Tiger at Bay

by Bernard Knight

  Iago stopped doodling. Though he was a long way down the queue when they handed out brains, it was obvious even to him where all this was leading.

  ‘Yesterday, a chap came to see me at work. A real fly boy, “villain” written all over him. He showed me a photo.’ Summers swallowed and gripped the edge of the desk.

  Iago cleared his throat in heightened embarrassment.

  ‘The sort we read about in these spy books?’ he ventured helpfully.

  Summers shook his head vehemently. ‘Just showed our heads together in bed – but to think that that bloody yob must have been hiding in the flat with a camera!’

  ‘What was his pitch?’ asked Iago.

  ‘He said he had a piece of paper with all the managers’ names in my writing. He showed it to me but alongside each name, somebody had typed the address of the branch and the name of the counter staff. This character said that it could be proved that it had been typed on one of the machines at Head Office – obviously Betty had done it when she was cleaning.’

  Iago scratched his head with the blunt end of the pen. He could not see where he was supposed to come into the story.

  ‘Blackmail – but what for?’

  ‘He wanted the security arrangements in three of the branches. Types of safe, alarm circuits, watchmen arrangements, the lot. He still wants them – by tomorrow, otherwise he says he’ll send the photo and the list to the area manager of Celtic – and a copy of the photo to my wife.’

  Summers did a bit more frenzied hair-raking with his fingers.

  ‘It’ll finish me either way. If I don’t do what he says. I’ll lose my job, pension – the lot! And as for my wife … Christ! She’s not the type to forgive and forget.’

  Iago massaged his wilting moustache. ‘This list … it’s nothing, as far as blackmail goes. Anybody could get the names of the managers. And the names of the counter staff are stuck up on their tills – anyone going in for bobs for the gas meter could get those!’

  The security man stuck his neck out almost defiantly.

  ‘I know … but would you risk it, with that photo? I’m supposed to be in charge of security! The bank would have to heave me out on my ear, they could never trust me after this, even though I’ve committed no criminal offence. We’re like doctors and clergymen, we’re vulnerable in our game. If there’s smoke, it doesn’t matter about there being no fire!’

  Iago rocked back on his chair. ‘Then you’ll have to go to the police.’

  Summers slapped his big hand on the desk. ‘I can’t. I know quite a few of the chaps there, they couldn’t do a thing without going to the bank, and that’d be the same as my telling this yob to get stuffed. They’ve got me over a barrel!’

  Iago had to agree with him. Although, as blackmail, it was an anaemic effort, in practice it was as effective as if the security man had been caught at a black magic orgy with the Celtic safe combinations tattooed across his backside.

  ‘But why come to me – I can’t undo what’s been done, can I?’

  Summers wagged his head from side to side. ‘I want to know who they are,’ he said doggedly. ‘I want you to tail this chap tomorrow, find out where he comes from and who he associates with. You should be able to do that blindfold, after all those divorce jobs.’

  Iago pondered for a moment. Although the set-up didn’t appeal to him one bit, he was reluctant to pass up a simple bloodhound job that should last only an hour or two. And this chap Summers was a security officer, perhaps in a position to recommend more business – if he survived his present sticky predicament.

  ‘Well, I suppose I can … but what good will it do you? They’ll have you over the same barrel once you give them any proper information.’

  Summers shrugged helplessly. ‘What else can I do? I want time to think out some action. If you can find out who these bastards are, maybe I can work around to some unofficial word with the pals I have in the police. I just don’t know, but I’ve got to buy some time. This was only sprung on me today.’

  Iago got up and looked at his watch. She’ll have gone by now, he thought, so he sat down again.

  ‘What about the woman – Betty, wasn’t it? What happened to her?

  Summers turned up his palms. ‘Vanished! Didn’t come to work today. I went around the flat, she’d done a flit. It was only a furnished place, rented by the week.’

  The private detective had another scratch at his head with the ballpoint. ‘So where do I pick up this fellow tomorrow?’

