Chapter Thirteen

 

 

Nice doggy, keep moving. There’s a good dog. Don’t sit here. Please don’t sit here.

 

Spider was as good as his word, and he steered me through the process in the Visitor Centre, where I presented the visiting order and my ID, had a photograph of my face taken with a Polaroid camera and a print of my right hand geometry taken with a machine that looked straight out of a science fiction movie.

I didn’t need Spider to tell me that all this was to ensure that it was me who walked in and me who walked out again – the same principle behind the fact that I was told to leave all my ID in one of the lockers available. But it was useful to get the odd survival tip, such as to leave my car keys and any other metal in the locker as well. ‘Anything that shows up suspicious on an X-ray or triggers off the metal detectors,’ as Spider had said. ‘Think what you have to go through at airports, then treble it.’

The most important piece of advice, though, I didn’t fully appreciate at first. ‘Do not, repeat not, start chatting up any of the other visitors. Keep your eyes on the ground. No smiling, no eye contact. Don’t talk to the women or the kids. Specially not the women.’ I had assumed this was to avoid confrontations of the You looking at my bird/wife/kids? kind once inside, and it seemed like good advice, so I followed it. After all, there were potentially a thousand very frustrated husbands the other side of that wall, which was a pretty scary thought.

Over two-thirds of the other visitors were women, and a few had small children with them whom they clutched like security blankets whilst answering with sullen monosyllables the questions of the prison officers registering their visits. None was very old, and two seemingly travelling together, one white, one black, wore PVC micro skirts, denim jackets with the sleeves cut off, day-glo yellow scrunchy hairbands around their wrists, and ankle boots with spiky heels. They laughed loudly at just about anything, swore profusely and screeched when they answered questions, adding ‘fuck’ to emphasise just a-fucking-bout every fucking word.

‘Diversion,’ Spider had whispered in my ear. ‘The two tarts will make a scene and get hauled off for a strip search and the Vaseline digit treatment.’

I had read, probably in some dubious ‘men’s magazine’, that the record for a woman visiting a prison was 27 wraps of heroin smuggled ‘internally’. I winced as I remembered that.

‘They’ll distract the POs while the carrier goes in,’ Spider confided. ‘The stuff’ll be on one of the quiet ones. Or one of the kids.’

I tried to resist scanning the faces of the other women, remembering what Spider had said about eye contact. Apart from the two garishly-dressed girl decoys, most had dulled, vacant expressions that gave nothing away except the fact that they had all been here before.

‘Some of them get two hours a month visiting,’ my tour guide hissed out of the corner of his mouth. ‘And it’s an hour and a half too much.’

And then it was time to leave Spider in the Visitor Centre and walk towards the main gates of steel and glass behind a bomb-proof outer door, and there were white-shirted prison officers, male and female, and we were told to form a line and have our VOs checked. While we waited in line, we all had plenty of time to read the big notice that warned us not to try and smuggle drugs into the prison and how there would be an amnesty for anyone who dumped their stash in one of the bins provided before we got inside.

The first door was an airlock system, allowing two or three of us in there at a time, one door hissing closed behind us. Only when there were officers enough to deal with us on the other side did the second door open and men were directed one way and women another.

The search area was similar to the set up at an airport, in that there was a large metal-detecting portal in the middle of the room, which you obviously had to walk through, and an x-ray machine like they have for hand luggage; but the actual procedure was a tad more thorough. After going through it, I could understand why nobody had ever hi-jacked a prison.

I was told to take off my jacket and put it, along with anything from my trouser pockets, in a plastic tray to be slid through the x-ray. Then I was told to add my belt to the tray, which I hadn’t expected, and a ‘first-timer’ expression appeared on the faces of all the prison officers in the room.

Then I had to step through the detector door, tensing myself – as you do – for the inevitable buzzing sound as the nail file or the keys you’d forgotten about set it off. There was no buzz, although they made me stay in the detector frame whilst a burly male PO positioned himself about four feet in front of me and planted his feet apart, almost like an American football player waiting for a tackle. He signalled me forward with small ‘come on’ movements of his fingers and then asked me to spread my legs and stretch out my arms.

I think the proper expression is a ‘fingertip’ search, but I’m sure there were a couple of knuckles in there somewhere as he patted me down then asked me to turn round so he could do the same from behind. The hands didn’t linger on my crotch, but they made sure there was nothing in there that shouldn’t have been.

Then they asked me to stand over by the wall and take my shoes off. While the male officer who had patted me examined my best pair of Russell Bromley brogues (my only pair, actually), bending the soles, tugging at the laces, twisting the heels, a blonde female officer approached me, stretching on a pair of thin surgical gloves.

‘Would you open your mouth for me, please?’ she asked in a soft Scottish accent.

I was so relieved I almost made a witty remark, but remembered where I was just in time and did as I was told.

Her rubber fingers ran over my teeth and probed the roof of my mouth and down the sides of my tongue, then squeaked down the sides of my back teeth.

Her clear blue eyes met mine as she withdrew her hand and I thought for a moment she was going to compliment me on my teeth, which I do take care of, but she just said I could get my things and move into the waiting area.

Six of us congregated in a corridor while an officer locked one door behind us and then unlocked another with keys from a bunch chained to his belt. Through that door we were in an enclosed courtyard in the corner of which stood two more officers each holding Alsatian dogs on tight leads.

We were lead diagonally across the courtyard and were able to catch a glimpse of the upper floors of the cell wings and, beyond, the roof of the high security prison-within-a-prison. We could also see the outer walls from the inside and the ‘skyhawk’ cameras on tall posts, which offered somebody somewhere pinpoint closed-circuit television pictures of us as we headed for another door bearing a sign saying ‘Visitors’.

The waiting area reminded me of a cinema foyer, though I couldn’t think of a cinema I knew that had large signs asking customers to dump their drugs in the bins provided or announcements that the toilets were about to be locked. Being British, we formed an orderly queue leading to the double doors at the end. They had even painted a yellow line on the floor to show us where to stand, and everyone was behaving themselves; even the two micro-skirted foulmouthed girls had reduced the number of ‘fuckings’ in their conversation by about a third.

It therefore seemed totally unfair when they set the dogs on us.

 

Keep moving, there’s a good doggy. Move along, little doggy, move along. Just don’t sit here ...

So it wasn’t exactly a slobbering, growling, flesh-ripping hound. In fact, I was tempted to say ‘Frankly, Mr Baskerville, we expected something larger,’ but I kept my lip buttoned and hoped the damned dog would as well. In any other set of circumstances, I would have been tempted to bend down and stroke him or pat his head, or find somewhere to hide him if Springsteen was in the vicinity. I’ve always had a soft spot for spaniels, though I was prepared to make an exception in this case.

Spider had warned me about the active and the passive sniffer dogs the prison used, tossing in at no extra charge that Belmarsh had the largest population of working dogs of any prison, bar one in Northern Ireland, as if that was a comfort. The active sniffers, an unholy alliance of Labradors and spaniels, were known as the Dogs From Hell, being bouncy, unstoppably enthusiastic and totally dedicated to finding hidden, abandoned or buried dumps of drugs. But it was the passive sniffers you had to wary of. They were mostly spaniels, trained from pups to sniff out drugs on a person. They didn’t bark or slobber or whine or drag their handlers as if they were saying ‘Come on, get a move on, it’s over here ...’ The passives, all bright eyed and bushy tailed, just wandered casually in and out of people’s legs so you wouldn’t know they were there, until they found the scent they were sniffing for. Then they did an awful thing. They sat there and stared up at you with their big, brown spaniel eyes. They sat there, and no matter how hard you tried to send them a telepathic message to piss off, they just wouldn’t move.

Come on, Fido, give us a break. Move along. Please. For God’s sake, don’t start getting comfortable.

The dog had been let off the lead by the door and had trotted along the length of the yellow line behind which we all stood, backs against a wall. Then the damned animal about-turned, trotted back about halfway down the line to where I was and sat down, his front paws up against the other side of the yellow line, like a sprinter on the blocks.

I glanced to my left as surreptitiously as I could. Next in line was a young black guy, his shaven head pressed right back into the wall, his eyes staring straight out front, his face expressionless. He had totally ignored the dog’s presence, and wasn’t that a sheen of sweat on his head?

Now he looked guilty, or at least more guilty than me. I could see that; why couldn’t the bloody dog? Why did it have to park its bum right in front of me?

But looking down, resisting the twin urges to say ‘good doggy’ and to kick the thing into touch, I thought that maybe the sniffing spaniel wasn’t right in front of me. Actually, he was halfway between me and the person to my right.

To avoid any sudden guilty moves, I turned my head slowly as if my shoulders had been nailed to the wall, and eyeballed the woman in front of me in the queue.

I honestly hadn’t noticed her before. She was a short, overweight White woman, maybe 35, which made her and me among the oldest there, and was wearing a crumpled and in parts threadbare grey pinstripe two-piece. She had large, black-framed glasses, wore no make-up, had her hair scraped back in a stubby bun held by a pair of garish yellow hairbands (the only splash of colour on her) and she clutched a dog-eared paperback Bible to her chest.

Surely not?

Then, down the line, I saw the two micro-skirted girls looking up the line towards me and the dog. Looking very anxiously.

‘Come with us, please,’ said a voice.

Two officers, one male, one female, stood in front of me. Or were they in front of the woman next to me? My mouth was dry and I couldn’t think of a way to phrase the question. The damned dog wasn’t helping, just gazing balefully upwards and actually wagging its tail whilst still sitting there, making a swishing sound on the polished floor.

I knew there was something to say, but I couldn’t think what or how to say it. I couldn’t think at all.

‘Yes, you, madam,’ said the male officer. ‘This way, please.’

I must have exhaled loudly or perhaps even giggled. I certainly felt as if I was in control of my bladder once more, and however boorish my response to the misfortune of others, it was nothing to the reaction of the Bible-holding woman next in line.

‘I’ve got my period!’ she screamed. ‘That’s what your fucking dog can smell!’

‘Please, madam –’

‘Don’t you fucking touch me, you twat!’

‘Just come with us, my dear,’ tried the female officer.

‘I’ll have you for assault, you fucking dyke cunt!’

They each grabbed an arm and pulled the woman between them down the line and towards the doors we had come in through. She tried a half-hearted kick at the dog as it watched her, mildly amused, as she was hauled away.

I winked at the dog.

‘Good boy,’ I said softly.

Down the line, Spider’s two tart-decoys were staring openly now, their jaws sagging. The black one raised her arm and gave the finger to the backs of the officers, and the white girl joined in and did the same.

‘Let go of me, you twatting fucks!’ the woman shouted, and naturally we all turned to watch.

Almost at the door, the woman wrenched herself free from the two officers (who had shown remarkable patience in not slugging her so far) and then, like a frisbee, she flung the Bible she had been clutching towards the big metal bin reserved for those who wanted to opt for the drugs amnesty.

Whilst the officers’ attention was diverted and before they had a chance to get hold of her again, she had managed to put a hand up behind her head and flip off the two day-glow yellow scrunchy hairbands she had been wearing. The officers holding her didn’t seem to notice what had happened, nor did anyone else in the queue, and once they had a fresh hold on the woman – who was still screaming and spitting in their faces – they began a determined march towards the doors.

It was only me who was looking not at the free show, but at the two yellow hairbands on the floor.

Me and the two girls in micro-skirts further down the line, who had worn them on their wrists when they were in the Visitor Centre.

Me, them, and the dog, who had quietly gone and sat right next to them, his tail wagging and his nose twitching.

There’s a good doggy.

 

The Visits Room proper looked like the conference suite of a hotel or a polytechnic lecture room, apart from the fact that the rows of plastic chairs were bolted to the floor. There were tables with individual chairs, all also bolted to the floor, near the entrance, each with a number card on it, and there were two desks, one by the door we were using and one on the other side of the room, serving an entrance we couldn’t see. There were no more than six officers in the room, although if they were expecting a full house, I reckoned that around 200 visitors could be accommodated.

I waited in line for the desk, and then my VO was checked, I signed in and one of the officers used a rubber stamp to ink a purple square on the back of my left hand. I guessed it would show up under ultra-violet light and could well have got me into any Friday night disco in Plumstead, but I didn’t say anything, as I suspected the officers may have heard that one before.

They told me I would be Table 7 and to take a seat in one of the rows of chairs until they called me. I picked an empty row and sat quietly, avoiding all the other visitors, especially the two micro-skirt girls, who were sitting right at the back, eyes to the floor, dejected.

It gave me a chance to get my bearings, though, and to note that there were black-dome CCTV cameras in the ceiling – the black plastic domes meant you couldn’t see which way the cameras were pointing, but they could probably see you. There was also a small canteen where you could buy tea, coffee and jugs of fruit squash, although Spider had warned me that sales of orange squash were monitored closely. (An inordinate amount to drink during a visit would suggest the exchange and swallowing of smuggled wraps of drugs.)

