Heavy Duty Trouble (The Brethren Trilogy) (11 page)

Out back in the single storey lean to kitchen was where it all came together and he did his actual cooking.

Scampi’s recipe was a classic hot cook.

Take two large screw-topped jars, put holes in the lids and connect the lids using surgical tubing, remembering to seal around the connections thoroughly.

Half fill one jar with distilled water, close the lid and place on a hotplate to warm up.

Once it’s beginning to steam, put your mix of pseudo and iodine crystals into the other jar, add a splash of distilled water and put this on a hotplate as well.

Then throw in your phosphorus and quickly screw the lid on tightly as the reaction will start immediately.

Cook for about an hour and a half or until the contents are no longer boiling.

Take off the heat and leave to cool. If you have a strong stench of rotten eggs then congratulations, you have made your dope in that black gunk at the bottom of the jar. Now all you have to do is get it out again.

Pour in some distilled water, screw on a lid without any holes and shake like hell until the gunk has all come off into the water. Filter the contents through into another glass jar, but keep the strainings as this is your phosphorus that you can keep for later reuse.

What you should be left with is a jar of honey yellow-looking liquid.

Top up the jar with pure petroleum spirit, add a couple of tablespoons of caustic soda, leave to sit for five minutes, shake violently to mix and then leave to settle again for about half an hour.

Siphon the petroleum spirit and dope mix into another plastic drinks bottle taking care to leave the sediment behind. Add a small amount of distilled water, and a drop of hydrochloric acid, and again shake well. Turn the bottle upside down and leave to stand so the spirit settles out above the water which will now contain your dope.

Put a clean Pyrex bowl on your hotplate and get it good and hot.

Then, very carefully, holding the drinks bottle as still as you can, loosen the lid until the water starts to dribble out of the bottle and into the bowl, being damn careful not to let any of the petroleum spirit spill into it or it could be Goodnight Vienna.

The water will quickly evaporate in the hot bowl and once it has dried off
,
pour a small amount of acetone into the bowl. Swirl it around as it sizzles and if you’ve done it right, as it boils off it will leave behind as a reward for all your efforts a circle of crystals of pure meth to depending on your choice, stick up your nose, share with like minded friends, or simply sell for profit.

Easy really.

And they say this stuff can be dangerous?

‘Listen Scampi,
’ Scroat asked,
‘
we need to hole up here for a while,
a
few days, maybe a week,
that OK with you?’

‘Sure guys, you’re my bros ain’t ya?’ he said
,
‘
M
ake yoursel
ves
at home
.’

H
e showed us into a large upstairs room with a selection of mattresses strewn across the floor around a filthy looking rug, ‘You can have the guest room here. Stay as long as you like guys. Be good to have some company.’

*

All told, w
e were there as it turned out for about a week.
Apart from our jail trips,
I never got to leave the house. In fact I never got to leave the room except to go for a shit or a piss. But by turns Bung or Scroat would disappear off to get something organized, or have quiet conversations on their phones, sometimes together, sometimes alone.

Something was up
,
I knew. This felt as though it was about more than
just
us lying low for a while; but I knew better than to ask what.

With the news about Loki MC having arrived it looked as though
Wibble and Charlie’s crews
had decided they needed to bury their increasingly obvious differences and disagreements about the future of the club, or at least work in uneasy alliance,
while they
met the new threat.

Scroat even
felt secure enough with arrangements that he disappeared
off
one afternoon
and returned having
fetched his bike which he parked up in the back yard. He had to go
and
get it himself of course. It was another one of those unwritten rules, no one in the club would ride another guy’s bike.
But the fact he felt comfortable enough to leave Bung and me alone at Scampi’s for the couple of hours it took, told me everything I needed to know about where Scampi’s loyalties lay in
the
club. And they weren’t with Wibble.

‘Thank fuck for that,’ muttered Bung looking out of the window as he rode up the track towards the house and
disappeared
out of sight round the side, ‘he should be easier to live with now he’s over his PMS.’

‘PMS?’

‘Parked
Motorcycle
Syndrome.’

Bikes were expensive toys to buy, Harleys especially. Out of interest, and delayed teenage ambition if I was honest, while I’d been working with Damage I’d taken a trip into my local dealer to check out the current ranges, and been shocked at the prices. There was obviously good money to be made in catering to m
iddle class men’s mid life crise
s.

So how on earth did a group of working guys afford them
,
I wondered
?

‘
I took out a home improvement loan to get mine
,’ Bung told me when I asked him
.

‘
So how the hell did that work?
’
I laughed.

‘
Well I thought my home was improved a lot by having a Harley parked in it
.’

I could see why he
would think
that
,
I’d admit
. I just wasn’t so sure his bank manager would have felt quite the same.

Anyway,
I had to resign myself to the fact that
for the fores
e
eable
future, Scampi’s fleapit was going to be home sweet home
.

Meanwhile I’d be
stuck between a pair of bikers belonging to differing factions within the club
.
As I listened over that evening, and then the days to come, to Bung and Scroat bickering while we were cooped up
, it was obvious that
allied against a common enemy or not,
bad blood was building with the club between the two factions.

