Heavy Duty Attitude (28 page)

‘But the question you then need to ask yourself is, are they going to stay there, or are they going to reappear some day? Are you getting the picture?’ Oh yes, I was getting the picture alright. The cops turning up Bob’s murdered body with hard evidence linking a gun and a crime scene back to a scumbag journalist with evidence on their files that I was some kind of tagalong wannabe Brethren, probably out to prove myself. That was going to take some talking my way out of.

‘And secondly?’ I asked.

 

‘Well I’d have thought that would be easy, after our little chat a while ago wouldn’t it?’

I guess it was. He could only be referring back to that afternoon, a few weeks and a lifetime ago now, when we had sat in the sunshine at the garden table out back of the London clubhouse, and he’d calmly and comprehensively catalogued everything they knew about me and mine.

Yes, I could see where he was heading with this bit of the picture he was painting.

‘We know where your family is. We know where your friends are,’ he answered, as if laying out for me the arguments he had been rehearsing to himself in his head. As if saying them out loud, spelling them out to me, helped him to refine his own logic and where it was taking him in his world of interests and pressures.

‘And the question you need to ask yourself is, would shopping us really be worth the risk?

 

‘Is it really going to be safe if you grass us up to the cops? For you, for them?

‘Even if the cops nick a load of us, they won’t get the whole club, there’ll still be some of us out there, and then beyond Britain there’s a whole world of our brothers we can call on for help. It’ll take months to come to trial. Months when you and your testimony will be target number one.’

He prodded Bob’s dead body with his foot. ‘Do you really think we haven’t got any more people we use within the cops, that this was it? Do you really think the cops can keep you, your family, your friends, every one of them, safe until a trial is over?

‘And even after that, what then? How long do you think the cops will keep it up once you’ve given your evidence?

‘You have to ask yourself how long after the verdict is in will the cops stay interested? And then ask yourself, how long do you think we’ll be prepared to wait if necessary?’
He went on remorselessly, ‘And even if the cops keep you all safe, what’s it going to be like? You might be prepared to spend the rest of your life on the run but are you going to do that to your family? Are you really going to put them all through that, for the rest of their lives?’

It took a moment for me to realise he had stopped speaking.
‘What’s this?’ I asked confused, ‘what about
Three can keep a secret
?’

I held my breath as I heard the words out loud. What I had just said without thinking about it? Did I want to die?

 

He looked thoughtful as he considered. Then it seemed that at last he had reached a decision.

 

‘Yeah well, sometimes,’ he answered, ‘just sometimes, maybe three can keep a secret better if two are alive rather than one.’

 

I shut my eyes with a silent prayer of thanks.

‘Well,’ he continued, ‘if I tell my guys you’re dead, then so long as you disappear and no one hears a peep out of you, you’re going to be safe aren’t you? No one’s going to come looking for a dead man are they?’

‘And if no one hears from me about any of this then you’ll be safe as well? Is that it? Is that the deal?’ I answered bitterly.

 

He gave a satisfied smile, ‘Well yes, now you come to mention it. Now isn’t that a happy coincidence?’

 

‘Isn’t it just.’

‘Just so long,’ he emphasised, the smile switched off as suddenly as it had come, and a cold look in his eyes, ‘as nothing, and I mean nothing, ever comes out to suggest that you might still be alive. Nothing about this, nothing about what you’ve seen, nothing about anything, ever. Zilch! Got it?’

I nodded. I got it. ‘Understood.’

‘Good,’ he said, for all the world as if we had just concluded some ordinary business deal. But then in his world perhaps we had. Perhaps it was just me who wasn’t used to bargaining for my life.

*

‘But why kill him?’ I asked nodding down at Bob by my feet. ‘That wasn’t just about setting me up was it?’
‘Nah,’ Wibble shrugged as though it was of very little importance. ‘Don’t flatter yourself. He got too greedy, too demanding, he outlived his usefulness, he knew too much, he became a threat, he was playing all ends against the middle, us, the cops, the Mohawks, selling info on all of us to the others. Take your pick,’ he said off-handedly.

