“There’s a fight circuit,” I said, before Vic Okonkwo had finished sitting down, before he’d even looked up from his monitor. Rain was still coming off my coat in a thin line onto his carpet, because I hadn’t stopped to shake it off outside. I’d promised myself on the bus that I would not let him choose how this meeting started. “Underground, unlicensed, running out of railway arches and warehouses south of the river.”
He looked up then, slowly, the slowness of a man deciding whether to be annoyed. “You look like you walked here.”
“I got the bus and then I walked the last bit. There’s a difference.”
“Is there.” He turned the monitor a few degrees away from himself, which was as close as Vic got to giving anyone his full attention. He didn’t otherwise acknowledge that I’d started without him. His office had a window onto a chimney stack and a shelf of documentary boxsets arranged by award rather than subject, and he watched me over the top of his glasses the way he watched everything, waiting to see if I’d fill his silence with something he could say no to. “Go on, then, since you’ve clearly already started.”
“It’s been going for at least six years that anyone can trace, probably longer. No press has ever filmed inside it. Not local news, not the true crime channels, not the two guys who did that Vice piece on illegal boxing in Manchester. Nobody’s got close.”
“Why not?”
“Because the man who runs it doesn’t let anyone close. Ever. He’s called Kit Bellamy, and as far as I can tell he hasn’t given an interview, a photo, or a quote to anyone in years. There’s a Reddit thread with four hundred comments arguing about whether he’s even real.”
Vic leaned back. It was the posture he used when he was interested and didn’t want me to know it yet, a specific tilt of the chair that I’d learned to read the way sailors read cloud.
“And you think you can get in.”
“I think I can get in because I already found someone who fights there.” This part was true, mostly. “A physio I interviewed for the care-home thing patches up circuit fighters on the side, cash in hand, no questions. He gave me a name. I’ve been feeding a very small, very patient email address for three weeks.”
“And?”
“And two days ago I got one line back. It said: Warehouse, Thursday, nine. Come alone. No promises.”
Vic said nothing for a moment, which from him was practically a toast.
“That’s not access,” he said finally. “That’s an invitation to stand in a car park.”
“It’s more than anyone else has ever gotten.”
“You don’t know that. You know it’s more than you’ve gotten.” He drummed two fingers on the desk, a rhythm I recognised from every negotiation I’d ever lost to him. “What’s the actual story, Marlowe? Not the mystery man. The film. What’s it about once the novelty wears off?”
I’d thought about this on the bus too, staring at the fogged window, watching a woman two seats up argue quietly with someone on the phone about money she clearly didn’t have.
“It’s about an economy nobody talks about,” I said. “Men who can’t get insured to box legally, who owe money they can’t pay any legal way, fighting for cash in front of forty people in a warehouse because it’s the last door open to them. It’s about who benefits from that door staying open, and who’s supposed to be protecting them, and isn’t. I think Kit Bellamy is the answer to at least one of those questions. I think he’s terrified of anyone finding out which one.”
“Terrified isn’t the word I’d use for a man who runs illegal fights for a living.”
“It’s the word I’m using until I have a better one.”
He looked at me properly then, the way he did maybe twice a year, when he stopped being a commissioning editor with a slate to fill and became, briefly, the person who’d hired me out of a masters programme a decade ago because my final project had made two grown men cry in a screening room. I had been trying to get that look out of him for four years, ever since a broadcaster’s lawyers had gutted Held down to something with no shadow left in it. My phone had mostly stopped ringing for anything that wasn’t a corporate away-day or, once, a wedding I still hadn’t told anyone I’d shot for cash.
“I can give you a few weeks and enough for one camera, one card reader, and your Tube fare,” he said. “No crew — I’m not putting anyone else’s neck on this until I know what it is. If it’s forty men in tracksuits watching two blokes hit each other for a hundred quid, you come back and we call it a short. If it’s what you think it is, we talk about a real budget, and you tell me everything. Including the parts you think I don’t want to hear.”
“Especially those.”
“Especially those.” He almost smiled, which for Vic was the equivalent of standing on the desk and cheering. “Don’t get arrested. Don’t get hurt. And for God’s sake, don’t fall in love with your subject. It’s the most boring thing a filmmaker can do.”
“Noted,” I said, in the tone of someone who has absolutely no intention of falling in love with anyone currently living in a warehouse.
Scene break
I met Ray Tovey the same afternoon, in the sort of pub that still had a carpet and a fruit machine nobody had won on since decimalisation. Ray had been the physio on Held, patching up the volunteer carers who kept throwing their backs out lifting people twice their own weight for a wage that made me want to set something on fire. He’d let slip once, over a pint I bought him out of guilt, that he did private work too. Cash, evenings, no paperwork.
