The Profession of Violence (33 page)

When they were in the sitting-room Ronnie began to give his orders. Before Frances died Reggie would probably have stopped him, but now he lacked the power and had drunk too much. Ronnie was in command. While Reggie poured himself another drink young Hart was ordered back to The Regency for the gun left in the office. To incriminate the Barrys and make sure they kept quiet, Ronnie gave strict instructions that Tony Barry was to bring the .32 to Cazenove Road himself.

Then it was the Lambrianous' turn. They were good friends of Jack the Hat; he would trust them as he never would the twins. Now was their chance to prove themselves fit to join the Firm. They were to follow Hart to The Regency, find Jack the Hat, buy him a drink or two, then ask him round to Carol's party without mentioning the twins. Hart and the Lambrianous left. Reggie appeared to fall asleep. The two boys put a record on and started dancing together. Ronnie watched them.

It was a crude trap for an old villain like McVitie; Hart, Tony Barry, the Lambrianous could all have warned him. Even when they failed to, he should have smelled something a little odd about this sudden invitation, but he was probably too drunk.

Barry brought the gun and drove off looking scared before becoming even more involved. Young Ronnie Hart returned; Ronnie posted him as a lookout in an upstairs window facing the street. Just before midnight Hart saw a beaten-up Ford Zodiac draw up. Five men got out: the Lambrianous, two brothers by the name of Mills and finally a man in a hat – McVitie.

Hart gave the alarm.

McVitie burst in, ready for a party.

‘Where's all the birds, all the booze?' he shouted.

Ronnie was waiting for him, watching from the sofa. Reggie was behind the door. As Jack the Hat barged past, Reggie tried to shoot him through the head, but the gun jammed. Outside big Chrissie Lambrianou, who had wanted to be a gangster, suddenly realized what he had done and was sitting weeping on the stairs.

McVitie must have thought he still had a chance when the gun jammed. When the same thing happened with George Dixon, Ronnie had let him off with a warning; if he decided he deserved a beating up, Jack could take it like a man. But he must soon have seen from Ronnie's face that he was not to be so lucky.

Ronnie was shouting at him, his eyes bulging with fury. The Mills brothers and the two boys ran from the room. Reggie had thrown away the gun and was grappling him from behind. McVitie, very sober now, tried to be reasonable, but he seemed to have no voice left and Ronnie was shouting incoherently, the others joining in.

Suddenly he managed to break free. In the far corner of the room there was a window with a wooden frame that looked on to the garden. McVitie made a dive for it, but he got stuck, only his head and shoulders free. The others pulled him back by the legs, then hauled him to his feet.

‘Be a man, Jack,' Ronnie screamed at him.

‘I'll be a man, but I don't want to die like one.'

Then Ronnie grabbed him, locking his arms behind him, and Reggie was holding Bender's carving knife. The room fell silent.

‘Kill him, Reg. Do him,' hissed his brother. ‘Don't stop now.'

McVitie had lost his hat through the window. He stood there looking very bald and gaunt, his long face sweating.

‘Why are you doing this to me, Reg?'

Instead of answering, Reggie pushed the knife into his face below the eye. The butchering followed as McVitie sank to his knees. According to Ronnie Hart, Reggie stabbed his stomach and his chest and finished by impaling him through the throat on to the floor. Reggie claims it was Hart who did the stabbing. Hart admits pushing a handkerchief into McVitie's mouth to stop the flow of blood. Hart says that Bender put his ear to McVitie's chest and then pronounced him dead.

It was approaching 1 A.M. McVitie's corpse lay in the centre of the room, the carpet round him soaked in blood. The party opposite would soon be over. Blonde Carol soon be coming home. Before she did the body must be dumped, the worst of the blood mopped up. Once this was done the twins could say there had simply been a fight and she was not to talk.

