Tiger at Bay

by Bernard Knight

  A little spark of anger began to glow deep in Iago’s soul. Just as it had after the car attack, so now a slow burn of determination to do something began to grip him.

  The new feeling was infinitely preferable to dull reproach. The sudden excitement it brought made him get up and pace the room, like some latter-day Sherlock Holmes in his long brown dressing gown.

  But what was to be done? No more hired assistants. Even if he could find one, he wanted to act himself this time. Not being a Batman or a Simon Templar, he had no talent for bursting in on Tiger and twisting his neck until he confessed.

  Iago shambled up and down, his thin stooped figure searching restlessly for some positive action.

  Suddenly he stopped opposite his stereo record player and stared at it. The maker’s original design had been deformed by extra wires and connections to a radio, on top of which was a microphone.

  Amongst Iago’s pitifully few talents was a knack with radio and electrical equipment. He had no theoretical knowledge at all, but a happy ability to join the right wires together to make things work.

  He looked now at his mess of apparatus and began thoughtfully to scratch his nose.

  He had wanted Terry Rourke to listen for incriminating words in the Cairo Restaurant –a wild hope considering that the lad could hardly have listened at Tiger’s keyhole for twenty-four hours of the day. But a microphone could listen for those twenty-four hours, as long as it was strategically placed and had someone or something to keep a vigil at the other end of the wire.

  Iago dropped to his knees and began toying with the plastic leads and the microphone itself. If only he could plant it in the right place … he came to an abrupt stop. He had been in there once himself and Terry had been caught at the same game. Ridiculous to think of gate-crashing or infiltrating there again.

  It took his pedestrian mind some minutes of frowning thought to arrive at an alternative scheme. He impulsively tore off his dressing gown, clambered into sweater and slacks and went for his car.

  He made a quick circuit through the deserted, rain-soaked city centre and then went on to the docks. Then he returned home, having seen all he wanted in one quick drive-past of the Cairo Restaurant. Back in the flat, he set to work feverishly on his equipment, struggling with coils of thin wire, screwdriver, headphones and a small battery tape recorder, which he had borrowed from Lewis Evans weeks before.

  Launched on this new flight of his butterfly mind, the hours flew by in almost ecstatic happiness; he almost forgot the grim reason for all his activity as he wrestled with leads and soldering iron.

  When there was nothing left to do, he went down to whisper his secret plan across the bar of the Glendower Arms. The landlord’s only comment was, ‘Make sure the police send back my tape recorder when they lock you up in a safe place, Iago.’

  Next morning, he had to explain it all again to Dilys. She was incredulous, scathing and contemptuous by turns, but, to his annoyance, not once did she mention the risk to himself.

  ‘I’ll have to look after this flaming office by myself again, then,’ was her final comment.

  He sulked at her, ‘Nothing to do – just hold the fort. Take any jobs that come in, but explain there may be a delay of a day or two due to pressure of business.’

  She sneered back at him, ‘Pressure of business my eye! … if it wasn’t for two divorces and that credit thing, you could spend all your time playing with bits of wire – apart from the little detail of paying my wages and the rent.’

  Her darkened eyelids flickered dangerously as she stabbed him in the chest with a red talon. ‘When are you going to grow up, Iago?’ she demanded.

  His sagging moustache came erect with indignation.

  ‘Look, Dill … that young chap Rourke, he got himself killed doing my dirty work. I may be weak in the head, but I’m damned if that lot in Bute Street are going to get off scot-free. This idea may be a dead loss, but at least I’ll have tried – and that means a hell of a lot to me!’

  There was a ring of sincerity in his voice that got through even Dilys’ thick skin and she backed down.

  ‘OK, have it your own way,’ she sighed, ‘but watch what you’re doing … you know you’re not safe to be let out alone.’

