Queen of Green

by V E Rooney

  Sean looks at Skinhead and cocks his head at me. “What a blast from the past, eh lad?” he says in a cheerful manner.

  Skinhead doesn’t recognise me at first. “You what? Who’s this?” he says hurriedly. His confusion is genuine. Sean smiles at him.

  “Take your time, lad. Have a good look at her. Are you sure you don’t know who this is?”

  Skinhead’s eyes are scanning me all over, trying to figure out who the fuck I am. And then I see it on his face. He recognises me. The flinch of recognition. He goes to say something but stops. If he has any shit left in his bowels, it’s about to dribble out of his arsehole. Oh yes, fuckface. You fucking well know who I am now, don’t you?

  Before Skinhead can work up the gumption to say anything, Sean crouches down beside him, with that Mona Lisa smirk again. “Isn’t this nice, eh? You remember your little friend from back in the day, don’t you, lad? I can see she even left you with a permanent souvenir, didn’t she?” Sean says as he pats the top of Skinhead’s skull. Skinhead, the stupid bastard, tries to flinch away from Sean’s hand. Sean responds by grabbing Skinhead by the throat.

  “So, tell me something, mate. How old were you at the time? You know, when you raped her?” Sean says, still keeping up the matey, cheery manner.

  “I didn’t fucking rape her!” Skinhead protests, a look of real fear across his face.

  “Oh really? You calling her a liar, mate?” Paul says, glowering at him. Sean turns to me.

  “What year was this, girl? Remind me.”

  “1982. I was nine years old,” I say, in a detached, monotone way. Sean pretends to do some mental arithmetic. “1982. So you’re 26 now,” he said, turning back to Skinhead. “Which means you were 15 at the time. Is that right, lad?” Skinhead doesn’t say anything. Sean continues with his patter. “15 years old and you’re raping a nine-year-old girl? That’s not very gentlemanly behaviour, is it?”

  “Nah, mate,” Paul concurs. “Shocking behaviour, that is.”

  “I didn’t! I didn’t mean to…We were just having a laugh, like. I was just messing about, honest,” Skinhead implores. “I just wanted to scare her.”

  “Messing about, were you? Mmm. So tell me something else, lad. How many other little girls have you raped, eh? How many other girls have you scared, eh? How many other girls have you raped between then and now?” Sean’s voice is growling now.

  “I didn’t fucking…I didn’t!” protests Skinhead, shaking his head at Sean.

  I step forward slowly.

  “Shut the fuck up, you lying, snivelling little bastard,” I say, bending down to look him right in the eye. It’s the moment when he looks back at me. That’s when I know. That’s the moment that changes me.

  “Actions have consequences. Doesn’t matter how much time has passed in-between. You’re about to face the consequences of what you did to me,” I say to him. “Have you ever been afraid? I mean, really afraid? Ever felt so weak and powerless in the face of your worst nightmare? Ever had the feeling that you’re about to be overpowered by something you can’t stop?” I say.

  He screws his eyes up at me. Is he trying to scowl at me? Is this fucker fronting me? Even as he’s sat there beaten to a pulp, he still thinks he can put the frighteners on me?

  “Look, love…just do whatever you’re gonna do to me, alright?” Skinhead says, but there is a sneer on his face as he says it. He thinks I’m gonna slap him around a bit and that’ll be the end of it.

  “I’m not gonna lay a finger on you,” I say calmly as I step backwards. I nod at Paul, who leaves the room. Skinhead looks from me to Paul and then around the room. I hear a muttered grumble of “for fuck’s sake” from him before he drops his head to one side, trying to work his neck muscles.

  The sudden unmistakeable noise of dog claws rapidly scratching across the cement floor makes his head snap up again.

  Tyson and Floyd bound over to me, their loud ominous barking bouncing off the bare walls and floor and making it sound like there are ten dogs instead of two. I grab hold of their collars as they both rear up in front of Skinhead. It’s an effort to hold them back – they’re both straining away from me as they let rip with an ear-splitting crescendo of barks and growls at Skinhead. Skinhead tries to move backwards in his chair, frantically jerking at the ropes which are binding him. Oh no, sunshine. You’re not going anywhere.