  ‘I’m meeting him in the Red Dragon in Queen Street at one thirty. You can’t miss him, he’s a tall, greasy-haired yob with long black sideboards. Looks like a Soho mobster, except that he’s got a Rhondda accent you can cut with a knife!’

  Iago turned his card over and scribbled on it. ‘Only a one-day job. That’ll be five guineas and expenses.’

  Summers nodded and hauled himself to his feet, looking ten years more than his age.

  ‘Where will I see you?’ he muttered.

  ‘In the pub over the road, same time tomorrow evening,’ said Iago.

  They went down to the foggy dampness of the street and the bank man trudged away in the direction of the city centre. Iago stumbled over the kerb and set off for the Glendower Arms, in the faint hope that Dilys might still be there.

  Chapter Two

  Iago Price sat with Dilys at the bar of the Red Dragon and tried to make his one lager last out for the whole operation. Expenses didn’t include the cost of his beer and he didn’t like drinking at lunchtime, it made him sleepy.

  As he kept one eye on Summers, who was hunched in a corner opposite, Iago reflected that most of an enquiry agent’s time seemed to be spent either in public houses, telephone boxes or staring into shop windows. He thought sometimes with nostalgia of his last job, a ‘con-man’-type salesman in a cheap furniture store. Though less glamorous-sounding than being a ‘private detective’, at least one stayed in a warm shop and could sit down on the goods – if you could find any strong enough to support you.

  His secretary burst in on his reverie. ‘If we stay much longer, you’re going to have to buy me another drink,’ she complained. Her voice jarred on him, but as soon as he turned and looked at the girl, he was lost again. She was slim, she was blonde, she was lovely. Iago almost slobbered mentally as his eyes soaked her up. He was not vain, but he often wondered why a chap of at least average appearance, such as himself, should so consistently get the brush-off from her.

  ‘What about it then?’ she snapped, tapping the foot of her empty glass impatiently on the bar. Her own thoughts were simple and uncomplicated, as she could think of only one topic at a time. There was a direct line from her mind to her tongue and she usually spoke with disconcerting frankness.

  At the moment, her grey matter was concerning itself with getting another drink, but Iago was saved by the bell. Summers’ expected blackmailer was over half an hour late, but suddenly the bank man made a warning jerk of his head.

  A moment later, a young man with an insolent face and a shock of greasy black curls dropped on to the chair next to Summers.

  He was over six feet tall and had a coarsely handsome face. His colouring, swarthy skin and fleshy lips suggested Italian or even gypsy blood, though unbeknown to Iago his family had in fact lived for generations in the Glamorgan valleys.

  ‘That the feller?’ hissed Dilys, switching her mind to her favourite channel – men.

  Iago nodded covertly. ‘Don’t go staring at him. Looks the part, doesn’t he? Fancy being his gun moll?’

  The blonde sniffed airily.

  ‘Look at the way he dresses. Five years out of date, those trousers. Bet he still does the Twist,’ she said contemptuously. ‘Smashing lips, though,’ she added rather wistfully.

  The newcomer was leaning over a sullen Summers, talking rapidly. The security officer finally produced a folded slip of paper and handed it over with every appearance of reluctance, though he told Iago that the information would be next to useless, as
he was having the security arrangements altered at once.

  The spiv-like character flashed a face-splitting grin and patted Summers on the shoulder. Then he swaggered out of the bar without stopping for a drink.

  Price took the opportunity to lay his hand on Dilys’ nylon-covered knee in a dramatic gesture of farewell. ‘This is my cue, honey!’ he hissed.

  She pinched the back of his hand viciously with her talons and he hastily took his hand away.

  ‘What are you today – The Saint, The Baron, or the Man from U.N.C.L.E?’ she asked sarcastically, as he stumbled from his stool to follow the greasy-haired man.

  Though the pavements of the main street were crowded, Iago’s quarry stood a head higher than most and he was able to follow him without difficulty to a bus stop a hundred yards away. Iago slunk into a shop doorway and waited for three people to join the queue before adding himself to the end.

