Grounds for Appeal

NINE

Gwyn Parry sat in his detective inspector’s office upstairs in the police headquarters on the promenade in Aberystwyth. Though a small room, its one window had a striking view across the beach and Cardigan Bay, from which sometimes Gwyn imagined he could see the Wicklow Mountains across the Irish Sea.

He was waiting for Meirion Thomas to finish his phone call, which he had made after the sergeant had told him what he had heard from Birmingham. The DI seemed more impressed with the rumour than he had expected, but being a cautious man, he kept to the old police principle of keeping his backside covered in case it was kicked by his senior officers. He had phoned the Deputy Chief and was speaking to him now.

From the rapid-fire conversation in Welsh, Gwyn gathered that the DCC was in favour of pursuing the matter and this was confirmed when Meirion put the phone down and picked up his 1953 Coronation mug of strong tea.

‘Davy John says to go ahead with it, at least as far as asking the Birmingham City Police to see if there is any substance in this yarn. He suggests going through your brother-in-law to find out who is the best person to approach, then if it firms up, we’ll have to make an official request for help.’

The detective sergeant nodded as he cradled his own dose of Typhoo Tips, in a cup inscribed ‘A Present from Tenby’.

‘Do you think there could be a connection?’ he grunted. ‘It sounds damned far-fetched to me. It’s a hundred miles between Borth and Birmingham — and the trail would have been cold for at least ten years.’

Meirion shrugged as he looked out of the window at a lobster boat half a mile out at sea.

‘We’ve got nothing else, boy! If B’rum will have a sniff around for us, we’ve got nothing to lose.’

‘What about those two clever dicks from the Met?’ muttered Gwyn. ‘Will they have to come back in on the act?’

‘Now fair play, Gwyn!’ replied the DI placatingly. ‘They did what they could, even if it was damn-all. Let’s just wait and see if anything turns up, shall we?’

On Monday, Tony Cooper was on an early shift at the police station in Steelhouse Lane in the central part of the city, near the courts and hospitals. His wife’s brother-in-law had come up over the weekend and told him of the blessing that the Cardiganshire Force had given to a discreet snoop around to see if there was any credibility in the legend of the mysterious head.

When his next refreshment break came, he went up to the canteen and, after a plate of bacon, egg and baked beans, took his tea over to another table where a detective sergeant he had known for years was sitting. He told him the story and asked him if he had any ideas about how to take this forward.

‘If there’s even a sniff of truth in this, then it’ll become official,’ he explained. ‘But the Welsh chaps don’t want to raise a fuss if there’s nothing in it.’

His colleague had never heard anything of a trophy head, but offered to enquire amongst other CID men, once again lengthening the chain of investigation.

‘I’ve always been either in the city or out east,’ he admitted. ‘But someone up in the Winson Green or Handsworth Manors might know something.’

He was as good as his word and next day, several plain-clothes officers in the older suburbs to the north-west of the city centre were asking questions of both their older colleagues and some members of the public. They were not going far from their normal routine to do this, but a natural curiosity, plus the not-unwelcome task of going into a few more pubs than usual, helped to spread the word quite effectively.

One of the older constables in Handsworth claimed that he had heard the same rumour many years before, probably soon after VE Day in 1945, but could recall none of the details nor whether it had ever been followed up. A day later, the best information came through a detective sergeant in the same area, who had occasion to meet one of his grasses, a local petty thief who in return for a few pounds and a relaxed attitude to some minor offences supplied him with snippets of news about local burglaries and the activities of worse villains than himself.

They met in a greasy spoon cafe at the end of one of the long streets of terraced houses, some of which still carried gaps like missing teeth, where Luftwaffe bomb damage had yet to be repaired. After the furtive-looking man in a stained war-surplus greatcoat had passed on this week’s trivial criminal intelligence, the DS casually broached the subject of pickled heads.

‘Ever heard of anything like that, Sweeny?’ he asked innocently. The unshaven man opposite looked at him suspiciously, as he took a bent cigarette from a battered tin.

‘What you wanna’ know that fer? Going back donkey’s years, that is!’

‘Just some rumour going round the station that one of the old fellers claimed he’d heard. Said it was supposed to be in some pub around here.’

Sweeny, whose nickname inevitably came from his surname of Todd, looked uneasily around the single room of the cafe, empty but for the fat woman dozing behind the counter.

‘Any money in it for the info?’ he muttered.

‘Ach, come on, man!’ retorted the detective. ‘This is a bit of local history, not jail bait.’

Sweeny pushed aside a dribbling bottle of HP sauce and leaned across the oilcloth on the table.

‘I never saw it meself, but there’s no doubt there were one in the Barley Mow, down Winson way. Years ago, that was, when Olly Franklin were the landlord.’

‘If you never saw it, how d’you know it was there?’ objected the detective.

‘Anybody who knocked about with the gangs knew that!’ replied Sweeny, scornfully. ‘That’s why the bloody thing was kept, wann’ it?’

‘I don’t follow you,’ said the sergeant. ‘Are you having me on?’

The sallow face looked at him pityingly. ‘It was a frightener, wann’ it? I wasn’t long out of the army then, but I soon learned that there were different gangs around here, real nasty bastards they were, too. I dunno who this bloke was, but he musta’ done something that really pissed off Mickey Doyle, ’cause he had him wasted and then kept his head as a warning to others.’

Sweeny suddenly seemed to realize that he had said too much and stood up abruptly.

‘You didn’t hear nothing of this from me, mind!’ he warned. ‘I don’t want to get mixed up with Doyle and end up with my own head in a bloody bucket!’

With that, he slouched off to the door and vanished into the street.

When Sweeny’s information went back along the chain of police officers to reach Aberystwyth, David John Jones had no hesitation in rapidly turning it around again.

He phoned the Assistant Chief Constable (Crime) in Birmingham and explained the situation, being careful to take responsibility for initiating the informal snooping, to avoid making problems for the Birmingham officers.

‘I thought the whole scenario was so unlikely that I didn’t want to waste your time with a lot of nonsense,’ he said with all the cunning of a Cardiganshire man. ‘But now that we have heard several different mentions of this damned head, I thought we might put it on an official footing.’

He went on to tell his opposite number that the Yard were also involved and got the usual reaction.

‘Let’s make some more enquiries up here before we wheel them back in,’ suggested the ACC. ‘This man you mentioned, Micky Doyle, is well known to us. A villain of the first water, though he somehow manages to keep out of jail.’

‘What could possibly be the connection between a body hidden down here and the rest of him being up there with you?’ asked Davy John. ‘Is this suggested gang connection feasible?’

‘I came down here from Manchester, so I’ll believe anything about gang warfare,’ said the Birmingham officer. ‘Anyway, I’ll get some men on to it and get back to you.’

With a promise to mail the whole file on the ‘Body in the Bog’ to him, David Jones rang off and sat back to ponder on when — or even, whether — to tell New Scotland Yard about this potential new development.