Powder Wars by Graham Johnson Page A

thingy about it. And next minute he’s like: ‘I can’t reach the hangle and that.’
    I’m thinking, ‘It’s only a fucking small car, you shithouse. You’re not even trying there.’ So I opens the back passenger door on my side. By this time, I’ve got one leg over the front seats and I’m half in the back. There are families, driving past and that. Teams of Indians in minibuses and that, on the motorway, like you used to get. All astonished at this caper going on in the car and I’m just carrying on wellying him hard up the arse.
    Kicked him out onto the hard shoulder, I did. Watched him out the back window, la. In bulk, he was. Rolling over dead fast, but his arm and legs smashing on the ground even faster. Flailing, they were, uncontrollably. Pure fucking splattered goodo, he was. We were doing 70 mph, by the way. Laughing, I was, in all honesty. Hysterically. There was loads of cars behind. Everyone saw what was going on. It was ontop to death, but I could not give a fuck. We just carried on fucking going as though nothing had happened. I was reading the paper and that.
    When I got back I had murder with Grimwood. Could not let this little escapade go, in all fairness. Was the first time I stood up to him properly. I was half fucking going to do him as well. He could have brought my whole operation ontop and got me serious time. For all I knew it might have been a set up from the word go. For all I know the busies might have been onto me for a while and knew about all the other jobs and this was the grand finale. The sting, to get the evidence first hand. I knew I could take Billy in a one-on-one and I was going to do it then.
    I was looking at him. He’d come down to my yard for the steward’s and all that, being all ‘I can’t believe it’ and all that baloney, but he looked half pathetic, in all honesty. For the first time I noticed that he looked old. All the time he’d served over the years was taking its toll. His suits didn’t look that great anymore. He’d passed his sell by, in all fairness. Times were a changin’ and there was no room no more for these Kray clones anymore. Trading off their tales of derring-do and their daft overcoats and that. Their idiosyncrasies and all. Modern villainy was about grafting hard and getting on your bike.
    Billy was getting sloppy, to be truthful. He was too used to waiting for things to come to him and now that it was drying up, he was taking chances on pricks like the fence, to make the numbers up. Was drinking a bit too much for my liking and all and he was surrounding himself with gangster ghouls, phoneys and yes men. Gobshites, the lot of them.
    As he was jabbering on I was half-thinking of just twatting him there and then, to shut the cunt up. I spied a nice iron bar about six foot away if he proved to be a bit more tasty than his demeanour of late had suggested. But deep down I knew doing him in would just cause untold. Pure beefs, it’d lead to, no two ways. Not only back home, mind you, but in London and that, where he still had a few be-suited community leaders on his side. They used to meet up at their big mad gangster funerals and that. He loved all that palaver Billy. Years later he went to the Krays’ funeral where Johnny Nash was pallbearer. In truth, in the end, I could not be arsed doing Billy in. Just left it, I did. I said to him: ‘You are full of shit. Stay out of my fucking yard.’ And with that, I fucked him off.
    Business carried on as usual after that. Builders used to ring us up: ‘I need a caravan for a site. Can you get us one?’
    â€˜Of course, no sweat.’
    I robbed a couple of these big fuck-off caravans they used as offices and digs for the workies and that. Could not believe it, la. Sold one for £3,000 – that was nearly enough for a house at the time. So I told Snowball to have off as many as he could. When we couldn’t get