by Iain Parke
‘Dazza he’s OK, he’s not talking to anyone, let alone the plod. He’s got himself barricaded in his house. I’ve told him to stay home and lie low, not to leave the place until he hears otherwise. There’s one thing though.’
‘Yes?’
‘He said to ask whether you still wanted him at the thing next month or whether he should stay home or just clear out completely?’
‘The thing? What thing?’
‘He didn’t say and I didn’t ask. He said you’d know and you might want to think about changing the date so that he didn’t know it.’
‘What? Why?’
‘Change the date for when whatever it is, is going to happen. That way he won’t know it so there’s no way he’s a danger to it.’
‘Christ, so now he thinks that I think there’s a risk he’s a grass, and he has to prove to me he isn’t? I don’t like that Damage. I don’t like that at all.’
‘Look what’s the guy to do? He must know that we’re suspicious about him because he gets lifted. He wants to make sure you’re secure and to prove to you that he’s no problem, only then we’re suspicious that he wants to prove he’s OK! It’s Catch 22 mate. Keep going round this loop and you can never trust anybody over anything.’
Dazza paused, then shook his head and laughed. ‘Who said I ever did? Anyway I can’t change the thing. It’s all set up now. So he’s not talking, but he’s talking to you?’
‘Well I’m the only one he can talk to and get a message to you aren’t I? You asked me to talk to him don’t forget. And anyway he isn’t telling me anything, he’s just getting me to play Postman Pat and pass on a message that I know fuck all about.’
‘Relax mate, I’m not having a go at you. Right then, tell him he can come and go. I don’t want him locked up inside his house, it’ll just look suspicious. Tell him he can get on as normal other than business. He can go to the shops, down the boozer, over to his birds’, whatever the fuck it is he does. But he stays clear of anything to do with business or the club and he stays clean until the heat is off and I say so. Is that clear?’
‘I’ll tell him.’
‘You do that.’
Dazza sat back. I started to get up to go but he stopped me in my tracks with a question.
‘Did you know Billy’s been up to meet with The Rebels?’ he asked me casually, catching me completely off balance.
‘No shit?’ I said turning back to meet his cold-eyed appraising stare, the tone of shock in my voice would have been real enough. ‘He can’t have, surely? Not even Billy would be that fucking stupid!’
‘Yeah, he’s been dealing with them,’ he said quietly.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Absolutely sure.’
‘Christ,’ I said, after a pause which seemed to just about cover it, what with Dazza not volunteering that he was the one who’d sent him up there in the first place, ‘So how d’ya find out about that?’
‘Through Butcher.’
‘Butcher?’
‘Yeah. I’ve had him and his guys tailing Billy for a while. See what’s going on, who he’s been talking to.’
‘Christ,’ which again seemed to cover it. I was thinking furiously, partly about my recent meetings with Billy. I thought I had in effect told Dazza about all of them so there wouldn’t be anything to arouse his suspicions about me.
Of course all I had was Billy’s word for it that Dazza had sent him to deal with The Rebels. So could Dazza be right? Was Billy just so terrified because he’d been found out, because of what The Brethren would do to him for dealing with The Rebels? Was he just making up a line to blame Dazza? Was he just trying to concoct a story to protect himself? But if so, how would putting Dazza in the frame help him?
Besides, I remembered the package I’d seen Dazza give Billy to post, addressed to Glasgow, and the cash that had come into the accounts, probably just about right for two Ks of coke I reckoned.
No, Billy’s story fitted. It certainly fitted much better than some bullshit about Butcher tailing people and Billy taking it into his head to wing it on his own with The Rebels.
‘So what are you going to do about it?’
‘Nothing, I just haven’t decided yet.’
*
I passed Dazza’s message on.
Billy was so wound up that he was crying with relief by the time I’d finished.
‘Look, what the fuck is going on here? I can only help you so much if I don’t know what the score is.’
He was shivering, ‘I’m scared, just so scared.’
