The Break

by Ronnie O'Sullivan

  Her . . .

  If Frankie hadn’t been there to pull her off of him, Jack’s head would have been rammed smack into that metal electricity junction box. Clunk. Lights out.

  ‘You,’ Frankie said.

  He was already on his feet, eyeballing her. Forget The Saint. This one didn’t give warnings. She liked hurting people for fun. He’d seen that for himself. His hands were already curled up into fists.

  ‘You’ve got a good memory,’ she said, looking him over the same way boxers did each other down Jack’s gym.

  ‘You don’t deny it then? That it was you?’ And Dougie . . . because, oh yeah, Frankie reckoned he’d glimpsed that posh prick too in the back of that Merc . . . there to watch his nasty pet tiger play.

  ‘Why should I?’ Her blue eyes flashed.

  Her accent, what was it, Dutch? Afrikaans? Something Frankie had puzzled over last night when he’d heard her message on the phone, telling him to be here today. Or else.

  ‘Because the way I see it,’ she continued, ‘there’s not much you can do about it here . . . or anywhere . . . ever.’

  A fact, not a gloat. Not even the trace of a smile on her cold shop dummy of a chiselled face. And fair enough. Because she was right, wasn’t she? Dougie had Frankie over a barrel. Because of what Terence had given him. Because of that gun. Terence’s handwritten letter telling Frankie he’d given it to Dougie had only reached Frankie last night. Delivered by hand. By some courier who’d insisted on giving it to him personal, like, and had told him to read it right away. About ten minutes before this one had then left that message on his phone, ordering him to be here today.

  ‘Dougie asked me to tell you to wait at the cemetery until after the interment,’ she said.

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Interment. In the family mausoleum.’

  Yeah, posh, all right. Like sodding royalty. A simple coffin in the dirt wasn’t good enough for the likes of Dougie Hamilton. Unlike his father, who’d grown up in the stuff and wouldn’t have given a shit.

  ‘You got a problem with that?’ said the woman, like she was reading his mind.

  Frankie just glared at her. Or tried to. Because that was the messed-up thing. He wanted to hate her. Because of what she’d tried doing to Jack. And yet . . . there was something about those big blue eyes of hers, a flicker of amusement there that wasn’t reflected in the rest of her face, like him and her were somehow connected, somehow in on some kind of grim joke that only the two of them got.

  ‘Just be there,’ she said – turning and walking back to the door, the crowd parting before her without her even needing to ask.

  ‘Best not get on the wrong side of that,’ said The Saint.

  ‘Yeah?’ Frankie watched her turn up her black coat collar as she stepped out into the rain. ‘She got a name?’

  ‘Viollet. Viollet Coetzee. Dougie’s right-hand man . . . woman, attack dog, whatever.’ The Saint’s lips peeled back to reveal another sabre-toothed smile. ‘Ex-South African copper, word is. Nobody fucks with her, a fact. No one at all.’

  Frankie tracked her outside. Watched her opening the door of a sleek black Daimler parked up directly behind the horse-drawn hearse. He thought he clocked Dougie Hamilton lurking in the back. Did she lean over and kiss him as she slid up beside him? It certainly looked that way to Frankie as she pulled the door shut.

  2

  Frankie locked eyes on her again an hour later down in Kensal Green Cemetery, as her and the rest of the Hamilton mob trudged back in slow procession through the rain towards their line of black limos, Beamers and Mercs.

  The last mausoleum Frankie had been near was the massive one him and some of his old school muckers had once tried breaking into in St James’s Church, Piccadilly, after watching Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. They’d been hoping to find a bit of Templar gold or whatever, to buy themselves some new BMXs with, but instead they’d got chased off by some crazy old vicar who’d heard them all fumbling about.

  Terence Hamilton’s final abode here looked more like a bungalow. A big fat rectangle of black granite. Hard. Soulless. Frankie grinned. Much like its new occupant. Hah. Must have cost Dougie a bomb. Well, hopefully it had a nice deep lift shaft in it too. To get Terence safely down to hell where he belonged at the foot of Old Nick.

  ‘Viollet said to give this to you.’

  Frankie turned to see a boy looking up at him. Or a bit of a boy anyway, a sliver of face peering up out of a baggy black hoodie. A headphone wire hanging out one ear. Couldn’t have been more than ten. He was holding out a folded piece of paper.

  ‘Did she now?’ Frankie opened it and read.

