Angel on the Inside (29 page)

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
un
Welsh 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.'