The Long Firm

by Jake Arnott

  ‘Why do you think?’

  ‘Harry’s not back for a couple of days.’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’

  ‘Come over, Ruby. We need to talk.’

  He was right about that, so I agreed. I went over to Harry’s flat with all the best intentions. I promised myself that I’d be sensible. When I got there, Tommy got us some drinks and we made small talk for a while. I found myself talking nervously about trivial things. I hadn’t realised how tense I was. I had a few more drinks to relax. We sat on the sofa together. Tommy looked more handsome than ever. He seemed strangely cool and collected. He talked softly as if trying to calm me down. I wanted all the mad thoughts in my head to go away and leave me alone. I let him put his arm around me. We started kissing.

  I remember thinking, as we went through into the bedroom, that this would be the last time. That this would be a way to finish it. And I felt a kind of sadness about that.

  ‘Tommy,’ I said afterwards. ‘We’ve got to stop.’

  ‘You don’t mean that.’

  ‘Yes I do. When Harry gets back . . .’

  ‘Don’t worry about Harry. He’s finished. Old Bill are on to him. He’ll be going away for a long time. Then it’ll just be you and me.’

  ‘Tommy,’ I said sternly. ‘Think about this for a second, will you? Harry could find out about us. Somebody already knows.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yes. Mooney knows. We’re in trouble.’

  ‘Yeah, well, don’t worry about Mooney.’

  ‘What do you mean, “Don’t worry about Mooney”?’

  ‘I know he knows.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because I told him.’

  ‘You did what?’ I nearly shouted at him.

  ‘Calm down, Ruby. It’s all under control. I told you I’d make things all right, didn’t I? I talked to Mooney. I knew he was looking for somebody to take over the porn racket once Harry’s put away. So I kind of put myself forward. He wants you in on it as well. So I told him about you and me.’

  ‘You stupid fucker.’

  ‘Don’t get angry, Ruby. I did all this for us. Once Harry is inside, it can just be you and me running things.’

  ‘And George Mooney.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And any number of faces lining up to move in. Tommy, this isn’t a game you know. There are a lot of heavy people out there.’

  ‘I can look after myself,’ he said, petulantly.

  ‘And what if Harry finds out about all of this while he’s still at large?’

  Tommy paused as if he was thinking something through.

  ‘Then I’ll kill him,’ he said suddenly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I mean it, Ruby. Look.’ He reached under the bed and came up with a small automatic pistol. ‘See?’

  ‘Tommy, please—’

  ‘He thinks he owns me. Thinks he can order me about. Knock me about. I’ll show him.’

  ‘Tommy, put that thing away.’

  Then I heard a sharp click from the hallway.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘What?’ asked Tommy.

  ‘That sound.’

  Another click. A key was being turned in the door.

  ‘Harry!’ Tommy whispered. ‘But he’s not due back until the day after tomorrow.’

  There was the sound of the door being opened and heavy bags dropped in the hallway.

  ‘Tommy!’ Harry called out. ‘Come and give us a hand with these bags!’

  I tried to gather the bedclothes around us. There was no time to do anything. We looked at each other, horrified. Harry was walking through the flat.

  ‘Tommy! Where the fuck are you? Judy cancelled Göteborg, so I came back early.’

  He was at the bedroom door.

  ‘The flat’s in a fucking mess. What you been doing while I’ve been away, eh?’

  He came in and looked down at us naked in bed together.

  ‘What?’ he asked, bewildered. ‘What?’

  He just stood there staring. His face all creased up with disbelief. I got out of the bed and went up to him.

  ‘Harry . . .’ I started to speak.

  Dull eyes registered me. His nostrils flared slightly. He slapped me hard across the cheek and I spun off away from him.

  ‘Come here you,’ he said softly to Tommy.

  Tommy pulled the gun from out of the bedclothes. He pointed it at Harry. Harry snorted.

  ‘Now, I’ve seen everything. Go on, shoot me you little fucker.’

  He started to advance on Tommy. Tommy used both hands to keep the gun steady.

