Heavy Duty Trouble (The Brethren Trilogy) (22 page)

‘
Oh the
talking
’s never over, not really. There’s always going to be a time
to talk eventually,’ he said
philosophically
. ‘H
ow else do wars ever end? It’s just a matter of what position each side is in when it comes time to
sit down at the table again
.
’

‘
So, like I said, why do you need me, because that time, whenever it is, is a while off yet surely?’

‘
Yes it is. So, this is why I want you to help me.’

‘
Help you with what?’

‘
Help me get to the point where I’m in a position to talk.’

‘
And how do I do that?’
I asked.

‘
Simple,
’ he said,
‘
money.’

‘
Money?’

‘
Money
,
’ he said firmly.
And then he explained.

*

‘The problem we have is how many guy
s will go with us
,
and how many will go with Charlie
.’

‘
And
h
ow many will go with you
d’you think?
’
I asked
sipping my brew
.

‘
Not necessarily enough
,’
was his answer.

‘How do you know?’ I challenged him
.

‘
When it comes down to it, you can basically tell who’ll go which way
.’

‘
Oh, how
’s that
?
’

‘Simple,’ he said, ‘
It’ll be the guys with jobs, against those without.
’

‘
You mean…
’

‘
Whatever the fuck the outside world thinks about us all being full time drug kingpins, you know
it’s complete bullshit. You’ll have seen that from the time you’ve spent
tagging along around us the way you have.

‘
Sure
there’s
some
guys who are real gangsters, seriously into moving shit
…’ he said
,
and
as he spoke
I
began to
realise
what it must be that Charlie had, what
it was that
he had to be, for him to have risen so far
,
so fast within the club’s
hierarchy
.

It wasn’t
simply
that he was Damage’s heir to the club,
that
in effect was simply a
by-product
, a reflection of what he brought to the party, otherwise what the hell was he doing as a senior officer in the club at his age
?

No, first
and
foremost, he was Damage’s successor in the family business, Damage Enterprises Inc, the importation and wholesaling on an industrial scale of class A drugs.

Ironically,
Wibble had been the one who formally brought him into
the
club, I’d been there, I’d actually
witnessed
it happen.

But actually
,
I now had to ask myself, had he really wanted to?

What if Wibble
,
with his ambitions for the club, hadn’t actually wanted Charlie in?

He might have been under pressure from the likes of Scroat and even Toad to let Charlie in given his inheritance. How much choice would Wibble have had?

How
had he really thought
it was going to go, with Charlie coming in so young and immediately
heading up to the N
orth to take
up
the post of
regional
P
?
As a southern kid heading into the heart
of
Damage’s old patch I
ha
d wondered
at the time
how the hell he was supposed to get on, I’d even said as much to Wibble.

Now
looking back
I wondered if that hadn’t been the idea?
Had Wibble deliberately set Charlie up in the hope that he’d fail? And
reasoned
that in
doing so
, Wibble would have the chance to take control of the business
for the club
under his
leadership
.

It was all speculation of course, and it was
unlikely
that I would
ever
get any answers, but as a line of reasoning it did seem to explain a few things I’d been struggling with for a while.

The problem was though,
if
that
had
been
Wibble’s
plan, it didn’t seem to have worked out too well. If
he
had been counting on Charlie’s
inexperience
to
trip
him
up, then he’d reckoned without
both
Charlie’s native cunning
, or
how much political nous he had picked
up
from his old man
, or both
.

Meanwhile, Wibble was still explaining, ‘
…but m
ost of the guys in the club work
. T
hey’ve got real world jobs. They’re just regular guys who’ve got old ladies and kids to support and a roof to pay for. The club has to come first
,
sure, that’s drummed into everybody
when they’re
striker
s
. I
t
’
s why
that part of joining i
s so important
. I
t’s training, 24/7, no downtime
,
in what the club means, and if you don’t think you can handle it then it’s just not the time to try out for the club. Either go away and come back when you are ready, or decide that the life’s not for you and just walk away completely.
’

‘
But while the club comes first, the reality is like I say, the guys in it need to work to live, to fund their dues, run their bikes. So most of the guys have jobs
.’

‘
And those guys don’t deal?
’ I asked.