Then Wibble stopped and looked at me quizzically for a moment, as if wondering how far he wanted to go with something.

Then as if he had made up his mind he asked, ‘Do you remember you asked me once who would have known about what was going down at the meeting? The peace deal?’

‘Yes.’

 

‘Well outside of the club, the only other people who would have known were the cops, his mob,’ he said, giving the body a prod with his foot. ‘Would they? Are you sure? How?’

‘Well we know they are investigating us, they use bugs, they try and get people into the club. Sometimes we spot ’em and then it’s a choice. Do we leave them be and just use them? Or do we sort ’em out?’

I didn’t want to ask what ‘sort ’em out’ meant as I could guess all to easily what it might involve.

‘And you made sure news got back.’
Yeah, I made sure Bob here got to know about it.’
‘How can you be so sure?’ I asked.
‘Because I was the one who told him,’ he said flatly.

As I sat there, slack jawed while I took this in, all I could think of was to ask, ‘Why?’

‘Well, somebody had to make the calls.’
Calls, I wondered. How many calls? And what about?
‘But why did you tell him?’
‘Because I thought he would make trouble with it.’
‘Why would he do that?’

‘He was a cop of course,’ he said sounding surprised that I’d even had to ask, ‘investigating the clubs. If times were peaceful, what’s he got to show for his investigations? Diddily squat and we’re all out getting on with our business so he’s not shining in the force. And by the same token, how much do we need to pay a bent cop when times are sweet? Why should we, what’s in it for us?’

Not a lot, I could see that.

‘But when the shit hits the fan, all of a sudden there’s more action around. More stuff for him to do on the force, higher profile investigations, all that shit.’

‘And there’s a bigger and better market he had for his stuff with you guys.’ ‘Yeah sure.’
And of course it just made perfect sense when he said it.

‘The more uncertainty there was, the more we would need the information he could sell.’

‘And the more you needed it…’
‘The more he could reckon on raking off us for it,’ he confirmed. ‘What did he mean when he asked Noddy if the offer was still open?’ ‘Capricorn had used him to put out feelers…’
‘A last ditch attempt to avert war?
‘Yeah, they wanted us to call Thommo’s boys off.’

And Bob had brought this message to Wibble. I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing. Not speaking to the cops about anything was such a fundamental rule amongst the clubs that I wanted to be sure about what he was saying.

‘So you knew he was going to make trouble with the info you gave him? About the meet and The Rebels being there?’

 

Wibble seemed pleased that I’d joined the dots. Of course he was the one that had told the cops.

‘Yeah, well I guessed he might.’
‘That much trouble?’
He laughed, ‘Well no, not quite that much.’
‘Did he do it deliberately?’

‘Yeah I reckon so. He knew what he was doing. The cops would have had sources in the goat fuckers and the zombies. He would have known that they were in the process of patching over to the squaws. He’d have known they’d want to blow onto the stage with a spectacular. And our run up to Cambridge is right into the turf the goat fuckers have always claimed was theirs so it wouldn’t have taken a genius to work out what was likely to go down and where.’

No it wouldn’t have, I decided. And that would have gone for Wibble as well. He might not have anticipated that the Mohawks would be patching over The Capricorn or Dead Men Riding, but he would have anticipated some trouble.

What was it Bob had said about Damage? He’d forever been going on about the
pax Damage
.

 

Damage had won the peace, had been his point, and that was what had settled his rep within the club.

Damage’s were a big man’s shoes to step into. So big that it had taken three of them to do it at the time but that wasn’t something that was going to last for ever.

How do you step into a big man’s shoes? You have to earn your own respect, your own rep, by doing something different.

So if Wibble wasn’t going to forever be living in Damage’s shadow, then Wibble would have to do something different. Just continuing Damage’s peace wouldn’t be enough.

Wibble would have to win a war.

 

There would have been just one slight practical problem with that as a plan for consolidating his powerbase and position from Wibble’s point of view. Which opened a whole new can of worms.

 

To win a war, there had to be a war to win.

 

*

There were so many questions that were churning around in my head and demanding answers, right now, about the events of that day back in Cambridge when the rockets exploded, that I was having trouble thinking straight.

