Heavy Duty Trouble (The Brethren Trilogy) (25 page)

‘Satan’s still got that restraining order out.’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ I said as I walked away with yet another heavy box from off the back seat, ‘pull the other one.’

Inside at least, Wibble was ferrying the boxes down the hallway and into the back room where they were piling up beside a dining table.

‘
Is this it?
’
a
sked Wibble
,
as I staggered through the door with the last one
.

‘
Yes, that’s it. That’s the lot
,
’
I confirmed
,
as he took it
from
me and led us
through to the room to survey the pile.

‘
Shit
!’
he said
setting the last box down on the table
.
‘
We
ll we
’d better get
on with it then
hadn’t we?
’

*

The house was quiet which seemed surprising for a Saturday and I noticed the kid’s bikes had disappeared from the hallway.

‘Place seems empty,’ I said casually, ‘the family not around?’

‘
Nah,
’ he said
,
not looking up from the box he was examining,
‘
they’ve gone to stay with her mum for a while, just until this is all over
.’

‘
Hey,
I thought you said this place was
s
afe
?
’ I objected.

‘
Yeah well, I think it probably is
,’ he said, glancing across to see what I was doing, ‘B
ut why take any chances eh?
Anyway, it makes life a bit easier.’

‘Oh, why’s that?’

‘Well
, like I said,
you can stay here while we’re going through this stuff.
You can have Sam’s room
, she’s got a full sized single bed now and she’s not going to be using it
,
’ he said decisively.

It was the
pi
è
ce de r
é
sistance
of what turned out to be a s
urreal stay.
Not having kids myself I have to say that a seven year old girl’s bedroom was
everything
I expected it to be, all Barbie p
ink
colours,
boy band posters, glitter stars
,
S
ylvanian families,
and
M
y
L
ittle
P
ony.

*

‘So, where do we start?’
I asked him, turning back to the pile of boxes stacked in front of us.

‘Well, it depends what we’re looking for.’

‘
So w
hat are we looking for?’
I continued.

‘I don’t know for sure.’

‘Well that’s going to make it a tad difficult isn’t it?
It’s not as though w
e’re even looking for a needle in
a
haystack here
is it
? We don’t even know if it’s a bloody needle
that
we’re after.’

Wibble had obviously been giving this some serious thought for a while now.

‘
Well he wasn’t going to make it that easy was
he
?
’ he reasoned
.
‘
If he’d done that then who knows who might have spotted it. He didn’t know what you were going to put in that
book of yours did he
? S
o he co
uldn’t have given it to you in a way that would have been too obvious in case you went out a
nd
just b
labbed
it to the world.
’

No, I could see that made sense.
‘
O
K
, I buy that, but it still doesn’t help us really does it? We still don’t know what we’re looking for
do we?’

‘
No we don’t, but I’ve got some ideas
.’

‘
Well, that’s a start, so what do you think it might be?
’

‘It’s going to be a
name perhaps?
’ he suggested, ‘It’s going to be something or s
omeone
that
doesn’t fit
.
’

‘
So the truth is
we don’t know what we are looking for or even that it’s actually here at all
?
’

‘No. But what other choice do we have?
If you’re sure he really never told you anything
,
that is?
’
he looked at me questioningly.

‘Look
,
Damage never said to me, Hey Iain, copy this down, X marks the spot where the treasure’s buried.’

‘Pity really. Would have made things a whole lot easier
i
f he had.’

‘Yeah, inconsiderate of him wasn’t it?’

‘Or something.’

*

‘So who do you think it is we’re looking for then Wibble?
’
I asked. ‘You must have some idea about who you think we’re after surely? Some suspicion? There must have been someone that Damage was dealing with who might have been it
that you can think of
?’

He shook his head as he carefully pulled the files out of a box and began to sort them into piles on the table in front of him.

‘Not a clue mate. If I knew I’d go right to them, but the truth is I don’t, so I can’t.’

‘Really?’ I asked, surprised, I’d have thought he’d known something.

