2. 1 The off
The Beast rested easy on her side stand. Saddlebags packed, waterproofs stowed away, oil topped
up, and with a full tank, she at least was ready for the off. The early morning sky had begun to clear,
the wind was calm with the pungent smell of the sea and the mudflats, and the only thing she was
waiting for was me.
The damp tarmac of the road stretched before us, heading inland like the start of an endless
highway. Looking east, and out towards where the horizon should be, the sky and the sea were
fused seamlessly into one, and in the luminous glare the shapes and furled masts of the yachts
marooned in the marina seemed silhouetted into clusters of abstract shapes. A haze rested on the
low shore that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. At this early hour the air was dark above the town
behind me, and further back still towards the west seemed condensed into a mournful gloom,
brooding motionless and red-tinged over where London lay.
There was no putting it off.
It was time to go.
Wrapping my scarf across my face against the chill air of the morning I pulled on my lid, cinching the
strap tight under my chin. Not bothering with my goggles to start with, I just slipped on my
wraparound shades and picked up my riding gloves from where they were sitting on the saddle.
The key was already in the ignition so as I threw my leg across the bike and sat down into The Beast’s
familiar embrace it was just a matter of a turn in the lock and the red lights flicked on, as she waited
silently for my next move.
With a heave on the handlebars to bring her head up straight, I pushed her deadweight upright from
where she’d been slouching by the curb and feeling her balance easily between my legs, I pulled out
on the choke and pressed the starter.
There was barely a whirr before, with a cough and a roar The Beast caught, throbbing into angry life
with her familiar snarl before falling back to a rumble. Twisting the grip I blipped the throttle a few
times, hearing the satisfactory growl of her engine responding with rising revs while I let it warm,
slowly easing off on the choke until I let her settle into her healthy uneven tick over, feeling The
Beast’s heart beating out her rumbling hesitating rhythm.
Lifting my leg up onto the peg I felt my toes slip naturally over the lever and as I squeezed in the
heavy clutch I pressed down, and felt rather than heard the heavy snick of first gear clunking into
place.
I glanced either way along the road one last time. Not a soul was about other than me, The Beast,
and some mangy looking seagulls inspecting the offerings of last night’s bins. With a gentle turn of
the throttle I lifted the revs and then easily fed out the clutch, feeling The Beast’s motor bite and
gently lift us up and launch us out and away onto the road as above us the streetlights were working
out whether it was time to turn themselves off.
For good or ill, The Beast and I were on our way. Wherever the fuck it was we were going.
*
You have plenty of time to think when you’re riding.
Other than enjoying the ride and watching the scenery roll by, hell there isn’t much else to do but
think.
It’s very Zen at times. Just you, the physicality of the ride and your thoughts, alone in the world.
It’s difficult to describe. At times when you ride you will be hyper aware, super conscious of every
sensation. Alongside the white sound of the wind noise and the rumble of the engine underneath
3. me that I both heard and sensed through the vibration of The Beast, I could feel the dampness of the
early morning air rapidly chilling against the slivers of exposed flesh above my scarf and the familiar
stinging as the piercing wind sought out the gaps above and below my wraparounds, the freezing air
playing against my eyes, the initial blast bringing reflexive tears that I blinked away until they settled
down.
But there’s no getting away from your thoughts as you ride. There’s no escape from that voice in
your brain. So at other times you just disappear into the zone, a place apart from everywhere else, a
place where there’s nothing else, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. It’s just you and it in your head
and you just have to deal with it. A chance to think, to work things through, and put them in order.
And this time, it was all my own fault, I knew that. The devil finds work for idle hands and all that. I
suppose the truth of it was that I’d been at a loose end, bored, hanging around the clubhouse. And
worse I’d been seen to be dossing about.