So the dismal rigmarole of cleaning up began. The body was humped into the bedroom where Carol's children were asleep. It was slung on their mother's bed and covered with her bedspread. The Lambrianous started scrubbing the carpet with hot water from the kitchen. When the worst of the mess in the living room was dealt with, McVitie's body was wrapped in an eiderdown, dragged up the stairs and placed in Bender's car. Ronnie ordered him to drive it away. Then somebody remembered McVitie's hat. It was his trademark and could easily identify him. When he dived at the window it fell outside. It was retrieved.

Blonde Carol had still not returned, but the twins were restless, particularly Ronnie. Now that the job was done he had to get away; the others could take care of things. As usual the twins were worried about getting clean again so that they could face their mother. For this they chose the house of one man they believed that they could trust. Harry Hopwood had been their parents' best man, an army deserter with their father, and had advised the twins on the best way to dodge their own military service. They ordered Hart to drive them to his house in Hackney, where they engaged in a sort of ritual cleansing. First they both bathed thoroughly, soaping themselves all over. Hart says he remembers having to help wash Reggie's hair as he had cut his hand on the carving knife. Shoes, suits and every stitch of clothing were left in a pile; later that day Hopwood arranged to have them burned. He also burned their paper money and scrubbed their watches, rings and cuff-links. Then Hart went off to fetch fresh clothes and Hopwood helped him throw the knife and gun into the Grand Union Canal by Queensbridge Road. At this spot, ten months later, the police dragged up a jammed .32 automatic.

Just after 2 A.M. Blonde Carol came back to her flat; as she came down the stairs Bender was coming up, his hands in a pair of her children's woollen socks, carrying her plastic washing-up bowl full of blood and water.

‘Somebody's been hurt,' he said. He emptied the bowl into the lavatory. She knew better than ask questions: instead she followed him downstairs and helped him with the scrubbing. When he told her it was no good and that the carpet would have to be destroyed, she still said nothing, but watched as he cut the stained part out and tried to burn it in the garden. It was so damp by now that it would barely smoulder. Later that day two men arrived with a van and removed every scrap of carpet and the furniture. The following day Donaghue arrived to mend the broken window in the corner of the room and redecorate the flat. A new suite of furniture arrived. No one said anything; Blonde Carol asked no questions.

* * *

Once they had washed and changed their clothes, the twins felt compelled to get away completely. Ronnie could not allow the deed to be obscured with its sordid aftermath: it was the act of killing he enjoyed, in all its dreamlike clarity. Others could cope with the dull reality of murder. He would have been depressed by it. Instead he made McVitie's death the excuse for a short holiday. Hart drove them up to Cambridge, where they booked in for two days at The University Arms. Now that Jack the Hat was dead, Ronnie could enjoy it all. He was in high spirits and quite irresponsible, relishing the details of the killing, talking about the way he died and how he looked, the noise he made and how much blood there was. The amount seemed to surprise him.

Reggie was stunned by everything at first and the drink took some time to wear off. Afterwards Ronnie's good humour was contagious. Here in this solid university hotel it was difficult to credit the drunken horror of the previous night. He felt safe with Ronnie near him, relieved to know he hadn't let him down. Ronnie's approval meant a lot to him these days.

The holiday continued. After two days in Cambridge they drove on to Lavenham, one of the prettiest villages in Suffolk, staying at the principal hotel among the wealthy tourists and country-lovers who were enjoying the English autumn. The twins enjoyed it too. They had an old acquaintance who lived nearby; with their help he had done well for himself and was now playing the part of the rich country squire with a large house and an expensive car. The twins visited him, ate his food, rode his horses and rambled across his fields to get fit. Ronnie was living his great adventure; he borrowed the car and had himself driven by the chauffeur to look for a country property for himself. He put on evening dress and went to the local hunt ball. He was beginning to see himself among the local gentry. Reggie got drunk.

* * *

It was some time before the police got wind that Jack the Hat was dead. The woman he had lived with reported him missing the morning after the murder, but his erratic ways were known; the police were inclined to think he had gone missing for some reason of his own. When there was no news of him there was still little for the police to go on. Ronnie had successfully produced a wall of silence by terror. The East End is full of police informers. There were a lot of people who knew that something had gone on that night between The Carpenters' Arms, The Regency and the flat in Cazenove Road. Not a word reached the police. Despite her new living-room carpet, Blonde Carol tried to pretend that nothing had happened. The Lambrianous joined the Firm; and Jack the Hat joined Frost and Teddy Smith on the missing list at Scotland Yard.

