossed once more in exactly the same place. He was on the west side of Queensbridge Road, heading north, while I was at the gates of Adelaide Quay, making for the park. I had paused to witness an incident at the traffic lights (a hole manufactured by Volker Highways, who are never out of employment from Hackney Council).
Two showroom cars stopped, bumper to bumper, within the thickness of a coat of paint, electric windows right down and stomping headache sounds blasting out. They were putting on a performance. Two smart young Asian guys wrestling, mock-slapping, swearing – before smearing their motors in shaving cream and cartons of fastfood. Windscreens completely snowed.Yellow curry accidents on passenger seats, on the new leather. Mess swept into the road as the lights change and they bomb away, horns blaring like the Thames on New Year’s Eve, neck and neck, zero to sixty in seconds, towards Hackney Road.
The man in the coat ignored the episode, to come over at his favoured place, the blind spot at the crown of the humpback bridge. It was just as before: the sudden lurch down to the flats, the open door. The rapid retreat. The march to the cashpoint. The vanishing. Gone again. For good.
On the fence beside the canal, at the bottom of the Queensbridge Road ramp, was a new notice: CAUTION DIVERS. Police frogmen this morning have the melancholy duty of searching the heavy water, among submerged bicycles, traffic cones and shopping trolleys, for missing limbs, for the head of Gemma McCluskie. We are a quarter of a mile from where the torso was found floating. Have McCluskie’s mortal segments migrated through the Cat and Mutton lock, then west towards Islington? Is it a feasible hypothesis that the killer managed to travel the busy towpath dispersing the evidence of his slaughter without being challenged?
Wreaths, flowers, furry bears and cards appear, overnight, woven into the fence above the lock basin where the torso was discovered. Yellows and purples. Flaming reds and pinks. Carnations, tulips, lilies. In funnels of cellophane and twists of stiff green paper. A silver star, helium inflated and tethered by a string, distorts the scene, the solemn faces of those who have come to pay their respects. With plenty of practice, we have learnt how to make a ritual of grief, even for those we have never met and know little about.
Council workers tidy away all traces of the spontaneous floral requiem. They dispose of the upper-case tributes, the letters on yellow and pink paper from friends and colleagues. And those awkwardly intimate communications from total strangers who feel the need to resurrect the identity of a deleted fictional character. Tabloid headlines strain to convert a brutal domestic drama, from the Pelter Street flat Gemma shared with her brother, into a national tragedy worthy of the hysterical conventions of television soap opera.
Pressure to blackbag all traces of the crime, a heady drench of morbid perfume, is made critical by the positioning, at just this moment, of a docking station of blue bicycles: the latest extension of a hire scheme allowing clients, for a modest charge, to pedal around inner London advertising Barclays Bank. The clunky bikes are sponsored by a financial institution, but the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, soaks up the credit. And ‘Boris bikes’ must not be associated, in any way, with towpath horrors. At this stage in his vertiginous rise and rise, the old Etonian charmer is never photographed out of the
saddle.
Staring down into the trapped water of the lock basin, I noticed the pages of an open book. There was a book barge, a narrowboat crammed with paperbacks, moored on the far side of the bridge. A quick search, passing through here on a dull afternoon, secured one item: Land Under England by Joseph O’Neill. Gollancz, 1935. A dust-wrappered first edition with bright black boards. ‘He has elevated the thriller into literature,’ says the Irish poet Æ (George Russell) in his foreword. ‘The story that I have to tell is a strange one – so strange indeed that many people may not believe it.’
But this drowned volume, its sheets detached, drifting in loose arrangements of threes and fours, is not a Gollancz novel. The text, when I studied my photographs with a magnifying glass, was German. WG Sebald’s Austerlitz? Sebald wrote in German and was then translated into English. The submerged text comes in solid blocks, soft focus under the smoky surface of the canal. I compared this page number, 162, with my English version. ‘All interlocking like the labyrinthine vaults I saw in the dusty grey light, and which seemed to go on for ever.’
