Grounds for Appeal

NINETEEN

On Thursday morning, Trevor Hartnell was sitting in Meirion Thomas’s room when a phone call came through for him from Birmingham. His DCI, a gaunt Scotsman nearing retirement, had news for him about Jaroslav Beran.

‘We’ve turned up something about him from way back in 1944. He’s never actually been convicted of anything serious up here — just a few drunk and disorderlies and a couple of minor assaults — but he was pulled in a couple of times for questioning on bigger stuff, then released for want of evidence.’

‘What sort of thing was he involved in?’ asked Trevor, giving a thumbs-up sign to the Welsh DI sitting across the desk.

‘He was suspected of being the driver in a smash-and-grab on a jeweller’s in Aston, but the main witness conveniently vanished before trial. Then there was a big black-market meat investigation that he was certainly involved in, but again it all fizzled out for lack of evidence. That one was almost certainly a Mickey Doyle enterprise, as it was known that it was he who had put the frighteners on some of the witnesses. Oddly enough, some of the lamb and mutton involved was known to have been rustled from Wales.’

‘Anything else known about him?’

‘His background was very dodgy. He was virtually kicked out of the Czech Free Forces after deliberately injuring himself, though again they couldn’t prove it. He turned up in Handsworth in forty-three, but after the black-market case, he vanished from the scene altogether.’

Trevor Hartnell shifted the receiver to his other hand, as he made some notes on a pad.

‘Does anybody actually remember him from those days, boss?’

His DCI told him that a couple of older uniformed officers from Handsworth recalled ‘this Czech bastard’, as they called him. ‘A real hard case, they said. Heavy drinker and violent at the drop of a hat, often involved in punch-ups with other toerags. One of them says he used to frequent the Barley Mow pub, which is interesting, as it was one of Doyle’s hang-outs.’

There was nothing more the DCI could pass on, but he promised to keep a couple of men asking around about Jaroslav Beran. When he had rung off, Trevor repeated what he’d heard to Meirion Thomas.

‘Sounds as if he was a low-level crook up in your place,’ was the Welshman’s response. ‘A getaway driver and an enforcer, presumably working for this Doyle character.’

‘Odd that he suddenly disappeared from Birmingham and turned up in Aberystwyth. His convictions for receiving were since he came down here, according to the probation people.’

Meirion leaned back in his chair and looked out at his favourite view, the cold sea now choppy in the winter wind.

‘Maybe things were getting too warm for him in Birmingham — or perhaps this Doyle wanted him as a sort of lookout man down here. A lot of the country house thefts were in Mid-Wales and along the Marches.’

‘You never got a whiff of him in your sheep stealing cases, did you?’ asked Trevor. ‘It seems he was involved in the black-market meat racket up in B’rum.’

The stocky DI shook his head. ‘I never knew he existed until this week. He’s kept his head down pretty well.’

One of the youngest detective constables came in with two cups of tea and a plate of McVitie’s digestive biscuits.

‘I like a proper cup and saucer,’ declared Meirion, lifting a yellow cup with Royal Welsh Show 1927 emblazoned on it. ‘Can’t be doing with this new fad for thick mugs… like drinking with a lot of navvies on a building site.’

Trevor grinned to himself at this unsuspected fad from a policeman who looked as if he could wrestle an ox, but then brought his mind back to the current problem.

‘So what do we do next? Knowing this chap Beran used to be a gangster doesn’t take us any further forward in our murder without more evidence.’

It was Thursday afternoon before some help in that direction arrived. Hartnell and his fellow DI were treated to lunch by David John Jones, going down the promenade to a small hotel which had one of the few restaurants open in the depths of winter. After a couple of pints of Felinfoel bitter, they sat down to a leek soup, which the other two said was cawl. It was followed by a good steak and three veg. A rich bread-and-butter pudding made Trevor suspect that the rigours of a decade of rationing may not have been so severe in Cardiganshire as in Birmingham and by the time he had walked back to the police headquarters and climbed all those stairs, he was glad to be able to drop into a chair in the office he had borrowed.

However, his rest was short-lived, as within minutes, Meirion Thomas appeared at the door.

‘Just had the forensic people on the line from Cardiff,’ he announced. ‘They’ve found human blood in the samples they took from the van! No doubt about it, they said, it certainly wasn’t just animal. Not only that, but it’s Group B, Rhesus negative, whatever that means. Doctor Rees says that B negative is relatively unusual. Only about eight per cent of the population are B, but only two per cent are B-negative.’

‘Are you going to tell me what I hope you’re going to tell me?’ asked Hartnell, rising from his chair.

‘Yes, Philip Rees confirmed that the corpse in the bog was also B-negative! Doesn’t prove it was his blood in the van, but it’s a damn good bet that it was!’

Though after a decade or so, urgency was not really a prime consideration, the looming imminence of Christmas sent the detectives back out to Beran’s cottage that same afternoon. Trevor Hartnell was especially anxious to get home next day, to avoid his wife’s exasperation, though after eight years as a policeman’s wife she was getting used to his inconvenient absences.

