Heavy Duty Attitude (10 page)

‘OK, you can take it off now,’ instructed a familiar voice.

It was a normal flat I saw, as I pulled the balaclava off my head. Up on one of the top floors of a block it had an anonymous view out over what I assumed was somewhere in north London but I really couldn’t be sure. Inside, the living room was sparsely furnished and quite ordinary, apart that was from the steel backing to the door and type of secondary internal security cage behind it of the type beloved of drugs dealers looking to avoid being taxed by the clientele.

Wibble was leaning casually against the doorway through to the kitchen, his arms folded across his chest.

 

‘Nice,’ I said, setting the lid down next to the ashtray onto a cheap veneer coffee table and pulling off my gloves, ‘your place?’

 

He grinned at that.

 

‘Nah, just a safe house we use,’ he said, stepping into the room and indicating I should take a pew.

As I sat on one of the small wooden armed sofas, Bung made himself comfortable, flopping onto an armchair beside the cage. He was going to wait for me and take me back I guessed, noticing he’d not bothered to take off his riding gloves. It occurred to me that Wibble might only just have got here as well since he was wearing riding gear and a pair of thin black leather gloves.
‘Drink? Coffee?’ Wibble asked and without thinking I said, ‘Yes, that would be great please.’

‘Bung?’

Bung declined with some comment about needing to get a striker up here to take care of this sort of shit which Wibble warded off with a query whether Bung thought Wibble was too grand to be making a cuppa or two? Besides which he knew this wasn’t the sort of place that they brought strikers to now was it?

Wasn’t it, I wondered? Why not?

So I sat there and fiddled for a minute while he ducked back into the kitchen and clicked on the kettle. It must have boiled already since with a rumble of bubbles it tripped off again almost immediately and I heard the clink of a teaspoon as he doled out the instant and then poured the water. A fridge opened and then closed with a pop of its seal and he reappeared bearing two mismatching mugs, thrusting one out for me to take before he plonked his onto a spare ring-stained space on the table in front of us beside a pile of bike mags and sat down opposite me.

He made his coffee strong, much stronger than I liked it I noticed, as I found a clearish spot to put the mug down in front of me. Dark brown-black smuts of undissolved granules were still swirling on the surface where he had stirred it. I decided that I wasn’t going to ask for more milk. Not now that he’d sat down anyway.

But the odd thing which was starting to make me very uneasy, as I nerved myself and took a cautious sip of the scalding dark brew, was that even now, throughout this process, he still hadn’t removed his gloves.

The reasons they might both want to keep gloves on were obvious of course.

I wondered if I could remember exactly which surfaces I had now touched that might have my fingerprints on them since they sure as hell weren’t going to have Wibble’s or Bung’s.

And that was the good scenario.

The bad one was that they were going to protect their hands while they did something else, despite the smiles and the relaxed atmosphere. And the only other person who was there that they might be planning to do that something to, was me.
*

‘So?’ I asked, taking another brave sip and wincing a bit at the heat as I peered over the rim of the mug at Wibble who had settled back into the sofa with his mug in his hand, ‘what’s up?’

‘It’s the goat fuckers,’ he said simply, ‘them and the zombies. They’ve gone over. They’re now squaws.’

 

Mentally I translated this news to myself.

Capricorn MC owned East Anglia above some ill-defined border somewhere on the edge of Essex and across into north Cambridgeshire and then up into Lincolnshire. They had been big in the acid trade in the seventies and eighties, and moving with the times to take full advantage of their distribution networks, they were now heavily into the E business, bringing it over direct from the producers’ labs in Holland.

What Wibble was telling me was that not only had they joined up with The Dead Men Riding MC who owned Yorkshire and Humberside, so that between them they now controlled a big swathe of eastern England, which was bad enough. But that they had swapped their own colours for new ones in the old Harley brand scheme of orange and black was worse still.

Both clubs had patched over to become Mohawks.

This was big news, I knew immediately that The Mohawks had established a mainland UK charter for the first time. And I knew something else too, that The Mohawks had a long history elsewhere with both The Brethren and The Rebels.

