Heavy Duty People: The Brethren MC Trilogy book 1 (12 page)

‘
Because,’ he said, relaxing back comfortably in his chair, ‘once you’re back on your feet I want you to do something for me.’

That had been a long speech for
Dazza.

‘
What sort of something?’ I asked. He must know that I didn’t want to go back into the business again I thought. Not after all these years.

He settled
even further back into his chair with a grin and folded his arms. What came next was an even greater surprise.

‘
I want you to be my financial advisor.’

‘
Your what?’

‘
My banker. It’s what you do right isn’t it? Look after peoples’ investments for ’em?’

I just nodded.

‘Well then mate, you’ve just got yerself a new client. I want you to look after my dosh for me.’

Why did the expression
‘Oh Fuck’ keep coming to me whenever Dazza appeared on the scene, I asked myself once he’d gone.

5              THE TAKEOVER

The guys had
some group photos done with their new patches. I wasn’t in it of course, I was still laid up in hospital, but I’ve still got my copies.

It was a
happy, sunny day by the look of it and they are all drawn up in the clubhouse courtyard arms across each others’ shoulders. From the upstairs windows someone had hung a huge Brethren club flag to act as a backdrop, a blood red rectangle with a white circle in the centre emblazoned with a stylised version of the club logo in stark black. There’s two versions of the pictures, one from the front showing the grinning faces of the scurviest gang of thugs you wouldn’t ever want to meet, and a back view, with so many guys that to get them all in there are two ranks of colours proudly showing, one standing, one kneeling.

So many faces, with
, in the centre, flanked by Tiny and Butcher, Dazza and Polly, current president of The Freemen and so de facto head of The Brethren in the country. Polly was short and stocky, his face all straight lines, planes and angles, with not a curve to be seen, and wiry short silver-grey hair like a fresh brillo pad. He was there to welcome the new guys to the firm, and to take a good look over what The Brethren had just acquired.

So many faces, and s
o many that wouldn’t make it.

It was like any
other takeover I guess. Even while we were getting our new club tattoos, The Brethren, but in reality Dazza, were clearly both talent spotting and cleaning house right from the start.

By the time I got out of hospital Butcher
’s boys, the hatchet crew from Wearside, had been appointed Dazza’s unofficial hit squad and personal bodyguard. There had been a couple of objections from some of the older fashioned die-hard Geordies in Newcastle but Dazza had soon used his new crew to silence dissent within the existing Brethren members. There had always been a difference between Dazza and the others. They were all Brethren of course, but Dazza always seemed part of an inner circle, almost a club within the club, I guess that was partly because he was coming close to joining The Freemen, but partly it was his air of self-control, his self-assurance, his watchfulness. Even at a party he was always serious, maintaining a distance.

Then it had been the ex Legion
’s turn.

Dazza
had been happy to take in the club and thereby to obtain the territory, but he clearly didn’t have any personal loyalty to the club’s individual members. We may have all come into The Brethren, but we certainly weren’t all going to stay. If your face didn’t fit, or if Dazza as judge and jury decided that you weren’t going to make The Brethren grade, then you were soon going to be out. And you’d have one chance to remove your club tattoos before Butcher and his crew did it for you with a hatchet if you left in good standing. If you left in poor standing you didn’t get the option.

I didn
’t like Butcher. I respected him, but I didn’t like him, or his crew. He had the dangerous brittle intensity that seemed to mark the coke head and Christ he was a miserable fucking hardnosed prickly bastard. I remember we were riding once and there were some kids coming the other way. Bikers wave to each other, or nod or do something to acknowledge each other, it’s us against the car drivers after all.

So I remember the first of these kids on their 250s or whatever they were, he lifted his arm in greeting as we approached.

And Butcher just looked straight ahead, blanked them completely from behind his wrap round shades. Apart, of course, for the one finger salute. It was so fucking funny to watch. What a complete and utter arsehole he was.

But I just thought, why the fuck did you have to do that? It had been a respectful enough greeting. If it hadn
’t been I’d have been with Butcher like a shot in pulling round, catching them up and giving the little wankers a good kicking. But it hadn’t been. It hadn’t been presumptuous, it had been civil, so what was the problem?

Don’t get me wrong.
I didn’t think they had to like us, it wasn’t anything like that. When you’re in a club like ours you know you ain’t going to be winning any popularity contests.

But s
o long as they feared us, that would suit me fine.

You never knew who might be useful at some point in the future. You can’t control whether people like you and even if they do, you can’t rely on them doing what you want them to because of it. People forget friendship and gratitude and all that shit really quickly when the chips are down.

But you sure as hell can control whether people fear you. And you can rely a lot more on people doing what you want them to if they’re scared of you and the swift and sure retribution that will come their way if they fuck-up or wimp out.

But you
can be feared without being hated, all you have to do is avoid unnecessarily disrespecting people or stealing their gear, and being hated can be dangerous. Someone who hates you will actively work against you.

So a
void being hated and you will stay feared but respected; and successful was my rule. Waste that respect by behaving like an arsehole the way Butcher did and all you do is breed resentment and hatred that can work against you.

And that was something Butcher never really got. That
’s why he was a tool. A good one and very useful to Dazza no doubt for some things, but one I recognised as ultimately disposable that could and would be sacrificed with impunity when it suited Dazza.

