Heavy Duty People: The Brethren MC Trilogy book 1 (36 page)

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The bad-press.co.uk team and Iain Parke.
             

Copyrigh
t
Iain Parke 2009

2
nd
edition Copyrigh
t
Iain Parke 2011

I, Iain Parke, hereby assert and give notice of my rights
under section 77 of the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988
to be identified as the author of this work.

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted at any time by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher.

Cover photograph © Iain Parke 2009

ISBN 978-0-9561615-4-3

www.
iainparke.co.uk

Bonus reading

Heavy Duty Attitude

1              RSVP

Tuesday 28 July 2009

‘I liked your book,’ he said, as we shook hands across the table.

‘Well thanks,’ I answered guardedly, as I slid onto the bench seat opposite him and sat down. It was around three months since it had come out and so just coming up to about a year since his election.

‘You mean the one that just about stopped short of saying that you killed him,’ I asked, ‘or that you at least had him killed?’

‘Yes,’ he nodded with a smile on his wolfish face, ‘I particularly liked that part.’

Obviously given the history and who he was, I had been very wary when I had taken his call last week at the paper asking me to meet up with him.

No, wary was the wrong thing to say. Scared shitless would be more like it.

So I had my work cut out to persuade myself that it would be safe to go, but eventually and possibly foolishly, I had managed to convince my inner coward.

That he wanted us to get together somewhere in public was some reassurance.

He would also have to assume that I would probably take some elementary safety measures. I would tell someone who I was meeting and where so they could call the cops if I didn’t get back in a reasonable time.

I might even, if I wanted to, have arranged for someone to come along to keep a watchful eye on me and raise the alarm if it looked as though things were getting ugly.

Even so, it had taken me quite a while to screw my nerves up to actually come. After all, fear of legal consequences wasn’t something that ranked very highly in his world. And the trouble with the all elementary safety precautions I could take was that they still wouldn’t mean I was safe.

I knew, absolutely and without question, that these were people who wouldn’t think twice about killing me, whatever the situation, if that’s what they had decided they wanted to do. It might only take a moment to take me out, and a moment might be too quick for anyone to intervene, while afterwards they would have all the time in the world to persuade witnesses that they might not actually remember what had happened.

So I knew I was taking a risk, perhaps even sticking my life on the line. But in the end I had decided I would go. The urge to know was too strong, and we’d agreed to meet at a motorway services, so it was about as public a place as I was going to get. Although, as I was on my way I suddenly regretted my choice as I realised that Heathrow might have been even better. The knowledge that armed police would be expected to be on patrol in the terminals might have given me even more comfort.

It was a summer Saturday afternoon, the road was busy with holiday traffic, and the car park was full as I pulled in and parked up. Families were milling around open cars feeding kids ice creams, and camped out eating sandwiches and slurping cokes at the wooden trestle tables on the grass beside the main block, to the background noise of traffic roaring by. Welcome to staycationland I thought, as I headed inside, the automatic doors swishing open in front of me as two large women in low cut tops that clashed with their orange-glow skin came out past me sucking at straws from Styrofoam cups, brown paper burger and chips bags grasped in their other hands.

I walked through to the eating in area, my eyes adjusting quickly to the relative dimness of the cool interior from the bright glare of outside. As the doors hissed shut for a moment behind me, the noise of traffic faded away to be overtaken by the noise of people echoing against the concrete cave as children ran about and a murmuring susurrus of the noise of people talking and eating competed with the piped musak and clattering cutlery.

Well, here goes, I thought, steeling my nerves.

He was easy to spot.

The restaurant area was crowded as I walked in, the noise level reaching a pitch and all the tables filled, except for across by the window on the far side where a series of booths lined the wall.

The bikers were where you would expect to find them, looking out into the room, backs to the wall, always watching, always wary.

He was sat in the middle of the row, a coffee in front of him at the otherwise empty table. The neighbouring booths on either side of him were each also occupied by a single full patched Brethren with a drink in front of them, and despite the jam packed tables elsewhere, obviously no one had asked them to move, or had even decided that they wanted to sit in the adjoining booths.

He had seen me as I arrived and gave me a quick nod of acknowledgement as I walked across to him, while I could feel eyes following me across the room as people realised I was approaching his table. Was this what it was like I wondered? For them I mean. To always be on show, to always be the centre of surreptitious attention wherever you went?

He had gestured for me to sit opposite him and I did.

We paused while he asked me what I wanted and one of the guys went off to get it, joining the queue to pay like any other law abiding citizen. He wasn’t in much of a rush and I guess he was safe enough that no one was going to nick his table while he was gone.

