Tiger at Bay

by Bernard Knight

  Then the body had almost certainly been disposed of in the Compass Building – the furniture factory was far less likely, thought Meredith, as he swung his Austin into the new estate where he lived.

  The last pointer was that a relative of Tiger was on duty at a time when the body was almost certainly cremated – old Arif’s relationship to the Ismail clan had just been unearthed by Detective Sergeant Rees. Although this sounded promising at the start, it was really about as much evidential value as a puff of smoke. Tiger had lost no time in pointing out that at least a hundred people in Cardiff’s dockland were related to him as closely as old Pandek. And as the old man himself steadfastly professed complete ignorance of any unusual happenings on the night in question, that brought that line of investigation to a sharp halt, unless they could dig up some independent witnesses.

  Meredith pulled into the drive of the small detached house that he had recently bought at an extortionate price. Stopping the car in the drive – the garage was still crammed with overflowing furniture and packing cases – he sat for a moment to let his train of thought run its course.

  Summers … he was still comatose in the Royal Infirmary and the doctors refused to forecast when – or even if – he would be fit for questioning. If only he would wake up, he could at least corroborate Iago Price’s tale … every now and then, Meredith had the horrible feeling that the private detective might be a complete nutcase and had invented the whole affair! Though he consoled himself with the fact that Price could hardly have invented that half-burnt lower jaw.

  Old Nick climbed wearily out of the car, locked it up and went indoors.

  Gwen, his amiable, rotund wife, gave him a smile from in front of the television set, then her hypnotized eyes swung back to the screen. ‘It’s in the bottom oven, Nick – mind the plate, it’ll be hot.’

  As a detective’s wife, she had hardly ever managed to put a freshly prepared meal in front of him –he was always late, or never came home at all.

  Meredith went through into the kitchen as Gwen called more instructions after him. ‘Cake in the cupboard. There are oranges there, too. Should be nice, the man said there was a shipload of the new season’s Jaffas just arrived.’

  As he sat down to the beautifully cooked, if slightly dried-up supper, he was conscious of a nagging at the back of his mind. For a time he drowned it with other, more immediate thoughts, but as he reached for one of the large oranges, his wife’s idle words came back to him.

  ‘… a shipload of new Jaffas’ … Jaffa ship … ‘gaffer’s chips’. He grinned bleakly at his childishness, and impatiently tore the thick skin from the fruit.

  But all through the rest of the meal and later, while staring unseeingly at some inane thriller film, the similarity of the phrases kept niggling at his mind.

  As there seemed nothing he could do about it, he forced it to the back of his brain. Yet later, when lying in his oversized bed and staring at the ceiling, the words crept back into his consciousness and hovered around until he slipped down the dark slope to sleep.

  Next morning, Meredith found that the business of the oranges had incubated in his mind overnight and now refused to be subdued. He was still in his dressing gown when he went downstairs to phone Ellis at home.

  In London, he would have made the enquiries himself, in order to limit the circle of people to whom he might make a fool of himself. But he didn’t yet know his way around Cardiff sufficiently well to do this and a few words to Bob Ellis would save time, if not his face. Twenty minutes later, the DI rang back.

  ‘Took a long time,’ he apologized, ‘but Sunday morning is hopeless for tracking people down. Anyway, you seem to have hit something, sir.’

  ‘Well?’ barked Meredith, covering his thankfulness with an ungrateful grunt.

  ‘I got on to the Transport Police at the docks, then the harbourmaster’s sidekick and finally a shipping company agent.’

  Meredith fretted away at Ellis’s long-winded approach, but the other man was almost at the meat. ‘There’s a boat due tonight from Marseilles – half her cargo is Jaffa oranges from Haifa. She’s on a regular general cargo run, always brings oranges this time of year, sometimes calls at Genoa and Alexandria as well.’ Meredith grunted again and thought hard.

  Like almost everything else in the damned case, there could be a perfectly ordinary explanation for what was hardly even a coincidence. Firstly, was ‘gaffer’s chips’ really anything like ‘Jaffa ship’? And if so, was the fact significant that such a ship was due on the night mentioned?

