Tiger at Bay

by Bernard Knight

  ‘How many times have I told you kids …’ But the nippers turned tail and fled, the dog barking after them.

  The coloured boy flung down something as he went and the foreman bent to pick it up. He scowled down at the pinkish-brown object, then his eyes widened.

  Jerking his head up, he stared after the retreating urchins.

  ‘Hey, you … come here!’ and his feet began pounding the rubble as he raced after them.

  Two hours later, a uniformed constable stood at the rough gate through the wire boundary fence of the tipping area.

  A collection of figures moved slowly over the desolate surface of the filled-in dock. From that distance, they looked like bluebottles crawling on a heap of offal, and a distant view was all the non-privileged were allowed.

  A crowd had gathered from nowhere – housewives, workmen, pensioners and a scattering of frustrated newspapermen. A couple of press photographers aimed long-focus lenses to get the usual sterile pictures of bored policemen turning over stones with their boots or of senior plainclothes men standing in earnest groups, discussing last week’s football. The real action was down by the water’s edge, out of sight of the nosy parkers.

  Here Nicholas Meredith, Bob Ellis and Dai Rees, the local sergeant, stood precariously on the ashes and questioned the site foreman. He was a burly, taciturn individual, but a good witness. He thought before he spoke and if he didn’t know something, he said so.

  ‘The dog had this thing, then one of the kids – the darkie – took it off him. I grabbed it, thinking it might be something they were trying to pinch, but it was this bone, with teeth in it. By the time I’d sort of realized it, they’d hopped it. I caught up with them just outside the gate. The ginger lad said the dog had found it just here at the water’s edge. I made him come back and show me.’

  The workman pointed to the centre of the ramp leading into the black water. Two men stood there, inspecting the debris. They were from the Cardiff Home Office Forensic Science Laboratory; one was a scientific officer, the other a detective inspector.

  Meredith looked back at the foreman and peered at him sharply from under his beetling brows. He wore his usual ‘civvy’ uniform and looked more like an undertaker than ever.

  ‘What about all this stuff that’s been dumped? If this bone was on the surface, any idea when it was put there?’

  The foreman frowned in turn. ‘You mean, if it came in the ashes – not just chucked on top?’

  Old Nick grunted, ‘That’s right … must it have come today?’

  The workman hesitated. ‘Hell of a job to say, sir. See, we’re dumping all along the face of the ramp, to keep the line even. So each truckload goes in a different place … although the dock is narrow, that means over a hundred yards width.’

  Ellis, pink-faced and fresh, cut in here.

  ‘So the load that had this jawbone could have been dumped today, or yesterday – or even before that?’

  The workman shook his head. ‘Not before yesterday. We tip stuff fast enough to cover the whole face at least once a day, so it couldn’t have been on the surface if it had been there very long.’ He hesitated again. ‘Except …’

  ‘Except what?’ snapped Meredith.

  The man waved across at the shape of a bulldozer half hidden beneath a tarpaulin.

  ‘Every day, we level off the edge of the tip with that. It mostly pushes new stuff over, but it scrapes a bit of the old as well. So it’s possible that hardcore that was put down days ago might get dug up again and rolled over the edge.’

  Ellis groaned. ‘When did you last use the blade?’

  ‘Last night; we usually tidy up after the day’s tipping. It hasn’t been used today yet.’

  ‘Nor will it!’ added Meredith dourly. ‘Not until we’ve done all we have to here.’

  ‘What about them?’ asked the foreman, pointing to three loaded lorries waiting outside the fence.

  ‘Anywhere else you can dump them?’ asked Ellis.

  ‘There’s a hollow up the other end that would take a bit.’

  Old Nick shook his head.

  ‘No, you don’t,’ he snapped. ‘The rest of the bones might still be coming. If we can identify the truck and find where it came from, we might get a lead.’

  The foreman was quick to grasp the idea.

  ‘If you square it with my boss, I could get the drivers to tip each load into a separate heap, then someone could keep a record of which truck it came from.’

  Meredith beckoned to a uniformed inspector hovering in the background. The business end of a personal radio stuck out from beneath his collar.

