CHAPTER 38
I managed to avoid another trip to the sluice room, but only just, and not for the first time I wondered how and why I had ended up in such a job. There was more, but Matt’s summary covered it rather neatly. Discounting the possibility of an utterly bizarre and complicated accident, our man had been beaten and badly wounded with axes. Not swords; Matt went into rather too much detail about the different wounds he would have expected if someone had been channelling some Japanese ninja film.

While still alive, and presumably conscious, he had been comprehensively gelded, then finished off with a stab slanting upwards from underneath the ribcage. His head and hands had then been sawn off with a fine-toothed implement.

Matt promised us a formal report within three days (“Got to slice him open and have a look inside; you don’t need to watch that bit”) and we set off back to James Street. Neither of us was up to conversation till we hit the edge of the city, and Rhys took a detour. It was a brilliant idea. I let him do the talking.

“Hiya! What can I get you?”

“Hiya back, Gemma. We’ve had a very bad morning, and we need something really, really nice for the team. Bad taste in the mouth, aye?”

She nodded.

“I get days like that as well. Big cakes or bags of finger food?”

“Um, couple of cakes and a bag of nibbles?”

“Give me a couple of minutes, then. I know what your lot like”

We were soon back in the car together with four bags of Danish pastries, a coffee and walnut cake and a beetroot cake, which our friend assured us would neither taste like beetroot (“Think carrot cake”) nor turn our pee red. Into the yard, dump the snacks in the office, and download the memory card. I got a number of looks as I sat at the machine, but they were looks of sympathy and comprehension, not Looks. I ran off and sealed the evidential disc, then made some working copies.

“Alun, mate? You got your keys?”

“Yup”

“I’m going to sort a few pics here, just the tats. I’ll add a note of where they were… Right. Should be coming out of the printer now”

“You OK, girl?”

“Just about. Had a couple of moments in the morgue”

“No shame there, Di. Well done. Anything so far?”

“Leave it to a team session, aye? Rhys is off dumping the DNA, so we’ll find out who he is, was, in a bit”

“As long as he was known, Di”

“I suspect he will have been, Alun. This sort of thing is too heavy for it to be some random Joe Public. Prints should be done”

“Got them. Let’s see… Ah. There’s a starter for ten, if ever I saw one. Spot this, Di?”

He showed me one of the pictures, which was one I had found difficult to take as the tattoo in question had been on the side of what was left of the victim’s neck, and the top edge was partly obliterated by the tearing of the flesh. Sammy was straight over.

“What you got, mate?”

“This one. Looks like the bottom half of a number. I… shit, that isn’t funny”

He looked at our puzzled stares, wincing slightly.

“I was just about to say I didn’t want to stick my neck out, but… Anyway, what do you think? Is that the lower half of a 23 or a 13? If it’s 23, I know where this is going”

I was lost, and my friend saw.

“Di, love, it’s letter code. 13 stands for either the thirteenth letter of the alphabet, ‘M’, or the first and third. Traditionally, it is M-for-marijuana. You heard of Combat Eighteen?”

“Of course. Evil Nazi bastards, innit?”

“Yes, but it’s One Eight, not Eighteen. ‘A H’ for their hero Adolf. Same with an 81 tattoo”

“H A?”

“Hell’s Angels. If this is 13, it could be anyone. If it is 23, then I will lay odds I know who this is. If not individually, then at least the group they were with”

“23? ‘B C’, then?”

“Y Brawdoliaeth Cymreig. An MC from up Merthyr way. I think we might have a war on, if it is”

Sammy was wincing with real distaste now.

“I hope to fuck you are wrong, Alun. Off and dig, yeah? Let me know as soon as; if you are on the money, this will need to go upstairs sharpish. Counterterrorism, for starters”

My face betrayed me, and for the first time I saw the Asian man behind the Welsh.

“Di, not all terrorists have got brown skin and are called Abdul. If Alun is right, we have some serious shit hitting the fan. Do me a favour and get that written up double-quick. If it’s a war, then we’ll have more bodies very soon”

I settled down at my terminal and transcribed the report from Rhys’ little recorder, trying but only partially succeeding to put memories of pork joints beyond the back of my mind. It did eat up some of the time, though, till Alun was back. I spent some of the rest trying to enjoy Gemma’s beetroot cake through the lump stuck in my throat. It was actually very nice, in the firm, moist way of a carrot cake, the root’s natural sugars doing enough work to avoid needing the cloying effect of adding more of the usual sweetener.

Alun was back surprisingly quickly, after less than three hours.

“LIO was actually in, so I knocked this time. Saved me the embarrassment of him walking in on me, thankfully. We’ve got a possible match”

He waited till we had drawn our chairs up around Sammy before showing us the card.

“Handy that Callum was in, to be honest. When I said he was anal, I didn’t know exactly how far up his fundament he actually is. He set me to looking through the ‘necks’ files, so I could cover both 13 and 23, but he went straight to his gang files. He’s been tracking members for bloody decades, cross-indexing, the whole shebang. He even tracks their membership history”

He snorted, once again without humour.

“He showed me one card he had which started with a kid from a school gang, the sort that goes out looking for a fight with thirteen-year-olds from another school because of just because, aye? Timeline on the card shifts to some street gang shit, via time with a twat like Mo Elmi, then actual time banged away care of Her Majesty’s Pleasure, followed by his joining an armed robbery crew and then Long Lartin”

Sammy nodded, then held up a hand.

