Heavy Duty Attitude (23 page)

Like he’d said, no one had a God given right to the colours. If the whole club over here got tarred by Bubba and the boys back in the States with the Cambridge brush of not having been tough enough to hold onto their territory, then it might not just be Thommo and his boys who would have to worry about having their patches pulled.

‘Agreed.’

 

‘And is that something you are going to do?’ came a voice that sounded like Stu’s, ‘on your own I mean?’

‘Yes.’
‘Is it in hand?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, good, because if you need any…’

‘Thanks,’ said Wibble firmly, ‘but like I said, it’s in hand. It’ll be taken care of to everyone’s satisfaction.’

 

‘Well, like I said,’ Stu replied, ‘that’s great.’

The what was in hand was never stated. Even here, they were still too careful for that. The consciousness that anywhere you went could be bugged by the cops was just a part of their life now. But like the minutes from
Wansee
, the underlying meaning was crystal clear.

Wibble had just proposed adopting a final solution to the Cambridge and Mohawk questions; and it had passed nem com.

‘Oh yeah before you all go, I’ve got something for you.’
‘The new flash?’
‘Here,’ he said.

There were murmurs of appreciation and approval and the backslapping sounds of mutual bearhugs.

‘Hey, not bad,’ I heard Bung say.
‘Bubba’s going to hate it!’

‘Well, Bubba’s not here is he? So I just guess we’re going to have to live with that aren’t we?’

‘We’ll be getting a visit from evil.’
‘Oh he’ll be coming alright; we just have to be ready.’
‘Everybody up for this?’
‘With pride mate, with pride.’

*
As they left I heard two of the bikers joking.
‘Three can keep a secret…’
‘You bet…’

I didn’t have to hear them finish it as the steel security door clanged behind them, I knew how it went.

 

Again it was a famous maxim amongst the outlaw clubs.
Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead
.

The Victim.
The Witness.
The Brethren.
One survivor.

11 Freedom’s not free

Wibble leant against the door jamb, the other side of the grille secured across the entrance to the room where I was perched on the bed, my back against the wall.

I think he must just have been bored waiting around for whatever was expected to happen next, so he’d come to pass the time.

‘What about me?’ I asked.
He seemed to find that amusing.
‘So what about you?’
‘What happens now?’

‘Are you slow or something? We’re hanging on to you for a while, that’s what.’

‘But what the hell are you doing?’ I insisted, ‘Letting me hear this stuff?’ ‘I thought you’d be interested.’
‘Bollocks!’
He pretended to be shocked and dismayed, ‘And you a scribbler and all!’

*

There was something different I noticed. He was wearing a new tab on the front of his colours. It was a variation on the classic outlaw biker’s diamond 1% badge. But instead of being the traditional white on black, this one had a white 1% embroidered over a background Union Jack. It must have been what he’d been handing out earlier so what was it all about I wondered?

He was still hanging around outside the cell door when there was the ring of his mobile again sometime early in the evening. I guessed it was Bung on station somewhere up by the Cambridge clubhouse.

‘Yeah,’ said Wibble, ‘you there?
‘Good. How far is it?
‘Five minutes or so? Yeah that should be fine. No cameras? You sure? ‘Yeah well, I’m just being careful.
‘Good.

‘OK, so now you call Thommo. He knows all this already, but tell him again from me. Just to be sure.
‘Tell him I’m on my way. You can say I’m rounding up some more guys or something.

‘Anyway, that’s not his problem. His job is to get everyone into the meeting room at the back. This has to be a fucking secure meeting and I want him to have every patch there. Make sure he understands, this isn’t just High Church, it’s the fucking Vatican as far as their guys are concerned.

‘Once they’re all in, Thommo’s to send Mikey over to you. Mikey’s job is to let you know if anyone hasn’t made it. If anyone’s skipped out then they’re a snitch and we’ll need to arrange to deal with them direct.’

A snitch, I wondered. Surely the snitch? Was Wibble worried there was more than one in the Cambridge crew?

‘You tell Thommo we’re going to send a van round the back of the clubhouse. It’ll have our guys in it, they’ll be there to block off the back door, stop the snitch from legging it if he makes a break for it. Thommo’s to start the meeting once he sees it’s arrived.’

‘How will he know it’s ours? Oh Christ, how many other fucking vans are going to park across the back of his clubhouse? Simple. You get your tagalong kid to drive it, Danny. He’s seen him before.’