  And what possible connection could a gang of suspected lorry-hijackers have with an ocean-going vessel … surely they were not turning their criminal talents to piracy or going into the fruit business!

  So many questions – and only one way to get an answer.

  ‘We’ll check on this, Ellis – just in case … what’s the name of the ship?’

  ‘The Akra Siros, sir … Greek owned. She’s a regular caller here. The agent said she had a mixed crew, mostly Greek but some Frenchmen and Levantines.’

  The phone rasped against Meredith’s morning stubble as his thoughts took a rapid new turn. The Levant – Alexandria – Genoa – Marseilles. He needed no crystal ball to find a common factor here, which would interest any police officer or Customs man. These were some of the main stations on the drug road from the East, either as halfway houses for opium or cannabis or for the conversion of crude opium into heroin in illegal laboratories, mainly in Turkey and Southern France.

  He still couldn’t see where this fitted in with Ismail, but it was better to be safe than sorry.

  ‘Ellis, get on to the Drugs Squad and see if they’ve got any thoughts about this set-up. Better speak to the Customs Waterguard too; they might want to be in on it. We may have to have a reception party for the Akra Siros.’

  Feeling slightly ashamed at leaving it all to Ellis, he went off for a shave.

  High tide was just after midnight, but by eleven o’clock there was sufficient water at the Queen’s Dock entrance for the Akra Siros to get into the locks.

  The fog had cleared and the rain had stopped, but there was a keen wind as the policemen and Customs officers stood on the Pierhead and watched the ship approaching.

  There was no real need for Meredith and Ellis to be there, but curiosity had got the better of the chief superintendent, mixed with a need to know if he was making a fool of himself. Bundled into their overcoats, the two CID men stood with Watkins, the detective inspector who dealt with drugs among a ragbag of other duties.

  ‘Never heard any whispers about this ship, sir,’ said Watkins in a mildly aggrieved voice. He moved closer and carefully stood so that Old Nick was between him and the wind. ‘The number of drug hauls we’ve had on the docks is damn-all, anyway – most of the stuff comes from London and the south coast.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen,’ muttered Meredith, ‘only that you haven’t caught ’em at it.’ The possibility of his pride soon taking a nosedive, if nothing was found, made his mood none the sweeter.

  As the black shape of the ship approached behind a tug, the Preventive officer from the Customs and Excise broke away from his waiting Rummage crew and came over to the policemen.

  ‘We’ll board her right away, Mr Meredith, and I’ll go straight to see the Master – I’ve got five men for a search. Though, of course, it might take days to go right through the whole ship, if anything is hidden in the holds. But we’ll have a quick look through the crew’s quarters tonight. Anything more will have to wait until morning.

  Old Nick nodded gloomily. As the ship got nearer, it seemed to look more and more like a mountain. The possibility of finding a small package in that great mass of steel seemed an impossibility.

  The rush of water from the lock had stopped and the outer gates were slowly opening. They flattened into their recesses in the granite walls and the leading tug entered the dock, straining the towering bows of the ship against the blustery wind.

&n
bsp; The Akra Siros was an old vessel, an ex-Liberty ship surviving from the war. Though loaded, she rose high in the water and tended to catch the gusting wind. Her bows slid past the gates, then a squall swung her stern around. The rusty plating on her port quarter rubbed along the quayside, raising a shower of sparks and a hideous grinding noise. The stern tug hauled her off and she came to a stop in the lock with no more protests.

  As the gates closed, the ship was warped in to the lock side and an ordinary painter’s ladder was thrust over the rail for the people who huddled on the quay.

  Port Health officials and the ship’s agent clambered aboard, then the Preventive officer led his Rummage crew on deck. The senior man went straight to the bridge, while the other Customs men split up and went various ways, their experience telling them the most likely places for a quick check on contraband.

  Though the Akra Siros was loosely tied up while the lock filled, she was slowly prancing back and forth a few feet in the wind and the long ladder swayed and rocked in spite of its lashings.

  The three detectives clambered clumsily aboard and stood awkwardly on the cold deck, now deserted.

