Judy Hamilton gazed critically at her reflection in the mirror on her dressing table. Dressed in a borrowed, floor-length, gold satin frock, with every visible inch of skin on her face, hands and arms covered with gold greasepaint and her black hair hidden beneath a crocheted gold elastic cap threaded with glass beads, she positively shimmered. She turned sideways and checked her profile. The idea for the costume had been her friend and employer Edyth Slater’s. But they had expended so much time and effort in putting together her outfit, and those of all the other members of the Bute Street Blues Band, it would be a waste to wear them just this once. They would certainly turn a few heads if they played their next engagement in one of the dockland pubs dressed like this – even without the greasepaint.
‘Why is it you look like a glittering angel while I resemble a tarnished brass effigy on a cathedral tombstone?’
Judy turned her head. Edyth was standing in the open doorway. ‘You look nothing of the sort.’
‘Gold greasepaint highlights dark skin and makes it glow, but it’s rusted mine. I only hope there will be other people in the carnival who look just as peculiar.’ Edyth went to the hall table and picked up one of the wickerwork baskets she and Judy had painted gold and filled with paper cornets containing tiny macaroons and coconut biscuits.
‘You don’t look peculiar – well, no more peculiar than I do,’ Judy qualified. ‘I wonder what mess my uncles and the others in the band have made with the sticks of greasepaint. I told them how to apply it, but I don’t think any of them were listening.’ She left her bedroom and scooped up the second basket. ‘Ready?’
‘As I’ll ever be.’ Edyth opened the door that led down the stairs into her baker’s shop. ‘Does everyone feel as idiotic as this when they dress up for a carnival?’
‘You’ve never dressed up for a carnival before?’ Judy questioned in astonishment.
‘I’ve been to fancy-dress parties, but a carnival is different. It’s public for a start. And it doesn’t help that my brother Harry has threatened to bring his entire family down to watch the procession. Thank goodness my parents have taken the rest of the tribe to North Wales on holiday; if they hadn’t, I’d have the entire Evans clan laughing at me.’
‘Half the fun is being laughed at by your friends and relations. I don’t know about carnivals anywhere else, but they’re always special in Bute Street. When I was little I used to look forward to them as much as Christmas. Although sometimes I think we had more fun preparing for them, than taking part in the actual parade.’
‘I must admit I enjoyed helping to make the costumes and watching the children practise their marching in the park. And listening to you rehearse in the bath,’ Edyth teased.
‘I wasn’t that loud, was I?’
‘For the first time in my life I know all the words to more than one song.’ Edyth ran down the stairs. She would have tripped over her skirt when she reached the bottom if she hadn’t steadied herself on the newel post.
‘Careful,’ Judy cried.
‘I was born clumsy and clumsy I’ll always be.’
‘The carnival party after the procession is the best.’ Judy followed Edyth into the shop. ‘It starts as soon as the floats have been judged in Loudoun Square, and goes on until the early hours. Everyone stays until the end – even the priests, the nuns, the vicars, the children, the old people …’
‘Sounds like every Saturday night in the Bay since I moved here from Pontypridd.’ Edyth walked into the back storeroom. The door to the yard was wedged open and all seven members of the Bute Street Blues Band were loading a drum kit into Edyth’s baker’s cart, which was unrecognisable beneath layers of gold paper ornamented with all the glued-on gold and silver shiny tobacco and sweet wrappings they had managed to scavenge for the last three months.
‘Careful! Break that drum skin and I’ll break your neck,’ the band’s drummer shouted at Judy’s uncle, Tony King. ‘You just knocked it against the cart –’
‘He didn’t, it just looks like he did from where you’re standing,’ Micah Holsten, part-time saxophonist, fulltime pastor of the Norwegian Church and acknowledged leader of the band, interrupted in an effort to calm the situation.
‘There’ll be no room for a mouse, let alone us on the back of that cart. The drum kit fills it,’ Tony grumbled when they finally managed to heave it into place.
‘We’ll have to perch on the sides and play our instruments over the edge.’ Micah gave Edyth an apologetic glance. ‘I know it’s your float, but if we are going to get all the band and our instruments on the back, you’ll have to sit up front.’
