I left the restaurant at five past ten and headed round the corner to the Roving Wolf, a pub used by the station’s CID, to see if there was anyone in there. It was busy, but I spotted a couple of DCs I knew vaguely standing near the bar and joined them for a couple of pints. They were both interested in how the Matthews case was going but I couldn’t tell them a lot. Slowly was the word that about best described it. Conversation drifted on to other things and I left them at eleven, wandering down onto Upper Street in search of that elusive late-night creature, the black cab.
Upper Street was buzzing as usual, its constant stream of pavement cafés and trendy bistros bustling with custom as people of all ages, and pretty much every race under the sun, took advantage of the balmy evening. Strains of jazz, mamba, flamenco and half a dozen other musical styles drifted out of the open doors and windows of a dozen different establishments, giving the place a pleasant, continental feel. It almost felt like being on holiday and, for one who’d travelled up Upper Street a few times back in the 1980s, the transformation was incredible. Once a barren, dark place of nasty drinking hovels and little else where only the adventurous and the foolish came after dark, it had now become Islington’s version of Paris’s Left Bank. If you weren’t careful, you might even forget to watch your back.
Incredibly, I managed to hail a cab near Islington Green after only five minutes, which had to be some sort of record for that time of night. I thought about heading home but for some reason I wasn’t that tired. Instead, I asked the driver to take me to the Arcadia nightclub. He gave me a funny look in the mirror but did as he was told and we made our way in silence up to the Highbury Corner roundabout, and then left onto the less continental and more menacing Holloway Road. I was hoping to catch Roy Fowler in residence and collar him for a few minutes since I felt confident that if he didn’t have anything to hide, he’d return there sooner rather than later. If you’re in the nightclub business, you don’t trust other people to look after your investment for too long, not if you want anything left at the end of it.
Four hundred yards up the Holloway Road, just past the Liverpool Road turning, the traffic slowed right down as a large group of maybe twenty-five or thirty people standing outside a pub suddenly spilled out into the road. Seconds later there were shouts and the sound of glass smashing, and a group of five of them split off from the rest in what looked like a wild dance. Others ran over to pile in and the whole scrum of them lumbered into the middle of the road, breaking apart and re-forming as half a dozen individual battles were fought, oblivious to the cars driving by. A bottle sailed lazily through the air, bouncing off the roof of the vehicle in front of us before ending up unbroken in the bus lane on the other side of the street.
‘Fucking kids,’ said the taxi driver in a voice that was half-snarl, half-sigh, as the group, most of whom looked no more than twenty, swirled back towards the pavement. One of them went down, putting up his arms in a vain effort to protect himself as he disappeared beneath a rapid-fire welter of kicks from at least three others. A girl screamed something unintelligible and rushed out of the watching crowd to intervene, wading into the kickers, handbag aloft. The one on the ground, sensing an opportunity, jumped to his feet and got out of the firing line. He was holding his head and bleeding from the nose.
The taxi driver accelerated and we left them behind to their fighting. ‘Fucking kids,’ he said again. ‘They get worse and worse.’ I nodded and mumbled something in reply, thinking that that was the thing with London. One minute you were drinking in the ambient atmosphere of a laid-back summer evening, the next you’d stepped unwittingly into an ugly battlezone. I suppose that’s why some people like it so much. The variety.
There was a long queue of revellers, mainly under-twenty-fives, snaking back along the street from the entrance to the Arcadia. I got the cab to stop directly outside, paid the driver in full, and tipped him a quid. ‘Enjoy yourself,’ he said, with a wave, as he drove off. Probably about ten years too late for that, I thought, but you never knew.
I walked to the head of the queue where a group of four male and one female door staff were frisking the waiting punters. One of them turned to me as I approached and gave me the same sort of funny look the cab driver had, like what on earth was a bloke in his mid-thirties in a suit he looked like he’d been wearing all day doing coming to a trendy joint such as this. ‘Yeah?’ he said, by way of greeting.
I produced my warrant card and thrust it in his face. ‘Police. I’m here to see Mr Fowler.’ I was getting déjà vu now.
He inspected the card, then looked back at me. ‘I don’t think he’s here tonight,’ he said.
‘Well, Miss Toms’ll do,’ I said, and walked past him.
There was a line of four further doormen