“I shouldn’t have told you,” he said now, turning his glass in a slow circle on the beer mat. “I’ve thought about it every day since I did.”
“You didn’t tell me anything. You said you knew a fighter who fights for cash sometimes. That’s not a state secret, Ray, that’s Tuesday for half of southeast London.”
“It’s the where that’s the secret.” He glanced at the door, which I’d notice him doing three more times before we finished our drinks, a habit I recognised because I’d started doing it myself without meaning to. “You know what I do for the ones who come to me after. I don’t mean strapped ribs. I’ve had a lad who couldn’t lift his own arm above his shoulder for a month, still fighting the next week because whatever he owes, it doesn’t wait for tendons to heal. That’s the world you want to point a camera at.”
“That’s exactly the world I want to point a camera at.”
“They’re frightened of him. Bellamy. Every one of them.” He said it carefully, like he was setting something down that might go off. “Not frightened the way you’re frightened of a boss who might sack you. Frightened the way you’re frightened of weather.”
“Frightened of him, or frightened of whatever he’s protecting them from?”
Ray didn’t answer that, which I understood later was itself an answer. He finished his pint instead, and wrote me the location on the back of a beer mat in careful block capitals, the way you’d write down a hospital’s name for someone in shock. He made me promise three separate times that I wouldn’t say where I’d got it.
I walked home along the river afterward because I wanted to think without anyone watching me do it. The tide was out, and the mud flats below the embankment had that particular smell London gets only near water, rot and salt and something almost sweet underneath. A heron stood absolutely still at the edge of the flats, like it had been paid to be there. I thought about the word frightened the whole way home, turning it the way Ray had turned his glass, and by the time I reached my own door I’d stopped being able to tell whether the fear I was chasing belonged to the fighters or to the man who was supposedly protecting them from something worse. I still hadn’t told Vic the meeting had gone anywhere near this well. I wanted one more day of it belonging only to me before I let anyone else decide what it was worth.
I spent the two days before Thursday the way I always spent the two days before anything that mattered: doing everything except the thing itself. I re-catalogued three years of B-roll I’d never use. I charged four batteries I only needed two of. I read the Reddit thread about Kit Bellamy so many times I could have recited it — four hundred comments circling the same handful of facts like moths around one bulb. A man who’d apparently once put a promoter in hospital for trying to run an unsanctioned fight on his patch. A man nobody had a verified photograph of past the age of about twenty-five. A man three separate users swore had “a whole other life” before the circuit that nobody would say more about. I didn’t believe half of it. I wrote all of it down anyway, because a filmmaker’s job, whatever else it is, is refusing to decide in advance what’s true.
Scene break
Thursday came in on a wind that turned every umbrella on Jamaica Road inside out at least once. I took the 47 as far as it went and walked the rest, past a chicken shop with its shutters half down, past a mural of a fox mid-leap that someone had clearly painted with real love and no budget, until the streets stopped pretending to be residential and started being what they actually were: the back of everything. Loading bays. Corrugated fencing wrapped in five years of flyers for raves that had already happened. A smell of the river even three streets away from it, mud and diesel and something colder underneath.
The warehouse sat at the end of a service road with no name I could find on any map, lit by a single security light that buzzed like it was thinking about giving up. A man leaned against a roller door smoking, watching me the entire two hundred metres from the corner, and didn’t move until I was close enough that not stopping would have been strange.
“You the filmmaker,” he said. Not a question.
“Marlowe Sinclair.”
“He said you’d try to bring a bag bigger than that.” He nodded at my camera case like it had personally disappointed him by being reasonably sized. “You got ID?”
I showed him my driving licence. He photographed it on his own phone without asking, which told me more about how this operation was run than anything I’d read in three weeks of research. Careful. Documented, in its own way. Not the chaos the Reddit thread imagined.
“Rules,” he said, pocketing his phone. “You film what’s happening in the ring. You don’t film faces without asking first, especially not his. You don’t go past the second doorway on the left, that’s not for anyone who isn’t crew. You leave when he says you leave, not when you decide you’re done. You got all that?”
“Who’s he?”
The man looked at me the way people look at a fire they’re deciding whether to put out or let burn a little longer to see what happens.
“You’ll know,” he said, and pulled the roller door up just far enough for me to duck under, into a wall of sound I felt in my back teeth before I heard it properly: feet on concrete, a bell, forty voices going up together like something had been decided.
I had six seconds, maybe seven, standing just inside that door with the rain still running off my jacket onto a floor that had clearly seen worse things spilled on it. I was nobody yet, unremarked, purely a camera with legs. I used every one of those seconds looking for a face I hadn’t seen a single photograph of anywhere on the internet, and somehow, before anyone told me, before I’d raised the lens or asked a single question, I knew which of the shapes at the edge of the crowd was him.
He wasn’t watching the fight. He was watching the door.