Tiger Ragtime Read online

  He could still recall the pain of the rope burns on his shoulders, knew how impossible it was to stand upright at the end of ten hours of back-breaking work – how it felt to be too tired to eat or even sleep.

  He’d believed the offer of a job on board ship with regular meals to be heaven-sent after his mother had died. Disillusionment had set in when he’d received his first whipping before the ship had even left Welsh waters. He’d come a long way in fifteen years but he had never forgotten the skinny, ragged urchin he’d been. Or the people who had turned their backs on him and his mother and allowed them both to starve, and her to die in squalor.

  He’d learned a lot in America: how to survive in a slum, how to rise from the bottom of the social pecking order to the top, how to make money – and use the power it bestowed. He’d also learned the value of fear and, most important of all, how to stay one step ahead of the law. If he hadn’t left America when he had, he, Freddie, and Aiden might well have ended up in Alcatraz. Fortunately for all three of them, he’d amassed enough money to pay their passage and settle anywhere in the world.

  Only one reason had drawn him back to Wales – revenge. Unlike fifteen years ago, he now had enough money to buy whatever he needed to destroy the people who had tried to destroy him – and succeeded in destroying his mother.

  * * *

  The crowds lining the pavements in Bute Street heard the carnival procession long before the first of the floats rounded the corner and came into view. Two palomino horses, their golden manes and tails braided with red and black ribbons, pulled an open cart. A broomstick-suspended banner above the driver’s seat spelled out ‘GOLDMAN’S BAKERY: THE MIDAS TOUCH’ in shimmering gold foil letters on a black background.

  ‘As usual, our Edyth’s being over-optimistic. I’ve seen her shop’s accounts.’ Edyth’s brother, Harry Evans, slipped his arm around his wife Mary’s shoulders to protect her from the people who were jostling forward in hope of gaining a better view.

  ‘The bakery is making money, isn’t it?’ Mary asked in concern.

  ‘Edyth only bought it six months ago; it’s early days,’ Harry answered evasively. Like his parents, sisters and brother, Harry had assumed that Edyth would return to their parents’ house in Pontypridd when her husband had abandoned her in Cardiff’s Butetown after only a few weeks of married life. Instead, she had astounded them all by emptying her bank account of her childhood savings and negotiating an overdraft with a bank which had enabled her to buy the bakery in Bute Street. She had kept the name ‘Goldman’ because everyone in the area was familiar with it. And playing on the ‘Gold’ part of the name, she had taken down the canvas back and sides of her delivery cart and transformed it into a glittering tableau.

  Edyth, Moody, and Jamie were crammed side by side on the seat behind the horses. The boys were dressed in floor-length gold cloaks that matched Edyth’s frock, and all three wore foil crowns studded with wine-gum ‘jewels’ and gold make-up. Moody and Edyth were holding gold baskets and tossing paper cornets from them to the children lining the pavements.

  Behind them in the body of the cart, the Bute Street Blues Band, dressed in gold rayon suits, gold make-up, and shiny gold boaters, with the exception of Judy who was dressed in an identical frock to Edyth’s, were belting out a rousing rendition of ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’. Judy’s voice rose, husky and true, above those of the children who marched on either side of the cart, dressed in green, their small faces framed by yellow crepe paper ‘sunflower’ petals.

  Mary’s brother David lifted Harry and Mary’s toddler daughter on to his shoulders, held her hands to steady her and stared mesmerised at Edyth.

  ‘I hope that gold paint comes off easily,’ Mary observed practically.

  ‘If it doesn’t they’ll all be looking odd for a while.’

  Harry glanced at David before waving to Edyth to attract her attention.

  ‘Isn’t that the band that played at your sister’s wedding, Harry?’ Mary asked when the float drew alongside them.

  ‘Yes, there’s Judy and Micah Holsten.’ Harry shouted a greeting, but his voice was lost in the music and the buzzing of a jazz band of young girls, led by two drum majorettes that followed the cart.

  ‘Look, Ruthie darling, Auntie Edyth’s seen you.’ Harry caught his daughter’s hand.

  ‘Sweets for the sweet.’ Edyth tossed half a dozen cornets towards her niece but all six were scooped up by young boys before either Harry or David could catch one.

