Jim punched him in the mouth and the man shambled outside spitting blood and teeth. As they reached the car, Jim brought the butt of a revolver down on his head and he slumped unconscious across the back seat under a dirty blanket.
They drove to a derelict factory on the outskirts of the city. Neil dragged the dealer, still unconscious, across to the door which Jim kicked down. ‘He’s still out cold. We’d better just leave the bugger here.’
‘Hold on. He’s not breathing.’ Neil dropped the body to the ground and knelt beside it.
‘I didn’t hit him that hard. Jesus Christ! What about the tart?’
‘She won’t go to the cops. Her sort never does.’
‘No, but she’s seen us, hasn’t she?’
They drove back to the house. Jim knocked on the door which was opened by the woman, now wearing a dressing gown.
‘What have you done to him?’ she shrieked at them.
‘We’ll take you to him. You’ve two minutes to change.’ They waited for her then drove back to the factory where they had left the body of the car dealer slumped on the floor.
‘Where is he? Oh my God...!’
‘Sorry, love,’ said Jim, taking the safety catch off his revolver and pointing it at her head.
Later they paid a security guard to let them into the local steelworks and turn his back while they dropped two bulging post‑bags into the furnace.
After that the Clark twins had to lie low for a few weeks until Chartwin could arrange for their safe passage out of Glasgow. Their usefulness had come to an end in Scotland, but had a contact in London, Big Pete McPhee, who would know where their talents could best be used. So it was that they passed into the hands of Arthur Black, who soon had them in the employ of a man they never met. Their only contact was with Black and their instructions were relayed by telephone. They had to contact him twice every day.
Six months later, their lifestyles had changed beyond recognition. They lived at separate addresses, Jim in Chiswick and Neil in Kew. They never visited each other’s houses and always dressed conservatively in business suits. Even their Glaswegian accents had been toned down.
The nature of their employment had also changed. Now, instead of using their fists, they were mostly using their breaking and entering skills to gather information. If this failed, they would use threats to obtain the necessary facts without resorting to violence. The mere sight of two identical hard men with fiery red hair, smartly dressed but roughly spoken was usually enough to elicit information from even the most uncooperative source.
* * *
Now the Clark twins looked at John, not sure they’d understood what he meant.
John Forbes spoke softly and with complete assurance. ‘In exchange for your souls you will get stability, friendship and wealth. From today I will be your only contact. No one else, apart from Arthur Black, will know anything about you. As before, you will be contacted only when you are needed. You are never to contact me unless specifically agreed in advance.’
The brothers nodded, impressed by his air of confidence and control.
‘I suggest that from now on you are paid four hundred and fifty pounds per week. After tax, I hasten to add, to keep the Inland Revenue sweet. Also I want you to move to better houses in your respective areas, taking out mortgages which you’ll pay by standing order. Each of you will be given a completely new identity backed up with passport, credit cards, drivers’ licence and bank account.’ He stopped, watching a model plane buzzing above them. ‘With me so far?’
They looked at each other, then nodded.
‘Your work will become more complicated. You’ll be enrolled in separate rifle clubs so we can apply for a gun licence for both of you...’ A child suddenly careered into him, spilling some sugar from a lolly on his coat. John steadied him, dried his tears and handed him back to his apologetic mother. ‘Not to worry. These things happen.’ He gave the child a ten‑shilling note. ‘Treat yourself to some sweets.’
They resumed their leisurely walk. ‘You’ll also attend military academies abroad to learn basic tactical skills. Ever heard of the Citadel in South Carolina? It’s the toughest in the world. Then we’ll see about a diving course, which could be useful. And, of course, you’ll have to learn about alarms and other security equipment. These things are getting more sophisticated by the week.’ He let this sink in then said quietly, ‘Think you’ll be able to handle all that?’
‘Nae problem,’ said Neil.
‘Right. The final thing is to give you the right image. What’s your opinion of the fairer sex?’