  ‘Don’t come any closer,’ he said. ‘I’ll shoot.’

  ‘You haven’t got the fucking bottle. Come on,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘Give me that fucking shooter.’

  The gun went off, clipping Harry on the shoulder and sending him spinning. The recoil threw Tommy back as well and he fell back against the head of the bed. Harry was on the floor clutching at his uper arm, grunting in pain and anger. Tommy knelt up on the bed and took aim again, pointing the gun down towards Harry. Harry frowned at the blood on his hand and then looked fiercely up at Tommy.

  ‘You bastard!’ he hissed. ‘Go on then, kill me!’

  Tommy gritted his teeth and pulled his face back, away from the gun. His finger tightened on the trigger.

  ‘No!’ I shouted and dived onto the bed towards Tommy, grabbing for the gun.

  It went off in his face. I don’t remember hearing the shot, I must have sort of blacked out. But when I opened my eyes I was on top of Tommy’s naked body on the bed. There was blood everywhere, splattered against the headboard and the walls. Half his face was blown off. His hand was still curled around the pistol. There were flecks of red all over the top half of my body.

  ‘Tommy? Tommy?’ I started to whimper, pressing my fingers against his body.

  I don’t remember much else. Harry had to pull me off and sit me down in a chair. I just sat there shaking and trembling in shock. Harry had taken off his jacket and put it over Tommy. There was a huge red stain all down one side of his white shirt. He took that off too and started to feel around the wound.

  ‘You, you . . .’ I stammered.

  ‘I’m all right. It’s gone through. Just a flesh wound.’

  He tore off the clean arm of the shirt with his teeth and bound it around his wounded shoulder. He went out into the drawing room and came back with a bottle of brandy and a glass. He handed me the glass and filled it. My hand was shaking wildly and some of the booze sloshed onto the floor. He took a big swig from the bottle. He closed his eyes and tried to slow down his breathing.

  ‘Fuck,’ he said softly.

  I drained the brandy in the glass in one gulp. Harry refilled it. I drank that down too.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Go and have a shower.’

  I wandered numbly into the bathroom. I turned on the water and stood under it, shivering and gulping for breath. I lost track of time. When I came out into the drawing room Harry was on the telephone, talking calmly. My clothes were on the sofa, neatly folded.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Harry into the phone. ‘Bring one of them up to the flat. Leave it in the hallway. Yes, right away.’

  He replaced the receiver and looked over at me.

  ‘You better get dressed.’

  ‘What are we going to do?’

  ‘It’s all being dealt with. Put your clothes on.’

  As I dried myself down and dressed, Harry got a first aid box. He unwound the sleeve from his shoulder and started to dress his own wound. He mopped at a small dark red hole with a cotton pad soaked in iodine, hissing with pain through clenched teeth. He taped a bit of gauze over it and then bandaged it. Blood seeped through at first so he wound it tighter. When he’d finished, we had another drink and sat for a long time in silence.

  ‘He was going to kill me,’ Harry said, finally.

  ‘Harry, about—’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it,�
�� he cut in. ‘This never happened. You understand?’

  There was a knock on the door. Harry went out into the hallway. There were voices, instructions. Something heavy was lifted in and placed on the floor. The men who brought it left. Harry came through again.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘You’re going to have to help me.’

  ‘What are we going to do?’

  Harry sighed.

  ‘We’ve got to get rid of the body.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘But nothing. We don’t have any choice. Come on.’

  He grabbed me firmly by the hand and led me into the hall.

  ‘You’ve got to help me with this,’ he said. ‘No one else can know. I can’t trust anybody else.’

  There was a large steamer trunk by the front door. Harry opened it up. Inside were stacks of shrink-wrapped magazines. Hard-core porn. Scandinavian. Smuggled in as part of Judy Garland’s luggage. Harry started to fish out the glossies with his good arm, handing them to me.

  ‘Take them through into the drawing room,’ he ordered.

  It took us about a quarter of an hour to empty the trunk and stack all the magazines in a row of piles behind the sofa.

  ‘Right. You need to help me again,’ he said, and led me towards the bedroom.