It also became clear that the second desk across the room was where the prisoners entered, and the first few had already done so without me noticing. They wore casual clothes and were distinguished from the temporary visitors only by the fact that they all had fluorescent sashes across their chests, of the sort cyclists wear after dark.

The man who was shown to Table 7 was wearing one. He was small, balding, aged anywhere between 50 and 60 and had a barrel chest that strained the neon sash to its limit. He didn’t look like any cyclist I’d ever seen.

‘Table 7,’ said the prison officer at my side for the second or third time.

‘Oh, yeah. Right. Thanks,’ I said and got shakily to my feet, hoping my legs didn’t give way before I got to the table.

Then again, I could have broken into a run and gone straight by Mr Creosote, heading for the doors at a rate of knots. But I didn’t rate my chances.

They were probably used to people doing that in here.

 

‘Roy! So good of you to come, boyo!’

For a moment I almost looked around to see if there was someone behind me.

‘Mr Fisher. Good of you to see me.’

I took his outstretched hand and he squeezed mine hard.

‘Just keep smiling and sit the fuck down,’ said Mr Creosote, the Welsh accent evaporating. ‘We’re on camera but they don’t have sound, so we can talk.’

‘They don’t have sound mikes?’ I said stupidly.

My immediate thought was that no-one was going to hear me scream for help. It would also be impossible to prove what we had talked about, should I have to do so later.

‘Some European Court of Justice shit,’ he said. ‘They can’t read our mail and they can’t listen in on our conversations. So, no microphones, so we can have a nice chat. In a funny sort of way –’ I noticed a Welsh lilt creeping back in ‘– we have complete privacy sitting here. There’s not many places you can say that about, is there?’

He sat back and intertwined his fingers, resting his hands on the edge of the table. His face was circular and weather-beaten, although a white prison pallor was beginning to take effect. He was stocky, not large, and didn’t exude menace, but he wasn’t the sort of guy you’d push out of the way to get to the bar.

‘You’re not chatting, Mr Angel,’ he said.

‘It was you wanted to see me,’ I said, finding my voice.

‘No, you don’t understand. You’ve got to play their game. I told you they could see you – no, don’t look up, you prat – but they couldn’t hear you. But if you just sit there like a lemon and I do all the talking, then it looks on the cameras like I’ve called you in here for something, and that’ll make them suspicious.’

‘But you did send for me. I don’t really know why I’m here at all.’

‘Keep talking for a bit,’ he said, without moving his lips.

‘All right then, if you want to be a captive audience, that’s fine with me. After all, you’ve had plenty of practice.’

Seeing that he wasn’t taking offence, I leaned my elbows on the table and wagged a finger at him as if I was laying down the law. I hoped somebody in the control room was appreciating my performance.

‘And I am the injured party here. I’d never heard of you until last week but as soon as I do hear about you, I start to hear a lot of other things as well. Things involving an ex-con called Keith Flowers, who served time in this very nick. Coincidence? I think not.’ I was getting into my stride now. ‘And then I run into a very nice family called Turner.’

I watched his face closely, but he was giving nothing away.

‘Tell the truth, they’re not very nice; but, interestingly, they’re Welsh, and so, I would hazard a guess, are you. And then there’s another character who keeps cropping up. A solicitor called Haydn Rees, and he’s Welsh too. Is there a welcome in the valleys for me or what?’

I paused for a beat, but he came in.

‘Don’t lean too far forward, Mr Angel. They’ll think you’re trying to pass me something.’

I pulled back my elbows and resisted the temptation to look up to see if one of the cameras was watching me, not that there was any way I could have told. In doing so, I lost any initiative I might have had.

‘Right then,’ said Fisher/Creosote, ‘let me put you straight on a few things. First and foremost is that whatever dealings you’ve had with the Turner clan, I reckon they’ve been unpleasant. Am I right?’

‘I don’t want to repeat them,’ I said, nodding for the cameras, as if he was asking me if Aunty Vera had recovered from the operation, or similar.

‘Thought not. But bear in mind that even though they’re out there and I’m in here, I’m the one you really should be frightened of.’

‘Hey look, I don’t want my lounge creosoted.’

‘Stop flapping your hands like that,’ he said. ‘It looks like I’m threatening you.’

He hadn’t moved, his fingers still linked in front of him.

‘I thought you were,’ I said, stuffing my hands in my jacket pockets.

‘Not yet I’m not, just telling you what’s what. You’ll know when I’m threatening you.’ He allowed himself a brief smile. ‘You’ve heard about the creosote job, then?’

‘Spider told me.’

‘Thought he would. Sad case, that Spider. Anyway, we’re here to talk about you, Mr Angel, so let’s do that, shall we?’

‘Me? What have I done?’

‘What have you done? You’ve put my old and distinguished friend Keith Flowers in a mental hospital where even I can’t get a message to him. Well, haven’t you?’

‘It was probably me,’ I said reluctantly, ‘but I didn’t know he was your friend. He was your friend?’

‘No, not really,’ he said calmly. ‘More a business associate.’

‘That’s funny. That’s what Len Turner called him.’

I watched him closely for a reaction to that, and I got one; but not the one I expected.

‘I know,’ he said, grinning like a loon.

 

Malcolm Fisher summed it all up beautifully.

‘Let me pose a question, Mr Angel. What interests do prisoners share?

‘Think about it. You’re banged up with people you’d normally cross the road to avoid, but in here you can’t avoid them. You eat with them, you shower with them, you shit with them, you share a cell with them so they fart in your face when you’re asleep. What do you do to break the monotony? They’ve taken your wife away, your mates, your kids. You can’t nip out for a pint or to put a bet on. They won’t even let you buy a Lottery ticket.

‘Okay, so you can’t vote and you don’t get calls from double-glazing salesmen, but those are the only advantages of being inside.

‘And it is so boring you could scream.

‘Boredom is the one thing everybody in here has in common. So what do they do to kill the boredom? Do they swap stamp collections? Do they sit around discussing books they’ve just read or make model airplanes or do Open University degrees? Do they bollocks.

‘They plot, that’s what they do. They plot revenge on whoever put them inside, because most of them firmly believe they’re only in here because somebody stitched them up, or grassed them up or dropped them in it.

‘Not the police, mind you – not unless a bent copper’s involved. Mostly the cops are just doing their job.

‘No, it has to be somebody they know who let them down. Somebody who deserves a good slapping when they get out. And they while away the long nights and the even longer days by plotting exactly how they’re going to give them that slapping.

‘Biggest single leisure activity in prison is plotting. Sod learning a language or metalworking or sociology or creative writing classes. Revenge is the one and only self-improvement course they all sign up for.’

 

And that was what it was all about.

A chance assignment of cell space in the overcrowded prison system had thrown Keith Flowers and Malcolm Fisher together for six months. Six long months of plotting, as it turned out.

For reasons I didn’t need to know (and certainly wasn’t going to ask about), Fisher had issues, bones to pick, topics to debate – whatever – with a rival ‘businessman’ called Len Turner. It had something to do with Turner being an upstart from Port Talbot and not fit to wipe the boots of the real hard men of Cardiff, but there are some things you are better off not knowing.

Keith Flowers probably felt the same, at first.

Then bells started ringing. Len Turner had a solicitor, didn’t he? Bit of a wiseguy called Haydn Rees? And Flowers had issues/bones to pick/topics to debate and so forth, so fifth, with that very same Haydn Rees. Not only had Rees been spectacularly inefficient as a solicitor (Flowers was inside, after all, wasn’t he?) but he’d be co-responding with Flowers’ wife on the side.

If they could get at Len Turner through Rees, causing maximum grief to both, it would be a job well done. Two straw voodoo dolls and two sharp needles for the price of one. Buy one, get one free.

But how to set them both up? What was to be, as Hitchcock would have said, their McGuffin?

 

‘When you put Keith in hospital,’ Malcolm Fisher asked casually, ‘had he pulled a gun on you?’

‘Oh yes,’ I said, keen to tell him anything he wanted to know. ‘And he used it, several times. That’s why I had to do what I did.’

As if even I would have had to trash a brand new BMW if he’d been using only harsh language.

‘Any idea what sort of a gun he was using?’ Fisher said vaguely, like he wasn’t really interested.

‘Oh yes,’ I said again, anxious to be of assistance. ‘It was a Brocock.’

‘Oh fuck!’

A normal person would have kicked the cat, smashed his fist into the table, slapped his forehead and yelled ‘Doh!’. Malcolm Fisher just sat in silence.

It was scary. If I had been a census taker, I would have served him my own liver and opened a nice bottle of Chianti for him, right there and then.

He said nothing. Neither did I, and I estimated that we wasted about five percent of the allocated visiting time sitting in silence not looking at each other. Then again, looking around the room, everyone else seemed to have run out of conversation. Why should two complete strangers have any more to say than family members? I wasn’t sure who I felt more sorry for, the prisoners or the visitors.

‘So, you know what a Brocock is, then, do you?’

Fisher’s voice, with the Welsh accent fully engaged again, snapped me out of my reverie.

‘It’s an air pistol,’ I said, hoping he was right about there being cameras but no microphones, ‘that fires a lead pellet, but it uses a self-contained gas cylinder system, so your pellet comes in a mini gas cartridge, just like a bullet. In my day, you had to compress the air by pushing the barrel against a brick or breaking a lever open to charge it. Of course, in my day – when I was a kid – air pistols looked like air pistols. Nowadays they look like proper guns.’

‘Yeah, they do, don’t they?’

He smiled at that, but it was a forced grimace, and for some reason I thought of the story of the German General von Molkte who was said to have smiled only twice in his life – once when told his mother-in-law was dead and once when the Swedish Ambassador insisted that Stockholm was impregnable.

‘But,’ I started off hesitantly, knowing I was probably pushing it, ‘with the revolver version – though you can’t get them so easily now – if you chuck away the gas cylinder and pellet and you make a shell case that will fit the cylinder, then you can put a real .22 bullet in there and fire it. Or so I’m told.’

Fisher narrowed his eyes at me. He looked like a man desperate for a smoke. I knew I was. Who the hell had the idea to make a prison non-smoking? Somebody cruel, that’s who.

‘You are very well informed, Mr Angel,’ he said. ‘Who was it told you all this?’

‘I got it off the internet,’ I said.

‘Jesus fucking Christ, is nothing sacred?’

‘Not on the internet.’

He leaned forward over the table, but kept his hands palms down, non-aggressive, for the cameras.

‘Do they tell you on the internet that the beauty of the Brocock is that owning the gun isn’t illegal – it’s an air pistol, for Christ’s sake. But owning the doctored ammunition to fit it, now that is a crime. Think about it. In every other case, it’s the other way round. You walk into a bank with shotgun cartridges about your person, no crime. Go in with a shotgun, even if its not loaded, and it’s next stop Crimewatch. And the other thing your internet doesn’t tell you is just how easy it is to make the shell casings, does it? Any idiot with a small light-engineering workshop can do it.’

As he was speaking, things he was saying were triggering alarm bells. He was telling me things I already knew. Or should know for some reason. Things – bits and pieces – somebody else had said. Things I should have seen coming, but at the time ... At the time, I hadn’t paid much attention. Things that Steffi Innocent had told me, ironically in all innocence.

‘Oh fuck!’ I said.

Well, it was my turn.

 

‘Haydn Rees was an air pistol champion as a schoolboy and he makes models, light-engineered type of models – trains, remote-controlled helicopters, that sort of shit. Even got a Blue Peter badge for it. It’s him you’re setting up, isn’t it? With Brococks. And he’s just the sort of nerd who would fall for it.’

‘Keep your voice down,’ said Malcolm Fisher. ‘Just because there are no microphones, it doesn’t mean nobody’s listening in here.’

‘But that’s it, isn’t it? You and Keith Flowers ...’

I knew now how that spaniel sniffer dog had felt back in the waiting area.

‘We had the idea, but it seems as if you’ve managed to ruin it for us.’

He sat back in his plastic chair and folded his arms across his chest.

‘Not necessarily,’ I said.

 

Fisher stared at me for a full minute. As job interviews went, I’d had worse.

‘You’re up for this, aren’t you?’ he said at last.

‘Depends on the plan,’ I said, feeling more confident than at any time since I had got out of Armstrong in the car park.

‘Len Turner wants guns. He doesn’t think his boys look tough enough unless they’re tooled up, and I don’t mean just his idiot son Ron and his grandsons, I mean his crew. They’ve got interests all round the coast of South Wales, from Newport to Swansea, and he’s trying to expand over into Bristol. He’s got a problem there, because he’s up against some of our darker-skinned brethren who’ve got diddly-squat respect for an old git who made his name running tarts in Port Talbot. So he thinks a few shooters will impress them.’