  ‘We’re a bit off our beat here, sir,’ said Ellis, his teeth chattering, ‘Let’s get up there, where the Customs chap went.’

  They groped their way up ladders and by trial and error found their way to the captain’s flat below the bridge.

  The Preventive officer was talking to the ship’s master just inside the open door of his day-cabin. He was a florid, bad-tempered Frenchman and he seemed not to be taking too kindly to the prospect of an extensive search of his vessel.

  ‘How do I know what my crew are up to?’ he demanded. ‘They change every trip – I do not know the names of half of them!’ He waved his hands about angrily and was obviously impatient to get back to drinking with the agent who hovered in the background.

  The Customs man winked at Meredith and they all left the captain’s quarters to go down to the ‘fo’c’sle’, which, paradoxically, was right in the stern of the ship.

  As they crossed the after-deck, one of the Rummage crew dashed out of a door in the stern quarters and ran to the ship’s rail. He leant out over the side and yelled something into the darkness.

  The Preventive officer broke into a run and the police followed him. Though there were bulkhead lights and a cargo floodlight in the mainmast rigging, the deck was full of shadows, and Meredith fell sprawling over some unidentifiable piece of metal.

  He fell heavily and pulled himself up, cursing fluently.

  Bob Ellis doubled back to help him, but the senior man shook him off impatiently. ‘I’m all right – what the hell’s the panic about?’ They joined the two Customs men and Watkins, who stood at the rail, pointing at the dark water.

  The ship only occupied two-thirds of the width of the lock and a stretch of inky-black water lay between them and the opposite quay.

  ‘Someone threw a package through an open porthole down below,’ snapped the Rummage crewman. ‘Fred Lloyd has got him all right, but I’m trying to see if the packet is still afloat.’

  They all searched the water with their eyes, but it was an abyss of blackness down there.

  The inner lock gates had just opened and a small rowing boat appeared in the gap, being sculled by a man in the stern. The Akra Siros was being put on buoys in the middle of the dock for the night and the boatmen were there to take out the hawsers.

  The Customs officer put his hands to his mouth and bellowed down the lock, ‘Boatman! Come up the lock – quickly.’

  A couple more shouts brought the little skiff nearer and it stopped directly beneath them. By then, other Customs men had got all the deck lights switched on and a wander lamp hung over the side.

  The illumination was still feeble, but was enough for the man in the boat to locate what they were looking for. Minutes later, the Preventive officer was holding a brown package the size of a small brick, wrapped in oiled paper inside a polythene bag.

  Almost before he had touched it, he said ‘Cannabis!’

  He smelt it and nodded in satisfaction, then handed it over to Watkins, who did the same.

  ‘Better see the merchant who dumped this, said Meredith grimly, after a cursory look at the packet.

  Inside the unattractive crew’s quarters, they found another member of the Rummage crew standing guard over a dismal-looking fellow with dark skin and a great hooked nose. He stared at the floor and refused to speak at all.

  The ship’s First Officer – a Greek – appeared and reluctantly identified the culprit as a Lebanese deckhand, a regular who had been with the ship for three or four trips in and out of Cardiff.

  ‘And I’ll bet he handed over a brick-sized packet every time,’ muttered Meredith to the discomfited Drug Squad inspector.

  Nothing would induce the man to speak, though the Mate said that he understood English well enough. The Customs man who had run up on deck said that he had caught the Lebanese throwing something through the porthole just as he came into the mess room. It was impossible to say where it had been hidden, but there were a dozen places big enough to conceal it – all the seats around the tables were boxes with padded tops and would have held half a ton of hashish.

  ‘Better give this place the old toothcomb treatment,’ said the senior Customs officer, ‘but I’ve a feeling we’ve had all our luck for tonight.’

  ‘It was luck enough that the stuff floated instead of going to the bottom,’ said Ellis thankfully.

  Watkins looked at the package in his hand. ‘It’s raw stuff – much lighter than the purified resin. That would have gone down like a stone. This waxed paper and the air trapped inside the plastic bag kept it up.’

