Tiger at Bay

by Bernard Knight

  Ellis banged on the faded panels and shouted, ‘Harry! Police again.’

  Meredith looked at him in the gloom of the stairwell.

  ‘Harry? I thought this chap was an immigrant?’

  ‘Proper name is Arif bin Pandek – so everyone calls him “Harry”.’

  ‘Funny name for an Arab.’

  ‘Got a dash of Malay in him, I think.’ Ellis grunted.

  He banged on the door again and eventually there was the sound of shuffling feet and rusty bolts being drawn.

  ‘You said this place was open day and night,’ said Old Nick, accusingly.

  ‘It was until today. I had a word with the owners, who have the whole of the ground floor offices. The manager did his nut, came dashing down with orders for the boilerman to keep the place locked up in future.’

  The door opened slowly and a face like a leather gargoyle peered out. The high cheekbones were covered in wrinkled brown skin that caved in where the back teeth should have been. A sunken, gummy mouth quivered at them.

  ‘Policemen?’ it croaked.

  Ellis pushed the door open and stood back for Meredith to enter.

  ‘Remember me, Harry? I was here this morning. This is the chief policeman. He wants to ask you more questions.’

  All this had to be said over again at double volume, as Arif appeared to be almost stone-deaf.

  They worked their way into a large room that was part-workshop and part-bedroom. A bench with a vice and a collection of rusty tools occupied one half, while a table and camp bed shared the other part with a small gas stove and an antiquated radio set.

  The table carried milk bottles, half a loaf and some dirty crockery, which overflowed onto a cracked porcelain sink and draining board in the corner.

  Harry tramped behind them on painful feet to sit on the edge of the grubby bed, one hand cupped ready about his left ear. Meredith saw that he wore a length of cloth wound round his head, a brown storekeeper’s coat and a pair of ex-navy bell-bottoms which flapped around his skinny ankles.

  ‘Where is the boiler?’ shouted Old Nick. At the second attempt, the message got through and the old man waved a hand at an open door opposite the workbench.

  Meredith and Ellis walked through and looked around them. They saw a much larger room with a flight of steps going up to the ground floor. A forest of pipes and valves came from a large boiler against an adjacent wall. It looked as if it had been taken from a ship the size of the Mauretania, complete with brass fittings and pressure gauges. The rest of the room was half-filled with coke, which was overflowing from a steel hatch in the opposite wall.

  Ellis pointed at this. ‘There’s a big bunker behind there, sir. Must hold all of fifty tons. It’s filled from a manhole in the street.’

  Meredith looked around critically. ‘Any other way in, except the steps we came down?’

  ‘No, except from the offices, down those other stairs. There’s the ash lift, of course, but that can only be worked from inside here.’

  The chief superintendent looked more closely at the boiler. The firebox was set on a massive concrete foundation and had a steel fire door about two feet square. This had large strap hinges riveted on to the front and a long lever which dropped into a slot to keep it shut.

  Old Nick walked briskly across to it, raising a black dust from the floor as he went. He gingerly felt the end of the lever, but it was no more than comfortably warm. Lifting it, he pulled the fire door open and bent to look inside. He saw a long cavern, at least six feet deep, glowing dully at the edges.

  ‘Banked down for the weekend, sir,’ volunteered the inspector. ‘I saw it this morning when it was going full blast, You could hardly bear to look inside then.’ Meredith slammed the door shut.

  ‘Plenty of room in there for a body. What happens to the ashes?’

  Ellis pointed to a steel plate running the length of the base.

  ‘That’s the edge of a big metal box – it pulls out and runs on castors to that lift over there.’

  On the outside wall of the basement was a crude lift operated by a chain hoist. ‘It goes up on that into a big hopper at the top. There’s a chute from there into the lorries, which come to empty it every couple of days.’

  They had a last look around the room, then went back to where Arif was sitting patiently on his bed.

  Meredith bawled into his ear. ‘When did they last empty the ashes?’

  The old Arab turned his calm brown eyes on the detectives and shrugged.

  ‘I do not know, sir. The day shift man, he does that.’

