Tiger at Bay

by Bernard Knight

  ‘Any questions?’ he challenged.

  Harris had one. ‘What about this motorway stuff and “gaffer’s chips” rubbish?’

  Old Nick looked towards the Crime Squad man.

  ‘The lorry hijacking might be something for you. As for the other, they were probably talking about the menu in the cafe. If you can think of a criminal explanation, I’ll be glad to hear it!’

  On this sarcastic note, the conference broke up.

  Chapter Seven

  Several other meetings were going on at the same time, all within a mile or so of police headquarters.

  In the Glendower Arms, Iago Price and Dilys were hunched over a couple of hot pies and half pints. Unlike their sessions each evening, they were in the thick of a Saturday lunchtime crowd of drinkers and Lewis Evans had little time to join them in their discussion of the recent drama.

  ‘I jus’ can’t believe it!’ said the blonde for the fourth time. ‘He can’t be dead – not murdered! He was patting my bottom only a couple of days ago.’

  Iago was too preoccupied to listen to her, he was wondering about a recent phone message from Ellis.

  ‘It must be that, Dilys. Why else should I get an urgent call to meet the chief superintendent at half-past two? It means they’ve identified the body and want to grill me a lot further.’

  ‘What’s this Meredith like?’ she asked curiously.

  ‘Real grim character,’ muttered Iago. ‘Scares the pants off me. He’d break his face if he smiled; he looks like an old-time chapel preacher. Wears a long black coat and a hat that was made about nineteen twenty-nine! … but they say he’s hot stuff at his job.’

  Dilys prodded the remains of her pie dispiritedly. ‘But we don’t know that’s what he wants you for. It may be about the running-down, perhaps they’ve found the car. I can’t believe that boy is dead!’

  Iago gulped, his outsize Adam’s apple bobbing like a yo-yo.

  ‘Look, somebody’s dead and it’s more likely to be Terry Rourke than anyone else. Burnt skeletons don’t just appear spontaneously in the West Dock.’

  Lewis Evans came across to pull a handful of halves. As he worked the old fashioned pumps, he whispered hoarsely across the bar.

  ‘Any definite news yet?’ He felt responsible for introducing Terry to Iago and was anxious to get the rumours either allayed or confirmed.

  Iago made him up to date with what news there was.

  The banging of empty glasses on the other end of the bar cut short any more chat, but Iago felt Dilys’ hand on his arm and nearly fell off the stool with ecstasy.

  ‘Can you get into trouble with the police for sending Terry to spy on these people?’ she asked, with genuine anxiety in her voice.

  Iago glowed, even through his troubles, at the sympathetic change in her manner.

  ‘Can’t see how,’ he replied. ‘He wasn’t breaking any law down there. I didn’t tell the police that he said he’d broken open some drawers and a desk. And it doesn’t matter now, if he’s dead,’ he ended, rather bitterly.

  The girl squeezed his arm.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault, Iago … every time you send me to the post office I could get run over, but that doesn’t make you responsible, does it?’

  Iago smiled wanly at her, not far from tears of mixed self-pity and gratitude at her sympathy. His moustache seemed to wilt and a latent, if unsuspected, maternal feeling began to stir deep inside Dilys.

  He sighed and looked up at the clock.

  ‘Time I was going, allowing for Lewis’s bar time. Will I see you later on?’

  She nodded. ‘I’ll do a bit of shopping, then come back to the office by four. You can buy me a cuppa and tell me all about it.’

  She smiled encouragingly as she left him and, for a moment, a bright shaft of anticipation broke through his gloom. Yet even the prospect of making headway with Dilys was sour success if it depended on Rourke’s death.

  Iago hurried out of the bar and made for the top of Bute Street. As he walked along the worn pavements, past sleazy cafes and abandoned shops, his mood began to change.

  He accepted the fact that the police were going to tell him that the body was that of his late employee and as he did so, his self-reproach began to turn to slow anger. With the anger came frustration that a mob of criminals could run down two men in a city street and then eliminate a harmless youth, all with apparent impunity.

