Heavy Duty Trouble (The Brethren Trilogy) (43 page)

I guess.

And let’s not forget who they were going to attack shall we? Mr Robertson was not only a man with his own reputation for toughness, but was at the time the
P
resident of the UK Freemen charter of the Brethren MC. He was therefore the effective leader of one of the most infamous motorcycle clubs in the country, who would be expected to look to back him up, or to seek revenge for his death.

Mr Robertson
,
in short, was not someone you would expect to go up against lightly
,
was he Charlie?

Of course not.

You would need to have a serious reason for doing so, and a serious incentive to succeed. And if you were going to take him on, you would need to make sure you were successful. You would need to make sure you got a clean kill and a clean escape, and have absolute confidence that your employer was never going to give up your identity, if you weren’t to worry for the rest of your days about having the rest of his club on your trail and looking to hunt you down.

So if that’s what needed to be arranged, let’s ask ourselves who could make this happen
.

Well
,
it was probably someone who had good links into the criminal underworld. Someone with access to Mr Robertson.

Someone.

Someone in short, very like Mr Parke.

Mr Parke was crime correspondent for
The Guardian
. As such he had regular contact with a wide range of parties within the UK’s criminal underworld, and indeed in some cases, elsewhere.

Mr Parke, by his own admission
,
had known Mr Robertson ever since his assumption of control of The Brethren MC. He also had regular and extensive access to Mr Robertson in the months leading up to his death.

Before that, he had been a business correspondent on the paper and therefore had a wide knowledge of business and financial affairs.

And as you have heard throughout this case, the
re has been the
suspicion that Mr Robertson was using someone from outside the club, someone with
the necessary
financial expertise
and criminal contacts
to act as his so-called banker and to deal with laundering the proceeds of his drugs ring.

And as you have also heard, the suspicion is that following the death of Mr Robertson, this individual then disappeared
,
taking
control of
the loot with them.

So Charlie, when you say that you believed it was Wibble and Bung who had your father killed, do you believe that they were acting alone?

No.

So who else do you think was involved?

Park
i
e. It was the three of them.

And why do you think they did it
?

To cover up the fact they were
nicking
the money he’d made.

But if Mr Parke had been involved in stealing that money,
why
on earth
did he
then
stay around?
Surely he would have disappeared straight away.

He and Wibble and Bung had thought they’d got away with it. And then they thought they could just carry on running the gear on their own account.

I think Parkie himself wanted
to
keep an eye on things. I think that’s why he used to talk about Damage so much.

Why?

It was his way of
check
ing
whether anyone else knew about his
real
link to
D
amage, his role in handling the money.

Whether anyone suspected he had a hand in Damage’s death.

And did they?

No, not until too late.

Tuesday
1
4
th
June 2011

Well,
D
efence
concluded
in the
seven
th
day of the biker murder trial in Newcastle Crown Court
today
.
Our legal correspondent,
Eamon
Reynolds, has been in
C
ourt following the case from the outset and he’s in our Newcastle studio
now
.

Eamon
, so what can you tell us about developments today?

Well Trevor,
absolutely astonishing developments here today in this trial.

Mr Adrian Whiteley
,
QC for the
D
efence
,
has continued to attack the
C
rown’s central exhibit in the case, the purported journal of Mr Iain Parke, essentially arguing that it is in essence a forgery, and one created as part of a gigantic hoax
, in part using Mr Parke’s own words against him
.

The
D
efence is suggesting that there were in fact no murders at all in this case, and that instead the three alleged victims faked the attack in order to cover up their disappearance with substantial sums in drugs money.

In part of the cross-
examination of one of the defendants, Mr Charlie Graham,
the
C
ourt hear
d allegations
that
Mr Parke, far from being something of a bystander in this, was in fact playing a leading role in firstly laundering the drugs money for Mr G
raham’s father, referred to in C
ourt by his club nickname of Damage, under the cover of his work as a journalist, and then was involved in organising Damage’s murder in prison.

As you say Eamon, extraordinary developments.
So do we know when a verdict is expected?

Well
the Prosecution and Defence are each expected to give brief closing arguments tomorrow morning, while
Mr
Justice Oldham
QC’s
sum
ming
up tomorrow
is expected to take
up the
afternoon, following
which he will ask the jury to retire to consider their verdict.

