'Don't bother, it's already sorted.'
Joe heard the exchange and saw the look on Jimmy's face. His sudden angry countenance seemed almost demonic.
He was looking at Freddie with such contempt Joe expected his burly son-in-law to take umbrage, to leap up from the floor and confront Jimmy.
Instead he sat there and took it. But Joe guessed that soon these two men were going to collide, and he knew who his money would be on as the victor.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
'I want him out, Oz, and I want him out sooner rather than later.'
Ozzy nodded, forgetting that Jimmy couldn't see him since they were on the phone. As always, Ozzy liked his young protégé's straight talking and he was pleased that Freddie was being aimed out at last. Personally, he would have seen the back of him years ago.
Since the boy had died he had felt a marked change in Jimmy. He was harder, and he was also easier to nark. This was to be expected, he supposed.
When the news had been broadcast to the wing that poor Jimmy Jackson had lost his son in tragic circumstances, Ozzy had seen the reaction of the men who had children, especially the ones with young families. He had understood Jimmy's grief much better then. Never having had a child himself, he could only imagine what it felt like to lose one.
Jimmy, like many a man before him, was focusing on his work to get through this terrible time. Everything in life was geared around it. It was working in Jimmy's favour, anyway, helped him escape all this grief. Ozzy had watched men in prison dissolve after an event like that.
Maggie, he understood, was not coping with it at all, and he also guessed that Jimmy couldn't even scratch the surface of her grief. How could he? Women were a different species and as they were the ones who grew the children inside them anyway, he assumed they felt the loss far more than the fathers. Though the newspapers and the TV news told him, some women had no feelings for their offspring, and he knew Maggie had not taken to the child at first.
Ozzy sighed inwardly. He was distressed for Jimmy, felt for him, but Ozzy could still see the personal opportunity that his grief was affording him. He was going to overhaul the businesses and he was starting off by getting rid of the dead wood.
'You do it, Jimmy, you have a good old clear out, son. It's long overdue anyway.'
'All right, son?' Freddie slowed the car down to the annoyance of the drivers behind him, and he waved at his son through the open window.
Little Freddie smiled and waved back, and his father tooted the horn of his car as he drove past him and the two friends he was walking to school with.
Freddie smiled. He was all right, there was nothing wrong with that boy. He was highly strung like his old man, that was all. It was temper, and he also had a temper, as those who crossed him found out to their detriment. Well, his boy had inherited it from him, so he couldn't be all bad.
His sorrow and shock had completely gone and Jimmy was the new focus of his attention. Jimmy was the bad bastard, and Jimmy had better watch out.
Freddie was weaving in and out of the early-morning traffic and he was cursing and gesturing to all the other, less-capable drivers who had the audacity to be on the road. He was driving to Jimmy's suite of new offices in a purpose-built block in Barking. Jimmy was working from there exclusively now, and they really looked the part.
Freddie was disgusted about them, seeing the use of them as a front as a mug's game, and he told anyone who would listen to him that Jimmy was heading for a fall. Filth raided premises as it was – their homes, their safe houses. Why put yourself in the frame by advertising your existence?
But Jimmy was running legitimate businesses from there, and the other stuff was only ever discussed in the place. Nothing tangible could ever link any of the employees to anything that was not above board and taxable. Jimmy was moving with the times while Freddie was still stuck in a time warp.
Freddie was fuming because he had not heard from Jimmy for a week, and then he'd got a message telling him to come to his office. Well, he was on his way, and he was going to sort it out once and for all. This showdown had been a long time coming. He was more than ready for it, and he was prepared to go to any lengths to see that it happened.
'Maggie's bad, Mum. I am really worried about her.'
Rox was sitting on her mother's bed and trying to get her to drink some tea and eat a piece of toast. The girls took it in turns now to force Jackie to get out of bed and to eat. They were worried about her and her escalating drinking problem.
'She'll be all right, now will you piss off, Rox, and let me sleep!'
Rox sighed. 'Imagine it was one of us, Mum, who had died. How would you feel?'
'At this moment, Rox, I would be over the moon. Now will you sod off and leave me be.'
Kimberley, who was on the landing, listened to her mother and wondered at a woman who had no real feeling for her sister's grief.
Rox tried again. 'Will you sit up, Mum, please, and eat this toast we've made you?'
Jackie was getting really annoyed now. This was becoming a regular thing and at first she had loved it. The attention and the knowledge her girls were looking out for her had been lovely. Now it was getting a bit over the fucking top. They were here every day like a gaggle of bloody witches, and all she wanted to do was have a kip.
Kimberley walked into the bedroom and, pushing Rox out of the way, she grabbed the quilt and dragged it off her half-naked mother.
Jackie went ballistic. She sat up in the bed and screamed in anger, 'What the fuck is it with you lot? Why can't you just leave me alone!'
Rox was trying not to laugh, but then she looked at her mother properly and saw the way she had bloated out again over the last few months and any thought of laughing vanished.
Jackie's legs were a mass of bruises and scratches, because her kidneys were gradually breaking down and causing an itchy rash. Rox and her sisters knew this because they had looked it up on the internet. They knew what was happening to Jackie and they wanted to try to help her help herself, before it was too late. Their mother was a textbook case for a female alcoholic and they wanted to stop her from drinking herself to death.
Rox looked around the bedroom. It was filthy The bedding was rotten, the carpet was a mass of cigarette burns and coffee stains, and the whole room stank of sweat and stale perfume. But the saddest thing of all was that it didn't look half as dilapidated as the woman sitting up on the bed amidst all the squalor.
Jackie had pulled the quilt back over her, but any thought of sleep was long gone, and her anger was being expressed as vindictive personal insults.
She lit a cigarette and said loudly and sarcastically, 'So what is this about, then?'
She spoke in a high, sing-song voice, the utter contempt for her children's do-gooding evident. 'Rox is having a baby, so now she is a fucking fountain of wisdom. Well, you know fuck all, Rox, you never have.'
'She knows more than you ever will, Mother.'
Jackie smiled as she looked at Kimberley 'Oh, now me junkie daughter is giving me the benefit of her experience as well, is she? Well, shove it. Go and have a fix, Kim, at least you were smiling on the skag.'
Rox walked to the door. She had heard enough.
Kimberley said quietly, 'Look at yourself, Mum, and your life. It stinks, you stink and you drink yourself stupid so you don't have to accept that. But you do, you have to try and stop destroying yourself and everyone around you.'
Jackie laughed nastily, and pushing her hair back off her face she hollered, 'At least I have a life, what have you got, eh? No man, no nothing. Who'd fucking want you, Kim, with your miserable fucking boatrace? You tell me that.'