“He’s good at his job, then, but cut to the chase?”

“Ah, that’s just it, Sammy. Most of the time I spent down there was having him Intelsplain how it all worked. Once he’d finished telling me all about it, finding the match was as quick as a quick thing”

“What have we got, then?”

“Decent match for the tats Di brought back, and that was a ‘23’ on his neck, girl. Our headless iron horseman was Henry Michael Yardley, known as Badger. Current address in Aberdare. I was going to put uniform up there on standby, but then I had a thought. He was the Sergeant-at-Arms for the Brawdoliaeth, so I have left Callum to do some digging into any other properties he might control. The BC have had three days to clean his place, though, so anything tasty will be gone by now. I was just wondering if we need to announce that we know who he was”

Every now and again, Alun drops in a little observation that betrays how sharp he is and how much experience he has from CID. I reached over to squeeze his arm.

“Nice one, mate. I’d have sent the boys straight in. What’s the call then, boss?”

“Hang fire on that one for mow, but I would like a couple of you to do a drive-by, eyeballs on the property. There’s nothing back yet from the search by the docks, but I have two hopes for that, one of them being Bob. Di?”

“Yes?”

“You got your notes up to speed enough to take upstairs?”

Shit. “I think so”

“OK. We’re off, and I want a slice of each cake and two pastries bagged and saved for me. I know exactly what a thieving flock of gannets you lot are. Grab your stuff, girl”

When Sammy said upstairs, he meant Bevan Williams. There were two people waiting in an office so far above my pay grade I thought my nose would bleed, with the obligatory tray of decent coffee with Bourbon biscuits. Sammy made the introductions.

“Diane, the Super you know. This is Chief Inspector Brad Cobner, from the TSG, or whatever TLA they have these days, Brad, this is DC Di Sutton, one of my star players”

Cobner grinned at Sammy.

“You always were a cheeky little bugger, Patel! We are not the bloody TSG, bunch of, well, you know my views. Di, was it?”

“Yes, sir”

“Brad in here, Di. Grab a pew, and I’ll give you some background, cause I think Sammy’s probably been too busy to brief you”

I dropped into a seat and Sammy handed me a coffee.

“Brad and I joined together, but he went a different route. He’s actually with CTSFU, based up in Brum”

Counter Terrorism Specialist Firearms Unit. Shit.

Brad looked over to me, nodding in thanks to Sammy.

“Your boss put a shout in for us as soon as you and your oppo got the tats confirmed. I will say one thing, and that is that I bloody hate helicopters. Remember what happened last month?”

“Um, I have been a little busy, sir. Brad. We had a shooting, friend of mine”

“I heard. We were heads-up on that one, but it was apparently, er, sorted out by persons unknown. Am I right?”

“Just about”

“Well, we both know who it was, and we also recognise their care in remaining out of the frame they should be in. Thing is, they have competitors, and they don’t follow RIPA or any other procedural rules. Said competitors upped it a notch shortly after your early Christmas presents”

I looked across at Sammy, recognising the two men’s kinship, their shared sense of humour. Sammy raised both eyebrows to me, that wince back in his face.

“We didn’t associate this until you did the morgue run, mate. Biker on a Harley came off on the M5, on his way to Cardiff from Brum. Truck went over his head, so all a bit of a mess. Traffic reviewed the CCTV and saw something odd. That’s what Brad told me a few hours ago. Nothing made sense till you got that tattoo”

He waved to Cobner, who took up the baton seamlessly.

“They were trying to see if the lad had been clipped by another vehicle or any other hint as to why he might have come off. Very poor quality footage, bad light, details all a bit blurred. Anyway, he’s rolling along, all bad ass broadsheet-on-the-bog”

“Pardon?”

Bev Williams was chuckling. “Your sense of humour is getting worse, Brad. Thank the Lord you cleared off, so I only have Sammy to put up with. Diane, it’s a description of the sort of riding position he was in. Imagine sitting on a toilet reading a broadsheet paper like the Telegraph”

Sammy slithered forward in he chair, arms out and wide at shoulder height, knees apart. Ah!

Brad tipped an imaginary hat to Sammy.

“Your boss hasn’t heard all of this. Bit rapid response today. Anyway, our boy is Bad and Nationwide in the middle lane, just finished passing a Polish articulated lorry and a BMW goes past them both in lane three. There’s just enough detail in the video to pick out the passenger’s head and arm, both out of the window, and then the bike does a shimmy, and the rider goes under the front of the lorry. Beemer keeps on going”

I had a flashback to a moped, two up, Paula falling, blood.

“He was shot, wasn’t he?”

“Yup. Once the video was in, someone brought in their mate’s metal detector thing. The victim’s head was strawberry jam, but the round was still there, and with that they had a better look at his crash helmet, which was more than a bit broken, and once they pieced the splinters together, there was the bullet hole. Nine mill. I shouldn’t really say this, but speaking professionally, I almost admire the bastard’s shooting. It was a very, very neat hit, and that is why I am down here”

I knew immediately where this was going, and looked across to Sammy for confirmation.

“One of Pig’s boys?”

“Not just one of them. Not just one of his club brothers, but his actual brother, same parents. That is why we gave Brad a shout, and why I am about to block all leave on the team for the foreseeable future. There’s a war on”