Heavy Duty Attitude (16 page)

So meanwhile, I had plenty of time to chat to Bung as he drove, if I could get him to give me anything more than monosyllabic answers.

Much to my surprise, he seemed happy to talk, even after some careful probing and working around towards the subject, about the taboo area of The Brethren’s internal politics.

‘So what’s Wibble’s standing like?’ I asked him eventually, mentioning some of the points that had come out of my last interview with him, ‘Is this situation damaging it?’

Bung shrugged. ‘Wibble sort of inherited the club when Damage died, he didn’t seize it in an open contest…’

‘So do some question or challenge his right to be in charge?
He just grunted dismissively at that.

I thought about our destination and what I’d seen to date of the Cambridge crew, as well as what Wibble had said, and hazarded a guess.

‘Was Thommo one of those?’
‘Why d’you ask?’

‘Oh I don’t know. It’s just Thommo seemed to be arsey, you know, before the thing.’

Bung smiled grimly, ‘Yeah, Thommo fancies himself.’
‘Is that a problem?’

‘No. It’s nothing Wibble can’t handle,’ he said with an air of finality that discouraged further questioning so we fell silent for a while. Outside the flat fields beside the motorway sped past in boring monotony under the open blue sky.

*

 

From the road signs I could see we were getting close now, so I stirred myself to break the rumbling silence.

‘Can I ask you a question?’
‘If you like.’

‘Well,’ I started, unsure as to how to phrase what I wanted to say, ‘Look, normally you guys don’t talk to anyone outside the club about what you do, do you? I had it from Damage a lot,
club business is club business
.’ He shrugged without even glancing towards me as if this was all just obvious. ‘Yeah, so what?’

‘So why are you guys talking to me now? Why are you telling me all this stuff?’

‘Beats me.’
‘Sorry?’ I asked in surprise.
‘I’ve no idea,’ he replied, ‘It’s Wibble’s idea, not mine.’
‘
Wibble
told you to tell me all this stuff?’ I repeated in amazement. ‘Yeah. He said that he wanted you to be fully briefed.’

He glanced across at me and added in a perfectly friendly tone of nothing personal, that’s just the way it is chum, ‘If it was up to me I’d tell you jack shit, but that’s the way Wibble wants to play it.’

‘Christ,’ I said.

Really, I needed to digest that. Apart from anything else I wasn’t too sure about how I felt about being ‘fully briefed’ about what The Brethren were up to. That sounded like very dangerous knowledge to be carrying around.

‘And Wibble’s the boss, what he says goes, is that it?’
‘Sorta.’
Bung had gone back to ignoring me and watching the road as he spoke.

‘Sorta?’ That sounded odd to me, ‘The way Damage told it, when he was in charge he was pretty much top dog and everyone did what he said.’ ‘Yeah well, that was back when he was around. Things aren’t quite the same these days.’

‘Aren’t they?’
‘No.’
‘In what way?’

‘Well,’ Bung shrugged, ‘when Damage went, we had to rally round to replace him. There was no one obvious to fully step into his shoes and we didn’t want any instability at the top after what had happened, so the three main guys got together to work it out, how to handle it I mean.’

‘The leadership?’
‘Yeah, we didn’t want any trouble over it that could give us grief. After all we’d just lost Damage which was a big shock. He’d been central to the club’s business, so it needed to be looked after.’

‘So what happened?’

‘Well, there’s not a lot to say really.’ He shrugged. ‘Wibble and a couple of other key guys from across the country got together. They agreed it was in everyone’s interests that there was a quick succession that could be announced after Damage’s funeral because the priority was to keep the business going.’

‘Was that it?’ I asked.
‘Yeah.’
‘As it was in everybody’s interests?’
‘That’s right.’
‘And Thommo? Was he involved in this?’

Bung glanced across at me and gave me a look as if to wonder whether I was a bit thick.

‘Yeah, of course Thommo was involved. He represented the southern charters and Toad represented the northern ones. But someone had to have the title so Wibble took it.’

‘Why Wibble?’
‘Wibble’s Freemen, Thommo isn’t.’