  ‘I’ll keep one for you, Ruth,’ Edyth called out as the cart passed.

  Harry cupped his hands around his mouth. ‘See you in Loudoun Square, sis.’

  Edyth nodded to show him she’d understood. Micah leaned over the side of the cart and played a few bars of the saxophone just for Ruth, before the procession moved on.

  It wasn’t until the jazz band had been supplanted by another float that David realised Ruth was imitating the noise the ‘sunflowers’ had made by blowing into their paper ‘trumpets’.

  ‘Bit noisier than the farm, isn’t it, Ruthie?’ he murmured absently, staring at Edyth’s back.

  The crowd shifted, clearing a space around them. Harry handed their six-month-old son to Mary, lifted his daughter from David’s shoulders and set her on his own.

  ‘Sweeps.’ Ruth struggled to free her hands from her father’s but Harry kept a firm grip on both of them.

  ‘If what they say about it being lucky to have a sweep cross your path is true, we’ll have more than our fair share of good fortune today, Ruth,’ said Mary with a smile.

  A coal cart pulled by a pair of black shire horses had been transformed into a Victorian chimney sweeps’ tableau. Small boys in ragged, coal-blackened trousers and shirts, holding flat-topped brushes and wearing top hats fashioned from black crepe paper and cardboard were clustered around a chimney, which, judging from its cracked and sorry state, had been scavenged from a scrap yard. Two lines of adolescent girls in grass skirts and flower-decked blouses danced alongside the cart, shaking home-made maracas made from tins filled with stones.

  ‘That costume looks a bit draughty even for summer,’ Harry commented, when a gust of wind sent the strands dancing, revealing the bathing costumes the girls were wearing underneath.

  ‘Trust you to notice.’ There was no jealousy in Mary’s comment, only fond amusement. She glanced at her younger brothers and sister. All three were running after Edyth’s cart. ‘Where are they off to?’

  ‘Loudoun Square,’ Harry guessed. ‘First there gets the best spot in the park close to the bands and the pickings of anything that’s left in the way of treats that were thrown from the floats.’

  ‘Will they be all right?’

  ‘They will, Mary’, David said, ‘but I’ll go with them just to be sure. You stay here and watch the rest of the parade.’ He had an ulterior motive for volunteering to look out for the youngsters. As Harry had said, the first ones into the small park in the centre of Loudoun Square would get the best position. But it wasn’t the view David was interested in.

  He had fallen hopelessly in love with Edyth the first time he had met her. Drunk and devastated after she had married, he had jumped off a bridge into the river Taff. His attempt at suicide had left him with fractured bones, but they had pained him less than his broken heart. His physical injuries had healed, but it had taken the news that Edyth’s husband had deserted her and she was seeking to annul her marriage to heal his shattered spirits.

  His two younger brothers were already swallowed up by the throng flowing into Loudoun Square. Undeterred, David called out to his younger sister, Martha, and ran after her.

  The crowd heading into Loudoun Square from Christina Street forced the taxi driver to slam on his brakes.

  ‘Why have we stopped?’ Aled demanded from the back.

  ‘Because of these idiots.’ The driver slid his window open. ‘Don’t you dare put your hand on that bonnet, nipper,’ he shouted at a child about to steady himself on the cab.<
br />
  The child stuck his tongue out before running to his mother. Once his hand was firmly locked in hers, he turned and stuck it out a second time. The driver glanced into his rear-view mirror and eyed his passengers. All three were dressed in unseasonably thick black woollen sailors’ jackets and black peaked caps, but he knew they weren’t seamen. Their hands were too clean and soft and there was something menacing about them. Even if the two he’d marked as ‘bruisers’ hadn’t addressed the tall, slim, fair-haired man with piercing blue eyes as ‘Boss’ he would have guessed from their deference that he was in charge.

  The tallest and largest of the three had the height, build and battered facial features of a heavyweight boxer. But the slighter man who was perched on the drop-down seat facing his two companions had dead eyes, which he found even more disturbing.

  He glanced back out of the windscreen. Just as he was about to move off, the blond man opened the door. The driver cursed and thrust his foot on the brakes a second time.