  A bus came and Greasy-Hair stayed where he was. All the other people got aboard and Iago found himself in the embarrassing position of being shoulder to shoulder with the man he was following. It was thankfully short-lived, as another bus came almost at once. The man jumped on and went upstairs, so Iago sat next to the platform on the lower deck.

  When the conductor came, he realized he had no idea where the bus was going. ‘Terminus, please,’ he asked in a moment of obvious inspiration.

  It was soon clear where the bus was going. It went back almost to Iago’s office, then turned into the one-way system that led to the top of Bute Street.

  Fifty years ago, this was one of the most famous – or rather, infamous – highways in the world. Almost a mile long and dead straight, it joined the respectable city centre to the then notorious dockland of Cardiff.

  At the height of the prosperity brought by the coal trade, it was a bawdy, bustling sailor-town. The warren of streets leading off Bute Street were known all over the globe as ‘Tiger Bay’, where no policeman dared wander alone.

  Today, as Iago Price watched it through the windows of a bus, it looked pathetic in its death throes. Half the street itself had been pulled down and most of Tiger Bay behind it was being reduced to a fine dust by Corporation bulldozers.

  Neat council houses and teetering skyscraper flats were rising phoenix-like from its ashes. Tiger Bay, once a boisterous den of iniquity, was now a building site.

  Yet some of the old area still remained, though it was dying. A few streets of old terrace houses hung to survival by their fingertips; some were derelict and roofless, others were still occupied by the children and grandchildren of the wild old days.

  As the bus neared the lower end of the famous street, Iago saw more of the old Tiger Bay, battered by Nazi bombs and Welsh builders, but still on its feet, waiting for the final knockout.

  Groups of Lascars and black men lounged outside seedy shops and cafes; children of all shades chased around the uneven pavements. Toothless old women with folded arms and fluffy bedroom slippers pugnaciously guarded their doorways.

  Iago had known this area for years. His pompous father had been ‘something big down the docks’ before he retired and Iago had often visited his office as a child and been taken on tours of ships in the great docks.

  Full of distant memories, Iago sat almost oblivious of his task as the bus reached the bottom of Bute Street and entered the equally seedy but un-demolished business sector, filled with shipping offices, ship stores and all the administrative wilderness of those who go down to the sea in ships.

  His nostalgia was rudely broken by the sound of large feet clattering on the stairs and the sight of Greasy-Hair suddenly jumping off as the vehicle slowed down at the traffic lights at the James Street crossroads.

  Iago leapt up, but the lights had changed and the bus accelerated across.

  ‘Where’s the next stop?’ he gabbled at the conductor.

  The busman shifted his gum from port to starboard and jerked a thumb.

  ‘Ere it is, mate.’

  The bus squealed to a halt and Iago fled back to the intersection. Looking frantically about, he sighed with relief when he saw the black, curly head bobbing above the other pedestrians on the other side of the road. He trotted after him and followed for a short distance back up the lower end of Bute Street in the direction they had come. Then the blackmailer turned abruptly off the pavement into a shop doorway and vanished.

  Iago slowed down and began to carry out the routine recommended in his Private Eye’s Manual. He had sent to New York for this, a paperback ‘Teach Yourself Detection’ course, complete with plastic badge, magnifying glass and a certificate of enrolment in the New World Academy of Detection!

  He walked across the road and nonchalantly gave the premises the once-over from the corner of his eye as he passed.

  It was the centre shop of an old three-storey terrace, being flanked by a nautical instrument dealer on one side and the empty premises of a bankrupt grocer on the other. The place that Greasy had entered was actually a cafe. It had once been painted green and over the front was a spidery neon sign tracing out ‘Cairo Restaurant’.

  The window to one side of the door was obscured by grimy net curtains and over the fanlight of the door was another neon sign in the shape of a star and crescent moon.

  Following Rules Two and Three in his book, Iago walked on another fifty yards, crossed over the road and walked back on the side of the cafe. At close range it looked even less inviting, especially as an eating house.

  Propped on a bar of the window was a faded and warped card with ‘English and Oriental Dishes’ at the top. The rest was illegible, but written on the inside of the window glass in whitewash was the legend ‘Egg, beans and chips – 2/6d’. Both the ‘esses’ were backwards.

