THE VETERAN
DAY ONE – TUESDAY
It was the owner of the small convenience store on the corner who saw it all. At least, he said he did.
He was inside the shop, but near the front window, rearranging his wares for better display, when he looked up and saw the man across the street. The man was quite unremarkable and the shopkeeper would have looked away but for the limp. He would testify later that there was no-one else on the street.
The day was hot beneath a skim of grey cloud, the atmosphere close and muggy. The hysterically named Paradise Way was as bleak and shabby as ever, a shopping parade in the heart of one of those graffiti-daubed, exhausted, crime-destroyed housing estates that deface the landscape between Leyton, Edmonton, Dalston and Tottenham.
When it was opened thirty years earlier with a grandiose civic ceremony, the Meadowdene Grove estate was hailed as a new style of low-budget council housing for working people. The name alone should have given the game away. It was not a meadow, it was not a dene and it had not seen a grove since the Middle Ages. It was, in fact, a grey poured-concrete gulag commissioned by a borough council that flew the red flag of world communism above the town hall and designed by architects who, for themselves, preferred honeysuckle-twined cottages in the country.
Meadowdene Grove then went downhill faster than the Tour de France coming off the Pyrenees. By 1996 the warren of passages, underpasses and alleys that linked the grim residential blocks were crusted with filth, slick with urine and came alive only at night when gangs of local youths, unemployed and unemployable, roamed their manor to ‘score’ from the area drug peddlers.
Working-class pensioners, fiercely respectable, trying to cling to the old moralities, the comforting certainties of their own younger days, lived behind barricaded doors, fearful of the wolf packs outside.
Between the blocks, each seven storeys high, each door fronted by an open passage with greasy stairwells at either end, were patches of what had been green grass. A few rusted and abandoned cars, stripped to shells, crouched beside the inner roads that traversed the squares designed for public recreation and from which narrow passages ran through to Paradise Way.
The main shopping parade had once bustled with retail commerce, but most of the shops had finally closed, their proprietors exhausted by the struggle against pilfering, shoplifting, wilful damage, broken windows and racist abuse. More than half were now boarded up with defaced plyboard or steel shutters and the few that stayed open for business tried to protect themselves with wire-mesh defences.
On the corner, Mr Veejay Patel soldiered on. As a ten-year-old he had come with his parents from Uganda, expelled by the brutalities of Idi Amin. Britain had taken them in. He was grateful. He still loved his adopted country, abided by the law, tried to be a good citizen, puzzled by the steady degeneration of standards that characterized the Nineties.
There are parts of what London’s Metropolitan Police call the north-east quadrant where a stranger is unwise to roam. The limping man was a stranger.
He was barely fifteen yards from the corner when two men emerged from a concrete passage between two boarded shops and confronted him. Mr Patel froze and watched. They were different, but equally menacing. He knew both types well. One of them was beefy, with a shaven skull and porcine face. Even at a distance of thirty yards, Mr Patel could see a ring glint in the left ear lobe. He wore baggy jeans and a soiled T-shirt. A beer belly sagged over his broad leather belt. He took up station foursquare in front of the stranger, who had no choice but to stop.
The second man was slimmer, i
n pale drill trousers and a grey zip-fronted windcheater. Lank, greasy hair fell just below his ears. He slipped behind the victim and waited there.
The beefy one raised his right fist, close to the face of the man to be mugged. Mr Patel saw the glint of metal on the fist. He could not hear what was said, but he saw the beefy one’s mouth move as he spoke to the stranger. All the victim had to do was hand over his wallet, watch and any other valuables he might be carrying. With luck the muggers would grab the loot and run; the victim might survive unscathed.
He was probably silly to do what he did. He was outnumbered and outweighed. To judge from his grey hair, he was middle-aged and clearly his limp indicated he was not fully mobile. But he fought back.
Mr Patel saw his right hand come up from his side, moving extremely fast. He seemed to sway slightly at the hips, turning his shoulders to add force to the blow. The beefy one took it full on the nose. What had been a silent mime was pierced by a shout of pain that Mr Patel could hear even through his plate-glass window.
The beefy one staggered back, throwing both hands to his face, and Mr Patel saw the gleam of blood between the fingers. When he made his statement, the shopkeeper had to pause to recall clearly and in sequence what happened next. Lank Hair swept in a hard punch to the kidneys from behind, then kicked the older man in the back of his good knee. It was enough. The victim went down to the pavement.
On the Meadowdene Grove estate footwear was either trainers (for speed) or heavy boots (for kicking). Both these assailants had boots. The man on the pavement had doubled himself into the embryo position to protect his vitals, but there were four boots going for him and the beefy one, still clutching his nose one-handed, went for the head.
There were, the shopkeeper later estimated, about twenty kicks, maybe more, until the victim had ceased to twist and turn. Lank Hair bent over him, flicked open his jacket and went for the inside pocket.
Mr Patel saw the hand come back out, a wallet held between forefinger and thumb. Then both men straightened, turned and ran back up the concrete passage to disappear in the warren of alleys that riddled the estate. Before they went, the beefy one tore his T-shirt out of his jeans and held it up to staunch the blood pouring from his nose.
The shopkeeper watched them disappear, then scuttled back behind his counter where he kept the telephone. He dialled 999 and gave his name and address to the operator, who insisted she could not summon any emergency service until she knew who was calling. When the formalities had been accomplished, Mr Patel asked for police and an ambulance. Then he returned to the front window.
The man still lay on the opposite pavement, quite inert. No-one tended him. This was not the sort of street where people wanted to get involved. Mr Patel would have crossed the road to do what he could, but he knew nothing of first aid, feared to move the man and make a mistake, feared for his shop and that the muggers might come back. So he waited.
The squad car was first and it took less than four minutes. The two police constables inside had by chance been less than half a mile away on the Upper High Road when they took the call. Both knew the estate and the location of Paradise Way. Both had been on duty during the spring race riots.