Terry was collecting rents in and around Custom House when he was shot in the face. He took the full force of the bullet as well as the glass from his driver's-side window; this left him a bloody wreck and guaranteed a closed coffin for his expensive and lavish funeral. He was still alive when the ambulance arrived, but he drowned in his own blood on his way to hospital, something his mother would have nightmares about and would never come to terms with.
He was calling out for her as he died, by all accounts, but this in no way diminished his credibility or his standing in their community. Everyone wanted their mums when life threw them a curve. They were often the only people who stood by you no matter what you had done or, more to the point, been accused of. Men had been given life sentences and the only person to visit for the duration of their tariff on a regular basis was their mother. All the time you had a mother you had somewhere to go and someone to care.
Terry had died calling out for his mother, that alone would have to be addressed by his brothers, let alone the sheer fucking front of the perpetrator thinking they could get away with such a heinous act. Their mother was in absolute bits and that was something none of them could bear to see. This whole debacle was an outrageous and diabolical liberty, mainly because no one could find any reason for it. There was no one in the frame, no enemies wandering abroad and no grudges that warranted such extreme action. It was a complete and utter head-scratcher. Terry wasn't even trumping someone else's old woman, he was on a fucking love job. There was no reason whatsoever for his murder and the sheer senselessness of it only made his brothers all the more determined to get their revenge.
But the one thing they were agreed on was that when they found out who had been the perpetrator of such a daring and needless killing, the woman who had given birth to them would get that person back bit by bit through the post. For every hurt their mother experienced, they would pay it back tenfold.
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.