Heavy Duty Attitude (29 page)

If Wibble won the war, he would be safe with his reputation ensured across the club.

Even as a combination of two regional clubs, the enemy would be relatively weak in numbers compared to the full strength of The Brethren’s national presence; let alone in combination with The Rebels. So whatever happened, the club stood a good chance in winning any war.

And it was a war moreover that he and his supporters didn’t need to do much fighting in. Since because of the way that it started, Thommo and his Cambridge crew had to take that job on.

So for Wibble, once it was on, really it was a safe little war.
It all came back to Bob again.

There had been a peace overture before. Capricorn had put out a call via a trusted contact, with a message for The Brethren, call off your dogs in Cambridge before it’s too late.

But it didn’t happen.
Bob?
Bob had been the channel.
We want you to use the place you met them before.

Wibble had known that Bob had used the safe house to meet with Noddy and Leeds Kev before. It had been where they’d given him the message to take to The Brethren.

Bob knew all the clubs and was known to all the clubs. He was the obvious choice to use as a last ditch envoy.

 

Bob. That was why they knew him. That was why they knew the house. That was why they thought they were going to meet him there.

Meet me where we did before, you remember?
That was it. I knew.
And who would Bob have taken a message like that to?
Well there was only one answer to that wasn’t there?
And he was straight in front of me talking to me.
Wibble had had the peace message from Bob before the war finally erupted.

But how long had Wibble had the message for? Trouble had been brewing for a few months in retrospect.

And then there had been the Leeds shooting. The local clubs would have been on edge, waiting for The Brethren’s response. They’d already lost both a member and a business and now they were waiting to hear what the verdict was going to be, peace or war?

And what did they get?

A drug debt collecting Cambridge charter full patch Brethren turning up in the heart of the zombies’ territory and throwing his weight around as he came to lean on somebody for money.

It had to have been the final straw. Dead Men Riding and Capricorn had taken it as their answer and it had all kicked off from there.

 

And to make all that happen, all Wibble had to do was to have deliberately ignored the message for long enough to have let it happen.

Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war.
Damage had brought and won the peace.
So Wibble had brought and won the war.
I was sure of it.

*
‘So what happens now?’
‘Now? About the squaws?’ he seemed surprised that I needed to ask.

‘Now we wipe out the rest of them, hunt them down, strip their colours, we might even have some of them strike for us, the ones we think have something, and we’ll split up their turf with The Rebels.’

‘How?’
‘Oh we’ve already sorted that. The Rebels’ll get Leeds and around about for the clubs, the security work. It gives them the dealing territory.

‘We’ll take East Anglia and the goatfuckers’ routes. We’ll keep them open and the shit coming in, only now it will be our shit.

 

‘So it all works out fine in the end. The Rebels get some good paying turf, we take out a competitor on the supply side. Everybody’s happy.’ ‘And you’ve established your own reputation and one of your rivals got taken out into the bargain?’

‘Yeah, sweet isn’t it?’ he smiled.
I risked the guess, more for confirmation than anything new really.

‘Just hypothetically, the war was good for you wasn’t it? You couldn’t lose unless you really lost it, in which case it wouldn’t have mattered anyway would it?’ I asked.

‘Well to quote something else old Damage was very fond of saying,
you might very well think that
,’ he said, reaching forward and prodding me in the chest,
‘but I couldn’t possibly comment
, and more to the point, you couldn’t possibly write it could you?’

‘No, no I couldn’t,’ I admitted as he stood back and looked down at me. For all sorts of reasons.

*
‘Why don’t I tell you a joke?’ he asked.
‘A joke?’
‘Yes a joke. Don’t sound so surprised, you’ll enjoy this one.

‘There’s this dictator right? And he’s on his deathbed so they call for a priest to read him his last rites.

‘So this young priest gets called in and he’s put in a chair by the side of the dictator’s bed and nervously he starts to prepare him for death, asking for God’s blessing and all that sort of stuff.

