The Profession of Violence (34 page)

Early in the autumn of 1967 he spent several weeks settling into the Yard and hoping for a copybook murder for his first big case. When the case came, the assistant commissioner, Peter Brodie, summoned him personally to explain that he wanted him to take over a top secret investigation. It had been started some months earlier by Superintendent Ferguson Walker. Walker was being promoted and Read was the only man available to take his place. The aim of the investigation was to catch the Krays.

Despite his lack of height – at 5 feet 7 inches he is supposed to have taken stretching exercises to get himself accepted by the police – Read would make an ideal detective for a television series. A sharp-eyed, compact man with dark hair and a quiet smile, he looks the part; he also sounds it. The faint Midlands brogue mixed with the policeman's diction gives the impression of crispness and the common touch. He seems a very human man.

But Nipper Read is essentially a loner. Since he joined the force at twenty-one to escape from a job in Player's Tobacco Factory, Nipper has made the police his world. He has no hobbies and, despite the ease of manner, few intimate friends beyond his family; a policeman never knows when friendships and outside interests could impinge on his duty, and Nipper acts as if policemen should not be quite like other men. He has a Scottish wife and a teenage daughter; both have long ago accepted that he is ‘a copper first, a married man second, and that's that'.

Had he been a vindictive man, he might have been excited at the chance of getting even with the twins; but he had been a policeman far too long to believe in vendettas. They were a dangerous self-indulgence, a betrayal of his ideal of the cool police professional; and no revenge was worth getting mixed up with the Krays again. And so a very downcast Nipper Read drove his red Volkswagen back to his home in Barnet after his interview with Brodie. It seemed as if he could never shake free from the Krays. This should have been his moment of success. Brodie was talking about top-priority investigations to catch the twins, but Nipper knew from experience what an interminable business this could be. He knew how cunning they were, how difficult to catch. A failure was not the way he wanted to begin his new career with the Murder Squad.

Next day he started finding out how much was known about the twins: hardly enough to cheer him up. In 1964 they had been publicly denounced in the
Sunday Mirror
for what they were – the leading organizing gangsters in the country. Since then they had committed murder and tangled with several top detectives from the Yard. But thanks to the strange class structure of the Yard, none of this knowledge can have reached the levels where the decisions were made. There had been a curious lack of urgency about the police investigation of London's leading gangsters. Even the killing of Cornell had done little to change things. Reports on the twins were scrappy; there seemed little attempt by the police to keep up with them or even to assess them. It had needed a shake-up of the top men at the Yard and public outcry at gang warfare to persuade New Scotland Yard to notice them at all.

This had occurred earlier in 1967; Sir John Waldron had replaced Sir Joseph Simpson as commissioner, with Brodie as his second-in-command, and the Richardson trial was giving London gang life its first real publicity. This was when rumours started that it would be ‘the Krays' turn next'. Ferguson Walker took charge of the small investigation that was starting, but the Yard possessed so little on the twins that he had to begin at the beginning. In the months since, he had uncovered certain details of their frauds and the connection between the twins and Cooper's private bank. Apart from this, his work confirmed what Read had learned about the twins three years before, and made it plain that they were now so strong that it would take a lot to shift them.

There was just one thing Nipper Read had not foreseen – the revived interest in the Krays among the senior members of the Yard. After the years of apathy they were prepared at last for almost anything to catch the twins. One man who demonstrated this was John du Rose, head of the Murder Squad. A shrewd, silent old detective, who earned the nickname ‘One-day-Johnnie' from the speed with which he used to solve his murders, he helped Read plan the facilities he needed. The investigation of the Krays soon turned into a full-scale campaign, backed by the full resources of the Yard, with Nipper firmly in command. He wanted police teams ready to dig out evidence against the twins similar to the teams he used against the Great Train Robbers. There were few detectives who had worked with Walker; Detective Sergeants Hemingway and Lloyd-Jones had been checking on the twins for months. So Nipper's first request was for more men; soon he had fourteen working for him.

