Notorious: The Immortal Legend of the Kray Twins

by John Pearson

  ‘And Reg. Don’t be long. I’m getting lonely.’

  Reg wasn’t used to finding girls so he consulted Tommy Cowley, a member of the Firm who specialised in looking after the West End clubs, and Cowley recommended Churchill’s Club in Bond Street. Early that evening Reg and Cowley visited the club to see what talent was on offer. It didn’t take them long to pick a shapely blonde with a ready smile called Lisa Prescott. Since the Twins were ‘looking after’ Churchill’s at the time, Reg seemed to think that they didn’t need to pay her. Nor, more important, did he feel obliged to tell her anything about her ‘duties’. Had he done so, no hostess in her senses would ever have accepted.

  Instead, Reg talked to her about this rich Arab friend of his who had just arrived in London and was feeling lonely. He asked her if she liked Arabs.

  ‘If they’re rich,’ she said, and reluctantly agreed to come.

  When she reached the flat and saw that the ‘rich Arab’ was Frank Mitchell she recognised him at once but had the good sense not to say so.

  Few girls, however keen or desperate for money would have gone through with it but Lisa knew that there was no alternative. At the same time she was a professional, and made it clear that she wasn’t doing anything until there was money on the table. And she stood her ground.

  She was a small woman and Mitchell could have forced her had he wanted to. But in the face of her refusal he showed a sort of battered decency which, combined with the way he still trusted those who were going to betray him, makes the end of the story seem more sick and sad than ever.

  Reg reluctantly returned to Vallance Road and came back with £100 in a paper carrier bag. After pocketing twenty for expenses, Donoghue gave the rest to Lisa, and she started work. It was heavy going. After each session making love Mitchell supposedly leapt out of bed, did fifty press-ups, then started off again.

  But although Lisa helped staved off disaster for a while she also raised the stakes. Not only was she trapped like all the others. To make her situation worse she was also an outsider as well as a potential witness.

  It wasn’t long before she too was becoming frightened, particularly when Reg made it clear that it was out of the question to think of returning to her little flat in Marylebone. When he told her, ‘This is like the war. You’re in this for the duration,’ Lisa understood that she’d be lucky to get out of it alive.

  In the intervals between sex and press-ups, she and Mitchell started talking. They talked about the country. Ronnie had promised he would take Frank to his house in the country. ‘Promise you’ll come there with me, Lisa.’

  The only excitement came when the papers published both of Frank Mitchell’s letters. The Times did it straight, without comment. The Mirror also published theirs and the editor added some words of exhortation to Frank. ‘Wherever you are, Frank, be a man and give yourself up.’ Had it been left to Frank, by now he would have done so. But when he suggested this, Reg made things clear that it would be over their dead bodies. And to make things worse, after the publication of the letters there was no further news from anyone.

  Since there was no response from the police, let alone from the Home Office, it was clear that Ron’s plan wasn’t working and they had landed in a mess to which there was no solution. Or rather, there was one obvious solution which nobody in that airless bed-sitting room, with the the curtains pulled and the electric fire permanently on, cared to think about, let alone discuss. It’s hard to know when everyone realised that the game was up and the whole hopeless enterprise was doomed to failure. But if anybody did, no one dared to say so.

  This meant that the atmosphere within that stuffy little flat was becoming tenser by the hour as hopelessness set in, and even Mitchell must have understood the truth – that he had exchanged one prison for another. The room had become a prison for them all, for if Mitchell was trapped within it so were his captors who were now utterly involved in keeping this large dangerous human being fed, watered and sexually serviced.

  Once they had come to realise how all of them were now involved in what had started so light-heartedly, the suspicions and the fears began to form around one all-important question that no one dared to ask. Who would be the first to break? Would it be Reg, whose desperate worries for his wife were constantly distracting him? Or homicidal Ron who, having initiated this whole crazy caper, had apparently opted out and was leaving everybody in the lurch?

