Heavy Duty Trouble (The Brethren Trilogy) (14 page)

‘It sounds the smart move,’ I said, waiting to hear where this was going.

‘Yeah well…’

‘But there’s a
“
but
”
isn’t there?’

‘
I
t can be too safe can’t it?’

‘Can it?’

‘It can when you don’t actually know where it is or who’s got it.’

I was that incredulous
I almost laughed out loud, ‘You mean, he never told anyone?’

‘Nope,
’
he sighed, ‘The point is, now Damage is dead, no one knows who it is or where the dosh is.’

‘Or if they do,’ he added after a moment, ‘they’re not telling.’

I could hardly believe my ears.

‘You’re seriously telling me,’ I said, wanting to be sure, ‘
that
the bloke
who’s had control of
all
of Damage’s, all of
the club’s cash
,
from over all those years
of Damage’s operation
;
you really mean that no one in the club knows who it is?’

‘No.’

‘Oh come on, someone has to know, it can’t be that difficult to work out surely?’

He just looked at me and shrugged.

‘So you tell me who it is if it’s that easy?’ he said.

And of course, I couldn’t.

*

‘So now what?’
I asked eventually
,
as
the enormity of what he had said
began to
s
in
k in.

‘So now we’re looking
,
’
he said calmly.

‘Looking?’

‘
Looking for whoever it was
.’

‘Who?’

‘The bloke who knows where the money is of course.’

Christ
, I thought,
still struggling to
deal with
this
development
,
good luck with that! Y
ou’d think whoever it is
with
control of the club’s pension pot would be making themselves
sodding
difficult to find.

You’d have to be
a particularly
brave or completely stupid
bugger
to piss about with nicking the club’s dosh, particularly on that sort of scale. But then I reasoned, if you had
helped yourself to
the sort of money we were probably talking about, then buying yourself some anonymity and protection probably wouldn’t be too difficult.

But I didn’t say it of course.

Instead I asked the obvious question, ‘So what’s this got to do with me?
’

‘
W
e want you to look for it
,
’
h
e answered simply.

Now who’s we in this conversation
,
I wondered
,
alongside Wibble? Charlie? The Club?

‘Look? Where?
’
I asked.

‘You know where.’

There was only one place he could be thinking of I realized. He meant in my papers.
The notes and tape recordings of my interviews with Damage.

And then it
all suddenly started to make sense.

Eamur had been right back then when she’d first put her finger on it. Wibble hadn’t kept me alive because he’d been concerned about what I might have stashed away on him on my files. Wibble could have worked out that there wasn’t likely to be anything substantially incriminating there
, so no, that couldn’t have been the reason.

No, I suddenly realized, something else had to
have
be
en
the real reason I was still alive
, and now I knew what it
was
.

Damage
had
always
been
the main man when it came to
all
The Brethren’s business arrangements. I had known that for years. And that meant that he was also the key man when it came to controlling the cash. That was also obvious; after all, it was his financial expertise that had got him so deeply embroiled in the operation in the first place.

But Damage was a great one for compartmentalizing, for splitting things up. He ran things on a cell basis, so people only knew what they needed to know
in order
to be able to do their own bit; w
hile he
sat at the centre of the web, the only one who knew how all the
parts
fitted together to make the whole.

He was also a great one for using outsiders to
do
much
of the dirty work where
ver possible. That way he could get leverage, have many more operators chipping away than if he had to rely solely on fellow Brethren. But using stooges, pawns and supporters had other advantages as well. It also meant that
if
things
went wrong, it was much more difficult for the plod to
trace
it
back to The Brethren.

And Damage was consistent in his thinking. Once a principle worked why change it, and why not apply it everywhere? He would have taken the same logic and approach to looking after the money, I was sure of that.

So did that mean that Damage had used third parties, outsiders to look after the business proceeds? It seemed likely.

And did that
also
mean that
D
amage was the only one who knew all about how they worked, even who they were? That seemed likely as well. After all
,
it was the fact that everyone needed Damage in order to have the whole thing work
,
that was the secret of his security. It meant he was worth more alive and in power to all his potential rivals and challengers, than he was dead, and so they all had an interest in keeping him that way.

Until they didn’t
of course
.
Or until he had crossed someone who didn’t have that interest to look after.

If that was the case, then how had th
ings
been left once Damage was gone?
Would Damage have passed on a briefing? Who to lean on? Where to look? If so, to
whom
?