Sergeant Parry drove them in a black Wolseley 6/80, the archetypal post-war British police car, and parked it across the front of Gelli Derwen cottage. He sat in the car with a uniformed constable in the front passenger seat, while Meirion and Hartnell went to the door, where once again a dog’s bark turned to a whine after they had banged on the panels. After a delay, James Brown dragged the door open and scowled at them.

‘Now what you want?’ he growled through the crack allowed by the length of security chain on the inside.

‘We want you to come with us to the police station in Aberystwyth to answer some questions,’ announced Meirion Thomas.

‘Go to hell, I done nothing!’ was the response. ‘I told you last time, I know nothing about what you talk.’

‘That was before we found blood soaked into the floor of your old van,’ snapped Thomas.

There was a coarse laugh from behind the door. ‘What the hell you talk about? That damn farmer had my van for years. He carry all sorts of animals in it, plenty of blood.’

‘Not human blood, the same type as the man buried down in the bog there!’ Hartnell gestured over his shoulder at the huge marsh in the distance behind him.

Beran’s response was unexpected. He closed the door, his visitors expecting him to unhook the chain inside, but instead there was a click as the lock engaged.

‘The bugger’s shut it on us!’ snapped Meirion and hammered on the panel. There was a momentary silence, then a muffled whine of pain from the dog inside, but the door remained obstinately closed.

‘He may be doing a runner!’ shouted Trevor. ‘Let’s get around the back.’

As they started to trot around the cracked cement path that went around one side of the cottage, there was the sudden roar of a motorcycle engine starting up. By the time they reached the back corner of the building, they saw Beran flying past them on the other side of a straggling hedge, where a side lane ran out towards the road.

‘He can’t get far, the number of his bike will be on record,’ shouted Meirion.

Beran didn’t get far, for as soon as he heard the engine start up, Gwyn Parry had moved the Wolseley forward so that it blocked the narrow exit to the lane. He reached it just before Beran’s BSA, which skidded in a desperate attempt to squeeze through the closing gap and fell on its side. The sergeant and constable were on him before he could get his leg from under the bike and in seconds, the PC’s handcuffs were snapped around his wrists.

The two detective inspectors hurried up, just as Gwyn hauled the would-be fugitive to his feet.

‘Put him in the car, sergeant, we’ll take him back to Aber.’

Meirion turned to the constable. ‘You’d better stay here and keep an eye on the place until we get back. And look after that poor dog, will you?’

Jaroslav Beran — neither of the detectives could think of him as James Brown now — stood glowering at them, but was keeping his mouth firmly closed. Dressed in a grubby pair of canvas trousers and a thick navy-blue jumper, he offered no resistance as he was pushed into the back of the police car. Meirion sat alongside him and Trevor went into the front alongside Gwyn Parry as they drove back to Aberystwyth.

‘Where were you thinking of going on that bike?’ asked Meirion, conversationally. ‘Back to Birmingham, was it?’

Beran remained mute, as he did when he was taken to a dismal interview room on the ground floor of the police station on the Esplanade. However, after being given a cup of tea and a cigarette, he unbent enough to complain that he had done nothing wrong and that they had kidnapped him unlawfully.

‘I reckon your parole has gone down the tubes now,’ advised Trevor Hartnell. ‘Obstructing the police in the course of their duties is enough for that. And now we want an explanation of how you happened to have had a van which has traces of human blood in the back.’

Vehemently, Beran argued that he knew nothing about it. ‘The bloody van had many owners before me, you find the log book and see their names,’ he snarled. ‘Then I sold it to a farmer, they all carried black-market meat for years.’

Meirion for once felt the urge to be facetious.

‘I know this is Cardiganshire, but even so, there’s not many cannibals around these parts. This was human blood, of a rare group which was the same as that body found less than half a mile from your cottage.’

Hartnell took up the questioning. ‘Funny you should mention black-market meat. We know you were mixed up with Mickey Doyle in Birmingham years ago. He ran rustling and illegal meat rackets, didn’t he? Is this all to do with that?’

For the first time, Jaroslav failed to deny anything. He sat staring down at the table, his cigarette burning down unheeded between his fingers.

‘Listen, we want some answers,’ continued the Birmingham DI. ‘Firstly, who was this man in the bog? Secondly, how did he die — and finally, did you kill him?’

The last question jerked Beran into sudden animation.

‘No, I not bloody kill him! Don’t try to hang that on me!’ he flared.

‘Hang it on you might be quite near the mark, Jaroslav!’ said Meirion heavily. ‘You can still hang in this country, you know. Both for murder or even being an accessory to killing.’

Trevor Hartnell nodded his agreement. ‘But you might be able to do yourself some good if you’re helpful to us by telling us everything you know.’

For a moment, they thought the Czech might be about to ‘cough’. But then the obstinate expression came back across his heavy features. Having learned about criminal proceedings from hard experience, he uttered the words he knew were his best defence.

‘I want lawyer — now!’ he muttered.