The Lighterman: The Kray Twins are out for revenge... (Charles Holborne Legal Thrillers Book 3)

by Simon Michael

  Hill enters the room. He nods a greeting to the Kray twins but approaches the other two men. He bends to speak quietly in the older man’s ear.

  ‘Sorry to disturb you Lucky, but d’you think I could have the room for a moment? A bit of business, you understand?’

  The man addressed turns his face toward Hill. He’s in his thirties, with an enormous moustache that dominates his face and eyebrows that almost join in the middle of his brow.

  ‘Yes, of course, Billy. We’re done here anyway.’ He stands.

  ‘But my Lord…!’ protests the man to whom he’s been speaking, half-rising at the same time.

  ‘Not another word!’ hisses Lord Lucan, barely suppressed rage in his voice, and he strides out of the room without a backward glance. His companion scuttles after him and one of Hill’s two bodyguards follows him out, leaving the other to plant himself heavily on the inside, his back to the closed door.

  Hill crosses the room towards Ronnie and Reggie Kray. They both stand. After a decade or more of mentoring the twins, Hill can no longer be caught out by their occasional trick of pretending to be each other, but he is still amazed at the resemblance between them.

  The similarities are not only physical: they think so alike — no, more than that, Hill corrects himself — they seem to share the same thoughts. Their ability for unspoken, and to anyone else, undetected, communication is genuinely eerie, and never more apparent than when they are required to make instant decisions, whether in the context of business or violence.

  Hill’s been present on many occasions when the boys couldn’t possibly have discussed a proposed course of action in advance, and yet they burst into synchronised movement, two cogs in a perfectly meshed machine. In Hill’s opinion that’s what gives them their edge over the rest of the new generation of ambitious strong-arm boys: people are frightened of their uncanny communication and the extent to which they’re prepared to back each other up, to the death if necessary.

  Hill shakes hands with each of them in turn and sits on the couch facing their two chairs.

  ‘Drink?’ asks Reggie, always the slightly more urbane and communicative of the two.

  ‘No, thanks,’ replies Hill with a wave of his hand. ‘I want to get back to the tables soon as possible. How can I help?’

  Reggie speaks again. ‘What happened to that mate of yours, the Irish geezer, Marrinan?’

  Billy’s eyes narrow. ‘He was no mate of mine. He caused me no end of grief; worse since he was disbarred.’

  ‘Is he still knocking about?’ asks Reggie. ‘We might have a job for him.’

  ‘Don’t waste your time, boys. I hear he died in a car crash a while back.’

  ‘Is that right?’ asks Ronnie.

  ‘So I hear. But he’s so slippery, I wouldn’t believe it till I saw the corpse myself.’ Hill smiles, briefly. ‘What do you need a disbarred barrister for, anyway? Is this still about Charlie Horowitz?’ Neither of the twins answers, but both stare at Hill. ‘Fine. None of my business. But I’d have thought you’d have more important things to waste your time on. He’s harmless.’

  ‘Really? He got Harry Robeson banged up,’ says Ronnie, with surprising force.

  ‘The way I heard it,’ replies Hill, calmly, ‘that was down to Robeson himself. He copped a plea at the last second. You can’t blame a brief for that.’

  ‘That ain’t the whole story,’ says Ronnie.

  Hill shrugs in apparent deference. He doesn’t need an argument with Ronnie Kray tonight. ‘Sure, it never is,’ he says in a conciliatory tone. ‘I knew Horowitz a bit, y’know? During the war. He wasn’t always the shining light of … what do you call it? … yeah, probity. Before his little dad came back and gave him a thick ear at the back end of ’42 he was a bit of a jack-the-lad.’

  ‘We know that,’ says Ronnie. ‘I fought him once on the undercard at Wembley in ’51.’

  ‘Nah, it wasn’t him,’ corrects Reggie. ‘It was that other Jewish kid. Horowitz was in the weight above.’

  ‘Whatever. I’m going to have him, whatever he fucking weighs,’ says Ronnie emphatically, his voice rising again. ‘He’s an arrogant cunt what needs teaching a lesson!’

  Hill’s eyes flick quickly from Ronnie to Reggie and back again, and shrugs, holding up his hands in submission. ‘OK. Whatever you think’s best. But Marrinan’s not going to help you. If you need to get close to Horowitz, Holborne, or whatever he calls himself now, you’ll have to come up with something else. Sorry boys.’ He gets up to leave. ‘I’ll send some more drinks up.’