  Skinhead looks up at me, the contemptuous sneer replaced by an expression of gut-churning fear. Skinhead tries to speak but he’s spluttering and coming out with gibberish. It makes no difference what he says now. He’s fucked and he knows it. He knows he isn’t getting out of this lock-up alive.

  “Please…please…I’m sorry…please…” Skinhead is looking at me now. He’s beseeching me to forgive him, to show him the milk of human kindness. But I can’t forgive him. I won’t. He doesn’t deserve it. Even though I can’t articulate how he affected me, even though I’m not yet fully comprehending how the attack damaged me, I know that it changed me irreparably in ways I can’t yet contemplate. And for that, he needs to suffer.

  Tyson and Floyd are inching forward towards Skinhead, almost wrenching my arms from their sockets. I don’t know how much longer I can hold them. I know what I need to do.

  “Tyson? Floyd?” I say firmly. “Fuck him.”

  Their collars slip away under my hands as they launch themselves at him. Skinhead screams as they pounce on him, they sink their teeth into his arms, his legs, he’s screaming louder now, the dogs are taking chunks out of him but I can’t look any more, even the lads have to look away, I turn around and put my hands over my ears because of the horrific sound of dogs tearing a man apart in seconds, their frenzied growls as they pull flesh from bone, the bloodcurdling screams of a man dying a horrendous, agonising death in the jaws of nature at its most instinctive and unbridled.

  I don’t register Sean putting his hands over my hands, trying to muffle the sound. I can’t take it anymore. I spin away from Sean, back towards Skinhead.

  “TYSON! FLOYD! BACK!” I yell. The dogs comply and come to heel without so much as a whimper.

  Skinhead can’t speak because the dogs have gone for his throat as well. The gaping wound just below his Adam’s apple tells me that he won’t be talking back to me. Sinews of flesh, bare tendons, torn muscles and deep gashes cover his jerking, twitching body. What’s left of his body.

  Sean steps forward. He’s staring at me. “Are you done?” he asks.

  I don’t move. I can’t look away from the bloodied mess in front of me.

  “I’m done,” I say quietly.

  “I’m not,” says Sean, as he pulls out a pistol and fires three shots into Skinhead’s face. Skinhead is killed instantly. What’s left of his head slumps forward and his body goes limp. The dent on the top of his skull reflects the beam of light from the lightbulb swaying overhead. Sean puts away his pistol and turns to Paul.

  “Flush this piece of shit.”

  Skinhead’s weighed-down body was dumped in the sea, joining the other lost souls in the murky watery graveyard. And I slept soundly that night for the first time in weeks. Years, even. Sean had seen to it that I never had to worry about coming face to face with Skinhead ever again. He forced me to exorcise the demon. The demon which had dominated my life without me even being conscious of it.

  ***

  The end of Reynolds’ anecdote is not triumphant in its description, nor is there an impression that Reynolds relishes imparting this information to me. She is as matter-of-fact as ever.

  “If you think for one second that I enjoyed that, that I wanted that, then you’re way off the mark,” she says resolutely. “But I can see why Sean made me do it. He could see how fucked up I was after seeing Skinhead again. He made me confront him and by doing that I was able to vanquish him. The method of that vanquishing was not my choosing but with hindsight I can see why it happened the way it did. I never, ever used those dogs in that way again. I don’t have the stomach for that sort of thing. Oh yeah, I
had to order a few beatings for people who were late paying me. Had to send the boys out a few times to crack some skulls together. But I didn’t get any pleasure out of that. Not in the way some sickos get off on inflicting pain.

  “But after that, I became the bogeyman for some people. The lads in the crew thought it was hilarious the way they could terrify some poor sod, you know, ‘don’t fuck around with the Queen or she’ll set the Corgis onto you…you don’t wanna pay the Queen? How do you fancy getting turned into dog meat?’ That kind of thing,” Reynolds says.

  “And it worked. People shat their pants at the thought of me getting my jollies watching some poor twat getting ripped apart by a pair of Rottweilers. The lads only had to have the dogs in the back of their car and people shat their loads. And you know what? If it meant more people paid up on time, then it had the desired effect,” she says, crossing her legs and cricking her neck.