I was going to be lucky indeed if it wasn’t going to be my blood that ended up being spilt.

*

Tuesday 1
6
th
February
2010

Day two in the Big Brother house and it was
something of a re
prise
of the first. A trip out to the M40 only this time we headed towards
Aylesbury
for my visit.
And once again to my great initial relief, having been dropped off in the car park by the chuckle brothers, no one inside the prison seemed to question my papers or identification at all
,
and so I was soon following a guard who escorted me to the door of a
yet another
visiting room.

‘
Well, well, well,
’
a familiar voice sneered
as I walked into the room
,
‘
look who’s back from the dead
then?’

‘Hello Charlie,’ I said
,
pulling up a chair
.

Charlie was much the same as I remembered him.

Having been with Bung again for a while he brought me up with an abrupt shock.

With Scroat it was easy. He was such an openly hostile, aggressive bastard that you couldn’t help but treat him like a living, breathing, and above all ticking, walking bomb just looking for an excuse to go off.

The trouble with Bung was that he was amiable,
so
I
sometimes
forg
o
t.

With Bung, once you got past his monosyllabic front and got him into conversation, you felt you could talk, joke even, and that was dangerous. Behind the scary exterior once you got to know him he was a genuinely nice guy, friendly, funny, loyal to his mates. But then you always had to remember that this was a guy who was a senior club member, and that meant that his loyalty to his mates went way beyond the point that most people would draw the line. He had his
Bonesman
tab. And as I knew from bitter experience, he hadn’t got that by being Mr Fozzy Bear
24/7
. When it came to taking care of club business Bung would do whatever it took, up to and including cold blooded murder.

People on the outside who’d never met them often made the mistake of assuming that everyone in the club would be the same. That they were all biker outlaws first, and people second, a process probably not helped by most of them telling anyone who ever dared to ask that they were outlaws first, second and last.
One-percenters
forever, forever
one-per
centers
.

But the reality was that like any other bunch of guys, despite how much they had in common, which was a hell of a lot, they were all different. Because the truth was that they weren’t caricatures or archetypes, they were people.
I’d met guys I thought were great and some that I thought were real shits, not I guess that any of them would care a toss what I thought about them.

And from what I’d seen in my time with them, none of them seemed to be living the luxury lifestyle that you might have expected if they were the international drug smuggling mafia that the cops and some of the commentators would have you believe.
The reality from those I’d met was
they were
a mix of ordinary working stiffs, with ordinary working jobs as mechanics, lorry drivers, brickies, chippies and labourers, mixed in with some more exotica, the nigh
tclub bouncers and the odd semi-
professional
.
Damage had been an IFA for Christ’s sake. Sure there were some within the club who were dealing drugs, from those wearing the ‘You can trust me, I’m a menace’ tab which was for many an invitation to customers to do street level business, through to Damage’s bulk importation service. But I seriously doubted that many
big time
drug kingpins were going to want to do business wearing either a tab or a patch. How much more visible could you make yourself?

For all that he could turn on the charm when he wanted to, be damn charismatic at times even, I was always conscious that there was a side of him
, behind those eyes,
that was a coldly calculating and manipulative machine. It was his MO; it had successfully got him to where he was, so there was little reason for him to change at this late stage. He could have me killed without a moment’s hesitation I knew, he was probably one of the most dangerous men I had ever met, but even so I didn’t find him personally threatening. He
wouldn’t do it on a whim and he
wasn’t going to just tee off without provocation, or for some perceived slight, or even just for the hell of it the way I felt Scroat was always just itching to do. He might have me hit, but if he did, it felt as though there wouldn’t be anything personal about it, it would just be business.

Which seems an odd thing to take comfort from
,
but I
had to say that despite everything, I
did. At least it made talking to him a less full on nerve wracking experience than dealing with Scroat, or worse, Charlie.

Charlie
,
Charlie
,
Charlie
,
I thought
,
as I sat down
.

How would you describe Charlie? Of all the club members I’d met I had to say that he was the one who struck me simply as a cold blooded, and completely ruthless, psychopath.

Wibble would kill you if you became a problem that needed to be dealt with.

Charlie would kill you if he felt like it.

But the irony was, the less overtly threatening Bung and Wibble were, the more I actually needed to watch my step with what I said
sometimes,
for fear of dropping myself in it or overstepping the mark.

With Charlie,
I didn’t know where to start.

He
was simply sitting there, staring silently at me as if
deliberately
psyching me out.

The chill came off him in waves.

He was in Grendon, and I now wondered whether that was actually just a coincidence. As a prison its main official claim to fame was that it had the leading psychiatric unit for prisoners with antisocial personality disorders. Unofficially, the incident when a jailed psychopath beat a middle aged paedophile to death in his cell, and only failed in his reported plan to use a spoon he was carrying to eat his victim’s brain because he hadn’t
managed
to break open the skull by repeatedly stamping and jumping on the dead man’s head, pretty much topped the list.