  This was the nearest she ever got to expressing concern for him, but Iago was strangely contented with it. He went back into his half of the office for a final fiddle with the contents of the battered suitcase that held all his equipment. He had yards of different coloured flex, joined by clumsy insulating tape joints. There was a small transistorized amplifier scrounged months ago from his sister’s baby alarm. Lewis’s small Japanese recorder shared the rest of the case with a pair of ex-army headphones. He checked all the items for the tenth time and snapped the case shut.

  ‘I’ll be back in an hour,’ he said, as he went through to the outer door. ‘Tell you what, I’ll treat you to a fried rice at the Ming Hong – might be the last square meal I get until tomorrow.’

  She sniffed and muttered something he hoped was agreement.

  Leaving the case in his car, he walked into town and made for the offices of an estate agent whose name he had read on a sign in Tiger Bay the day before. This was a small, obscure firm who specialized in seedy business properties. As he climbed the gloomy stairs to their den, he reflected that their standard of office accommodation was only a shade above his own.

  A few minutes’ tapping on a grimy glass door eventually brought an adenoidal girl. She seemed faintly surprised that anyone should want to enquire about a property, but at length unearthed a creased paper giving details of a shop in Bute Street.

  ‘Dis d’ one?’ she murmured through her blocked sinuses.

  Iago glanced at it and nodded. ‘Can I have the key, please?’

  She looked at him suspiciously. Asking about a property was bad enough, but actually waiting to see it!

  She grumbled to herself and vanished for another five minutes into the dusty recesses of the office. Returning with a Yale key on a grubby luggage label, she slapped it on the counter. ‘Mr Lloyd says he supposes it’s all right – nobody to go with you, mind. Sign here.’ He signed and made his escape.

  He went nowhere near Bute Street, but only to the nearest Woolworth’s, where he got a copy of the key cut in a few minutes. After a decent interval, padded out by a pint of beer in the Buccaneer bar, he took the original key back and told the uninterested girl that he was sorry but it wasn’t the sort of place for which he was looking.

  He gave Dilys the promised lunch at a Chinese restaurant, his spirits mounting with every minute. The girl by no means shared them.

  ‘And just how long do you reckon you’ll be off on this damn fool nonsense?’ she demanded.

  ‘You’re nagging me, Dill – just like a wife,’ he said happily.

  She glared at him. ‘That’s about as much action as you’ll ever get in the wife direction, so get any nasty ideas out of your head right now,’ she snapped. ‘I asked how long you’ll be out of the office.’

  ‘All week if needs be,’ he said airily. ‘I’m taking a Thermos and a couple of bottles, as well as some food. I’ll stay there until the early hours, then knock off until next morning.’

  ‘Or die of old age!’ she retorted sarcastically.

  But nothing could dampen his enthusiasm for his latest brainstorm. As soon as the girl had gone back to mope by the office phone, Iago drove down to the remnants of Tiger Bay. He parked the dented old Jaguar on one of the plentiful patches of bare ground, well away from the vicinity of the cafe.

  Before leaving the car, he struggled into a set of faded dungarees, added a cloth cap and a plastic mackintosh, then perched a pair of glasses on his nose.

  Clutching his battered suitcase under his arm, he walked off towards Bute Street, fondly imagining himself to be the image of a typical employee of the South Wales Electricity Board.

  He circuited the restaurant by the back lanes so that he could approach the next door premises from the
other direction.

  His new key worked smoothly in the lock and, more by luck than the impenetrability of his disguise, he got inside without being seen.

  Iago closed the door with a sigh of relief and leant against the inside for a moment while the inner tensions faded away. Then he stripped off the cap, raincoat and spectacles and lugged his case up the stairs to the second floor of the deserted building.

  Here came his first setback.

  He found the trapdoor to the loft easily enough – about twelve feet up, directly over the upper landing! Iago groaned and began a search of the rooms.

  He scoured hopefully through each floor and even in the yard and outhouses at the back, but there was no stepladder.

  The whole place was thick with dirt, dust and fallen plaster, but very little else. He made an inventory of any object that could be climbed upon and started dragging what there was towards the landing. To be baulked at the post by such a stupid detail as reaching the trapdoor was infuriating, though typical of Iago’s mad impulses.

