To Hell in a Handcart. Richard Littlejohn

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       Twelve

      Ilie Popescu swallowed another handful of aspirins to dull the pain. It had taken fifteen stitches to treat the deep wound in his right arm.

      He had told the staff at North East London Memorial Hospital that he had impaled himself on a garden fork. His English was imperfect, but he could get by.

      Ilie had given them the name he had adopted, Gica Dinantu, the name of his partner in crime, now deceased.

      It had been accepted without question by the immigration officer at Croydon and since he had no papers, it was impossible to prove otherwise. He couldn’t risk being traced.

      Having registered at Croydon, he was issued with temporary papers and a berth in a hostel in Tottenham, which now housed almost a hundred asylum-seekers from Eastern Europe. It had been a dilapidated old people’s home, due for closure. The local council shipped out the last of the elderly residents and spent £400,000 refurbishing the building in the style to which the migrants intended to become accustomed.

      All rooms had satellite television and small refrigerators, like hotel minibars. There was a communal canteen offering a variety of food, no worse, Ilie thought, than his expensive hotel in Hamburg.

      There was a snooker room and, in the grounds, a brand-new tennis court and five-a-side football pitch.

      Ilie was amazed at the generosity of the British. He received free board and lodging, clothing coupons and £117.50 a week in cash, which he supplemented with the proceeds of begging and petty crime.

      Ilie had struck up a friendship with a pretty Kosovar Albanian girl, Maria. They’d been hustling passengers on the London Underground when they were spotted by a gang of skinheads, roaming the West End rolling foreign tourists, putting the boot into beggars and nicking collecting tins from the homeless.

      Ilie and Maria were chased up the escalators at Warren Street, through the Euston underpass and into the sidestreets at the back of the railway station.

      They lost their pursuers in an alleyway behind the Exmouth, a popular pub with railway porters and guards. Panting furiously, hearts pounding, they grasped each other frantically. He hardened instantly. She reached inside his tracksuit trousers, lifted her skirt, put her arms round his neck and raised herself, straddling him. He pulled aside the gusset of her knickers and she lowered herself around him, knotting her ankles behind his back. The sex was violent and brief. They came together.

      Since then they had spent every night together at the hostel. Their encounter with the shaven forces of English nationalism had not deterred their begging. Their expeditions became ever more ambitious.

      Soon Ilie, or Gica, as even Maria called him, was running street crime and begging out of the hostel. There was no shortage of willing volunteers.

      Using a stolen van, Ilie would transport his gang to various areas of London, where they would burgle, beg, snatch handbags, and hustle drivers, posing as squeegee merchants at traffic lights.

      It was Ilie’s idea to steal the temporary traffic lights from the High Street and set them up at various locations. Easier to sting a captive audience. It was a variation on the idea he had used to hijack the car transporter in Hamburg, which would have worked like a dream had it not been for Freund’s treachery. If he ever straightened things with the Russians, Ilie vowed, he would return to Hamburg one day and slit Freund’s throat.

      Ilie also came up with the idea of buying, or rather shoplifting, a doll to use as a prop. The English were mugs, he reckoned. Real suckers for a woman begging with a bay-bee.

      That day they’d set up their phoney roadworks on the main drag through north-east London at the point where three lanes funnel into one.

      Ilie’s gang surrounded the car and went into their usual routine, banging on the windows, sloshing dirty water on the windscreen.

      The driver was a big man, his wife much smaller. There were two children in the rear. A pretty little girl and a boy, younger, a scale model of his father.

      Ilie tried to grab the woman’s handbag, smashing the passenger window with a crowbar and reaching through with his knife to cut the straps.

      The driver had grabbed the knife and buried it deep into Ilie’s forearm, accelerated away, brushing Maria into the gutter.

      At the hospital, they insisted on giving Ilie a powerful tetanus jab. Now his arse was sore, as well as his arm.