Freddie was surprised at his own calmness as he slipped on the latex gloves with a satisfying rubbery snap. The past eight or so hours had been a complete blur. At 4.15 the previous evening, he had received an answer-phone message from his postman, stating he had sensitive information for him. As soon as Fred had returned the call and had been informed about the man Mr Jones had seen in the business park, he had sent out an alert to all those he knew for further information. This was at six pm. By ten, he had a name and a reasonable motive. Around midnight, he and Lenny had found Vinny Smith in the cemetery ahead of Niamh's headstone. It was almost poetic. The sheer gall of it was astounding.
That little fact among everything else was why Freddie was impressed by himself as he stood there in the warehouse that sat in the industrial park in Beckton, inspecting the tools he had laid out before him with the quiet intrigue of a child choosing a toy from the shelf. It was almost dead silent; there was only Freddie, Lenny standing like stone with his hands folded simply ahead of himself, and Vinny, unconscious and limp in the chair at the centre of the room. He had woken up in the boot on the ride over and had a large goose's egg above his eye from one of Lenny's notorious right hooks, a satisfying hit that had guaranteed Vinny's silence for the rest of the journey.
Slowly, the drunkard groaned as he returned to consciousness. At first, he took a few moments to place the heavy feeling in his limbs through the throbbing of his head, but soon realised he was fastened to the chair with cable ties on each of his wrists and ankles. It was only upon this realisation that he began to panic, thrashing about and squinting in the bright, yellowed light the exposed bulb hanging above his head emitted.
'You're awake,' stated Fred simply without turning around to look at him. Even through the fog of his injuries and the drunken haze in his head, Vinny could see the tools Fred was inspecting piece by piece, and knew somewhere in the back of his mind that this was to deliberately make him anxious.
'Didn't wanna wake you,' the mobster went on with mock, theatrical enthusiasm. At last, he turned around to face the bound Vinny, holding a pair of secateurs which he gestured with naturally. 'You looked like you was having a good dream.'
Vinny made to speak, but realised far too late that he couldn't—there was something stuffed into his mouth and taped over, preventing him from producing all but weak, muffled groans.
Freddie watched the pitiful sight before him and laughed. He held a false veneer of almost vaudevillian bravado, but behind his eyes there was something very dark. This man was the one responsible for the dark stain on what should have been his nephew's—his son's—happiest day of his life. The same son that was fighting for said life in a hospital bed in Kensington while this piece of scum roamed the streets.
Well, not any more. When Fred was done with him, Vinny Smith would be treated like the cockroach he was; ground into dust and forgotten about.
'For your sake,' Fred went on, striding forward with a sniff. 'I hope you was having a good dream, anyway. Because now, things is gonna become very, very real.'
Vinny choked out a few muffled sobs as the gangster strode around him, lightly tapping the secateurs rhythmically against his own palm. He circled him like a shark, and as he made his second round, he suddenly stopped directly ahead of his captive, the gardening tool resting still against his hand. He was smiling.
'Don't worry,' he said animatedly, his voice a melodic sing-song. 'We're not getting started just yet. Maybe give ya a chance to plead your case, eh Lenny?'
Lenny the Nut, who stood still and motionless nearby, only nodded at his boss' and long-time friend's joke. Vinny turned his head as much as he could to look at the hulking man, in a desperate attempt for him to do something, anything, but Len's dopey expression was cast towards the horizon, as if oblivious to Vinny's presence.
'Nah, don't you look at him,' said Freddie, running his tongue through one of the spaces in his teeth. 'He can't help you, can he!'
The gangster was laughing, but his right-hand man could tell it was tinged with a hint of delirium. Smartly, Lenny said nothing, knowing it would only end badly. While he had no room for pity, seeing Vinny trussed up like a Christmas turkey struck a chord somewhere deep inside of him. Perhaps the pang was for Junior, who over the years had become something of a nephew figure to old Len, or maybe because Vinny was really only just a kid, twenty-five or so years old.
Unfortunately, in their world twenty-five was as it had been in the old days, a man, and young Vinny had made a very adult decision. While most young men that age were going to university, those in their profession had been on the take since they were only thirteen or fourteen years old. Lenny himself had worked for Archy since he was sixteen years old down on the dockland doing a black market racket selling Chinese knock-offs. Now you were expected to grow up that quickly—even over the course of one generation, he saw kids doing a lot worse than he had ever done at that age. It was becoming a violent world now, people were shooting people over the most insignificant things like it was some kind of Hollywood gangster film, and unfortunately all too often innocent people like Niamh Evans paid the price.
He and the others in the room were pulled from their thoughts at a bit of commotion near the entrance of the warehouse, and suddenly Frankie burst in through the doors in a light pink trouser suit and a small string of pearls around her neck, looking as well-put-together as she did furious.
