Sitting on a Time-Bomb

On June 12th 2000, I was working in my study at home when there was a knock at the front door. (I’m sure of the date because I wrote it down afterwards in my diary.) I went to answer, and found two people standing there - a man and a woman.

'We're from Channel Four news,' the man said, 'Did you know David Copeland?'

Out of context, the name meant nothing.

'The nail-bomber,' the woman explained.

'Why should I know him?' I asked.

'He used to live here,' the man said, and gave the flat number - one floor down, directly below mine.
I felt stunned, and slightly bemused. If what they were saying was true, then why hadn’t I heard anything about it? Why hadn’t the Police come round to question me?

'When was that?' I asked.

'1998,' the man said.

I'd moved into my flat on April 8th, 1998. There seemed little doubt about it: I’d been living upstairs from the nail-bomber.

The journalists had already doorstepped the rest of my neighbours. I told them all I knew, which was nothing.

I live on the top floor of a block of flats on a stretch of dual carriageway which motorbike-riding City Boys use for the first 60 mph rip of their commute back to Essex. The children who live round here climb happily over the railings in the middle of the road, cars and lorries smashing by on either side of them. To use the pelican crossing, ten yards away, is just not done. A few of the flats in my building are occupied by residents who’ve been here since the war; some have been bought by younger couples; the rest, including the one David Copeland lived in, are let out for six months or a year, usually to students.

When I closed the door on the Channel 4 journalists, I didn’t do anything particularly dramatic - start shaking or crying. It wasn’t as if I was in any danger. To make a big thing of it seemed ridiculous. In some ways, I felt excited. Before, the nail-bomber had just been a news story concerning the whole city; now it seemed to have focussed down to something I was - even though very peripherally - involved in.

I went back to work.

But the big question was already present in my mind, awaiting an answer: The guy made bombs - was he trying to make bombs while living below me?

It wasn’t until a couple of weeks ago, in February 2001, that I found out.

I had followed the story at the time of the bombings (April 1999), but not particularly closely. Brixton, Brick Lane, Old Compton Street - these were places I, and my friends, went, worked, lived. They were where the centre of the action was, which is why we'd come to London in the first place. The whole city had a strangely fevered atmosphere, back then - as if something with horrific and long-term consequences was just beginning. Coming on top of the Stephen Lawrence case, the bombings made it very hard to see London as anything like a reasonably well racially integrated community. There was this intense hate out there, and it was finding atrocious ways to express itself.

The sequence of the bombings seemed to follow a weirdly distorted logic. The first bomb, April 17th, was in Brixton; the second, April 24th, along Brick Lane; the third, April 30th, The Admiral Duncan pub in Soho. Everyone, it seemed, was having a go at playing detective. After the Brixton bomb, people thought it was clearly racially motivated. The Brick Lane bomb confirmed this, but also confused it. Was this a lone bomber, or was it the start of a concerted campaign by the far Right? The use of bombs seemed to be a terrible escalation from organizations which, before, had always been fairly low-key about their evil. What turned out to be the final bomb suggested this was someone motivated entirely by a personal set of hatreds.

After the pub bomb, there wasn’t much time for speculation: the bomber was arrested early the following morning. And then, with everything sub judicae in advance of the trial, there was little more to learn from the newspapers.

When the guilty verdict came through, I was on holiday in Greece. As I read about the trial two days late, it all seemed very distant.

Even then, I didn't particularly take in the neutral sounding name 'David Copeland'. If I thought of the bomber it was as just that - 'the bomber' or 'the nail-bomber'. (I still don't find the name very memorable, though it's the kind of thing you're not meant to be able to forget. First name: same as my father's; surname, same as the drummer in The Police.)