  I froze.

  ‘I can’t go in there, Harry.’

  ‘Come on, I can’t lift it by myself. I’ve only got one arm.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Come on. We don’t have any choice.’

  We went into the bedroom. Harry had already rolled Tommy up in the bedclothes and cleaned some of the blood off the walls. We slid the body around on the mattress. I took the head end, lifting under the shoulders, Harry put his good arm under the knees and we shuffled it out to the trunk.

  He closed the lid and locked it.

  ‘Right. Someone’s going to come and take this away. Only you and me know about this. We keep it like that, OK? This never happened. Tommy never had any family so no one’s going to report him missing. If anyone asks, you don’t know where he is.’

  ‘Harry . . .’

  ‘We don’t talk about this. Not even to each other. I’ve got to finish clearing up. You go home now.’

  Home. I had a dinner date that evening with Gerald Wilman. I had to go, I told myself. Mustn’t let anyone know that anything’s wrong. Pretend that everything’s all right.

  I went to the bedroom and sat down at the dressing table. A ghost face stared at me from out of the mirror. I pulled my hair back and slapped on a mask of foundation. Stuck on false eyelashes, drew eye liner across the top lids. Blue eye shadow, some eyebrow pencil. I concentrated on the process, tried not to think. I spat into a dried-up cake of mascara and was nearly sick. I swallowed hard and worked the mascara brush into the pigment and spittle, and painted it thickly on. A bit of rouge. Some powder. Deep-red Chanel lipstick.

  The hair was a straggly mess. The roots needed doing. With plenty of backcombing and lacquer, I worked it all into some sort of shape.

  Got out my favourite dress. A Belville Sassoon evening number in pink beaded organdie. I could still get into it. I looked OK. A little dab of Shalimar and I was ready. I went out.

  The next few days passed in a blur. Alcohol numbness interspersed with anxiety and horror. I started having nightmares. I still have them from time to time. I got some yellow pills from the doctor to help me sleep.

  And waited. I kept away from Soho. I didn’t go into The Stardust. I kept away from Harry and from Detective Chief Inspector George Mooney. But nothing happened. I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t want to know, but not knowing drove me even more crazy.

  All sorts of horrible visions came to me. I kept seeing Tommy covered in blood, his face blown off. I imagined awful things that Harry might do to me.

  So finally I went around to see him. He came to the door, his eyes all bloodshot and bleary.

  ‘Ruby?’ he croaked, as if he hardly recognised me.

  He showed me through to the drawing room. ‘Get Happy’ was on the gramophone.

  ‘You heard about Judy?’

  I hadn’t but I immediately knew what he meant. The only shocking thing about Judy Garland’s death was that there was no shock. You just wondered how she’d lasted so long.

  ‘She had an overdose. Mickey found her dead on the toilet.’

  ‘Harry, about what happened . . .’

  ‘I told you, Rube. I don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘But nothing. It’s all over, Rube. The Dirty Squad have started raiding my bookshops. Mooney’s incommunicado. Most of the firm’s scarpered. I’m finished.’

  ‘Isn’t there something that can be done?’

  ‘Nah.’

  ‘But you could implicate the police. Accuse them of corruption.’

  ‘Nah, the Dirty Squad have got nothing to do with the case they’re building on me. It’s all the long firms I did way back. Besides, it’s no good screaming on about bent coppers. Doing that only means that you’re not going to be able to deal with them in the future. You’re a wrong ’un and they’ll never do business with you again. One look at your file and then it’s over, that’s for fucking sure. No, you don’t want to go at the Old Bill. You want them to fancy you for the next time. Sometimes you have to go down. You have to wipe your mouth, do your time, and the next time – and there will be a next time, Rube – you can start off again.’

  ‘So what do you think will happen?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Harry sniffed. ‘A seven stretch, maybe even ten if the beak’s feeling brutal. I need to get my affairs in order.’

  He smiled thinly at me. Garland croaked jauntily on the gramophone. Forget your troubles c’mon get happy. We never mentioned Tommy. Harry tapped his fingers in time to the record on the arm of his chair. We’re headed for the judgement day.

