Brothers in Blood (6 page)

The barman served me a half a bitter without a glance in my direction. His attention seemed to be fixed on his star punter. I took a seat opposite Rhodes and his fan club so that I could observe the man at close quarters. He was an ugly, unshaven fellow with two very small shifty eyes, receding black wiry hair which sprang from his large head in an unkempt fashion and was already turning grey at the temples. He had a large mouth with flabby lips which he moistened with his tongue constantly. Rhodes was recounting an anecdote from his prison days. It concerned some incident where he had got one over on ‘the screws’. It was clear to me, but not to his enraptured audience, that it was a made up piece, a lie to make him look good, to make him look tough, to make him look sharp. He was not merely embellishing the truth, he was manufacturing it.

‘And then I held his head down the fucking toilet until he pissed himself,’ he announced with a rasping declaration, bringing the story to a close. There was general laughter and patting on the back.

The psychology of this reaction puzzled and fascinated me. It would seem the onlookers, damaged by poverty and a poor education, felt so alienated by society and authority figures that their main source of entertainment was to revel in stories of anarchy related by an unrepentant drug addict/murderer. As someone once said, ‘How different from the home life of our dear Queen.’

I became determined to damage this errant star, this jumped up piece of human garbage. With the help of Laurence and Alex we would delete his arrogant leer forever. As he began another tale of prison life, I drank up quickly and left. Now, I thought, was the time to take a closer look at Rhodes’ house. He would be rattling on with his concocted tales of self glory and basking in the sunshine of the mob’s approval for some time. Long enough for me to have a shufty at his gaff.

It was dusk when I walked up the garden path. Well, not so much a garden path as a short track through the long grass and rampant weeds leading to the front door. The curtains, as usual, were drawn across. I went around to the back. There was a yard here with the remnants of what had been an outside lavatory and a motorbike covered by a tarpaulin.

I pulled back the cover to reveal a shiny new mean machine. It was an impressive piece, purchased no doubt with part of his pools win. Unlike the house and the tiny garden it was obviously cared for with meticulous devotion. It gleamed and shimmered in the fading light. As I gazed at it, bells started ringing in my head.

I’ve never been attracted to motorbikes, they are too vulnerable on the road for my liking, but I had to admit that this piece of machinery looked very cool. I noted down the make and model which meant nothing to me – a Kawasaki 750 – a plan already forming in my mind.

There were no curtains up at the kitchen window and I was able to peer inside. It was a tip. I could see the sink piled high with unwashed crockery and discarded boxes from some take away establishment, the left over congealed food already furring with a green mould. Miss Havisham would have felt at home here.

Before I left, I looked again at the motorbike. This time I pulled the tarpaulin cover off completely and straddled the machine, leaning low over the handlebars and emitting a soft brum brum noise, smiling as I did so. I toned my noise up an octave as I took an imaginary bend at incredibly high speed and then with great glee I manufactured a loud crashing sound at the back of my throat. And then there was silence and I grinned broadly.

SEVEN

JOURNAL OF RUSSELL BLAKE 1968-1970

I took great delight in working on the Darren Rhodes project on my own. I saw it as my special baby and I wanted to present the whole scheme to Laurence carefully planned down to the finest detail – pre-packed and ready to go.

I wanted to impress him.

I haunted the reference library reading up on motorbikes and even visited a couple of garages in the role of an eager teenager ready to buy his first machine, (a rich eager teenager) wearing the cocky salesmen down with my questions. In the meantime I made the odd visit to The Royal George to keep my eye on Darren. I learned a little more about him. In truth, there really wasn’t very much to learn. He was a simplistic, shallow creature, small of brain and big of ego. He lived off benefit and his pools win, with apparently no intention of seeking work. Lying in late and spending most lunch times and evenings in the boozer, his horizons were low and narrow. Occasionally he would take the bike out for a run in the afternoon. ‘I likes doing a ton on Lakely Moor Road, a nice stretch that, with no fucking coppers around,’ he was fond of repeating to his cronies. Even having a splendid bike like the Kawasaki 750 – through my researches I now knew this to be the
crème de la crème
of roaraway engines – he had no greater ambition than to speed at a hundred miles an hour on a quiet country road just five miles away from where he lived. His life like his ambitions was small with limited vision. It was my intention to make it much smaller and more limited.

