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First, you take away his safety nets. You send out words to your extensive and comprehensive network of lawyers and solicitors, and you don’t blackball Richard Thornton—you blackball the entire Thornton name. You make sure that anybody who might ever consider taking up his cause in a court of law will know the consequences and that those consequences will be heavy, irreparable and inevitable.
That’s the first safety net.
After that, you destroy every other safety net. You contact every last friend and ally to the Thornton family, and you make naked allusions to the fast-coming downfall of their friendDick,and you overtly imply that they will be dragged with him if they choose to stand by him.
You leak embarrassing photographs and footage to the press, just enough to let them know your threats are never idle, that the gun you’re pointing at their skull is fully loaded with money-proof bullets.
Last, you take away his final safety net. Her name is Anne-Marie Aldenshire, a wealthy widow with a weakness for flattery and a fairly significant drinking problem. It doesn’t take much to topple that particular chess piece, and I show some grace, operating on the generous assumption that Anne-Marie is nothing but another one ofDick’s victims. I send her sons every damning piece of information and document I hold on Richard Thornton, as well as her family attorney—they do the rest. Richard Thornton becomes single faster than it takes for me to roll up the sleeves of my shirt.
Because now that the safety nets are dismantled, now is when I get towork.
The first thing I do is disgrace Richard Thornton. This part isn’t work; this part is the insult before the injury. I circulate everything I have on the man, everything I get my hands on. Bank account statements, evidence of tax fraud of every shade and variety, family estate paperwork exposing the slow and spectacular financial decline of the hundreds of years old Thornton estate.
I don’t just expose Richard Thornton’s poverty, I expose his failures too. His gambling addiction, his sordid drug habits, his taste for being too rough with sex workers. All of his crimes and scams are splashed across every news outlet in England, and from there they spread fast and wide. His face makes the front of every paper and magazine in the country—and that’s just the first strike.
The next blow is immediate and heavy. It doesn’t take me long to uncover Richard Thornton’s hidden assets and offshore accounts, and I already have more than enough on his many illegal financial activities. All it takes is swift legal action, and then Richard’s assets are frozen, his remaining properties seized from under him. After spending decades on the very edge of ruin, Richard finds himself propelled into absolute poverty over the space of a single week.
But it’s not enough.
Severing his personal relationship, annihilating his reputation, bankrupting him. None of it is enough.
Once, I told Willow Lynch that for every drop of blood of mine she spilt, I would spill ten of hers.
That was only justice.
Thisis revenge.
For every scar on Willow Lynch’s skin, Richard Thornton will pay a hundred times over until nothing remains of me or nothing remains of him.
And so next, I sent some men to pay him a visit at the dirty little hotel room he’s hiding out in while he tries to work out what’s happening to him. I don’t dignify his shitty existence by sending my personal staff—I send the kind of men one might send to eradicate someone like they’re a cockroach infestation, human exterminators, if you will.
I send them with one mission: get a written and signed confession from Richard Thornton.
Everything that he did, over the long years of his career as a leech, every woman he used and abused. I give them no specific instructions so as to how they are to elicit this confession, only that it should be unquestionably his and that they are free to take as much artistic liberty as they desire on their mission.
It takes them three days to get the confession. I have no idea what state Thornton is in at this point, though I’m familiarenough with the men’s work that I can make a fairly educated guess.
And then I keep going.
His personal confession is for me, but I do make copies of it, and those are the final documents in the enormous fuck-off case I launch against him, an armada of lawyers armed to the teeth with a damning arsenal of evidence and paperwork. Richard is arrested before the summer is out.
And that’s when I finally pay him a visit.
It costs me lessto be in a room alone with Richard Thornton than it would cost me to buy a new pair of shoes for Willow to kick me with. When I enter the police interrogation room, I check the cameras before I even look at Richard. The lights are off, our privacy bought and paid for.
I lower my eyes to Richard, stooping, at last, to look on the man responsible for harming the human thunderstorm that is Willow Lynch.
All I see when I look at him, though, is a flabby middle-aged man, big-boned and heavy in the middle, the permanent redness of alcohol in his nose and cheeks where excess has burst the capillaries. His eyes, a weak, watery blue, roll up to look at me. His mouth falls open.
“Who are you?” he asks.
I sit down in the metal chair facing him across the table, resting an ankle on one knee, gloved hands in my pocket because I’d rather melt my own skin off than touch anything in this room.
“Don’t make yourself sound more stupid than you are, Dick. You know exactly who I am.”
His eyes flicker nervously up to the cameras in the corner, then back at me. “I—I know who you are, of course. Henrietta’s son. Why are you here? You’re the one, aren’t you, the one who’s done all this? I don’t even know you, I’ve never doneanythingto you. There must be a mistake, I know it.”
The words come spewing out of his mouth, probably out of fear, and probably out of eagerness too, the despair of trying to make sense of everything that’s happened to him, of finally getting answers. I don’t even deign to give him the shadow of a fake smile. I stare at him like the insect he is, scuttling helplessly at my feet knowing he’s about to end up a smear under my shoe.
