Shoot to Kill

by James Craig

  The guy readjusted his cap and kept filming. ‘Danny Craven, Scattered Flowers Productions.’

  ‘What?’

  Keeping his eye glued to the viewfinder, Craven pulled a crumpled business card from the back pocket of his jeans and thrust it towards Carlyle. ‘Content providers for the Mayor’s website.’

  Reluctantly taking the card, the inspector weighed it in his hand as if it was a piece of desiccated dog shit. Several thoughts passed through his mind, none of them pleasant. ‘Fuck that,’ he said, striding towards the door. ‘Sergeant Bishop! You can arrest this stupid fucker as well.’

  ‘Sure thing,’ said Bishop with a smile.

  Sticking to his task, Craven went in for a close-up on the belligerent stripper.

  ‘Good man!’ Carlyle shoved Craven’s card into his jacket pocket. Over his shoulder, he gave the troops a regal wave. ‘I’ll see you back at Agar Street.’ After, he said to himself, I’ve had a decent kip.

  Another day, another dollar. Wiping the sweat from his brow, Adrian Gasparino watched as a small contingent of Afghan National Army soldiers entered the compound, looking like a bunch of schoolkids on a day out. As far as he knew, they hadn’t been expecting any ANA, but that didn’t mean much – they had a habit of just showing up.

  Given that the ANA were usually quite good at arriving in places where there wasn’t going to be any fighting, he was happy enough to see them. Maybe this would be a quiet day at the office for all of them. He counted a dozen of them as they stood aimlessly in a group about twenty feet from where he was sitting. None of them looked older than about fourteen; they were small, stick-thin, their uniforms several sizes too big, with hollow cheeks and dead eyes. Gasparino sighed. The idea that the coalition forces could train these boys to take the place of professional soldiers was just another of the fantasies you had to believe in if you were to try and convince yourself that this was a war worth fighting and that the billions of dollars’ of weapons, equipment and aid thrown at the locals had been money well spent.

  The British Prime Minister, a feckless ex-public schoolboy by the name of Edgar Carlton, had recently said that the 10,000 British troops in Afghanistan could start withdrawing from as early as next year. British commanders were under ever-greater pressure to talk up the ANA and its ability to take over responsibility for security in the country. The 146,000 trained ‘Afghan warriors’ had to be praised at all times. Gasparino had been particularly amused by the comments of the Commanding Officer of Task Force Helmand Brigade Advisory Group at one press conference: ‘They are brave in the fight. They are willing to tackle the insurgents head on and they are astute and shrewd in their judgement when they are dealing with the local population.’

  If the embedded hacks had taken the comments at face value, the soldiers had been somewhat more sceptical. ‘Bollocks,’ had been the sergeant’s mumbled response. ‘I wouldn’t want those bastards watching my back.’

  Most of the ANA soldiers carried M-16 assault rifles, although Gasparino noticed a couple carried AK-74s, weapons left over from the days when the Soviets had been fighting here. One of them had a 7.62mm, M240 machine gun slung over his shoulder. All of them looked jumpy, although that was the usual state for members of the ANA. Gasparino noticed that a couple of them were holding hands, ‘man love’ being Standard Operating Procedure in the ANA. He shook his head, mumbling the local Afghan saying to himself: ‘Women are for children, boys are for pleasure.’ It was accepted that many Pashtun men were bacha baz – ‘boy players’. Like his colleagues, Gasparino had been shocked by the tradition of Afghan men taking boys, some as young as eight or nine, as lovers. In Kandahar, on an earlier tour, he had been to a dance party where boys of around nine dressed up as girls, with make-up and bells on their feet, performing for leering middle-aged men who threw money at them before whisking them off for sex. One of the unit’s translators, Rahmatullah, had explained to him that it was down to Islamic law. Women – covered from head to foot – are invisible and unapproachable. It is commonly accepted that Afghan men cannot talk to an unrelated woman until after they have proposed marriage. ‘How can you fall in love if you can’t see her face?’ Rahmatullah asked. ‘We can see the boys, so we can tell which ones are beautiful.’

  ‘But,’ Gasparino frowned, ‘doesn’t Islamic law also forbid homosexuality?’