  After half an hour, sheer trial and error won the day. The upper rooms had a few mouldering bits of furniture lying around, stuff that had not been worth taking away. Two small tables, a chair and a cupboard, dragged painfully from different rooms, made a tottering heap below the trap. After two collapses, Iago managed to scramble through the hatchway and drag his case up on a length of strong string.

  The filth in the loft was appalling.

  By the light of his large rubber-covered torch, he looked around from the edge of the hole. At first sight, he seemed to be in a jungle of grey vines and creepers. They were dust-covered cobwebs hanging in festoons from the rafters. It seemed unlikely that the place had been entered since the building was put up, some eighty years before.

  Nerving himself to endure the filthy embraces of the foliage, Iago tripped delicately from joist to joist in the direction of the Cairo Restaurant.

  The cobwebs formed an almost opaque screen, but after a few steps he breathed a cautious sigh of relief – there was no wall between the loft of this empty shop and next door. If there had been, the fiasco over the trapdoor would have been eclipsed by total defeat. In all fairness, he had thought of this possibility. In fact, the object of his short trip on the previous day had been partly to confirm his hunch. As well as making sure that there was an empty shop next to Tiger’s place and to get the name of the estate agent, he wanted to check that the arrangements of doors and windows of the adjacent premises suggested that they had once been a single large building, in which case the attics would almost certainly be continuous. Now he had proved his point – the beam of the torch struggled through the murk and failed to hit any wall after he had crossed a dozen or so joists.

  A little further on, he found the boundary line with next door.

  There were cross baulks of timber of a different vintage marking the partition wall, and major alterations of the electric wiring separating the supply to the two premises. Obviously, his guess about the age of all the cobwebs must have been wrong, but the alterations were still quite ancient.

  The sight of the ‘frontier’ made him appreciate the nearness of the enemy and he tiptoed back to the hatch and sat on its edge. As he took all his electrical stuff from the case, he tried to recall the sketchy description that poor Terry Rourke had given him of the upper floor of the Cairo Restaurant … a large lounge across the front and a bedroom next to the landing. So he should be able to locate the centre of the lounge by the lighting wires going to the ceiling rose and the switch cables should mark the line of the wall.

  Having no real plan in mind beyond this point, Iago was sublimely unworried about his next moves. The success of getting so far, seemed an omen for inevitable success.

  He coupled up the last wires of his Heath Robinson apparatus – more like a bad dream from an Emmett cartoon – and rested the tape recorder on the lip of the hatch.

  Carefully, he went back across the joists, paying out the thin flex behind him. Reaching the line of the partition wall, he hesitated. It was mid-afternoon and he had no idea if Ismail or any of his cronies were likely to be in the room below.

  He listened intently, but apart from the muffled sounds of traffic in Bute Street, he could hear nothing.

  His heart thumping, he worked his way cat-footed into enemy territory, crouching under the rafters to try and avoid the creaky areas of the centre of the loft. The joists were made of timber that shamed the skimpiness of modern builders, but even so they gave an occasional squeak that brought Iago’s stomach up into his neck.

  He traced the electric wires to the light socket – they were so encrusted by dirt that only a slight humping of the general grime gave away their position.

  As he worked towards the centre, the creaking of the beams got worse, but in a few steps he was there and had placed the microphone face down on the lath and plaster. Next to it he put the baby alarm amplifier. He had no idea whether or not it would pick up speech from below, but he just had to wait and see, using his inexhaustible optimism. On tiptoe, he went back across the foetid loft and sat with his legs dangling through the trapdoor.

  He slipped on the earphones, plugged into the monitor socket on the tape recorder and settled down to wait for something to happen.

  During the late afternoon, while Iago Price was dozing among the cobwebs, Tiger Ismail and three of his colleagues were having an earnest talk with the police.

  Detective Sergeant Rees arrived at the Cairo Restaurant about four o’clock with the firm request to see Mr Ismail and escort him to the police station ‘to assist the police in their inquiries’.