They looked at him blankly.
‘Women. Do you like the ladies?’
Neil said after a pause, ‘They have their uses.’
‘Ever thought of getting married?’
‘We’re hardly the marrying kind, Mr Forbes,’ said Jim directly.
‘I know, but we must change that. A married man, with a proper job, children, a mortgage, a tax bill, attracts little attention. And should something go wrong one day, and who knows? then the courts look much more positively on a family man than someone they regard a career criminal. Are you getting my drift?’
The twins had been taken by surprise. This man was serious.
‘Find a couple of nice women and start families. This isn’t over the top. We’re going to work together for years ahead. We must plan very carefully, something most people in our business regard as a waste of time. But we are different. We are here to stay.’
* * *
The brothers became proficient in all aspects of security and their overseas military training made them ruthless, efficient tacticians. They worked either separately or together, when their identical looks were often useful in establishing fake alibis.
‘Deniability’ and ‘cut off’ were their watch words. Everything they planned had these as top priority. They had to be prepared to defend themselves in court at any time, should something go wrong.
Jim met his wife Shelley, a typist for the local council, in a sports club. For weeks he had discreetly kept watch on the twenty or so women who went to the weekly evening fitness course there, wanting to lose weight. He selected a smiling and bubbly woman and invited her for coffee at the sports club. Slowly and carefully he nursed the relationship along before inviting her on holiday in Spain, where he proposed.
Neil decided to watch the same post office in Brentford every day to find out when the Social Security giros were cashed. He noticed a neat, well dressed young woman pushing a pram. By placing himself behind her in the queue and getting her two‑year‑old son to giggle, he started chatting to the woman. Two months later he married Vivian, an unemployed single mother.
Both the Clarks were now fathers but their wives had never met and were not even aware of the other twin’s existence.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
_________________________
London, Spring 1973
On the evening of Monday, 5th March, David Kennedy met John in the Cricketers public house on Richmond Green. The pub was lit by candles, due to the miners’ strike and it took some time for John’s eyes to adjust to the darkness.
‘Ramona has been followed,’ his second‑in‑command said urgently.
John’s eyes scanned the room. ‘Let’s get out of here.’ He did not want to be trapped in a dark pub if they were under observation.
They walked along the Green towards the Richmond Theatre. ‘Tell me all about it,’ John said.
David explained that Ramona had been followed twice over three days.
‘Do the rest of the team know?’
‘No,’ David said. ‘The first time was Tuesday. She told Shastri, but at first they put it down to paranoia.’
‘It’s never paranoia or coincidence,’ John said grimly. They stood in the entrance to the theatre and waited. John looked round. It did not seem that anyone was following them. They began walking again.
‘There was no problem on Wednesday,’ David continu
ed, ‘but yesterday Ramona was in no doubt at all. She phoned me from a public phone box and described the man who was waiting close by.’
‘Sounds quite unprofessional to me,’ John commented.
‘But it could be the police.’
‘The police or our competition. We’ll have to find out.’
They walked on in silence. Then John said, ‘Tell Ramona and Shastri not to say anything. Tomorrow, she’s to take the tube to Richmond Station and walk beside the wall outside in the direction of the main entrance to Kew Garden. If she’s under police surveillance, they’ll have tapped the phone, so you’ll have to be careful how you get the message to her.’
‘OK. What’s your plan, John?’
‘We’ll be able to spot anyone following her quite easily, There’s a drive into the rugby ground where we can grab whoever’s following and find out what’s going on.’
* * *
John waited in the Esher office for the phone call. It was quite possible that Ramona would not be followed today, which meant the same procedure would have to be repeated day after day.
Eight years had passed since the hemp operation had started. The team was still the same and had gone from strength to strength. David refining and improving every last detail of the operation. However, John knew that no criminal enterprise could last forever. Perhaps this was the sign that this one was due to come to an end.
