Cardiff Dark 3: A Short Story

Cardiff Dark 3

by

David Williams

Please read
http://sharkfishinginwales.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/postcard-short-story.html
and
http://sharkfishinginwales.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/cardiff-dark.html
first

Arthur’s long gaze pierces the sunlight across what they, the City fathers laughingly call the Bay! The day it went from the Docks to the Bay was the day that something inside Macey died. Not only were they trying to whitewash history, they were killing the darkness, the joy and the jazz. He knew students that used to come down in the 1980’s for the excitement of the North Star and the Docks Non Pol. Average people being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The wrong tablet swallowed in the wrong toilet. Some went into the gents and came out of the ladies dressed to the nines. Wouldn’t stop them coming down. The bodies found in the feeders were always young. The feeders of the Taff that fed the Dock. Deep Dock, Short Dock, Long Dock, Tiger Dock. There was no Porth yr Aur in those days. There was one Welsh Speaking Gangster of that era but another one that had been white washed from Chapel History. A man who had enjoyed the Casablanca Club a little too much. Any place is about its people.

The elites stayed up in Cyncoed, Whitchurch, Lisvane and Rhiwbina. This was working class down here. Dark, deadly and present. Not to say the bankers, accountants, councillors and local mayors didn’t come down here to pick up some rough. The girls with the shiny beads. What the punters always forgot was that these women were always somebodies daughter, sister or mother.

 A pleasure boat docks close to Arthur’s vantage point. A hen party in black lycra and pink cowboy hats alight tripping over each other to get to the bars of Mermaid Quay. These were the furthest thing from a mermaid. Valleys ladies, useless but harmless. Arthur was twenty years past his last erection. He just looked down with pure disdain. He had been spotted. “Yoo hoo old man, old man yoohoo” “I’m deaf fuck off, what do you want” “Drink, we want to drink” “ Are you blind as well as thick?” “ No need to be like that you miserable old fucker” “Why talk to me then?” “We wanted to speak with a local!” A local, there aren’t any fucking locals left any more. “What a charmer, you picked the wrong one there Sue” “Sue, if you were named Sue, then you’re too old to be out” shouts Arthur after them. They had put him in one of his long dark despondent moods, ones which would and could last for weeks on end. He had never been diagnosed as a manic depressive but enough people had told him that he probably was one, people like him who had touched the stars and plummeted the depths. People who were no longer around. Why Arthur had been spared he asked the big hombre in the sky sometimes! He wanted to go, he wanted to die? Peacefully, not in the way that he had dispatched some of his victims over the years.

He had come to terms with his own mortality in prison. Always manslaughter never murder and in Cardiff always banged to rights by Detective Ken Frane. Four officially killed but it was more like eight, Frane had not been able to pin the others on Macey. Thirty five years of his life spent in different nicks. Maybe about the right amount of time. Each one of the eight deserved to die because they were a threat to Macey’s reign as Docks Gangland Boss. A right bestowed upon him by Uncle Bertram. Bertie Riggs had earned the right but had not had a son of his own. He had sewn up the Docks of the twenties and thirties. He was even able to deal with the killers returning to civilian life after the second world war. The scars on Bertie’s face were transluscent upon his death. So Arthur, an heir to Bertie’s throne through blood and there was always plenty of that on the streets of James and Bute.

There was one body left that needed burying and that was the man who had helped put him inside for so long. The problem was, that body was still very much alive. Ken Frane was back in the good books of South Wales  police after falling foul of the higher echelons in the late eighties. Arthur had heard in Cardiff nick that Ken Frane had had to resort to security work and there was plenty of banging of enamel mugs on grey greening radiators on that occasion. It was difficult to be a good police officer but that wasn’t Arthur Macey’s problem. He often felt in his cell that he could have swopped places with Frane both tired, depressed and suicidal. He and Frane had been like that often but they had both come through it.  Arthur was in his late seventies now and Frane must be late sixties, a decade between them. A decade he needed t make up. Both legends to each other but losers and has beens to today’s hard men and police. If he had his time again Macey would have joined the force at 18 but with the knowledge of the 'Cardiff Dock’ underworld. Many lives would have been saved, many more than under Frane. A lucky incompetent and that’s what stuck in Macey’s craw, that he had been sent to prison by an idiot. He could never make the murders stick so it was always manslaughter. He had all the evidence required but the jury would always believe Macey’s motives, so much so that another group of students, film students from the Atrium, the flashy building next to the prison in Knox Rd, had tried to make a film in 2003 called ‘Macey’s Motives’ but in the end Arthur had told them to fuck off just like the hen night off the boat. Even though he was considered a Psychopath he ironically had a strong sense of justice and fair play. If the eight had not crossed him, they wouldn’t have died. Why did the human animal always have to get above his station?

So it was a race now, to see who would die first? Cardiff gangland history would be complete if Ken Frane was to go first. Arthur Macey outlives the short arm of the long law. It would be ideal if Macey could help him along a little bit.