  ‘We don’t love them,’ Rahmatullah shrugged, ‘we just have sex with them.’

  ‘Bloody hell!’ Gasparino laughed nervously. ‘You make it sound like the Catholic Church.’

  Rahmatullah gave him a confused look.

  ‘Never mind.’

  ‘Are you after a boy yourself?’

  ‘Er, no thanks.’ Gasparino felt himself blush violently as he beat a hasty retreat back to the camp.

  It was a conversation that Gasparino had played over in his head many times. However you looked at it, the set-up was basically institutionalized child abuse. He was all for religious tolerance, but couldn’t get past the fact that many aspects of the treatment of children and women here were just plain wrong. He thought about what his own family life would be like – a world away from this – and felt more confused than ever about what he was supposed to be doing here. The whole situation made him hugely uneasy – but he had no idea what he could do about it.

  He watched as one of the sergeants, Spencer Spanner, wandered over to the ANA’s commanding officer, a lieutenant who was still too young to be able to grow a proper beard, shook hands and started talking. There was the usual gesturing and waving, head-scratching and grinning as Spanner explained about the day’s operation and tried to get to the bottom of just what exactly it was that the ANA were up to. Gasparino felt a wave of nostalgia wash over him. Spanner was a great bloke; he would miss him, back in England. Closing his eyes, his mind wandered to the shower he would have back at camp. After that he would try and call Justine, leaving it as late as possible, in case today was the date of her scan.

  TEN

  The receptionist had disappeared without a trace. Sitting in the empty waiting room, with nothing on the off-white walls, Roche looked around for something to read. But there were no pamphlets, no magazines to browse, not so much as a copy of yesterday’s Standard or today’s Metro. The idea was that you just sat there and contemplated your fate.

  What was Dr Wolf’s first name? She had no idea and, somewhat disappointingly for a police officer, no real curiosity either. Wolf was not someone she saw as ‘helping’ her situation; rather he was just another part of the bureaucratic maze that she had to negotiate, in order to continue with her professional life.

  The question of the guy’s name fluttered across her brain as she was trying to focus on other, more important things. Or maybe less important things. Different things. Alison Roche had seen the psychiatrist, once before and once after her arrival in SO15. Those had been routine meetings. This, most definitely, was not.

  Roche fretted about not calling Carlyle ahead of her visit. She knew that the inspector had been sent to see this guy too. A couple of years ago, Commander Simpson had insisted on Carlyle getting some ‘help’ when his run-in with SO15 and Mossad had spiralled out of control. Roche had even busted him out of a session one time; inventing an ‘emergency’ that allowed the pair of them to escape to a nearby café.

  Even now, the thought of the inspector being made to sit through an hour of Dr Wolf’s painful extended silences made her laugh. Carlyle was easily the most shrink-proof person she had ever met: he just didn’t do introspection – that was something they had in common.

  All the same, maybe he could have given her some tips on how to handle the session; how to take control, keep Wolf at arms’ length. Fail to prepare, the saying went, and prepare to fail. Maybe, after the massacre at St Pancras, she wanted to fail.

  After a while, the door to Wolf’s office opened. The shrink popped out his head and beckoned her inside. The room itself was small and cosy. Littered with family photos and books, it had a lived-in look
that Wolf had doubtless striven hard to create. There being no couch, Roche took a seat in one of the two armchairs in front of the battered wooden desk. From the bay window behind the desk came the remaining dregs of the afternoon gloom, along with the reassuring hum of rush-hour traffic. Illumination came from a freestanding floor lamp in the corner, its light falling across a framed poster for The Wild Bunch.

  Roche cleared her throat. Better get on with it, she thought. ‘Good evening, Doctor.’

  ‘Good evening to you, Sergeant Roche,’ Wolf replied, somewhat uncertainly, as he slipped into the chair behind the desk. Opening a hardback A4 notebook, he flicked through the pages until he came to the notes he was looking for. Running an index finger down the page, he scanned them carefully.

  Waiting patiently, Roche looked Wolf up and down. In a grey, open-neck shirt, he was a short, wizened man of indeterminate age, with watery blue eyes and long grey hair, tied back into a rather unfortunate ponytail. Sometimes he wore a wedding band. Today it was absent. Otherwise, she noticed no differences from her last visit.

