Tiger at Bay

by Bernard Knight

  Old Nick nodded brusquely. ‘Have to hawk the details all round the city. How many dentists in Cardiff, I wonder?’

  ‘Must be flaming scores of them,’ said a heavy man sitting next to Meredith. This was Detective Chief Inspector Harris, Old Nick’s senior assistant. He had been away all day at the Assizes and had only just come into the picture. The burden of organizing routine jobs such as dental searches fell on him; he was an anxious, worrying type and looked as if he didn’t relish the idea.

  ‘Try the Dental Hospital first,’ he went on, ‘then the local dentists in Butetown.’

  ‘Of course, he may not be from Cardiff at all,’ said Huw Prosser sweetly. ‘Then you’ll have a hell of a job on your hands … John o’ Groats to Chipping Sodbury!’

  Meredith looked sourly from the Job’s comforter to Peter Wade. ‘Any help you lab people can give us? You’ve had it soft so far.’

  ‘Not with the bones,’ answered the biologist, ‘But if we get samples of boiler ash from these three places, we might be able to match one of them up with the stuff from around the bones.’

  ‘But it was the same fuel in each case,’ objected Ellis.

  ‘Maybe, but different boilers may burn slightly differently. Design, temperature, draughts and all that, may make very slight differences in the nature of the ash. Worth trying, anyway.’

  Old Nick got up, his lanky body towering above the table.

  ‘I’ll be glad if you can do that tonight, Mr Lewis. Ellis has the addresses of the places with the boilers. I’ll be going around them myself later on, as soon as his scouts have reported back.’

  The meeting broke up, the pathologist staying behind with the bones to make a provisional chart of the teeth.

  In the morning, he intended getting expert advice from a dentist on the partly melted fillings and the age of the jaw, but to allow Harris’s team to start chasing the dental records, he wanted to give them a rough diagram of the main features.

  When the police officers reached their own headquarters on the other side of the park, the cadet on the reception desk buttonholed Bob Ellis.

  ‘There’s a chap to see you, sir, in the coroner’s waiting room. He said it was urgent.’

  A few minutes later Ellis broke in on Meredith, who was in his room organising details with Charlie Harris.

  ‘Excuse me, sir, but think you ought to hear this, in case there’s anything in it.’ The reluctance in his voice suggested apology in advance for the waste of time. He stood aside to let a nervous, raincoated figure into the room.

  ‘This is Mr Price, sir – Iago Price. You remember, he runs an enquiry agency. Had a nasty accident a few days back, not far from the area we’re interested in.’

  Ellis stumbled on, making half-excuses whilst Old Nick glared at him from under his beetling eyebrows.

  Iago was sat in a chair facing the desk and Ellis felt sure that if he had brought a hat, he would have started twisting it around by the brim in the approved anxious manner.

  ‘Well?’ snapped Meredith, not laying much of a foundation for a nice cosy chat.

  Iago cleared his throat and looked up at Bob Ellis, who was his anchor in this strange charade. He knew Charlie Harris as well, but there was a marked lack of sympathy between them. Ellis had always been more easy to get on with.

  Meredith scowled across the desk and Iago hurriedly got his story under way.

  ‘I gather you already know about that car running Mr Summers and myself down the other night?’ he began diffidently. Meredith made a gargling sound; his frown stayed fixed in place.

  ‘I’m sure it was deliberate,’ Iago said desperately. ‘I’m lucky to have got off so lightly,’ This all seemed so much harder than when he had rehearsed it in front of his bathroom mirror.

  ‘I realize that you may not have had enough grounds to take it seriously, so I hired someone to do some private enquiries on my behalf.’

  The prepared words sounded like rejected film script, but they got through to Old Nick.

  ‘You mean, you got someone to do your own snooping!’ he snapped impatiently. He didn’t know why this twerp was here at a hectic time like this. What was Ellis playing at?

  ‘I couldn’t go myself,’ countered Iago weakly. ‘I was already known there. They’d had one go at me already!’ Meredith looked over Price’s head at Ellis. ‘What’s all this about, for God’s sake?’

  The detective inspector short-circuited Iago’s laborious explanations.