  The New World Academy of Detection left him on his own from here, and Iago wandered uncertainly past the cafe. He stopped to gaze in the windows of the next shop, waiting for inspiration. He stared blankly at the dusty collection of navigational aids that looked as if they had been on display since Drake rounded Cape Horn. He looked at his watch … was two o’clock too late for egg, beans and chips?

  He turned, walked boldly to the door of the Cairo Restaurant, and went inside.

  His first impression was that he had gone into a disused railway tunnel. As his eyes got used to the winter light that forced its way through the yellowed net curtains, he began to see a double row of tables running down a long, narrow room to a counter at the far end.

  The place was empty apart from a little old man with a round Moslem cap and a white apron, who sat near the counter. As the door shut, it gave an anaemic ‘ping’, and a moment later a fat woman with frizzy hair waddled out from a door at the far end. ‘No tea on its own!’ she snapped threateningly …

  ‘Egg, beans and chips, please,’ retorted Iago, in a tone more fitting to a five-star hotel.

  The old woman scowled, banged a bottle of sauce on to the counter, then went duck-footed back into the nether regions.

  As he waited for the speciality de la maison, Iago looked around him. The tubular steel tables and chairs and the red plastic tablecloths added little to the atmosphere of Cairo, but on the grimy emulsioned walls were a few gaudy panoramas of Egypt. The one immediately above him depicted Port Said apparently in a snowstorm; on looking more closely, he saw that this was due to woodworm having eaten their way through from the back of the picture.

  Halfway down the cafe, the underside of a staircase faced him. The man he had followed from town must have gone either up there or through to the back, he thought.

  As the taciturn waitress doled out his meal, he felt no inspiration as to any way of learning more. Chewing through the tasteless chips, he wondered how he was going to justify his five-guinea fee to Summers when they met that evening.

  ‘This feller followed me all the way from the pub. Sitting downstairs now, he is!’

  There was an injured note in the voice of the long-haired man. He rejoiced in the name of Joseph Stalin Davies, thanks to his father’
s political inclinations twenty-eight years earlier.

  ‘Is it the “law”, Joe?’

  The other man in the second-floor room was busy filing his fingernails and did not look up as he softly asked the question.

  Joe Davies shook his head. ‘Not even the coppers could be as bad as ’im at trailing somebody! He did about everything bar grabbing hold of my coat tails.’

  His companion sat on the window ledge so that the meagre light fell on his manicure operations. He was a very handsome fellow. In his early thirties, he was good-looking in a smooth, almost feline way. Whilst Joe was coarsely attractive in a boxer-cum-pop idol fashion, ‘Tiger’ Ismail was a genuine throwback to desert tribesmen.

  His grandfather had been an Arab stoker who, like so many of his fellows, had settled in Tiger Bay at the turn of the century. He had married a Welsh girl, and his son, who had never set a foot outside South Wales, married a local barmaid.

  This last pair had six children, five of whom were indistinguishable from usual Cardiffians, but the sixth was Tiger and he seemed to have inherited a full set of Arabic characteristics. No one knew how he had come by his nickname, as his real one was Lawrence Trefor Ismail, but his cat-like sleekness and his obsession with his immaculate ‘talons’ had fixed the name so firmly on him that most of his acquaintances had no idea of his real one.

  His striking appearance, high intelligence and complete lack of moral sense made a dangerous combination that bordered on the psychopathic. Taken from school at the earliest legal opportunity, he had run with the gangs and soon became a teenage leader.

  Though the modern Cardiff dockland is no worse than other areas where delinquency is concerned, Tiger had been deeply involved in what there was of it. After a few salutary appearances in the juvenile court, he became cunning and from then on never managed to take the rap for anything. He despised pointless vandalism and concentrated in those formative days on petty theft and extortion from other youths who had anything to give. When the police or probation officers moved in, it was always one of Tiger’s numerous relatives or underlings who took the blame. From seventeen onwards, he was always ‘clean’ as far as the courts were concerned and this persisted into his adult activities.