‘It’s the only place for the non-musical.’ Edyth handed her basket to her driver, Jamie. Sitting alongside him was her baker, Moody. Only sixteen, the West Indian had been trained to bake bread, cakes and biscuits by the Jew who had opened Goldman’s bakery and sold it to Edyth before returning to Poland. At Mordecai Goldman’s suggestion, Edyth had kept Moody on as chief baker and she hadn’t regretted the decision. Not only an expert baker, Moody had also shown a remarkable aptitude for passing on his skills, and was training two of Judy’s cousins as apprentices.
Jamie set Edyth’s basket on the bench seat next to him. He was keeping the horses on a tight rein although they looked more likely to fall asleep than bolt.
Micah glanced into Judy’s basket. ‘What’s in the cornets?’
‘Macaroons and coconut biscuits.’ Judy saw him frown and realised she’d said more than she should have.
‘After only six months in business you can afford to give away the stock?’ Micah looked keenly at Edyth.
‘It’s only a few biscuits and the Goldman name is on the paper cornets. It’s good advertising,’ Edyth replied defensively. ‘And don’t you all look handsome.’
‘Don’t change the subject.’
‘I’m not,’ Edyth countered. It didn’t help that Micah was right. She knew she couldn’t afford to give away stock.
‘The carnival is only once a year, Micah,’ Judy’s oldest uncle, Jed, reminded.
‘So is Easter, and Edyth gave away biscuits to all the Sunday Schools in the Bay then. Next it will be Christmas. No doubt you’ll want to give every resident a stocking filled with mince pies?’ he mocked.
‘Is that what Mr Goldman used to do before I bought the business?’ Edyth chose to deliberately misunderstand Micah.
‘You know perfectly well he didn’t.’
Micah sounded more like an angry husband than an irritated friend. Sensing Edyth’s embarrassment, Judy attempted a diversion. ‘Jamie, stop touching your face. You’re smearing greasepaint over the reins and your costume.’
‘It will wipe off the reins and my costume is gold, same as the paint,’ Jamie retorted truculently.
‘It is not the same at all, because your suit is cloth and stage make-up leaves a horrid stain.’
‘You should know,’ Jamie grumbled. ‘You’re used to dressing up like a clown, I’m not.’
‘Come on, Jamie, less of your moaning – grin and bear it,’ his father, Jed, broke in sternly.
‘You’re used to people laughing at you when you play in the band,’ Jamie snapped mutinously.
‘I trust they don’t laugh.’ Micah rubbed his fingertips together to check they were dry before picking up his saxophone case.
‘They will when they see you in that get-up.’ Jamie glared at Judy. Technically she was his cousin, but as he was fourteen, she nineteen, and they had been brought up in the same street, they were more like brother and sister. ‘That’s enough, Jamie.’ Jed didn’t raise his voice but Jamie fell silent. He knew when he had pushed his father’s tolerance to the limit.
‘All right if we leave our instrument cases in your storeroom, Edyth?’ Micah asked.
‘Of course.’
Jed pulled his pocket watch from his gold satin waistcoat and opened it. ‘It’s time we joined the other floats at the assembly point in Church Street.’
Micah watched Edyth close the storeroom door after they had all deposited their cases. ‘Lock it,’ he advised.
‘But I never lock the shop,’ she protested.
‘The carnival attracts all sorts from miles around,’ Jed warned, ‘including pickpockets and burglars. No one will be leaving the door to an empty house open on the Bay today.’
‘I don’t suppose you’ve locked the front door either.’ Micah opened the door again, looked behind it and shook his head disapprovingly. ‘You’ve left all your keys on the hook?’
‘It’s where they’re kept.’ Edyth knew she’d been foolish. Common sense should have told her that the carnival would attract an influx of strangers, including a criminal element.
‘I’ll make sure every outside door is locked and the front ones bolted. Leave a couple of inches for me on the cart, boys. I know I’m thin, but I need more room than you’ve allowed,’ Micah called back, before disappearing inside.
