In straight terms, that means he’s slipping a goldfish to his own flesh and blood. Can’t be right, I mean look what inbreeding’s done to the Royals. The front doorbell chimes the opening bars of Evita, and presently the door’s opened by Kelly Amore, glammed up like she’s going out on the game, and peering out from under the roof of a strawberry blonde beehive that resembles a stick of candyfloss. Every day’s a bad hair day in lady gangster-land.
‘Hello, Kelly,’ I murmur, strolling straight through into the living room to find Danny, sitting alone in the dark as usual, staring at his reflection, in a turned-off large screen TV, as usual. Flopping down into an oversized leather Chesterfield chair opposite I drop the holdall to my side, my nut flicking through last night’s bit of graft.
‘How’d you kip?’ says Danny, making no attempt at eye contact.
‘Not all that,’ I say.
‘Coffee!’ He calls out loudly, and in no time at all, Kelly appears, dutifully proffering two scalding beverages.
‘Too fucking hot!’ He growls, thrusting his cup back at her to blow on, which she does in the manner of a small chavvie blowing bubbles.
‘How did I kip last night, Kelly?’ he growls again.
‘Like a baby, why?’
‘Don’t ask stupid fucking questions. Now get back in the kitchen, we’re talking business.’
Handing Danny back the cooled coffee she does as she’s told without a murmur. How I detest this man’s lack of manners. And while I appreciate that silence equals compliance, I never say anything. But Kelly suffers it. I don’t know how, ‘cos I’m fucked if I would. Probably writes the constant humiliation off against the fox fur coats and Cartier watches. And who am I to judge?
‘Easy bit of graft last night or what?’ says Danny.
‘In and out,’ I say.
‘Yeah, in the back of his head and out the fucking front.’
STEVIE, DANNY’S YEAR-YOUNGER brother is out on home leave. His first steps on civvy street after an eighteen month stretch for malicious wounding, so it’s a night out for the boys. The whole firm’s here. Me, Danny, Stevie, and Frankie Simmons, who’s as staunch as a tourniquet and a good pal of Danny’s from way back. After an Italian supper, the four of us wash up in the Peacock, an all-night drinker in Custom House, to catch up on war stories and what’s what. Charlie’s in abundance, Moey Joey’s flowing non-stop down our throats, and appropriate respect is shown by everyone who passes by. Which means everything is good and pleasant. A little firm of armed robbers from Stratford come bowling in, lairy as Mary. There’s Darkie George, Tony Teroni and Mookie Wilson. Very good blaggers, quick on the bag but not our cup of tea. Rumour has it they’ve just done a tasty bit of graft. Security van and well over a mil in readies. But like all armed robbers they ain’t got a clue what to do with the dough except squander it on shite. Hence they keep sending us over bottle after bottle of bubbly. We acknowledge the respect and the night prowls on.
‘Hello, Frankie,’ says Darkie, washing up his hands just as Frankie strolls into the toilet, some fifty feet or so from where we’re partying.
‘All right, Darkie,’ says Frankie.
‘How long Stevie been out?’
‘Just gotta bit of home leave, Darkie.’
‘Heard he was making tea for the screws in there.’
‘What you talking about?’
‘That’s what I heard.’
Now there’s insults and there’s insults. And proper people in the boob don’t make tea for screws, they make trouble. You might as well call a man a nonce case as a screw’s boy, and an insult to one is an insult to all. So, Frankie does the right thing and chins Darkie, knocking him down into the nearest pisser. Then he comes back out into the company, without saying a word, until all of a sudden he lets out a loud sigh and collapses. Well, we just think he’s out of the game, and pull him to his feet.
‘I’ve been fucking plunged,’ he groans. ‘It was that black cunt, Darkie George.’
Knowing it’s bang on top, their firm’s already scarpering for the door, but down to more luck than judgement, I manage to catch Tony Teroni with a champagne bottle across the back of his canister, one of the ones they sent over. Down he goes, like a Premiership footballer while his two pals run off leaving him, a terrible dog-stroke thing to do. In the frenzied atmosphere a friendly hand slips Danny a stiletto. He picks up Teroni’s head and rams the blade right the way through the back of his neck, just missing his windpipe and leaving me to gawp, ‘Fuck me, he looks just like Frankenstein!’ Helped out by an assortment of unseen fists and boots, we proceed to smash the granny out of him, stomping him to near death before carrying him outside and tossing him over a wall like a sack of shit. Then without a backward glance we climb into our motor and put down the pedal sharpish to get Frankie to Newham hospital.
