He picked up his mobile and his car keys and made to leave.
Freddie grabbed him by the shirtsleeve. 'You can't do this to me, Jimmy.'
Jimmy shrugged him off aggressively. 'I just did, Freddie. You had your chance and you blew it, like you've blown every chance you've ever had.' He shrugged once more and then smiled happily. 'Bye.'
Freddie had envisaged many things on this day but not to be outed. Out of all this meant he was a complete no one, it meant all he had ever known would be gone from him. He would have to move away, he would have to disappear because the shame would kill him otherwise. No one would even acknowledge him if Jimmy outed him. He felt almost sick now with apprehension and dread.
He had to keep his wits about him, he had to try to talk his way through to Jimmy, Jimmy who had loved him once. The enormity of what had happened was hitting him like a ball-peen hammer, and he felt fear, real fear, for the first time in years.
'He is my son, Jimmy, don't forget that. I got him help, he's on drugs… It was a game, that's all, a tragic game that went wrong.'
Jimmy looked into the face so like his own and said with absolute incredulity, 'He needs locking away and I tell you now, once this is all over, if you ain't fucked off out of it somewhere new, I am telling a few choice people what the score is with him. Joseph knows, he always said Little Freddie was a fucking few paving stones short of a patio. If I see him I will fucking kill him. He might be a kid but he is a big cunt and he's a dangerous cunt, and he is for the out along with you and that fucking scab you married. I don't ever want to clap eyes on you, that retard you fucking fathered, or the fucking moron you call your wife, ever again.'
Freddie tried for the sympathy vote. He could not be outed and he could not bang his boy up. He had been banged up and he knew what it was like.
'You can't fucking tell me what to do with my child. He is a kid. He is a big fucker I admit, but he ain't got the brains he was born with. Jackie was always out of her box when she was carrying him, you know that. That's what happened to him, Jimmy, that's why he is like he is… He is on the pills now and he is a changed boy.'
For the first time in years Jimmy heard a real emotion in Freddie's voice. He grinned. 'You don't honestly believe that I am going to swallow that load of old cods, do you? Let you off with another caution like I did with that poor Stephanie and fucking Jewish Lenny? You're a fucking animal and you bred an animal. You live like fucking animals in that filthy shit hole you call home. You are a man whose card has been well and truly marked, mate. No one will touch you with a fucking dodgy DVD now, Freddie. The word is out. You are finished, and if you are foolhardy enough to think that you can fucking resume your usual skulduggery, under my nose, then you are even more stupid than I thought.'
He poured himself a Scotch then, and he sipped at it before saying quietly, and without passion or even a hint of smugness, 'Do you know the funny thing, Freddie? No one defended you, not one person even asked what you had done to get a punishment like this. No one has been outed for years, yet no one was curious about why you were being blanked. They were all more relieved than anything else, and I can understand that, because I am relieved meself that I ain't got to fucking have you hanging round my neck like a cast-iron fucking albatross any more. And I made it perfectly clear that you are to be treated like a fucking pariah, and everyone from Glenford to the Blacks was over the moon about it.'
Freddie was once more in mortal agony at his words and it occurred to Jimmy that he had expected violence, extreme violence. In fact, he had placed a small axe in the back of his trousers. But Freddie was too busy trying to think his way out of the total blanking he was going to get when this all came to fruition.
Jimmy had taken Freddie's very livelihood from him, a serious step in their world where compensation was paid out liberally if anyone happened to accidentally tread on someone's toes, either by encroaching on their scams, or even something trivial like dealing in the same clubs. This was a world where your reputation was only as good as the firm that you worked with, drank with or was employed by you. Freddie was past killing him, because once Jimmy was dead he would lose all chance of ever getting another in, getting another take, and their take had been huge and yet he knew that Freddie was probably boracic lint as per usual. He just spunked it all up as he got it.
He had worked out one night that Freddie had spent over half a million pounds on his house over the last fifteen years and yet it was one of the scruffiest in the street. They had not even bought it on the Right to Buy Scheme. They were still on the fucking council and he knew they were still in rent arrears. It would be laughable if it wasn't so very sad.
The man he had visited all those years as a young boy had been a figment of his imagination. His boyhood hero was now reduced to less than nothing and he felt not one iota of compassion for him.
Freddie glared at him now, and Jimmy knew that the implications of what was going to happen to him in the future were starting to sink in properly.
'You would do this to me.' It was said without menace, it was said without a questioning tone, it was a statement of fact.
Jimmy nodded silently.
Freddie finally understood then that Jimmy would do it, more to the point had already done it. He had a nasty feeling that his predicament was being discussed by people even as they were standing here. He looked at the two of them in the bar mirror and saw they were evenly matched protagonists, except, as he looked properly, Jimmy, being of lighter years and larger build, looked already like the victor.
Freddie saw then, for the first time, what he could have been, should have been.
Jimmy looked the part, acted the part, he was the part.
'Have you served my boy up, grassed him?' This was said with accusation, with the disrespect that would normally be reserved for a grass, a supergrass in fact.
Jimmy didn't answer him. His face told Freddie what he thought of the accusation and that he would not give the question any credence by honouring it with a reply.
But he could grass. Freddie knew he could take the fucking lot down if he wanted to and the filth would reward him, he was sure. The idea took root as he knew it would, and he filed the thought away for future reference.
He stood there for long moments with his huge hands clenched into fists and an almost electric charge going through him as he gradually allowed the predicament he had caused to sink into his brain.
'Well, I ain't going quietly, Jimmy. I'll fucking kill you before I will let you do this to me. You'd fucking humiliate me, you fucking scumbag. When everything you got, you only got because of me!'
He was poking himself in the chest now as he began to lose his temper once more. 'I was the one who done the lump and set all this up. I was the one who had to listen to that boring cunt's stories of the old days over and over again, and set the meets up, and I brought you in with me because I loved you, and now you are snatching it off me. But you remember, Jimmy, that it was me, it was me who laid the foundations of everything we have now and you know it. I want my fucking compensation, because without me you would still be nicking fucking cars and selling dope on the side.'