Edyth was handing up the last of the musical instruments to the band squashed on the cart, when Micah returned. He drew Edyth into the doorway.
‘Tuck these away safely.’ He closed her fingers around her keys. After glancing at the cart to make sure no one was watching them, Micah sneaked a kiss.
Judy glimpsed them embracing and turned her back. Edyth and Micah’s affair was the worst-kept secret on the Bay. But Edyth had married a man who had deserted her less than two months after their wedding.
For the last six months Edyth had worked almost every hour in the day and most of those in the night to make her bakery a success, and in Judy’s opinion her friend was entitled to all the happiness she could get. Even if a few – a very few – straight-laced people said that it was scandalous for the pastor of the Norwegian Church to carry on with a woman who was still, on paper at least, married.
Aled James climbed on deck of the merchant ship heading into Cardiff Docks, leaned against the bulkhead, and gazed at his approaching homeland. The red-brick, French Gothic façade of the Pier Head building that dominated the shoreline loomed inexorably closer and he closed his eyes and breathed in half-forgotten scents. The July air was warm and balmy, perfumed with the tang of salt, fish, and smoke from the funnels of the surrounding vessels and laced with half-forgotten sounds.
The thud of coal barges knocking into one another as they were hauled down the canal to the waiting ships; the metallic slam of coal trams being fastened on to hoists followed by an avalanche clatter as their loads were tipped into holds; the sharp cries of gulls almost but not quite drowned out by the incessant sound of the ships’ hooters. But most evocative of all was the Welsh lilt in the warning shouts and cries of the dockers loading and unloading cargoes. It was music to his ears after fifteen years in America.
‘Glad to be home, boss?’
Aled opened his eyes and continued to stare ahead as Freddie Leary stood beside him. ‘Yes,’ he answered briefly.
‘Family coming to meet you, boss?’
Aled turned to the six-feet-four, red-headed, square built Irishman he had ‘employed’ for the past five years. ‘I have no family left who would want to own me, Freddie.’
‘That’s sad, boss. I know what it is to be an orphan. Not that I’ve any shortage of family with nine brothers and eight sisters.’
‘With eighteen of you fighting for food and space it’s little wonder you left Ireland,’ Aled observed dryly.
‘I would never have left, if the Catholic Brothers who took me and my brothers into the institution hadn’t pushed me out of the old country. They sent my older brothers to farms but put me on a ship bound for Australia. I was nine years old but they said I was big and fit enough to earn my own bread. They even told me that I was the lucky Leary, off to see the world instead of a field in County Cork. Not that I saw much of the world until I jumped ship two years later in New York, and then America wasn’t what I thought it was going to be.’
‘What did you think it was going to be, Freddie?’ Aled asked curiously. Freddie’s heavily muscled bulk was enough to inspire fear in the most hardened thug, which was why he’d paid him, and paid him well, for the last few years. But he doubted that Freddie’d had an original thought in his life.
‘Land of opportunity where every man is equal,’ Freddie recited as if he were a child repeating a lesson he had learned by rote but failed to understand.
‘That’s just a story the Yanks tell children before they’re old enough to see through fairy tales, Freddie.’ Aled resumed his study of the docks.
‘I’ve seen the captain, boss.’ Aled’s second ‘employee’, Aiden Collins, a Cuban-Irish Negro from Havana who was shorter and slighter than Freddie Leary, but somehow managed to look even more menacing, joined them. ‘He’s arranged for one of the boats to be lowered at the stern of the ship before we dock. He said our papers might not pass muster with immigration.’
‘They bloody well should, the money the boss paid for them and our passage,’ Freddie swore. ‘We could have crossed the Atlantic in style on a cruise ship ten times over for what that captain charged. You want me to sort him for you, boss?’
‘No, Freddie. I paid the going rate. A cruise ship would have wanted to see our passports and put our real names on the passenger list.’ Aled pulled his seaman’s cap down low over his face. He was dressed in a dark sweater and slacks like the other sailors on board, although he, Freddie and Aiden hadn’t done a stroke of work on the voyage. ‘You told them to send our luggage on to the Windsor Hotel?’ Aled checked with Aiden.