‘Yep
,
’
h
e said, not looking up
.
‘It could be anyone see? Literally anyone Damage was dealing with. It might be someone we and the other clubs know that he’d had recommended
to him as being reliable
. We all use the same guys, tattooists, bike builders, we book the same bands and acts for shows, so there’s loads of contacts and
go-between
s that all the clubs use, and a load of crims as well. It could be any of them.
’

He hoiked another box up
on to
the table and lifted the lid
off
to check its contents, ‘
And then we have club open nights, events when anyone who wanted could come along.
Or it might be someone that we’ve never even fucking met.
Truth is, it
could be
fucking
anybody.’

‘Yes
,
but it can’t really just be anybody though can it?’ I objected. ‘Damage wasn’t just going to ask random strangers,
H
ey
mate,
could you do me a favour and launder a few millions of drug dosh for me
,
was he
?’

‘No
,
’ he admitted.

‘So,’ I said, following the logic, ‘it’s got to be somebody who Damage knew could do what needed to be done, either themselves or through contacts. It
also
has to be somebody Damage
either
already
knew
and
groomed, or more likely had introduced to him as being the man for the job. Which means it probably needs to be someone who knows other crim
inal
s, who knows money, and how to move it. And it probably has to be someone that Damage could see easily when he needed to give them instructions.’

‘OK
,
’ I saw him nodding as I spoke, again it all made sense.

‘So does that narrow it down at all for you?’
I asked.

He thought for a minute but then shook his head. ‘No. Not really.’

*

Given the
volume of paper and the hou
rs of recordings I’d stored on my laptop, it was going to be a
long old process. Basically we decided that we’d both
look at everything, and both li
sten to ever
y
thing
and
each
make our
own notes
. We would
jot down anythi
ng that struck us as odd, or meaningful, anything
in other words
that might in retrospect s
ound like Damage hinting at a hi
dden meaning
, a deeper importance than I’d picked up on at the time.

And then once we were done
with each bit
, we’d swap notes, discuss our ideas, see where we agreed, where one had spotted so
m
ething the other hadn’t
,
and what other things it reminded us of
,
or might link back
in
to what we’d already heard o
r
read.

Like I said, it was going to be a long
, slow, painstaking
job
,
so we al
so had plenty of time to c
hat. We were looking for connec
tions, things that fitted or didn’t fit, and if I was to help to try to spot these I needed to know as
much about what was going on a
s
possible
,
I argued to Wibble
.
I needed him to be open with me, I
said, I
needed him to tell me about club business
, or at least as mu
ch as I needed to know if this was going to have a chance of working
;
and after a moment’s consideration, with a shrug and a nod he conceded the point.

And so over the next few days, as we read through my interviews with
D
amage
and lis
t
ened to his gravelly voice on the laptop’s speaker,
I had another experience
of interviewing a senior
one-percenter
club officer who would answer my questions about club business.

Not so much
déjà vu
, as
déjà ou
ï
r
.

‘Have you ever taught anyone to ride?’
Wibble asked me
once
,
as we talked
while leafing through yet another box of interview notes and press cuttings I had collected as part of my research.

I have to say that it wasn’t something I’d ever done. So I said, ‘No, why?’

‘
I taught the old lady to do it after we first met. And I found there’s a bit of a trick to it
,
’
h
e reminisced.

‘
You know, it’s a funny thing, but when she started out, she was all wobbly and stuff, like you’d expect, she was all over the place
cos
she was trying to get her balance. But then once she’d got going and the bike was moving properly and she had her feet on the pegs, then just balancing wasn’t so much of a problem.’

Where was this leading
,
I wondered as he carried on talking.

‘I don’t understand…’ I started
,
but he cut me off.

‘T
he real problem once she was rolling was that she just looked at anything that was in the way.’

‘And that’s a problem?’

‘Oh fuck
,
yes,’ he laughed. ‘
Cos
the thing is, the bike tends just naturally
to go
straight towards wherever you’re looking. So the more she was focusing on the problem looming up, the more certain she was to ride straight into the fucking thing.’

‘So the trick is?’

‘So the trick is to get them to look up, not down. Look at where they want to go, not what they’re trying to miss. Do that and then they and the bike’ll just head the right way.’

‘But what’s this got to do with Damage?’ I asked
,
I had a shrewd idea that Wibble wasn’t just sharing happy family memories for the sake of it.

Damage had been looking to get the club out of what he saw as the downside of
the
business
,
Wibble explained. The corruption of the brotherhood that too much money brought, that was Wibble’s gig as well
.