Laurence chuckled and then took a drag on his cheroot. ‘You have been busy, Russo. Quite the worker ant.’

‘I trust you approve, sir,’ I said in my Jeeves voice, after I had explained my plan in detail.

‘Indeed I do, my man. I shall raise your wages by a penny per annum and allow you to sodomise the gardener once a week on his day off.’

‘You are too kind, but I do that already.’

Suddenly Laurence dropped the silly voice and looked serious. ‘So, we need to tell Alex. Rope him in. What d’you say?’’

I nodded. ‘I think he’ll be all for it.’

‘So do I. But if he isn’t we’ll have to dump the plan and pretend it was some kind of wishful joke thing.’

‘And then dump him.’

Laurence nodded rather glumly. ‘Yeah. It will be a pity but we can’t have a wimp queering our pitch – if you’ll pardon the expression.’

I giggled.

As it turned out, any doubts we’d harboured about Alex becoming a fully fledged member of the Brotherhood proved to be ill-founded. He knew of Rhodes through the local press and TV reports and jumped at the chance of being involved in some scheme to bring ‘the oiky bastard down a peg or two’.

In reality, the plan was destined to do more than that, but we didn’t quibble over the sentiment.

‘This calls for pints all round,’ smirked Laurence. ‘And as I managed to half-inch a fiver from my dad’s wallet this morning, the round is on me.’

It was the same night, after several pints, that we told Alex the Old Mother Black story. He listened in wide-eyed fascination. I could see that at first he didn’t quite know how to react.

‘Is this really true?’ he asked after we had finished, suspicious that we were sending him up.

‘Not if you don’t want it to be?’ said Laurence mysteriously.

Alex looked blankly at us for a moment and then, as the truth dawned on him, he smiled gently. ‘You bastards. You terrible bastards.’ He was laughing now. ‘You really did it, didn’t you? You killed the mutt. Poor old Caesary-waesary.’ His laugh had grown into a splutter and his eyes bulged in merriment as he tried to control himself.

Laurence and I exchanged glances and joined in the laughter with pleasant relief.

And so the triumvirate was formed and sealed with a pint of Tetley’s bitter. It was an historic moment which was to affect the rest of our lives.

It was very early on Sunday morning two weeks later. The month was June and even at six o’clock in the morning you could already tell it was going to be a beautiful summer’s day. The pale blue sky was clear of clouds and there was a thick, gentle warmth in the air that promised a hot day to follow. Laurence had managed to borrow his mother’s car and we had transported all our gear up to Lakely Moor Road. It was a wild whipcord of a highway which ran across the expansive moorland, rising up into the hills and cutting across into Lancashire. And it was deserted. There was no traffic at all, which suited us perfectly.

First of all we set up our tent and changed our clothes and then began adopting our disguises. For three young lads to appear much older than we were and to play figures of authority was one of the dodgier aspects of the plan. If we couldn’t fool our victim about this we were lost. Laurence was a born actor and he volunteered himself for the role of police officer. He had secured a fairly authentic looking uniform from the local amateur dramatics group costume department and even before he began applying other parts of his disguise he looked pretty impressive. He whitened the temples of his hair and applied a false moustache which he’d also obtained from the drama group wardrobe. He was, he’d told them, going to a fancy dress party in aid of the Samaritans. The jammy devil had managed to get a reduction in the hire fee as a result. Once he’d doctored the moustache and put the peaked cap on, he looked very much the part. As long as Darren Rhodes didn’t peer too closely, the illusion should work.

I’d borrowed a tweed jacket from my dad’s wardrobe and bought a corduroy flat cap to shade my face and hide my youth. Laurence applied some rouge to my cheeks to give me a ruddy aged appearance and tested me in lowering the tone of my voice until it sounded older and resonated with gravitas.

From the point of view of appearance, Alex had the easy task. No real disguise for him really, just jeans and a T-shirt, although he wore a baseball cap to hide part of his face. However, he had a pivotal role to play. Failure to carry out his duties meant a total failure for the whole scheme.

Once we were ready, Alex pinned the sign to the side of the tent, ‘Speed Bike Trials – Check In’.

And then we waited.

