Heavy Duty Trouble (The Brethren Trilogy) (26 page)

But he
’d had a problem, he
was stuck, how did you let the clubs get back to being clubs while keeping the dosh
? It was the problem of the
I
f you try to get out someone else will come in
and
take you to the cleaners
argument. Worse,
A
nyone new coming in
,
if they were smart
,
wouldn’t want to leave you around as a wounded and weakened adversary
.
N
o
, Damage had learnt the P’s lesson well on that front and what it would mean for the club if
he
ever did step down
,
I
f you are going to
harm
someone
,
you
couldn’t just wound them, you
always
had to utterly destroy
them
so they could never be a threat to you afterwards
.

‘
So it’s catch twenty-t
wo?’ I asked, ‘You want out because it’s destroying the club, but to get out means that someone else co
m
ing in will destroy the club?’

‘Pretty much
,
’ he agreed.

‘
So what was the answer?’ I wanted to know
,
intrigued.

‘
Détente
,
’
h
e said simply.

‘
Détente
?’

‘Yeah, what Damage had realized was that all the clubs had the same problem.
He said it was like the Yanks and the Russians facing each other down with their ICBMs.
We were all living in a world of mutually assured destruction.’

I’d put down what I was looking at by now so as to be able to concentrate on what he was saying.

‘
It was what
Damage
called a
zero sum game
, everyone was in a
competition
with everyone else, that none of us really wanted
,
but once it had started, none of us could get out of without asking to be eaten alive by the others that were left.
’

O
f course I’d heard this sort of analysis before, from Charlie. It was just that Wibble drew different conclusions about what sort of policy should flow from it.

‘So it was an arms race?’

‘Yes.’

‘That nobody wanted, but nobody could stop?’

‘That’s right.’

‘So what you needed was…’

‘Like I said,
détente
. Damage had realized that if everyone could be persuaded to start to slow down at the same time, then maybe, just maybe, we could eventually work this thing back, back to where we all wanted to be…’

‘Earning and secure?’

‘Yeah, not looking over our shoulders every time we went out for a drink won
dering if one of the other side
s
’
crews was cruising around looking for us.
Not g
etting in a fucking car without having to check underneath for a bomb before you drive off. Little things like that, you know.’

‘That’d be a bit of a change wouldn’t it?’
I commiserated.

He shrugged. ‘He said he was realistic about it. It wasn’t going to come at once. Damage knew there would need to be little steps, confidence building, treaties that would have to be negotiated, signed, ratified
,
by each club’s members, and they would be a suspicious bunch of fucks I can tell you, and then monitored. There’d need to be arrangements for verification, a hot line for emergencies…’

‘UN peacekeepers?’

He gave a snort of sardonic laughter at that,
‘Just about, if we could get anyone dumb enough to do it.
But if we could get all the clubs to link up, and all agree to step back, even if it was
only
one step at a time, then it would at least be a first step in the right direction.’

‘Wow.’

‘Of course it didn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell in the real world. I’m just surprised that Damage lasted as long as he did.’

‘So that’s why you think he was killed?
’ I asked,
‘
For deliberately trying to make the peace work?’

He shrugged. ‘It’s part of it, I’m sure.’

‘But was it what all of you wanted?’ I asked, knowing damn well how it played alongside what Charlie was after.

‘Well that’s it
,
isn’t it? Was it what all of us wanted? Or was it just what some of us wanted?’

*

Sunday
28
th
February
2010

We looked at everything. We read every note, we played every tape, we noted down every name, every number, every company he had
mentioned
.

It took us all
of that
weekend and
then
the
whole of
the
rest
of the week. I’d been interviewing Damage
fairly intensively
for
well over
three months
, and
then
do
ne a
load
more general research around
the clubs in general as well
.
Even I was surprised looking at it all now, just how much
material
I had accrued
in that time
. N
ow
all of it
, down to the last scribbled note,
needed reviewing. Papers needed sorting and then reading. Recordings needed listen
ing to. Notes needed making. Li
sts needed tabulating and cross
-
referencing.

Not for the first time I wished my handwriting was a hell of a lot more legible than the scrawl of hieroglyphs that we
had been
confronted with
, much to Wibble’s disgust
.