At quarter past three in the afternoon, the phone finally rang. Jim Clark said, ‘Its Grace’s man.’
‘Right. Find out why he was following her. I’ll wait here till you call again.’
Then he phoned David and asked Shastri and Ramona to leave their home and check into two country hotels and wait for instructions.
Duncan Grace was one of the eight gangland bosses mentioned by Arthur. He had grown in influence after other gang leaders had fallen foul of the law and been given life imprisonment. Grace was shrewd, unscrupulous and extremely dangerous. As no objection had come from any of the big London firms to the activities of Auto‑Trade‑Factors, although Duncan Grace was bound to know of them, and as neither Ramona nor Shastri was involved with Auto‑Trade‑Factors’ operation, this aggravation had to be tied to the hemp business. Duncan Grace’s main income was from hard drugs.
The peaceful interlude John had enjoyed was the main reason why he had become wealthy. The Company, whose invisible profile had been carefully cultivated, would become widely known if there was a full scale confrontation; it could never function in the same way again.
John had no intention of embarking on a gangland war with an old‑fashioned mobster like Duncan Grace in order to defend the hemp business. His organisation had only the Clark twins as enforcers, whereas Grace probably employed thirty ‘heavies’. This problem would have to be resolved quickly and dealt within such a way that no other gangland boss would even think of threatening them again.
In the early evening Jim Clark phoned him back.
‘Our chap knows very little. He was just told to report on her movements.’
‘Do you know who’s Number Two in Grace’s gang?’
‘A bloke called Derek Harvey.’
‘Pick him up.’
Later the same evening Neil and Jim picked up Harvey outside the Pensbury Arms in Wandsworth. He was a stocky, overweight man in his late forties, notorious for his temper, who had worked for Duncan Grace for many years and was regarded as more cunning and intelligent than his boss. In a safe house in Ealing he was taken to the basement and, was standing. handcuffed to a pipe in the ceiling. The man picked up earlier was also in this house.
Harvey refused to answer any questions and instead threatened revenge.
Jim Clark calmly picked up a chair and placed it next to him. Without any warning, standing on the chair, he poured acid over Harvey’s handcuffed hands. It made a hissing sound on the unprotected flesh and ran in rivulets of fire down his raised arms to inflict similar damage on his armpits and chests. Gasping and quivering with pain Harvey started to talk.
Having obtained the answers, Neil Clark drove to Esher and briefed John at three o’clock in the morning.
It appeared that one of the Company’s wholesalers, an Indian friend of Shastri’s, had become well‑known in various London nightclubs. Duncan Grace’s men had noted his expensive Ferrari and overheard him bragging about his extravagant lifestyle. Grant arranged to meet the Indian and leant on him hard. The wholesaler eventually let slip that he was part of a larger organisation dealing in drugs.
Grace put him under surveillance for a week. When the man met up with Ramona in a restaurant in Chiswick, Grace ordered that she should be followed.
John sat quietly while Neil recounted these events. There was a chance that Duncan Grace might think the whole thing was an Indian operation and would not take it any further. However, two men from his gang were now being held in the safe house. John could not let them go back to their boss with details of another organisation, much more dangerous than Grace would ever have envisaged.
John gave his instructions to Neil.
The next morning in the house at Ealing, the twins carried out their instructions. They stripped Derek Harvey and while he stood naked and shivering, spread a plastic sheet on the floor: ‘to wrap up the body’, said Jim in a casual voice.
The twins discussed between them if they would allow him to write a farewell letter to his wife. All the while Neil played with the silencer of his gun.
Harvey was left alone for an hour. When the brothers came back, Jim briefly mentioned that perhaps there was another option.
Harvey was promised weekly payments to a bank account in Spain. He was to live there closely monitored. If the money was not picked up from the bank or should he try to leave the country, a close relative in England would pay the ultimate price.