‘Yes, boss.’
Aled watched dockers, women as well as men, unload potatoes from a low-lying, Irish-registered vessel on the quayside. They slung the sacks they’d filled on to their backs, staggered down the gang plank and dumped them on wooden pallets on the dockside. It brought back memories of the days he’d fought older and heavier boys for a few hours’ paid casual work after his mother had succumbed to her fatal illness.
He could still recall the pain of the rope burns on his shoulders, knew how impossible it was to stand upright at the end of ten hours of back-breaking work – how it felt to be too tired to eat or even sleep.
He’d believed the offer of a job on board ship with regular meals to be heaven-sent after his mother had died. Disillusionment had set in when he’d received his first whipping before the ship had even left Welsh waters. He’d come a long way in fifteen years but he had never forgotten the skinny, ragged urchin he’d been. Or the people who had turned their backs on him and his mother and allowed them both to starve, and her to die in squalor.
He’d learned a lot in America: how to survive in a slum, how to rise from the bottom of the social pecking order to the top, how to make money – and use the power it bestowed. He’d also learned the value of fear and, most important of all, how to stay one step ahead of the law. If he hadn’t left America when he had, he, Freddie, and Aiden might well have ended up in Alcatraz. Fortunately for all three of them, he’d amassed enough money to pay their passage and settle anywhere in the world.
Only one reason had drawn him back to Wales – revenge. Unlike fifteen years ago, he now had enough money to buy whatever he needed to destroy the people who had tried to destroy him – and succeeded in destroying his mother.
* * *
The crowds lining the pavements in Bute Street heard the carnival procession long before the first of the floats rounded the corner and came into view. Two palomino horses, their golden manes and tails braided with red and black ribbons, pulled an open cart. A broomstick-suspended banner above the driver’s seat spelled out ‘GOLDMAN’S BAKERY: THE MIDAS TOUCH’ in shimmering gold foil letters on a black background.
‘As usual, our Edyth’s being over-optimistic. I’ve seen her shop’s accounts.’ Edyth’s brother, Harry Evans, slipped his arm around his wife Mary’s shoulders to protect her from the people who were jostling forward in hope of gaining a better view.
‘The bakery is making money, isn’t it?’ Mary asked in concern.
‘Edyth only bought it six months ago; it’s early days,’ Harry answered evasively. Like his parents, sisters and brother, Harry had assumed that Edyth would return to their parents’ house in Pontypridd when her husband had abandoned her in Cardiff’s Butetown after only a few weeks of married life. Instead, she had astounded them all by emptying her bank account of her childhood savings and negotiating an overdraft with a bank which had enabled her to buy the bakery in Bute Street. She had kept the name ‘Goldman’ because everyone in the area was familiar with it. And playing on the ‘Gold’ part of the name, she had taken down the canvas back and sides of her delivery cart and transformed it into a glittering tableau.
Edyth, Moody, and Jamie were crammed side by side on the seat behind the horses. The boys were dressed in floor-length gold cloaks that matched Edyth’s frock, and all three wore foil crowns studded with wine-gum ‘jewels’ and gold make-up. Moody and Edyth were holding gold baskets and tossing paper cornets from them to the children lining the pavements.
Behind them in the body of the cart, the Bute Street Blues Band, dressed in gold rayon suits, gold make-up, and shiny gold boaters, with the exception of Judy who was dressed in an identical frock to Edyth’s, were belting out a rousing rendition of ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’. Judy’s voice rose, husky and true, above those of the children who marched on either side of the cart, dressed in green, their small faces framed by yellow crepe paper ‘sunflower’ petals.
Mary’s brother David lifted Harry and Mary’s toddler daughter on to his shoulders, held her hands to steady her and stared mesmerised at Edyth.
‘I hope that gold paint comes off easily,’ Mary observed practically.
‘If it doesn’t they’ll all be looking odd for a while.’
Harry glanced at David before waving to Edyth to attract her attention.
‘Isn’t that the band that played at your sister’s wedding, Harry?’ Mary asked when the float drew alongside them.