Jumping forward to February 2001, and I finally got the answer to my big question. I was in the Oxford Street Waterstones, browsing the books out on the front tables. One, with a dark cover - a grainy photocopied image of the side of a young man’s face - caught my eye. I could tell, even without picking it up, that it was a True Crime book. It was coloured with the tricolour of True Crime genre: black, white and blood-red. Mr Evil was the title, The Secret Life of Racist Bomber and Killer David Copeland. Immediately fascinated, I picked the book up. I felt shaky with adrenaline that seemed to have come from nowhere. Standing there in the shop, I flicked quickly through and found the passage that answered my question:

'In the summer of 1998, Copeland moved from Forest Gate to a studio flat in Bermondsey, in south-east London. It was a dark, one-roomed bedsit in an old purpose-built block on the noisy, busy Jamaica Road. Living in such a place only added to the mental instability of the 21-year-old man. He had again decided to move to be closer to work, which was then based at the Bermondsey Underground station on the Jubilee line...'

(I could forgive the writers, Graeme McLagan, the Panorama journalist, and Nick Lowles, co-editor of the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight, for creating a bit of seedy local colour. But they were making the building sound worse than it is.)

'Once installed in the flat, Copeland added to his collection of newspaper and magazine cuttings, filling an entire wall with horrific pictures.'

This was a terrible image - one that I still haven’t got over. His hate was there, on display. Something only a few inches away from the everyday trudge up and down the stairs.

'He also had another go at bomb-making,...'

'Right,' I thought. Strangely, the adrenaline began to subside. I felt shakier, but more relaxed. I knew.
'..equipment was bought locally - some from a local DIY store.'

Where I shop.

' - while a trip across London secured him a large amount of liquid ammonium from a medical supply shop in west Hampstead. This was to form a booster charge for what he called a 'professional fertiliser bomb'.'

I felt nauseous, excited, bewildered. This was something that had been going on right under my nose. I had been sitting on top of a bomb.

'Despite his best intentions, Copeland failed yet again to make a viable device. Increasingly frustrated, he dropped the bombing plan, albeit temporarily. He poured the remains of the nitric acid down the sink and discarded the empty canister in the rubbish bin at the bottom of the stairs to his flat. He had initially tried to drop the canister down the chute, situated on the landing outside his front door, but it was, unsurprisingly, too big.'

In a shocked state, I walked up to join the queue for the till.

On the tube home, I looked through the book for any further references to the summer of 1998. There were a couple of minor ones: to Copeland being ill, eating in the local cafe. (Where I eat.) Nothing really to add to the fact he'd been trying to make a 'professional fertilizer bomb' behind a door that I pass several times a day.

As I passed the door this time, I took a closer look at it. Just as before, there were no external signs that anything unusual had been going on in there. It was of dark, chocolate-coloured wood; it had frosted glass; there was a decal of Snoopy, fishing, with a big semi-circular smile on his face.

I tried to think back to the summer of 1998. Had I noticed any strange smells in the stairwell? If I had smelled ammonia, I'd have put it down to the rubbish chutes. Had I brushed past David Copeland on the stairs? No memory of that whatsoever. Nor of hearing any Screwdriver or other skinhead favourites blaring out the back windows.

One of the clichés that jailers regularly come out with is that some inmates are so evil, you can feel it even as you walk past the door to their cell. Well, I'd been walking past the door to Mr Evil's cell, and had never felt a thing.

Part of me felt a renewed excitement by the idea of close proximity to something, somebody, so notorious. London is such a huge city that you expect most things that happen here to happen somewhere a long way away, to other people. And these terrible things had happened elsewhere, and not to me. But part of what led up to that was very close to home indeed.

Thinking about all this, I came to a realization: London may be a huge city, into which people can disappear completely, but just because they've become invisible, it doesn't mean they've ceased to exist, or hate, or build bombs. They may be nowhere to be seen, but they're always somewhere to be found.

And there's a very fine line between wanting to be at the centre of the action and wanting to be safely outside the blast-zone

(Mr Evil is published by John Blake, £14.99. ISBN: 1857824164)