  ‘Doesn’t know nothing, this old bugger!’ muttered Ellis. The old man’s eyes flicked sharply towards him.

  Meredith tried again. ‘Until today, the door was always open, eh?’

  He struck oil here.

  Arif nodded. ‘Always! Sometimes my friends, they come in at night to take tea and talk. I got no enemies,’ he added enigmatically.

  ‘Anyone else been in this week, except your friends?’

  This took a second bellowing to get through, then Arif shook his head.

  ‘No one at all?’ barked Meredith.

  This high-decibel interrogation went on for some time. All the nightwatchman’s friends were listed, but Arif bin Pandek admitted to no events out of the ordinary during the past few nights. Meredith found his stonewalling infuriating; usually an astute judge of a witness, this Asiatic impassiveness threw all his usual criteria right off-centre. Old Nick knew that the fellow was either being truthful, cunning, or lying – or was just plain dim – but he couldn’t tell which it was.

  Harry did admit to being out of the basement for at least an hour every night.

  ‘I am so old, sir, and so slow now. I take many minutes to get upstairs, my feet are so bad. I have to look in every room for fire, so I am away from here a long time every night.’

  He didn’t actually say it, but the inference was that if any funny business had been going on in his basement, it must have been when he was away on his rounds.

  Meredith gave up eventually and turned to Ellis. ‘Do you known definitely when the last ash collection was made from here?’ he demanded.

  ‘Yesterday, about nine o’clock in the morning.’

  ‘And before that?’

  ‘Beginning of the week – Monday.’ Bob Ellis had it off pat.

  ‘So if the bones came from here, it must have been just before they were found in the dock?’

  He turned to look at the patient watchman. ‘Has he made a formal statement?’

  ‘Rees took it today. Said exactly what he’s told you. Damn all!’

  Old Nick rasped a finger over his stubble. ‘Better take the ash that’s accumulated since yesterday. Arrange for it to be collected and sent up to the forensic lab. There may be something still left that will tie it in with the bones. One bit would be enough for us.’

  Leaving the ancient Arab to his lonely vigil, they made their way back to the cars.

  ‘Hard to tell if he’s shooting us a line, sir.’ Ellis tried to break through the heavy silence that had come down like a curtain over Meredith.

  The senior man grunted in reply.

  ‘Have to get on the knocker round these streets, Ellis. All these houses, see if they heard anything unusual on Wednesday night or Thursday morning.’ He waved a hand at the rows of small terraced houses that made up Tydfil Street.

  Ellis nodded, then stopped hesitantly with his hand on the door of his Hillman.

  ‘Where now, sir? Back to the station?’

  Meredith straightened his black hat carefully.

  ‘No, I think the time has come to meet this Tiger,’ he said softly.

  Chapter Eight

  An hour later the opposition were having their own council of war.

  Joe Davies, glass in hand and feet propped on a coffee table, looked smug and confident. ‘You handled them like a genius, Tiger … that dark, miserable sod looked fit to hand in his badge when he was leaving.’

  His confid
ence cut no ice with Ismail, who stood restlessly near the window, staring down into the street below. He swung round on Joe, a glare of anger on his usually impassive face.

  ‘If it wasn’t for you brainless set of bastards, there would have been no need for this Meredith and his mob to have come here in the first place,’ he said in a biting snarl. ‘First that fool of a Greek with his car, then you … after this, I’m packing up, d’you hear! I’m starting from scratch, with a bunch of boys I can trust to do what I tell them.’

  Joe flushed and half rose from the chair. He thought better of it and sank back, taking a wallet from his pocket.

  ‘Look, Tiger, we had to rub him out, di’n’t we?’ he appealed. ‘He’d been on the snoop in here. God knows what he heard. Look at these!’ He held out two pieces of paper, but Ismail ignored them. Joe put them on the table and smoothed them out. ‘I told you, Tiger, Terry Rourke was planted on us. Here’s a cheque for fifteen quid signed by that bloody stupid private dick … and here’s a sheet of paper in your handwriting.’