‘This wouldn’t by any chance conflict with your business interests in that neck of the woods, would it?’ I chanced.

Fisher shook his head slowly.

‘Rule of Life Number One, Mr Angel: you never, ever ask somebody what they’re in here for.’ Then he shrugged his shoulders. ‘But there’s nothing to say I can’t tell you if I want to, though I don’t really want to. Let’s just say I’m a robber, I work alone and have been known to get carried away sometimes, so much do I love my work. That’s more or less what it said on the charge sheet. What’s between me and Len Turner is strictly personal, not business.’

‘Fair enough. So the plan was to – what?’

‘Build up a stock of Brococks, manufacture the shell casings to fit them, load ‘em up with live .22 ammo, get Len Turner interested in buying a job lot, say a hundred, even get a down-payment off him. Then plant the guns and the ammo on Haydn Rees, call the cops and sit well back from the fan as the shit hits.’

I let him have half a minute of looking pleased with himself.

‘You call that a plan?’

 

Fisher looked as if he’d been slapped. The last person who had questioned him like that was still sitting on a creosoted sofa watching a creosoted television. But he took it well, leaned in towards me and spoke quietly and quickly.

‘It’ll work because there’ll be so much circumstantial against Rees. He’s an air pistol nut and has a whole armoury of them, a lot of them Brococks. He also has his own workshop – lathes, machines, the lot – up at his country place in Tregaron, where he builds his poxy toy models. He’s well-known as Len Turner’s brief, and there’s a fair few cops, even in South Wales, who know he’s dirty but have never been able to prove anything. Even the cops think twice before fitting up a solicitor.’

‘You’re saying he’s slipped out of things before, so why can’t he talk his way out of this one?’ I asked.

‘Because Keith has stitched him up good and proper, using his special expertise. You do know what Keith was good at, don’t you?’

‘No, I don’t, as a matter of fact.’ And I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

‘Fraud, that was Keith’s thing. He trained as an accountant – the best sort of accountant.’

‘You mean a bent one,’ I said.

‘Exactly.’

‘That doesn’t narrow it down.’

Fisher smiled his General von Molkte smile.‘No, I know how you feel. I don’t like ‘em either. Still, Keith had a good idea way back. That was his trouble; he was always having good ideas that went bad. Anyway, before he went down, he opened a bank account in Gloucester or somewhere in the name of Haydn Rees. He kept dribbling money into it – no big sums, mind you – and writing the odd cheque but never going overdrawn. Then he gets lifted and the account sits there earning a bit of interest but not attracting the attentions of the taxman. When he comes up with his masterplan, he needs a bit of working capital – which is where I came in, having a few bank accounts of my own – but he has enough cash in this Haydn Rees account to get a credit card ...’

‘And buy Brococks over the internet,’ I finished for him.

‘You’re very sharp,’ he said, and I think he meant it.

‘It’s what I would have done. About the only place you can buy the Brocock revolvers now is from individuals who are selling second hand. I spotted that when I surfed the web. Something called the National Crime Intelligence Squad is clamping down on official retailers. You can still get the automatics, but not the revolvers.’

I had been amazed at the deals the air pistol people had done with the arms industry so that a Walther or a Beretta air pistol now looked exactly like – and weighed the same as – the real thing.

‘Very good,’ nodded Fisher, ‘but I bet you didn’t check the wholesalers in Europe, did you?’

I saw where he was going. Where Keith Flowers had gone.

‘You wanted a job lot, so you bought in bulk. There would be paperwork, invoices, delivery notes; all with Haydn Rees’s name on them.’

‘You’re getting there,’ he breathed heavily.

‘But how could Flowers set this up while he was inside?’

‘He couldn’t. I told you, they won’t even let us buy a fucking Lottery ticket in here.’

‘He had to have a business partner, didn’t he?’ I jumped in, remembering Len Turner using the phrase. ‘On the outside.’

‘Correct,’ Fisher said approvingly.

‘Oh my God,’ I said before I could stop myself. ‘Not Amy …’

Fisher let out a short bark of a laugh.

‘Fuck, no. She wouldn’t even talk to Keith from what I hear. I told him to leave it alone, but no, he had to try and see her, didn’t he? Should’ve known then that he was losing it, taking his eye off the ball.’

I wasn’t really listening to him, even though he was confirming what was going through my head.

Amy had avoided Flowers like the plague when he started stalking her on his semi-release from Belmarsh. She’d taken out a restraining order. He’d come after her with a gun when he couldn’t take the rejection any more. No, Amy couldn’t have been his ‘business partner’. Len Turner seemed to know about her anyway, and yet it was me he’d taken for a ride on the Eye, not her. So he didn’t just think, he knew she wasn’t the silent partner. That was why he’d got Rees to hire Rudgard & Blugden, and by sheer dumb luck he’d drawn their one operative who took the job seriously.

‘Flowers had a mate,’ Fisher was saying, and it was time to listen up, ‘a mate called Ion – John – Jones. Known him for years, bit of a nutter, like Keith I suppose. Mae’n off ei ben, as they’d say in the Welsh – he’s off his head – but he has this knack with machinery, light engineering stuff.’

‘Bullets?’ I suggested.

‘It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to do what Keith wanted doing; which is just as well, as this Ion Jones, according to my sources, is a case of the gates are down and the lights are flashing, but the train isn’t coming. But Keith trusted him to set things up.’

‘You said “trusted”.’

‘So what?’

‘As in past tense. “Trusted”.’

‘Ah, well, that would be because he’s sort of disappeared off my radar. You see, he was Keith’s man. Keith knew him, trusted him to do what he was told and set him up with the phoney Rees bank account to buy the shooters. Soon as he’d done his probationary month at St Chad’s, Keith was going to pop down to Cardiff and do the nasty on our solicitor friend. Trouble is, he never made it, ‘cos he ran into you, Mr Angel. And so, somewhere down in Wales, there’s this idiot with a hundred Brococks, enough doctored ammunition to start a small war and a downpayment from Len Turner who’s expecting to buy them.’

He sat back in his chair, giving the impression that it was straining against the bolts holding it to the floor.

‘So guess what I want you to do, Mr Angel.’

‘Recommend a good private detective?’ I tried.

‘No. I want you to go and find Ion Jones and make sure our plan is still on track,’ he said.

‘That would have been my second guess.’

 

Our time was almost up.

‘Tell me why – just one good reason – why I should do this,’ I said to him.

So he did.

 

 

 

Chapter Fourteen

 

 

I signed out, had my ink stamp checked under ultra violet light and my hand geometry read by the palm print machine, went through a dozen doors and waited for them to be locked behind me, and then, finally, I was in the airlock by the main gate, waiting for the pneumatic hiss that meant: outside.

I needed a drink, a pen and paper, a street map of Cardiff and then probably another drink, in that order. I got Spider.

‘You had your money’s worth, didn’t you? Thought they’d decided to keep you in there.’

I shuddered at the very idea.

‘Your Mr Creosote had a lot to tell me,’ I said, when I had collected my things from the Visitor Centre locker and we were walking across the car park.

‘Did he mention me?’ Spider asked, snapping at my heels.

‘Yeah. He told me to find a nice house you could burgle so you could be back inside for Christmas.’

‘That was decent of him,’ said Spider in all seriousness.

I stopped dead and he went on a stride before turning and seeing my expression.

‘What?’ he asked.

‘You really want to go back into a place like that?’

‘It’s what you know, innit? Got a smoke?’

‘No Have you?’

‘Yeah.’

He produced a pack of Marlboros this time, and what looked like a silver-plated Ronson, and I took a cigarette and a light from him without asking any questions.

‘Tell you what,’ I said, ‘let me buy you a pint on the way back to St Chad’s and I’ll give you a couple of addresses.’

 

As the rush hour traffic slowed me down, I called Debbie Diamond on the mobile.

And almost immediately regretted it.

After an earful about how I hadn’t told her anything and what the hell was going on, she admitted that Amy did appear to be alive, well and back at work. Or at least back at work in Madrid, as she hadn’t actually seen her in the flesh.

‘That’s okay,’ I said cheerily, ‘I have. Has she made it to Madrid?’

‘Yes, she rang me half an hour ago. Her plane landed on time. That’s why I was still in the office, waiting for Her Master’s Voice to tell me what I had to do before I could go home. Now I’ve also talked to Her Master’s Voice’s echo, I suppose I can get a life of my own.’

‘Do I detect a note of dissatisfaction here, Debbie?’

‘I’m a mushroom, that’s what I am. Covered by shit and kept in the dark.’

‘Chill out, Debs. What exactly is Amy doing in downtown Madrid?’

‘Doesn’t she talk to you either?’ she said bitchily. ‘It’s her latest all-purpose presentation; the four basic food groups of fashion. Uptown Girl, Screen Siren, Boho Chic and Glam Goth. Which will survive? Discuss. Use one side of the paper only. Have you any idea what I’m talking about?’

‘Of course. Uptown Girl is the white or cream trouser suit with matching fedora whilst trying not to look like an extra from Our Man In Havana; a Screen Siren wears satin, backless gowns with spaghetti straps and only goes out at night; the Boho Chic chick shops at flea markets and goes for the mix’n’match look with a compulsory element of something South American – Inca or Andean llama-herder, that sort of thing; and the Glam Goth is the modern day femme fatale, not the gloomy teenager vampires with two tons of black make-up. How did I do?’

‘You’re weird,’ she said, and hung up.

 

I wasn’t going to let her depress me. For the first time in days – weeks – I had something definite to do and I was going to do it. If I did it right, Amy could stop hiding from her past, the lounge would remain un-creosoted and Len Turner wouldn’t take me to any more tourist attractions. And thinking about what he could do on the Eye, I would make a point of not going anywhere near the London Dungeon.

That was all assuming there would be no further complications, such as getting arrested in the process. Or, say, running across Steffi Innocent again.

There was a black London cab parked in the driveway of the Hampstead house and it wasn’t Armstrong. I was driving him. I parked next to it, giving it room to reverse, and giving Steffi Innocent room to get out and march round to confront me before I had switched off the engine.

‘You conned me! There was nobody following Amy, she just needed a free ride to the airport, you bastard!’

‘No, I needed a diversion,’ I said, supremely confident, as I climbed out. If I could survive Mr Creosote in prison, handling Steffi would be a doddle.

‘A diversion? What for?’

She almost stamped her foot in frustration. She’d probably missed lunch and had been waiting for hours. I was surprised the Neighbourhood Watch hadn’t arrested her.

‘So I could go and sort out the mess you’ve landed me in,’ I said haughtily.

She stood there, hands on hips, cheeks inflating as she took deep breaths to keep her temper, whilst I took the two frozen pizzas I had stopped off and bought at the local 7/11 from the back seat.

‘Mess? What mess? How dare you say that?’

I looked at my watch without saying anything, which is a good way of making anyone nervous. It was 6.30 and Cardiff was 150 miles away. I should be able to do that before the pubs shut, even in Wales. Just time to get a few things together and eat some pizza on the hoof.

‘I asked you how you think I got you into ...’

‘Your client’s a scuzzbag,’ I said. ‘Garlic chicken or pepperoni supreme?’

 

I showed her into the kitchen, pointed to the oven and the cupboard where the baking trays were kept and handed her the pizzas.

While she was still reading the instructions, I put my mobile on its charger and made a mental note to take the charger with me, then I packed a bag with the essentials I might need for a short summer break in Wales: thermal socks, a couple of fleeces, two sweaters and a shirt in case I went anywhere posh. I added a rubber torch and a pair of leather gloves and then an unopened bottle of Italian brandy, just in case. I checked that I had cash and that the credit cards in my wallet were in my real name (Keith Flowers wasn’t the first to think of that one), and while I was upstairs in the bedroom I used the phone to get Directory Enquiries.

I asked for the number for the St David’s Hotel, Cardiff, and for an extra 45p they connected me. What the hell, I wasn’t counting pennies now. A very nice lady with a Welsh accent told me they had only Suites free, and only one of them as they were very busy, and I said that’ll do nicely, told her to book me in for two nights and read her a credit card number.

I collected shaving gear and toothbrush from the bathroom and was back down in the kitchen before the pizza crust had burned.

Steffi was more or less where I had left her, leaning against the kitchen units. She’d been worrying, and I could tell she’d been chewing her fingernails from the way she snapped her hands down to her jeans pockets as I came in. Either that or she was hungrier than I was.

‘Get the pizzas out then and let’s eat. I’m afraid I’ve got to run.’

‘What did you mean ...?’

‘Plates,’ I said, pointing to a cupboard as I took a large knife out a drawer and ran it through the wall-mounted sharpener a couple of times.

She didn’t even flinch.

