The head of the Shakespeare firm in Woolwich, South East London is a man with big ideas and very little experience, but he feels that with his men behind him he's going to reach great heights in the London underworld. After taking impulsive and lethal action against a very powerful rival, he is sure that he is on his way up. The men on his firm are unaware of his past, and he knows that it must stay that way if he is to become a known face. In the end it is his own carelessness that lets him down, and it is the catalyst for a chain of events that can only end in carnage.