Kenny

It's not often you look at someone and know they could kill. Realise immediately they're way beyond the idle, macho threats that disappear with the rage that uttered them. I've only ever seen it once.

Kenny had taken it upon himself to police where the police never went. He did a better job than driving past every now and again, hoping someone would be deterred from wrong-doing by glimpsing a black van with locked doors as it headed to another tea-break back at the station.

I first heard about him while still lay up in bed after jumping from a window. What had been a big gang of friends had split in two, some still in need of Dean and his powers or powders, others sick of what he was doing. These were the ones who still came to visit bringing stories and Lucozade when it was still covered in that noisy yellow wrapper.

He'd started his campaign against Dean by walking up to the car he was in, the window wound down despite the weather so money could be handed over, with what looked like a crumpled sheet of newspaper in his hands. After his suggestion it might be best to move on was met with a stoned and stony silence, he took out a lighter and set fire to the package, letting it catch before pushing it through the window onto Dean's lap, where he flapped at it with his hands trying to put out the flames. Inside was dog shit, easy enough to collect from the threadbare grassy areas, which got splattered all over the car and everyone in it. I thought I'd split from laughing when I heard they couldn't use the car for a week it smelt so bad. I knew it wouldn't stop there though and wanted to meet the guy who'd done this before they did.

The night they smashed the front room window at the house his family had moved into a few months earlier, they hadn't expected him to sprint out, fully clothed, armed with a rounders bat. He caught up with them in the playground, from where they were taken to the hospital. When I did meet him and asked why a rounders bat and not the usual baseball bat, he explained they were too long to swing in a confined space, and both did the same job. I guess that's what you call insiders knowledge.

I didn't know it was him I'd glimpsed running along the road outside my mum's house, but I was right in thinking whoever it was running in all-weathers was a nutter. He told me later it was a habit he'd picked up in borstal, where by trying to wear down young criminals, they'd instead created super-fit ones. It soon became known he could out sprint a police van whenever one made a rare half-hearted attempt to catch him.

He was born into it, his dad was inside for robbing banks. He once let slip that he reckoned that song by The Clash was written for him and inspired him to make sure he never let down the family business. I thought it was just a rumour he had his dads sawn-off buried in his back yard till I saw it pulled in the local pup where he'd been short changed half an hour earlier when paying with one of the new 20 quid notes no one was used to seeing. Seems a bit over the top, but he got his money and could be pretty sure it wouldn't happen again.

He saw it more as sport getting rid of Dean, reburied the gun and stuck to weapons without bullets. Petrol was a favourite and was what he poured through the letterbox just as the night became dawn. Most of us were woke up by the fire engines, but unfortunately, no ambulances. They'd arrive a few weeks later when he cornered Dean in the alley he had to walk down on his way back from the Post Office. He taught him a lesson with half a brick his solicitor claimed in court he'd found lying about after being attacked by this known violent drug dealer. He got off with a suspended sentence while Dean wasn't his usual chatty self and had to drink liquidised meals for the rest of the year. Kenny waited for the wires to be removed before breaking his jaw again, this time with a claw hammer. Dean got the message loud and clear and no one saw him again. Over and out.

Right or wrong, he was still a hero at this point. A psychopathic one, but one that was liked for ridding the area of vermin. Our very own Rentokil. If it had stopped there he'd still be remembered fondly.

The kids who stuck them all over the walls at school really didn't know what they meant. They knew they were stickers and it was the Union Jack, but the words immigration and repatriation? What did that mean? They were everywhere within a matter of days. Not just the school, the local shops, the bus stop, the pub toilets. Where ever you looked, Union Jacks and slogans most people didn't understand but got the drift meant 'go home'. When election day came, they suddenly appeared all over the outside of the Polling Station where they remained long after the next day when it converted back into a nursery. They musn't have had much effect though 'cos no one voted for them. Except for one. Which might be why he decided to step up his campaign.

It was a repeat performance of his pouring petrol through the letterbox trick. His target this time was a neat and tidy house house that had become the pride and join of a Pakistani couple and their two young kids since they moved in the year before. Fire engines woke everyone up again, before Ambulances arrived for the kids wrapped in dampened blankets carried out through the thick smoke. Though no one died and nothing was said, a line had been crossed. There wasn't that sort of hate where we lived. Dealers - yes; dealt a bad hand and forced to move to a new country - no. It was children seen coughing and spluttering in the back of the ambulance.

Kenny knew this and made it known he'd come after anyone who mentioned his name to the police. Which shut people up for a while, at least in public. It wasn't long until someone whispered loud enough to make it easy for even the cloth-eared police to take notice. His mum told everyone she was moving so she could visit him more easily. The estate's first black family moved into the house a month later.