I got the pizzas out and onto a chopping board and cut both into four segments, ground some black pepper and sea salt over the pile and offered her first pick. She took two slices without hesitation.

‘You said ...’

‘Haydn Rees is a scuzzbag,’ I said as I ate. ‘I have it on very good authority, trust me on that. He must be one of the dodgiest solicitors around, and I don’t say such things lightly, because it doesn’t narrow it down, but take it from me he has been involved in money laundering and fraud and just happens to represent one of the biggest hoods in South Wales. He also thinks nothing of stitching up former clients if the need arises and has, so I’m told, some personal habits that are probably still illegal in 40-plus states in America.’

She took a bite of pizza and waved the remains of the slice at me.

‘You think he’s gay, that’s what it is!’

It was my turn to stand back in amazement.

‘What?’

‘Mid-thirties, bachelor, still lives with his mum. Of course that’s what you’d think. And he’s Welsh, so you’ve probably been making sheep-shagging jokes about him as well. Amy didn’t think he was gay, though, did she?’

I did some serious chewing to keep my mouth occupied. God knows I had reason enough to hate this prickly little bitch, but now wasn’t the time. She deserved something special.

‘You’ve got it so wrong, Steffi. I don’t for a minute think Haydn Rees is gay. Gay would be good, gay I could handle. Well, you know what I mean.’ Maybe she didn’t. Oh, what the hell. ‘The basic point is, this guy is iffy, bent, a wrong ‘un, a nasty piece of work, call him what you like. He’s used you to gather information on me and on Amy and he’s passed it straight on to a Welsh thug called Len Turner. You might try running that name by your contacts in the Leek Squad.’

‘I can do that,’ she said seriously.

‘In the meantime, you can tell me where this Rees character lives and works.’

‘Most of the solicitors in Cardiff have offices in Park Place or the Boulevard de Nantes near the law courts, but Rees has gone all upmarket with a place down near the Bay. He has a house in Pontprennau, which is where the young professionals live, and his mother’s installed there. His father died ten years ago, by the way.’

‘Oh,’ I said, like I cared.

‘Then he’s got a place in the country, somewhere called Tregaron, which he bought for the fishing rights.’

‘Fishing rights? That would be on the coast, right?’ I played dumb.

‘No way. It’s up in the hills somewhere. He’s into trout fishing, or wild trout fishing, I think they call it, big time.’

‘A man of many hobbies,’ I said, then added: ‘If you include the model building, the charity work and the air pistol shooting.’

‘So what’s your point?’ She picked out another two slices of pizza.

‘Nothing. Listen, sorry to throw you out, but I’ve got to go.’

‘You’re going to Cardiff, aren’t you?’ she said, but not like it was a sudden revelation to her.

She’d been listening in on the downstairs extension. She really did deserve something very special in the revenge market.

‘That’s for me to know and you to wonder. Your job’s finished.’

‘No it isn’t,’ she pouted.

‘I thought you’d done your final report for Rees. Has he hired you to do extra stuff?’

‘Well, no ...’

‘Has Stella asked you to ... Oh, no, of course she hasn’t. She would have told me, us being such good friends and she being your ... what’s the word? Oh yes – boss, that’s it .’

‘But if Rees hired me – us – the agency – for something illegal, and I’ve only your word for that, then it’s up to me to find out what really is going on.’

‘You don’t want to do that.’

‘When it’s my reputation at stake I do!’

She tried to look angry, but it didn’t really come off with her holding a piece of pizza in each hand. I fought the urge to smirk.

‘Did Rees pay for your services? The agency’s, I mean.’

‘Yes.’

‘Did the cheque bounce?’

‘No.’

‘So your point is what? You’re done, finito, out of it. Your conscience is clear.’

‘But that’s just not right!’ she shouted.

I thought for a moment that she was going to throw the pizza slices down and storm out, but instead she checked herself, held on to the pizza and then stormed out towards the front door.

She was wearing a suede jacket with vents up the back, but cut long so I couldn’t see what the dolphin tattoo was doing above her waistband. I sort of hoped it was drowning, though I’ve nothing against dolphins per se.

I did have a lot against her though. Driving a delicensed London black cab so nobody spotted you was sneaky enough. Taking photographs of you and listening in on private telephone calls was downright naughty. Finding things out about your partner that you didn’t know, and then making assumptions – that was well out of order. Accusing you of being homophobic and anti-Welsh – well, all right then, homophobic – that was the pits.

But saying ‘Me – who loves cats?’ with a straight face after what she’d done to Springsteen.

That was serious.

I could wait.

 

I parked Armstrong in the garage and remembered to lock it, and the house, and set the alarms. I piled all my gear into Amy’s Freelander and set off towards Golders Green to pick up the North Circular, then dropped down Hanger Lane to the Chiswick Roundabout and the M4 motorway heading west into the bright, slowly setting sun, which was still so bright I had to fumble in my bag for my fake Ray-Bans.

It wasn’t until I stopped to fill up with petrol at the service station outside Reading that I was sure it was Steffi’s TX1 following me. Even as far out as Reading you’re not surprised to see a black London cab on the motorway. It’s really only beyond Swindon that they become rare.

I paid for my petrol and bought a bottle of mineral water and a pack of cigarettes as emergency rations, though I was pretty sure they had such things in Wales by now, got back on the motorway and put my foot down.

There was no way the TX1 could keep up with me, but then she knew where I was going and she’d find me. After all, she was the detective, and I had a feeling that she may have some small part yet to play in all this herself.

 

It had been a while since I had been to Wales, but some things never change. For instance, the spectacular toll bridges across the River Severn charge you to get in to Wales, but going from Wales into England is free, presumably on the basis that they think you’ve suffered enough.

The weather too is always reliable. Halfway across the bridge, I took off my sunglasses and threw them on the passenger seat, reckoning I wouldn’t need them again for a while. And before I reached the outskirts of Newport, I was fumbling for the windscreen wipers.

Cardiff itself was unrecognisable.

When I had known it, and then only vaguely from fleeting visits as a student earning cash during vacations by driving trucks, it had been famous for Tiger Bay and the shipping docks, the red-light districts of Grangetown and Butetown, heavy drinking in a city centre pub called The Philharmonic, the Arms Park where once the Welsh ruled the world of rugby, and the beers of S A Brain & Co, whose advertising slogan ‘What you need is Brains’ became the unofficial motto of the University.

Nowadays, more English fans flocked to the new Millennium Stadium to watch English teams play in football cup finals than there were Welsh rugby fans, and they drank lager rather than Brain’s famous S A bitter. In my day, ‘a pint of S A’ meant the ale named after Sidney Arthur Brain. Today it stood for Stella Artois.

I remembered that Brain’s had their ‘new’ brewery (dating from about 1920) in a grim, grey area called Splott, basically because you never forget a place called Splott if you’ve ever been there. Splott was now a desirable residential area being tarted up like mad, and the ‘new’ brewery was long gone, as indeed was the ‘old’ brewery on St Mary’s Street, though The Philharmonic was probably still there. The working girls and boys of Grangetown and Butetown were probably still there as well, or at least not very far away, but their customers had changed.

Grangetown now had its own mosque and a fair population of Muslims, and Butetown housed the Welsh Assembly now that the country had a semblance of self-governance. But the main difference was that it was no longer a ships and docks town. The Queen Alexandra Dock was the only remaining one in working order, and no-one mentioned Tiger Bay anymore. Cardiff Bay was now an in place to be and be seen, with most of the best restaurants and the poshest hotel and health spa. The old docks had been tamed and not so much gentrified as media-fied.

The ‘media’ was possibly Cardiff’s main industry these days. It was home not only to studio complexes belonging to the BBC, HTV and the Welsh Channel 4 (SC4), but also to a positive rash of arty design companies, animation studios, web designers and so on. They cross-fertilised with probably the city’s biggest employer, the University of Wales, which ran lots of media-based arts courses, and were all constantly on the look-out for arts funding, especially from Europe, claiming they were in a Third World country recently released from the English imperial yoke and they had a native culture and language to protect.

Which was odd, really, as Cardiff was probably the most unWelsh town in Wales, and virtually nobody spoke Welsh there unless they were applying for a grant. And perhaps it was trying just a little too hard to be arty and cultural, with its public sculptures on roundabouts made out of rehashed road signs and trendy new bars – or ‘media watering holes’ as they were known – such as the Ha!Ha! and The Cayo Arms and the new Union, the Welsh version of The Groucho Club.

But what did I care? After a long drive, there was the St David’s Hotel, Cardiff’s ‘most stylish landmark’, with its glass-backed atrium offering every comfort for ‘those connected with the mass of inward investment’ into Wales, whatever that meant. (But it was on their website so it must have been true.)

I parked the Freelander and grabbed my bag, hoping that they really had reserved me a Junior Suite (£220 a night as opposed to a £295 a night Master Suite).

I wished I’d remembered a raincoat, though.

 

I was one of the handful of diners left in the restaurant, enjoying a chunk of lamb shank (Welsh, of course) that had been slow cooked in rosemary and perusing the Cardiff A-Z kindly supplied by the hotel concierge, when she slid into the empty chair opposite me, her hair plastered to her head and her suede jacket stained dark with the rain.

She didn’t say anything at first, just looked enviously at my plate. I hoped she was a vegetarian, and concentrated on the A-Z.

‘Rees has a house in Pontprennau – a flash, four-bedroomed executive home. Shares it with his mother,’ she said at last.

‘I know; you told me.’

‘I could help you find it,’ she offered, watching my fork as I cut the lamb with it, it being so tender a knife was irrelevant.

‘I’ve found it,’ I said. ‘Well, the place if not the house. Came through it as I left the M4.’

‘Oh.’

‘You could find his office for me if you wanted to,’ I threw her a crumb – of comfort if not of protein.

‘It’s in the Bay area somewhere,’ she said, looking around for a window. ‘It can’t be far from here. Just out there somewhere.’ She gestured vaguely into the rainy night. ‘I can find it.’

‘How about Len Turner? Can you use your contacts to find him?’

Preferably before he found me.

‘I’ve already had him checked out, after you mentioned him on Friday. He’s got a posh house in a village called St Nicholas, out towards Cowbridge, wherever that is.’

Her face lit up. Surely she’d done enough for me to throw her a bone?

I finished the last of my succulent lamb and carefully placed knife and fork across my empty plate.

‘Thanks for that. Where are you staying?’

‘They won’t give me a room!’ she wailed, then lowered her voice as she caught the eye of a waiter.

‘Well, it is a very busy hotel,’ I said, ‘not to mention rather exclusive.’

‘It’s because I don’t have a credit card,’ she hissed. ‘I spent most of my cash on petrol following you down here and I can’t get any more until the banks open in the morning.’

I tried to hide my surprise. I thought everybody had credit cards these days. Goodness knows, they were easy enough to get hold of, even legally.

‘I’ve got a Suite,’ I said smugly, not letting on that it was a Junior one. ‘There’s a sofa in there you could crash out on – as long as you promise to behave yourself.’

‘Why shouldn’t I?’ she asked with an awful seriousness.

How did a plank like this play such good jazz piano?

‘And there’s a condition – that you stake out Haydn Rees’s office for me tomorrow morning.’

‘I can do that,’ she said. ‘Are you having a dessert?’

‘No.’

‘Can I use room service, then? I’m starving.’

‘If you must,’ I said with a sigh and a shake of the head.

She looked down at herself, examining her scoop top and her suede jacket, even tentatively sniffing at the shoulders.

‘Is there a laundry service?’

‘Don’t push it.’

 

I let her order some sandwiches from room service and she helped herself to some Ty Nant mineral water from the mini-bar. I let her use the shower and the complimentary bathrobe and free shampoos and even gave her the loan of a pillow for the leather sofa.

In the morning, I only complained once about her snoring and took her to the breakfast buffet with me.

She asked me then what exactly I intended to do in Cardiff, and I told her I had some private business to take care of that was none of hers. But whilst I was there, I just might take the opportunity to meet Mr Haydn Rees.

Convinced I wasn’t going to do anything she might miss, Steffi pulled up the collar on her jacket as she walked by the registration desk and out of the hotel. She would find a bank, get some cash and then stake out Rees’s office in the Bay, reporting back to me at the St David’s at 5.00 pm.

‘You’re not going after this Len Turner, are you?’ she asked, and I assured her I had no intention of doing so.

It was the last thing on my mind. I was more interested in avoiding the Turner clan than having them welcome me to Wales.

As soon as Steffi had left, and I had followed and watched until the black TX1 had moved off, I asked the concierge for directions to Tyndall Street.

Did I know Roath or Adamsdown?, he asked me, and I said not really.

How about the prison at Newtown? It was near there.

I could find that. I was good at prisons.

I slipped him a tenner and pocketed his A-Z, then asked for my bill, paid it and checked out.