The body never was recovered. A year later the twins were to be found guilty of his murder, but the police and prosecution had to admit that there was no trace of the mortal remains of Jack the Hat. The twins' cousin, Ronnie Hart, turned Queen's evidence and went free, and it was largely because of his evidence that the twins were both convicted, along with Bender and the Lambrianou brothers. It was also because of him that two more men were brought into the case and finally convicted for helping to dispose of Jack McVitie's body – the twins' brother, Charlie, and their old friend Frederick Foreman from South London.

According to Hart's story in court, the twins telephoned Charlie from Hopwood's house when they had bathed and changed their clothes. They were extremely worried. They had told Bender to dump the body somewhere in the East End; instead he had telephoned to say that he had driven over London Bridge and parked the car near a church with the body in the back, covered with the eiderdown. Hart claims that Charlie was furious at hearing that the twins had killed McVitie, but that as usual he finally agreed to do what he could to cover up for them, telephoned his old friend Foreman and drove over to Foreman's pub, along with Hart, to make arrangements for McVitie's body to be collected and disposed of.

Hart claimed to have heard Foreman saying later that when he got McVitie's body from the car it was covered in slime, but nobody explained what happened afterwards. There were suggestions that McVitie ended up concreted into the foundations of a City block, or was made into pig food on a Suffolk farm, buried in Epping Forest or fed to the furnaces of Bankside Power Station.

All this is hypothetical. Ronnie himself liked spreading false rumours through the Firm, and several of these ideas certainly originated with him. But there are two important facts which suggest that Jack McVitie had a different end from any of these. The first is that the twins were widely credited with having their own means of disposing of bodies; the second is the evidence that Bender was originally told to dump the body somewhere in the East End. Ronnie seems to have been unconcerned about getting rid of McVitie's body until Bender disobeyed his orders and drove it to the wrong place. This would suggest that the twins had the problem taken care of locally and in some simpler manner than the dramatic methods that have been suggested.

The most convincing theory, which was never aired in court, is that the twins had a hold over a local undertaker and made him perform an occasional professional service for them on the side. It is an undertaker's calling to get rid of bodies; it would not take too much ingenuity to arrange for an extra one to disappear. Certainly there are stories of cremations which the twins paid for privately. Another theory is that sometimes an additional body was slipped into an already occupied coffin before the lid was finally screwed down.

Ronnie Kray often said that if anyone arrested him it would be Nipper Read. He regularly asked his spies for news of ‘the cunning little bastard', but Read's duties as a detective chief inspector had kept him right away from the twins since the McCowan case. For Ronnie this had been a great relief: there was something about Read that made him uneasy. The most satisfying minor victory of the McCowan business came when he upset Read's career by involving him in the publicity of The Hideaway Club party.

Read shared Ronnie's relief at this lack of contact. The twins never quite managed to destroy his reputation, but he counted the McCowan case the biggest failure of his twenty-two years as a policeman; in his own eyes he had taken a long time to redeem himself, although success had followed quickly once he was away from the twins. On the Great Train Robbery investigation he seemed to typify the new style ‘technocrat' investigator, as opposed to Butler, the star detective of New Scotland Yard. Butler (‘every schoolboy's idea of what a great detective should be,' as Read described him) relied on speed, experience, intuition. Read was an organizer, believing in teams of efficiently directed detectives performing prodigies of detailed work. Butler got the arrests; Read and his men produced much of the detailed evidence to make the case stand up in court.

He had another big success organizing teams of detectives to keep down West End crime among the extra crowds in London for the Football World Cup in 1966; but
Read still nourished one ambition – the Murder Squad. The following year he made it. At forty-three he was promoted detective superintendent, posted to the Yard and entitled to wear the maroon tie with the embroidered globe pierced with a stiletto – the badge of Scotland Yard's twelve top detectives.