'Where is he?' she shouted, her voice heavy as if she had just been crying, but it held nothing but pure rage. 'I wanna see him! I wanna see the bastard what tried to kill me son.'
Freddie turned casually just as his sister swept through the room like a storm in her matching pink suede Jimmy Choo pumps. She hadn't looked this good in a long time, longer than he could really count, and Fred could have laughed at the fact it took something like this to make her put the pieces of her former self back together again if the idea wasn't so heart-breaking.
Fred took a seat on the table with the tools, watching Frankie steadily as she stopped directly ahead of Vinny and looked down at him, the malice in her gaze so palpable he was shocked it didn't bore through the poor cunt's skin.
'I just wanted to get a good look at you,' Frankie went on, nodding firmly a few times. 'I just wanted to get a good look at the bastard that shot my little boy. But you . . . You're not a little boy, are you. You're a monster. Yeah? You're a monster.'
Freddie let her have her words before sniffing and pinching at his nose a few times. 'All right, babe,' he said after a short while, standing and taking her by the shoulders. 'Sling your hook, I've gotta get started if we wanna get anywhere tonight, eh?'
Frankie pulled herself roughly from his grasp, though her eyes never left Vinny, who sat tied-up ahead of her with tears running down his face. 'Oh, I'm not going anywhere, Freddie. I'm staying right here, and I'm not leaving until he's dead.'
Freddie watched his sister a few moments before shrugging. There would be no reasoning with her, and while normally he wouldn't have wanted her to see something so gruesome as what he had planned for young Vinny Smith, he had the feeling she needed to see it in order to properly grieve. And so, when she stepped back and folded her arms stubbornly across her bust, he simply rounded the murderer and crouched behind him, raising the secateurs he held.
Lenny took this as his cue to step ahead of Vinny and place his lacquered shoe against the top of his thigh, as if to prevent him from tipping the chair over should he move. And while Fred managed to force one of Vinny's fingers between the secateurs' blades, the cunt was jostling about violently, panic filling him as he realised what exactly was going on.
Frankie flinched at the sickening snap of breaking bone and flesh, but otherwise hadn't moved, even as Vinny screamed against the cloth in his mouth and thrashed back and forth. One by one, his fingers were snipped off between the first and second knuckle—this was the general procedure for after the victim was dead, to prevent the body from being identified, as well as the teeth in the instance of dental records. Now, it would be used as torture, and while Frankie had done her best to avoid the dirty side of the business and blissfully ignore the heinous atrocities her brother committed, she was seeing it now in all of its dirty, gritty reality. But she wouldn't allow herself to be scared. She couldn't. This was vengeance for her son, her's and Freddie's son, even if it didn't taste as sweet as she thought it would.
After removing all ten of Vinny's fingers, Freddie moved casually to the table lined with tools and set down the bloodied secateurs in favour of a pair of Knipex pliers. Vinny's muffled screams were filling the warehouse, but neither Lenny nor Frankie or any of the men guarding the door made any move. On all of their minds was Junior and Niamh and the tragedy they had suffered. They had to remember them, to make the violence tolerable. At this point, it wasn't just part of the job. It was revenge.
Lenny held down Vinny by the throat while Freddie ripped the tape from his mouth and pulled out the cloth gag. Immediately, he began pleading and begging pitifully, despite the intense pain in his hands and blunt ends where his fingers once were, but Fred's stony expression hadn't moved a millimetre. Instead, he raised the pliers with the methodical disinterest of a dentist, placing the blunt metal ends against Vinny's incisor and squeezing the handle tightly.
Frankie was finding it hard to watch, but forced herself to continue, if only for Junior's sake. He would have wanted this. In fact, if he could be, she knew he'd be right there with his father doing the deed himself.
His father . . . What a thought that was. She knew it was fucked up—her entire relationship with her brother was and always had been—but while perhaps the world would never really understand it, she did. To her, the reality of it was simple. Out of something so ugly as their love was, something so taboo and wrong by most people's standards, came the most beautiful, perfect little boy she had ever seen. And if someone like Junior could come out of her and Freddie's bastardised love, then she needed no more convincing that it was fate.
And that's what she thought it was, fate. She remembered the old days, as she and Freddie liked to call them, when their relationship had first begun. She remembered the first time they kissed, the first time they made love—and Freddie had been her first everything. Her first lover. He was her half-brother but it wasn't as black-and-white as she knew the world would see it.
Sometimes, it killed her not to be able to live a happy life with him. What she would have given to be a proper family with him and Junior, married and all, with a dog and a nice garden and maybe a little baby on the way. She wanted to give him that, wanted to give him the family she knew he wanted, the family she also knew he would never really have.