  Ismail strode across and snatched it from Joe’s hand, throwing it into the hearth. ‘I told you, that’s only some rough accounts from the cafe.’

  Joe Davies wagged his head knowingly. ‘But it shows he went rooting through your papers, don’t it! In his wallet, these were, when we done him.’

  Tiger whirled away scornfully. ‘When you done him!’ he mimicked with a sneer. ‘Listen, we’re small-time thieves, not Al Capone. We’ve made a packet of money these past couple of years and not done a day’s bird for it. We haven’t made a million, but at least we’ve stayed outside the nick where we could enjoy the loot. Now you and the other BFs go and louse it all up by playing gangsters!’

  Joe started to protest his innocence, but Tiger, without raising his voice, steamrollered him by sheer force of personality. ‘Look, get it into your head that your level is knocking off trucks and a bit of smuggling. Even that bank idea you had was out of our class – it was that that dropped us right in it this time!’

  Davies muttered something under his breath and scowled into his drink. Archie Vaughan and Nikos Kalvos sat quietly, trying to look inconspicuous. Though they looked like naughty schoolboys, their naughtiness had led to a manslaughter charge hanging over them, possibly even murder.

  Like the affair with the car, it had been a case of misplaced enthusiasm. When Terry Rourke came downstairs after his snooping, he was wrong in thinking that his exploits had gone unnoticed. Uncle Ahmed, who was by no means as senile as he looked, had padded up the stairs after him and heard him searching in Tiger’s lounge.

  When Joe and the others came down later, Uncle had told them about Rourke. Joe had rushed out into the night after Terry and caught up with him at the phone box just as the Irish boy was finishing his call to Iago Price. When the others caught up they formed the grim reception committee for Rourke as he stepped from the box. Joe got the proceedings off to a good start by punching Terry in the mouth and the interview took that line from then on. They dragged him to a nearby alley and, in spite of a spirited defence, the three men pounded him into a stupor. They got no word of confession mixed with his rapidly weakening blasphemies.

  When he lay almost senseless on the cobbles, Joe Davies went through his pockets and triumphantly discovered the cheque and other papers from Tiger’s desk. With this proof of Rourke’s villainy, Joe decided to take him back to Tiger to see what was to be done. As he bent to pick him off the ground, the foxy Irishman brought a knee up to smash into Joe’s groin. With a quick twist, he was up and away, dashing for the open street at the end of the alley.

  In a blind rage of pain and anger, Davies – almost twice the size of Terry – pounded after him. He caught his victim within a few yards and grabbed him around the throat with a grip like a gorilla.

  At the sudden impact of thumb and fingers on both carotid arteries, Terry Rourke crumpled to the ground like an empty sack.

  When they tried to pick him up, they found that he was quite dead.

  ‘You done for ’im, Joe!’ whispered Archie, hoarsely. They stared aghast at the twisted shape on the ground.

  Uncle Ahmed, a late starter and a slow runner, caught them up and gazed down expressionlessly at the body. He alone had the sense to do something quickly. ‘Policeman come along soon – better get him home to the cafe,’ he said simply. ‘Pretend he is drunken.’

  Joe, his anger evaporated by the turn of events, nodded dully. He and Nikos, the other heavyweight, grabbed Terry on either side and they tried to imitate a party limping home after a heavy night on the beer. The charade was strained and cheerless, but their luck held and they went through the back lanes to the Cairo Restaurant without seeing a soul.

  Leaving the body in an outhouse they went up to Tiger’s room to tell him the bad news.

  His cold, seething anger was worse than a violent rage, but his inbred fatalism rapidly brought him around to practical matters.

  ‘Sure he’s dead, you damn fools?’ he hissed.

  Joe nodded miserably. He was grey and sweating with delayed shock. He had many a wounding and ‘grievous bodily harm’ to his credit, but a killing was new to him.

  Ismail pulled on a suede jacket. ‘Wait here – I’m going round to see someone.’