People think once you’ve got your patch you’ve made it and that’s that. But it really ain’t like that at
all. You always have to keep working to keep justifying your patch, there’s no kicking back on your
commitment to the club and coasting just because you have your colours. If anything, when you
were a fresh cut like me, quite the opposite. You still have things to prove, you’re still on probation
almost. To start with you’re always conscious of that first year vote hanging over you and wondering
what you need to do to make sure you keep your patch, and by then it’s automatic, it’s become part
of you, always wondering not what your club can do for you, but what you can do for your club, to
sort of coin a phrase.
So I’d been bugging people, wanting to know if there was anything going on I could get involved in,
asking what I could do.
So when at last I got asked – told – what was needed, well I could hardly complain or turn it down
could I? Like the man said, I’d wanted a mission. And whether I liked it or not, for my sins they’d
given me one.
And that really was that.
*
I’d had the message through Wibble. I was wanted at the clubhouse, he’s said, as soon as. It was a
phone call so obviously Wibble didn’t say any more and I didn’t ask. I just upped sticks, clocked off
and headed out to where The Beast was waiting for me in the company car park.
‘You knew Buddha didn’t you?’ asked Damage, as I sat down opposite him in his office at the
clubhouse an hour or so later. Wibble had gestured to me to sit while he elected to perch on the
edge of Damage’s desk.
‘Buddha?’ I said in surprise, no one had mentioned his name in years, ‘Well, yeah, sort of I suppose.’
Which sounds a bit odd I know, but it wasn’t as though I’d ever really known Buddha.
I’d seen him sure, but only really as a kid, he’d been about when I’d been very young, up to about
seven or so, and as mum was about the club sure he’d been a presence I’d been aware of. Then he’d
been away and the next time I’d seen him around had been ten years or so later for a while before
he’d disappeared again, this time for good.
But like I said, I’d just been a kid, I hadn’t really known who he was or understood what his coming
and going had meant.
And if anybody had been talking about it at the time, well they sure as hell hadn’t been telling some
club bird’s spotty kid all about it.
So, sure I had a mental image. A huge towering bloke with a bulging beer gut that I guess had
something to do with his name and a time warp picture of seventies long hair, spade beard and filthy
4. denim cut-offs.
And a huge smile. That was my memory of him.
A big dark bear of a man. Always smiling. And that was it really.
But to say I knew him. Well that was something different.
*
‘So you guys never met Buddha did you? When you were striking I mean?’ I asked Damage.
He shook his head, ‘Nah, I’d heard about him, but he was long gone by the time our lot patched
over. What, mid-eighties wasn’t it when he vanished?’
‘Eighty-eight,’ Wibble helped him out.
‘Well, whatever,’ Damage waved his hand dismissively, ‘and we became Menaces six or seven years
later…’
‘Ninety-four,’ Wibble added specifically again.
‘Christ, was it as long ago as that?’ Damage grunted with a smile, ‘Well, doesn’t time fly when you’re
having fun?’
‘Don’t it just.’ Wibble joined him with a grin.
‘Anyhow,’ Damage continued, ‘he’d have been off the scene years already by then, let alone by the
time we came down here.’
It had been a few years after his club had been absorbed into the Brethren and as a result Damage
had almost immediately taken over the Northern charter, when he had finally made his move south
and staged his coup against Polly, the previous national P, who had ended up feeding some pigs out
on a farm Basildon way, or so it sounded to me from reasonably well informed rumour.
‘But you must have wondered about him at the time?’
‘Nah, not really. Why would we?’ Wibble asked, ‘OK so he’d been a big noise in the club, P even, but
he’d chucked it up to go off and be a student or something and then disappeared completely.’
Damage shrugged, ‘Yeah, so what? He got tired and jacked it in? It happens. I just assumed he was
one of those. He’d drifted off and eventually he’d drifted so far he was out and not coming back.’
‘Either that or he was dead,’ added Wibble, reflecting one of the other main theories I’d heard over
the years and to be fair, it had to be a possibility.
I’d been a striker in the mid-nineties after I’d come home, booted out of the army and with nowhere
else to go. It was just around the time that Dazza up North had been making his first fatal moves on
Damage’s club, and they were right, Buddha had been a long time gone already, otherwise I would
have met him properly. It’s just how it would have happened.