Mind you he had his funny side as well.
Fat Mick had been moaning one evening in the bar about not having been made up before the vote the way Wibble had been. We’ve a strict rule about no fighting in the club house, you get fined. So Butcher just calmly reached into his pocket, took out his wallet and plonked his fifty quid on the bar. Then he turned round and just coldly smashed one straight into Fat Mick’s face that took him completely by surprise and dropped him straight down to the ground where Butcher then launched in with a good kicking, stomping him good and proper for a few minutes, shouting all the time about how he was fed up with all Fat Mick’s whining and moaning until Fat Mick was a bloody foetal ball that managed to roll out of reach under a table, while we all stood around with our beers in our hands and had a laugh or shouted encouragement.

A lot of the guys didn’t get what was going on and why
Dazza was doing this. Why go to so much trouble to bring in new members through the merger, only to then devastate the club he had taken over. And why push someone unpopular like Butcher to the top of the pile?

But
to me it made perfect sense.

All the way back
to the early days of The Reivers and then on through The Legion, we as a club had always been used to being free to run our own affairs, but life within The Brethren was going to be very different, at least to start with, and that could easily lead to serious problems.

S
o Dazza had to decide how he was going to hold onto the territory he’d just acquired for The Brethren.

The best thing
he could do would probably be to get involved personally, to base himself at the clubhouse where he could be at the centre of what was going on, to be very visibly in charge. The problem was that this wasn’t practical for him for a variety of reasons, not least that he needed to stay visible back in town.

So he had a choice, he could leave the club as it was, operating under Tiny as its local leader. But
Dazza just couldn’t take the risk. It wouldn’t be taking control; it would leave the club and its ethos intact, under its old leader and so still a separate unit with the threat that it could, as a unit, go against him at some point in the future. You could see it happening; if there was ever a challenge coming out of the ex-Legion members in our area, it would be the spirit of independence and freedom that drove us.

So Tiny had always known his position would be the first casualty if the merger went ahead.

But it wasn’t just Tiny as the figure-head. Dazza had to go further, to weaken the club, breaking it up to reduce its numbers, ruthlessly driving out any member who could be an opponent or didn’t make the grade in terms of loyalty and attitude. After all, the surest way to ensure control over the patch would be to wipe out all the potential competition for it. But he knew that Tiny would never drive this through for him.

So his only option was to impose a new leadershi
p who would weed out anyone whose face didn’t fit or who was thought to be too soft for the new regime. But it had to be someone who was loyal to Dazza, who knew that their power only came from Dazza’s support and who would fall without it. Someone then who would be ruthless and active in promoting Dazza’s interests in everything they did for their own power and protection.

Butcher fitted the bill perfectly. Unpopular and a ruthless bastard. He would be ideal.

Funnily enough, Butcher’s crew would be a very different story if it ever came to it. There was a charter run by a single dominating individual. If you took him out it would be easy to replace him with someone else that you imposed and expect the rest to follow as they were likely to find it difficult to chose one of themselves to take charge.

But
even leaving aside the how he was going about it, I still didn’t get the why, and that troubled me more.

I was still wondering what
Dazza was up to and why The Brethren had gone to all the trouble to acquire The Legion? There was still no sign of war with The Rebels, no sign as yet of the expected Rebel takeover of The Hangmen that Dazza had used as the reason for pushing the patch over. So I still wondered whether this had just been an excuse to get The Legion in, and whether Dazza had some private motives of his own.

Th
e question still bugged me. Why would Dazza feel he needed The Legion and our territory? Why had he been so particular about needing Westmorland? We had some small towns and an awful lot of empty moorland, holes or no holes, nothing surely to get excited about?

But as it happened
I wasn’t the only one who seemed concerned about how things were shaping up, although for different reasons.

After only a
month or so in his new colours Billy was complaining, loudly. Surprise, surprise, things weren’t working out the way he had expected and he was moaning to me about it.

‘
What’s the point of taking us over if he doesn’t want to exploit the territory? You know I thought that when we patched over it would be the big time man, that we would really start to roll, I thought it would be my chance to really start to earn but no, now I’m stuck with this shit.’

That was one of the problems that
Dazza would be having now across the piece I guessed as I let the whining wash over me. It was as old as the hills really. He had used people like Billy as his route in to taking over The Legion and now they would be expecting it to be payback time. But the problem was he could never satisfy them, he would never be able to give them as good a deal as they would be looking for in return for the help that they had given him, so inevitably they would start to resent him. Funnily enough I thought that he had a better chance of winning over the guys who had been anti but that he hadn’t needed to hurt. After all, they had gone into this with no expectations of him, no assumptions that there would be favours done for them, so all he had to do really was to leave them alone, to treat them OK and in time they would become reconciled to him.

Whereas
Billy as a supporter was complaining about how difficult he was finding it to make his nut now and becoming resentful.

The message had come down from
Dazza clearly enough. One of the reasons he had pushed for the takeover was that he wanted the space our territory could provide. Space in the open countryside so that he could organise things that were difficult to do in town. The long and the short of it was that we weren’t great territory for selling gear. Billy’s and the other guys’ operations had always been relatively small time deals and a change of patch wasn’t going to change that. It was just the law of supply and demand and out here in the sticks with small towns and villages the demand for Billy’s gear was never going to grow that much, whatever colours he was wearing.