So Danny was still around I noted. So was he playing some kind of game? Had he set me up? I still couldn’t believe it. The kid had been really shit scared when I’d seen him I could tell. If he’d been putting that on to set me up for The Brethren he deserved an Oscar not colours.

‘Then you give Mikey the number and tell him to take it to where Danny’s waiting in the van round the back. You tell him that once he’s there, he and Danny are to call it to let you know they’re both in position as you and your lads will be heading round to the front. In the meantime you just get the fuck out of there.

‘Got that?

 

‘No, don’t dump the phone. Make sure it’s turned off so it can’t be traced and then bring it back here and we’ll get it dabbed up again.’

 

So Bung was using my phone for some reason I gathered, before I heard Wibble’s next chilling words.

 

‘For insurance.

 

‘No it’s OK, they can’t trace this call back here, the VOIP thing bounces it all over the web first.

‘OK, see you then.
‘What?

‘Yeah, you’ll need to fetch the cleaning gear. We’ll need it but it can wait awhile.’

Wibble clicked the phone off.
I didn’t like the sound of cleaning gear.
‘The call?’ I asked.

‘Yeah. Danny thinks he’s back-up and that Bung’ll be hightailing it round to the front. He’s got a number to call, we’ve told him it’s Thommo’s to let him know to open the front door to let us in.’

‘But Bung’s not going to be there is he…’
‘No of course he isn’t.’

I couldn’t believe how stupid I had been about what was about to happen. But suddenly I was as sure as I could be that I knew what was going on. I’d seen the van and what was being loaded into it.

 

I knew without ever having seen it what it was that Toad would have been wiring up back at Scroat’s yard.

I knew what it was that Danny would be calling, even if he didn’t. And it wasn’t Bung and his outlaw cavalry.
‘You bastard!’
The other side of the bars Wibble just smiled and shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

*

Wibble brought a little colour portable in from the kitchen and perched it on a chair in the hallway where I could see it. And after a bit of fiddling with the old wire loop aerial off the back of it we got a reasonable if slightly snowy picture.

Then we watched TV. Just like he’d told whoever it was on the phone to do.

It was on the news of course. The Beeb had sent their young local stringer, all blond ambition wrapped up against the night and staring into the harsh camera lights saying the inevitable words.

Reports of an explosion…
Building destroyed…
Police cordon…

The reporter standing beyond the taped barriers, strobing blue lights and fluorescing hi-vis jackets in the background, with nothing to say at this stage beyond the barely obvious.

Massive explosion…
The scene behind me, as you can see, ripped through…
Police sources saying substantial casualties…

It was all
local-sources-local-rumours-lack-of-confirmation-filler-rolling24-hour more-guesswork-and-platitude-than-news-fodder-Thank-youSarah-that-we’ll-be going-back-to-as-soon-as-there’s-any-more-newsmeanwhile-back-in-the-studio-we don’t-want-to-speculate-but-on-the-linewe-have…

And that was when I knew for sure.
There was no way I was walking away from this alive.
Three could keep a secret. Me, Danny and Wibble.
And one of them was gone already.
‘OK?’ said Wibble.
‘OK?’ OK? No! Of course I wasn’t fucking OK.
‘Fancy a coffee?’

*

In my calmer moments over the next few hours, I reflected on the fact that it was a very odd situation. Wibble had obviously moved in here for the duration and set the flat up as his wartime HQ with Bung, who had arrived back later, as his number two.

It made sense. It was obviously a safe house for them and would be easy to defend if it ever were attacked.

 

‘We like these blocks,’ he said, gazing out of the window.

‘The whole floor’s ours,’ he added conversationally, ‘Not directly of course. It’s through a couple of our holding companies. It’s been a good investment over the years, for business I mean. It’s good to have somewhere away from the clubhouse for stuff, a bit out of the limelight. We’ve got the next floor down as well. It’s empty at the moment but gives us a little privacy, know what I mean?’
I understood. Anyone who wasn’t with the club or coming up on club business would stick out like a sore thumb. There was no other reason or excuse for being up here.

It also meant that as I had suspected, there really was no point yelling for help. There was no one who was going to hear.

 

‘So is the rest empty?’ I asked.