The next demand was for total secrecy, both from the Krays and from the Yard itself. During the trial of the Richardsons there had been disturbing rumours of a spy at Scotland Yard. The twins were known to have told potential witnesses that anything they said would always get back to them; so rather than take chances John du Rose arranged for Nipper's team to be an undercover operation run from outside Scotland Yard. On the far side of the river was Tintagel House, a modern block of government offices used by the department of the Receiver of Metropolitan Police. Nothing could appear more nondescript.

Once they had offices here Read and his men could disappear into the anonymity of the civil service.

Even within the Yard contact with Tintagel House was kept to a minimum – effectively to Brodie and du Rose. To damp down speculation over what was happening across the river, a rumour was put round that the personnel were busy on a number-one docket – a full-scale inquiry into police corruption. And Nipper got a cover story too: a full-scale murder of his own to solve. A girl had died in Dublin; Nipper's name and the inquiry went up on the Murder Squad detail board in Scotland Yard.

With all this Nipper still had one request: a strict time limit to his assignment. Du Rose agreed to a conditional three months, after which Nipper could move on to something else.

Nipper Read had been nicknamed for his speed and cunning when lightweight boxing champion of the police, and he was to show the same qualities against the Krays. His vitality was catching – also the sense of drama at the task which faced him. This was a dangerous, clever enemy he and his men were fighting. Secrecy was vital; all members of the team were to have revolver practice, all were to take elementary precautions to protect themselves and their families. Cars should not be left out in the open where they could be tampered with, routes home were to be varied every day, care taken against being followed.

Despite all these elaborate precautions the twins soon knew that Nipper Read was back. By mid-October they had learned about the new department in Tintagel House. At first they were a little flattered, then they began to take precautions of their own. One was the attempt to silence Leslie Payne. Ronnie believed that he was just about to talk to Read. Yet in November when McVitie died, despite all Nipper Read's vitality and the high-powered planning at the Yard, the police were still so far from the twins that no one at Tintagel House connected them with the murder. The first the Yard heard was that Jack the Hat was missing. Later an informer said there was a rumour that two men with Greek-sounding names were involved. Cypriots were blamed.

Nipper believed that there was still one way to get the twins. The strategy was simple but required an immense amount of work. This was an attraction in itself: work appealed to him.

All previous police attempts to get them, his own included, had failed through trying to catch them over one big crime. The twins had proved that this would never work. The Law was weak; the twins were powerful enough to twist it any way they liked. They could employ the finest lawyers to defend them. They had intimidated witnesses and threatened jurors. They could always pay others to take the blame or give an alibi. They had their friends in the press and parliament to make the most of any slip by the police.

But there was just one point where Read knew the twins were vulnerable – their past. For more than twelve years now they had been extorting money, maliciously wounding and organizing large-scale crime. Each of their crimes had had its victims; if he could find them and get them to talk, the twins were finished.

Nipper wrote thirty names down in a small black notebook. He called it his ‘delightful index'.

There was no more talk now about his three months' attachment to the case: for the first time he began envisaging himself as the man who caught the Krays. But for his plan to work he needed further help from Scotland Yard. Just before Christmas he and John du Rose had a long session with the top police lawyers. Read had a way with lawyers. Unlike most policemen he is at home in court, clear-cut, unsubservient, extremely sharp, and as he faced the lawyers he explained exactly what he needed. He was confident he could catch the Krays, but the evidence against them would have to come from criminals. These were the men the twins had worked with and the police must have discretion to overlook serious crimes as the price of talking.

No lawyer likes the idea of deals with criminals; Nipper insisted there was no alternative. As he explained, could he have found a set of bishops and top businessmen to testify against the Krays he would have done so, but since the twins did all their business with other criminals, these were the only witnesses available. If the lawyers disapproved, now was the time to say so. The Law would certainly be saved a messy case; the twins would just as certainly stay free.

There was a long discussion. Nipper Read is a forceful man in a debate and his case appeared unanswerable: this was the price the Law was being asked to pay for having left the Krays immune so long.