  But the biggest danger now was Frank himself who was growing more suspicious by the hour. Who wouldn’t have been suspicious in his situation? But his obsession with his precious Ron was getting on everybody’s nerves. So were the questions he was always asking. ‘Why does Ron stay away from me? I thought Ron was my friend. Why can’t he come and see me?’ It was a good question and since Frank was getting so upset Donoghue suggested that Reg should bring Ron over in disguise, as he used to bring him to The Double R at night after his escape from Long Grove.

  Reg simply answered that this would be impossible.

  But why was it impossible? What was Ron up to in his Finchley Road hideaway? All too predictably he had started drinking and as he floated in and out of sanity the intricate psychology of the paranoid schizophrenic was being triggered off by its surest motivator – fear. It would not be long before those volatile emotions of Ron’s rickety stability would be overwhelmed in a flood of panic at the thought of what was happening.

  This meant that the only person Frank Mitchell could really trust was Lisa, and inevitably he fell in love with her.

  Whatever she was, she tried to be honest with her clients. Girls like her knew better than to fall in love with anyone and she didn’t like to lie to him. She also knew that if it came to it she was expendable, particularly to people like the Krays. She hadn’t taken long to work out the situation, and while she knew there could be no way out for Frank she also knew that her own chances weren’t much better. With only a few days left to Christmas, Frank was getting still more restless and was saying that he wanted to spend Christmas with his family and take Lisa home to meet his mother. For by now he had decided that he was in love with her. She knew that she could never be in love with him. But if it made Frank happy to believe they were in love, she’d go along with it. By now she was desperately sorry for him. He talked a lot about his mother.

  ‘I know she’ll love you, Lisa. She’s never seen me with a girl like you. So promise you’ll come with me, Lisa.’

  ‘I promise,’ she replied.

  Meanwhile Mad Teddy Smith had still not given up and made one last attempt to sort things out by contacting his old lover Tom Driberg. But when he went to a public call box and rang the number he had always used to speak to him in the past, whoever answered pretended not to know him and hurriedly rang off. The same thing happened when he rang again that evening. This left him one last hope – to persuade Francis Wyndham, the Twins’ former contact on the Sunday Times, to act as a go-between with the Home Office over Frank’s surrender.

  But Wyndham understandably refused to get involved. When Teddy reported this to Reg it briefly jolted him from his worries over Frances into doing something practical. He finally took charge as he had after the Cornell murder to save everyone, himself included, from arrest. If he didn’t make a decision nobody else would.

  He realised that there were just two possibilities. The first was to persuade Mitchell to surrender to the authorities, which would inevitably land the Twins in trouble followed by immense publicity, a sensational trial and lengthy prison sentences for all involved – and Mitchell’s situation would be worse than ever.

  And the second possibility? It didn’t take much imagination to work that one out.

  Had there been any further doubt about his fate, it was now that Mitchell wrote his own death warrant in the form of a note he laboriously composed to Reg spelling out a threat which placed a dagger to the heart of both the Twins. Unless they did something soon he would leave the flat and go round to Vallance Road to talk to Violet. Once he sta
rted threatening their mother they knew that they would have to kill him – or have him killed. Mitchell’s behaviour left them no alternative. At first Ron wouldn’t hear a word against his friend until Reg mentioned Ron’s earlier fear which had triggered off his murder of Cornell, when he became obsessed with the idea that Cornell would come to Vallance Road to murder him and Violet.

  The threat to their mother had restored Ron to some sort of sanity, and he sent a message round to Freddy Foreman to arrange a meeting.

  One gets some idea of the state the Twins were in when one realises that faced with this mess that Ronnie had created neither of the Twins nor anybody else in the Firm could clear it up.

  The arrival of Freddy Foreman – who liked to call himself the managing director of British crime – on the scene signalled the arrival of the professionals in the madhouse. They simply had a job to do and, as with most things Foreman set his mind to, it was done with maximum efficiency.

  The time for pity or softness or any sentimental nonsense was over. He acted in the only way that one can do this sort of thing – swiftly, efficiently, pitilessly. For the first time in many months an action that involved the Twins would not be bungled.