  The Cobden Club, 170 Kensal Road.

  2.30. Staff entrance.

  Staff, eh? Frankie checked his watch. A Rolex, kosher. His dad’s name engraved on the back. The Old Man had given it him to look after seven years ago, the same night he’d got arrested for armed robbery.

  It was still only two o’clock. Thirty slow minutes, then, until he found out whatever the hell fate had planned for him. A tad melodramatic? He bloody wished. Because whatever reason Dougie Hamilton had summoned him here for today, it certainly wasn’t a nice cuppa and a chat.

  ‘She said you’d give me a tenner for delivering it,’ said the boy.

  The bloody cheek. Frankie stared across the cemetery to where Viollet was standing under a black brolly next to Hamilton’s car. And, yeah . . . even over that distance, he could have sworn he saw her staring right back at him, with that same ‘in on it’ look as before.

  Viollet . . . He reckoned the name suited her. Half violin, half violence, right? Both playful and deadly all at once.

  ‘And who the hell are you, then?’ Frankie asked the kid.

  ‘Little Terry. After my uncle.’

  Terence Hamilton’s nephew, then. Dougie’s little cousin. ‘You don’t look so little to me.’

  The kid held his stare. ‘I’m second tallest in my class.’

  And first hardest, if your rellies are anything to go by. Frankie shivered. It was still pissing it down and he was half-soaked, raindrops dripping off the brow of his hat and running down his coat. He folded and stuffed Viollet’s note into his pocket and took out his silver money clip. Peeling off a twenty, he handed it across.

  ‘Looks like you’re in luck, Little Terry,’ he said. ‘Unless, of course, you’ve got change?’

  ‘Nah,’ the kid grinned.

  ‘Didn’t think so. You can owe me then,’ he said.

  ‘My cousin, Dougie, told me never to owe anyone anything.’

  ‘Good advice.’ And easy to give too, if you had thirty thugs standing by to take anything you wanted off anyone you wanted whenever you saw fit. ‘What you listening to?’ Frankie could hear the tinny sound of music coming out the earphone.

  ‘The Notorious B.I.G.’

  ‘Yeah? That good, is it?’

  ‘He’s my favourite. Him and Puff Daddy.’

  Sounded more like a cereal than a singer. Frankie just nodded. The kid might as well have been speaking a foreign language. He really did need to start getting out a bit more.

  ‘See ya, then, Frankie,’ said the kid.

  ‘Yeah, see ya, Little Terry.’

  Frankie. So she’d told him his name as well, eh? Not that man. Not that prick. Frankie. He watched Little Terry running back through the rain to the Daimler. Viollet opened the door as he reached her and the two of them climbed in.

  *

  ‘Sit.’

  Frankie looked round the small room on the top floor of the Cobden Club. A stink of paint. Fresh white emulsion on the walls. Cloth draped over the only window. A single bare light bulb glaring down from the ceiling. Relaxing. Welcoming. Not.

  But other than the solitary red leather armchair Dougie was uninvitingly staring at him from, there was nowhere to sit.

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘Yes, yes. Come on. Chop chop. Right there.’ Dougie jabbed a manicured forefinger at the bare floorboards halfway
between him and the door. His expensive and fashionable black-rimmed glasses glinted, as he smoothed down the lapels of his tweed suit jacket and pushed his long black fringe back behind his pointed ears.

  ‘Are you –’ Frankie started to say.

  ‘What? Serious? I don’t know.’ Dougie pointed at his own face, all pale and ghostlike in the gloom, apart from his beady little eyes that glinted darkly, like a rat’s. ‘Do I look like I’m joshing?’

  Joshing? ‘Er, no,’ Frankie said.

  ‘Then bloody well sit.’ Colour flared into Dougie’s cheeks.

  Spoken like Barbara bleedin’ Woodhouse . . . like Frankie was his mutt . . . his junior . . . a servant . . . some scum . . .

  ‘Go fuck yourself,’ Frankie said.

  Boom. Big mistake. A creak of floorboards. A shadow fell. Something smacked Frankie hard in the back of his kidneys. He sank gasping to his knees. All he could do not to puke.

  ‘There, now. Much better. Who’s a good boy?’ Dougie leant forward and rubbed his hands together like he was warming them in front of a fire. ‘Now stay.’

  Frankie couldn’t have moved if he’d wanted.

  ‘If I had a biscuit or a chew, I’d give you one,’ said Dougie. ‘But I don’t.’