  Meredith murmured in Ellis’s ear. ‘We’ve got to try and break this deckhand down and tie him in with Ismail, or we’ve wasted a whole night as far as that side of things is concerned. Let’s get him back to Bute Street.’

  Twenty minutes later, after some mugs of nightshift tea, they sat down in the CID room of the Docks station and tried to wring something from the blank-faced Levantine.

  After a quarter of an hour, all they had achieved was ten repetitions of the word ‘Consul’. Meredith’s eyes were starting to get bloodshot and he had to restrain himself from flinging furniture at the infuriatingly uncooperative sailor.

  At last, throwing the Judges’ Rules to the winds, he stooped menacingly over the seated deckhand and brought his clenched fist gently up under his nose. ‘Listen, sailor-boy,’ he hissed, ‘you get this – chop-chop! … you don‘t tell me anything, then you go to jail so long your mother and father will forget you ever lived – savvy?’

  This had an immediate effect. Meredith’s pent-up passion, more than the actual words, caused the man to suddenly remember his English.

  ‘I don’t know nothing, boss,’ he muttered sullenly.

  ‘Who were you to give the packet to, eh?’ snapped Old Nick.

  There was no answer and the chief superintendent suddenly slammed his other hand on to back of the chair. An innocent move, but it did the trick. The sailor’s eyes flicked across and he licked his lips. ‘Honest, I don’t know. I was to keep it till somebody came to fetch it on ship.’

  ‘What happened the other times – who fetched it then?’

  But the magic had gone. Over and over, the Lebanese denied he had ever brought hemp into the country and nothing Meredith or Ellis could pretend to threaten would alter his story.

  After an hour they gave up and at two thirty in the morning – and in a very bad temper – Meredith threw himself into his half of the conjugal bed.

  His wife stirred slightly. ‘Have a nice time, dear?’ she murmured and went back to sleep again.

  Chapter Nine

  Iago Price had spent a miserable weekend.

  His self-reproach about Terry Rourke’s death had not faded with the passing of the days – rather it had grown stronger in his mind. He had moped about his flat all weekend. His parents were still abroad and th
e loss of his usual Sunday duty visit to them had thrown him even more upon his own dismal company.

  It poured with rain each day and Iago felt that if ever he were to do away with himself, this was the sort of weekend it would happen. At lunchtime, he sat in his frayed dressing gown pecking at a reheated frozen meal and staring glumly at the fungus that was starting to grow on the inside of his window frame.

  As he listlessly prodded his ‘Tastee-Peez’ he wished that Dilys was here. She was not scintillating company, but she was a woman. Iago had never managed to manoeuvre her into his seedy flat – in fact, he had never managed to manoeuvre her anywhere, apart from the Glendower Arms.

  He couldn’t explain why he was so fascinated by her. She was conceited, as hard as nails, not very intelligent and treated him with about as much affection as her typewriter. Yet he had come to wait eagerly for every working day, so that he could share the same office with her; every evening, the few minutes in the pub was like an assignation with a fairy princess to him.

  He had once read some cynic’s words who said that a man will eventually fall in love with the most repulsive woman on earth, if she is the only one available. He hardly rated his office as a desert island, but if he had thought about it, the fact of being thrown together for so many hours a day was leading to an inevitable infatuation.

  The urge to hug her, kiss and slap her bottom playfully was always with him now – only her cold glare kept him at bay.

  She was common, ill-mannered and spoke abominably, but he was rapidly becoming crazed with her. As the rain dribbled down his window panes, fantasies of an alluring Dilys came thick and fast upon poor Iago.

  Then he sighed and pushed his plate away – Terry’s ghost had returned to drive away Dilys’ mirage.

  Poor Terry – he had only met the boy for a few minutes, but the feeling of guilt would be with Iago for life unless he found some means of exorcising it.

  Tiger Ismail and his crowd had killed Rourke – Iago was convinced of that. Yet it looked as though they were going to get clean away with it. He had had an unofficial word with Ellis on the phone that morning – he was by far the most approachable of the policemen. Ellis had more or less said that there was no evidence at all to connect the restaurant owner with the crime and unless they could unearth some independent witness there was no chance of a charge being brought against Tiger or his cronies.