‘What the fuck was all that about, Frankie?’ says Danny.
‘Darkie George reckoned that Stevie was joeying for screws in the boob. So I chinned him.’
‘Fucking black cunt, I’ll do him,’ says Stevie. But Stevie’s out on home leave so he can’t afford to get nicked. And so, after dropping off Frankie, we also bid our farewells to Stevie.
A few hours later me and Danny are plotted up not far from Darkie George’s flat, hoping he’s on his way home. Danny wants to do him properly, end of, pushing up daisies. You see how this can escalate from nothing. For all we know, Darkie could have just been fucking about, but when you’re on the charlie and booze, a careless word said in jest can quickly lead to paranoia.
‘I hope that black cunt shows,’ says Danny.
‘Can’t believe they ran and left Teroni,’ I say. ‘I heard that Darkie’s fearless on the pavement.’
‘Fearless! I’ll show that black cunt fearless. His barnet’ll turn fucking white. He’ll end up looking like Uncle fucking Ben by the time I’m finished with him.’ Our patience pays off. Just before sunrise, along comes Darkie, and like so many others about to become victims, he don’t have a clue it’s bang on him. Not only that, he’s so fucked up he can’t see more than two feet in front of him. In the meantime we’re ready to rock and roll. The other thing that don’t bode well for Darkie is that Danny has a pathological hatred of black men. Not long ago, Stevie sorted out some grief for a black dude called Mongoose and brought him round the safe house for him to weigh us on. When he left, Danny went fucking garrity and ordered Kelly Amore to throw the coffee cup he used in the bin.
So now it’s off, and we’re into Darkie like a pair of jackals, ready to pull a wildebeest to pieces. The poor cunt don’t have a chance. Using a small, silenced semi-automatic I lodge a bullet in the back of his left leg which smashes his kneecap, causing him to fall forward with barely a murmur. Then, with the moonlight dripping evil in his eyes, Danny weighs into him again and again, full pelt in the back and shoulders with a sharpened fireman’s axe. Thirty-two times in all, carving deep, blubber-pink chunks out of Darkie’s black skin.
‘Let’s ping, he’s in a bad fucking way,’ I shout, but Danny ain’t listening. He’s lost in his madness, the madness of a man possessed by demons that make mine look like angels of mercy. And insults from a black man are a transgression too far. And so to round the punishment off, he pulls out a Stanley knife and slices off Darkie’s eyelids, handing one to me as a souvenir as we drive away and leaving Darkie wide-eyed and legless, less than two feet from the safety of his front door.
A BLOKE CALLED Hoggy wants to see me. Reckons he’s got something that me and Danny might be interested in. We’re partners with Hoggy in a dodgy sauna on the Essex Road, Canning Town. He’s all right but he ain’t one of your own. We suffer him because now and then he does come up with some interesting graft. Truth be told he’s a bit of a gangster’s moll. Loves a chap and goes around growling and terrorising the locals where he lives up on the Norfolk coast. And being swede-bashers who don’t know their arses from their elbows, they’re terrified of him because of the way he paints himself as a London villa
in. But if you weigh the man up in stone cold daylight, what you see is a sweaty cunt, as fat as suckling pig and who dyes his head and chest hair aubergine. When Hoggy’s in London he holes up at his moody sauna in King’s Cross. I stroll in unannounced to catch him on the nest with a couple of sorry looking sorts, all spots and silly grins. Not only that but he’s looking as sore as a weeping boil himself, being strewn, butt-naked except for a red leather thong, across an ever so slightly leaking water bed, while sucking the life out of a bottle of snide champagne. All in all a sight about as edifying as discovering a short and curly in your sandwich.
‘Hello, Billy,’ he says, dismissing the two birds with a wave of a fat pink hand, dripping in shit tom, which he then uses to sheepishly stash the bottle of snide plonk in a fridge that lets out a blast of sickening stink when he opens the door.