 

Malcolm ‘Creosote’ Fisher had given me a name – Ion Jones – and the address of a light engineering works called Pengam Moor Tooling on a small industrial estate off Tyndall Street, only a grappling hook’s throw from Cardiff prison. That was my mission in Cardiff.

And from the start, it was Mission Incredible.

It was the sort of place where you didn’t want to leave the car unattended. To be honest, I wasn’t too sure about even slowing down, but I had to. The sign saying Pengam Moor Tooling swung from the one corner still attached by blue baling twine to a bent panel of Heras fencing. Underneath it was a hand printed sign saying ‘These Premissess Are Garded By Pit Bulls’, but there was no sign of a dog anywhere. Maybe they’d been stolen. Or perhaps they meant a real bull that had worked down the mines and had become a guard bull only since the pits closed.

There were two vehicles in the yard – a dark blue Ford Escort that had seen better days and a dirty white Transit van that had probably never seen a good one. They were parked in front of an oblong brick shed with a flat roof and a shuttered door opened to head height to let fresh air in and the smell of hot oil and grease out. It also let out Radio 2 playing at full blast, which just about covered the whine of machinery.

I reversed the Freelander, so that I was facing the way out of the yard, parked and locked it. Then checked I’d locked it. Then I turned my jacket collar up against the light drizzle and went and peered into the gloom of the shed and rapped on the shutters with my knuckles.

‘Helloooo? Shop?’

A tall, gangling youth wearing dark blue overalls and a pair of plastic protective goggles appeared out of the shadows.

‘You’ll be wanting the boss, then, is it?’ he shouted over the background radio noise.

‘I’m looking for Ion Jones, is what I am,’ I said, realising immediately that I was doing a bad imitation of his sing-song Welsh accent and hoping he wouldn’t think I was taking the piss.

‘Mr Jones!’ he yelled over his shoulder. ‘Visitor!’

A small, no more than five feet tall, middle-aged man with a goatee beard appeared from behind a work bench where he had been completely obscured by a new Super 7 lathe and a couple of cheap Taiwanese bench drills. My first thought was that he must have to stand on a box to use them. My second thought was: why is he advancing on me carrying a still glowing red hot soldering iron in one hand?

‘Can I help you, young sir?’ he said, giving me a big grin that flexed his goatee to make him look positively Satanic. That and the red hot stick he was holding towards me.

‘I was looking for Ion Jones,’ I said nervously, ready to jump backwards out of the shed if he came much closer.

‘Oh, it’s Ion you want, is it?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said, thinking I seemed to be doing all the answering, or maybe the Welsh just naturally spoke in questions.

‘Not Gareth Jones, then?’

‘No.’

‘Because that’s me, you see.’

I couldn’t tell if that was a question or note, so I didn’t take my eyes off the soldering iron until he casually plucked a cigarette from behind his ear, stuck it in his mouth and applied the soldering iron to it. When it was lit, he put the iron down on the concrete floor and stepped over it, to exhale smoke in my general direction.

I just breathed out.

The bearded dwarf stepped by me and out into the yard, seemingly impervious to the drizzle.

‘Ion’s not with us any more. Was there anything we could do for you?’

He held his cigarette between forefinger and thumb and flicked ash off the end with his middle finger.

‘I was told he worked here,’ I said.

‘So he did, didn’t he? Up until about a month ago. Is there a problem with Ion?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said honestly. ‘I was told he’d be here, but ... I know this might sound crazy, but you’re not related to him are you?’

‘What, Ion?’ he roared, still determined to answer a question with a question. ‘No more than I am to Tom – or Catherine Zeta, more’s the pity.’

‘Of course,’ I said, blushing. ‘Jones is quite a … er … popular name here, isn’t it?’

Now I was doing it.

‘Popular? Dead common, I’d call it.’

‘So would I, actually,’ I said with a tentative grin, ‘but I’m not from around these parts.’

‘You’re not?’ he said, deadpan. ‘Get away with you. Thought you were a native.’

‘I guess I deserved that. Can you tell me what happened to Ion?’

‘You know Ion, then?’

Damn him.

‘Nope, never met him in my life, but I have to follow up a bit of business he was involved in.’

‘Would this be the model business, then?’

‘Yes, it would.’

A straight answer seemed to stump him, but only for as long as it took him to draw on his cigarette.

‘Great one for the model engineering was Ion. Caught him working late on one of the machines once. Said he was making a gas-turbine model locomotive, would you credit it? Him who needed help tying his bootlaces, he’s there building a jet engine the size of a can of Coca-Cola, which could do 160,000 revs per minute. What rpm does that fine beast of a car of yours there do?’

‘About 6,500 rpm flat out,’ I said, wondering if this was going anywhere.

‘So was that what he was working on for you?’

I decided to play along.

‘No, nothing so elaborate. I was looking for a model ...’ I thought quickly. ‘… a model traction engine, and I was told Ion was the man to build one.’

‘One than ran on Welsh coal, was it?’

‘Naturally,’ I said, as if I knew what he was talking about.

‘You didn’t give him any money up front, did you?’ the other Jones asked, and for the first time he avoided my eyes, making a big play of dropping his cigarette and crushing it out with semi-circular turns of his boot.

‘Yes, I did, as a matter of fact,’ I said, taking a chance. ‘Was that a bad idea, you think?’

‘It might have been. Ion’s not a bad lad, but then again, he’s not the firmest slate in the chapel roof.’

It took me a second or two to realise he hadn’t asked me a question and that I had cracked it. There was no point in trying to engage in conversation with the Welsh; what they wanted was gossip.

‘You didn’t have to let Ion go, like they say these days, did you?’ I went on the question offensive.

‘Oh no, nothing like that. He was a good worker ...’

‘Well, I’d heard that,’ I chipped in.

‘But a bit of a dreamer, and one day he said he wanted to branch out on his own, set up his own business.’

‘Wouldn’t have been fair to try and stop him, would it?’

I was getting good at this and quite prepared to throw in a few rhetorical ones just for effect.

‘No, you can’t take dreams away from a lad like Ion. And anyway, he had the money.’

‘You saw it?’ I said, lowering my voice and hoping I wasn’t overdoing the awe.

Mr Jones leaned into me conspiratorially, which meant I had to bend at the neck.

‘Seven thousand of your English pounds,’ he whispered. ‘Saw it myself, I did. I hope it wasn’t yours.’

I pushed my hands into my pockets and shuffled my feet.

‘Not all of it ...’

Gareth Jones looked triumphant. It was just as he’d thought. A daft Englishman with his fancy big car had been taken in by local boy Ion. But Gareth Jones wasn’t one to gloat.

‘Well, I’ll say this, I never had cause to question Ion’s honesty, and if he said he’ll make you one of his models, then I’m sure he will. He seemed to be serious when he gave his notice in. I mean, after all, he bought one of my old machines off me – though he got a fair price, mind you.’

‘He bought a machine?’

‘Oh yes, one of my Boxford lathes. It has a few miles on the clock, I don’t deny, but he wouldn’t have got one cheaper anywhere else.’

‘So he bought a lathe to set himself up in his own business?’

‘Yes, he did. Said he’d got some premises dirt cheap and might even get a grant from Europe if he employed anybody. And he certainly had a bit of start-up capital, like I told you.’

‘And this was about a month ago?’

‘That’d be right. It was what he’d always wanted to do. He was model mad, that boy.’

I put on what I thought was a suitably anxious face.

‘Look, Mr Jones, this model I was after ...’

‘The traction engine, was it?’

Was it?

‘Yes, that one. It’s not the money, it’s just that this was going to be a present for someone and ...’

‘You don’t have to tell me. I’ve got children of my own, and in this day and age any son of mine who wanted a finely-tooled model traction engine instead of a Game Box or whatever they call them, well, that’s to be admired, isn’t it?’

I was so glad he’d swallowed that. I was still stuck with the image of explaining away a model traction engine as Amy’s Christmas present.

‘So would you know how I can get hold of Ion, then?’ I asked, throwing myself on his mercy.

‘Derek in there can tell you exactly. He delivered the Boxford to Ion’s premises in the van, didn’t he?’

Mr Jones stepped back into the gloom of the workshop and shouted to make himself heard above the radio and the machinery.

‘Derek! Where was that place in Tregaron you took the Boxford

to?’

 

 

 

Chapter Fifteen

 

 

Gareth Jones (no relation) and the boy Derek (still wearing plastic goggles) described the route to Tregaron, which they said was about 90 miles away and would take me two hours at least, but I couldn’t go wrong. It was between Lampeter and Aberystwyth, as if that meant anything to me.

At the first garage outside Cardiff, I bought an Ordnance Survey Landranger map (Number 146) and wasn’t much wiser. It was indeed between Lampeter – which I had heard of because it had a university that specialised in theoretical archaeology – and Aberystwyth – which I’d heard of because it had a university that specialised in Welsh.

Tregaron on the map seemed surrounded by green patches with conifer tree icons, which I took to be forests, and close circular brown curves, which I knew were contour lines and indicated hills. To the north of the town was marked a wide blue marsh area astride the River Teifi, which was labelled Cors Caron Nature Reserve and seemed to be some sort of swamp. To the south west was the site of a Roman fort and bath house, though no indication at all as to how you actually got near enough to see it. I might as well have being looking at one of the maps of Middle Earth in the back of The Lord of the Rings, for which anyone over the age of about ten needs a magnifying glass.

Fortunately, the first tranche of the journey was M4 motorway all the way; to the end, in fact, bypassing Port Talbot and Swansea on the one side and ignoring the signs to the other that said things like Tonypandy, Treorchy, Pontypridd and Merthyr Tydfil, which brought back faint classroom memories of rugby, trades unionism, coal mining and male voice choirs, but could just as well have actually come from The Lord of the Rings.

From then on, I was following the map and driving with one hand, which became slightly hazardous, not just because of the rain, which seemed to have set in, but because the road started to rise then fall then twist as I followed signs for Llandeilo and then Llandovery and other places that started with a double ‘L’. As if that wasn’t bad enough, I then worked out that Llandovery was actually the same place as Llanymddyfri, and by that time I was quite willing to stop and ask a passing hobbit for directions. Trouble was, they were all sensibly indoors keeping out of the rain and stoking up their coal fires, the smoke from the chimneys of the squat stone houses the only sign of life, and one that anyone from smoke-free London would notice straight away.

To be fair, as I crossed over the arse end of the Cambrian Mountains, I suspected the scenery would have been stunning on a day when it wasn’t raining. The average tourist takes a gamble on finding that day, and I hear that the National Lottery offers you better odds at 14,000,000 to one.

I saw a sign saying Lampeter and followed it, heading north-west as the main road branched north-east. I had the windscreen wipers on slow so I could pick out the quaint stone village houses of Pumsaint, which I knew meant ‘Five Saints’, and the signs leading off the road to Dolauchti and to the gold mines – yes, gold mines – that had been there before the Romans arrived. In fact, they were one of the reasons the Romans had come in the first place, and they had literally moved mountains (using water sluices) to get at what little Welsh gold there ever was, in one of the first acts of environmental vandalism ever recorded.

And then I was in Lampeter, or Llanbedr Pont Steffan as I was told to call it. The only university town in the United Kingdom without a McDonalds. But it did have a police car, the first one I’d seen in Wales, with ‘Heddlu’ painted on the doors and, backwards, on the bonnet. The biggest bonus though was it also had a signpost saying Tregaron.

I wasn’t sure what to expect, but then I didn’t really know where I was going. I was just dropping down from a country road into a small town nestling at the bottom of the River Teifi valley. Suddenly there were slate-roofed houses and a school and a library and then a narrow street with cars – lots of cars – parked down both sides, and then there was a bridge, and over that seemed to be the town centre: a bank, a post office, a garage, a butcher’s shop, a Co-Op store (‘Open til 10 every night’), a sign pointing to something called the Red Kite Centre and then a town square of sorts, with a statue of some politician or other (you could just tell), which doubled as a municipal car park. Or so I thought as I slowed down.

There seemed to be no other reason for all those cars to be parked there in such a haphazard way. It must be a car park, I thought, though in truth it seemed to be a road junction; a crossroads, in fact.

Then I realised that I had automatically come to a stop – as had so many others – outside The Talbot Hotel, where all the lights were on, even though it wasn’t dark. In fact, it wasn’t yet three o’clock in the afternoon, yet some cars – and not all of them Volvos – were driving on side lights.

A good time seemed to be being had by all, judging from the music coming from within. It seemed as good a place to start as any.

I followed the local custom and didn’t so much as park the Freelander as simply abandon it on the crossroads. In London, I wouldn’t have lasted 20 seconds without a ticket.

I pulled up the collar of my jacket against the rain, although doing so only made me wish I’d brought an umbrella, and ran for the front door of the Talbot. As I got nearer, the music seemed to get more familiar, but it came with singing, which didn’t immediately register as quite right.