‘You have to trust me.’
I sat down opposite him and just stared at him. Immobile and immovable. I’m not going anywhere I told him, without saying a word. Not until you start talking.
‘I’m all that stands between you and Dazza. So what’s it to be Billy? What’s it to be?’
So eventually, he told me just what it was he’d been a part of. What Dazza was really worried about.
‘So what happened?’
‘It was the week after Tiny died, in the evening.’
‘The week after we got back from Portugal?’
‘Yeah, middle of the week, Wednesday night I think. There was Dazza and Butcher’s boys and me. Dazza had told me to organise a van, a Transit or something similar, and to meet him at the clubhouse. We were all to go clean, no patches, nothing traceable. When I got there, Butcher was waiting. He had brought along a load of those big square battery torches, you know the ones? The big jobs?
‘Anyway he bunged those in the back of the van and all the guys piled in to it and an old long wheel based Defender that Dazza had brought along. Dazza opened the gate into the field out the back of the clubhouse and led the way up the track and out onto the moors. It was rutted and bumpy, but once on top it wasn’t too bad. It’s been dry recently so it wasn’t muddy and I guess someone must look after it for driving the shooters around.
‘We must have gone about half a mile or so, possibly a bit more, so we were right on top, you know where it’s flattened out. It was about ten o’clock so although the sun had gone down, the sky was still quite light, you know that sort of turquoise. It was beautiful when we stopped, you know you feel like you’re on top of the world up there, nothing but you, the sky, the wind, the birds. As though there’s not another person in the world.
‘Dazza never told us what we were doing so we just hung around the van and the Landie while he and Butcher took nine of the torches and set them out across a flat piece of ground beside us in a big cross shape, about 50 yards wide.
‘Then they came back and told us we were gonna have to wait. So OK, we waited. Had a smoke, chatted a bit, but other than Butcher and Dazza, obviously nobody else knew what was going on, or if they did, they weren’t talking.
‘After about an hour or so it got much darker and Dazza said it was time to get ready. Dazza, Butcher, Wibble and I were to take one arm of the cross each. The other guys were to take the Landie and head back down the track to make sure no one came up. So we split up and I walked over to my arm of the cross. Butcher had put the torches on their backs on the ground so that when they were switched on the light would shine straight upwards which seemed strange at the time. According to Dazza my job was to wait until his signal and then switch on the torches in my arm of the cross then get the hell out the way.
‘I didn’t have a clue what he was on about.
‘So there I was standing in the dark feeling like a complete plonker when I hear the sound of an aircraft in the distance. It wasn’t a jet, not one of those fighter boys that come screaming over every so often. No this was a big prop type, something like one of those big military jobs, the Hercules or whatever it is. And as it gets closer, I’m more certain that it’s heading towards us.
‘And that’s when Dazza shouts to us that we’re to turn on the lights. So Butcher hits the central one and I do my two and get the fuck out of there because this thing is coming straight for us and it’s down to only a couple of hundred f
eet and still dropping. I chucked myself face down on the ground as it came roaring overhead and there was a tremendous crack and a crash behind me above the howling storm of noise and wind from the rotors as it swept overhead. Looking up I could see that its back door cargo ramp was closing as it headed off down the valley.
‘Looking across I could see Dazza and Butcher were already on their feet and running towards where the thump had come from. In the continuing back draught from the plane I could see something billowing black against the dark blue of the sky. When I got there a moment later what I saw was a sort of specialised pallet. It was bigger than what you’d normally see, reinforced, with sort of metal skids. At the back, Butcher was already reeling in what looked like a couple of parachutes. I guessed that they had dragged the pallet out of the back of the plane so that it could drop from such a low level and the pallet with the skids was designed to absorb the impact.
‘I mean this looked like specialist military gear to me. And that plane, it was in civvies, and it was a military type, but it just wasn’t one of ours.