‘Sorry for the interruption, Hoggy,’ I smirk. ‘But the bird downstairs told me to come straight up.’
‘No problem, fancy one of ‘em yourself, Billy? Right filthy little shitcunts, they are. That blonde one could suck a golf ball through a fucking hosepipe. Swallows an’ all.’
‘Bit fucking young for a man your age, ain’t they?’ I say, patting my ticker.
‘Nah, not at all. Eighteen and nineteen. It’s gotta be pink, Billy. Can’t be having none of the brown. Sure you don’t want one?’
‘Don’t do sloppy seconds, Hoggy.’
‘I’m rather partial myself. Anyway, cut to the chase. Pal of mine up north, Blackpool, got a casino. Right on the front between the two piers. Busiest plot in town. I can have a deal with it for crabs.’
‘Us run a casino?’
‘Peepshow.’
And off he goes trying to spiel me the deal. An upmarket peepshow, one side catering for blokes and the other side for birds. End of the pier stuff, sort of what the butler saw, but with flying spunk and dildos. Then he starts running off loads of facts and figures trying to blind me with science. Only the thing with Hoggy is, he’s always too much of a minge to put his own dough in. What he’ll want to do is set the deal up, get us to put in the readies, then ride on the back of it, and if it goes boss-eyed he ain’t out of pocket and we are.
‘It’s like the third fucking world up there, Hoggy,’ I say to him as he winds down his waffling. ‘Might as well give our dough straight to Oxfam. At least it’ll save an Ethiopian’s life and us a lot of unnecessary grief.’
‘Shame you feel like that, Billy,’ he replies, throwing me a bone. ‘‘Cos I was with Ronnie Olive yesterday, and I mentioned the deal to him. Told him that you and Danny might be interested, and he said he was dying to meet the pair of yous.’
‘Really?’ My ears prick up because Ronnie Olive’s old-school. Not only is he the head of a top south London crime family but he’s also infamous, among other things, for being part of the firm that topped mad axeman Frank Mitchell for the Kray twins back in the day. But what’s giving me a boner is that, as the whole underworld and his friend knows, Ronnie Olive is bringing in very big parcels of pills, powder and puff with the Mason brothers from Blackpool, the exact neck of the woods where Hoggy’s punting his pony fucking deal.
Me and Danny badly need to get into large scale drug importation. Done properly, it’s big dough for relatively little risk. Sure, we’ve dipped our greedy fingers into the drug trade already, but only on a small scale. Mainly we’ve made our dough in the porn and protection game, putting the heavy on other firms and taking other gangsters out of the game, permanently. The problem for us is that most drug importers, despite their media profiles, are pussies. They’re absolutely terrified of heavy-duty villains like Danny and me. Fuckers keep their distance. But Ronnie Olive is a heavy-duty warrior himself, which means he understands what we’re all about. This could be a good punt. After kidding Hoggy along for a while I bell Danny and we lay on a meet to see Ronnie Olive.
A FEW DAYS later me and Danny are plotted up in a BMW on a petrol station forecourt at the top of the Old Kent Road, just down by the Bricklayers’ Arms. Both of us are tooled up and keeping wary eyes on punters creeping in to refuel. We don’t reckon Hoggy would have the bollocks to middle us up, but we both know that Ronnie Olive is a slippery, dangerous little cunt, and that he could have used Hoggy to unwittingly lure us into a trap. Being at the heavy end means we have to be on guard at all times because there are more than a few top London faces that would pay big dough to have our heads on a plate, or blown to bits on the front seat of a motor. Right on time Ronnie Olive pulls up beside us in a bulletproof Mercedes, and we climb out of our motor to greet a dapper man in his mid-sixties, but who nevertheless looks like he’s carrying the whole weight of the world on his shoulders. There’s a brief introduction and a bit of gangster bollocks about how pleased we all are to be in the company of other proper people, then we follow him as he jogs slowly ahead of us, leading as towards the spieler from which he runs all his operations.