It didn’t seem likely
, and for the obvious reason
. The moment he’d done that he’d lost a hell of a lot of his immunity from attack.

Besides which, given what was going down now, it ought to be obvious if he had. Enough cash, and there was bound to be enough cash, would get you whatever the hell you wanted in life, weapons, hands to use them, you name it. So if one side or the other had inherited access to huge financial resources they wouldn’t be screwing about like this. They would have bought
in
enough muscle to settle the other side in short order and that would be that.

The fact that neither side had done so said one thing and one thing alone to me.
Wibble was right.
Neither of them had the cash Damage had hidden away.

And if neither of them had it, then that could only mean that they had lost it.

They couldn’t find it. Damage hadn’t told them or left them the clues they needed.

Holy shit
, I nearly had an attack of the giggles
.
That’s what this was about I
now knew
.

Wibble w
as
looking for Damage’s stash of cash.
He had been all along.
That had to be it.
That’s why he had left me alive. He wasn’t worried about what I might have had tucked away in my papers. No, he’d been waiting to see them because he wanted what might be in them.

But
then
I was back to the ‘we’ in Wibble’s sentence. Who was the ‘we’ in Wibble’s mind? It might have been Charlie once upon a time but that seemed unthinkable now
.
Not if
he meant looking
together at least
,
I qualified myself.

Did he mean Charlie was looking for it as well? Did he mean they were now in competition to find it? Rivals in the hunt?

Rivals who each thought they needed me to be able to find it?

Now t
hat was a very uncomfortable thought.

If so, t
hey both wanted to find the clues that would lead them to it and that meant they wanted to examine anything and everything relating to Damage that they could get their hands on that might help lead them to the dosh.

Which brought us right back to the question of
who was the person who’d spent most time with Damage before he died?

Who had notes and tape recordings of hours of interviews stored away?

Who had told them that there was loads more materials that he had which had never gone into the book?

Me.

Christ. No wonder Wibble was so keen to understand what I might have stashed away and was willing to take the risk of letting me live rather than killing me and maybe never finding all my files.

The thing that was keeping me alive was the fact that they thought that unknowingly, I had the map to Eldorado stashed somewhere in my files and that I was the only one who might know where it was.
Wibble, and possibly Charlie, thought th
at my files and the things I had picked up from Damage in all those months of interviews just before he was killed,
was the one place that Damage might have hidden the key.

The question in my mind was simple.

Did I
have it
?

If I didn’t, I was a dead man the moment they realized it.

If I did, what did I do about it? And was I any less of a dead man anyway?

One thing was clear enough. Whatever happened, I was going to need to play for time.

*

‘I thought I was out?’
I asked Bung sotto voc
e as I got back to the car.

Bung
just
laughed
and shook his head
.

‘Out? I should co-co. No way sunshine. Once you’re in at all mate, there is no
way
out. Not really.
I thought you’d have realized that by now
.
’

*

B
ack at Scampi’s place
that evening
,
B
ung and Scroat
were squabbling
about the club
again.

‘What the fuck are we doing with a mumblie like that in the club
any way
?’ Bung
was saying
, sneering at Scampi’s drug-
slurred speech.

‘Earning good, that’s what.’

‘And that’s what it’s all about these days isn’t it?’ said Bung in disgust. ‘Damage wouldn’t have let him stay in the club for a minute, and neither w
ill
Wibble
once he sees him again
, and you know it.’

‘Well Damage ain’t here
anymore
is he? And Wibble ain’t P either, so I guess what they would or wouldn’t do ain’t worth a toss is it?
So what Charlie says goes in my book.
’

‘Who says Wibble’s not P? What gives Charlie the right to call himself that? When the fuck was that voted on?’ Bung objected violently.
‘The club’s about more than one bloke and what he wants to do
.
’

‘Yeah, but the club needs a leader, someone who decides what we’re going to do.’

It made me think
back to the three months or so I’d spent interviewing
D
amage in jail, and
about something Damage
had
always used to say whenever I asked him about his role in the club. Damage was always adamant that he didn’t run the club.

The members run the club
,
he
had
insisted,
the officers are just there to serve the members. And if the officers get too far up themselves and want to do things that the club
’
s members don’t want to do then the club needs to remove them.

But sometimes you make decisions and have to make them stick on the members whether they like it or not
, don’t you?
I had said, referring back to some of his earlier talk about the need for strong leadership in the club.