He shrugged
,
‘
Some of them
will
sure, hell why not, for an extra bit of dosh? And some of them’ll
have
other bits on the side to help out, who the hell
cares
? The point is that firstly the club doesn’t know and doesn’t give a fuck what they do in their own time to make a living, and secondly, these guys aren’t like I said, king pin drug dealers. When was the last time you saw a major crime lord fixing someone’s plumbing on a Saturday morning, cash in hand, for fuck’s sake?
’

‘
But there are guys who do? Deal big
time
,
I mean
.
’

‘
Sure there are. You
spoke to
Damage
. H
e told you what he had done. Sure there are guys in the club who
se
business is drugs.
You know w
e’ve never denied that.
’

‘
And that’s how you’ll tell?
’

‘
Who
’ll
go with Charlie?
’

‘
Yes
.’

‘
Ye
ah, that’s how I’ll tell.’

And from doing his calculations, it seemed it was very much on the edge
. On Wibble’s side he reckoned were about a third of the club, the regular guys, mainly the members
who were longer in the tooth
, the ones who hankered after the
good
old days, who wanted to get back to
what the club was really all about
in Wibble’s terms.

Charlie, Wibble thought, had about the same number in his camp
. They were
heavily concentrated around the late and unlamented Scroat’s London charter which had been out recruiting younger members aggressively over the past few years
,
and working hard on its control of a string of key nightclub venues across the region.

‘And the rest?’

‘Undecided,’ he said
.
‘
T
hey’re guys who aren’t into the big time stuff but they see it going on and the action it can make and hey
,
some of them will be thinking to themselves well
,
maybe this is my chance to get a slice of that. It’d only be natural.’

‘And Toad?’ I asked, remembering
Bung’s question last night and Gibbo’s shake of the head, ‘where does he stand in all this? Is he with Charlie?’

Even without his fearsome personal reputation,
someone who liked his booze hard, his sex rough and his enemies buried
,
as Bung had described him to me once,
Toad would be an importa
nt factor in this I reasoned
.

With Stu
of the ex-Rebel’s contingent
having effectively taken Scotland as his fiefdom in the Union Jack
share out
of territory, he was to a degree out of the picture when it came to the ex-Brethren part of the club in England slugging it out.

T
he fact
I
had spent the night at Chertsey rather than
Wembley
confirmed
that Charlie had the London charter in his camp, which would make sense given that was where he’d come into the club under Scroat’s wing. Scampi had been a Midlands charter member so I guessed they were leaning Charlie’s way as well.

Against that, from the guys I’d seen and what I’d overheard, Wibble seemed to have the support of the Southern elements of the club outside London, from the Thames Valley down to the South Coast and across to the West.

Which would seem to just leave
Toad and the powerful northern charter in play
, despite the fact that Charlie was in theory, and very much in theory it now turned out, P of the northern charter
.

And from where I s
a
t it was difficult to guess which way Toad would want to jump. Toad was an old school, hard core one-percenter. Toad, I knew from having met him last year, didn’t want to be an officer, he just wanted to be one of the boys, and to concentrate on putting the animal back into party animal. So from that
standpoint
, I’d have thought that he would have leant towards Wibble’s point of view and
would
want
to get the club away from gangsterism and back to his hard drinking, riding and partying roots. On the other hand, he was still Charlie’s uncle, and Charlie was still in theory the P of his charter, and if there was one thing Toad was,
other than violent,
it was loyal.

‘No, he’s undecided at the moment
,
’
s
aid Wibble.

There was a second or two of shared silence.

‘A
nd
of course,
if Charlie can get hold of Damage’s money, well then, all bets are off
,’ he added.

‘
Why?
’

He gave a cynical shrug, ‘
All power grows from the barrel of a gun they say. But on the other hand, if you’ve got enough money, it can buy you loads of guns, and the people to use them.
’

Which seemed to make sense.

*

‘So w
hat about you Wibble?
’
I asked,
changing the subject for a moment, ‘
we’ve never spoken before about what you do outside the club. What’s your day job?
’

‘
Me?
’
h
e asked,
seemingly
amused
by the question
,
‘
I’m a QS.
’

That was a bit of a surprise.

‘
Self-
employed
.
’
H
e reached out to top up his
coffee and offered the cafetière
to me, I shook my head, I felt I’d had enough
caffeine
just for the moment, so he put it down again on the table between us.