Cult of Violence by Pearson John

Author:Pearson, John [Pearson, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

Twelve

Enter ‘Nipper’

A human being who has exercised the right of private judgement and taken the life of another human being is not safe to exist in the community. I tell you that.

Hercule Poirot

Towards the end of March 1968, the Twins began using their parents’ brand-new top-floor flat in Bunhill Row as their headquarters and sometimes slept there. I think they felt safe to be back again with Violet in this haven high above the City, particularly now that the demolition contractors were on the point of knocking down Fort Vallance. Out of interest I went to Vallance Road one evening just before they demolished it. I found the little street deserted, the houses empty, and I remember looking at the battered green front door of Fort Vallance and wondering if there was any way of obtaining it as a grim souvenir of a world that would soon be gone for ever.

I still have vivid memories of the Twins in their last few weeks of freedom in their parents’ flat on the ninth floor of their high-rise block. Ron, in vest and grey baggy trousers, appeared to have expanded physically even in the few days since I saw him last. In contrast, Reg had shrunk, and was looking more than ever like his father. I was reminded of an anxious monkey in his cage, perpetually worried and unable to escape, as he chain-smoked the cigarettes that would kill him thirty-two years later.

How both the Twins had changed since I first saw them just a few months earlier at Gedding Hall. There was something beleaguered and doomed about them now, and I had the feeling, as I often did when I was with them, that their fantasies were taking them over, and that they were acting out the last scenes of the great gangster movie of their lives that so obsessed them.

It was late afternoon. On the table by the big window with its views across London stood an empty teapot and a half-finished bottle of Gordon’s gin. The sky was streaked with pale cloud, the sun was dissolving in a pool of gold behind St Paul’s, and just to the right was the dome of the Law Courts with the blindfolded figure of Justice holding up her sword and scales. As the day began to die and the first lights of evening glimmered in the office blocks around us, I had a feeling of being isolated in this tiny flat high above London, with Ron as an East End Harry Lime, looking down on ant-like humanity below him from the top of his very own Ferris wheel.

If you’re a big-time criminal controlling London, what better place to do it from than there? And here, away from the crammed little houses in Vallance Road and whatever they once stood for in their lives as criminals, the Twins seemed finally released from all that had bound them to their past in Bethnal Green. But however invulnerable they may have felt, they also knew by now that, somewhere in the city down below them, the police were closing in.

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