  He quickened his step as his temper began to smoulder. Passing over the hump of the old canal bridge, the straight line of Bute Street stretched away almost to the horizon. Like a child’s perspective drawing, the grey railway embankment wall on his left and the motley collection of old buildings on the other side converged in the distance.

  A row of police cars stood outside the police station, blue and white Pandas, a white traffic wagon and two black patrol cars. Nearby, the pneumatic drills and bulldozers were silent against their backcloth of rubble and half demolished buildings. On a Saturday, with the City playing at home, the population had drained away westwards to Ninian Park.

  Iago looked at his watch and walked through the uninviting doors dead on two thirty. A sergeant answered his knock on the Enquiries hatch and took him through the dismal corridors to the CID room.

  ‘Mr Price, sir.’ The uniformed officer tapped on the door and left him with three men he already knew.

  Meredith was the centrepiece, black overcoat and all. The chief superintendent pointed to a vacant chair and Iago sat down. The slow anger still burned and he felt none of his usual diffidence.

  He gazed at Meredith’s hawk-like face noticing for the first time the grey at the sides of his otherwise black, lank hair.

  ‘Mr Price, I’m afraid we’ll have to take you over all that you’ve told us before in greater detail.’ He motioned briefly towards Ellis and Rees who stood at either side, then his eyes fixed on Iago again as if daring him to tell anything but the whole truth.

  ‘I’m afraid your fears yesterday were well-founded. The body was that of Terence Rourke. The teeth proved it beyond any doubt.’

  He paused to let this sink well in. Although Iago had already resigned himself to the fact of Terry’s death, Meredith’s words made him go cold inside. He swallowed hard a few times and for some reason felt acutely sick.

  Meredith waited, then continued as if nothing had happened. He had found from bitter experience that fussing with the soft approach usually made things worse. Anyway, it was Mrs. Rourke who was due for any sympathy. If it wasn‘t for this silly, interfering amateur sitting here, Rourke would still be alive. Or would he? That was what Meredith was paid to find out.

  ‘You told me the outline last night. I want to fill in with every detail you can remember. Firstly, is there anything in the Summers part of the affair that you haven’t told me?’

  Iago, still white and quivery, thought for a moment, then said there was not.

  In spite of this, Old Nick went over the whole story again, patiently enlarging on every point and probing every angle. Dai Rees unobtrusively kept a note of what was said, as he would have to go through Iago’s old statement later on and build any additional information into a supplementary one.

  Meredith pulled his own notebook from a pocket. It was not a standard police issue, but a thick one with a glossy cover, black like the rest of him.

  He scowled through the pages, then asked, ‘This woman Betty. Summers never managed to get a line on her?’

  Iago shook his head.

  ‘I asked him that. When he went back to her flat, she had cleared out, no forwarding address. The details she gave to the bank about her employment were all phoney too, even her Insurance card.’

  Meredith looked up at Ellis, then at Rees. ‘Anyone on the fringes of the Ismail outfit who might fit her description?’

  The two detectives looked at one another, then shook their heads.

  ‘Their “fringe” is so big, we don’t know half of them, sir,’ said Rees, ‘But no one springs to mind. Though surel
y, wouldn’t they have used a girl outside the immediate clan, just to avoid being traced?’

  Meredith grunted. ‘What’s Tiger’s reputation with women?’ he demanded.

  ‘Opinions vary, sir,’ replied Ellis. ‘He’s a bachelor and very much the lone wolf. Dresses a bit fancy, but that’s nothing to go by these days. Some reckon he’s “queer”, but that’s a load of rubbish.’

  Nicholas Meredith scratched something in his notebook with a small pencil, then turned back to Iago Price.

  ‘You said the only contact Terry Rourke had with you was a phone call on the evening of Wednesday. Do you know where he phoned from?

  ‘A call box – definitely. He didn’t say where it was, but he’d just knocked off work in the restaurant, so it must have been nearby.’

  Meredith scribbled some more and glanced up at Harris long enough to say, ‘Check all the boxes in the area for signs of a fight.’