The place where the two rubber-clad policemen were diving was a bridge with history. It was where all the old Hackney villains staggered to dispose of knives and guns. Tony Lambrianou, the Kray foot-soldier, chauffeur to the carpet-wrapped body of Jack the Hat, lived in the flats on the far side of Queensbridge Road. When we stood on this spot in 1992, Tony was proud of his legacy, waxing sentimental about the canal where he dumped the keys from the two-tone Ford Cortina he had used to carry Jack through the Blackwall Tunnel.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The weapons went into the water here, after the murder of Jack McVitie… When they sent the diver down to search the canal, he found two pieces they thought resembled a gun and a knife. It was never proved. It’s like an armoury down there, in the mud, goes back generations… There have been allegations of other things happening around here, not down to us, going back to Victorian times. It’s got a great history, Hackney, when you come to think about it. If you ever dredged this stretch, you’d be surprised what you’d find. It’s part of the mystery of it all. It’s part of your tradition if you live on the canal.’
A few days later, a leg was found. It was identified as belonging with the recovered torso. McCluskie’s brother, Tony, was formally charged with the murder on Monday, 12th March, 2012.
And now I understood the concept behind the docker’s hook artwork. The curved arm was pointing to the spot in the water where Tony Lambrianou dropped the knife that killed Jack the Hat.
Starting with the man on the bench, wondering how he got there, how he survived, my simple-minded curiosity had led me once again into a detective story that was all beginnings, arbitrary photographs shuffled across my father’s desk, unsatisfactory stalkings through the parks and alleys of East London. I was reminded of Walter Benjamin’s vision of the ‘angel of history’. Jean-Luc Godard spoke about this in a 1978 interview. ‘His eyes are staring, his mouth open, his wings are spread… His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.’ Godard’s cinematic angel is charged with waking the dead, bearing witness before the storm carries us forward into an unknowable future. ‘This storm is what we call progress.’
For no good reason I thought of my angel as a woman. And I associated her with the winged warriors on a plinth opposite the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel. Here, I suppose, was another link to Gemma McCluskie.
In the state that manifests itself when projects are launched, and when they dictate their terms by way of coincidences and excited discoveries, unexpected phone calls, emails from strangers, I found it difficult to sleep. The streets had become a displacement dream. A not unpleasant fugue of liminal insomnia allowed me to know the night, to step outside among the dramas of foxes and cats. An engagement with these false glints of a new day could be glossed as preparation for the nocturnal walks I planned, when I would be doing without sleep for many hours, in order to achieve a dissociation of sensibility through which the hallucination of London would reveal the secret of mysteries worried at for fifty years.
Pelter Street, rechristened in 1905 in honour of a sixteenth-century landowner, was formerly known as Willow Walk. It is still a lane impregnated with memories, bucolic aspirations, running in a curve from Ravenscroft Street to Columbia Road. The flats with their balconies of fresh laundry and flowers have a pleasing Dutch or German sense of community. Nicely preserved stone setts are contemporaneous with sections alongside the Regent’s Canal that have not yet been improved by bitumen.
When I lost my man in the black coat at the Sainsbury’s Local cashpoint, I carried on south, struggling to form some impression of the property where Gemma McCluskie had been murdered by her junkie brother after a domestic disagreement. Studying the involuted pattern of the shadow-bathed setts on Pelter Street made me appreciate how the old equation of light and stone, leaf and masonry, was a more reliable register of London’s changes than the histories of people and events that passed in the blink of an eye.
The signs were ominous: invocations of ‘dragon’ and ‘river’ spirits. I photographed collages and stencils in which skulls and voodoo devils were dominant. IS THIS LIGHT FAULTY? Pelter Street had been infected by pressure on the optic nerves, a queasy electric pulsing in advance of a fit. On a ‘Customs Declaration/Déclaration en Douane’ pasted to the wall, a totemic black head had been painted with horseshoe lips and huge white eyes. A mask. A head on a stick. Another skull wore a full Sioux headdress from Little Big Horn and was winged with fire.