‘But I thought…’ I started.
‘That they were at each other’s throats?’ Wibble asked calmly. ‘Well yes. What about the stabbing and stuff…’

‘Well whatever that was about, it obviously isn’t a problem between them now.’

Bob would be interested in this, I decided. Now at least I would have something to trade, assuming of course he didn’t know already from the cops’ sources in other clubs. For all I knew the cops might have had grasses in either or both The Capricorn or Dead Men Riding. But then if he had, surely he would have been better informed before the attack. A question to file away to think about.
But then how long had Wibble known, I wondered? But that also seemed like a question to keep to myself.

‘It’s a bit too much of a coincidence that the attack took place then wasn’t it? Just as your peace with The Rebels was being announced?’ I asked. He glared at me.

My implication was obvious, even if unstated, and he didn’t like it. But all the same he couldn’t avoid it. If the attack was aimed at spoiling the peace deal’s coming out party then someone had to have let The Mohawks know.

‘So who is it?’ I continued.
He shrugged as if trying to shake off an irritating detail.
‘Someone who wants to split the clubs apart again.’
‘But who could that be?’ I pressed.

‘I don’t know. Yet. But when we do…’ he left it unfinished and I thought it best to leave it there as well and not to risk my luck any further. But the ‘who could it be’ was easy to answer. I could do that for myself straight away.

There wouldn’t have been that many people who would have known what was about to go down, and all of those would have had to be at least full patched members of either one or the other clubs, if not amongst its top officers.

There would be plenty of guys in both clubs who might object to the two of them cosying up like this. Everyone in and around the outlaw biker scene knew there were hatreds that ran long and deep from what had been twenty or thirty years of virtual war between the clubs.

Or then again, it might be someone with another agenda. Someone aiming to embarrass the leadership of either club perhaps, for reasons of their own.

And that was before you started to think who outside the club might want to attack. But then how could anyone outside have known? I checked myself. No, whoever had actually pulled the triggers, they had to have been operating on the basis of information from within one or other of the clubs.

‘So what happens now?’

‘We’ll leave it to the local guys. They were hosting the run, it was their turf, they were responsible for security and they fucked up. So it’s up to them to deal with it or to ask for help if they need it.’
With the serious loss of face that would involve, I thought. Given how Thommo felt about Wibble and his crowd I guessed it would be a fairly chilly day in hell before that happened.

I gathered from his tone that was about all I was going to get for the moment. I could sense, without saying a word, he was drawing our discussion to a close, but that was alright, I didn’t need to fight it, I had enough for what I wanted at the present.

Then just as I was getting ready to go, Wibble had a last surprise for me. ‘Here,’ he said handing me a small cloth embroidered badge, ‘Before you go, I’ve got something for you to take. Put that on.’

I looked at what he’d given me quizzically. It was a smaller stylised variation of The Brethren’s patch than the one they all wore between their rockers, with the word ‘Support’ on a tab above, Wibble’s name on a flash across the centre and the initials LLH&R woven on a tab at the bottom.

‘Get that sewn on your jacket. Have it on the front or the side somewhere and it’ll give you protection, no one will lift a finger against you,’ he instructed, ‘But don’t put it anywhere on the back or you’ll get filled in sharpish.’

I understood and nodded as I slipped the token into my pocket. Having it on the back of my jacket would look too much like an outsider claiming some kinship, some entitlement to the Menace colours, and whatever my status no Brethren was going to tolerate that sort of infringement for even a moment.

But by the same token, a Freemen named support patch would be my ticket to the inside. It marked me out as someone who was trusted to work with and for The Freemen, someone on the inside and in the know. It would be a critical pass that told Brethren that they were free to speak to me. And it would be my safeguard, telling any Brethren that decided to take me on that I was under the protection of The Freemen and that they would have to answer to my sponsor if they did so.

‘I said I’d sort you out didn’t I? Well there you go.’

It was weird, I thought, as I slipped into blackness behind the balaclava again for the trip back. With this support patch, without asking for it or seeking it, I now found myself in a unique position. I was a journalist still, but now one potentially ‘embedded’ on one side for the duration of what was likely to be a bloody biker war.