  To Iago he said, ‘I want you to remember all the details of what he told you … I know you’ve done it twice before, but this is vitally important now. Any details, no matter how damn silly they may sound.’

  Iago thought hard. This matter-of-fact approach was good for his state of mind, it stopped him wallowing in self-recrimination. He tried to throw his mind back to the night when Terry had spoken to him on the telephone.

  ‘He said he’d just left the Cairo Restaurant – told me he’d had a bit of luck, but couldn’t see much future in carrying on there. Then he said he’d had the chance to look in Tiger’s rooms and have a glance at some of his papers.’

  Old Nick’s head snapped up. ‘You didn’t tell us this before!’

  Iago’s pallor flushed into pinkness. ‘I must have forgotten that,’ he mumbled. ‘Rourke said he’d opened the doors of Ismail’s lounge and bedroom and looked through all the drawers. He opened a locked desk too, but there was nothing there he could recognize as incriminating in any way.’

  ‘Anything else?’ rumbled the senior detective, his long face glowering at Iago.

  ‘There was a safe there, though he didn’t attempt cracking that,’ faltered Iago. ‘Apart from that, it’s exactly as I told you. Something about lorries on the Ross Motorway – the M50, I suppose – then this bit about “gaffer’s chips on Sunday”.’

  ‘Who else was in the restaurant?’

  ‘He mentioned Florrie, Tiger’s aunt and an Uncle Ahmed. He said he’d seen Joe Davies in there, and some others, but he didn’t say who.’

  ‘Do the names Archie Vaughan or Nikos Kalvos mean anything to you?’

  The enquiry agent shook his head, then thought of something else.

  ‘The night Summers and I were run down, there was a chap near us in the Glendower Arms. The landlord says he seemed to be eavesdropping on us, then he suddenly got up and went, even left his drink behind. A few minutes later, we were bowled over by that car!’

  ‘What was he like?’

  ‘I didn’t notice him, but the barman says he was very thin and small, like a jockey,’

  ‘Archie Vaughan!’ said Rees and Ellis simultaneously. Iago felt a throb of righteous pleasure in his breast as at last something confirmed his story, of which the police seemed so sceptical.

  Meredith showed no such satisfaction. Head down, he said, ‘See the barman, Rees, get a statement. Got any photographs of these merchants yet?’

  Dai Rees had his own notebook out.

  ‘Not yet, we’re chasing Records for them. Almost all this crowd have got form, so we should be all right for a picture of most of them.’

  Old Nick grunted. ‘Get a photo, show it to Mr Price here. Then go around to the landlord of that pub. See if they can pick out Vaughan, for a start.’

  ‘Right, I’ll have one of Rourke printed, too, we may need a general search for anyone who saw him on Wednesday or Thursday.’

  Old Nick went back to trying to squeeze any last drops of information out of Iago Price. It was soon clear that he was now as dry as any stone. Soon Meredith got up, his height making the little room seem tiny, especially with the other large officers in there as well.

  ‘Thank you for your help, Mr Price. Anything else that might come back to you will be very welcome. We’ll just get all that down in another formal statement and you can go.’

  He cleared his throat and altered the pitch of his voice to make it more severe. ‘I have to say now that you did a very unwise thing in employing Rourke on what was frankly a quite illegal job. You weren’t to know the outcome, I suppose, but his breaking and entering Ismail’s rooms was bad. It might have involved you in conspiring to commit a felony or whatever the new Act calls it now. But in the unfortunate circumstances, we’ll forget that. I’d stick to divorce work in the future, if I were you.’

  This was the dismissal and with a murmured farewell Iago slunk away after Rees to make his statement in another room. Half an hour later, he left the station in a subdued mood and made his way back through the ghosts of old Tiger Bay.

  Meredith and Bob Ellis had their own cars parked in a side street near the police station – or what had been a side street, now just a tarmac strip between rubble and new foundations.

  Ellis was going with Old Nick to interview the watchman at the office block, so far the most likely source of the bones. He led the way from Bute Street in his Hillman, with Meredith – a stranger to these more obscure parts of the city – following in his Austin 1800.