  Why couldn’t they kill Mitchell themselves? Ron was too drugged and unreliable. Mitchell could easily break free, and anyhow, he still had the gun he’d taken from Exley.

  Besides, too many people were involved, which meant that there would be too many witnesses.

  It was a very simple plan but, when it comes to killing, simple plans are usually the best. And with Mitchell showing every sign of preparing to escape from the flat it had to be done quickly if it was to be done at all. Which meant making arrangements for the following evening, 22 December.

  Reg, of course, was in on it, and since Donoghue had always got on well with Mitchell he was the one he chose to tell him the glad tidings that Ron was staying in the country with Violet and wanted Frank to join them both for Christmas. Some friends would drive him down and Donoghue would travel with him. To avoid arousing suspicions they had an unmarked van which would be waiting for them down the road at six o’clock. Ron sent his love and said he couldn’t wait to see his old friend Frank at last, and they’d have a great old time together. Happy Christmas.

  Then, as they waited for six o’clock to come, everybody in that bleak suburban dungeon acted out the gruesome tableau of deception round the figure of the lovesick Axeman.

  ‘No, Frank,’ they told him. ‘Lisa can’t go with you in the van. She’ll come on later. Imagine what would happen to her if you were stopped by the police.

  ‘Yes, Frank. Ronnie’s in his house in the country. He’s there now with Violet getting it ready for you and Lisa. Lisa will love it, won’t you, Lisa? The two of you will soon be there together.’

  Mitchell had already asked someone to buy him a Christmas card and he gave it to her now. She read it.

  ‘For Lisa, the only one I love,’ he had written.

  ‘Lisa, don’t be long. I’ll be waiting for you,’ he said.

  ‘I know you will,’ she said, and gave him one last kiss.

  ‘Happy Christmas, Frank,’ everybody said, ‘Enjoy yourself.’ And as he followed Donoghue outside to where a van was waiting just along the road with its headlights dimmed, everyone knew that the nightmare they had lived through for so long was over, and that no one in that room would have to see any more of Frank Mitchell this side of eternity.

  Donoghue always claimed that when he and Mitchell left the flat, and he led him down the Barking Road to where the van was parked, he, like Mitchell did not know what fate awaited him and genuinely believed that they were going somewhere in the country. This was, to say the least, unlikely. Donoghue knew the Twins well enough to know that they had never had a country house. But he also knew that if he gave the slightest hint of trouble, he also would be dealt with later.

  Sometime afterwards Donoghue described what happened. How the driver of the van got out to meet them, opened the van’s rear doors and told Mitchell to get in. Two men, Foreman and Gerard, were already sitting on the floor and he heard one of them tell Mitchell to make himself as comfortable as possible on one of the rear wheel casings. With which the driver shut the doors, told Donoghue to get in beside him, and started off.

  When he glanced back, Donoghue could see what happened next. Foreman was holding an automatic, Gerard a revolver, and as the van gathered speed the shooting started. Mitchell, of course, didn’t have a hope in hell. Something like twenty rounds entered his body and his head, and although he made one last despairing lunge to reach his killers two shots behind the ear finished him off for ever.

  As he was now a witness Donoghue imagined he was next and was preparing to make a fight of it when the van stopped and the driver signalled to him to get out. Not a word was spoken and as he started walking back towards the flat, half expecting a bullet in the back, he heard the van accelerate away. The last he saw of it were its rear lights vanishing around the corner.

  Less than five minutes had elapsed since he’d left the flat but by the time that he returned Reggie had arrived with several members of the Firm and had already started clearing up, destroying any evidence of Mitchell’s presence, down to the faintest sign that he had ever existed. Even the beret he had worn was burned and when it was all over everyone went on to a party at Walthamstow. Donoghue and Lisa stayed on drinking until almost all the other guests had gone. It might have been exhaustion or relief or simply the drink, but Lisa suddenly became upset so, as he put it later, Donoghue ‘did the honourable thing, and spent the night with her as she needed comforting.’