When you’re striking for the club it’s a matter of principle that your sponsor takes you around to
everything, so that everybody, and I mean, everybody, gets to have a look at you. It’s important.
When you become a club brother you become a brother to everybody in the club, not just your
sponsor or your local charter, so all your prospective brothers across the whole of the club need to
have a chance to have a look at you. Everyone in the club needs to have the chance to check you
out, see you, judge you. So as a striker you go to all the runs, all the parties, and of course, when
you’re there you do all the skivvying, and the fetching and carrying, all the guarding and all the
clearing up. And it’s not just that you’re there as free labour so that no patch has to lift a finger they
don’t need to. It’s so that every patch can see you work, see how you commit to the club and what it
needs.
But it’s not just the events. It’s other things as well. You did visiting days in jail, you took things in to
5. guys in hospital. Basically, wherever there was a patch, sooner or later there you would be as well,
working your ticket and putting in the face to face time as you rode back and forth across the whole
bloody country, mile after sodding mile tagging along after your sponsor as you made sure you met
everybody, but everybody.
So if Buddha had still been there, anywhere, in contact with the club and still wearing his colours,
then I’d have met him. No question.
But he wasn’t and I hadn’t.
‘So what’s this all about then, Damage?’ I asked. ‘Buddha disappeared years ago. Either like Wibble
here says, he’s dead or he’s just plain gone, whichever. So why the interest now?’
‘Oh he’s not dead,’ said Damage with a surprising degree of calm certainty.
‘Some people think he is,’ I said, only to see Damage shake his head.
‘Well I don’t care what some people think. They’re wrong.’
There was something about his tone of voice that set alarm bells ringing in my head and now this
turn of conversation was beginning to seem seriously weird. There was something about the way
Damage said it which made me realise this wasn’t Damage speculating about something or voicing
an opinion.
When Damage said something like that, it meant Damage knew something, for certain.
I realised with a mounting sense of what, well, not excitement really, not at that stage, but certainly
curiosity, it could only be one thing. Damage knew that Buddha; Buddha that larger than life
character from my childhood; Buddha, that legend around the club, our Arthur, our mysteriously
vanished king; Buddha, Damage’s predecessor but one as club P; Buddha was alive.
I had to ask the question. Looking directly into Damage’s face as he sat there brooding I came out
with it.
‘So how do you know he isn’t?’
The pair of them were watching me as I looked between them, waiting for one of them to fill me in,
and eventually it was Damage as P who put me in the picture.
‘Like you know, for years, ever since we’ve been around, all we knew was that he’d gone.
Disappeared off the face of the earth long before we were around. Sure everyone had their pet
theories but really, why would we give a shit? It was ancient fucking history as far as we were
concerned and we had all sorts of other crap to deal with at the time.’
He was talking about sorting out Polly’s crew, although of course he would never say so as such,
walls have ears or if not ears, at least the possibility of microphones and all that.
‘So he was gone, so what?’ he continued, ‘We just weren’t bothered or interested.’
‘Until now?’
‘Until now,’ he agreed.
‘And now because?’ I asked.
‘Because,’ he said reaching into his vest pocket and pulling out a baggie which he tossed onto the
table in front of me, ‘because, now we’ve just had this shit through.’
I glanced down at the clear package between us and recognized the contents immediately.
‘Acid?’
‘Yes,’ chipped in Wibble, ‘but not just any acid. This, sunshine, is the very best, purest gear you’ll
ever taste, and I mean ever. Wombat tried some yesterday and he’s still somewhere in orbit around
6. Saturn.’
Damage just chuckled and I had the feeling that Wombat hadn’t been given much of a choice about
sampling the product.
‘So where’s it come from?’ I asked. ‘If it’s that good gear there can’t be many places knocking it out.’
‘Well that’s the question isn’t it?’ grumbled Damage.
‘And you think it’s from Buddha?’ I continued.
‘It’s from him,’ Wibble stated flatly.
‘How do you know?’