It was a crazy idea. It was too big a risk even for someone like Wibble to contemplate.

 

After all, how far could Wibble really hope to try to control events once a war had started?

 

Everything would then be in play, nothing would be certain from then on.

The Mohawks’ attack could well have immediately resulted in a challenge to his leadership from someone like Thommo. But for how it had actually turned out, wouldn’t a war have given Thommo the ideal opportunity to try unseating Wibble using the pitch, ‘We need a real boss in charge now, not some kind of weak-arsed compromise choice?’

But it hadn’t happened like that, had it?

 

Instead, the way it had turned out the war had bought time for Wibble’s leadership.

In fact, going further, the war would have actually made it difficult for Thommo to start a challenge to Wibble, not just because of the way Thommo’s boys were involved, but in general, because the natural reaction of the club under attack would have been to enrage their truly ferocious elemental sense of loyalty to the club and each other.

When one Brethren fights, all Brethren will participate
was the club rule. So God help anyone inside or outside the club who got in the way of that.

No, the only risk for Wibble to his position from a Thommo challenge was if the war had gone badly. But then again, if the war had gone badly, given that Thommo was responsible for leading the fight locally, how strong would Thommo’s credentials have then been to launch a take over bid?

That couldn’t be right, could it? That the outbreak of war was actually a win/win situation as far as Wibble was concerned? But the more I thought about it, the more I started to think that it was.

Fact – the war was actually good for Wibble. It was just what he needed to show the club and any private doubters what he was made of. It was his opportunity for him to show he could lead the club.

Which begged the question, how much had Wibble known about the planned attack in advance?

 

Fact – from what he’d said he was obviously expecting some trouble. He’d told me as much and…

Fact – he’d actually deliberately leaked the information about the event to Bob because he thought it would get back to Capricorn and Dead Men Riding through him and cause some trouble.

So really, the only question was, had he known it was going to be so serious?

 

The choices weren’t appealing.

Perhaps Wibble didn’t know anything about what was about to go down that day. He might have been expecting there to be some aggro at some point, perhaps even a ruck, but not the sort of attack that actually happened, in which case he would have been as surprised as anyone when the assault came.

But given the build up of tensions, and with the show being on Cambridge turf just next door to Capricorn, Wibble surely had to know there was a risk of real trouble that day. He didn’t seem the type to be in denial or to think that something on that scale just couldn’t happen, but then if Barbarossa seemed to take a suspicious bastard like Stalin by surprise even after all the warnings the Soviets had received, didn’t that prove anyone could make a mistake?

The final possibility was the truly chilling one, which was that Wibble had known full well about the Mohawks’ plans to attack that day and their likely scale; but had calmly and deliberately let the event go ahead and accepted all the casualties that would ensue, without warning anyone else in the club what was about to take place. Now I was starting to sound like one of those American nutters who say Roosevelt deliberately let Pearl Harbour happen.

Bob was the key here I realised.

I knew Bob had contacts with the other clubs’ leaders, Noddy and Leeds Kev, his last conversation with Noddy had been evidence of that. But whatever relationship they had with him I reckoned they were unlikely to tell a copper what they were planning were they?

But he also had other sources in the clubs I was sure of that. It had to have been him who called Wibble after the Cambridge crew bomb to say that the Mohawks leadership weren’t getting together the way Wibble had expected.

So what would Bob have known about the planned attack in advance and how much had he told Wibble?

Bob was the key to the puzzle.
But Bob was dead.
Two can keep a secret, I thought to myself bitterly.

*
So was that it? Was this war Wibble’s Thatcher moment?
It was starting to look like it.

A war would unite everyone underneath him, it was no time for division and anyone who showed anything but absolute loyalty to the club and its war at such a time would be risking more than just their colours, so it would remove any immediate threat of a challenge.

There was a risk that it would give an opportunity to a challenger if the war didn’t go well. Someone could say that it was time for a change at the top, that The Brethren needed a real leader. But it would be a tricky pitch to make, particularly for someone already known to have a grudge, as it risked being seen putting personal interests before the club and being divisive in the face of the enemy.