The music was easy, that was ‘When The Saints Go Marching In’, but the words weren’t in English and the music wasn’t … well, wasn’t the brass ensemble syncopated treatment you would expect. I could hear bagpipes, for Christ’s sake!

I stopped a yard short of the door and listened carefully, trying to work it out, get the sounds clear in my head.

Yes, there were bagpipes, and yes, there was singing in two languages, English and – not Welsh, but Breton, as in Brittany in France.

Here I was in the middle of Wales, miles from the nearest anything, and here was a pub with a live bagpipe band playing traditional jazz.

Things were looking up.

 

The bar was heaving and there was only one large, solid-looking barman on duty, but he seemed perfectly able to deal with the crowd, serving drinks with a mechanical fluency without moving his feet and managing to speak three languages – Welsh, Breton and English, in that order – without pausing for breath.

In a timbered alcove, three pipers – playing authentic binou pipes – and a guitarist were segueing into ‘St James Infirmary’, and from the audience came the hum of signing, but whether they were singing the proper words or not – or in which language – I couldn’t tell.

The barman told me the kitchen had closed, though it would reopen at six, and served me a pint of lager and a packet of roasted peanuts whilst pulling drinks for at least two other customers, and he still had time to chat.

‘This lot are a bit off the beaten track, aren’t they?’ I jerked my head towards the band and the singing, which was definitely in Breton. Or maybe Welsh.

‘Come here every year for the arts festival, don’t they?’ he said.

‘Arts festival, is it?’

He gave me a quizzical look. I had to stop doing the phoney Welsh inflections.

‘Oh yes, very popular. You’ve just missed it, really. Finished on Sunday night officially. This lot are going home to France tomorrow morning.’

‘So there’ll be a bit of a party tonight, will there?’

‘It’s party night every night this lot are here, but if it’s a party you want, you should be here tomorrow night. That’s when the Irish turn up.’

‘The Irish?’

‘They’ll be here for the races. You couldn’t keep them away.’

‘Races?’ I asked, uncertain if this was a joke or not.

The barman pointed a finger, whilst holding a pint, at a poster stuck on the open bar flap. The barman did not lie. Tregaron, it seemed, was the trotting race equivalent of Ascot.

Trotting races, arts festivals, Breton bagpipers and invading Irish gamblers (horses plus the Irish equals gambling)? What was going on?

‘Have you thought of putting in for European City of Culture?’ I asked.

‘Do you get a grant?’ he came back like a whip.

‘I dunno, probably. I don’t suppose you’ve got a room have you, with all this going on?’

‘No chance. Booked solid all this week.’

‘Oh, that’s a bummer. I didn’t much like the look of Lampeter.’

‘You’ve been to Lampeter?’ The barman said it like he would say Samarkand or Timbuktu, but did so whilst handing over two glasses of wine and working the cash register and all of that in time to the music.

‘Didn’t take my coat off; wasn’t stopping.’

‘Sensible. You here for the kites, then?’

They had a kite flying festival as well? And then I remembered one of the signs I had seen.

‘That’s right, the Red Kites.’

‘Famous for them, we are. From endangered species to most successful reintroduction to the wild, no question. So successful, the farmers’ll be complaining they’re taking the lambs soon; but you know what farmers are.’

I might have been a stranger in these parts, but I wasn’t going to fall for that one.

‘Hey, don’t knock the farmers, man. Foot and mouth, the Common Agricultural Policy, the bloody supermarkets controlling the prices ... I’m surprised you’ve got any farmers left. You should look after them before they become an endangered species.’

It wasn’t that good a guess. I mean, this place was surrounded by hills and green stuff – there was nothing else for miles except countryside, which meant that the majority of his year-round customers, in the bar at least, were farmers.

I’d given the right answer.

The barman leaned forward and lowered his voice whilst pouring a pint of Guinness for someone.

‘We really are booked solid, but if you don’t mind the home cooking, go and see Delith Williams just round the corner, house called Nodfa. She does bed and breakfast. Say John the Beer sent you.’

‘Thanks for the tip,’ I said. Then I couldn’t resist. ‘John the Beer?’

‘My name’s John, and I serve the beer,’ he said.

The man could speak three languages, serve 50 customers in a crowded bar without spilling a drop and still he had to deal with idiots like me. The man deserved a pay rise.

 

‘I don’t normally do the bed and breakfast, Mr ...?’

‘Fitzroy.’

‘But if John the Beer told you, then they must certainly be full at The Talbot, and we’ll just have to do what we can.’

‘You’re too kind, Mrs Williams, but only if you’re sure it’s convenient. If it’s not, I’ll be out of your hair and try Lampeter, but only if I can have another piece of that ginger cake.’

Mrs Williams flapped at my protests with both hands and shushed away the very idea, then reached for the teapot again. The ginger cake wasn’t half bad, but then I was starving.

‘There’ll be no need to go all that way to the big towns if all you need is a bed with clean sheets.’

All that way? Lampeter was about 12 miles away, and it wasn’t exactly Gotham City.

‘That’ll do me. It’s probably only the one night, and only if you promise me it’s not putting you out.’

It was going to be all right. I could tell from the way she sat back in her armchair and crossed her legs at the ankles.

‘Not at all. We’ve got the space, you see,’ she explained, ‘now that my son has gone up to Jesus.’

That stopped my teacup halfway between saucer and mouth.

‘Oh, I’m so sorry, Mrs Williams.’

She looked at me like John the Beer, as if Tregaron had been invaded by idiots.

‘Jesus College, Cambridge. He’s studying anthropology. Not at the moment, of course; he’s on his summer holidays in Fiji. It’s his room you’re having.’

I grinned inanely.

‘Must be a bright lad,’ I said weakly, but I meant it. If he was studying anthropology, coming from Tregaron gave him a head start, and he was in Fiji, I was in Tregaron. Which one of us was the prime candidate for natural deselection?

‘Oh he is, and we’re very proud of him. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if you had a read of some of his books, and he’s got his own television and videotape player in there too, so if you want to rent a video, just pop along to John Video and tell him you’re staying at Nodfa. He knows us.’

‘John Video? That would be the chap who runs the local video rental shop, right?’

‘Yes. Of course.’

‘Who runs the garage?’

‘John Petrol runs the shop side, but if your want repairs …’

‘John Repairs?’

‘No, John Garage.’

‘Of course. What’s the local butcher called?’

‘We’ve got two,’ she said. Here it comes, I thought. ‘There’s Ernest Smith and Frank Spurgeon. Why do you ask?’

‘Oh, it’s just that I might need a bit of work on my car,’ I fluffed, ‘and I thought about taking some Welsh lamb home with me.’

I better had buy some meat now. She’d probably check.

‘Well, I’m sure we can make you comfortable whilst you’re here. There is one thing I’ve got to ask you, though, Mr Fitzroy, before I show you the room.’

‘Yes?’

‘How do you get on with cats?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Cats. How do you get on with them?’

Was this a trick question? Some ancient Welsh superstition? I knew that the word ‘Welsh’ came from the Saxons and it meant ‘strangers’. Did they have some strange rituals involving ...

No, that was crazy. I obviously didn’t have a cat with me, so she was referring to one in the house, and I know my reaction to people who say ‘Oh, cats love me’. I knew Springsteen’s reaction, too.

‘Fine and noble creatures,’ I said, ‘that show grace and beauty and bring comfort to a lot of people. But they’re not like dogs. Don’t try and tell them what to do, like dogs. Cats are independent; tell them to do something and they just think “Why should I?”‘

I felt I was on firm ground there. After all, I knew a cat who would argue with a signpost.

‘The reason I ask, Mr Fitzroy,’ said Mrs Williams, and she was actually wringing her hands, ‘is that the room you’ll be having is my son John’s ...’

That would be John Anthropologist.

‘... and John has had this cat since he was a little boy. We call him Tom Sean Catty.’ She waited for a response to that, but I didn’t get it.

‘I know,’ I said. ‘The cat likes using John’s room when he’s away at college. That’s it, isn’t it?’

Mrs Williams looked truly pained, her face creased with anguish.

‘Not so much uses … Mr Fitzroy, can I be blunt? Are you frightened of cats?’

‘I don’t think so. Should I be?’

‘Of this one, yes. I know of grown men – big men – who are scared of Tom Sean, with good reason. You see, Tom Sean’s a one-person cat. He likes – he loves – our John, always has. He’s putty in John’s hands he is. But John’s the only person in the world he likes. He absolutely hates everybody else in the world.’

So the cat liked one person, eh? I’d call that weakness. Maybe he wasn’t that hard.

‘I’ll just pretend he’s not there. That way, he can’t take me for a threat,’ I reassured her.

‘Well, if you’re sure …’

‘Trust me, Tom Sean Catty holds no terrors for me.’

‘In that case, would you mind going upstairs first?’

I said I would but I needed to get my bag out of my car first, which wouldn’t take me a second as it was parked in the official town car park across the road, which was no more than 50 feet from the back doors and beer garden of The Talbot. (The car park was nearly empty. The road junctions were double-parked. Go figure.)

While I was at the Freelander, I took the pair of yellow leather gardening gloves that Amy keeps as part of her tool kit in case of a breakdown and slipped them inside my jacket. Actually, they were Amy’s entire tool kit, as she had pre-sprayed some oil on them and the plan was that when the Automobile Association man (or whoever it was she phoned) turned up, she’d be wearing them and would swear that she’d tried just about everything.

I had insisted that Mrs Williams let me go to the room alone. If he wasn’t there, I would call her. Second door on the left at the top of the stairs. Yes, I thought I could find that. I’d found Wales, hadn’t I?

Going up the stairs, I slipped on the gloves and unzipped my hold-all and rooted around until I found the T-shirt I’d worn the day before, pulling it to the top of the bag so I could get at it. Then I opened the second door on the left and marched in.

He was lying on the bed, and God, he was big.

 

‘Are you all right, Mr Fitzroy?’

‘Fine, Mrs Williams. Come in.’

She opened the door about two inches, checked, and then entered.

‘I heard the growling,’ she said.

That had been mostly me. Tom had be mostly hissing.

‘Was he ...?’

‘Tom’s gone out,’ I said, indicating the window, which I had left open. Well, it wasn’t cold and it wasn’t raining that much.

‘He didn’t give you any trouble?’

‘No, we just got to know each other. I don’t think he liked me, so he went out.’

She looked.

‘I’ll make your bed up,’ she said quickly, obviously hoping I hadn’t noticed the fine covering of long ginger hair in a circular patch on the eiderdown.

‘Oh, there’s no need to do that now,’ I said generously, gazing out of the window. Below me was their tiny back garden, and down to the left, a metal coal bunker on which rested the remains of my shredded T-shirt. It hadn’t been a favourite.

‘I’ll give you a key for tonight, as I don’t expect you to be staying in.’ She said it like there was no choice in the matter. ‘I have a meeting of the Merched y Wawr to go to.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Daughters of the Dawn – you’d call it a Women’s Institute sort of thing.’

‘And Mr Williams?’

‘Oh, he doesn’t go. He’ll be in for his tea and then out himself. He’s one of the stewards at the races, which start tomorrow, and they’ll be setting up the railway tonight.’

She was stripping the covers off the bed as she spoke, and I gave the bookshelves and her son’s CD collection the once over. It was exactly what you would expect from a male first year student; he had left all his Harry Potter books, his Terry Pratchetts and a handful of serial-killer thrillers at home in case anyone thought him uncool, along with all his Manic Street Preachers CDs in case anyone thought him too Welsh. Surprisingly, given the spotless nature of the rest of the house, there was a thin film of dust on the shelves. Tom Sean Catty had obviously not wanted his large, ginger-haired rump to be disturbed.

Speaking of which, I suddenly noticed a slim volume on the top shelf of the bookcase, and one of the few books in what I presumed was Welsh, though it could have been Patagonian for all I knew. It was called Twm Sion Cati. I brandished it at Mrs Williams.

‘Is this Tom Sean Catty?’

‘Oh yes. Of course the book is about the hero, not my John’s cat. We just called him that because it was John’s favourite when he was a boy. Very famous, Twm Sion Cati was; a bit of a Welsh Robin Hood, except he was a poet too. Something of a highwayman – there’s lots of stories about him – who hid a cave in the hills until he was pardoned for his crimes by Queen Elizabeth. The first Queen Elizabeth, that would be.’

‘Right ... naturally. Listen, Mrs Williams, I’ll take that key, because I want to have a look around whilst it’s still light and I need to put petrol in the car.’

‘Don’t forget to ask for John Petrol, and tell him you’re staying at Nodfa. He’ll do you a good deal.’