‘
Do you forgive your enemies
? asks the priest.
‘
Oh I have no enemies
, the dying man replies calmly.

‘
How do you know that
? asks the priest surprised that such a powerful figure like this could be so sure.

 

‘
Oh that’s simple
, the dictator replies,
I had them all shot
.’

It was funny, I’d give him that. But it was funny with a message. A bit like a lot of things I got used to someone else saying to me, a couple of years ago now that seemed like a lifetime.

‘Damage told you that one didn’t he?’ I asked, taking a chance. It had to have been him, it just sounded too much like Damage for it not to be. And from Wibble it sounded like some kind of a test.

I just hoped to God that I’d passed.
He nodded, ‘Yes, yes he did.’

There was a strange look on his face, one that I couldn’t decipher. Then with what might have been a small sigh, as if over some little regret, he added, ‘He was a good teacher, was Damage.’

A veritable
Prince
amongst men I thought but did not say.

And Wibble had been a good student by the looks of things. If a charter gets out of hand, the answer is simple, liquidate it and turn the liquidation into an opportunity to be made the most of.

Damage would have been proud of that one.
*
‘So?’ he said as though he was waiting for some kind of answer.
‘So?’ I asked.
‘So do we have a deal?’ he said.

‘We need to make a decision one way or the other since we’re going to need to start getting organised,’ he said coming back to the point of our cosy little chat.

‘The plod’ll be able to trace the detonation call within a few days I guess. As soon as they find the remains of the phone they’ll know that was how it was set off and start looking. They’ll be able to zero it back to here easy enough through triangulation, they can work out a bearing from the local masts that have relayed the signal. And when they find here, they’ll find the blood, they’ll find the bullet, they’ll find your dabs.

‘But what they won’t find is a body, or these,’ he said picking up the white red and blue Tesco’s carrier bag from the coffee table containing the gun and my phone, and the baggie, ‘at least…’

‘Not if I keep my mouth shut.’

 

‘Not if you disappear you mean.’

 

‘And where will they be?’ I said nodding at the bag which looked heavy with my future.

‘Oh I’ll be keeping them safe, you can bank on that. But they will if…’ I nodded in agreement. ‘What choice do I have?’
‘None, and that’s the way I like it,’ he said with satisfaction.

*

Having decided what he was going to do with me, to my surprise, Wibble didn’t seem to be in any great hurry to do it. I realised that as I sat there, bound to my chair and listening to him barking orders down the phone on a number of calls over the next hour or so, I just wasn’t at the top of his list of priorities today. As far as Wibble was concerned, I was just one more loose end he’d needed to tie up and now he’d done so.

He seemed to have got over any irritation he’d felt at my question and between the events he was coordinating we even had time to talk a bit more. *

 

It gave me more time to think through the implications of what he’d told me. And the more I thought about them, the worse they looked. Ever since the Cambridge crew bomb it was obvious that Wibble had taken advantage of the situation to settle internal club business.

But now, knowing that Wibble might actually have deliberately started it, since it was more than a simple sin of omission in allowing the war to start, I was presented with another possibility.

That Wibble had planned all this, everything that had happened, right from the start.

 

Fact again – from Wibble’s point of view the war had killed two birds with one stone, which just seemed too much of a coincidence for comfort.

Because not only had he established his reputation and leadership across the club, Wibble had also culled the local Cambridge charter, destroying Thommo as a threat.

And without the war, without Thommo’s apparent fuck ups, he’d have never been able to take him out like that. Now he’d done it and the whole club would just applaud him for cleaning house.
Wibble had just applied one of Damage’s old P principles. If you are going to hurt someone, destroy them utterly and absolutely so they can never, ever, recover to threaten you again.

So Wibble hadn’t just looked to take on his rival Thommo and his Cambridge crew piecemeal. He hadn’t wanted to disband them, strip them of their colours and hound them out of the club. No, that was too casual. Instead in one surgical strike of absolute violence they had been wiped out to a man.