  “And then, like you said, it got turned into an urban myth that persists to this day,” she says, nodding at me. “That’s how reputations are made and destroyed. It only takes one incident to define someone for the rest of their life. No matter whether it’s true or not. Actions have consequences, eh? Don’t I know it,” she says, shaking her head as her gaze returns to the floor.

  ***

  Sean tells me to go home, he and the boys will get rid of Skinhead, or what’s left of him. In a few hours, Skinhead’s tightly wrapped body will be dumped in the boot of someone’s car, driven to north Wales, placed in a dinghy, rowed out into the Irish Sea, strapped to a concrete block and thrown into the murky water, never to be seen again.

  I leave the lock-up, slam the door behind me and suck in a few deep breaths of cool night air. Am I in a state of shock right now? I’m not shaking, I’m not panicking. I can’t feel anything.

  Normal service has been temporarily suspended. That much I know.

  On the way back to my place, it hits me. Magnanimous as he is, as gallant as he can be on occasion, Sean is not stupid. Oh, I have no doubt that Skinhead got what was coming to him. I’ve no doubt that Sean exacted the kind of punishment he reserves for the worst kind of arsehole. I’m also owning up to wanting to torture Skinhead in the worst possible way. He deserved it after what he took from me – the last vestiges of my childhood innocence, not that I had much of that in the first place.

  But now, Sean has directly involved me in a murder. I am now bound to Sean for the rest of my life, tied by blood and secrecy. That kind of bond can only be broken by betrayal or death. That’s the moment when it hits me properly. That is when Sean truly owns me. He owns me just like he owns everyone else.

  At what point does someone command so much respect, loyalty, fear and power that it’s impossible for them to look at people and not think, ‘I own you’? I’m not sure I ever want to get to that point.

  29. INSIDER TRADING

  Up to this point in her story, Reynolds has been surprisingly open, more so than I expected from someone with a reputation for discretion and caution. Bar some uncomfortable personal revelations, her tone is mostly affable and amicable throughout our conversations, like she is catching up with a long-lost friend and wants to give them the full account of her life in the intervening years. She is alert, engaging, almost effusive in her desire to tell her version of events.

  In some ways, she is a journalist’s dream interviewee, with a bemusing habit of slipping effortlessly from impenetrable rapid-fire Scouse vernacular and street slang into eloquent and articulate evenly-paced soliloquies. She is intelligent, level-headed and rational, particularly when describing some of the most highly-charged and pivotal issues which shaped the course of events. She has not ducked any questions I have put to her, although some of her answers are carefully phrased in a way which could be designed to minimise her knowledge of events or to evade issues of responsibility.

  It is when I mention the name Jimmy Powell that her tone noticably changes. Jimmy Powell, another notorious Liverpudlian gang boss, was a bank robber turned heroin smuggler. In 1998, he was released from prison in the most puzzling of circumstances, having served less than 18 months of a 16-year sentence for cocaine smuggling.

  In contrast to Reynolds’ open and engaging demeanour previously, there is now hesitancy in her speech, longer pauses, slower responses to my questions and carefully considered answers. Whereas before, she had maintained steady eye contact, she seems unwilling or unable to look me in the eye. Her gaze invariably falls to the table and remains fixed there for long periods when she is thinking about what to say. Is this a sign of lies? Guilt? Shame? Fear?

  I begin by asking her about Powell and how she came into contact with him. With her eyes still rooted to the table, she emits a long sigh. Her hands are suddenly restless and she is subconsciously tapping her fingers on the edge of the table as she thinks through her response. After what seems like a few minutes of pained, tight-lipped silence, she looks up at me, sits up straight in her chair and clasps her hands together.

  “If you think us lot are a load of immoral degenerates? Wait until you hear about this Teflon-coated twat. Jimmy Powell.”

  ***

  I never liked Jimmy Powell. Nobody did. The only people who tolerated him were the people he was paying. He literally made my skin crawl. You know how sometimes you meet someone for the first time and within a nanosecond, you’re getting a really bad vibe off them? So much so that you can feel yourself backing away from them without you realising it? Yeah, that’s what I felt with Jimmy. I first met him that night in 1994 at the party. I had no idea who he was, had never seen him or a photo of him, but I’d heard plenty about him before that.