Wibble looked much as I remembered him from the few times we had met. The guys’ lids were all with the bikers’ Harleys parked up outside the entrance and were being guarded as always by a striker serving his time. Wibble was wearing his summer riding gear, a padded check work shirt which was now open to reveal the black and red hooped T-shirt underneath, with part of The Brethren logo showing just above the left breast. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, and over the top of the shirt was his black leather biker’s vest which I knew would have his colours on the back.

He looked a bit older that when I’d met him before but then it was what, four or five years ago now? His sharp featured face was a bit more lined than I remembered, his shoulder length mass of wild hair and short cavalier style beard was showing grey amongst the black, but he still looked wiry, whip-hard and very, very dangerous.

But then when you looked at the front of his cut, when you took in the grinning ∫∫ style skull and crossbones tottenkopf flash on his left breast that was his Bonesmen tab, and the simple red and black embroidered Freemen and President flashes ranked above it; then that would have told you he was a Menace, in every sense of the word, and needed to be treated as such, whatever he looked like.

Despite what people assume, few of the bikers actually wear any Nazi insignia these days, not because of any objection to it of course, much the reverse in fact as many of them often admire the triumph of the will image of the Nazis. An aura of disciplined ranks, marching as a body and a strength through joy reliance on violence has an atavistic and strong gut appeal. But in practice any of the clubs which has a presence in
Germany has dropped anything with a swastika from its flash as their German charters simply can’t wear it without going straight to jail. The Brethren’s bonesman patch with its ∫∫ style skull and crossbones was unusual in that in its red dyed variation, so far, they had managed to get away with it.

There was a plain diamond shaped black and red patch on the opposite side of his cut. It was a new tab, one I’d not seen before, for obvious reasons.

It simply read In memory, Damage. RIP and underneath, LLH&R.

So why the hell I went and blurted out what I said next, I’ll never work out. Did I have some kind of death wish?

‘Well,’ I said, ‘now I’m here, do you mind if I ask you a question?’

‘Naw, feel free mate,’ he said, lounging back, ‘What do you want to know?’

‘Alright then,’ I said in an in for a penny, in for a pound moment of madness, ‘can I ask, did you kill him?’

His smile seemed to stay fixed, but he leaned forward, resting his heavily tattooed arms on the table and bringing his face closer to mine as though he was going to say something in confidence and I couldn’t help but tense, wondering with a sudden mix of what – terror or regret? – if I’d just blown it with the first remark out of my mouth?

‘Of course,’ he answered steadily, the smile still on his face but nowhere near to touching his eyes which were boring into mine, ‘but just because you can ask anything you like, doesn’t mean that I have to answer, does it?’

‘No,’ I quickly surrendered.

‘Well I didn’t really expect an answer to that one anyway, but I’ve got to try,’ I said making an effort to recover the situation.

He left me on the hook for a moment or two, his expression not changing a bit, as though he was silently and deliberately calculating whether to have a problem with what I had said, or not. But, he was also saying in his silence, he didn’t need to calculate what he would do if he decided to take it that way. We both knew what he would do, crowd and CCTV or no crowd and no CCTV.

Then he let me go.

‘I suppose so,’ he agreed, leaning back again and looking a little more relaxed after that demonstration of his power.

‘How are his wife and kid? Are they OK?’ I asked, partly to change the subject a bit, and partly out of genuine interest, ‘It’s been a while since I saw them.’

‘Shaz and Lucy? Oh they’re fine, they’re being looked after.’

‘Good,’ I said and meant it. I had liked Sharon; Damage’s petite and pretty wife was a talented artist, and Lucy had seemed a great kid.

‘So,’ I said, a bit more nervously but relieved that he still seemed to want to talk to me, ‘can I try asking you another question?’

‘Sure,’ he said, the smile wider now, ‘Christ, you really are a nosy bugger aren’t you? Beats me how Damage put up with you for so long.’

‘Sorry,’ I shrugged, ‘it’s just the job, that’s what I do for a living, quiz people.’

‘And then you write it all down?’

‘Well, some of it anyway,’ I said, a bit more defensively than I had intended. ‘You always have to leave some stuff out as a journalist, and of course you can’t reveal your sources.’

‘Yeah, I get that and that’s good,’ he said looking up and back over my shoulder, ‘Ah here we are.’

‘There you go,’ said the full patch man-mountain of a Brethren as he arrived back at our table to serve me with a skinny latte and a couple of sugars. Not something that I had ever really expected to happen.

‘Thanks,’ I said automatically, ‘that’s great.’