‘I don’t think you can get a discount on petrol, Mrs Williams,’ I said, perhaps just a little too patronisingly, as I followed her down the stairs.

‘Well if you want to pay the price it says on the pumps, go ahead, but everybody here knows that’s three pence higher this week because of the visitors coming in for the races.’

‘Well, thanks for that, I’ll certainly remember to mention your name.’

Maybe being in with the locals had some advantages after all.

‘Did you say Mr Williams would be setting up a railway this evening?’ I asked as she handed me a front door key on a key ring to which was attached a small ingot of slate.

‘Oh yes, very popular with the kiddies is the railway.’

‘Let me guess, it’s a steam train.’

‘Of course, but a model one, not a real one. The driver sits on the tender to drive it, but it has a real fire and boiler and it runs on coal. You’ve seen them. They have carriages that are just back-to-back benches on wheels. It takes people once round the race course in between races. Become an annual attraction, has the steam train. Ever since Mr Rees moved into the town.’

‘Mr Rees?’

‘The man who owns the model engine. Built it himself, he did.’

 

This place was a detective’s paradise; people told you anything, sometimes without you asking the question. I suspected, though, that if you did ask questions, they would remember you forever.

So I was grateful that I didn’t have to ask directions to Ion Jones’s place. When Gareth Jones had got his lad Derek to tell me where he’d delivered Ion Jones’s newly-purchased lathe, I had made him draw me a map on the back of a piece of corrugated cardboard. It was pretty crude, but with an Ordnance Survey 1:25 detailed map it should be easy enough to find Bryngwyn, which could be a house, a farm, a suburb of Tregaron or a mountain range. Young Derek hadn’t been terribly clear, which was why I’d made him draw me a map, and that was fine if I just wanted to pull up and knock on the front door. I would feel a lot happier if I new where the back door was and who the neighbours were. I was in no doubt that Mrs Williams, or John the Beer, or John Petrol could have told me if I had asked, but they would have told everyone they knew that I had asked.

As it was, I got more than I bargained for at the garage when I went to fill up the Freelander.

The garage was near a bridge over a rain-swollen river in the middle of the town, and the garage forecourt seemed to impinge on the road. Judging from the way people parked around here, a queue for the petrol pumps that actually blocked the main through road wouldn’t attract any attention.

The pumps did indeed show a price at least 3p a litre higher than I was used to paying in London, but when I plucked the nozzle of its hook, nothing happened.

‘Let me do that; it’s not self-service!’ somebody shouted.

I turned to the garage, where a man was pulling on an anorak before venturing across the postage-stamp sized forecourt. John Petrol, I presumed.

‘Right, sir,’ he said as he took the pump from my hand. ‘Fill her up, is it?’

‘Only if I get the right price.’

‘And what’s that then?’ he shot back, not waiting but inserting the nozzle and starting the pump.

‘Whatever you’d charge Delith Williams.’

‘Oh, you’re staying at Nodfa are you? You should have said.’

I thought I more or less had.

‘Here for the races?’

‘Well, I came to see the Red Kites, but now I’ve found out about the races, I might have a small flutter, if that’s allowed.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t know about that, sir,’ he said with a big wink. ‘But watch where the Irish money is going; that’s always a good indicator.’

‘Thanks for the advice. Do you sell local maps?’

‘Oh yes, we’ve got the big scale maps of most of the river and the bog. You know, Cors Caron, the Tregaron bog. Famous it is.’

‘Yes it is. And the river’s good for the trout, isn’t it?’

I hoped that hadn’t come out in a Welsh accent.

‘Mostly it’s the tributaries up in the hills, but don’t even think about it unless you’ve got a licence.’

‘Don’t worry, fishing’s not my scene. How much do I owe you?’

‘Come inside and I’ll work out the discount.’ He grinned conspiratorially. ‘And I’ll get you a map.’

As we walked the few feet to the garage office – in the window of which was a handwritten sign saying ‘No cheques accepted from Morgan (W) and Harding (G)’ –

John Petrol looked back over his shoulder at the Freelander.

‘Nice motor, that. You don’t see many of them round here.’

‘Really?’

‘Though we had one in the town just like that, same colour and everything, only last week. ‘Course, I really remember it for the girl who was driving it. Dressed to the nines, she was, and a right cracker. Ooh yes, she’d be at the top of my cracker list. Wore these dead sexy red shoes. Real fuck-me shoes, I think you call them.’

He rang up a price on the cash register that was 2p a litre less than the price on the pump. I paid in cash.

‘You get to chat her up?’ I said, my mouth suddenly dry.

‘Oh, she was too good for the likes of me. To be truthful, she’s the type of woman that scares me a bit. No, she was just asking for directions to Haydn Rees’s house.’

I pocketed my change and turned to go.

‘Who’s he then?’

‘Our famous local solicitor. They have all the luck, don’t they?’

Not if I could help it.

 

 

 

Chapter Sixteen

 

 

The rain hadn’t actually stopped – I suspected it never did – but it had thinned to a faint mist, or maybe I just didn’t notice it anymore. I reparked the Freelander in the public car park near Nodfa and perused the map I had bought.

I used The Talbot to orientate myself, as most roads seemed to start from there; one running north-west towards Aberystwyth, two running south-west towards Lampeter on either side of the Teif river valley and one running north-east to the Cors Caron nature reserve and somewhere called Pontrhydfendigaid, which I didn’t attempt to say out loud.

The road I was looking for, which the lad Derek had described, went nowhere. Literally. Well, technically it went up into the mountains to the east and then stopped dead in a conifer plantation. Single track, it followed what looked to be the ridge of another small valley, through which ran the river Berwyn, a tributary of the Teifi. There were half a dozen farms or houses off the road on tracks marked with dotted lines and, sure enough, just as Derek had said, there was one called Bryngwyn. It was less than a mile away up the same road Nodfa was on, to the left of The Talbot as you looked at it, but the road rose steeply up the mountains to about 1300 feet according to the map, and the rain had brought the clouds down, so I couldn’t see anything from where I was.

I decided not to take the Freelander. It was a dead-end road going up a mountain and I preferred to go where I knew I had an exit. Plus, it was a vehicle that had already been seen and noted in the town and I didn’t want to draw attention to myself. So I opted for a foot patrol and cursed myself for not bringing any hiking boots or waterproofs. There was something in the Freelander that could be useful, though. Amy always kept a pair of Praktica binoculars, with up to x 40 zoom magnification and light enhancing lenses, in the glove compartment. She claimed she used them at large fashion shows to make sure she didn’t miss a single pleat, cut or seam in a new item. A likely story, but they were perfect for the idiot bird watcher walking in the rain. I put up the collar of my jacket against the drizzle and set off down the road, hoping my shoes would hold up to the damp and that I wouldn’t meet an ornithologist coming out of the trees saying ‘The name’s Bond, James Bond’, as had happened once to Ian Fleming.

The streets were narrow here, with front doors opening on to the road, and though there was little traffic, what they was seemed to move at 90 mph, and twice I had to take refuge in somebody’s doorway to avoid being scraped along the walls.

Then suddenly the houses ended but the road continued to snake its way upward, flanked on one side by two-strand barbed wire fence to stop traffic – or at least sheep – from going down the scree slope to the river. To my right were a series of unmade roads leading off to individual farms or houses, some with their names on wooden arrows or carved into slate blocks: Ty Mawr Farm, Brynteg and Garth Villa and then, finally, Bryngwyn.

I was relieved, because the cloud had come down, or I had gone up to meet it, and I could no longer see the town behind and below me. I was quite prepared to believe the scare stories about mountain walkers getting lost and dying of exposure, and I was less than a mile from an international centre of trot-racing, bagpipe playing birdwatchers and I’d left my emergency bottle of brandy in my bag back with Mrs Williams.

Still, no need to panic yet. It wouldn’t be dark officially for about another three and a half hours, though the visibility couldn’t get much poorer, but it meant no-one could see me leave the road and follow what was little more than a farm track towards whatever Bryngwyn was.

After about a quarter of a mile, the track dropped away to the right until I lost sight of the road. I reckoned I was heading back on myself around the slope of a hill and if I kept going down and in a circle, according to the map, I would eventually hit the back road to Lampeter, just the other side of The Talbot. I would have felt more confident if I’d had a compass.

Bryngwyn was a ghost house.

It was a low, black stone house with the obligatory slate roof, seemingly crouched down, burying itself into the hill, with a couple of ramshackle outbuildings at the side. There was no sign of life, no sign of a vehicle, and although there were overhead electricity wires running into the house, not a light showed anywhere.

I was pretty sure there was nobody about to see me, but for the benefit of any Red Kites floating above, I walked up to the front door and knocked loudly. There was no answer, and judging by the amount of mould around the door frame, I guessed this wasn’t the most-used entrance anyway.

I wandered around the side of the house near one of the outbuildings, which was a garage affair of corrugated iron sheets around a wooden frame. It had been so twisted by the damp that the whole thing leaned to one side as if a giant foot had squashed it. There was a tongue-and-hasp lock on the door, but instead of a padlock, it was held in place by a rusty six-inch nail.

I reached out for the nail, then paused. I had Amy’s leather gloves in my back pocket and I put them on, as something was telling me it was better to be safe than sorry. It was only as I pulled them tight that I noticed the dozens of Twm Sion Cati claw holes that had gone through the leather but not the thick furry lining.

The garage contained an old Kawasaki motor-bike that had seen better days, with a helmet and a pair of gauntlets balanced on the seat. I sniffed the exhaust pipe and slipped off a glove to feel the cylinders with the back of my hand. That and the fact that a spider was busy weaving a cobweb over one of the wing mirrors confirmed that it hadn’t been run for at least a couple of days.

I continued round to the back of the house, where a flimsy half-glass door, obviously not an original feature of the house, led in to the kitchen.

I looked around nervously but from the back of the house could see only cloud-covered hills. There was no-one watching me, not even a sheep. I turned the knob on the door and prepared to put my shoulder to it, but it opened without any undue pressure. Not locked. Well, they probably didn’t get many burglars up here.

I stood there in the kitchen, and only when I was sure I couldn’t hear a thing did I breathe out.

Somebody had been here until recently, judging from the dirty plates and cups in the sink and the pan on the Calor Gas stove, which contained the desiccated remains of some tinned ravioli. No great detective work – the empty tin was on the side of the sink.

There was a parlour and two rooms at the front of the house. The first one I tried had a military-issue camp-bed in the middle of the floor, complete with a pillow wrapped in cellophane and a sleeping bag. Apart from a radio cassette player, a copy of Mayfair and a magazine called Big Ones, which I’d never heard of, there was no other furniture in the room.

The other room was unusual as well. Not everybody has a Boxford lathe in their living room. They probably don’t have a metal work bench with a vertical drill either, or a digital calliper gauge, or a tungsten carbide parting tool, or interchangeable drill bits on a speedloader clip; nor, for that matter, a stack of about 20 12-inch mild steel bars by the skirting board in front of a blocked-off fireplace, probably removed and sold at an antiques market down the Portobello Road. These things are for sheds at the bottom of the garden.

The floor was a concrete one and uncarpeted and had been swept by a long-handled broom, which was propped against one wall by a pile of dust and silver metal shavings. I poked around in the pile with a gloved finger until two solid objects surfaced. They were hollow cylinders that had been drilled out of a solid bar of mild steel, less than half an inch long with a rimmed end. They would have been drilled to a set depth and then reamed to the correct width. These two had been trial runs. They looked like newly-ejected cartridge cases from a hand gun. Except these hadn’t been ejected from a gun; they were meant to go in one.

I turned on the lathe and it whined into life. I turned it off again at the switch. That proved the house had electricity, nothing else. It didn’t tell me when the lathe had last been used. Sherlock Holmes might have done a monograph on the oxidisation rate of freshly cut metal slivers, but I hadn’t.

I had a good idea what the lathe had been used for, though. If he was following the plan cooked up by Keith Flowers and Malcolm ‘Creosote’ Fisher, then Ion Jones would have been churning out casings that would fit the chambers of a Brocock air pistol, replacing their gas-and-pellet cartridges. Inside each of these casings he would have inserted a real .22 bullet, and I remembered Fisher laughing when I’d asked if they were difficult to get hold of. I had picked up one thing off the internet that he hadn’t known: that a micron out in the tooling could make the live rimfire .22 ‘inner’ cartridge highly unstable. There were reports of the things going off when dropped during police confiscations, without a gun in sight.

I stared at the blue-metalled lathe some more, but it didn’t tell me anything. There was still no sound from inside or outside the house. That was the trouble with the countryside; it was so damn quiet it was like being in solitary confinement.

There was nothing for it but to check the upstairs, and for that I risked turning on the lights. I made it to the top of the stairs without being attacked by a knife-wielding maniac and looked into the two bedrooms, both doors of which were open. They revealed nothing; absolutely nothing, as they were empty of anything but dust. No furniture, no curtains, not even a light bulb in one.