‘Take it from us,’ Damage tapped the table for emphasis, ‘we know.’
Presumably there’d been a note of some kind with it, I guessed.
‘So where’s it come from? How did it get here? There must be a clue?’ I asked.
‘It’s been posted from somewhere in London by the look of the envelope,’ Wibble informed me, as
we each stared at the baggie.
‘That doesn’t mean a thing,’ said Damage in disgust, ‘He could have got anyone to stick it in a post
box.’
‘Anyone he knew…’ Wibble retorted.
‘Hmm, yeah. Alright,’ Damage waved that line of discussion away in exasperation. I got the definite
impression that I had come in on the end of what had already been a long and frustrating
conversation.
‘So what do you want me to do about it?’ I asked, wondering where the hell I fitted into all of this
and almost immediately wishing that I hadn’t.
‘Simple really,’ said Wibble as Damage lifted his gaze from the baggie to stare straight at me
unnervingly, ‘we want you to find him.’
‘Find him?’
Or find the source of the gear, I wondered? Well it amounted to the same thing as far as I could see
at this stage.
‘And we want you to find out what the fuck is going on,’ added Damage with sudden vehemence.
So definitely the gear then, I decided.
‘Christ, you can’t be serious!’ I protested, ‘I mean, he disappeared, what a dozen or so years ago
now?’
‘Yeah, well now he’s back, so he’s got to be somewhere,’ Wibble observed.
‘Yeah well, woopy fucking doo, but where do I start?’ I asked, omitting the words this wild goose
chase from the end of the sentence, although they hung in the air all the same. ‘Somewhere’s quite
a big place so how the hell am I meant to begin looking for him? Do I look like a private detective or
something?’
‘How about trying the last place he was known to be?’ suggested Damage with a shrug. As far as he
was concerned this discussion was over, I could see that. He’d told me what he wanted me to do, so
now it was up to me to just sod off and do it.
‘Which was?’ I asked turning to direct my question to Wibble.
‘How the fuck would we know?’ was all he said, helpfully.
7. ‘Talk to the old timers,’ suggested Damage, ‘the guys who knew him back in the day. They’re the
guys who’ll remember what happened, what they thought at the time.’
It made sense I supposed, as a way of getting started, as much sense as anything else anyway.
As our sit down was obviously over I stood up to leave while Damage gave me my valediction, ‘Keep
it quiet and keep in touch eh? Anything you need, anything you find out, you give us a call. A daily
shout.’
I had his mobile number and I knew to call from phone boxes if there was anything serious I needed
to discuss. If I gave him a bell he’d pick up the number and then one of them would call me back on
it from another call box they’d pick at random. That way we could speak without the risk of his
mobile being tapped. It wasn’t perfect, but given the chances of the plod wiring every phone box in
London, meant it was pretty good, we reckoned.
*
Like I said, it made as much sense as anything else so I did what Damage suggested and made my
way downstairs to the bar. It was early but surprise, surprise, some of the old timers were already
there and settling in with their pints at the far end beyond the pool table.
I didn’t want to be too obvious, not given how much of an issue this looked as though it was for
Damage, so it took me a while to settle in and join them for a chat. Bringing the subject around to
the good old days didn’t take too much doing. These were guys I’d known on and off my whole life
and I played the d’you remembers, who was that, and whatever happened to just as I needed to, to
get to where I wanted to be as I played off my time as a kid to finally get round to Buddha.
‘So no one had any problems with him going off like that?’ I asked looking round at Nosh, Dumpy,
and Jonno who were sat at a table.
‘No way mate,’ said Nosh, ‘Buddha’d given the best part of twenty years to the club, building it up
from nothing. You had to respect that, everyone did.’
‘Yeah,’ added Dumpy, ‘if anyone deserved life membership and the opportunity to kick back, do a bit
of his own thing, it was Buddha, you know? It was the least we could do.’
I hadn’t known, or if I had at some point, it hadn’t really registered, but that when he’d come back
and then resigned the P, Buddha had been one of those few people ever granted life membership.