‘Yes, there’s Judy and Micah Holsten.’ Harry shouted a greeting, but his voice was lost in the music and the buzzing of a jazz band of young girls, led by two drum majorettes that followed the cart.
‘Look, Ruthie darling, Auntie Edyth’s seen you.’ Harry caught his daughter’s hand.
‘Sweets for the sweet.’ Edyth tossed half a dozen cornets towards her niece but all six were scooped up by young boys before either Harry or David could catch one.
‘I’ll keep one for you, Ruth,’ Edyth called out as the cart passed.
Harry cupped his hands around his mouth. ‘See you in Loudoun Square, sis.’
Edyth nodded to show him she’d understood. Micah leaned over the side of the cart and played a few bars of the saxophone just for Ruth, before the procession moved on.
It wasn’t until the jazz band had been supplanted by another float that David realised Ruth was imitating the noise the ‘sunflowers’ had made by blowing into their paper ‘trumpets’.
‘Bit noisier than the farm, isn’t it, Ruthie?’ he murmured absently, staring at Edyth’s back.
The crowd shifted, clearing a space around them. Harry handed their six-month-old son to Mary, lifted his daughter from David’s shoulders and set her on his own.
‘Sweeps.’ Ruth struggled to free her hands from her father’s but Harry kept a firm grip on both of them.
‘If what they say about it being lucky to have a sweep cross your path is true, we’ll have more than our fair share of good fortune today, Ruth,’ said Mary with a smile.
A coal cart pulled by a pair of black shire horses had been transformed into a Victorian chimney sweeps’ tableau. Small boys in ragged, coal-blackened trousers and shirts, holding flat-topped brushes and wearing top hats fashioned from black crepe paper and cardboard were clustered around a chimney, which, judging from its cracked and sorry state, had been scavenged from a scrap yard. Two lines of adolescent girls in grass skirts and flower-decked blouses danced alongside the cart, shaking home-made maracas made from tins filled with stones.
‘That costume looks a bit draughty even for summer,’ Harry commented, when a gust of wind sent the strands dancing, revealing the bathing costumes the girls were wearing underneath.
‘Trust you to notice.’ There was no jealousy in Mary’s comment, only fond amusement. She glanced at her younger brothers and sister. All three were running after Edyth’s cart. ‘Where are they off to?’
‘Loudoun Square,’ Harry guessed. ‘First there gets the best spot in the park close to the bands and the pickings of anything that’s left in the way of treats that were thrown from the floats.’
‘Will they be all right?’
‘They will, Mary’, David said, ‘but I’ll go with them just to be sure. You stay here and watch the rest of the parade.’ He had an ulterior motive for volunteering to look out for the youngsters. As Harry had said, the first ones into the small park in the centre of Loudoun Square would get the best position. But it wasn’t the view David was interested in.
He had fallen hopelessly in love with Edyth the first time he had met her. Drunk and devastated after she had married, he had jumped off a bridge into the river Taff. His attempt at suicide had left him with fractured bones, but they had pained him less than his broken heart. His physical injuries had healed, but it had taken the news that Edyth’s husband had deserted her and she was seeking to annul her marriage to heal his shattered spirits.
His two younger brothers were already swallowed up by the throng flowing into Loudoun Square. Undeterred, David called out to his younger sister, Martha, and ran after her.
The crowd heading into Loudoun Square from Christina Street forced the taxi driver to slam on his brakes.
‘Why have we stopped?’ Aled demanded from the back.
‘Because of these idiots.’ The driver slid his window open. ‘Don’t you dare put your hand on that bonnet, nipper,’ he shouted at a child about to steady himself on the cab.
The child stuck his tongue out before running to his mother. Once his hand was firmly locked in hers, he turned and stuck it out a second time. The driver glanced into his rear-view mirror and eyed his passengers. All three were dressed in unseasonably thick black woollen sailors’ jackets and black peaked caps, but he knew they weren’t seamen. Their hands were too clean and soft and there was something menacing about them. Even if the two he’d marked as ‘bruisers’ hadn’t addressed the tall, slim, fair-haired man with piercing blue eyes as ‘Boss’ he would have guessed from their deference that he was in charge.