Only when we walk with no agenda does the past return. A police van was shadowing me as I tried to record my impressions. They were, as ever, photographing the photographer. Or so I thought. In reality, in the drowsy suspension of a warm afternoon, they were killing time between busts, hiding in the shade. If I had a phone with me now I could call my son in Brighton to ask him about his first mainstream directorial job in television, in at the deep end with multi-camera pressures and the volcanic egos of EastEnders. Had William known McCluskie out there in the cod-Hackney theme park at Borehamwood? With Barbara Windsor and the rest of the Stamford Hill gang.
Where Pelter Street emerges into Columbia Road, the Columbia Market Nursery School survives. That’s where my older daughter went. Anna remembers pushing the pram through Shipton Street and swerving to avoid a bloody missile, when a first-floor window opened and a woman flung out a dead rat. On several occasions, they carried on to Brick Lane to meet me coming home from my stint in the ullage cellar of Truman’s brewery. The nursery hung on, where Columbia Market, the fantastic mall-palace designed by Henry Darbishire for the charitable banking heiress, Angela Burdett-Coutts, in the late nineteenth century, failed and was erased from the landscape. The deserving poor were not impressed by a monster market with a proscriptive housing element; ill-fitting doors and no glass in the cloister windows, in order to keep the atmosphere bracing. Markets in Bethnal Green and Whitechapel favoured unpoliced street stalls, a weekend clearing house for stolen goods and illicitly imported animals. The gateposts and railings of Columbia Market now enclose the nursery school.
After remaining submerged, out of sight and mind during the cold rains of the Royal Jubilee, and the delirium of the 2012 Olympic regeneration of the Lower Lea Valley, the missing head of Gemma McCluskie broke surface in the Regent’s Canal, close to the lock basin where her torso had been pulled ashore. Six months in Hackney water before rising through the duckweed carpet. Like an unsightly bump in the ironed surface of a snooker table.
A television crew set up lights and a crane on the far side of the canal for another episode of London noir. As witnesses, memory thieves, we are all implicated in the formulaic iteration of a limited stock of dark motifs. My younger daughter, Maddie, worked as a script editor with the original Luther writer, Neil Cross. He surprised us both by revealing that, as a student in Brighton, he’d
been inspired by my novel White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings. And that one of the episodes in the second series was ‘meant to be a bit of a homage’. Which the director never ‘got’. But it was disconcerting to think, even as a Xerox of a Xerox, that those scarlet tracings laid down so many years ago were now surfacing in the scenes I watched, with scepticism and a reflex shrug, on my morning walks.
The scenic gasholder would soon be decommissioned to make room for a riverside container stack. The narrowboat dweller with a pirate flag, a man who uncovered stories of radioactive contamination around the Olympic Stadium, told me that he had been fitted up and was facing trial for the crime of protesting an illegal incursion on centuries-old Lammas land, one of the last of the unenclosed Lea Valley spaces. This, he said, was standard practice, a tactic for muzzling voices of opposition at a sensitive time. When the games were safely over and the cheers had faded, his case would be allowed to slide.
McCluskie’s return to newsprint, that tight smile, that dark hair, haunted my attempt to write my way towards a London different – in ways I couldn’t yet define – from anything that had come before. There were plenty of violent deaths in the record, but none, in the thrust of the regeneration moment, so much like found footage from a deleted file. The unmanned cameras that monitor our lives were beginning to make their own reality programmes.
As the trial of McCluskie’s crazed brother moved to its inevitable conclusion, news channels ran surveillance footage in its raw form. The tragedy began with a phone row over an issue of personal hygiene, the state of the flat they shared in Pelter Street, taps left running. The sort of hopelessly loud, one-sided rants we hear all the time, on buses, outside betting shops, on park benches.
The Last London Page 5
