Jonny’s cross because he’s the one with the heaviest bag. Today’s T-shirt is a picture of an Ancient Greek bloke and the sloganWE SHOULD HAVE STAYED IN THE CAVE. I swear they’re getting weirder.
Elle’s not cross at all, which is – I’m starting to realise – classic Elle.
We arrive at 12.15. That gives us plenty of time to get a secluded booth, and time to check the serving staff are dressed exactly like the clothes Em bought this morning – white shirt, black trousers, dark brown apron – so to any inattentive punter she’ll look just like a waitress. The other advantage of this place is that it’s massively overstaffed. She’ll blend right in.
We all order drinks (Doom Bar for me, double vodka tonic for Em, pint of Diet Coke for Jonny, heavily diluted lemonade for Elle). Elle gets ‘lost’ on the way to the Ladies, and reports back that the table is already laid for five in the pub’s private dining room upstairs. Jonny looks in his bag and makes sure the tech is working. Em rehearses her role again. And, in the time between us and our targets arriving, I open my phone and try to unpick the tangled history of the Balham Brats.
Now, anyone who knows south London knows what the leafy suburb of Balham is like these days. It’s chic. There are pizza restaurants where sometimes they don’t even put any tomato on. There are still grocer’s shops, and a butcher, butthey’re the posh modern sort who know about graphic design and have given themselves whimsical names likeMr Barney’s Meat Emporium. There are lots, and lots, and lots of prams.
Basically, for Balham virgins (rare commodity), it’s where the young lawyers and management consultants go when they’ve tired of Clapham, the next staging post on the way out to the Home Counties. As inevitable as salmon, the well-to-do start in Zone 2, in posh places their parents have helped them with because even a top law firm position won’t get you a flat these days. Then they gradually head outwards to spawn. Eventually their own young will wriggle against the ferocious tidal wave of money sloshing back the other way, and – with a bit of help from their parents – secure their own starter flats in the centre of town, and the cycle will begin once more.
It hasn’t always been like this. Forty years ago, Balham wasrough.
A colleague from my snappers’ agency lived there back in the eighties. Red lights in every other window, red and blue lights flashing down the street every five minutes. Fights spilling over from the pubs to the street and from Fridays to school nights. Sometimes, if you didn’t have any cash, the minicab firm by the station would give you a lift home for free just because they didn’t want you getting in any trouble, my colleague told me.
This is the Balham that Davy and his friends started out in. A foundation to help the area’s poor boys and girls probably made sense at the time, even though these days it seems a bit like a sick joke.
The other thing I often think is: how the hell were all these places so shabby within living memory? I’ve had people tell me that when they were young, Clapham was edgy, that you wouldn’t go to Notting Hill without an armed escort. Some have even told me that Wimbledon used to be a bit ragged round the edges, although that one I find hard to believe. Were people just not aware how lovely all the homes in these places were? I guess not.
I suppose people a few decades ago weren’t to know about the right to buy and about the government not building any more social housing, and about 2008, and about the tripling of assets since then because of all the money being pumped into the economy, and about the failure to sort out planning, or council tax, or the bank of Mum and Dad setting up shop, or the Boomers getting a nice seat at the table then clearing the other places off it before anyone else arrived.
Anyway. Here are the Balham Brats, one by one:
Rob Wallace we know already. Swish agent, angry man. Killer? No idea. I wonder if he’s planning to tell his friends today what Davy was up to, and why they had such a furious row. Now that Davy’s dead, I suppose the relations between the four survivors are going to start evolving a bit. They must have had all sorts of arrangements over the years – Davy keeping a nice flat back for someone here and there, maybe without Wallace knowing? Don’t know.
Jay Hawthorne is one of the two men who was smiling in theSouth London Gazettesnap. He’s a senior police officer in the Met. I get briefly excited that maybe he’s in fraud like ournew friend Kate McAdams, but he isn’t. From the little I can tell, he’s simply a senior officer, with all sorts of phrases like ‘operational command’ and ‘urban pacification unit’ swirling round him in news reports. At the few public appearances we’ve been able to find, he’s either been explaining that this or that corrupt police officer is positively the last in the force and it’s all going to be fine from here, or stonily refusing to answer the questions of a parliamentary committee who are trying to find out why the bad apples keep on tumbling out of the barrel. He must have been a very good copper or a very bad one to get this far.