As a normal member you were part of your charter and you followed your charter rules, one of
which was mandatory church attendance unless you were inside or physically incapacitated, no
exceptions. That was one of the things that had been odd about what Buddha had been doing
before he disappeared since he’d been off in the Midlands, bloody miles away from his charter and
there was no way he’d have been blatting back down to London week in week out to attend church.
But as a life member, well, he hadn’t had to. I mean sure, he was entitled to attend church, in
London or at any of the other charters, but as a life member it was no longer compulsory. To get to
be a life member, well, you were someone who was judged to have given your life to the club
anyway. It wasn’t as though you needed to prove anything to anybody any more.
‘So tell me about him, what was he like?’
And whoever I asked, the answers were always the same.
Buddha? Well, Buddha was the tops.
Buddha? You had to hand it to him. Without Buddha we wouldn’t be here today.
Buddha? Buddha saved the club. It was his strength that got it through.
When you talked to any of the older guys about Buddha, like Nosh, or Dumpy or Jonno, heard their
stories about him, well, telling Buddha’s story was telling the story of the club, in its early days
8. anyway. Buddha had been a rocker, a classic London greaser, from fighting with mods in the sixties
to helping create the club in the early seventies and build it up from well, nothing really, becoming P
and then being put away.
And it was being put away that started the chain of events that eventually led to his disappearance,
or at least that’s the way the old guys saw it.
He went down for a long stretch. I remembered it happening, that was the time he went away, the
kid’s memory of one day Uncle Buddha not being around anymore and not really understanding
why, with no one, not mum, not the other guys in the club wanting to talk about it and even then as
a kid, understanding it was something that I didn’t ask about.
Inside, there wasn’t much to do except read. He’d stayed P of course, but on the outside it was Polly,
his rising VP who had to take up the slack and handled the club. Polly was a younger breed, a more
professional outlaw if you will, coming into a club that was already organized and not having to be
built from scratch, one punch-up at a time. Don’t get me wrong, Polly wasn’t adverse to a good ruck
when he wanted one, but Polly was more about building the club business than the bare knuckled
style of Buddha and his generation, and it was the start of Polly’s cool, efficient rise to the top,
slipping along in his shadow as Buddha’s smoothly and dangerously competent lieutenant, deputy
and ultimate fixer.
So with Polly handling most of the outside Buddha began reading, seriously reading, I guess really for
about the first time in his life, and to everyone’s surprise, including as I heard it his own, he
discovered he’d got a taste for it.
In fact, more than a taste since pretty soon he was signed up on an OU course and by the time he
was eligible for parole it was Buddha, Bachelor of Science no less, with a first in sociology that the
board was deciding on and inevitably given his model prison record, releasing on license into the big
wide world.
And the thing was they were all agreed, when he came out, he was a changed man.
Oh underneath he was still the same old Buddha all right, the bloke who would do anything for you,
the man who was the rock the club was built on. But as well as that there was a new Buddha, a more
thoughtful Buddha, a Buddha with other new interests and directions in life.
And the announcement came as a shock to everyone. They had all welcomed him back and expected
him to pick up where he’d left off. I mean, he’d kept on the P post all the way through his time. So
when about six months or so later he told them one evening at full church that he’d made his
decision, that he wanted to retire from active leadership of the club, that as a member in good
standing he wanted to go Freebooter, and that he was planning to go to university as a mature
student to do a PhD, there was general consternation.
Of course the ever ambitious Polly couldn’t wait to agree, in as seemly a fashion as possible and was
eager to smooth Buddha’ path in doing what he wanted to do, after all Polly argued to everyone
around him, look what we all owed Buddha and if that’s what he wants after what he’s done for the
club, doesn’t he deserve it? Which frankly no one could really argue with. It was Polly who pushed
the life membership that made Buddha’s university ambitions compatible with continued club
membership and it was Polly who organized everything to allow him to go.
I had a sudden and ludicrous mental image of Polly standing at the clubhouse gate waving Buddha
off with a white hankie as Buddha flew the nest, roaring off to the Midlands to start this new phase
of his life.
