by Mike Ripley
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 wa
s 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.