  ‘You trying to kill yourself … sir?’ he added, only just stopping himself from calling the man something less polite.

  ‘I need fresh air.’ Aled stepped outside. ‘You remember the name of the hotel, Freddie?’

  ‘The Windsor?’ the bruiser who’d sat alongside him mumbled through badly fitting false teeth.

  ‘The street?’ he checked.

  ‘Stuart Street.’

  ‘Put my luggage in the bedroom of my suite when it arrives and make sure your rooms are on the same floor. I’ll be along shortly.’

  ‘You don’t want one of us to come with you, boss?’

  Aiden asked.

  ‘No.’ The reply was definite.

  ‘But, boss …’

  ‘Nothing’s going to happen to me at a carnival. Don’t worry – your meal ticket is safe, Aiden. Don’t forget to tip the driver.’ Aled pulled his sailor’s cap down to cover most of his face and walked away. The taxi driver watched Aled stroll into the square and filed away a mental description. The police occasionally asked him if he’d seen any ‘suspicious characters’ and had twice tipped him five bob when he’d been able to give them what they wanted. He had a funny feeling that the coppers might be asking questions about these three men sooner rather than later, and over the years he had learned to respect his instincts.

  He’d marked the two bruisers down as hired thugs, but the blond man looked more dangerous. Despite his workmen’s clothes he had the air of authority that came with money – and lots of it. He couldn’t even hazard a guess why someone like him would want to stay in Butetown, but he sensed that it wouldn’t be for any good reason.

  ‘This will be the first time David’s seen Edyth since he left hospital. Do you think he really has got over her?’ Mary asked Harry anxiously.

  Harry wished he could reassure his wife, but he knew Mary would see through any platitudes. ‘I don’t know the answer to that question any more than you do, darling.’ He stepped forward so Ruth could see a Noah’s ark float crammed with ‘bird’ toddlers dressed in capes covered with chicken feathers. They were surrounded by older children in animal costume who were having difficulty keeping the younger ones away from the edge of the cart. ‘Yes, Ruthie, monkeys.’

  ‘And teddy bears,’ she cried in delight.

  ‘I’ve never heard mention of Noah rounding up a pair of teddy bears, but as they’re here now, he must have.’ Mary knew Harry was talking to Ruth so he wouldn’t have to discuss David’s obsession with Edyth, but she refused to drop the subject. ‘What if David is still in love with Edyth?’

  ‘If he is, he is. There is nothing we can do about it.’ Harry didn’t want to consider what his headstrong brother-in-law might do, should Edyth reject him a second time.

  ‘Harry.’ Mary touched his arm.

  ‘All we can do is be there to help David pick up the pieces should Edyth break his heart a second time, darling.’

  ‘You do know that Edyth has never encouraged him.’ Much as Mary loved her brother, she wasn’t blind to his faults and she had grown to love and regard all of Harry’s family as her own; especially Edyth, who hadn’t allowed the disaster of her marriage to sour her, or affect her ability to turn any family gathering, no matter how small, into a party.

  ‘I know,’ Harry mused thoughtfully. ‘That’s why I find his fixation with her so difficult to understand.’

  Aled James stood behind a lamp-post across the street from Harry Evans and his family and watched them. He hadn’t seen Harry for twenty-three years, but he had recognised him as soon as he’d caught sight of him through the taxi window because Harry was a mirror image of himself. They could have been twins. Same height, same slim upright figure, same shade of pale blond hair and blue eyes.

  The only difference between him and Harry had been in their upbringing – and their fortune. His mother had told him before she died that although Harry had been born a bastard the same as him, their father Mansel James’s family had left every penny the family owned to Harry, simply because, unlike her, Harry’s mother was middle-class. The injustice of the James family’s decision had burned within him every day since.

  He looked from the attractive, beautifully-dressed, dark-haired woman clinging to Harry’s arm to the smiling baby Harry was carrying, and the toddler holding Harry’s wife’s hand. If things had been different – would that have been him? Wealthy, secure and happily married …

  ‘Hello, sailor, looking for a good time?’