And why wouldn’t Polly have been keen to sort it all, I thought? It was the opportunity he must have
been waiting years for, handed to him on a plate, Buddha’s voluntary departure gave him the
opportunity he needed to take over the club without the messy and potentially risky business of
staging a coup against the man who most members felt by that stage was the club’s, if not father
9. given the history, then at least step dad.
‘Polly had wanted that?’ I asked Nosh.
‘Polly wanted it? Oh fuck me, yeah,’ he said, ‘Polly was always ambitious, you could tell, but all the
same he’d done a good job in managing the club while Buddha had been inside, so I guess Buddha
felt… well we all did really… felt the club was in safe hands. I mean, it wasn’t as though Buddha was
going to be around for ever so we had to be thinking about the club’s future even then.’
‘So Buddha went off to uni and then disappeared, is that it?’ I asked, keeping it deliberately cool.
‘Well it wasn’t as if it was one day there, one day not,’ explained Dumpy, ‘because he was away it
was up to him to check in with whatever chapter he wanted to for church.’
‘And given his rep, who would be keeping tabs?’ I nodded, seeing how his absence could have been
missed.
‘Exactly,’ Nosh agreed, ‘Buddha wasn’t a guy you would check up on. So he used to hit the local
charter most Mondays, keeping in, and then for a few weeks he didn’t, but sod it, so what? They just
thought he was back down home or something or off on one of his runs. He was a big one for long
jams was Buddha.’
‘Yeah, and down here, well we just thought he was at the local gig,’ added Dumpy, ‘why wouldn’t
we? It was where he usually was while he was up there.’
‘So you thought he was there, and they thought he was here?’
‘Yeah, that’s about the size of it,’ Dumpy shrugged.
‘So how long did this go on before someone twigged he was missing?’
‘Weeks, months I guess,’ said Nosh gazing up at the ceiling as he reminisced, ‘I think it was only
when Jonsey was chasing up dues and asked the local charter to hand them over that anyone really
noticed he’d not been seen for a while.’
‘And he really hadn’t been there?’ I asked, ‘they were sure of that were they?’
‘Fuck no, I mean Jonsey was a suspicious bastard when it came to club dosh…’
‘Best treasurer we ever had, Jonsey was,’ said Jonno.
‘S’right, agreed Dumpy. ‘You can be frigging sure Jonsey checked, he went through their register,
there’d been no sign of Buddha like I said for a while, couple of months I think it was.’
‘So what did you do? You must have looked for him? Wanted to know what had happened to him?’
‘Sure of course we did…’ Jonno protested.
‘Yeah we tried to find him,’ Nosh overrode him, ‘you’d better believe it. I mean this wasn’t just
anyone, this was Buddha, you know? Whatever the hell had happened we wanted to know. We
couldn’t just have an ex P for fuck’s sake, disappear off the face of the earth and not do something
about it!’
‘But at the same time we couldn’t go too public,’ pointed out Jonno.
‘Why not?’
‘What? Don’t be daft. What were we going to do? Let the world know that an ex P had vanished,
maybe been knocked off, and we hadn’t missed him for months? That we didn’t have a bloody clue
where he was? What the fuck do you think that would make us look like?’
I could see the problem and I could imagine the ramifications as the guys at the time tried to work
out what this meant, how best to play it.
10. ‘So what did you do?’ I asked.
‘We put the word out, discrete like, asked around, friendly clubs, bars, everywhere really. Everyone
around the club was told to keep an eye out.’
That tied in. Damage had said something about his club at the time getting cryptic messages from
the Brethren, as in the end the club had gone for discretion. A club like the Brethren trades off its
rep that to screw with one is to screw with all of us, and to be looking at immediate and all out
overwhelming retaliation. The last thing the club needed or wanted was for word to get around that
you could potentially take out a life member, and ex sodding P at that, as Nosh had said, and get
away with it, worse still, without us even bloody noticing.