  ‘Inspector, call Control Room and ask them if the site contractor has been contacted yet. We want him here, fast!’

  He turned back to the foreman. ‘Anything else you can tell us.? What about all this stuff’ – he swept a hand around the tip – ‘Where does it all come from?’

  ‘All sorts of places, sir. We’ve had a lot of hardcore from the Tiger Bay demolitions, but lately we’ve been getting boiler ash as well. Comes from factories and big buildings in the neighbourhood.’

  He knew no more details and eventually went off with a constable to make a formal statement at the police station. The detectives moved gingerly down the slope to the water’s edge.

  ‘Any sign of any more?’ Old Nick asked the men from the lab.

  The scientist, Roger made a face expressing disgust. ‘A few thousand tons of rubble and we’re not even sure to a few yards where it was found.’

  He was a stocky man with a strong resemblance to Harold Wilson, a gimmick he deliberately cultivated with a pipe and elephant-hide mackintosh. He held the original find in a plastic bag, treasuring it with a reverence more suited to the Holy Grail.

  ‘Think it’s been there long?’ persisted Meredith.

  ‘No – and it’s been burnt. It’s brittle and porous. It’s not been rained on, so that means it’s only been here since last evening at the latest, unless it was buried too deep for the weather to get at it.’ He looked up at the leaden sky.

  ‘How do you know it hasn’t been wetted and then dried again?’ objected Bob Ellis. He had a healthy distrust of scientists.

  ‘Dry! In this weather!’ The laboratory man looked scornful. Though not raining, the air was damp and heavy. ‘Anyway, there’s burnt tissue between the teeth, all crisp and crackly. If it had got wet, it would have collapsed into a slime.’

  ‘Is the pathologist coming?’ muttered Meredith.

  Ellis looked at his watch. ‘Should be here soon. Had an inquest to finish.’

  Meredith looked down his nose. ‘Better tell the coroner’s officer. I don’t know what the Cardiff one is like, but some are very much on their dignity and get offended if they’re not let in on the act.’

  He was interrupted by a triumphant bellow from DI Peter Wade, the laboratory liaison officer. Bending double like a seashell collector on a beach, he had been studying the rubble carefully, occasionally turning a piece over with his fingers. He stood upright holding a brown splinter on his palm.

  ‘More burnt bone! God knows what part of the body, perhaps the doctor will recognize it.’

  He bent down again and the rest shuffled nearer.

  ‘Just here, almost in the water,’ added Wade.

  Within ten minutes, some twenty slivers of brittle bone had been recovered and placed reverently into plastic bags. In a temporary lull in the hunt, Wade looked across at Meredith.

  ‘I think we’ll leave this until we can do it properly, otherwise our big feet are going to crush everything.’

  Old Nick nodded. He was the boss, but the laboratory angle was Wade’s pigeon and his suggestions were to be heeded.

  ‘What do you want us to do?’

  ‘Peg off this area and start looking intensively in square yard plots … move all the big lumps and sieve the small stuff. It all seems to be in this small zone, so it shouldn’t be too bad.’

  All twenty finds had been in a triangle no more t
han ten feet across.

  ‘Here’s the pathologist, Mr Meredith,’ called an officer standing on the top of the slope.

  A large, fat Billy Bunter type came slithering down the tip, puffing with exertion.

  ‘Just in time, Doc,’ greeted Ellis, who knew him well from many a previous case in the city.

  Meredith had never had any dealings with him before and Ellis did the introductions. ‘Dr Prosser, from the Medical School, sir. Always clears things up for us, does the doctor.’

  Prosser wheezed his greetings and nodded at Peter Wade, a companion on many a previous murder scene.

  ‘What you got for me today, Pete?’ he gasped, mopping his round, red face with a handkerchief.

  The man from the Home Office handed over the first bag. ‘Careful, it’s a bit brittle.’

  Huw Prosser fumbled in his waistcoat for a pair of steel-rimmed pince-nez, almost falling in the dock as he did so. Screwing them onto his prominent nose, he peered through the polythene, turning the bag this way and that.