  As he walks towards the door, his bodyguard’s hand resting on the handle, Hill turns and pauses, head cocked to one side and intelligent eyes glinting like those of a corvid.

  The Kray twins regard him patiently, waiting. There are few people in the London underworld Ronnie and Reggie Kray actually respect, but Billy Hill is one of them. He’s clever, thoughtful and, since his release from prison for a warehouse robbery in the late 1940s, had made a fortune through his various criminal enterprises, never getting caught.

  ‘Who gets closest to barristers?’ Hill asks quietly, almost to himself.

  The twins think. ‘Coppers?’ suggests Ronnie.

  ‘Closer.’

  ‘Clients,’ says Reggie after a moment’s consideration.

  ‘Exactly. And where? Inside, that’s where. Where legal visits are…’

  ‘Unsupervised,’ finishes Ronnie, sitting back in his chair thoughtfully.

  The door is opened for Hill and he’s about to step outside when he turns again. ‘If I wanted to shiv a brief, I’d find someone already banged up on a murder charge, someone bound to go down, and I’d offer him a top-class brief and a promise to look after his family once he’s convicted. What’d he have to lose? He can’t be hanged twice. G’night gents. Have a nice evening.’

  Hill disappears through the door but, as it’s about to close, his head reappears, wearing a smile. ‘I’d avoid the Chemmy tonight, if I were you. Got a feeling it might be another good night for the house.’

  CHAPTER TEN

  Charles eases himself into the hot water of the bath with a sigh. He can hear Sally in the kitchen making them both a cup of tea. A moment later she prods the bathroom door open with her toe and comes into the steamy bathroom. She holds out a cup to Charles, who takes it, and she sits on the edge of the bath.

  ‘Do you want me to have a look?’ she asks.

  ‘It feels as though it’s falling off,’ replies Charles bending forward so that Sally can see the dressing on his back.

  ‘Hang on a sec,’ she says, placing her cup of tea on the floor and kneeling by the side of the bath to look more closely. Her fingers explore the edge of the dressing. ‘It’s curled up at the edges. And it’s a bit grubby.’

  ‘They said not to touch it until today.’

  ‘What you want me to do?’

  ‘If it looks as if it’s going to come off, just peel it off carefully.’

  Sally picks at the one remaining corner still adhering to Charles’s skin, and slowly lifts the dressing off completely. ‘Jesus, Charlie! This is much worse than you let on. There’s got to be — what? — twenty stitches here.’

  ‘Thirty, I was told.’

  In not wanting to worry Sally with his suspicions, at least until he has a plan, a course of action to follow, Charles has been selective with his account of the attack outside the Old Bailey, repeating the police theory that he was the victim of an attempted robbery. He has made no mention of the phone message left, presumably by his attacker, in Sally’s name.

  Sally gets a flannel and carefully washes the dried blood off Charles’s back. She runs a finger gently along the fresh pink scar. It looks fully healed but she knows it still hurts when Charles moves, as she hears his breath catch when he bends to pick up his bag or put on his shoes. ‘Have you heard anything more from Snow Hill?’ she asks, concerned.

  ‘No. I need to chase them.’

  ‘Yes, you do,’ replies Sally emphat
ically.

  She gets off her knees and returns to her position on the edge of the bath. She appraises Charles’s naked body in the water. Sally has had boyfriends before Charles, but that’s what they were, boys, compared to this powerful, very masculine man. They haven’t had sex in the two weeks since the attack due to Sally’s fear that the movement might open Charles’s wound. It’s been their longest period of abstinence since their relationship began and both are acutely aware of it.

  Sally slides her hand into the hot water and caresses him, staring into his eyes with a growing smile. She looks down. ‘Glad to see everything’s still working,’ she says. ‘I was beginning to wonder. Fancy a gentle test drive?’

  Detective Sergeant Cyril Jones, known throughout Soho as “Moody’s sergeant”, pinches out his roll-up and slips the remaining inch in his top jacket pocket. He knows it’s a disgusting habit and his guvnor says it makes him stink but, by his calculations, it saves him at least half a crown on snout and Rizlas every week. That amounts to over ten quid a year, or the price of a weekend in Bognor. And despite the fat brown envelopes received weekly from those kings of pornography, Humphreys and Silver — his share of the licence fees paid to the Dirty Squad to turn a blind eye — Cyril Jones has always been careful with his money. Known for it, in fact.