  Sean and Jimmy were never mates, they never ran in the same circles. They grew up in different areas at different times – Jimmy is a good 15 years older than Sean. But their paths crossed a few times in the 1980s. Not that you’d know it from Sean. Sean didn’t mention him that much. He never spoke about Jimmy unprompted. When he did mention him, it would be in reponse to some of the crew reminiscing about some of the stuff Jimmy had done. And Sean would get this look on his face, almost like contempt or disgust, like he couldn’t bear to waste any time thinking about the fucker.

  Back in the late 1970s and early 80s, Jimmy Powell and his younger brother Joey were your bog-standard, old-fashioned, old-school bank robbers. The blokes with the balaclavas and the sawn-off shotguns who thought nothing of storming into some bank or Post Office and terrorising every poor sod in there for the sake of a few grand. They’re the cunts who would smash the butt of their guns into some old lady’s face, who would stick the barrel into the mouth of the petrified young cashier girl behind the counter and threaten to blow her head off if she didn’t do what they said. And when they’d ransacked the place and gotten what they came for? They’d still pistol-whip the security guard into a bloody pulp on their way out just for their own satisfaction.

  Violence was second nature to the Powell brothers. No. Make that first nature. Those cunts enjoyed hurting people. You know that phrase? Hair-trigger temper? That’s those two. If someone looked at them the wrong way? Was too curt with them for their liking? Didn’t show them the respect and the deference they thought they were due? Head-butts. Pint glasses in the face. Broken bottles rammed in your neck. You name it. Whatever was nearby when they went off, they would pick it up and fuck you up before you even knew that you’d pissed them off. Jimmy was the top dog in that relationship, not just through being the eldest, but also being the ranking lunatic. Joey was just as much of a cunt as his older brother but was the more impressionable and easily-led of the pair. Jimmy called the shots, literally and figuratively.

  Obviously, these two volatile, impulsive liabilities were bound to fall into the hands of the busies eventually through their own doing. I don’t know how many bank jobs they did, but Jimmy did official jail time on three occasions. The first time was for theft and assault. Jimmy was hanging around outside some bookies and was sizing up the punters as they came out. He took on
e bloke’s winnings and gave him a kicking for good measure. He went to Walton Prison for that and served 18 months. That was around 1975.

  Not long after he was released, he tried to get into some bar in town but the bouncers told him to do one. He went berserk and took them all on, managed to put one of them in hospital with a punctured lung before the others could subdue him. He got eight months for that back at Walton.

  It was in 1980 that Jimmy and Joey robbed a TSB branch on Smithdown Road with a sawn-off. Joey battered the security guard and one of the customers while Jimmy piled about £6,000 in his bag, and then the pair of them made their exit, only to run across a plain clothes off-duty busy who was walking past the bank outside. What are the odds of that? The busy sees these two muppets speeding off in their getaway car, phones it in, gets a proper description out on the radios and the pair of them are picked up less than five minutes later. I wish I could’ve seen the faces on the cunts when the busies collared them, they must have thought they were home and dry when they ran out of that bank.

  Joey got eight years in Walton for that, while Jimmy got six years but only served three. Joey never even got to serve a full year of his sentence – he got stabbed to death in the prison canteen in a fight over a bowl of rice pudding, believe it or not. Jimmy ended up in Strangeways Prison in Manchester. And that is where he met some of Sean’s old mentors and got schooled in the art of drug dealing.

  When Jimmy was released in 1983, he had by now sussed that the days of bank jobs were coming to an end. Too much hassle for too little reward. The big money was coming through drug dealing, and at that time, it was heroin. That was the trade to get into if you wanted to make serious money. You don’t need me to tell you how heroin flooded the country in the 1980s. All of a sudden, it was everywhere, on every council estate up and down the land. I saw enough of it when I was growing up at that time. I remember there were a few times that the teachers in school wouldn’t let us go onto the playing fields for P.E. because they had to pick up all the dirty syringes and bits of foil that had been dumped there by the local smackheads. Some of the blocks of flats near to my Mum’s place? The stairways were filled with that shit, with smackheads using them as makeshift drug dens. I’ve always hated that stuff. I never dealt in it.