  A wrinkle stretched at the right side of his mouth. The closest this bastard ever got to a smile? Yeah, that was Frankie’s guess. Dougie stroked his square, clean-shaven jaw. He might have been handsome, if he hadn’t been such a prick.

  ‘If he swears at me again, Barry,’ Dougie said, ‘split his head open with that bat of yours and then bring a real dog in here to lick up whatever muck dribbles out.’

  Barry . . . Frankie was guessing he meant the same hulking Sasquatch in a suit who’d been standing sentry outside the room with a Louisville Slugger baseball bat propped up beside him when Jimmy Flanagan had led Frankie up here just now and shown him in.

  Frankie felt the hard end of the bat pressing up against the base of his skull, just to remind him it was there. He heaved in more breath. Keep your shit together. If Dougie really wanted you dead, you already would be, right?

  Dougie gazed down at him with the kind of expression that stared out at people through DHSS hatches, letting them know they were about as important as a piece of shit on a shoe. The kind that let you know they were totally in charge.

  And, Christ, it couldn’t have been more different, could it, to the first time him and Dougie had properly met? Because that had been outside the Ambassador after Jack had been arrested for the murder of Dougie’s fiancée . . . after Dougie had lost control of his sky-blue Merc and had rammed it into Raj’s newsagent, before trying and failing to stove Frankie’s face in with his fists, a drunken, distraught bloody mess, more boy than man.

  Frankie would never forget what he’d screamed at him: Your bastard brother. He fucking killed her . . . he’s ruined everything that I had. He’d never forget either how Dougie hadn’t given up struggling, even after Frankie had bested him. Making him the very worst kind of bastard there was – one who didn’t know when to quit.

  And all that when Dougie had still been a civilian . . . a lawyer, a man with a career and a family and a civilized life ahead of him, before he’d been sucked into his father’s gang on the back of his fiancée’s death.

  God only knew what kind of resistance he’d put up now.

  ‘Of course, today should be the worst day of my life,’ Dougie said, his voice calm again, businesslike. No harsh East End vowels like his dad’s on show here. Word was Dougie had gone to some posh private school. Then off to read law at uni, then into the City. A right little Thatcher’s child, he was. ‘Because that’s what they say, isn’t it?’ Dougie went on. ‘How it feels to lose a parent. But not for me. Not by a long shot.’

  Frankie already knew where this was going. Nothing he could do to stop it.

  ‘But then you’d know that, wouldn’t you?’ Dougie said. ‘Because you were there, weren’t you? Not when she died, not when she was killed, not when she was clubbed to death, not when she was sexually molested – but there outside your club when I drove there to . . .’ He pressed his fingers hard to his brow. ‘. . . to what? I don’t even recall now. Stress does that to you. It makes you forget. My psychiatrist told me that. Did you know I had a psychiatrist and that he charges me over a hundred quid an hour to doctor my head to make me feel good about myself?’

  ‘Er, no,’ Frankie answered. Something he’d learned from his dealings with Tommy Riley, this. When in the presence of a quite possibly verifiably psychopathic personality, it was always best to assume they weren’t being rhetorical and really did want an answer to every single crazy question that they asked.

  ‘They even tried putting me on that trendy new medication everyone’s taking . . . Prozac, because it numbs you,’ Dougie said. ‘It detaches you from your anxieties. It calms you down and stops you getting upset about the things that hurt. But do you know what?’

  Again, Frankie dutifully replied, ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t want to be numb. I don’t want to forget. I want to remember everything about her. Everything that happened to her. It’s what drives me, do you understand?’

  Frankie nodded.

  For a second, Dougie looked pleased. Genuinely. His whole expression seemed to soften. But then it tightened again and he stared at Frankie so long that Frankie started hearing his own heartbeat. Only all messed up. In his neck. In his bloody ears. Shit. What if he just ran? How far behind him was that door? Could he make it past Barry the Sasquatch? Could he fuck.

  ‘You look different,’ Dougie finally said. ‘Shorter.’

  Another tight little twitch at the corner of his thin-lipped mouth. Another joke? Well, sod him. Frankie had had enough. Just how screwed was he? He might as well find out and get this done with. Whatever this was.

  ‘Just tell me what you want,’ he said. He’d hoped to sound businesslike, even defiant. But instead he just sounded beat.