‘Meanwhile Dazza had his knife out and was already cutting away the straps that held the cargo crates onto the pallet. As I got closer he shouted at me to get the van. Wibble was going round dousing and collecting the lights.
‘I backed it up and we loaded all the gear into the van as well as the pallet and the shutes. Man, there were some heavy bastard boxes there. Dazza called ahead to the guys in the Landie to make sure the coast was clear and we headed back down to the clubhouse.
‘Dazza was sitting next to me in the van for the ride down the hill which he made us do without lights. I guess he wanted to keep an eye on the stuff. He seemed quite pleased with how it had gone. I asked him about the plane. He didn’t give me much, he just said it was a big Russian job, an Antonov or something, and it was off to land at Glasgow, clean as a whistle if anyone wanted to check it when it got there.
‘You’ve got to hand it to the guy. He’s a brilliant operator. Complete fucking genius.’
I could see it now. And Billy was right, it was genius. I could see why he needed us and Westmorland as well. The Tyne Gap had been an aircraft route for years, uncontrolled airspace not covered by air Traffic Control and up here across the moors the RAF and army helicopters were forever practising low-flying, so no one was going to notice one more low-flying aircraft one night. With all the clutter from the hills you’d guess that any radar operator would lose a plane flying that low and certainly they wouldn’t be able to catch the pallet being dropped.
Up on the moors no one, except in the aircraft overhead, was going to see the lights of the torches arranged in a giant X to mark the spot, and if anyone did find their way up to investigate, other than some broken heather and some tracks there wouldn’t be anything left to find.
And I knew that it was booked as an ordinary commercial flight. Of course I knew, I’d booked it. My fingerprints were metaphorically speaking all over this. Machinery parts from Russia landing legitimately at Glasgow with all its paperwork correct.
We all knew that sending stuff was always the easy bit of any run. Customs most places were never that bothered about checking stuff going out of a country. The difficult part was always getting stuff in, which was where Customs were always interested. Airports and ports were the choke points on any route so that’s where Customs concentrated. Only with this plan there was no need to try and smuggle anything past Customs or through the airport checks, it had already left the plane en route. So long as the pallet had never officially been booked on the plane when it left, no one would be looking for it or miss it on the plane’s arrival.
Billy was right. Dazza really was a fucking genius, I thought.
‘So that’s what’s happening again next month?’
‘Yeah, another drop. But all I know is that it’s going to be different stuff this time.’
I’d been sending some heavy cash to Luis’s nominated accounts in Portugal for Dazza recently. And if Dazza’s method had worked for gear from Russia, then there were no reasons I guessed that it wouldn’t work just as well for gear from Portugal. So if I knew the when, where and how, the only questions were what and why.
But as far as Billy was concerned, I still needed to know two things.
‘Billy, Billy listen to me,’ I said, grabbing him and pulling his face up to mine, ‘listen to me, there’s stuff that I need to know. And I need to know it straight.’
‘Yeah, sure, like what?’
‘Well the first is, are you talking?’ I overrode his expressions of innocence and kept hold of him, ‘You’re my bro, I can help you but I need to know. Don’t lie to me. This is your one chance do ya understand that?’ He nodded and mumbled something.
‘I didn’t get that Billy,’ I said threateningly, ‘Now are you or aren’t you?’
He protested again.
‘Because if you are, you’ve got one last chance to tell me, get out of the house and get the cops to protect you.’ He looked up at me, his face frozen, ‘if you aren’t, then you just need to stay clean.’
‘Look mate, I’m not fucking talking alright! I fucking swear to you!’ he suddenly shouted at me, ‘and you can tell that to Butcher or any other fucker that wants to know.’
I looked into his face and then let go of his jacket so he could step back from me.
‘OK, I believe you.’ And I did. ‘I just had to be sure.’
There was a moment of silence between us, then he collapsed back into his chair. ‘Christ man, for a moment there I thought you’d come to kill me.’