  Tiger was fast asleep in his bedroom – Uncle Ahmed roused him and brought him downstairs without Iago getting so much as a whisper in his headphones.

  Dai Rees was polite but determined. Tiger thought of standing on his legal rights and refusing to say anything or go anywhere unless he was charged. But on reflection, he guessed that he might come off better if he avoided antagonizing the police more than necessary. He accepted a lift in the police car standing outside and in two minutes was going through the doors of the police station.

  Tiger was slightly disturbed to see Nikos Kalvos and Archie Vaughan sitting on hard chairs in the corridor with a large, impassive policeman planted between them.

  On his way to the CID room he caught the sound of Joe Davies’ voice coming from an adjacent interview room. His annoyance deepened, though it was still far from being apprehension.

  The sergeant led him into the small, back room, where the beetle-browed face of Nicholas Meredith scowled at him across a desk.

  No one asked him to sit down – there was no chair in any case. Dai Rees slid on to a table behind him and ostentatiously took out his notebook.

  ‘The time has come for a good talk, Ismail,’ grated Meredith.

  Tiger said nothing. He knew the form and was confident that nothing was going to happen.

  Meredith knew that he knew and was aggravated before he even started.

  ‘Where were you between eight o’clock and midnight last night?’ he demanded.

  ‘I don’t have to tell you, do I?’ said the olive-skinned young man easily. There was no insolence in his voice, just a rather bored statement of fact.

  Meredith held himself in check with an effort. ‘You’ll have to tell me sooner or later – and if it’s later, the fact won’t escape notice. Now come on – stop arsing about!’

  Ismail smiled humourlessly. ‘Are you going to arrest me – and if so, what for?’

  Meredith felt his blood pressure climb a notch or two. ‘You know damned well I’m not arresting you – not just at this moment, anyway. Whether I do in the future depends on what you tell me now.’

  Tiger remained silent.

  ‘Where were you last night – and what have you got to say again about your movements last Wednesday night?’

  Tiger sighed – a loud, over-dramatic sigh. ‘Last night, I was in the cafe until ten … give you a dozen
witnesses, if you like. Then I drove to the Roma Club and stayed there till two … ditto another dozen witnesses. Next question?’

  Old Nick, stopped dead on that one as he had expected, abruptly switched to another tack.

  ‘Ever been in the basement of the Compass Building in Tydfil Street?’

  Ismail’s smoothly arched eyebrows rose. ‘Yes – when I was a kid. My great-uncle works there. We been through all this, mister!’

  Meredith ignored him. ‘You swear you’ve not been in there this last week?’

  Ismail looked elaborately around him. ‘Swear? We in the witness box already!’

  Dai Rees looked at Meredith, half expecting to see smoke wreathing from his nostrils. ‘Don’t act too smart, Tiger,’ he muttered from behind.

  Meredith glared at the sergeant, who subsided into his notebook.

  ‘Any of your numerous family work the boats at present?’ he snapped.

  ‘At a quick guess – about ten. Why?’

  ‘Ever heard of a ship called the Akra Siros?’

  Tiger, having heard that morning of the seizure of his cannabis consignment, was ready for this one. ‘No – none of our family on that one.’

  ‘Do you know that a ship of that name arrived in Cardiff last night?’

  Tiger was beginning to enjoy himself with this thick copper and, over-confident, put his foot right in it. ‘How would I know – I run a restaurant, not a wholesale fruiterer’s! ’ As the words left his mouth, he cursed himself. It was not even a trap – he had thrown that one away for nothing.

  Meredith’s saturnine face actually smiled. A slow burner that left Tiger well out of the joke.

  ‘Wholesale fruit? What can you mean?’ he repeated sarcastically. His face snapped back into a stony mask. ‘Come on, you’ve dropped yourself in it now,’ he said briskly. He stood up and stood a full head above the younger man. ‘I happen to know that you knew all about that ship’s arrival –and you just confirmed it for me … so cough, Ismail –let’s have it all.’