Derek Harvey accepted the terms offered. The following day he called his wife from Heathrow to tell her he was on his way to Spain and would be away for some time.
The tail who had followed Ramona was released the same evening, under similar conditions.
* * *
‘Is Mr Grace in, love?’ The uniformed policeman stood on the doorstep of Duncan Grace’s house on Saturday morning at seven o’clock.
The front door had been opened by Grace’s wife who shouted for her husband.
‘What’s the problem?’ Grace looked as if he’d just got out of the shower. His hair was wet and he rubbed at it with a towel.
The policeman asked if he could come in. He nodded, and led the way down the hall.
‘I’m from Tooting Police Station,’ the red haired officer said showing a black fold‑over Metropolitan Police Warrant Card. ‘I’d like you to come with me to St. George’s Hospital. A man believed to be Derek Harvey has been involved in a car accident. He’s unlikely to survive the next couple of hours.’
‘What’s that got to do with me?’ asked Grace suspiciously.
‘Mr Harvey had a letter in his pocket addressed to you,’ the policeman explained. ‘There was a passenger in the car whose identity is unknown. Unfortunately he was dead on arrival at the hospital. We wonder if you might be able to identify both Mr Harvey and the dead passenger.’
‘OK. I know Derek Harvey. I don’t know about the other fellow.’
‘Sorry to rush you, sir, but this is a matter of extreme urgency.’
The policeman and Duncan Grace got into the police car, a dark blue Rover with a single blue light on top, parked outside the house with another police officer in uniform sitting ready to drive off. Quietly, but at high speed they drove down the road to the corner. As it took the corner, Neil Clark turned round and shot Grace twice, once in the temple and once in the heart. Calmly he put a blanket over the body.
Two hours later the twins drove down a country lane in Essex which led to some old factory buildings close to the Blackwater River.
The factory was empty. The owner had agreed to leave the day before after a payment of £2,000. There
was a strange, unpleasant smell hanging over the whole place.
The twins dragged the body into one of the buildings to an enormous wood chipper machine which was placed next to a container the size of a swimming pool. Neil switched on the electricity for both the chipper and an electric saw which was laying next to it.
Half an hour later Duncan Grace body had been spit out by the chipper in tiny parts into the container holding billions of maggots, which the owner packed and sold to fishing clubs and shops.
Before leaving, they turned off the electricity and opened the gate to the pigsties enabling twenty‑four hungry pigs to roam around in the bigger area, eating everything they could find.
The police car was set on fire and crushed in a breaker’s yard. Later that same day the compressed remains were dumped from a fishing boat into the Channel.
When John was informed by phone, that Grace had ‘retired’ forever, he replied, ‘That sounds like a shrewd career move.’
* * *
At four o’clock Sunday morning the loose tongued wholesaler came out of Stringfellow’s nightclub, which had newly opened.
A waiting black cab took him through Covent Garden. The driver showed precision skills when reversing the car out of Maiden Lane and into Bull Inn Court. Entering the narrow passageway Neil Clark jumped out and let the car roll a few yards. Jim stepped out from the shadows and poured petrol over the back of the car. The wholesaler was trapped inside when it went up in flames, hammering wildly on the car windows.
He survived, but was scarred for the rest of his life. The incident was reported next day in all the newspapers. The other wholesalers had been given a stark warning. They knew what would happen to them if they stepped out of line.
John was not concerned with the possibility that information linking his organisation to the disappearance of Duncan Grace could have been passed on to the police. They were bound to have found out about the bogus police car from Mrs Grace, but there was nothing they could do without a body. That Derek Harvey was suddenly living in Spain was meant to look suspicious, but he had been told what to say when contacted by the police. It was a clear case of a gangland feud settled.
Only John knew that he intended calling Derek Harvey back to London after a couple of months to let him rebuild Duncan Grace’s organisation. It would provide John himself with a useful alibi and he was prepared to count on Harvey’s willingness to repay a favour, should John want it one day.