  All of which left the question open of what subsequently happened then to the unusually large body of Frank Mitchell. Donoghue always said he didn’t know and didn’t want to. The Twins, on the other hand, undoubtedly did know but kept the secret to themselves until their death. And the stories started. The old tales about the body being stuck in the concrete of some distant flyover reappeared. Perhaps it had been placed in someone else’s coffin by a dodgy undertaker. Perhaps, ultimate indignity, it had been cut up for animal feed and fed to pigs.

  In fact it was Foreman himself who finally decided he would spill the beans on prime-time television. Relying on the double-indemnity rule of British justice, which ruled out anyone being tried for the same crime twice,1 he had already confirmed Donoghue’s account of Mitchell’s killing in his memoirs. Now he went on to give the answer to the final mystery of the Mitchell case, in the process revealing one of the best-kept secrets of the London underworld, the story of what he called the ‘Little Facility’ at Newhaven.

  Just along the coast from Brighton, the port of Newhaven on the estuary of the River Ouse serves a dual purpose. On the left bank is the harbour for the cross-Channel ferry to Dieppe, and on the right its west quay has long been home for the trawlers of the fishing fleet. In the past Newhaven also had another role, as a centre for smuggling along the coast, which continued on and off for years. Sometimes there were bitter confrontations between Customs men and smugglers. Sometimes smugglers were betrayed, and sometimes Customs men were killed. And from time to time it was useful for the smugglers to be able to dispose of an unwanted body – which was when Newhaven’s best-kept secret started. None knew better than the local fishermen that a human body dumped in the English Channel rarely disappeared for good and that the swift Channel tides would usually wash it up somewhere in the end. But a few of the old trawlermen had also learned that there were certain places where the water was deep enough to ensure this didn’t happen.

  In an emergency it could be very useful to know exactly where a weighted body wrapped in chicken wire and canvas could be sunk for ever. It was a piece of knowledge passed on from one generation of fishermen to the next. And it was knowledge that whatever smart old sailor ran the ‘Little Facility’ at Newhaven on behalf of the London underworld in the 1960s must have made the most of. For according to Freddy Foreman, Mitchell’s body was driven dow
n to Newhaven late at night and the ‘Little Facility’ became the final destination for the ‘Mad Axeman’s’ bullet-riddled corpse. So far it has not resurfaced.

  17

  Invitation to a Sacrifice

  THERE WAS A deceptive calm between the Twins in the aftermath of the Axeman’s murder. For Reg there must have been considerable relief in having Ron still in hiding from the court order naming him as a witness in the Townsend case. Wherever he was now, Ron would always be an unpredictable liability for Reg who could never be certain what would happen next. With Ron safely out of harm’s way – at least for the time being – and being looked after by someone from the Firm, Reg and the family might even have a chance to come to some decision over what to do with him. But this wasn’t easy.

  There could be no argument over the seriousness of Ron’s condition and, far from quieting his fears, the cool extinction of Frank Mitchell by Fred Foreman seemed to have intensified Ron’s nightmares. Since the killing he’d been haunted by the fear that friends of both Mitchell and Cornell were now out for their revenge. It was up to him to kill them first, and to keep his courage up much of Ron’s time was spent preparing lists of those who had to go – and how he’d deal with them.

  This occupied his time, but once he’d finished the nightmares started, nightmares in which he, and not his enemies, was the victim. There was no escape from his imagination: it kept returning to the death scene at the murder of Cornell, which he had relived so compulsively after shooting him. The only difference now was that, since Ron had become the victim, he had condemned himself to watch the bullet entering his own head, not Cornell’s.

  This was when his nightmares started up in earnest, as the tortures he was planning for his enemies turned on him and gave him no relief. After one of these attacks he was usually delirious and would lie immobile on his bed, drunk or drugged with Stematol, for days on end, with Reg or one of his boys beside him till his fears abated.