Heavy Duty Trouble (The Brethren Trilogy) (31 page)

‘Well, OK then,’ I said, ‘you asked for it.’

I
sat
back and tried to order my thoughts in my head.

‘I guess,’ I started, ‘It all depends on why you think he was killed. The who depends on the why.’

‘OK, so let’s hear your why
s then
,
’ grunted Bung
.

S
o I reeled off a selection of reasons I’d considered, in no particular order.
‘Well, how about him wanting to do what you guys are trying to do? To get out of being about business and go back to being a club?’

‘Well you can see how popular that idea’s become,
’ Wibble snorted,
‘
but then back in Damage’s day he was in charge
and
we didn’t have this load of little scumbags that
Scroat and
Charlie’s brought in
. S
o when he wanted us to take the next step to go that way once we’d got Stu’s boys on board, then he’d have taken us all along that way. So no, not that. What’s next?’

‘He was too dictatorial?
’

Bung
laughed
at that, ‘Damage? No way. He was a club guy th
r
ough and through. Sure someone has to be the Pres and take decisions but he was there because the guys believed in him.’

‘OK,’ I ventured, ‘He wanted out of the club but couldn’t be allowed to go…’

Wibble thought that was an even funnier joke, ‘Damage, wanted out? No fucking way, and if he had wanted to retire, well
,
why wouldn’t he be allowed to go?’

‘Well he knew too much for one thing…’

‘Oh crap…’

‘Oh yes?’ I challenged, ‘And how easy
do
you
think you’d
find it to step down?’

‘Fair play,’ chipped in Bung, ‘he’s got a point on you there chief.’

‘How about someone taking revenge for Dazza then? Taking him out must have made Damage some enemies surely?’

‘Christ that was years ago.’

‘Or the others? Polly, anyone like that?’

‘Nah mate. It’s old news. No one in the club would be giving him grief about what he had to do to get to the top.’

‘A rival then? Someone who wanted the P spot for themselves?’

‘You’re talking
about
Thommo
now
aren’t you?
’ queried Wibble, before shaking his head,
‘
No, he wouldn’t have had the balls, and no one else would have had the interest, including me by the way,’ he said, darting an angry look of emphasis at me.

‘Hey,’ I said holding my hands up in protest, ‘I believe you, I never said it was.’

‘Well who gives a fuck what you
believe?’ he said dismissively.
‘
S
o what’s next, you got any more of these?’

‘Hell yeah, loads,’ I told him, ‘How many do you want? So how about to stop the tie up with The Rebels as the next one?’

He shrugged. ‘Hardly anybody knew that Damage was working on it. Just the inner circle, me, Toad, couple of the others, and we were all for it, you know why.’

‘There’d be people in The Rebels who’d know,’ I pointed out.

‘True, but it’s the same sort of deal. It was just Stu and his top guys, and they’re all on board, so no, I just don’t see it.’

‘
All right
then, it was someone who wanted to clear the way for Charlie to come through
?’

‘Christ, are you joking? Like when Damage got it Charlie wasn’t even old enough to legally become a member.’

While each of the charters had a reasonable degree of autonomy and the ability to write their own local
by
-
laws and rules, the core club constitution was very strict about the criteria for membership and a local charter would mess with that at the peril of having their charter and patches pu
lled. It was only open to
males of
twenty-one
and over who owned a Harley Davidson. Charlie would only have been nineteen when Damage died so it ruled him out of membership.

‘Besides which, at that time
,
while we knew Damage wanted him to come on board and take over from him eventually, we just hadn’t seen how he was going to step up to the plate. Hell, the job’s not Damage’s to pass on to his son just because he wanted to you know. This isn’t North Korea or something. Anyway, we all knew from Damage right down to Charlie, that Charlie’s best interests lay in having Damage stay on top, in charge, looking out for him.’

‘
All right
then
,
someone who wanted to stop Charlie becoming the heir apparent. Someone who didn’t want it to become a hereditary dynasty?’

‘But what’s the point? Everybody knew there was no chance of that happening just because Damage wanted it to. Charlie would only have been able to step up if he really was able to
,
and commanded the support of the guys.’

He was the one that had mentioned North Korea
. G
iven the orchestration of the succession of first Kim Jo
ng-i
l to Kim Il-
s
ung, and now Kim Young-
u
n or whatever the new fat boy was called, I had my doubts about that, but I let it slide.

‘So was Damage a danger to someone?’ I ventured.

‘He was fucking dangerous to anyone he met, 24/7
,
’ said Wibble, ‘but no, not in the way you mean.’

‘Did someone think he was talking?’

‘Well he was talking
,
wasn’t he? To you for a start. But then he was the club P and if there’s one person who’s allowed to speak for the club it’s the P so that was up to him.’