  As he kept behind the Hillman, Nicholas Meredith allowed himself a few rare moments of introspection. For the first time since leaving London, he took stock of himself in his new role in life.

  How odd, he thought, that returning to his native land seemed a bigger wrench than leaving twenty-two years earlier. Not an unpleasant wrench, but certainly an upheaval.

  For six years and more since he had been a superintendent at the Yard, he had had the itch to come home. When the chance had arrived he almost funked it, afraid of himself and the possibility of a let-down when he exchanged the known for the unknown.

  For years, Wales had loomed larger and larger in his dreams. Every holiday was spent there, even snatched weekends. The prospect of ‘going home’ had become almost an obsession, but when the chance actually came, he found himself frightened. Not of anything tangible, but fear of disillusion, the fear that the reality wouldn’t live up to the dream.

  Two months later he was still walking this tightrope, waiting for a sign to tell him whether he had done the right thing. This case, the first killing, would probably provide the sign. He didn’t know how yet, but he felt it deep inside.

  As a murder, it was nothing outstanding. Intriguing and unusual perhaps, especially by Cardiff standards, though twenty years in the ‘Met’ had made him incapable of thinking in capital letters about any crime.

  But this was going to be the first big case for Nicholas Meredith – ‘Old Nick’, as he well knew they were calling him already.

  He was the CID boss here – in the Smoke, however blasé he could afford to be about big-time crime, he had been only one superintendent amongst scores. He thought wryly about the old saw of the ‘big fish and the little pond’.

  Yet Cardiff was a big city – a capital city – and it had plenty of crime relative to its population. On paper it had a higher crime rate than London. Newcastle was top of the league and Cardiff was about third, with London well down the list. He snorted to himself as he thought that statistics could prove anything. Stealing bicycles was equivalent to mass murder in the Home Office crime figures.

  He sighed as he halted behind Ellis’s Minx at a set of traffic lights. He watched the other car’s traffic indicator winking to turn right and thought that this place was as foreign to him as Hong Kong, though he was born only forty miles away.

  The brick-and-mortar forests of Hackney, Bayswater and the West End had become more familiar to him than his home town of Swansea, though Hitler had taken a big hand in re-shaping the streets of his boyhood. Cardiff was quite strange to him – like so many Welshm
en, the only part he knew was the Arms Park Rugby Ground, and a dozen public houses nearby.

  Though Meredith’s thoughts centred on the changes in his surroundings, he failed to see that his own character raised the biggest barrier to acceptance.

  He genuinely had no idea of how remote he could be. He consciously kept his staff at a distance, sincerely believing that familiarity weighed against efficiency. He craved for acceptance by his men, but was determined not to buy it with easy bonhomie-like slaps on the back, Christian names and pints in the local after every case. He stuck grimly to his role of ‘The Boss’, expecting respect to come from the results of hard work on the part of all the team, not least his own hard work.

  His slight eccentricities in dress were no gimmick; he genuinely never noticed his outdated clothes. His good-natured, but rather vague wife occasionally made feeble protests about his appearance, but these he impatiently brushed off as ‘women’s nagging’.

  As he followed the Hillman on the last lap of the short journey, he wondered how eager the ‘Met’ had been to get rid of him. Often the enthusiasm of testimonials was inversely proportional to a man’s popularity, so that there would be a better chance of unloading him on to someone else!

  He had certainly walked into the job against all competition and promptly began worrying about whether it was due to his undoubted success as a thief-taker or his being a square peg in a round London hole!

  His self-examination was cut short by the winking of Ellis’s tail lights. The detective inspector had pulled up outside a high, old-fashioned office block which stood on the corner of a side street.

  The weak winter daylight was already fading, but Meredith could see the ornate frescoes around the entrance and the intricate stonework of the window mullions – a reminder of the affluent days of the coal boom when prestige and profits were reflected in the pseudo-classical efforts of Victorian and Edwardian architects.

  The heavy oak doors at the top of the front steps were tightly closed, but Ellis led him around the corner into Tydfil Street. Here another much smaller flight of steps led down from the pavement. They clattered down the iron treads to a door at the bottom, about twelve feet below street level.