And at the end of it all we had...
nothing.

Or to be more accurate,
we had
everything and nothing.

We had lists of names, we had schedules full of numbers, we had details of companies, of properties.
We had questions
marks and exc
lamation marks
, a
rrows and circles.
We had d
ots that had been joined
,
and q
ueries and questions
that remained outstanding
.

And
when you boiled it all down like one of Scampi’s reductions,
none of them meant anything to either of us.

I could see how Wibble
had
becom
e
more and more despondent as the days went on. Again and again he
had
asked me,
I
s this it? Is there anything else?
And again and again I
had
assured him that
yes,
this was all I had, that no
,
I wasn’t holding anything
back
o
n
him,
and yes
,
I understood and shared the need to make sure we found the dosh, not Charlie, that
I fully realised this
was in my
vital
interests
,
in the true
st
sense of the phrase,
as well as his.

And so we
had
kept on working,
kept on digging out the pictures and press cuttings I would have been showing
Damage
at the time,
kept on turning over the pages, making our notes and listening to Damage’s gruff voice on the tapes, analysing, searching for the clue that Wibble hoped, believed, prayed would be there.

But
in the end
, no matter how many times we listened, no matter how many times we tried to put the pieces together, eventually we both had to admit the truth
,
first
to
ourselves, and then
,
finally
and
o
h so
reluctantly, to
each other.

I guess Wibble had
just
been expecting to know it when he saw it. To come across someone who he might recognise as being part of the money trail, possibly someone who he would know acted as a courier, a go-between, a messenger, anything in the shady world of criminal banking and money laundering. Perhaps he was expecting
D
amage to have left him a coded message. Something
Damage had
told me that I hadn’t recognised
the importance of,
but which would give Wibble the clue that he needed.

Well, if
Damage
had, then it hadn’t worked. Wibble hadn’t clocked it.

‘There’s nothing here,’ he said
, sitting back in his chair
at last that Sunday evening and rubbing his eyes as he yawned. I knew how he felt
,
I’d been going cross eyed from constantly staring at my laptop screen for the last few days solid.
‘
Or if there is, w
e can’t find it, whatever it is.
Which amounts to the same thing.
’

‘Which is?’ I asked.

‘We mate,
’ he told me,
‘
are a little bit fucked if we’re not careful.’

*

Monday
1st
March
2010

The next morning
I
had idly
thought about tagging along with Wibble to Court
to see what happened
.
To see Wibble in a suit would be a first for a start.

But then I remembered that Charlie was going to be up there in the dock with him, and I suddenl
y
didn’t fancy being seen around with Wibble in public again, particularly when both men would presumably have their supporters out in force.

Getting caught up in a potential riot wasn’t my idea of a smart move if I could avoid it, particularly after what I’d been through already.
So I decided to sit this one out
.

It’s a strange feeling, being on your own in someone else’s house. I sort of drifted from room to room
downstairs
for a while with my breakfast shot of
caffeine
in my hand, unable to settle, thinking I ought to be doing something,
anything,
but what?

Eventually however I came to my senses with a ‘Sod it!’ and
just
slobbed out on Wibble’s sofa
with my feet up on the
coffee table
and the curtains closed, after having first
raid
ed
the collection on
Wibble’s shelves for
DVDs
. I
settled in to
watch first
The
Battle of Britain
,
and then
The Usual Suspects
to pass the morning. Even without Wibble’s
parting shot about not going outside, there was no way I was leaving the house.

About half past one I did myself a pizza from their freezer and by half two I was just starting to think about what to watch
next
;
it was while since I’d seen
Blues Brothers
I decided,
or perhaps read
instead,
when I heard a car draw up outside.

Cautiously I twitched the
edge of the living room
curtain and peered out.
It was the Range Rover and
Wibble was walking up the path to the front door w
hile
Bung
was
locking the car.

Well, he was out, I decided
. Highly trained journalist me
,
you learn
to spot these sort of things. B
ut from the expression on his face, he didn’t look happy.

I was already undoing the bolts as he rang the bell, and I swiftly let them
,
in shutting the door quickly behind Bung although I couldn’t see any other signs of life in the road outside.