  Aled eyed the woman who had propositioned him. He had been about to tell her to push off but to his amazement he recognised her too. She had dyed her hair red, but even without the standard prostitute’s trademark he would have guessed her profession from her skimpy organza frock and obvious lack of underclothes. The frock was transparent and, considering her age, which he knew to be around her late thirties, the body beneath it wasn’t in bad shape.

  ‘I’m always looking for a good time, Anna. I’d have thought you’d have remembered that much about me. Although it has been a long time.’

  She stared at him. ‘How long?’

  ‘Oh, fifteen years or more.’

  She continued to look blankly at him. ‘I’ve a good memory, but I haven’t met that many Yanks, and none who look like you.’

  ‘I didn’t always have an American accent. And when we last saw one another I was a young lad. You were my mother’s apprentice.’

  ‘Apprentice,’ she repeated indignantly. ‘I was never apprenticed to a trade in my life …’

  ‘Try the one you’re in now, Anna.’

  ‘You’ve mixed me up with someone else.’ She went to move on. He grabbed her elbow. She froze.

  ‘I’ll scream if you don’t let me go.’

  ‘As if anyone will take any notice of a woman screaming in Bute Street. Come on, Anna, I’ll buy you dinner in the Windsor. We’ll wash it down with champagne and vintage cognac while we chat about old times. And afterwards you can bring me up to date with what’s been happening in the Bay since I left.’

  ‘The Windsor?’ Her eyes rounded.

  ‘The Windsor,’ he repeated.

  She snorted. ‘They wouldn’t allow me in through their front door.’

  ‘They wouldn’t dare object to a woman I choose to entertain in my suite. I’ll be paying too much for the privilege of living in it.’ He decided he’d teased her long enough. ‘I bet you never thought when Maisie’s boy Aled sailed out of Cardiff Docks all those years ago that he’d be back with enough money in his pocket to move into the Windsor and entertain you in style.’

  ‘Aled Cooper!’ she exclaimed. ‘You’re little Aled Cooper!’

  ‘Aled James now, Anna. I use my father’s name.’

  ‘I never met him.’

  ‘Neither did I,’ he said dryly.

  ‘You were so small and skinny, you looked half-starved. And you were always bloody angry about something or other. You used to come back to the house covered in bruises after fighting boys twice your size …’
r />   ‘I’m older and wiser, Anna. I pay people to fight my battles for me now. Dinner tonight, eight o’clock? Ask for me at the desk, I’ll tell them I’m expecting you.’

  ‘It’s carnival night.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘I’m hoping to make at least a fiver. I run my own house now, and own it, outright. I have the deeds to prove it,’ she said proudly.

  ‘How many girls?’

  ‘Six. And even if I say so myself, they’re bloody good. The cream of the docks’ crop. You must pay us a visit one night. We cater for all tastes, and I’ll see you all right. On the house, for old times’ sake. Your mother, God rest her soul, was good to me whenever she had a few bob and I didn’t.’

  ‘Which wasn’t often.’ Aled glanced across the road.

  Harry Evans and his family were walking towards Loudoun Square. The festivities would be going on for hours yet. ‘Far be it from me to stop a working girl from working. How about I buy you a drink now, in the Jug and Platter in West Bute Street?’

  ‘Your mother’s favourite pub.’

  ‘It used to be,’ he agreed.

  ‘And you’ll still buy me dinner if I come round to the Windsor tomorrow?’

  ‘The best the house can provide.’

  She shook her head. ‘Who would have thought it? Little Aled Cooper.’

  ‘James,’ he reminded her shortly. ‘Cooper is dead and buried.’

  There was something in the tone of his voice that carried a warning. ‘James it is. And to think I tried to pick you up.’

  He offered her his arm. ‘Is your tipple still gin and it?’

  ‘Fancy you remembering that.’ She smiled.

  It hadn’t been difficult – gin and it had been his mother’s favourite tipple too.

  Chapter Two

  It took David half an hour to fight his way through to Loudoun Square. He wasn’t only hampered by the crowds. His sister insisted on stopping and staring at the costumes of the revellers every few minutes, and by the time they reached the park in the centre of the square the parade had ended and the floats had drawn up and ringed the perimeter. Families had spread out blankets and coats and were camped on every available inch of space inside the railings, making it difficult to walk between them.