  ‘The chap he hired has gone missing, sir A fellow called Terry Rourke.’

  Meredith’s impatience vanished, but no one would have guessed it from his face. ‘Rourke?’ he repeated. ‘Do we know him?’

  ‘We do indeed,’ answered Charlie Harris, who had a passion for remembering criminal records. ‘Small-time yob, breakings and petty larceny. Spends most of his time on probation.’

  Meredith looked down again at Iago.

  ‘Go on, Mr Price.’ The use of ‘Mister’ was a mark of acceptance.

  ‘I saw him on Tuesday morning, paid him a retainer, and he went off to the Cairo Restaurant. I thought he might find some sign of damage on one of their cars or overhear something incriminating.’

  ‘And did he?’ demanded the chief superintendent.

  ‘He telephoned the same night, said he had got a job as kitchen boy in the restaurant. I told him to ring back when he had something to tell me and he did so the next evening, quite late.’

  Iago paused and swallowed hard. Suddenly, this visit to the fountainhead of detection didn’t seem such a good idea. He faltered on.

  ‘Rourke said he’d been eavesdropping outside Tiger Ismail’s door, and he’d give it another day before packing up the job … that was the last I heard from him.’

  ‘Wednesday night?’ repeated Meredith tonelessly.

  ‘Yes … I didn’t hear from him all day Thursday. I was disappointed more than worried. Thought he’d just run out on the job. Then today I read about this body being found in the West Dock and got uneasy. I went over to Rourke’s home in Riverside. His family haven’t seen him since Wednesday, which is very unusual.’

  He pulled a copy of the South Wales Echo from his raincoat pocket and tapped the front page headlines. ‘When I saw this about it being the skeleton of a young man, I got really worried … probably nothing in it … thought I’d better just tell you ’

  His voice tailed off into an embarrassed mumble as he ran right out of self-confidence. He wished himself a mile away with his highly unlikely story.

  But Meredith did not pour scorn on his head. He got up from his chair and stood stooping far above Iago’s head.

  ‘Thank you very much, Mr Price. As you say, probably nothing to worry about, but technically he’s a missing person if his family is concerned about him. And we’re interested in all missing persons in Cardiff, especially young men.’

  He swung around to Harris. ‘How old is this Rourke?’

  ‘Twenty-three, twenty-four,’ answered the other detective. ‘Can check Records quick enough.’

  Ellis nodded. ‘He’d be about that. I wouldn’t put too much store on him vanishing, though. He’s a wild one, has about three jobs a week, when he’s not sponging off the National Assistance.’

  Meredith pierced Iago again with his dark eyes. ‘Going back to the reason that you employed Rourke – did he find out anything for you?’

  Iago shuffled uneasily on his chair. ‘Not a lot – he said he’d come to the office next morning to give me details. That’s partly why I got worried; he didn’t turn up.’

  The private detective thought it prudent not to mention that Terry had rifled Tiger’s drawers and cupboards. ‘He said that he had his ear to the door of an upstairs lounge and recognized the voice of a man called Davies, who was the one that approached Summers to blackmail him.’

  Meredith nodded. He avoided saying that so far nothing of this could be substantiated by anyone but Iago himself.

  ‘All he could hear was something abo
ut lorries on the Ross motorway, then someone else asked what the next job was.’

  Iago was improvising here, but the general sense was right. ‘Then Rourke heard a voice say “gaffer’s chips on Sunday night”.’

  Ellis and Charlie Harris looked at each other. Lorries on the motorway made good sense to them after rumours about Tiger, but the rest was just gibberish. Meredith looked as if he was trying to decide if Iago was pulling their leg or headed for a padded cell.

  ‘Gaffer’s chips on Sunday night?’ he echoed.

  ‘Yes, exactly that. I wondered what the hell Rourke was talking about, so I got him to spell it out. I don’t know what it meant,’ he added unnecessarily.

  There was a silence. The brief moment when Iago’s credit seemed to have risen was over as ‘gaffer’s chips’ was too much for them to swallow.

  Meredith sniffed. ‘Well, thank you, Mr Price. We’ll look into this. I’m sure we’ll turn up this Terry Rourke somewhere.’