Freddie hadn't been like her, he hadn't had a proper go at things, and part of her was selfishly thankful for that. She wasn't sure what she would do if he was married, and deep inside her Frankie knew that it had killed Freddie when she had wed Donny. But she didn't have a choice at the time—her mum had found out she was pregnant before she had even noticed it herself and had told her there was no choice, she had to get married. It was the Catholic way. Her mind wouldn't allow her to believe the child was Freddie's, but maybe she had known, deep down, like a mother's intuition. She had named him Freddie Jr after all.
Her mind lingered on that thought as she watched her brother pulling out Vinny's teeth one-by-one. She knew he was in excruciating pain by the sound of his screams and the blood seeping out of his mouth, but she felt no pity for him, not when her little Freddie was in pain himself, struggling to survive in hospital. Oh yes, Vinny Smith could suffer a thousand deaths and she would never feel pity for him, not after what he had done to her baby and Niamh. There was no pain severe enough to mend the wounds that cunt had created in the Evans family, but she knew with his torture and subsequent death, things might feel a little less sore.
Frankie had stood and watched as the pile of bloodied teeth and saliva mounted on the concrete floor, though the process was slow and agonising due to Vinny's struggling. Five teeth in, Lenny had punched him to get him to shut up, to no avail; they wouldn't let him pass out, they needed him to feel the pain. And it was nearly unbearable, but not the point where he would fall into shock. Freddie knew well that the threshold was reasonable, and it was for this reason he had chosen this method of torture.
At twelve teeth, Frankie started feeling sick with each stomach-churning pop of a tooth coming loose from its socket, and lit a cigarette with shaky hands. Still, she wouldn't allow herself to turn away. Like Vinny, she would endure, for the sake of her son. She needed to see this, needed to watch him suffer. She needed to hold onto the anger, whether it be at Vinny or her husband or anyone else. Anything to dull the grieving ache in her breast.
Nineteen teeth, most of them broken pieces, lie on the floor before Vinny vomited down the front of his shirt, a revolting mixture of booze and the blood he had choked on. Freddie, annoyed at this, brought back the pliers and hit him in the face with them, cracking the man's cheekbone from the sheer force. The fracture broke a number of blood vessels beneath the skin and blood had welled up in his eye socket. The sight hadn't satisfied Fred, and so he clouted him once again, and again, and again, each hit mashing Vinny's already-deformed face into a concave pulp.
Frankie and Lenny both silently realised, as Freddie stopped his ruthless beating in favour of continuing to yank out the teeth at a much faster pace now that Vinny's head hung back limply, that he had lost himself into his emotions as he often did. There would be no stopping him now. Both of them watched onward silently as the mobster finished pulling the teeth, and after he was done he slammed the pair of pliers onto the ground amongst the blood and vomit and broken teeth.
'You fucking bastard!' he screamed in the puréed mess that remained Vinny's face had once been. 'Piece of shit fucking wanker! Stupid fucking cunt! You hurt my little boy! You hurt my Freddie! Bastard! Fucking scum!'
Even through her nausea and her inability to look away from the horror unfolding in front of her, Frankie suddenly became aware that Freddie didn't even realise Vinny was dead.
She wanted to vomit. In fact, it was nothing short of a miracle that she was even still standing, with her legs trembling beneath her like jelly. However, despite this, a cool sense of ease settled in her gut and, like a woman able to lift a car off her child in a burst of adrenaline, she suddenly felt the need to comfort Freddie and calm him down, a need that outweighed her own in that moment.
Stepping forward, she pulled the fag-end from her lips and placed her trembling hands on her brother's broad shoulders. 'Come on, babe,' she said, swallowing the weakness in her voice. 'Let's go home.'
Freddie turned to look at her, and in that moment, seeing the agony in his face and the tears in his eyes, Frankie's heart both broke and swelled with pure love for him. She wanted to take away his pain, like she always did, even though he caused her so much of it himself. She would let him hurt her because she wanted nothing more than his happiness. Right then, she knew that as well as she knew her own being.
Their love was so ugly, and it was broken, and unhealthy, but it was theirs all the same.
If she was not so aware of Lenny's presence, she would have kissed him. Instead, she placed her hand against his cheek and felt the prickles of his facial hair against her palm. 'Let's go home, Freddie,' she told him again, and this time he nodded.
The wild look in his eyes suddenly softened into something nearly unreadable, and he spoke to Lenny with a jarring, almost chilling calmness. 'Take care of this, would you, Len.'
By 5.30 am, Vinny's clothes would be burnt, his fingers and teeth discarded, and his body bound in a tarpaulin, weighted down, and tossed into the Thames. At eight, the postman and his wife Olivia would receive a bouquet of pink carnations and a letter of gratitude stating that if they ever needed anything, to come to Freddie Evans personally. Benjamin Jones had quietly disposed of the card before his wife saw it and, when she asked him about the flowers, explained that it must have been from a secret admirer of hers.