The tallest and largest of the three had the height, build and battered facial features of a heavyweight boxer. But the slighter man who was perched on the drop-down seat facing his two companions had dead eyes, which he found even more disturbing.
He glanced back out of the windscreen. Just as he was about to move off, the blond man opened the door. The driver cursed and thrust his foot on the brakes a second time.
‘You trying to kill yourself … sir?’ he added, only just stopping himself from calling the man something less polite.
‘I need fresh air.’ Aled stepped outside. ‘You remember the name of the hotel, Freddie?’
‘The Windsor?’ the bruiser who’d sat alongside him mumbled through badly fitting false teeth.
‘The street?’ he checked.
‘Stuart Street.’
‘Put my luggage in the bedroom of my suite when it arrives and make sure your rooms are on the same floor. I’ll be along shortly.’
‘You don’t want one of us to come with you, boss?’
Aiden asked.
‘No.’ The reply was definite.
‘But, boss …’
‘Nothing’s going to happen to me at a carnival. Don’t worry – your meal ticket is safe, Aiden. Don’t forget to tip the driver.’ Aled pulled his sailor’s cap down to cover most of his face and walked away. The taxi driver watched Aled stroll into the square and filed away a mental description. The police occasionally asked him if he’d seen any ‘suspicious characters’ and had twice tipped him five bob when he’d been able to give them what they wanted. He had a funny feeling that the coppers might be asking questions about these three men sooner rather than later, and over the years he had learned to respect his instincts.
He’d marked the two bruisers down as hired thugs, but the blond man looked more dangerous. Despite his workmen’s clothes he had the air of authority that came with money – and lots of it. He couldn’t even hazard a guess why someone like him would want to stay in Butetown, but he sensed that it wouldn’t be for any good reason.
‘This will be the first time David’s seen Edyth since he left hospital. Do you think he really has got over her?’ Mary asked Harry anxiously.
Harry wished he could reassure his wife, but he knew Mary would see through any platitudes. ‘I don’t know the answer to that question any more than you do, darling.’ He stepped forward so Ruth could see a Noah’s ark float crammed with ‘bird’ toddlers dressed in capes covered with chicken feathers. They were surrounded by older children in animal costume who were having difficulty keeping the younger ones away from the edge of the cart. ‘Yes, Ruthie, monkeys.’
‘And teddy bears,’ she cried in delight.
‘I’ve never heard mention of Noah rounding up a pair of teddy bears, but as they’re here now, he must have.’ Mary knew Harry was talking to Ruth so he wouldn’t have to discuss David’s obsession with Edyth, but she refused to drop the subject. ‘What if David is still in love with Edyth?’
‘If he is, he is. There is nothing we can do about it.’ Harry didn’t want to consider what his headstrong brother-in-law might do, should Edyth reject him a second time.
‘Harry.’ Mary touched his arm.
‘All we can do is be there to help David pick up the pieces should Edyth break his heart a second time, darling.’
‘You do know that Edyth has never encouraged him.’ Much as Mary loved her brother, she wasn’t blind to his faults and she had grown to love and regard all of Harry’s family as her own; especially Edyth, who hadn’t allowed the disaster of her marriage to sour her, or affect her ability to turn any family gathering, no matter how small, into a party.
‘I know,’ Harry mused thoughtfully. ‘That’s why I find his fixation with her so difficult to understand.’
Aled James stood behind a lamp-post across the street from Harry Evans and his family and watched them. He hadn’t seen Harry for twenty-three years, but he had recognised him as soon as he’d caught sight of him through the taxi window because Harry was a mirror image of himself. They could have been twins. Same height, same slim upright figure, same shade of pale blond hair and blue eyes.
The only difference between him and Harry had been in their upbringing – and their fortune. His mother had told him before she died that although Harry had been born a bastard the same as him, their father Mansel James’s family had left every penny the family owned to Harry, simply because, unlike her, Harry’s mother was middle-class. The injustice of the James family’s decision had burned within him every day since.
