London Calling - James Craig [74]
Young master Hawley had stumbled out of the Sir John Lydon Imperial Grammar School for Boys in Canterbury more than fifteen years earlier, wandering the beaches of Thailand and Goa for a while before strolling into London’s booming financial services industry. There, in the bright, gleaming, non-judgemental, ultra-short-term, fuck-everything-and-then-fuck-it-again world of high finance, he found his metier through dealing in foreign exchange. He established a niche in obscure currencies like the Turkish lira, Lebanese pound and Israeli shekel. These had a tendency to gyrate wildly against the major currencies – namely the dollar, sterling and the Euro – with every car bomb and airstrike occurring in the Middle East, of which, of course, there were plenty. It didn’t matter what was going up or down because, as long as things were moving, you could trade. If you could trade, you could make a profit, which was good for your end-of-year bonus, or a loss involving someone else’s money.
Trading forex was a nice little earner, but it was nowhere near as profitable as the drugs Hawley sold on the side. His was an uncomplicated business, essentially providing grass, ecstasy and cocaine to between sixty and a hundred recreational users within his extended social set. Clement observed certain standards: he didn’t sell crack, the drug of choice for the truly degenerate, and he didn’t sell anything to those that he didn’t know, or to anyone who didn’t arrive at his table with a personal recommendation from an existing customer. Even without chasing every last pound, it was a very lucrative set-up, and Clement was comfortably clearing three hundred thousand pounds a year. Added to the money from his trading job, this sideline pushed his overall income towards half a million.
There were scores of dealers like Clement throughout London. For the police, most were a useful source of market intelligence, people to trade information with rather than to close down. Arresting them was pointless, since there was always someone else to fill the void. Better to make use of them out on the street.
Clement had been arrested just twice, once for being drunk and disorderly, the second time for possession. The first time, three years ago, he was taken to Charing Cross, where Carlyle, after a short but frank discussion regarding the six grand’s worth of ecstasy in his pockets, had him released without charge (but minus the drugs). The second time he was arrested, eight months later in Camden Town, Hawley declined his right to a phone call and asked for Inspector Carlyle, straight off the bat. All in all, Carlyle felt that he had built up a lot of credit at the Bank of Hawley, and now it was time to make a small withdrawal.
Hawley’s normal stomping ground was Brick Lane, in the heart of a run-down East London neighbourhood just east of Spitalfields Market, and less than five minutes’ walk from the Liverpool Street offices of the Australian bank where he worked. One of the poorest districts in the whole country, it was historically famous for housing successive waves of immigrants: the Huguenots, the Irish and the Jews. It gained a small but important mention in twentieth-century British history with the Battle of Cable Street in 1936, when anti-Nazis fought the British Blackshirts. More recently, it had become a centre of the Bangladeshi community and was now famous for its curry houses. It was not an area that Carlyle knew well but, constantly changing and full of hustle, bustle and hardship, it lay at the heart of what made London the heaving, restless metropolis that it was. As a Londoner, therefore, he felt that he could relate to it well enough.
Brick Lane had once been home to more than twenty