Conor Vane is an MP, and the other man smiling in the publicity shot. Lots of the newspapers call him ‘Weather Vane’ because in the last fifteen years since he entered Parliament he’s somehow managed to stay on the right side of almost everyone. (I’m actually impressed that anyone with the words ‘con’ and ‘vain’ in their name went into a career where it would be referenced every single day. I guess that’s nominative determinism for you.) He’s had three ministerial jobs of increasing seniority, and he’s on a staggering number of committees. Horse-racing, manufacturers, European relations, defence … he has left no pie un-fingered on his way to the top. He’s a member of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for at least fifteen different countries, lots of them vibrant beacons of autocracy across the Middle East and north Africa. He’s frequently written up as ‘one to watch’, presumably because if you don’t keep an eye on him, he’ll go through your stuff.
The one I can’t work out is Ben Westcott. I’ve searched for him online. He pops up a bit in the nineties, in the newspaper archives Jonny helped me look through. He appears to have made a stack of money with a gambling firm when the industry was starting to deregulate – he came up with some clever new ways of undercutting the old-school bookies – but sold up for a colossal amount of money in about 2004 and has hardly appeared anywhere since. Maybe he retired.
The final member of the group, of course, is David Harcourt (deceased). Going on his diary, he really wanted to be here with his mates today. I wonder why.
These men are all in their mid- to late fifties. I suppose the story of the Balham Brats is the story of a whole cohort of people in this country in the last few decades. They found a bubble, almost without knowing it, and rode it all the way to the top. I’d have done the same in their loafers, given half a chance.
We have a nice view from the window of our booth of the four surviving Brats as they turn up.
Officer Hawthorne arrives first. He’s round and ruddy, with a wily look about him, as if Fantastic Mr Fox has let himself go a bit. He emerges from the back seat of a Range Rover with tinted black windows, so it’s safe to say his career in the Met is going all right. He greets the barman like a local, loud and coarse, before hauling his way up the stairs.
Rob Wallace walks in next. He’s still in a suit, even at the weekend, although this one is more ‘sophisticated urbane countryman’ than ‘killer estate agent’. He’s much lower-profilethan Hawthorne, murmuring his arrival to a waitress and waiting for her to lead him to the private room. He doesn’t spot me. There’s a lot of anger in his movements – Elle notes with some concern that he’s ‘really carrying the week he’s been through in his lower back’. I don’t care, as long as he keeps the tension in his lumbar region and doesn’t take it out on me.
The third man to arrive is Vane, the MP. He’s in a shirt and jeans with a preppy jumper draped round his shoulders, and he looks highly moisturised. He glances around as he crosses the threshold with the confident smirk of a man who knows he’s been recognised by at least a few people in the room. Nobody comes over to say as much, though, and eventually he decides the court of public opinion has failed in its duty and sidles upstairs unacknowledged.
Vane’s got two security men with him, I note, the sort of shaven-headed Statham-alikes who doubtless spent some time in the SAS, SBS or another Acronymic Agency for Hardmen (AAH).
Much to my relief, after conducting a walkaround of the room, dismissing us entirely in the process, the two goons settle themselves at the bar, where they start leafing appreciatively through theSunand spending taxpayers’ money on pork scratchings.
Finally, Ben Westcott shambles in, hardly recognisable from last year’s photo. Shabby cords, grubby boots, ancient Barbour. A scruffy beard is scaling his cheekbones, and the only things missing that would complete the impoverished-gamekeeper look are a shotgun under his arm and a brace ofpheasants on his back. He walks straight through to the stairs, apparently neither expecting nor desiring a greeting from anyone.
‘Right,’ says Jonny. ‘I suppose now they’re all assembled it might be worth our while actually doing something, eh?’
‘Good idea, Jonny,’ says Em.
I should explain, there’s a bit of tension between the four of us at the moment.
When we got here, Em decided she would place the flowers herself, but that she wouldn’t do it yet. She’s had plenty of time – especially once Elle had checked out the room – but she still hasn’t got it done. She says she wants to do it right, and for that to happen all the Brats have to be here first. The rest of us – particularly Jonny, who is as calm and relaxed about his expensive equipment as a mother with her newborn baby – politely asked her to get on with it, but she dug her heels in and said she was the one taking the risk so she’d be the one to decide when to move. Also, the four men were hardly going to start saying the juicy stuff as they were still taking their coats off.
Hence Jonny now saying: ‘Can we get on with it then?’