And what a fucking khazi it is! Plonked on top of a second-hand furniture shop with security like Fort Knox. We wait impatiently as a buzzer allows us through the fortified front door, after which we follow Ronnie round a couple of flights of stairs that wouldn’t be amiss on a helter-skelter. A coded tap on a steel door leads us into the main room, a flock wallpapered hovel, infested with a right sorry looking bunch of scruffy cunts, smoking and gambling their poxy lives away. I flick a sideways glance to Danny, and his sly smile shows what we’re both thinking. That if this is the cream of south London villainy, we’d hate to see the shit of the manor. Ronnie introduces us to one of his brothers, deaf and dumb Joey. By way of response Joey emits a high pitched whine like Flipper the Dolphin. Fucking hell, he must be one of the ugliest men that God ever blew breath into. Now I don’t know if Joey’s hung like a donkey, but he sure do fucking look like one. Ronnie then tells us that Joey punches a hole in the wall every time a horse he backs fails to make it first past the post. The walls of the spieler look like Swiss cheese.
Ronnie proceeds to introduce us to what we now realise are a few very well-known south London faces, some who’ve only just finished terms of very lumpy porridge, after which he leads us past a bashed-up goggle-box blaring out the afternoon’s horse racing, down a rat run corridor and into a third world kitchen, where Kit, a tired looking old bird who looks like a bingo player, is cooking up an afternoon roast. At Ronnie’s bidding we find our pristine clad arses being forced to sit down on a stinky old sofa, that starts me to scratching, while Kit serves us up minted lamb sandwiches, which we wash down with over-sugared tea in cracked mugs.
‘Nice little set-up you got here, Ronnie,’ says Danny, comically straight faced.
‘It ain’t bad, Danny,’ says Ronnie. ‘I get a ten per cent cut off the card tables, plus I lay down tax-free bets. And I get my whack out of any crooked business that goes down as well. Most days it’s like Aladdin’s fucking cave in here. Can’t move for hookey gear. All of it ream. Got a little firm of Scousers that slip over to Switzerland to cane watch and jewellery shops. Plus, anything else that moves through this manor has got to come by me first.’
‘Sweet,’ say me and Danny in unison, as I get up to carve myself an extra slice of lamb with the help of a wicked looking kitchen knife, and with Ronnie watching me warily out of the corner of his eyes.
‘So what do you reckon about this bit of graft that Hoggy’s got up north, boys?’ he says.
‘Sounds sweet, Ronnie,’ I say. ‘But we’ll have to slip up there and have a nut round ourselves.’
‘Make you right, son,’ he says. ‘By the way, how d’you two rate Hoggy, on the quiet?’
‘We don’t rate him at all, Ronnie,’ Danny cuts in. ‘He ain’t like none of us three here. And we’re only here ‘cos we heard you wanted a piece of the pie.’
‘I hear you,’ says Ronnie. ‘And I’d love to do business with you boys. But I have to let you know, I’ve got a bit of grief at the moment.’
‘We heard something,’ says Danny. ‘You got it all under cont
rol?’
‘Yeah, between me you and the gatepost, it was our little firm that gave it to Spotty Dave’s brother last week at the boxing do.’
‘The one at the Elephant and Castle?’ I say.
‘Yeah, that’s the one. Jimmy Carter stuck a knife right through the top of his fucking head. And just to make sure, Blackheart done him through the throat as well. The slag gurgled like a baby then gave up the ghost.’
‘How is Blackheart?’ says Danny.
‘Dead,’ says Ronnie.
‘Fuck me,’ says Danny. ‘When?’
‘Two days ago. Heart attack in a hotel down in Brighton.’
‘Fuck me,’ we both say, knowing that Blackheart was Ronnie’s best bit of help.
‘Anyway,’ says Ronnie. ‘Back to Hoggy. This deal up north, is it a definite goer?’
‘For sure, Ronnie.’ I say. ‘But the only downside is that we don’t know anyone up there. It’d be nice if we had someone there on the inside, give us the SP properly.’
‘I’ve got people up there,’ says Ronnie, rising to take the bait. ‘Two brothers.’
‘You have?’ says Danny.
‘Yeah, good stuff they are. Their old man runs most of the stuff that comes out of the coast up there.’
‘Maybe we should take a little trip?’ I say. ‘Get you off the plot for a couple of days, clear your head.’
‘You know what, son, I’d like that.’ says Ronnie. ‘When do you fancy going?’
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