‘And that was it?’ I asked, ‘that’s how you went about it?’
‘Yeah. Polly decided we needed to play it cool, it was the best way he said.’
‘And you all went with that?’
I looked around and they were all nodding or shrugging their shoulders in resignation.
Nosh seemed to speak for all of them when he said, ‘Yeah, well, it seemed to make sense at the
time.’
‘So what did you find?’
‘Oh we had all sorts of crap came in. People who’d seen him, people who thought they’d seen him,
people who knew someone who knew someone, you know the sort of thing.’
There were murmurs of agreement around the table, memories of false leads chased. Times of
running back and forth across the country chasing down sightings and what not.
‘And these were from all over the fucking shop,’ Dumpy was saying, ‘the West Country, East Anglia,
even frigging Scotland. I mean how the hell were we supposed to follow all those up?’
‘What did you all think had happened to him, at the time I mean?’
‘Well, the obvious really,’ said Nosh. ‘Nobody came out and said it, but we all thought it, you could
tell. Buddha was riding on his own and hanging out on the local independent club’s turf and not
somewhere that was core club. There was a lot of interclub tit for tat stuff going on back then, lots
more independents scattered around the place, not so much of an all-out war as there was later, but
still it could get pretty nasty if you got caught up in something on another club’s turf.’
I could see Dumpy on the bench behind him shaking his head wearily in disagreement but obviously
not rushing to volunteer an opinion, and I marked him down for a discrete follow up question later,
alone if needs be.
‘So you thought…?’ I encouraged.
‘We thought someone had grabbed him and offed him…’
‘Just because of his colours? Wrong place wrong time?’ I suggested. It was a thought that had
occurred to me.
‘Yeah, something like that.’
‘So what about the local club, did you press them?’
‘The Beep Beeps? Oh hell yeah,’ Nosh said emphatically, ‘they were the obvious place to look, so
they got a visit or two but you know, they said they’d had nothing to do with it. I mean they weren’t
a support club as such, but they weren’t like hostile either. We knew Buddha had been drinking in
their clubhouse a few times. So at a club level there didn’t seem to be anything in it for them. It
didn’t make sense, why create such an issue with a club like ours for nothing?’
11. I could see his point. The Roadrunners MC had been, still were as a matter of fact, a fair sized
independent club, and one we had on a club to club basis, reasonable relationships with.
As their name suggested, they were one of the outfits that had been around since the late sixties
and it reflected the early slightly jokey initial origins as a gang of local lads with a sense of humour.
And so to friendly clubs they were known almost inevitably as the Beep Beeps, a nickname they took
from friends with respect with good grace. But despite the humour and their easy going attitude, like
any club they were sensitive to sleights, and familiarity, like anything in the biker world, was
something that had to be earned with respect, so God help you if you pushed it or were thought to
be taking the piss. Say Beep Beep behind one of them without being a friend of the club and you
were going to have a Wiley E Coyote moment.
‘So, some personal beef then? An accident they had to cover up? A punch up in the clubhouse that
had gone wrong?’ I suggested. These things happened. Guys got pissed, guys got wired, fights
happened and sometimes inevitably a punch up became something else, something more serious
that needed dealing with.
‘Yeah. It was possible, we thought of that, but they said there wasn’t anything in it,’ Nosh said. ‘I was
one of the guys who went up to see them, they seemed pretty straight about it.’
‘CCTV?’
‘Too long ago, mate. This was back in the eighties remember, before we had all the gizmos we have
now. Besides which, if they had had it, they’d have just made sure they wiped that tape wouldn’t
they?’
‘Yeah,’ I conceded, ‘I suppose you’re right.’
‘So if you were going to look for him, today I mean, where would you start?’
Nosh looked at me with a suddenly serious expression on his face.
‘Are you serious?’ he asked shrewdly. ‘Where’s this coming from?’
Knocking on sixty or so he might be, and despite the effect of a lifetime’s abuse of booze and
whatever controlled substances he could get his hands on to contend with, I knew Nosh was still a
wily old bugger with a razor sharp nose for bollocks. People underestimated him at their peril.