It was at this point that I began to panic. I began to see all the potential holes in my supposedly water tight plan. There suddenly seemed to be so many links in the chain that could lead the authorities to us. The leaflet for example. Could they trace it back to Alex’s printer at work? Anyone passing could stop to ask us what was going on and then we became evidence. Even at six thirty in the morning that was possible. What if someone had noted down the number of Laurence’s mum’s car on our way here? That was highly unlikely, I knew, and we had now driven it off the road behind some trees out of sight, but it was possible. And worst of all, what if Darren Rhodes had smelt a rat and turned up with a gang of his mates. I began to feel sick to my stomach.

I felt sweat begin to dampen my armpits. This was a crazy, shit scheme. I should never have suggested it.

Laurence sensed my unease and gave me a little punch on the arm. ‘Come on,
mon ami
, no long faces,’ he murmured in his Poirot voice. ‘Today we shall triumph. No other outcome is acceptable.’

‘I hope so. I don’t fancy prison food.’

Then just before seven we heard a faint droning in the air. The sound of a distant motorbike. It seemed to resonate in the pale sky and the skeletal trees all around us.

‘I spy Muggins,’ cried Alex pointing at a little red dot on the horizon. He was right. As the vehicle drew nearer, I could clearly identify the Kawasaki and its brutish driver.

‘Action stations,’ I snapped, although in truth there was nothing we could do until Darren Rhodes arrived.

Less than a minute later, he skidded to a halt beside the tent. ‘What’s this all about?’ he growled brusquely by way of an opening gambit, as he clambered off the bike. From one of the zipped pockets in his leathers, he extracted the flyer we had sent him and held it aloft. ‘I mean this?’

I stepped forward with my clipboard. ‘Mr Rhodes,’ I ventured, low of voice.

‘Yeah.’

‘Good man. You have come to take part in the speed trial.’

‘Maybe. What’s it all about?’

‘It explains it all on the leaflet, ’I said simply, taking it from him, retrieving the evidence. It was that easy.

I smiled indulgently. ‘This is a speed competition to see how fast you can drive in a ten mile stretch. As you can see,’ I nodded at Laurence, ‘we have the co-operation of the local constabulary in this venture…’

Laurence saluted.

‘We are testing six Kawasaki owners in the area who have bought the 750 within the last six months. Three today and three next Sunday and the rider who records the fastest time will win a thousand pounds.’

‘Why?’

‘Publicity for Kawasaki of course. The best bikes on the road.’

Darren Rhodes sniffed and looked about him. ‘Where are the others?’

Laurence stepped forward. ‘We can’t have more than one bike on the route at a time, sir. That would be far too dangerous. You’re in our 7 a.m. slot. The next rider is due at 7.30. So… er, we’d better get a move on, eh?’

‘What do I do?’

Our fish was nibbling at the hook.

‘We time you when you set off. You drive ten miles along this road and there you will see the Bike Trials finishing line. Our officials there at the other end will note down the time of arrival. Out of the six riders, the one with the fastest time will win a thousand pounds. As simple as that. That’s all there is to it.’

Rhodes sniffed again. ‘OK.’ He made a move to return to his bike, but I waved my clipboard at him. ‘Oh, sir, just before you set off, we need you to sign a few forms – an entry form and an accident waiver form. If you’ll just step into the tent, it won’t take a moment.’

Without a word Rhodes followed me into the tent. Bless his simple little brain. He’d taken everything in. Greed had overridden any other thoughts he may have had. But then again, our Darren was not a man for thoughts anyway. Laurence stepped smartly forward and held open the flap to the tent. I followed behind, giving Alex the nod. On the instant, he made a beeline for the Kawasaki.

Sadly my pen wouldn’t work and I had to leave Mr Rhodes in the tent while I went to see if the police officer would lend me his. As I returned to the tent with Laurence’s Biro, Alex gave me the thumbs up.

The forms duly signed, Darren returned to his bike. Alex took a photograph of him astride the machine, ‘for publicity purposes, sir.’ Rhodes liked being called ‘sir’.

‘Good luck,’ I cried as he revved the engine. I retrieved a stop watch from my pocket and Alex raised his arm in readiness. I shouted ‘Go!’ and Alex dropped his arm. With a screech of tyres, Darren and his mean machine shot off down the deserted road which led into the soft fold of the hills.