‘Yeah
,
but I didn’t mean that kind of talking though…’

‘I know you didn’t
,
but if
you’re asking if anyone thought Damage was going to snitch on them then you need your head examining
,’ Wibble said firmly
.
‘
Damage was a stand up guy, he’d have
...
he did, do everything for the club. There’s no way Damage would ever have been a tout or that anyone would have ever thought that he might. He’d been through that murder trial don’t forget, he’d been sentenced to life with a recommended minimum term of thirty years, and he hadn’t squealed then had he? He could have tried to cut a deal, name names, see if he could get himself a lighter sentence if he’d wanted to but he hadn’t. No way. He’d just sucked it up and got his head down to do his time.’

I had to admit, it did sound like the rock solid Brethren Damage that I’d come to know, or thought I had at least.

‘He ripped someone off on a deal?’

Wibble shook his head, ‘No drugs burns, you know the rules.’

Most of the clubs were strict on that. They all carried the same patch and if one member ripped someone off, or failed to pay a debt, then they could make everyone a target. Failing to pay a drugs debt inside or outside the club was a serious problem and you could very easily end up very dead over it if you weren’t careful.

Not to say that if you weren’t powerful enough in a club that you couldn’t or wouldn’t
want
to see what you could get away with.

But I had to admit, it didn’t sound like Damage. He had put too much into building a business empire and a network of contacts that however strange it might sound in the context, relied on a high degree of trust, albeit an always wary sense of it, and endangering that would have been the last thing that Damage would have wanted to do.

‘It was just a prison beef then, some crappy little local thing and nothing to do with the club or business at all?’ I suggested.

Wibble almost smiled in surprise at that one. ‘To take out Damage?’ he scoffed, ‘No chance. If it was something like that, the fucker who did it would be dead before he knew it, if he was lucky.’

‘Women then? Damage had slept with someone else’s old lady or someone wanted Sharon?’

‘There’s strict rules about that sort of thing as well, everybody knows it and no one would brea
k them, not Damage, not nobody.’

‘
Besides which
,’
added Bung, ‘It’s mates before muff every time in the club.’

‘Well then,’ I said at last, ‘then if it isn’t any of those, it has to be to do with all this, all of what’s going on here. It was to prevent your project Union Jack.’

‘Well the only ones who’d want to prevent that would be the
Yank
s…’

‘Or anyone working for them,’ I added, ‘Or of course, anyone who thought they would lose out as a result
of the changes
…’

‘Damage used to have one of his quotes about t
hat,
’
a
greed Wibble.

‘So like I said, it could have been anyone working for them or anyone who thought they were going to lose…’
I said.

‘Or. Or. Or…
’
Bung
interrupted
obviously bored with where this was going
, ‘
That’s the point isn’t it? It could have been fucking anybody, so why don’t you just shut the fuck up about it? Haven’t you got anything better to talk about?’

*

They
both
looked at me as my mobile rang.

I answered it to hear a familiar voice on the line.

The message was short and to the point. I had a time and a place.

‘We’re on,’ I said, ‘or at least, I am to start with
, tomorrow morning
.’

‘It’s the smart move,’ nodded Wibble.

Friday 5th March 2010

The
café
was set high up on the bank leading up into town and
overlook
ed
the car park
. Charlie had said to meet
at ten. I was parked up by nine-
thirty just to make sure. As I walked to the ticket machine and back I scanned,
surreptitiously
I hoped, the car park, not really knowing what I was looking for or even what I would or should do if I spotted it.

It was the main park
ing
for the town
above
, with a supermarket and a leisure centre at the other end, so it was as full as ever with the normal shopping crowd.

I walked up the few steps and pulled open the café door. It had recently been refurbished and reopened after being closed for a while. Last time I’d been here was with Damage many years ago when it was
still
very much a truckers
’
greasy spoon. Now with fresh owners, paint, windows and table cloths it had gone a bit more
up market
. It was latte and very good bacon and brie baguettes with some side salad these days, rather than the mug of Nescaf
é
and a bacon bap that I remembered.

Apart from a few old dears at a table by the entrance, resting their legs and their shopping baskets before tackling the slope up to the town shops proper, the place was empty so I stuck in my order
,
picked out the
furthest window
table in the
room and sat down facing the entrance
. M
y back
was
to the wall and
I
look
ed
out over the car park with a rising knot of anticipation in my guts.

It seemed unreal, to be sitting here like this, waiting for Charlie to appear. I felt an
air of apartness,
an overwhelming
watchfulness
. I looked over at the grannies again by the entrance as they sipped their tea and gossiped happily amongst themselves and thought, how different this was from the ordinary citizen’s life
,
how the hell did I get myself into a position like this, and how
eas
y it would be for this to slip
over into
complete
paranoia
.

Except that I knew they might very well be out to get me.

And then just before ten there was a familiar rumble of bikes as three outlaw Harleys swept into the car park and barked to a halt as the riders blipped the throttles and killed the engines
,
before
slid
ing
the
bikes
on to
their side stands in the
spaces below.