Tell a lie, there was something: two sheets of printed paper on the floorboards. They were particulars from a estate agent and letting agency in Lampeter and told me that Bryngwyn was available for short-term lettings (unfurnished) until the end of September, when the new owners would redevelop the property. (Estate agent code for second/holiday home bought by the English). I noted that it was ideally situated for wild trout fishing (with permit) and the pony-trekking/wildlife centre that was Tregaron. The other room upstairs was a bathroom that had been in use, with soap, a razor and a toothbrush on the sink. There was also a can of industrial grease-remover and a towel, which had one been lime green but was now basically black with grey-green stains. There was an airing cupboard, with some more towels and a couple of T-shirts hanging from one of the shelves. There was hot water in the tank for the central heating, and the T-shirts had been there long enough to dry.

Lots of indications that Ion Jones had not gone far, and there was nothing to say he wasn’t coming back. He hadn’t taken his motor-bike, for a start, so maybe he’d just nipped down the hill into town. Maybe he was drinking in The Talbot at this very minute.

I retraced my steps to the kitchen door and stepped outside. The rain had stopped and the sky was clearing, making it lighter than at anytime since I’d arrived. It was just after six o’clock and the kitchen of The Talbot would be open. There was nothing like a walk in the fresh mountain air for working up an appetite. Come to think of it, the air did smell different up here. Apart from the ever-present scent of coal fires, there was a noticeable absence of petrol fumes, blocked drains and hot and sweaty humans. It must be all that rain.

I took another lungful and decided to celebrate with a cigarette, leaning on a metal coal-bunker of the kind that seemed to be issued by the local council like dustbins around here.

The plan for the evening was to have a giant steak at The Talbot – unless the Welsh lamb was compulsory – and keep a low profile. Thankfully I had hit the two weeks of the year when Tregaron was crawling with strangers.

I had quite a view now, thanks to the clearing cloud, and I remembered the binoculars, so I opted for a bit of bird watching, or at least mountain watching as there didn’t seem to be a living thing in sight. Unzipping the Prakticas, I dropped the fake leather case on the ground and immediately bent to pick it up before I forgot it, not wanting to leave any trace of my visit.

It had landed on a small pile of coal, leaking from the coal bunker’s small trap door, which you slide up to insert your shovel or coal scuttle. Coal was something you didn’t often see in London these days.

Nor in a house, albeit in Wales, that has electric central heating.

And no fireplaces.

The lid of coal-bunker was about a yard square, weighed about half a ton, and I had to use two hands to lift it and slide it back. Inside was: coal.

Or at least a thin sprinkling of small nuggets and a lot of coal dust resting on folded sacking. The sacking peeled back more easily than the tab on a carton of orange juice to reveal a cardboard box, of the sort you used to get in supermarkets to carry your groceries in (until some officious health and safety twit decided they were a fire hazard). This one had once contained loose Spanish red peppers grown and picked for Jose Suarez Ltd of Almeria.

It now contained, give or take the odd one, 25 loaded revolvers.

 

Well I couldn’t say they were unexpected, could I?

It still unnerved me enough to slam the lid back on the coal bunker and look furtively around in case anybody had seen me.

What if they had? Was coal theft – because that’s all it could have looked like really – a hanging offence in Wales? It probably was.

There was nobody to be seen with the naked eye. But then, I had binoculars, and I used them to sweep the surrounding scenery.

There were no other houses visible from this side of Bryngwyn, and the nearest properties off the road I had walked up were hidden by undulations in the hill. In front of me the ground sloped down and round to where I reckoned Tregaron was, and if I had read the map right, that was open country sloping gently down to the road near The Talbot and then up again into more mountain and the conifer plantations.

Nothing. Not even a sheep. I scanned the area twice, and then noticed something to the right and down the hill in the direction of Tregaron. Because it hadn’t moved, I had dismissed it at first as a patch of brown ferns or a patch of weathered topsoil, but using the Praktica’s zoom function I saw that it wasn’t.

I had been right about there not being another living thing on the mountainside.

 

I don’t know how tall Ion Jones had been in life, but he was about three-foot-six in death, kneeling as he was in soft, boggy earth.

He had slumped down and forward onto his knees, still clutching a cardboard box just like the one I’d found in the coal bunker. A few inches from him was a rubber torch buried in the mud. The switch said it was still ‘ON’.

I circled him warily. From the front, I could see what had happened. He had stumbled, slipped – whatever – and one of the two dozen or so Brococks had gone off. Unluckily for him, it was one pointing his way. Right at his heart, judging by the brown stain and scorch marks on his shirt.

Where had he been going? Obviously away from Brwyngwyn, but if he was going into Tregaron this way at night, instead of by the road, carrying what he was carrying, he was an idiot. Well, obviously he was; he’d shot himself.

I straightened up and looked around me. Just hills – it was a sadist’s definition of an open prison. I jogged up the slope, in the direction of the road, and almost immediately went into a crouch. I was in the back garden of another house, except this being the wild west Wales frontier, there were no garden fences or hedges or anything. The house ended, there were a few plants and a square of lawn, and then the mountain began.

Because of the dip in the slope, no-one from the house could have seen Ion Jones’s body, knelt in prayer like it was, not even from the upstairs windows. Not that the house – a bigger, more imposing version of Bryngwyn – seemed to be inhabited.

The poor sod must have been there most of the night and all of the day, and because he was so far off the beaten track, not even somebody walking their dog had found him.

The local foxes had though.

 

‘You look as if you’ve had a good blow, Mr Fitzroy.’

‘Pardon?’

‘A good blow in the fresh air,’ said Mrs Williams.

‘Oh yes, of course. Been for a walk, haven’t I?’ Damn, I was doing the accent again; but she seemed not to notice. ‘Just popped back to get changed before I have dinner at The Talbot.’

‘Ah, The Talbot. There’ll be parties and whatnot every night this week,’ she said disapprovingly, ‘what with the Irish in town for the racing. They always make an unholy row after hours. Sometimes into the small hours.’

‘Do you ever have to call the police?’ I asked casually as I started upstairs.

‘The police? Pah! The nearest station is in Lampeter, and it’s supposed to take them 18 minutes to get here. That’s what they call their response time. But it’s more like half an hour; that’s if they bother answering the call in the first place. The town council’s complained time and time again. Not that we’re always having to call the police, mind you. It’s the principle of the thing. Ooops, there’s my programme.’

She had been keeping one ear on the television set in the lounge. I guessed it must be time for Pobol Y Cwm, of which even I had heard, usually in the context of a pub trivia quiz, as it is one of the longest-running TV soap operas in the UK (if not the world) and the only one not in English.

‘You carry on, Mrs Williams, don’t mind me.’

‘Oh, by the way,’ she said to my back, ‘I put a key in the lock of your room. You might like to keep it locked; you know, to keep the cat out.’

‘Okay, thanks.’

Note that. Twm Sion Cati had to be locked out. Merely closing the door was not enough.

I took the key out of the lock and pocketed it, closing the door behind me and reaching for my bag, determined to do some damage to the bottle of Italian brandy.

I was sitting on the edge of the bed, the bottle to my lips, when I felt the first rake of claws across the back of my ankle. Fortunately, Italian brandy is a good aesthetic, and I was too busy drinking to cry out, so I just leaned back and lifted my feet off the floor. In completing this complicated manoeuvre, I consumed more than I had intended, and when I had finished spluttering and trying not to wipe the mud off my shoes with the Williams’ eiderdown, I realised that I now had the upper paw, so to speak.

Twm Son Catty was a big boy, I reckoned twice the size of Springsteen even allowing for the longer hair, and it was probably a bit of a squeeze for him under the bed there. I took another belt of the brandy and put the cork in. Then I pulled off my shoes, threw them into my bag and got to my feet and started bouncing. I hoped that Mrs Williams had the television on loud and that it was a particularly dramatic episode of Pobol Y Cwm. If she had come in then and found me jumping on a bed waving a bottle of brandy – well, she wouldn’t have been the first.

On the fourth or fifth bounce, Twm had had enough and emerged from under the frame with as much dignity as he could muster, despite having to bend his back until his stomach scraped the carpet in order to do so.

I bent my knees and came to a stop, toasting him with another drink whilst he strode over to the door, sat down and began to lick every piece of fur that been ignominiously displaced, quite determinedly ignoring my presence.

So I ignored him.

But neither of us really took an eye off each other; neither of us was stupid.

Keeping the bed between us, I pulled my bag towards me and fished out a clean shirt. As I took my T-shirt off, he flashed both yellow eyes at me, like the headlights of an oncoming truck in the rain. I wasn’t going to catch him with that one again. Very obviously, I put the T-shirt back in the bag. As it was, I couldn’t spare another one.

My shoes weren’t that bad, considering that I’d run down a mountainside without looking back; my socks were damp, but they’d mostly dried out when I bounced on the bed. I’d blame Twm for that.

But I also had to thank him for taking my mind off things.

I put my jacket back on and zipped it up the front, then I took a step towards the door and waited, arms at my side. Eventually he stopped licking his fur and stared at me for a good minute. I guessed at him weighing in at over 12 pounds, and with the long hair he could have been mistaken for a small pony at a distance. When he stood up, his paws looked the size of a puma’s.

He took one tentative step towards the bed. I didn’t move. Then another, and then he was on the bed in one fluid leap. When I still didn’t make a move, he circled twice, not taking his eyes off me, plucking gently at the eiderdown. The he wrinkled the skin down his back, a gesture of contempt that only cats have perfected, and lay down, curling his great brush of a tail around himself.

But he kept his head up and his eyes open until I’d left the room.

 

I went as planned to The Talbot and ordered a pint of their local ale – which turned out to be keg Welsh Bitter – and their largest steak, with no fried onion rings. I got the onion rings anyway.

While I was waiting, the shakes started over what I knew was on the mountain less than half a mile from the cosy back bar, and through the French windows I watched the night fall on Ion Jones for a second night, or perhaps a third.

The bar was busy, with half the customers speaking Welsh and one or two groups speaking Breton, which I understood at least the gist of. A few said ‘Hello’ and ‘Here for the races?’ and I smiled politely but didn’t get drawn into anything, even when the Breton band started up.

I ate my steak and drank my beer and then another one just to be sociable. When most people’s attention was on the band, I sneaked into the hotel side, where there was a public phone in an oak-lined alcove, complete with a local telephone book.

It was a long shot, but it paid off. Something had to go right for me; I was long overdue.

I had expected a book full of Joneses, and possibly an entire appendix of Williamses, with perhaps a separate chapter of Pughs. I hadn’t expected so many Reeses, but it was worth ploughing through to find that he was listed, as Hadyn Rees, LlB.

His address was: Brynteg, Pentre, Tregaron.

I had walked right by his house that afternoon, and then looked in at the back of it.

Ion Jones had been his next-but-one-door neighbour and had been headed towards Hadyn Rees’s house when he shot himself.

Well, at least, that was the way the body was pointing.

 

I left The Talbot before the party got going, not trusting myself not to join in, and went back to Nodfa. I don’t think anybody noticed I’d gone.

Mrs Williams was out at her Daughters of the Dawn meeting and Mr Williams was watching the local news in Welsh on the television. It didn’t take long. We said good evening and I said I was turning in now. He asked me, nervously, if I’d seen the cat recently, and I told him not to worry, I had a key. He said: ‘Use it, ‘cos that bugger can open the handle somehow, believe it or not’. I told him I believed, I believed.

Twm Sion Cati was asleep on the bed, or that’s what he would have liked me to believe.

I ignored him, went to the bathroom, came back and turned a bedside light on.

He had left me just enough room if I thought I was hard enough.

I kept my underpants and shirt on and perused the Williams son and heir’s bookshelves. His Terry Pratchett collection was mostly hardbacks. He was a serious fan. I picked one at random, and with the bottle of brandy in the other hand, I slid under the covers.

I don’t think Twm Sion Cati was impressed with my choice of bedtime reading, but he knew that a hardback hurt more than a paperback.

 

Thanks to the brandy, I slept a dreamless sleep. I was woken by Mrs Williams knocking on the bedroom door and telling me that breakfast would be in about ten minutes if that was okay and, by the way, had I seen the cat?

I answered in the affirmative to both questions and she scurried downstairs, unsure whether to cook the bacon or to get the first aid kit out.

Twm Sion was stretched out full length across the bottom of the bed, and I slid out without disturbing him.

I drew the curtains and was greeted with a fine bright morning with hardly a cloud in the sky. A red letter day in Wales indeed.

From my window I could see across the road into the municipal car park, and there was the Freelander safe and sound.

It couldn’t last; and it didn’t.

Parked next to the Freelander was a black London cab. A TX1.