Obviously
,
it then depends on the jury and how their deliberations go, so we will simply have to wait and see how quickly they are able to reach a decision.

Eamon
Reynolds, handing back to you in the studio
,
Trevor.

Well thank you then
,
Eamon
.

Eamon
Reynolds there
,
reporting from the ongoing trial at Newcastle.

Case number 36542 of 201
1

REGINA

–v–

CHARLIE GRAHAM, ANTHONY JOHN GRAHAM,

NIGEL PARVIS,
S
TEPHEN TERRANCE ROBINSON,

PETER MARTIN SHERBOURNE

Court Transcript
– Extract

1
5
th
June 2011

Mr Justice Oldham QC

Ladies
and gentlemen of the jury,
before we break for lunch,
you
have
heard the closing statements from both the
P
rosecution and the
D
efence
. That therefore
brings us to the end of this part of the trial and it now falls to me to
firstly
sum up the case
,
and
secondly
to
give you your directions as to the law involved
,
before
I ask you to
retire to reach your verdict.

Both the
P
rosecution and the
D
efence
have been commendably brief in this case and so I will not take up much of your time in summing up what is doubtless still fresh in your minds.

The
P
rosecution has
alleged
that
the men before you in the dock
are
guilty of the murder
under The Homicide Act of 1957
of three men
, Mr Iain Parke, Mr
Stephen, or ‘Steve’
Nelson, al
s
o known by his
club
nickname of ‘Wibble’
,
and Mr
Peter Milton
, also referred to as ‘Bung’,
by way of a professionally staged ambush on the evening of
Friday
5
th
March
2010
.

They are each charged
as well
with being involved in a
conspiracy to commit these murders
under
section 1(1) of the
Criminal Law Act of 1977.

Using the evidence of a notebook which is claimed to give a contemporaneous account by one of the victims of the events leading up to the shooting, the
Crown
ha
s
set out a series of events involving a growing dispute between the other two victims and some of the men in the dock over the control of the
motorcycle
club to which they belonged. The underlying cause of this friction, it is alleged, was the extent to which the club would be involved in the unlawful supply and distribution of controlled drugs.

According to this account, the victims were asked to meet with the defendants at the club’s premises on Enderdale Moor on the basis of allowing their peaceful retirement from the club
as a resolution of this dispute
. Whether this was just a pretext to draw them into
a
carefully
pre-
prepared ambush
,
or whether this was hastily arranged as a result of some further disagreement is not known.

The Crown has described to you the scene of the alleged murders that evening and neither the
P
rosecution nor the
D
efence
disag
ree that a burnt out and bullet-
ridden car was found there.

The Crown has also played you the contents of an intercepted mobile telephone call and neither the
P
rosecution nor the
D
efence
disagree that a call was made from the area of the burning car shortly before it was reported to the authorities, to another mobile phone in the vicinity of the clubhouse that the men had recently left.

On the basis of this evidence, the Crown says it has proved
to you that the three victims were murdered at the site of the shooting by, or at the orders of the accused, motivated by the desire to obtain control of the club and the criminal enterprise it represented.

The
D
efence
however
has argued that in fact
no such
crime was
ever committed.

They say that there are no signs of any bodies at the site, nor of any of the pistol bullets which are alleged to have been used to deliver the
coup de grâce
.

While acknowledging that the mobile telephone call took place, the
D
efence
argues that the voice
s
cannot be identified
as any of the
defendants
and there is no evidence other than the approximate proximity of the location of the received call to link them to the phones involved. Further
, the Defence goes
on to
suggest that in fact this call
was
staged as
part of a plan, created by the alleged victims, to implicate some of the defendants in their alleged murder.

In fact the
D
efence
has gone on to
suggest that the so-called murders were actually a gigantic hoax designed to cover up the disappearance of the three, together it is supposed, with the no doubt substantial profits of their drug smuggling operation.

An operation that
it is further alleged
they gained control of through the murder of
Mr Martin Robertson, a prior club president
,
the father of Mr Charli
e Graham, one of the defendants
. A murder
arranged by
Mr Iain Parke
and carried out on his behalf by person
or persons
unknown.