‘Humour me,’ I said, with what I hoped was a disarming smile, ‘I’m just interested.’
‘This is ancient history, you know?’ Nosh said, by the tone of his voice not buying my pitch at all.
Yeah, and someone else told me that as well this evening, I thought, as I just shrugged.
‘So, what do you reckon?’ I asked, ‘What would you do?’
‘Me?’ he thought about it for a moment, ‘apart from just sit here and have another beer you mean?’
We laughed at his joke, but I stayed waiting until he realised I was actually still expecting an answer.
‘Well,’ he said at last putting his now empty glass down in front of me with a raised eyebrow, to
which I nodded.
‘Well then,’ he said, ‘I guess I’d start where we left off, back up where he was living, up there at that
uni and back with the Beep Beeps as the local club. They’re the guys on the ground, they’ll know the
local scene, if anyone can point you in the right direction I’d guess it would have to be someone up
there, but fuck it mate, that’s a big if isn’t it? I mean this was what, nigh on twenty years ago now
isn’t it? Shit, there’s a lot of brain cells flowed under the bridge in that sort of time so I don’t fancy
your chances much I have to say…’
*
I walked out of the club house with Dumpy an hour or so later.
12. He wasn’t surprised. I could tell he’d been expecting me to try to catch him.
‘So what do you think?’ I asked generically, as he stopped at his bike.
‘Think? About what?’
‘About what we were talking about in there.’
He had his lid on by this stage and was swinging his leg across his bike so that he sat down on it with
a shrug that said loud and clear Not a lot.
‘Oh come on Dumpy,’ I said to him, ‘I saw you in there. You had something to say but didn’t want to
say it in front of the guys.’
‘Maybe,’ he admitted, pulling on his riding gloves, his breath like steam in the chill night air.
‘So then, it’s just the two of us here isn’t it? It’s not all the guys, so I gotta ask, what do you know?’
‘Know?’ he seemed surprised at the word. ‘I don’t know sod all mate, none of us do.’
‘OK then,’ I said, backtracking with a show of my hands, ‘not know then, but you think something
don’t you? You suspect something, I can see that easily enough. So tell me that at least. What do you
think really happened?’
Dumpy stuck his keys into the ignition and casually pushed the bike upright, pulling the bars round
to face forwards. For a moment he sat there lost in thought, before with a shake of his head, wearily
he said, ‘Oh well, fuck it, what harm does it do now?’
‘What harm does what do?’
‘I always just thought Polly had him offed.’
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Because it was obvious wasn’t it? Buddha had given Polly the train set to play with. Why would Polly
want to risk him ever coming and taking it back?’
Which made a whole load of sense when I thought about it. Like him or loathe him, and there were
plenty in either camp, if there was one thing everybody but everybody agreed on about Polly it had
been his ambition and ruthlessness when needed.
Except it appeared that Polly hadn’t offed him as Dumpy put it, not if Buddha was still alive anyway.
Which was also a bit of a big if I told myself, since at this stage all it seemed we had to go on as far as
I could tell was a scrawled signature on the end of a scrappy note.
And then with a roar of the engine into life and a graunch of gears Dumpy was gone, a disappearing
red light and noise fading into the darkness, as I stood and thought.
So where did this evening leave me, I wondered, before I turned and I walked to where The Beast
was waiting for me, nodding at the striker lurking at the far end of the row who was stamping his
feet against the cold of the evening. After a dozen years or so, even if it wasn’t twenty, it wasn’t
much to be going on, now was it? That and Dumpy’s final parting comment.
‘Why don’t you ask your mum about him?’ he’d said over his shoulder as he’d manoeuvred the
rumbling bike to be ready for the off. ‘She knew him alright, back in the day.’
Yeah, I guess she did.
And I needed to see her anyway. So it looked like my next stop was going to be Mum’s.
Still, it wasn’t all bad, I decided. There was one thing I could rely on at least, she’d have the kettle on.
