Once Upon A Time In The East End

Contributed by Dan Lester on 27/09/08

Parador publishing is proud to present an excerpt from ‘Once Upon A Time In The East End’, the forthcoming novel by former gangster Ron ‘Fish-Fingers’ Jackson. The novel, which will soon be adapted into a major British motion picture starring Danny Dyer and Ray Winstone, will be published in hardback this December.

Laurence ‘Larry’ Fogelbinder, a top hardman, and quick with it too, stepped off the bus and into the street. It was pissing down harder than a Mexican housewife, but Larry didn’t care about the wetness, all he wanted was a pint. He’d just done thirty years of hard time for snuffing a southend snitch with a sawed off shotgun and he was ready to get his fingers dirty again. He looked around and saw a pub across the street, The Foxy Owl. It was the kind of place where men were real men. Larry knew what kind of man he was, the kind that wanted a beer, and fast. He crossed the street after looking both ways and waiting for a few cars to pass. Then stepped into the pub.

Inside there was nobody about, apart from the bartender, a squeaky nonce with a penchant for fishcakes, who looked up at Larry, grunted “we’re closed”, and went back to the magazine that he had been formerly reading.

“Listen you horrible twat,” growled Larry with all the menace of Dennis the Menace multiplied by at least fifteen, “I’ve just done a barnyard for offing a dirty chinstrap. The last thing you want to do is make me go off my onion, ‘cause if I do I’ll kick your arse so hard you’ll piss shit through your nose. Now get me a pint before I lose my temper.” The bartender looked at Larry with a mixture of fear and desire, then scampered over to the beer taps in an effort to fill the hardman’s order before he filled his underpants. He brought Larry’s pint over then dashed over to the toilet, using the disabled one because the others were downstairs and he didn’t want to walk that far. Larry downed his pint, savouring it the way a newborn baby savours it’s mother’s breasts, then walked out into the rain, and hailed a taxi.

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Meanwhile, in an innocuous looking building on the other side of the city, ‘Crazy’ John Croziere was going off on one at his accountant, James ‘Simple Jim’ Von Daniken, whose recent accounts had displeased him immensely. “How the shitting hell can you lose ten thousand pounds, you fucking shitmelon?” He plunged his fists into Von Daniken’s belly, causing the accountant to fold up like a shitty deckchair. Von Daniken was as soft as a bag of cottage cheese, and knew it too, so he usually tried to stay on his boss’s good side. This time however, he had incurred his master’s full wrath. “I can explain!” he gurgled desperately, like a Shetland pony being held underwater. Suddenly a phone rang. It was Croziere’s phone, which he carried in his pocket.

“Hello?” he said after taking it out and pressing it.

“Bad news, boss,” said the voice on the other end, which belonged to one of Croziere’s cronies named Tyler, a man with a shady past that he didn’t like to discuss.

“Larry Fogelbinder just got out of prison.”

“Shit!” exclaimed Croziere, pressing the end call button on his phone before putting it back in his trousers. He looked down at Von Daniken, who was quivering like a bowl of jelly on a washing machine. “I’ll deal with you later.”

———————————

Detective Inspector Jeremiah Gelatos, formerly the kind of cop who investigated cases with one hand down his trousers and the other on a shotgun, now utterly paraplegic after an incident with a fat bird, was examining a crime scene remotely via a trained monkey with a camera attachment.

The victim of the murder whose crime scene Gelatos was remotely viewing was Leslie ‘Leslie’ Shivers, British Sumo Champion for the year 1984. Shivers had been many things to many people; a fence, a nark, a grass, a dealer, a wing ding and a schlemiel. Now he was dead. Not slightly dead, like one of those coma victims who just lie there and shit themselves until someone pulls the plug, but completely dead, like a slab of meat on a plate that appears in front of you after you order a steak at a fancy restaurant. That’s where the similarities ended, however, as Leslie ‘Leslie’ Shivers was accompanied not by chips or mashed potatoes, but by the harsh lingering stench of gangland brutality. Shivers had suffered before he died, someone had seen to that. His nostrils had been filled with chilli powder, and his fingers had been cut off then sown back on the wrong way round, so it looked like his left hand was on his right and vice versa. And finally someone had written ‘twat’ across his forehead. With a biro.

Gelatos let out a heavy sigh. He had a pained expression on his face. He also had an erection, but that had been there before he saw the corpse so it was alright, and he was paralysed so he couldn’t tell anyway. “Nurse!” he called out, in the direction of where the nurse would probably be. “Bring me my tape recorder!” Seconds later, a woman in a nurse’s uniform entered, carrying a tape recorder. She was a generously proportioned woman, and looked more like a stripper than a nurse, although she did look more like a nurse than a lion tamer, or a bricklayer or something. She placed the tape recorder in his lap, where instead of lying flat it was tilted to one side by his erection. The nurse blushed but Gelatos hardly noticed, and after the nurse started the tape recorder by pressing not only the record button but also the play button, which you had to do on this tape recorder otherwise it wouldn’t actually record anything, he began to dictate his initial report. “Why is Leslie Shivers dead” he began, “and why are his fingers the wrong way round?”