  ‘Poor Judy,’ he said, as if it summed everything up. ‘Poor, poor Judy.’

  Harry was arrested the next day. One count of GBH, another of making an unwarranted menace. These were holding charges. Once he was away they could get more witnesses to come forward. By the time of the committal proceedings there were fourteen counts of Grievous Bodily Harm against him and several charges of fraud and uttering menaces.

  It went to the Old Bailey, and the press had a field day. Reporting with relish all the testimony of the beatings, the pliers that pulled teeth, the black box that was used to give electric shocks. The Daily Mirror dubbed Harry THE TORTURE GANG BOSS.

  As the trial continued it looked like Harry’s own sentence prediction was a little on the optimistic side. But there was no mention of Harry’s pornography racket. Mooney would have seen to that. And nothing was ever heard of Tommy again. There was no investigation. I don’t think he was even reported as a missing person. Harry was right. He had no family, no permanent contacts. No one who missed him. Except Harry. And me.

  So I sort of picked myself up and tried to start all over again. I managed to keep out of the way of George Mooney. And I got a casting. A part in a comedy filming out of Pinewood. Same old stuff but I really needed the work. I think Gerald Wilman put in a good word for me.

  The last time I saw Harry was on the day of the verdict. I managed to get a seat in the packed public gallery of Old Bailey’s Number One Court. The jury found him guilty. The judge passed sentence.

  ‘Harold Starks,’ he said. ‘Over a period of years you led a disciplined and well-organised gang for the purpose of your own material interests and criminal desires. You terrorised those who crossed your path in a vicious and sadistic way. That you set yourself up as judge, jury and executioner in heinous attacks on innocent citizens is particularly odious and a disgrace to civilisation. Your punishment must be severe because it is the only way in which our society can show its repudiation of your crimes. I won’t waste any more words with you. In my view society has earned a rest from your criminal activities. You will go to prison for twenty years.’


  If the sentence was a shock to Harry he didn’t show it. He casually scanned the court, nodding to the jury and gazing up at the gallery. As if two decades were just a shit and a shave.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ he said, like it was the end of a performance.

  ‘Take him down,’ boomed the judge.

  5

  Open University

  After two hours the felt stub is removed, for the man no longer has the strength to scream. Here in this electrically heated bowl we put warm rice porridge, of which the man can, if he feels inclined, take as much as his tongue can reach. Not one of them misses the opportunity. I am aware of none, and my experience is considerable.

  Franz Kafka, In the Penal Colony

  THE TIMES FRIDAY NOVEMBER 30 1979

  Harry Starks writes to The Times

  Why I have escaped from prison

  This extraordinary letter arrived at The Times yesterday from Harry Starks, the gang leader who broke out of Brixton Prison earlier this week. We publish it as it stands, as a unique contribution to the debate on the rehabilitation of offenders.

  Sir, I am writing to provide an explanation as to why I escaped from HMP Brixton and to put into context the charges for which I was sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment. I hope to counter the image society has of me from the gutter press with their prurient and overstated reports of my alleged activities in an attempt, desperate as it may seem, to counter-balance the biased opinion of my case and bring attention to the unfair treatment which I have received in my application for a conditional release on parole.

  Firstly, I would like to address the nature of the offences of assault for which I was convicted. It is important to bear in mind the environment in which I was socialised. A subculture in which conflicts were resolved without recourse to authoritative norms or judicial agencies. A harsh world maybe, but one whose logic can only fully be understood within the terms of differential association. I must stress that the individuals upon whom such assaults took place were themselves part of a system of closure, not unknowing members of normal society. I do not wish to excuse my behaviour but to point out that I was operating in accordance with, and necessarily guided by, the perspective of a value system that I, myself, was part of and ruled by. I was found guilty of assault, not murder, on men who themselves were far from blameless and yet I have served more time than many criminals who have murdered or raped innocent people. Given the nature of my transgressions, I feel that the price I have already paid (ten years) is far more than my debt to society.