By the end of that long afternoon Nipper had obtained the pained assent of the lawyers, and was prepared to ‘go down into the sewers after the twins'.

The twins soon guessed what Read was up to as word began to filter back about the people he was seeing. There was not much they missed. This was the sort of secret warfare they could understand; both had good memories for people they had hurt, and soon began to block the loopholes in their past. Several of the men they had shot or wounded were brought to their solicitors and told to swear affidavits exonerating the twins. A general warning was passed out through gangland in case anybody felt like talking to the police. Each member of the Firm was made responsible for keeping tabs on two or three potential witnesses.

A few days later Nipper found himself asking a man the twins had maimed and ruined why he would not help him put them safely away for good.

‘I hate the sight of blood,' the man replied, ‘particularly my own.'

Then when it seemed as if the twins were winning, one of their old mistakes caught up with them. Nipper got his first big stroke of luck.

There had been no need for Ronnie to send Jack the Hat to try to silence Leslie Payne – Payne was too shrewd a criminal to talk to the police. But Jack McVitie's vain attempt to kill him and his subsequent disappearance made Payne think twice about his safety and his family. Had the twins left him alone he would have done nothing to harm them. But once they had tried to kill him he had no future until they were safely locked away.

Payne is a cold fish, with his pale-blue eyes and careful manner. He had no way of knowing whether the twins would try again, but he was on his guard; he made doubly sure about the locks on his doors, kept all his curtains drawn and stayed out of sight. When Sergeant Hemingway approached him as part of Nipper's plan to check all contacts with the twins, he told them he was prepared to talk. He would give everything he knew; it would take quite a while.

Read was sceptical. He had enough on Payne to know that he was too big a name to give himself up for nothing. He agreed to meet him next night in a West End bar, but went convinced it was a trap. Payne was at ease, dressed in a lightweight dark-blue suit and foulard tie; Read had a gun and was covered by two police marksmen. Finally he was convinced that Payne meant every word he said and was prepared to talk.

The full interrogation lasted three intensive weeks. Payne shrugged aside the offers of police protection, so Read chose a quietly down-at-heel hotel in Marylebone, hoping that the Krays' eyes wouldn't reach that far. He arrived each morning punctually at 9.00; Payne would unhurriedly appear an hour later in a taxi. Then, with a police guard sitting in the next-door bedroom, the questioning would start. The guard made coffee, meals were sent in from the cafe round the corner. Nothing was omitted from the questioning; each morning Read read over what Payne had said the day before. Payne had a meticulous memory. Nipper checked places, names, dates and bank-account numbers against his statement. Payne would then sign and date it and the questioning continued.

It was nearly Christmas before it finished. Payne's statement ran to more than two hundred pages and detailed everything he knew about the twins: the early frauds and gang fights, the entry into Esmeralda's Barn, protection and the long-firm frauds, the share deals, rackets, woundings and connections with the Mafia. All the names Payne remembered were included, together with the figures, facts and places. It was a blueprint for a prosecution. All Nipper needed now was proof and witnesses.

As his war against the twins gained ground, Nipper's real talents showed. Like a good general he could see his one advantage over the twins and make the most of it. He had the initiative now and numbers on his side. He could no longer hope to keep the investigation secret, but he could keep the twins guessing by working fast. Speed and surprise might crack their wall of silence.

Over Christmas Tintagel House was mobilized. Twenty men were working on the case; Superintendent Donald Adams had taken charge of documentation with three policewomen as assistants, leaving Nipper and his detectives free for action. It was a very big, simultaneous investigation. The different crimes and victims named in Payne's statement had to be verified before the twins could get at them. There was no time for conferences or the sequence of routine inquiries. Each policeman operated separately, directly responsible to Nipper Read. As well as countless inquiries in London detectives had to go to Scotland, Canada, Belgium, Spain and the United States. Prisoners were interviewed. All the time Read's men knew they could easily be signing a potential witness's death warrant.