Then it was done, and done for good.
Why had I been so slow in working it out?
Wibble hadn’t just started a war, that’s what he had just told me.

In doing so he’d deliberately set Thommo and his crew up to take the fall as well. It wasn’t just a side effect or a happy accident, it had all been part of the plan right from the start.

The essence of power is control, Damage had taught me that. Don’t be reacting to other people’s actions, had been his rule he said, instead have them react to yours. Make your enemies come to you, to fall into your trap.

It was so obvious once you saw it. Wibble had evidently been a good student.

 

Fact – Thommo and his Cambridge charter had been a threat, even I had seen that.

 

Fact – their charter territory ran up against Capricorn and Dead Men Riding, the clubs which would come together to form the new Mohawks club.

And if these clubs were the likely enemy then the attack when it came was likely to be on Thommo’s crew’s territory and with any luck as far as Wibble was concerned, they would suffer casualties. Whether they did or not, as the local Brethren charter it would be up to them to step up to the plate to take revenge. It was a club and charter honour thing straight and simple. If you couldn’t control your territory for the club, then you didn’t deserve to wear the club’s colours.

So once the war had started Thommo was faced with a choice, to go it alone or to appeal to the rest of the club for help.

Thommo’s problem was that neither choice would look good. A pair of regional clubs they may have been, but once Dead Men Riding and Capricorn had combined into the Mohawks their numbers outstripped those of the Cambridge crew many times over so going it alone would be a problem.

But as I’d heard that day on the field, Wibble had beaten Thommo to the alternative of all out mobilisation for war involving all The Brethren’s UK charters, by spelling out a local responsibility.

It’s your shit.
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?

Worse he’d done it in front of The Rebels.
We’ll let them handle it, so long as it gets handled right and quickly enough.

And he’d even made it clear that there would be support offered if Thommo needed it.

 

If these guys need any back up both clubs will step up.

 

Now if Thommo asked for help he’d be accepting Wibble’s offer and admitting he couldn’t cope with the situation on his own.

 

The situation had immediately turned into a nasty trap for Thommo. I could see that for Wibble, by contrast, it could all have been quite amusing.

Going forward once he’d got Thommo into that position he could even be all charm and concern if he wanted to play it that way. Looking back I was surprised that he hadn’t been more solicitous of Thommo as a way of lording it over him and giving him the needle with very public offers of support and concern from the rest of the club, that Thommo would have had no choice but to reject through gritted teeth.

Wibble could have been as ‘love-to-help-offer-is-there’ as he liked, in the full knowledge that Thommo couldn’t possibly accept it without losing all hope of ever challenging Wibble.

Instead he’d gone the hard nosed approach.

So you started this. So you need to finish this, and soon. Or if you can’t handle it, we’ll come in and do it for you. Is that what needs to happen here?

But either way I guess, the overall effect was the same. Thommo had been on the hook and squirming with no obvious way off.
And it wasn’t just that the attack was on their territory of course and that his crew should have been able to keep the local junior clubs under control.

Then he’d been able to pin responsibility for the provocation on Thommo and his crew as well. He’d been able to show the rest of the club that it was Thommo’s fault that the squaws had ever formed on the mainland in the first place, not Wibble’s.

That was why Wibble had had Bob leak the information about the previous run-ins to me knowing that I would print them.

 

I don’t know where he got that.
I don’t give a flying fuck where he got it, that wasn’t the question. Is it right?

It gave him the excuse to call the council of war, to put on record in front of the other key Brethren players, and The Rebels, Thommo’s responsibility for letting the Mohawks form; and in doing so to pile more pressure on for Thommo to solve a problem that he could never tackle without the one thing he would never have but Wibble did, an inside track on the Mohawks.

In effect Wibble had forced Thommo into a position where he had to take enough rope to hang himself.

 

Particularly if the Mohawks had sources that let them anticipate and counter every move that Thommo made.