Now I realised the real situation at last. It wasn’t a dictatorship at all, it was really a triumvirate.

‘So there were three of them running it to keep the peace?’ I wanted to check my understanding, ‘a southern rep, a northern rep and Wibble as P? So Wibble was in office, but not fully in power the way Damage had been?’

‘Something like that,’ Bung nodded distractedly as he negotiated a roundabout on the outskirts of town and I digested this news and its implications.

‘And the Rebels? Where do they fit into this?’

 

Bung shrugged as if it were of no account. ‘It’s just good business. If we’re in competition then all we’re doing is cutting each other’s…’

‘Throats?’ I suggested.
He laughed, ‘Yeah well, sometimes I guess, but actually ‘margins’ is what I was gonna say.’

We took another left turn, passing through what looked like a rundown housing estate.

 

‘But if we co-operate,’ he continued, ‘we can keep prices high and make more money with less hassle. It’s a no brainer.’

Wibble didn’t, as Bung put it, seize the post of President, I realised. That was the key. From what Bung was telling me, Wibble was seen to have almost inherited the title. Alright, formally he had been voted in, but I now understood that some of The Brethren undoubtedly saw him as piggybacking on Damage’s achievements. So Wibble’s problem in essence was that he hadn’t yet proved himself, he hadn’t won the position outright and in his own right. And until he did so, he would be vulnerable to the barons with their own powerbases below him, who would be continually manoeuvring against him, jockeying for power and looking for their opening.

And proving himself was going to be bloody difficult, especially after the reign of someone with Damage’s stature. It was one of those basic rules of life I suppose, never succeed a successful bloke.

I thought about what Bung was saying and what it could mean. It made some kind of sense of what Wibble was up to I supposed. If Wibble hadn’t clearly taken the presidency on his own, hadn’t built his position on his own reputation, and was having to deal with powerful and rebellious barons beneath him, then would that be a reason for wanting to build his own PR reputation?

But it only made sense so far, I decided. No matter what anyone outside the club thought about him, that surely wouldn’t do him much good internally with the guys.

Plus I kicked myself that I’d been missing something so obvious here that I should surely have seen before! The most obvious beneficiary after an event isn’t the only beneficiary, or even the only one who expects to benefit.

It was the old
cui bono
issue. Just because he had succeeded to the top title of president didn’t mean that Wibble had been the only one to have had, or even just hoped for, a bump up in power as a result of Damage’s death.

Of course, Wibble was not the only Brethren who would have had an interest in Damage’s death. On the basis of what Bung had just said, there was at least Thommo and this other bloke Toad.
Thommo, obviously, I’d met already. And Toad, while I’d not yet come across him in person in my dealings with any of The Brethren, was a name I recognised. He was a man with quite a reputation within the club.

Of course I remembered then, he’d not been at the Toy Run. Toad had been The Rebel’s guest for the day, enjoying their hospitality, as Stu had put it.

Which in reality meant that Toad had been The Rebel’s hostage, to be held as their guarantee that they weren’t simply riding into an ambush by their old enemies The Brethren. And it was a role for which Toad would have had to volunteer.

So Christ, he had to be someone with balls to step into that one I decided.

Both of them had been promoted to key roles in running the club after it had happened. And who knows, perhaps one of them might even have been expecting to be in with a shout at the top job?

And that, I decided, might shed a whole new light on Thommo’s attitude problem with Wibble.

 

After all, whatever else they were known for, triumvirates weren’t famed in history for their great longevity.

Which, I thought, as we passed high hedgerows along a leafy street back out of town, raised another interesting question which I’d been puzzling about on and off over the past year or so, and which had assumed even more relevancy since Wibble and The Brethren had barged their way back into my life at the end of last month.

And that was, why had Damage talked about Wibble in the material he had given me in those prison interviews that went on to become his biography
Heavy Duty People
? In general, as I had realised when I was reviewing and editing the tapes as I prepared the material for writing, Damage had been scrupulous to only name members of The Brethren who were dead as being involved in any crimes.

With one exception. And that was Wibble.

