Tiger Coat

Tony Davies

Description

The Tiger Coat' is the first crime thriller featuring the flawed but likeable Bryn Lawton as he starts his police career. Here is a young, naive but enthusiastic new recruit poised to make his mark. His posting to a remote, isolated Welsh village with little support and a marriage already on the rocks, proves to be a baptism of fire.Sound like a story you have heard before?Well, this is no ordinary village...This is a village populated not only with criminals but also eccentrics, oddballs, undesirables and even a Nazi war criminal! As Bryn becomes embroiled in this community, chaos ensues, and his personal life gradually falls apart. He embarks on a dangerous affair with Fiona Henley, a glamorous good-time girl who also happens to be the wife of a London villain. A year into his posting, Bryn is inadvertently involved in the death of a young girl, witnessed by Fiona's husband, clearly a precarious situation to navigate, with Bryn's career, freedom and now even his life in jeopardy.

Informations

• Publié par: Distributed by eBookpartnership
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781839784774
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE TIGER COAT
A Bryn Lawton Mystery
Tony Davies


The Tiger Coat
Published by The Conrad Press Ltd. in the United Kingdom 2022
Tel: [phone]
www.theconradpress.com
[e-mail]
ISBN 978-1-839784-77-4
Copyright © Tony Davies, 2022
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction and any resemblance to any person living or dead is purely coincidental.
Typesetting and Cover Design by: Charlotte Mouncey, www.bookstyle.co.uk
The Conrad Press logo was designed by Maria Priestley.


To Jane


Introduction
Thursday 17th April 1986 3.58 pm
Ten years after the fateful day
This nerve-jangling exhilaration was something he had rarely experienced in his life before.
He stood there; his throat so dry he was hardly able to speak as he waited for the warder to unlock the large wooden entrance door of that famous or to be more precise - infamous secure mental hospital.
He felt his heart roaring, resulting in a pulse that hadn’t raced like that in a very long time – in fact, not since those beautiful, long-lost times when he was alone with her. He felt sure that his companions could hear it or at the very least see his chest pulsating through his shirt. He just couldn’t wait to be outside. The black cloud of depression that had hung over him when he entered that forbidding building was now gone. He even felt lighter.
The door seemed to take an eternity to move but finally, and to his great relief, it swung open and the weak sunlight slowly filtered in. He hurriedly stepped out into the open porch and took a large gulp of that clean, fresh air – it was drizzling but the rain that was being blown onto his face by the strong, cold, easterly wind felt fantastic. It seemed as though every drop was cleansing away the last ten years.
He turned slowly and happily shook the senior administrator’s hand, nodded to the large warder who never seemed to leave the boss’s side; then quickly spun and walked briskly down the gravel path towards the waiting car.
Had he finally been released from the demons that had troubled him for all those years.
Was he at last free? Free to resume what was left of his life – was that possible?