  He listens as keys jangle in the corridor outside the visiting room. A few moments later the prison guard escorts a man into the room and shoves him into the chair opposite Jones.

  ‘Thanks,’ says Jones, and the guard leaves without a word, closing the metal door behind him with a clang.

  Jones examines the man before him. He’s in his thirties and he is strikingly good-looking. His face and the top part of his neck are bronzed by sun and wind, though Jones glimpses white skin below a “V” of suntan. Thick honey-coloured hair highlighted blond by exposure to a lot of sunshine falls over a level brow. Deep-set light brown eyes, a straight nose and a strong chin complete the look of a man who’d not be out of place on the billboards for the Saturday matinees films Jones with his wife attend when they tire of the dreariness of their two-room flat in Shepherd’s Bush. However, Jones knows that this specimen of perfect manhood is no film idol; he has read the contents of the manila file now closed on the table between them.

  As a remand prisoner the man is entitled to wear his own clothes, consisting in this case of a sleeveless leather jerkin over a shirt with rolled sleeves revealing powerful tattooed arms with tight knotted muscles; high-waisted baggy blue trousers held up with a frayed leather belt; and a flat cap perched back on the crown of his head. The tan and build speak of hard physical work.

  ‘What do you want, copper?’ asks the young man. ‘You’re not Waterguard.’ His bright eyes appraise the policeman from between narrowed lids.

  ‘Hello, Merlin. You don’t mind me calling you “Merlin” do you?’

  ‘I don’t give a fuck what you call me; what d’you want?’

  Jones reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out a packet of Players. He doesn’t usually smoke them himself — rollups are much cheaper — but cigarettes are universal currency inside, and he knows that Merlin can use them to buy soap, shampoo, perhaps even protection. He can also see from the tar stains on the index and middle fingers on Merlin’s right hand that he’s a heavy smoker. He reaches over the table and offers the packet. Merlin looks from Jones’s face to the cigarettes and back again.

  ‘Go, on take one,’ urges Jones. ‘In fact, take a few. It’ll cost you nothing.’

  After a momentary hesitation Merlin reaches over and takes a handful of cigarettes from the packet. He puts all but one carefully in his shirt pocket to spend later, and flips one neatly into his mouth. Jones smiles, takes one himself, strikes a match, and lights them both.

  ‘How’re you finding it inside?’ asks Jones. Merlin doesn’t answer, but stares hard at the policeman. ‘No one giving you any … trouble?’

  Merlin continues to stare, his brow creasing slightly as he tries to understand the hidden depths to the question.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ says Jones, drawing a deep lungful of smoke and sitting back on the hard, wooden chair. ‘Right. It says here —’ he points at the manila folder with the cigarette — ‘that you killed an Assistant Preventive Officer as he was conducting a search of your lighter. Is that right?’

  Merlin turns his head away and he looks up at the barred rectangle of sky in the wall above the sergeant’s shoulder. ‘If that’s what it says,’ he replies in a disinterested voice.

  ‘It does. It also says that you confessed to murdering him. In an interview under caution.’

  Merlin resumes his steely-eyed glare for a second, but then looks away without response.

  ‘You’re going to be arraigned in a fortnight,’ continues Jones. ‘Pleading or fighting?’

  ‘I don’t have to tell you that,’ says Merlin lazily, still focusing on the patch of sky-blue in the institutional green of the interview room wall. He lowers his head slowly to look again at the policeman and spits a flake of tobacco onto the table less than an inch from the other’s hand. ‘I don’t have to tell no one that, ’cept my brief.’

  ‘Quite true, son, quite true. But your brief’s surely told you your chances? I mean —’ Jones pats the folder gently with his fingertips — ‘you’re no fool. You’re banged to rights. You know it and I know it.’

  Merlin examines his nails as if disinterested. Jones smiles; it’s a decent act but he can read the tension in the young man’s pursed lips and guarded eyes.

  ‘And you know what that means. Waterguard are coppers, weird boat coppers it’s true, but coppers all the same. And you was resisting arrest. So either way, you’re gonna swing.’