  Taking the old uncle, he drove his Zodiac to within a few hundred yards of the Compass Building in Tydfil Street. Dropping Ahmed off, he drove well away and came back in ten minutes to pick up the old man again. Uncle Ahmed reported that Arif, his second cousin, was on duty in the basement as usual and had taken the hint to be out of the way for the next half hour, with no questions asked.

  Tiger drove back to Bute Street and garaged the car. A few minutes later an old Morris station wagon, belonging to yet another distant member of the family, was on the road. It stopped for a couple of seconds at the basement steps of the office building, sufficient time for Joe Davies and the Greek to slide down the steps with a long bundle wrapped in sacking. Ten minutes later, the two men walked back to the main road to be picked up by the cruising Morris. It was now well after midnight and there was no one to notice the black smoke that drifted for a time high over the Compass building.

  Since that Wednesday night, Tiger had gone over every detail of the affair in his mind a hundred times. So far he could find no flaw, apart from the unlikely chance of someone peering through their windows for a brief moment in the middle of the night – someone who would have to have super-cat’s eyes in that gloom. The only real flaw had been the great one of having the murder discovered at all and the even more tragic one of having the police tracing it back to the Compass Building so quickly.

  Though this was a setback of the first order, he still felt that they were safe enough. Uncle Ahmed had told his cousin to spend all night breaking up anything he could find in the furnace with a cleaning rod. The old fool must have missed the jawbone and knocked it through the fire-bars into the ash pan. He had been instructed to look through the ashes as well, and destroy any recognizable pieces, but evidently this was easier said than done. ‘You think old Arif will be copper-proof?’ asked Joe now.

  Tiger glared at him coldly. ‘If you do half as well, we’ll be all right. My family stick together – and think before they do crazy things!’ he retorted acidly.

  He paced up and down the thick carpet. He was not worried about the nightwatchman’s tongue wagging – he could put on his deaf and dumb act for eternity. It was this mob here that worried him.

  The police had spent almost an hour at the Cairo this evening. Thankfully, only Tiger and the cafe staff were there. Meredith expected – and drew – a complete blank from everyone. No one had heard anything, seen anything or knew anything about anything!

  Yes, Terry Rourke had worked there for a day and a half. He had gone off on Wednesday night as usual and had not been seen since. They knew his feckless reputation and were not a bit surprised.

  Meredith, with the intuition of years of interviewing behind him, knew it was waste of
time trying any clever methods of interrogation on them. This bunch were as close as any Mafiosi and had the added veneer of the East to deter any questioner.

  He admitted to Tiger that he had no warrant, but asked to see over the premises. Ismail readily agreed and with a certain sense of futility, Meredith and Ellis tramped through every room and looked in every cupboard.

  Then they went away, to think of something else to do.

  At ten o’clock Nicholas Meredith called it a day and left headquarters for home. He drove slowly back to his home at Lakeside, in the northern part of the city thinking all the way of the various unsatisfactory angles of his first killing in Wales.

  It seemed impossible to think otherwise than that Ismail’s mob must be responsible for Rourke’s death.

  If Iago Price were to be believed, then there was a definite threat of events touching the owner of the Cairo Restaurant at several points. The running-down of Price and Summers – if it was no accident – followed close on Joe Davies’s encounter with Summers at the Red Dragon public house and on the odd behaviour of a man almost certain to be Archie Vaughan. Even now, Ellis and Rees were looking for the other members of Ismael’s clique to interview them, but Meredith had little doubt that they would have ready-made stories to cover their movements.

  As he drove sedately past the large lake in Roath Park, he wondered how much he could rely on Iago’s story about Terry Rourke’s last phone call. All that mumbo-jumbo about ‘gaffer’s chips’ seemed too puerile to be imagination and was perhaps all the more credible as a result.

  Certainly, Rourke had gone to the cafe to work. Tiger Ismail admitted that freely … and Iago Price had a counterfoil in his chequebook to show that he had paid Rourke a retainer, so that appeared to tie up the truth of the whole over-dramatic affair.

  But there, the trail of evidence ended abruptly. Ismail said that Rourke had left work on Wednesday night and hadn’t been back … in the absence of any other evidence, that was Full Stop Number One.