‘Can you be in Bermondsey at two?’

‘What’s in Bermondsey?’

‘Me. At two o’clock.’ She gives me the address. ‘I’ll see you there.’

*

From Southwark to Bermondsey is only a couple of miles, but it’s a journey to another country. The address Marilyn gave me is the Beatrice Webb housing estate, a vast 1930s redbrick complex of low-rise council flats. It used to be largely white working class and, according to folklore, was one of the more crime-free parts of London because they had a rule that they never nicked from their own. After years of high unemployment, it is battered, rundown, depressed. Windows are barred or boarded-up, walls are covered in graffiti, and there is litter – Coke and beer cans, newspapers, dog shit, used condoms – everywhere.

The buildings are in a rectangle overlooking a scrubby patch of brown grass. It was originally a play area for kids, though judging by the small group of pallid teenagers on the far side, it’s now only a haven for dealers and addicts.

This was Dickens’ London. It was remade by a welfare state. And if it was ever the new Jerusalem, it’s become Gomorrah. Dickens would not struggle to find stories of deprivation, and perhaps even less hope than when he was chronicling.

Marilyn stands on the periphery of the grass, wrapped in a long black-and-white houndstooth coat and keeping a wary distance from the teenagers. With her pageboy haircut and a cigarette dangling from her hand, she affects the 1960s chic of the Nouvelle Vague.

‘Why are we here?’ I discreetly nod towards the teenagers. ‘It feels dodgy.’

‘They’re probably more frightened of us than we are of them.’ She might be right. The teenagers have their backs turned and are all deliberately looking in the other direction. They must assume we’re social workers about to ask them why they’re not in school. Since I’ve arrived, the group has shrunk.

Then I realise the kids aren’t bothered about Marilyn and me. By a doorway on the east side of the quadrangle there are three men with short haircuts and dark overcoats, earpieces connected to bulges in their jackets.

‘What’s going on?’ She rolls her eyes at me. Which is fair enough: there can only be one reason why Marilyn and Special Branch would be here. ‘Johnny?’

‘He’s inside number thirteen.’

There’s something odd about this. Politicians doing walkabouts on housing estates is nothing new. It’s all part of the ‘man of the people’ schtick. Even the Tories do it. But there should be dozens of people: TV vans and news crews, local party workers, central office flacks and minders. Not Marilyn, and a few disgruntled drug dealers whose work’s been interrupted.