  Merlin suddenly stands, the chair rocking back and falling on the floor. ‘Piss off!’ he says, and he bangs on the door. ‘I’m going back to me cell.’

  ‘Up to you son. But I’m trying to do you a favour here. I’m offering to get a decent brief for you — not just some tosser you’ve never heard of, assigned under legal aid. I’m offering to make sure your mum’s looked after if the worst occurs. Not just for a while, but for the rest of.’ The metal door opens and the prison guard is standing outside. ‘Sure you don’t want to discuss it?’ asks Jones, still in his seat.

  Merlin pauses. ‘It’s all right,’ he says to the guard. He turns and rights the chair, settling back in his seat at the table. The guard closes the door again. ‘Who are you?’ asks Merlin. ‘And why would you help me?’

  ‘I’m Detective Sergeant Jones of the Obscene Publications Squad.’

  The young man’s brow screws up in puzzlement. ‘The Dirty Squad? What on earth would you want with me? That’s not my game.’

  ‘We know that. I’m just a messenger. Let’s just say you’ve a got a guardian angel on the outside who’s prepared to throw a lot of effort at your defence. If you get off, well, that’s your good fortune. But —’ Jones leans forward intently, pointing so that his index finger is only two inches from the bridge of the other’s nose — ‘but … if you’re convicted, we need you to do a little job for us.’

  ‘What sort of job? I’ll be banged up, won’t I? Waiting on the hangman. Not exactly available for work.’

  ‘You’ll be in exactly the right place for this little job, believe me. And when it’s done, your mum — Beatrice, isn’t it? — will receive a very large sum of money; enough to see her through to the end of her life. Where else you gonna get an offer like that? Eh?’

  The young man stares hard at the policeman and blows smoke straight at his face. Jones doesn’t flinch.

  ‘Think about it, Merlin. She’s in bad health, I hear; got no one but you. How else you going to provide for her after … well … once you’re gone?’

  Merlin takes a final deep drag of his cigarette and slowly stubs it out in the foil ashtray on the table. ‘How can I trust you? I don’t know you from Adam.’

  ‘You don’t have to trust me, son. Wait till you see the brief we’ve g
ot lined up. He’s one of the top barristers in practice. If you’ve any chance of an acquittal, it’s with him.’

  ‘I don’t see the catch.’

  Jones smiles slowly and shakes his head. ‘That’s the beauty of it, son. There ain’t a catch. It’s a win-win.’

  Merlin sighs deeply. ‘OK. If I was to be interested, just what’s the job you want done at the end of this?’

  An hour later the prison door clangs shut behind a satisfied DS Jones. He pauses to light up the stub end of his rollup and then walks back to his private car, a light blue Morris 1100, parked around the back of Brixton Prison. He appears to be in no hurry. He opens the door, sits in the driving seat and leans back, his eyes closed.

  Fifteen minutes later a tall man with thinning grey hair brushed across a domed head walks around the corner from the front yard of the prison. He wears a raincoat buttoned up to the neck which, had it been noted by anyone, might have appeared odd as the weather was warm and there had been no rain for several days. He approaches the Morris, places a hand on the door handle of the passenger door, scans the empty pavements quickly and slides into the passenger seat. As he does so, his raincoat parts slightly around his knees, and a flash of blue prison uniform serge is visible.

  A hurried whispered conversation occurs in the car and a fat brown envelope is passed from DS Jones to the prison officer. Without a further word the recipient of the envelope leaves the car and walks swiftly away. The entire exchange takes less than sixty seconds.

  The front door of 178 Vallance Road, a small terraced Victorian cottage in Bethnal Green, opens and closes as Reggie Kray steps into the narrow hallway. The noise of his entry is drowned by the rumble of the Liverpool Street-bound train whose tracks run almost directly behind the terrace’s backyard. As the street falls silent again Reggie hears his mother, Violet, talking quietly to someone in the kitchen. He hangs up his jacket and opens the kitchen door.

  Ronnie Kray sits at the kitchen table in his shirt sleeves, his hands clasped around a tumbler of amber liquid, full to the brim. Reggie’s eyes flick to the almost empty bottle of spirits by his brother’s elbow. At the table are their mother and older brother, Charlie. There is tension in the room. Violet shares a look with Reggie, her eyebrows raised with a fractional incline of her head towards Ronnie.