  ‘Oh, I think you already know. I’ve invited you here today because of the letter my father sent you. The one I had couriered round to you last night. Do you have it with you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is that because you’ve destroyed it? Because it incriminates you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you always this monosyllabic?’

  Ha-bloody-ha. Frankie didn’t answer.

  ‘Do you even know what that means?’

  ‘Yes.’ The prick.

  ‘Good, because that’s what I heard. That you’re smart. Half-educated. A rarity for a member of your family, I’d have thought.’

  I could say the same for you. This time, Frankie kept the words to himself.

  ‘Which means you’ll no doubt have realized,’ Dougie said, ‘from the fact that I was cc’d in on that letter, that I have a copy of it myself.’ Another smug twitch. ‘And, of course, you’ll also know that’s not all I have. I also have the pistol that was left to me by my late father. A Browning Hi-Power. Quite classy, according to Dad, not that I really know much about these things – although I am trying to learn. A pistol with your fingerprints all over it. That was used to kill Mario Baotic, who as I’m sure you’re aware, was the chief police witness to the murder of my fiancée, Susan Tilley.’

  The way he said it . . . these last two words, her name, soft, that faraway look in his eyes . . . it was the same way you heard religious people talking about their saints and their gods. But that wasn’t what put the shits up Frankie. It was the switch in Dougie that came with it. No longer expressionless, his whole face was clenching up. Redder and redder, like he’d started burning up from inside. Like he was about to go exo-fucking-thermic. Christ, maybe this bastard really was planning on watching Barry the Sasquatch crack Frankie’s head open with that bat after all?

  ‘I didn’t do it,’ Frankie said quickly. ‘I didn’t kill Baotic. The only reason my prints are on that gun at all is because your father –’

  ‘Enough.’

  But no
. It wasn’t enough. Frankie might not be able to prove any of this, but he might as well at least try to tell Dougie the truth. And Dougie was still a lawyer, right? Meaning maybe he still might listen to reason. ‘ . . . is because your father . . .’

  Dougie clicked his fingers, once.

  The bat came smashing down. Pain ripped through Frankie’s shoulder. He groaned. Slumped. Nearly fell flat on his face. Barry’s shadow was all over him, shifting, ready to lamp him again, even though, Christ, he’d just nearly popped Frankie’s collarbone clean out.

  ‘You will not interrupt me again,’ Dougie said. ‘Do you understand?’

  ‘Yugh-guh,’ was all Frankie could manage. He squeezed his eyes shut. Breathe, just breathe, do it . . . breathe through it, through the bleedin’ pain . . .

  ‘My father warned me you’d try lying your way out of this,’ Dougie hissed, ‘that you’d try blaming someone else for Baotic’s death.’

  But I’m telling you the truth! Frankie bit down on his lip. The shadow of that tosser behind him was still swamping him. Bat up. Ready to strike. And Dougie would let him too, wouldn’t he? Because he’d already been poisoned so much against Frankie and Jack. He didn’t understand that Terence Hamilton was still pulling everyone’s strings, even from beyond the bloody grave.

  ‘He said you might even try telling me some nonsensical story about a recording you had of him and threaten me with giving it to the police.’

  Which of course would have been fine. Just bloody dandy. If that sodding recording existed. But it didn’t. Because it never had. Because it was just something Frankie had invented to plea bargain his way out of that cellar.

  No, he’d got nothing to prove to Dougie that the real truth about his fiancée’s death was anything but what his bastard of a dead father had said.

  ‘He said you’d try all kinds of tricks, but you’re not to be trusted,’ Dougie went on, ‘just like the rest of your family. Not without an extreme threat hanging over you . . . but fortunately that’s exactly what I’ve got here with this pistol.’ The redness in his face was fading now, growing more corpse-like by the second, like he was somehow getting control of himself, pushing the devil inside him back down. ‘Because, you see, whether you did actually pull that trigger on Baotic is irrelevant. All that matters is that the prints on the gun say you did. Then there’s the fact that, according to my sources, the police already suspected you were messing around with their investigation into your brother . . . and were already looking into you even before Baotic died.’ He smiled, watching this sink in. ‘And that, of course, alongside the pistol, would pretty much cement your guilt in their eyes, wouldn’t you agree?’ That posh accent of his getting stronger by the second, like some brief’s closing statement, when he knew he had the opposition beat. ‘In fact, even without the pistol, I’m guessing it wouldn’t take too much pressure to get that investigation into you started again.’