Divine settled for a bacon cob, brown sauce, toast, tea with two sugars, and a Lion bar for later. Naylor and Lynn Kellogg were already sitting at a table by the window, near the rear of the canteen. The air was thick with tobacco smoke and talk.
“Right,” Divine said, decanting cup and plate onto the table, propping the tray against the leg, from where it fell onto the floor. “What’s going off, that’s what I’d like to know?”
“We’re talking about last night’s EastEnders,” Naylor said pleasantly. “What d’you want to know?”
“Conspiracy of silence then, is it, or what?”
“How d’you mean?”
“You know what I bloody well mean.”
“How’s that?”
Divine jerked a hand back round in the direction of the door. “This bloke. Vincent. Why’s nobody said a sodding thing about the fact he’s black?”
“He is?” Lynn said innocently.
“Never thought you’d notice, Mark,” Naylor said, amused. “Reckon that’s why.”
“Anyway,” said Lynn, “he’s not really black. More a sort of light chocolatey brown.”
Naylor nodded. “Milky Way.”
“That’s it,” Divine said through a mouthful of bacon roll, “make a bloody joke out of it.”
“Oh, Mark,” Lynn said, “come on.”
“Look.” Voice getting louder by the minute. “If it were anything else, anything else at all, as marked him out of the ordinary …”
“Such as?” Naylor asked.
“I don’t know, anything. All right, suppose he wasn’t a bloke, he was a woman …”
“Transvestite, you mean?”
“No, you pillock, a proper woman …”
“Well, that would be out of the ordinary, true enough,” Lynn said, “Just look around.”
“Right. Exactly. Anything from a club foot to a man with two heads, we’d talk about it, yeh? But, no, not this, this is different. No one’s supposed to notice, not a blind thing. So there’s the boss, introducing him, welcome to the team. And that’s it.”
“Well, what d’you expect?” Naylor asked. “This is Carl Vincent and in case you haven’t noticed, he’s black.”
“Why not?”
“Jesus!”
“Because, Mark,” Lynn said, leveling her voice, “it doesn’t matter.”
“Bollocks!”
“What?”
“You heard, bollocks. Of course it bloody matters.”
“Mark,” Lynn said, “you’re so full of crap sometimes.”
“Yeah?” Divine on his feet now, leaning towards her, finger in her face. “Well, listen up. It matters to him, you can bet your life on that. And I’ll tell you something else, it fucking matters to me.”
There was sudden hush around them at the scarcely suppressed anger in Divine’s voice, and through it Carl Vincent walked blithely, carrying a cup of coffee and two pieces of buttered toast. “Mind if I join you?”
“Please,” Lynn said.
“Yes, sure,” said Naylor. “Pull up a pew.”
Divine had a quick swallow of his tea and grabbed what was left of his bacon roll. Sitting in the vacated chair, Vincent turned his head to watch Divine go.
“There’s one in every station,” he said with a slow shake of the head.
“Only one?” Lynn smiled. “Things must be looking up.”
The Football Intelligence Unit had been at its busiest in the Eighties, when self-styled firms of young men could afford to invest considerable time and money in promoting violence in and around major soccer grounds. Often they would eschew the match itself in order to ambush unsuspecting groups of visiting fans at railway stations before or after the game. Officers went underground, spending months establishing solid cover before infiltrating the more dangerous of the firms-the Chelsea Headhunters, Arsenal, Oxford, Portsmouth, Millwall.
When a move to all-seater stadiums thwarted one of the most popular pastimes-a sudden vicious charge to take the home supporters’ “end”-and with spiraling admission charges ensuring lots of youngsters stayed away, hard-core fans intent upon trouble followed the national flag abroad. And the Unit went with them. Information about known troublemakers was passed on to other national police forces, and although the violence was to a degree curtailed, it didn’t stop. Wrecked bars and cafés, water cannon and baton charges testified to that.
“Here,” Trevor Ulman said, “take a look at this.”
Resnick and his team watched the monitor as, on somewhat bleached-out video tape, a mob of chanting youths, mostly in shirtsleeves, Union Jacks to the fore, erupted from a curbside café and charged across a broad square, despite the attempts of heavily outnumbered uniformed police to stop them. Even mounted officers, swinging their long truncheons, could not deter the English supporters as they raced over cobblestones and tram lines, intent upon catching any local fans with fists or feet or both.
“Now watch this,” Ulman said, as the camera closed in on a group of five young men as they chased, tripped, and then proceeded to punch and kick-especially kick-the single youth who had been their quarry. Ulman paused the video a few frames before a boot made contact with the victim’s head.
“Here,” he said, pointing. “The lad with the footwork. Chelsea Headhunter, close links with Combat 18. I’ll say a bit more about that in a minute. But look here, this bloke with belly, over to the left-Leicester Baby Squad. And this one here, leaning over to throw a punch-more local, Forest Executive Crew.”
Ulman stubbed out his Silk Cut and lit another, using a slim gold lighter with a dangerously high flame.
“That was two years ago, Rotterdam. But this second clip’s more recent. February of this year. Most probably, I don’t have to tell you where it’s from.”
“Dublin,” Divine said, with an edge of disgust.
“Correct. One friendly international between the Republic and ourselves abandoned thanks to scenes like this.”
The screen, in color this time, showed a man in the upper tier, his face, save for the eyes, hidden inside a dark balaclava; he stood and turned away from the camera, back towards the crowd, and signaled with his arm. Immediately, the rioting began. Arms were thrust skywards, Union Jacks waved, mouths open with the shouts of “No surrender! No surrender to the IRA!” and then pieces of guttering were torn away and hurled down upon the unguarded crowd below.
“Combat 18?” Resnick asked.
“Precisely.”
“But you’re not saying,” Millington asked, “that everyone in that upper stand at Dublin, those yobos you showed us running wild in Holland, that they’re all political?”
“Well,” Ulman said, “I doubt they’re all fully paid-up members of the British National Party. But that’s not the way it works.” Arching back his head a moment, he released an almost perfect smoke ring towards the ceiling. “Combat 18, no matter how much the BNP might now try to deny it, are enforcers. Write a letter to the Post complaining about a Fascist rally, stick an Anti-Nazi League poster in your window, and the lads from C18’1I be round to pay you a call.
“Now as far they’re concerned, soccer grounds are breeding grounds; they use football as a way of spreading propaganda, gaining converts who’ll stay interested just long enough to let them pull off some stunt like Dublin, Rotterdam, Oslo. Then C18 have got maximum publicity and they can rattle on in The Order-that’s their magazine-about getting a good result.
“The difference is, their racism is reaclass="underline" they believe it. To the rest, most of them, it’s unthinking. The kind that’ll throw bananas at the visiting team’s black players, jump up and down and make monkey noises, but not apparently notice they’ve got-what? — three or four black players of their own. Most likely they don’t think of themselves as racist at all. And when you get down to it, they’re probably not a whole lot more so than the rest of us. It’s ingrained. Difficult to shake.”
Millington leaned his chair back onto its hind legs. “This anti-Irish thing, that’d fit in with what the landlord told us, out at this pub we’re interested in.”
“It would indeed. Though, I have to say, we’ve no record of that particular pub being a meeting place for the kind of nice young character we’re talking about. However, habits change. It’s possible. What I can’t do, at least until you can provide me with some kind of visual identification, a name, is tell you whether these youths who were creating a disturbance the night Aston was killed are known to us already.”