Damage knew his words were going to be published. Hell, that was the reason he had wanted to speak to me in the first place, to get his story out. So why, I asked myself, did he run the risk of implicating Wibble in crimes in what he told me? Wibble hadn’t been central to what was going on at the time Damage wanted to talk about, in fact he’d been The Legion’s junior patch at the time of the patch over. It would have been easy for Damage to have left his name out altogether, he could have quite easily told his story without it, so why hadn’t he?
Could it be that far from being his chosen successor as so many assumed, Damage had actually been trying to damage Wibble with what he said?

Certainly that explanation had seemed to make sense if you assumed that it was Wibble who had had Damage killed, and that Damage’s speaking to me was intended as his posthumous revenge on the people he realised were moving against him.

This explanation also tied in and answered another question I had asked myself, which was why, in talking to me, had Damage blown the very smuggling route that had been the basis of his power within The Brethren?

The only answer I had been able to think of at the time was that it had been some form of a scorched earth policy. That Damage felt he had already lost control of it and therefore he just wanted to take it down so no one else could benefit from it.

But this all rested on an assumption that Wibble and Damage had fallen out, that Damage believed Wibble was organising some form of coup and had been using me as a tool, for, if not fighting back, then at least taking his revenge.

But what if it wasn’t like that, I now wondered.
Did it also work the other way round?

Because even though Wibble was the only living Brethren that Damage had come anywhere close to dropping in it with what he’d told me about Wibble’s links to business, he hadn’t actually given anything definitive that the cops could use to nail him, had he? Undoubtedly he could have done so if he had wanted to. Damage must have had enough real dirt on Wibble to have the cops bury him if that’s what he had wanted, but he hadn’t dished that dirt.

But what if, instead of thinking that Wibble was the one moving against him in the club and that Wibble was going to be the one that was going to have him killed so he could take the top slot, Damage was actually supporting Wibble as his chosen successor?

Seen in this light, suddenly what Damage had let slip about Wibble, the hard man who’d become intimately involved with The Brethren’s drug business, looked very different.

What, I asked myself, if Damage had been looking to send out a different message about Wibble? A message that Wibble was the one who he wanted as his successor, that he knew the gang’s business and that Damage trusted him. What if all that stuff about Wibble had actually been Damage giving him a public character reference for the guys?

And how did this then fit with the way Damage had blown the drug route to me?

Was it, I wondered, because he had come up with something else? Something new that would be under his control or that of someone he trusted? If that was the case, then blowing the old route might simply have been a way to stop other officers in the club from trying to take the operation over and run the business independently of Damage or his chosen proxy.

Christ, it was a long old road I thought to myself, trying to second guess what was going on here.

Bung was slowing down as we approached a small parade of boarded up shops on an out of town estate. He pulled over and parked up in the lay-by in front of the middle one. It had The Brethren’s colours painted across the shuttered windows.

‘We’re here,’ he said somewhat unnecessarily as he tugged up the handbrake.

 

But I was still thinking furiously.

If all this was the case. If Wibble really was Damage’s groomed successor, then just because Damage wanted him to get the job didn’t mean everyone else would accept him, did it? Particularly once Damage was out of the way. And anyway, what would be in it for Damage once he was gone?

But I could answer that for myself as soon as I asked it. Lots of reasons. The club for one.
Sharon for a second.

His kid, no – kids, I reminded myself, for a third, as we climbed out of the car.

Was that it, I wondered, thinking about the way Wibble had the attitudefilled young Charlie riding with the club. Was that the deal? Damage would back Wibble so Wibble would look after Damage’s kid as the quid pro quo? Was Wibble his guardian, or did it go further, was Wibble really no more than regent for Damage’s kid?

I shook my head as I stood back while Bung pressed the clubhouse intercom. It was all just speculation I told myself, all ifs and buts and maybes. I could read everything either way with as much conviction. If I was trying to just theorise I would be building a house on sand.

*

Other than the strikers who were mounting security at the front door under the watchful supervision of a full patch, the place seemed empty, deserted, and silent as we stepped inside and the steel reinforced door was quickly secured behind us.