  They did turn up Terry Rourke, with the aid of a bulldozer. They eventually turned up a total of two hundred and seventeen fragments of him, but that was after he had been identified.

  Later that evening, the Friday of the discovery of the jaw and of Iago’s visit to police headquarters, a description of the teeth was printed and all available CID men were detailed to start going around dentists’ surgeries next morning.

  Their journey proved unnecessary, as that evening Detective Sergeant Willie Rees called at the Rourke household a mile from Bute Street. He did so half-heartedly, convinced that he was having his time wasted. Terry’s mother, a rather vague, harassed woman in her fifties, answered the door of a terraced house that seemed to be bulging with children and young people.

  Though she was worried by Terry’s disappearance, she seemed to have so many other troubles that its importance was submerged. However, the sergeant gathered that it was unusual for her eldest son to spend a night away from home.

  Rees tried not to alarm her too much. ‘His last employer reported him absent from work – we’re just checking up.’

  He took down some mundane details in his notebook, then slipped in a casual question about Terry’s dentist.

  ‘Sure, I don’t know, hardly ever did he go,’ she. said with no apparent interest at this odd question. Luckily, one of the teenage sisters hanging about the background could tell him, and the sergeant made his exit after some comforting platitudes.

  The dentist named was only a few streets away, but Rees could get no answer there at that time of the evening. Next morning, to get the loose ends tidied up before the real work began, he made it his first call.

  He was ‘on the knocker’ at five past nine. By nine fifteen, he was hot-footing it back to Headquarters and at half past he was laying a buff dental record card on Meredith’s desk. By noon the identity had been established beyond any doubt.

  The dentist from Riverside, a lecturer from the dental college who specialized in such things, and the portly Dr Prosser had all sat in judgement on the jawbone, comparing it with the record card. They had declared it to be the jaw of Terry Rourke beyond all reasonable doubt and their provisional handwritten report lay on Meredith’s desk.

  It was there when he held a lunchtime conference with other senior officers. As well as Charlie Harris, Bob Ellis, and Willie Rees, there was present a new Detective Inspector to replace the one with the fractured arm, another DI from Headquarters, the uniformed Superintendent of ‘A’ Division, which included the Docks Station, and the deputy coordinator of the Regional Crime Squad.

  Old Nick pushed his hands against his desk and rocked back dangerously on his chair.

  ‘I’ve just had a word with the Chief about things. He’s naturally anxious for us to pull out all the stops. The boffins have done a good quick job in getting an identity for us, so it’s up to us now to equal them by some snappy police work.’

  He shot a dark look at Bob Ellis. ‘How are you getting on with this furnace angle?’

  Bob pushed himself off a filing cabinet and almost stood to attention.

  ‘The forensic people have been to see each of the three possible boilers this morning, sir. They phoned just now to say that we can eliminate one of the factories straight away – a totally different kind of ash from the other two, which seem to be indistinguishable from each other. Both use identical makes of boiler and though they’re still working on it, they can’t tell the ash apart.’

  ‘Which two are these?’

  ‘One is in the office building on the corner of Tydfil Street, the other is in a furniture factory in Dumballs Road. The office block is an old one, got all sorts of firms in it, shipping companies, the lot.’

  Old Nick gnawed at the edges of his nails. ‘Have your lads found anything significant to favour one place or the other?’

  Ellis shrugged. ‘Both have got pretty lax routines at night. Almost anybody could have got at the furnaces. At the factory, the furnace is in full view of the working area, so that seems to rule out anyone bunging in a body during working hours. They don’t have a night shift.’

  ‘What about the night, then?’

  ‘The boiler is damped down and the nightwatchman comes out a few times to bung a bit of coke on. Security is awful there; there could easily have been a break-in if someone wanted to get at the furnace.’

  Meredith looked shrewdly at the detective inspector. ‘You’re keeping the best till last – you favour the other place?’

  Ellis nodded. ‘The boiler is in the basement, not kept locked in the daytime. Anyone could get in by just walking down the steps from the street. There’s a full-time boiler-cum-maintenance man in the daytime. He spends a lot of time in the basement next to the boiler room, but he goes up into the offices a lot to do odd jobs.’