I just shook my head. ‘I’m just here as your bro. And if you just play it the way I tell you to then I’m going to get you out of this.’
‘Christ mate, thanks. You know I’m going to owe you my life mate after this.’ I just shrugged.
‘What else was it you wanted to know?’
‘You said there was gear that had been dropped. Tell me about that, did it all land OK?’
‘Seemed to, it ended up just past the cross and all the packaging seem to have survived.’
‘So did you see it? What was the gear?’
‘No. It was still all in its crates when we were at the clubhouse. Dazza had the guys get them out and then he told me to take the van and make sure I lost the pallet and the shutes so they wouldn’t be found. So I stuck them in my garage and had myself a bit of a bonfire at the weekend. But I do think I know where the stuff is.’
‘Where?’
And he told me.
*
I couldn’t afford to be spotted so I needed some wheels that wouldn’t be recognised. I called Sharon and told her to borrow one of her mate’s cars for the next evening.
‘Is it gonna be OK? I wouldn’t want to get them in any bother.’
‘It’s OK, it’ll be fine, nothing to worry about. Just a Sunday evening drive in the country. The motor’ll come back completely clean.’
‘Promise?’
‘Promise.’
‘Alright then. I’ll call Julie and see what I can do.’
I took the back road, sweeping wide out to the west before it dropped down into the valley running south into the hills parallel with my normal route up and over the top of the moors. Eventually I turned off onto a small side road that snaked its way up into the hills, following the winding course of a steep sided river valley, before at its end rising up to join with the clubhouse road at a junction about half a mile past its entrance. So just before it started to climb I pulled over into the shadow of a field gate entrance about a quarter of a mile before the gate to the club’s drive and killed the lights. I pulled a small but powerful torch and my jemmy out of the bag I had bunged on the back seat of the little Peugeot 106 that no one from the club would recognise if they noticed it parked up. But to start with the moonlight would be enough to let me find my way.
It was Wibble who had given it away apparently. He had been whingeing on the next time Billy had seen him at the clubhouse. He was all, ‘It
was alright for you, you bastard, you got to fuck off with the van. Left me, Butcher, and the boys to hump the gear down the hill.’
‘Down the hill?’
‘Yep, that’s what he said.’
‘Into the woods?’
‘That’s what I’m guessing.’
We’d both grown up out this way. As kids we had walked and cycled and explored. And one of the places that we’d camped had been the woods across the field and the road below what was now our clubhouse. And so we both knew what was there.
The land that came with the clubhouse was a huge slice of the hillside up from the road and past the clubhouse to where a dry stone wall and rickety gate marked the end of the field line and the start of the moors proper. Below the clubhouse the land stretched down to the road, and then down again below the road towards the lower road that followed the snaking course of the shallow rocky river. The stretch between the two roads was heavily wooded and so as a club we never used it much, except as a handy additional source of firewood for party bonfires. It was one of the regular chores for the strikers to be sent down there with axes to chop stuff up to make sure that there was always a ready stash in hand for the summer parties.
I climbed over the gate and was instantly hidden from the road by the darkness of the trees beyond. I hadn’t been here for years but I was sure I would remember the way easily enough as I headed along the overgrown remnants of the old mine path, two huge piles of tailings growing on either side of me. Opening some crates when I got there was going to be interesting.
As I felt my way through the trees on that old familiar path it seemed to me that too much business, too much serious money had rotted what we were about. I think Billy saying that he had thought I was there to kill him had shocked me more than I had realised.
That wasn’t what we were about. Not in my book.
OK, so back in the old days, Gyppo, Billy and I had been in business, we had dealt a bit of blow and a bit of whizz, but the main thing about being in the club had been about belonging, about being with your mates.
Now though, through Dazza I was involved in serious dosh and serious shit, and when the stakes had become as high as this, the game had got serious for everyone involved. It was becoming play or be played. How had it come to this, I wondered, that our loyalty to our club and our bros could end up with Billy being scared I’d come to kill him?