"The
Blue Lamp, Jack Warner and Dirk Bogarde “Get back I say, get back” but Jack
Warner wouldn’t get back. Blue lights, Bluebirds, The blues clubs of Butetown.
They had their own language, Creole, Cymraeg and Voodoo. Frane stood under a
street lamp and lit his cigar; the cigar that his GP told him would kill him.
Frane liked to live dangerously but not as dangerously as the body found in the
old East Dock. Pulled out yesterday evening, Wednesday, covered in seaweed and
bloated. It hadn’t been down there long. It wasn’t for Frane to start
speculating. He would wait for the call from Cardiff Bay Police HQ as it now
was. They knew that he knew that it would need an old head to help solve this
one".
"On nights like these down the Bute Dock when
visibility was only a
few feet in front, you could be forgiven for thinking
that you were
walking about in any year between 1880 and the present day so
dark
and so Gothic were some of the corners of the old Cardiff Docks.
As he
walked past the Norwegian Church ghosts of the old sailors in
roll neck jumpers
made their way down the steps singing hymns of
Scandinavia. The old Black Friars
of Bute Park were walking and
chanting in unison up Lloyd George Avenue as
Tommy the Fish passed
by with his barrow. The voice of Shirley Bassey came out
of an old
Café in Adamsdown. Was it a Jukebox or was it a younger her? Time
stopped and started at random down the Docks when Ken Frane was
about to start
another investigation."
"From policing the miners’ strike of 84/85 and match duty at the Ninian he
couldn’t have asked for postings that rooted him as much into his home area.
The further up the greasy pole you climb however the more tenuous that your
former connections become. Napoleon used to place his police who had been
former soldiers in his armies into bases and stations away from home so that
they couldn’t be leant on or bribed. Frane could see the sense in this because
he had been propositioned many times and he had got so fed up of it, asked to
turn a blind eye here, accept a bung there that in the end it ruined his
career. He was better off as a freelance gum shoe anyway. He was on Redemption
Song journey. Anything he could do to crack a case now would look good when the
vicar came to read out the eulogy at his funeral which couldn’t be that far off
now."
“She
has gone home”
“Home?”
Ken Frane presses the question home.
“She
has gone home to Haiti to grieve in peace, away from prying eyes”
“When
did she leave?”
“Last
Thursday”
“That
was very soon, his body was only found in the East Bute Dock on Wednesday evening,
I was present when they fished him out”
.jfif)
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