  ‘Again, what about the night?’

  ‘The day chap knocks off at six, then an old fellow takes over until next morning. He feeds the boiler, makes tea and shuffles round the building with a torch every now and then.’ Ellis coughed to conceal his satisfaction at the coming punchline ‘He’s an Arab, sir!’

  There was an almost palpable silence as the policemen chewed this one over in their minds. The implication was obvious.

  ‘Has he coughed anything?’ asked Harris harshly.

  Ellis made a face. ‘No, he’s as old as hell, stone-deaf into the bargain. I slipped around myself to see him when the boys brought in the news. Couldn’t get a thing out of him. He’s either a bit senile, a bit daft or just plain cunning. Pretends either not to hear you or not to understand you!’

  Meredith’s blue cheeks seemed to cave in even more under the harsh light of the bare room.

  ‘The “lab” are definite that it must be one of these two furnaces, eh?’

  ‘That’s where the ash was collected from these past two days,’ said Ellis defensively.

  ‘Then we’ll have to grind this old feller down a bit – where can we get hold of him in the daytime?’

  ‘He lives in digs a couple of streets away from the offices.’

  ‘No known connection with Tiger Ismail?’

  ‘Nothing we know of, so far,’ replied Bob Ellis cautiously. ‘But after a couple of generations of inbreeding down there, I’ll bet his second son’s wife’s sister’s cousin is an Ismail!’

  ‘Doesn’t have to mean anything,’ objected the ‘A’ division superintendent. ‘The bulk of our residents – Arab, Greek, Indian – anything – they’re as straight as the rest of Cardiff. Straighter than many!’ he added with aggressive defence of his local flock.

  Meredith raised a hand placatingly. For all his gloomy brusqueness, he knew when to play it soft.

  ‘I know, I know, some of the biggest villains are up in the stockbroker belt. But we’ve got to eliminate the obvious.’

  ‘We’ve got nothing on Tiger, anyway,’ Charlie Harris reminded them. ‘Only long-term suspicions and some hare-brained claptrap from that idiot Price.’

  The mention of the enquiry agent triggered o
ff Old Nick. His head jerked up towards Ellis. ‘Have you got that fellow for me?.I’d better be having a few more words with him, I think,’

  The inspector nodded. ‘I‘ve told him to be at Bute Street Station at half two this afternoon.’

  Several of the soccer fans present groaned inwardly – it was Saturday and the City were playing at home that afternoon.

  Meredith made a quick round-up of all the straggling threads.

  ‘Summers, the man from the bank. Anything new?’

  ‘Still the same,’ supplied Harris. ‘Deeply unconscious and likely to remain so, for all the Infirmary can tell.’ Meredith thought rapidly. ‘Better treat that running-down as a serious crime now. A bit late, but see if you can get Summers’ clothing from the hospital. We’ll get them up to the lab in case there’s any paint flakes and all that rigmarole.’

  He gobbled his finger, then shot a look at Willie Rees.

  ‘Check at the Docks end. Snoop around any car associated with the Cairo Restaurant. Check garages and accident repair yards. Put somebody on to stolen car lists for the period that interests us. You know the drill as well as I do,’ he ended impatiently.

  Having ordered in a couple of sentences enough work for half the City CID for a week, Meredith jumped to something else.

  ‘What are we going to do about this guy Ismail – has anyone approached him yet?’

  ‘Waiting for you to say, sir,’ said Ellis, with a questioning look across at Charlie Harris. They were still feeling their way with Meredith, they didn’t know yet whether he was the sort who wanted all the reins in his own hand or if he wanted people to use their own heads. Both ways had their peculiar advantages and dangers. Ellis was particularly vulnerable. He had been thrown into the case from the start, before it had escalated into a five-star crime. He had to be wary of treading on several senior toes.

  Meredith solved his problem.

  ‘I’ll do it myself,’ he growled. ‘But I want to talk to Price first.’ He glowered around the room, even at the Crime Squad man, who was the same rank as himself. Although they had only known Old Nick a few weeks, already it was apparent that his satisfaction was inversely proportional to the depth of his scowl.