  Finally he handed it back. ‘Ho-ho! Got any more of him?’

  Meredith jumped on the words like a terrier on a rat.

  ‘Him? You really mean that?’

  The fat pathologist seemed taken aback.

  ‘Well, just a preliminary guess, that’s all. Very strong ridges where the jaw muscles were fixed. And a prominent point of the jaw, where it juts out. But don’t take that as gospel, at this stage.’

  He peered again through his pince-nez at the other bags that the liaison inspector from the laboratory handed to him. ‘Fragments and splinters – not a lot of help there, at the moment.’

  The inspector pointed to the ashes below them. ‘There’ll be a lot more when we get a team on this lot,’ he said, in satisfaction.

  Meredith started to toil up the slope. ‘I suggest we get back to ground level. Do less damage to any stuff still here.’

  The doctor was blue in the face when they got him up, but as soon as he was able to talk, Old Nick tackled him again. ‘First thing, Dr Prosser, this must be a death, I take it? Not just some hospital refuse?’

  He remembered bitterly two days wasted in London on a futile murder hunt, only to discover that a dismembered leg on a council tip had been amputated in an operating theatre.

  Prosser wagged his great head slowly. ‘No, they don’t remove lower jaws like this and anyway, it shows no serious disease. And there’s all the other bits of bone to consider.

  ‘And of course, it’s human?’ Meredith wanted to keep the record straight, though he had no doubt of the answer.

  Prosser grinned. ‘I don’t think even gorillas often get their teeth filled.’

  Old Nick grunted. ‘Right – so we’ve got a dead man to deal with. Now, what else can you tell me?’ The forensic doctor took the jaw right out of the bag and studied it again after he had balanced his optical system on his nose.

  ‘A young person, not a child, but probably between eighteen and twenty-five. One wisdom tooth is through, the other only half erupted. Some fillings, but a few bad cavities as well. Not careful about looking after his teeth, in other words.’

  ‘The death – how recent was it?’ persisted the chief-superintendent.

  Prosser peered at him over his rims. ‘Very difficult, very difficult!’

  He had a strong North Wales accent, making the ‘very’ sound like ‘ferry’. Peering again at the bone, he added grudgingly, ‘There’s burned tissue between the teeth. That means …’ he hesitated in committing himself. Things said rashly were hard to retract later on. ‘It could mean less than a year since death,’ he wheezed.

  The scientific officer, Roger Lewis, grinned and nudged his fat ribs.

  ‘Come off it, Huw. That tissue has never been wetted since the fire. This is fresh, surely?’

  Huw Prosser gave him a withering look. ‘Not if it’s been covered up,’ he objected.

  ‘Well it hasn’t or the dog wouldn’t have found it. And this particular ash has only been here since yesterday at the earliest.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t know that, did I?’ muttered the doctor in an injured voice.

  The whole party walked back to the edge of the tip and looked down the slope.

  ‘If bones were tipped down there, the biggest bits would go the furthest,’ observed the pathologist. ‘So any whole bones like a skull or limb might actually be in the water.’

  There was a silence as they digested the implications of this.

  ‘That means pumping out the dock or using frogmen,’ said Old Nick.

  ‘They’d have to pump for bloody weeks,’ observed Ellis gloomily. Although little of the dock was left, the actual volume of water was still massive.

  The inspector’s radio buzzed and he came across to Meredith with a message. ‘The contractor has arrived at the Docks Station, sir.’

  Old Nick sighed. ‘Right, we’ll go across, there’s a lot of organizing to do. I’ve had bodies in all sorts of places in my time, but this one takes the prize.’

  At six o’clock that Friday evening, a council of war was held in the Forensic Science Laboratory. This was a brand new building which nestled between the National Museum and the University in Cathays Park, the administrative centre of the capital.

  In an upstairs room, the detectives and scientist sat solemnly around a large table on which were spread all the trophies to date from the West Dock.

  On several large sheets of paper, a series of bone fragments were spread out, each one marked by a ticket giving the grid reference of the search area, which had been marked out with pegs and cord. Dr Huw Prosser had stopped wheezing now that he was settled on a chair.