I wasn’t at all sure how comfortable I was at that as a prospect. *

 

As we rode back I had nothing to do but think in the darkness as I jerked and swung about on the pillion behind Bung.

And try as I might, there was nothing that I could think about other than the immediate aftermath of the attack that day. And out of all the fractured images of the burning bikes, and the screaming of wounded people, there was one fragment that kept coming back to me, playing itself out endlessly again and again like a loop of film projecting against the back of my eyelids.

It was a vision of Wibble. Wibble standing, a picture of cold, calm and collected fury, his lieutenants, and The Rebels guys as well, gathered round him.

It was stuff I hadn’t put in my piece for the paper. He might not even know that I had seen and heard it from where I was sitting on the clubhouse steps, still deep in shock at what had just happened.

‘It’s your shit,’ I heard Wibble say forcefully, his face set like stone and all but prodding a fuming looking Thommo in the chest.

‘You want to be a P in this club? Well then it’s your responsibility to take care of these local cunts, unless you need us to come in and do it for you?’ he demanded, backing Thommo even further into a corner.

Of course Thommo couldn’t do anything but say he would handle it, take care of business on his turf. The idea he would lose face in front of not just the gathered Freemen, but also The Rebels, by saying he couldn’t tackle some local second string club was simply unthinkable. Thommo just had to stand there and suck it up.

And I was sure that Wibble had deliberately done it, putting a Brethren on the spot in front of Stu and The Rebels as well.

 

Snapping his ferocious gaze from Thommo, Wibble turned to speak to Stu who had been standing by his side.

‘Well,’ he asked him, addressing him formally in Stu’s capacity as president of the assembled Rebels, ‘we know you guys have skin in this as well. It not just Brethren that have been hurt here today, but Rebels as well.’

‘So this,’ he said waving his arm to indicate where bodies were still being tended by the bikes, ‘was an attack on both clubs, which means you have your rights here as well, we recognise that.
‘But you’re our guests here and it’s happened on our patch, on our watch, so we have to take responsibility. The question is, are you happy to have these guys here,’ Wibble indicated towards the fuming Thommo and his skulking crew, ‘handle it for both clubs, or do you want a piece?’

Stu considered this for a moment, glanced across at his guys and then turned back to Wibble with his decision.

 

‘We’ll let them handle it,’ he announced, but then laid down his condition, ‘so long as it gets handled right and quickly enough.’

 

Wibble nodded. He obviously felt that this was fair enough and honour would be satisfied on both sides.

 

‘Understood,’ he answered. ‘We’ll keep you posted and if these guys need any back up both clubs will step up,’ he proposed. ‘Agreed?’

‘Agreed,’ said Stu, and then grim-faced they shook to seal the deal. Again it was a strong biker handshake, clasped forearm to forearm, but this time it denoted something much grimmer. They wouldn’t want to pose for a photo of this one.

Wibble had backed his own local charter into a corner. The onus was now solely on them to hold up The Brethren’s reputation in front of not only the other charters but also The Rebels by finding and dealing with the attackers. And quickly.

And Wibble had known, I realised, putting my finger on it for the first time. Even back then, as the bullets had only just stopped flying, Wibble had known it was a local club that had attacked.

The problem with that I pondered, as we swayed to a stop again back in the services’ car park, was that it was either bloody good guesswork or it was something else on Wibble’s part.

And he didn’t strike me as the type to be a psychic.
*

The support patch lay on the desk next to the phone where I had dropped it as I came in. I really wasn’t sure how I felt about it and the bargain it implied.

Despite my misgivings, I picked up the phone and dialled Bob’s number. ‘The answer’s still no,’ I said, when he came on the line.

‘Is that what this was about?’ I had asked him, what, only this morning. ‘You want me to spy on The Brethren for you? I’m a journalist not a grass, you know I can’t do that.’

‘So tell us what’s going on then,’ he’d insisted, ‘Give us some background, whatever you can. We’ve got a fucking murder case on here now you know. The chiefs are screaming to know what's going on and where it’s going to end and I’ve got fuck all to tell them at the moment. So help me out here. What do you know? What are they thinking?’