 

‘Pretty much. There’s a couple of the lower floors that’re squatted, but that’s fine by us. Otherwise it’s just here and the shunting yard.’ ‘Squatters?’

 

‘Punks, dealers and stuff. Kids and crusties, but there’s some fun chicks as well so we party sometimes. Always has an eye for the ladeeez has Bung.’ ‘The shunting yard?’

 

‘The boys’ve got some beds set up in the flat down the hall. It’s always good to have a place to take some patch snatch.’

 

‘Yeah,’ Bung gestured as though he was Casey Jones pulling a whistle, ‘specially if you want’em to pull the train.’

 

But with me there as well and time to kill there was just no way that we weren’t going to talk about something.

 

And what was there to talk about other than what was going down and why?

‘You aren’t using this as an excuse to settle some business are you?’ I asked, ‘That’s what this has all been about for you hasn’t it? Getting to here?’

‘Hey, never waste a good crisis.’

From what Bung had let slip on the way up to Cambridge, Thommo was already a threat to Wibble and I realised that Wibble had obviously known it when we went on that run. After all, everyone knew that a triumvirate wasn’t the usual way to run any kind of outlaw club, it had only come about as an interim solution to solve the immediate problems caused by Damage’s assassination, and in reality, behind the appearances, from the moment it was formed, no one in the club actually expected it to last.

Rubbing Thommo’s nose in it to make him mad the way he’d done at the run hadn’t been creating an enemy for Wibble the way I had feared, it just made an existing enemy mad. And if you made an enemy mad while you remained calm, you put yourself at an advantage.
‘What about Danny?’

‘Who, the kid?’
‘Yes.’
‘He was expendable.’

‘How about Mikey then? He was a patch. He was your spy in the Cambridge charter, wasn’t he? Was he expendable too?’

 

‘That was good, how did you work that out?’

In truth it was a lucky guess as to who, but the fact that Wibble would want to have a source inside Thommo’s crew seemed obvious. As Damage had given me one of his bastardised quotes once, something about how a guy in charge uses spies to see, the way ordinary guys use their eyes.

‘Well,’ Wibble shrugged, ‘never trust a grass. He’s turned once, what’s to say he won’t turn again for someone else?’

 

*

 

In truth I was still struggling to grasp the scale and implications of what had just happened.

 

‘Christ you’ve taken out an entire chapter of your own. You’ll never get away with that will you? What will the rest of the club think?’

‘What will they think? I can tell you what they’ll think. They’ll say Thommo and Cambridge fucked up. Thommo got too ambitious, too greedy and as a result they brought a whole shitstorm down on all of us just as things were going well and everyone was earning, that’s what they’ll think. That they were given a chance to make it right and they fucked that up as well.

‘They’ll think that I’m a patient man, that I gave them a second chance. Some of them’ll think I’ve been too patient, but all of them’ll think that enough is enough and they didn’t get or deserve a third.

‘They’ll think that someone had to step in to clear up the mess in the interests of the club before it got completely out of control, to do what had to be done.

‘And they’ll think, that’s what Wibble did, he stepped in and cleaned up the mess once and for all.’

 

‘That you cleaned house?’

 

‘Fuck yes, I cleaned house.

‘And now,’ he said breaking off and glancing at his watch, ‘nice as it is to chat, I’ve got some stuff to organise so I’m going to leave you in the capable hands of Bung here.’

*

 

Bung was happy to keep on chatting, happier than I was considering what I knew he’d just done.

‘There’s one thing I don’t get,’ he asked.
‘What’s that?’

‘You keep asking about Damage. Why? What is it to you? Is it just another story for your rag?’

 

It was a good question. It was a bit of a mystery I suppose. Not just Damage’s death, now that was a mystery, who had organised it and how.

But my reasons for needing to know, they were a bit of a mystery to me as well. It could make a good story, sure, but it was more than that. Lots more than that. It was more personal. I’d spent quite a lot of time with him by the end, he’d spoken to me about his life and what he’d done, the good the bad and the pretty bloody ugly, in a way that I doubted he’d spoken to almost anyone, even his club brothers. Not because he wanted to confide in me per se, I knew that, it wasn’t that he wanted me to know, I wasn’t some late found bosom buddy, I realised that. I was just a means to an end, I was just a convenient channel for his to get out what he wanted. Our discussions had always been about Damage’s agenda and on his terms.