  ‘Definitely a man – late teens or early twenties,’ he said ponderously. ‘He’d had dental treatment, but still neglected some bad cavities.’

  Meredith brooded at the end of the table. Ellis looked up at him and thought he would have been a great hit in Victorian melodrama as the wicked squire.

  ‘This tooth neglect – is that any use for guessing at his social class?’ muttered Old Nick.

  Prosser grimaced his doubts.

  ‘You’re as well-placed as I am to say that. On general grounds, I suppose a labourer is less careful of his teeth than say, a doctor or company executive. But there are so many exceptions that I wouldn’t let it influence you.’

  He pulled at his ear and reassembled his broken train of thought.

  ‘The cause of death is absolutely unknown and will probably stay that way for ever. So far, after six hours scratching around, you’ve found forty-six bits of bone. Apart from the lower jaw, a bit of skull and the top of a thigh bone, they’ve all been splinters.’

  Roger Lewis, the biologist, broke in.

  ‘I wonder why the jaw was so much less damaged by fire than the rest? It’s the only bit with any remains of tissue on it.’

  The pathologist nodded. ‘The hinges are burnt, but the centre is only scorched, thank God … must have been out of the centre of the fire for some reason, otherwise it would have been calcined like the rest.’

  ‘What’s this “calcined” you keep talking about doc?’ asked Ellis.

  ‘Means that the bone is reduced to its mineral parts only – the fierce heat burns away the protein network, that’s why it’s so brittle.’ The pathologist answered with the earnestness of a professional teacher. Meredith was reminded of an aphorism of some ancient Greek – ‘More than the calf wants to suck, does the cow want to suckle.’

  He grunted, one of his favourite sounds. ‘No hope of knowing his height or anything else about him?’

  Prosser smiled with polite deprecation.

  ‘Not a chance, I’m afraid. One or two of these bits might be recognisable to an experienced anatomist, but there isn’t a hope in hell of reconstructing the skeleton. We’d need at least a limb bone to have a shot at estimating the height.’

  The chief superintendent sighed. ‘No cause of death, no identity … some case I get landed with for my first Welsh murde
r!’

  ‘Can’t even say it’s a murder,’ murmured Prosser smoothly. ‘Could be anything from coronary thrombosis to ingrowing toenails!’

  ‘So how does he come to be unofficially cremated?’ demanded Meredith. ‘This is concealment of the body by a third person!’

  Ellis idly wondered who the second person was, but wisely kept his thoughts to himself.

  Lewis was staring at the fragments on the table.

  ‘These bits are remarkably uniform in size, between one and two inches, mostly. If a chap fell accidentally into a fire, then you’d expect big bits and little bits left, even intact bones. There seems to have been deliberately bashed up to avoid notice.’

  ‘Except the jaw and bits of skull,’ observed Dai Rees, speaking for the first time.

  ‘They must have been missed – a furnace big enough to take a whole body must have produced a lot of ash, easy to miss some pieces in that lot, especially if it had to be done on the sly or in a hurry,’ agreed Prosser.

  Meredith rasped fingers over his evening beard.

  ‘That’s the next thing. What sort of fire has he been in? Ellis, did you get all those details from the contractor?’

  The detective inspector nodded and pulled a black notebook from his pocket.

  ‘Since yesterday, ashes were collected from five different places. Three of them use identical grades of fuel. The Coal Board chap said this afternoon that the ashes from the area of our bones must have come from this fuel – but he can’t distinguish between the three.’

  Old Nick chewed his fingers.

  ‘You told me all that two hours ago – have we been around all those places where the ash comes from?’

  ‘I’ve got lads out now, sir. Two of the furnaces were at factories on the docks and the other was a big office building just off James Street.’

  Meredith looked back at the pathologist and the lab men.

  ‘What’s the next step as far as you’re concerned?’

  Prosser touched the jawbone gently with his pencil.

  ‘This is the gem of the collection, the rest is just junk. With these fillings, you may well get a definite identity, if you can find the right dentist.’