Pat was sitting with an old friend in a drinking club he had recently acquired when he heard the news about young Terry.
The murder of the bookie Jamie Curtis had not really affected him; he had put it down to a grudge of some description, personal maybe, or a private bet that had gone wrong. James would not be the first book-maker to take on a few private bets. The trouble with private bets was that the bookie had no redress if it all fell out of bed. As the bets were not accountable to people like himself, meaning they did not go through the books he earned from, meaning he earned fuck all off them, Pat had no reason to make sure they were paid in full. Why would he? A big debt could turn nasty, everyone knew that; gamblers were like junkies, once they were given their fun upfront with no money changing hands, they had a tendency to be a trifle lax when the bills started rolling in. They were more inclined to look elsewhere to spend the money they had left.
Most bookies would sell a debt like that on and take whatever they could get for it, leaving the punter to take his chances with whatever lunatic eventually came after them. And make no mistake, someone would come after them. Pat bought a debt occasionally, for a favour, and collected it quickly and efficiently.
So Pat assumed that Jamie had made a complete fuck up; it was not, after all, a robbery. So it had to be a score being settled, or someone who had decided it was cheaper for them if Jamie was off the scene once and for all.
Either way, Pat wasn't too worried. It had nothing to do with him and anyway, he was confident he would know the reason sooner rather than later. He was sorry, of course. Jamie was all right, and whoever did it was on a fucking death wish because they must know that Jamie paid them protection money, and so this was a double insult. What kind of an advert was this for the firm? Naturally, someone would have to pay for that. But if it was a private bet, they would not step in, so he was happy enough to wait until he had the full SP and take it from there.
Now though, young Terry's demise within hours of Jamie's, put a different complexion on it completely. This felt personal, was personal, Pat would lay money on it, even though the irony of that thought nearly made him smile. He still wasn't too worried though because he was confident in his role as a man to be reckoned with. There had to be a logical explanation, he was sure. He needed to see Dicky and find out what he knew about the situation. Young Terry had to have been up to a bit of private skulduggery.
A chill passed through his body all the same and he ordered a large brandy to counteract it. He was suddenly very uneasy. Paranoia went with the territory, he had known that when he took all this on, it was what kept them on their toes and was part and parcel of their lives. When evil whispered there was always someone willing to take heed. He knew that, trouble was how they earned a living after all. But now he had a feeling that this was not just the usual one-up, this was real trouble, serious trouble.
No one watching Patrick would ever have guessed his thoughts in a million years. He looked relaxed and untroubled. Like a politician caught with his cock in his hand and a friend's son naked beside him, he was fronting it out. No one watching him could see him question or ponder on anything that had occurred; as he was hearing about the afternoon's atrocities, so were they. He was fronting all right, but he was also watching everyone around him carefully in case they might be involved in some way. In case he picked up a nuance, or a vibe.
In Pat's world you were guilty until proven otherwise and, even then, he would keep an open mind.
Dicky Williams was angry. He knew it was a fruitless anger though, because there was nothing he could do about it. Terry was dead and nothing would bring him back, but he was still reeling from the realisation that his little brother had been murdered.
It had not been what he would call a happy or even productive few hours. In fact, it had made him feel so vulnerable and so convinced that there was more serious skulduggery afoot that he was on the verge of harming someone just to vent his colossal anger and therefore get some respite. Pat had explained on the blower that the only relevant thing he had heard was concerning Freezing Freddie, and he had no real proof that it had anything to do with the day's events. Dicky was convinced though that Pat knew more than he was letting on.
It seemed that Fucking Freddie Dwyer, the cold and callous piece of shit, had managed to get himself a serious capture. He had been caught, so the word on the street had it, with a large amount of money and drugs. The house he scavenged from had been overrun at daybreak by a crowd of filth who hailed from New Scotland Yard and went under the name of the Flying Squad. The Flying Squad had actually been around since 1919 and no one had given a flying fuck about them until the early seventies when they were suddenly in everyone's faces. They were as bent as a barrister's cock and about as effective on serious crime as Germolene on an amputated leg.
The Sweeney, as they were known, were not averse to fitting someone up, that was public knowledge, and they were also loath to strike unless they had the person bang to rights in their minds, meaning the fit up was watertight. Sometimes they had a genuine capture, which was less often than they let the public and their bosses believe. Dicky knew for a fact that Freddie had been in possession of enough amphetamines to keep the whole of London up for a week and still have enough left over to do the same again in Glasgow. He should know, he had supplied them to him in the first place.
So how was it that they were hearing that Freddie had got bail? Was it because he had been overzealous with his explanations to Old Bill? Being overly helpful with the filth was becoming more and more acceptable these days, at least that is how it looked at the moment to Dicky Williams. Especially where a dealer like Dwyer was concerned. The courts had started handing out such outrageous sentences that some of the members of their world were unwilling, or more pointedly, unable to cope with that amount of time in prison. He was convinced that Dwyer was one of those people. The dirty, filthy, two-faced fucking rat.
In short, he now strongly suspected Dwyer had offered up some choice information in exchange for a guaranteed sentence and if that was the case, what the fuck had he said? And, even more to the point, how much of his chatter involved him and Pat? If Terry had been taken out and Jamie the Book, then Old Bill were obviously using old scores to take the onus off Freddie's grassing. The Flying Squad often used old scores to take out people they knew they had no chance of nicking.
Freddie was a useless ponce, everyone knew that. But he was also a necessary evil where they were concerned because he made sure that any contacts he managed to secure were guaranteed earners. But, no matter what anyone said about bent filth, you had to procure them long before you finally used them with any degree of confidence, and the fact that they were tucking up their own mates and colleagues spoke volumes. With bent filth it was all about baiting the trap and making sure you grabbed the fucker painfully and with malice aforethought by their gonads, therefore ensuring their full and frank cooperation. Freddie had no filth in his pocket, he relied on Pat and the Williamses to smooth out anything that might cause him aggravation. But the amount of speed he had in his possession would have been the collar of the year to Lily Law and they would have locked him up and thrown away the key before he had even seen his brief. His sojourn in whatever nick they decided to bury him in should have been a foregone conclusion, it was too much gear to even contemplate getting any kind of result, let alone fucking bail. This was fucking freaky, there was no doubt about that.
As Dicky Williams had pointed out to Patrick not an hour ago, if Fucking Freddie Dwyer had grassed him or anyone close to him, he was a fucking dead man. Because Terry's demise was such an affront none of them could believe it was to do with business. Who would be mad enough to take them on?