CHERUB: Brigands M.C. - Robert Muchamore Page 0,66
all she could hear was the four teenagers laughing, but also slightly embarrassed.
‘Sorry,’ Joe said, as he took the remote off his mum and pressed the mute button.
‘Mad bloody lot, you are,’ Joe’s mum laughed. ‘I don’t mind you having fun but I could hear that down in the kitchen.’
23. LONDON
Saturday morning
There were Brigands chapters in twenty-three countries. They all wore the same patch and obeyed a club rulebook set down by the mother chapter in Long Beach, California. All members had to own a Harley Davidson motorcycle and go through an elaborate recruitment process. They had to pay membership fees, attend weekly meetings, go on two mandatory runs per year and contribute generously to the club’s legal fund.
The chapters also had rules to follow. Each had to have a minimum of six full-patch members, including a president, a treasurer and a sergeant-at-arms. The clubhouse had to be permanent, with an area for socialising, an area for working on motorcycles and a bunkhouse to accommodate guests. A full-patch Brigand was entitled to enter and stay at any Brigands clubhouse in the world.
Beyond these rules, much depended upon a chapter’s wealth. There were chapters in Argentina whose clubhouses were little more than tin sheds, while chapters like Long Beach and South Devon had custom buildings, with elaborate security, air-conditioning and accommodation that was comfortable, if unlikely to impress anyone’s mother in terms of cleanliness.
The London chapter fitted between the two extremes. Its clubhouse was a canalside pub, near King’s Cross station. It was bought for a few hundred pounds in the 1960s when it was surrounded by bombsites. Now its security cameras and bricked-up windows stood out amidst low-rise offices and budget hotels. Tourists occasionally wandered off the canal path to have their pictures taken in front of the painted Brigands logo and chromed bikes parked outside.
The London chapter had 24/7 security, with the cameras manned by an elderly biker called Pikey who lived in an attic room. Pikey had lost a lung to pneumonia and he wheezed as he leaned over a banister and shouted to the cramped bar downstairs.
‘Paki on the intercom. Says he’s here to see you, boss.’
Sealclubber stank of booze and cigarettes. He’d played poker until 3 a.m. and crashed out on a mattress on the floor of his president’s office without even bothering to remove his boots.
The steel-reinforced entrance had an electronic lock and undercover officer George Khan shoved it when the intercom buzzed. The door opened into a shabby pub, the carpet black with filth and cigarette burns. The pool table and fruit machines looked new while the bar had been ripped out to make space: food and drink were free in Brigands clubhouses, although non-members who didn’t slide paper money into one of the donation jars before leaving were liable to find themselves on the end of a fist or boot.
‘We used to have a problem with rats in here but they walked out in disgust,’ Sealclubber explained, as George stepped inside. ‘I’m gonna have to ask you to strip down.’
This kind of search was standard for anyone entering a clubhouse to do business. The two other Brigands sitting at tables across the room gave evil stares as George pulled his T-shirt over his head and dropped his shorts so that Sealclubber could see there was no recording device strapped to his body.
‘Leave your keys and mobile over on the table,’ Sealclubber said. ‘Just in case.’
He then led George through a low door off the side of the room. The walls of his office were layered thick with pinned-up photographs, newspaper clippings and scrawled messages. George was horrified by the stained mattress and knocked back by the overpowering combo of cigar smoke and Sealclubber’s BO.
‘Is it safe to talk here?’ George asked, sitting in a wrecked armchair as Sealclubber settled behind the mounds of paperwork on his desk.
‘The office is locked when I’m not here,’ Sealclubber said. ‘Whole clubhouse gets swept for bugs every week and I’ve been doing business out of this office since eighty-three without any shit happening.’
George produced a bundle of cash from a Nike gym bag. ‘It’s only forty-two grand here,’ he said nervously.
Sealclubber reared forward in his seat. ‘Sixty-three,’ he growled. ‘I’m fronting you for six hundred grand and you can’t even put up a ten per cent deposit?’
‘I could have had it Monday,’ George said. ‘It’s not a question of having the money, but of moving it around so that it doesn’t get detected by money laundering controls.’