1
Saturday 17 th April 1976 03.51 am
The fateful day
She woke, not that she had really slept much that night and slowly tried to raise her head from the pillow, attempting to see the time on the bedside clock, but just couldn’t make it out - that ache behind the eyes always blurred her vision.
Knowing it was early, for even the birds had only just started their chirping in the dense pine forest that was just across the river, she gently laid her head back onto the cool pillow and closed her eyes, for even the slightest exertion, caused the pounding in her head to increase dramatically.
Will it never stop? she thought to herself, her whole head was sore from the aching. Even the act of thinking seemed to cause more distress. She had suffered with these attacks for quite a while, years in fact, ever since the very first time she had tried ‘H’, but they had never been like this one – they were getting worse, no doubt about it. That dull unstoppable pain…
‘Please Lord. Just let me be - just for a few minutes. I will be ok if I can just stay in the dark a little longer, secure in this warm comfortable darkness – just a little longer. PLEASE – I BEG YOU WITH ALL MY HEART. AMEN.’ She muttered, then began to recite what she could remember of The Rosary, when finished, she struggled to make the sign of the cross.
She had turned to prayer a lot lately – her strict Catholic upbringing with the nuns she always referred to as the Sisters of the Eternal Misery, was returning to haunt her – perhaps? She tried again to smile, thinking about his comments about burning all Catholics. How she had come to love his weird sense of humour – the sense of humour that must come with the job – she supposed.
She couldn’t even raise a smile so she settled for just picturing him in her mind – that would have to be enough – for now.
The pain continued. ‘Why am I still suffering – I’ve stopped taking everything. I’m clean,’ she moaned loudly to her god, who, throughout her adolescence and all the abuse she had suffered, she thought had deserted her, and for the first time in over fourteen years she was almost telling the truth, to herself and even to her god.
This major change in her life was something she had done solely for him. Just one of many changes she had made in her life over the last couple of months. That was the power he had over her. A power she had allowed no other man to ever have before, and what made the whole thing so funny - he didn’t even know it.
Then suddenly another thought entered her mind - she now had someone else to consider – someone she had only found out about yesterday. Someone new was entering their lives. She would have smiled when this came into her thoughts, if it wouldn’t have pained her too much.
Lying there in the darkness, she knew the nausea would pass very quickly – but the splitting headache would remain for quite some time yet. She took some more painkillers and tried to concentrate on him whilst listening to the sounds of those birds that were just now starting their dawn chorus across the river.
Waking well after dawn. The bright, spring light that came into the room through the chink in the heavy floral curtains was excruciating. It seemed like a searchlight, scanning the room. She felt unable to get up and sort it out, preferring to keep her head under the quilt. She felt disappointed. For over the past few months she had come to love the light that streamed into that quiet Welsh valley; their valley, it had always seemed so soft and tranquil. She often wished she had a talent for painting so as to make some sort of use of it, capture it in some way and take it back, back to the grime and stench of London – a place where she had lived ever since she was thirteen but now a place that was no longer home to her.
But not this morning – the light certainly was not her friend - but a vicious, merciless enemy, intent on causing her as much distress as possible.
As the next couple of hours passed, and no further sleep was forthcoming, she contemplated going back to see the local doctor, then thought better of it for as she had discovered yesterday, on that first ever visit to him, that he was black, and that was enough for her not to trust him. She had a lot of bad experiences with black men in her life, in fact, two of her pimps had been black and the abuse she suffered at their hands from the tender age of fifteen had left her with a deep-seated mistrust of them all.
Besides yesterday’s visit to his empty surgery had been enough. The Paki had confirmed what she had already suspected. She just hoped that he would be as happy as she was when she told him.
So, putting the pillow over her face, a thing she only felt safe doing when she was alone, to hide from the light and tried desperately to sleep, for she wanted to be at her best to tell him the news later today, news that would change both their lives – forever.
Thursday 13 th March 1975
Thirteen months before the fateful day
Constable Bryn Lawton had joined the local Constabulary at the tender age of nineteen years of age, following a short stint as a steward in the Merchant navy. After serving part of his probationary two years in the large industrial town of Crymachno; he was posted to this rundown backwater, the tiny village of Dynas Dre.
When he had first seen the new patch – his first thought was ‘if the world had an enema – this would be the end of the tube,’ he had told a colleague who had called it the ‘end of the world’, that is wasn’t that, but you could certainly see it from there.
He sometimes remembered back to those very early days, when he first joined the job, when he naively thought, he was going to make a difference. Change the world. Fight crime – not in the Dixon of Dock Green way- for no one could be that clean cut but really take the fight to the baddies – what an idealistic twat he’d been.
So, with less than two years’ service as a policeman, and still what was termed a proby constable, Bryn Lawton had become the local policeman in this small Welsh village in the middle of nowhere. He was there alone, with his nearest police colleague thirteen miles or more importantly – if any assistance was needed – a good fifty minutes away, even if they rushed, which was highly unlikely for the people down here didn’t have a rush in them.
When he accepted the posting, not that any of his bosses had given him much choice; he tried to put a positive spin on it. He really thought it would hone his skills as a policeman, it would certainly sharpen his decision-making faculty and make him even more self-reliant, but he soon discovered that this wasn’t the kind of policing he really wanted, he had designs on becoming a detective, for he craved action, but, as he soon found out, here in Dynas Dre that was a rare commodity indeed.
Welsh was the first, and in some cases only, language of the bulk of the population. That was another nail in the coffin of Bryn being accepted by the locals – he only spoke English.
The overall responsibility for the area rested with Sergeant Greg Silverman, who, when Bryn first saw him, was a weedy looking fellow that a strong gust of wing would have blown over. The sergeant only had five years’ service himself, a police college graduate, and it was clear to Bryn from the outset that he was not a patch on Bryn’s former boss, Sergeant Jack Rowlands, who was schooled in real policing and had been educated, the school of hard knocks, followed by the University of Life. Once he discovered that his new boss also had a university degree, he viewed him, as was the norm within the rank and