He looked from the attractive, beautifully-dressed, dark-haired woman clinging to Harry’s arm to the smiling baby Harry was carrying, and the toddler holding Harry’s wife’s hand. If things had been different – would that have been him? Wealthy, secure and happily married …
‘Hello, sailor, looking for a good time?’
Aled eyed the woman who had propositioned him. He had been about to tell her to push off but to his amazement he recognised her too. She had dyed her hair red, but even without the standard prostitute’s trademark he would have guessed her profession from her skimpy organza frock and obvious lack of underclothes. The frock was transparent and, considering her age, which he knew to be around her late thirties, the body beneath it wasn’t in bad shape.
‘I’m always looking for a good time, Anna. I’d have thought you’d have remembered that much about me. Although it has been a long time.’
She stared at him. ‘How long?’
‘Oh, fifteen years or more.’
She continued to look blankly at him. ‘I’ve a good memory, but I haven’t met that many Yanks, and none who look like you.’
‘I didn’t always have an American accent. And when we last saw one another I was a young lad. You were my mother’s apprentice.’
‘Apprentice,’ she repeated indignantly. ‘I was never apprenticed to a trade in my life …’
‘Try the one you’re in now, Anna.’
‘You’ve mixed me up with someone else.’ She went to move on. He grabbed her elbow. She froze.
‘I’ll scream if you don’t let me go.’
‘As if anyone will take any notice of a woman screaming in Bute Street. Come on, Anna, I’ll buy you dinner in the Windsor. We’ll wash it down with champagne and vintage cognac while we chat about old times. And afterwards you can bring me up to date with what’s been happening in the Bay since I left.’
‘The Windsor?’ Her eyes rounded.
‘The Windsor,’ he repeated.
She snorted. ‘They wouldn’t allow me in through their front door.’
‘They wouldn’t dare object to a woman I choose to entertain in my suite. I’ll be paying too much for the privilege of living in it.’ He decided he’d teased her long enough. ‘I bet you never thought when Maisie’s boy Aled sailed out of Cardiff Docks all those years ago that he’d be back with enough money in his pocket to move into the Windsor and entertain you in style.’
‘Aled Cooper!’ she exclaimed. ‘You’re little Aled Cooper!’
‘Aled James now, Anna. I use my father’s name.’
‘I never met him.’
‘Neither did I,’ he said dryly.
‘You were so small and skinny, you looked half-starved. And you were always bloody angry about something or other. You used to come back to the house covered in bruises after fighting boys twice your size …’
‘I’m older and wiser, Anna. I pay people to fight my battles for me now. Dinner tonight, eight o’clock? Ask for me at the desk, I’ll tell them I’m expecting you.’
‘It’s carnival night.’
‘So?’
‘I’m hoping to make at least a fiver. I run my own house now, and own it, outright. I have the deeds to prove it,’ she said proudly.
‘How many girls?’
‘Six. And even if I say so myself, they’re bloody good. The cream of the docks’ crop. You must pay us a visit one night. We cater for all tastes, and I’ll see you all right. On the house, for old times’ sake. Your mother, God rest her soul, was good to me whenever she had a few bob and I didn’t.’
‘Which wasn’t often.’ Aled glanced across the road.
Harry Evans and his family were walking towards Loudoun Square. The festivities would be going on for hours yet. ‘Far be it from me to stop a working girl from working. How about I buy you a drink now, in the Jug and Platter in West Bute Street?’
‘Your mother’s favourite pub.’
‘It used to be,’ he agreed.
‘And you’ll still buy me dinner if I come round to the Windsor tomorrow?’
‘The best the house can provide.’
She shook her head. ‘Who would have thought it? Little Aled Cooper.’
‘James,’ he reminded her shortly. ‘Cooper is dead and buried.’
There was something in the tone of his voice that carried a warning. ‘James it is. And to think I tried to pick you up.’
He offered her his arm. ‘Is your tipple still gin and it?’
‘Fancy you remembering that.’ She smiled.
It hadn’t been difficult – gin and it had been his mother’s favourite tipple too.