  After what seemed like several minutes, Wolf closed his notebook and looked up. ‘So,’ he smiled, then said in an accent that Roche had never been able to place, ‘how are we today?’

  ‘I am okay,’ said Roche, careful to sit up straight in her seat.

  ‘I see that you have gone back to work,’ Wolf said evenly.

  ‘Like I said,’ Roche replied, ‘I feel fine. I saw no reason to stay away. I think it is good to get back to being busy.’

  Wolf leaned across the desk. ‘But you are not able to carry a gun.’

  ‘No,’ Roche said calmly. ‘Given what happened, there will need to be an investigation before I can do that.’

  The shrink raised his eyebrows. ‘How does that make you feel?’

  Ha! thought Roche. I saw that one coming. A tight smile spread across her lips. ‘It makes me feel that I am going through a proper and professional process that will help me return to my full range of duties in due course.’

  Sighing, Wolf sat back in his chair and folded his arms. ‘Tell me about what happened when you lost the prisoner.’

  Christian Holyrod took a sniff of his half-full tumbler of Auchentoshan Three Wood and let out a purr of pleasure. Allowing the blackcurrant, orange, plum and raisin aroma to fill his nostrils, he took a healthy mouthful of the Lowland single malt. The oaky sweetness covered his tongue and he swallowed slowly. Sitting forward in his chair, the Mayor pulled up the video file that had just arrived in the inbox of his private email account and hit Play. As the interior of Everton’s Gentleman’s Club filled the 17-inch screen he took another mouthful of whisky and carefully placed the glass on his desk next to the laptop. Slipping on his telephone headset, he quickly dialled the number of Abigail Slater with one hand while fumbling with his fly with the other.

  She picked up immediately, even before he had time to find his member. ‘I’m in a meeting,’ she whispered.

  Distracted by the black woman straddling the pole on the screen in front of him, he could only manage a grunt.

  ‘Christian?’

  Finally releasing his tool, Holyrod began massaging himself. ‘I was just . . .’ A blonde girl had arrived on the stage and proceeded to stick her face between her colleague’s buttocks. Squeezing the tip of his penis between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, the Mayor began to pant. He hadn’t realized just how horny he was; this was going to be a sixty-second job, at most.

  ‘Christian?’ his mistress said crossly, her voice rising as she became more angry. ‘Are you all right?’

  Just when he thought he was going to reach la petite mort, the fake lesbians disappeared and the screen went blank. ‘Shit!’

  ‘Christian!’

  For some reason, she sounded like his mother. It was not a mental image he wanted right at this moment and he tried to shake it from his mind. Happily, the screen burst back into life with an image of the naked Amazon haranguing a cowering police officer.

  ‘Hello?’

  The more annoyed Abigail sounded, the more aroused he became. ‘I was just wondering,’ he groaned, ‘what kind of underwear you’ve got on.’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ she breathed, lowering her voice to less than a whisper, ‘you’re not playing with yourself again, are you?’

  The Amazon was astride the policeman now, hitting him repeatedly over the head with what looked like an outsized albino truncheon.

  ‘Good God!’

  As he teetered on the point of no return, Holyrod watched in horror as the camera jerked up and away from the action. For a couple of seconds he was treated to a series of shots of Everton’s ceiling. Then a face filled the screen. As it came into focus, Holyrod let his erection slip from his hand. ‘Holy shit!’ he hissed, trying not to fall from his chair. ‘What the fuck are you doing there?’

  ‘Thanks.’ Carlyle took the mug from his wife and gave her a quick peck on the forehead. Alice had already left for school and they had the flat to themselves. Taking a couple of hasty gulps of peppermint tea, he poured the rest down the sink.

  ‘In a hurry?’ Helen asked.

  ‘I’ve got to get going,’ he replied. ‘See how the great strip-club round-up is going.’

  She gave him a stern look. ‘I hope you’re not going back there.’ Helen had been deeply unimpressed by his tale of the raid on Everton’s. Although she trusted her husband, she saw no need to have him put needlessly in the way of temptation. For that reason, the Vice Squad had never appeared on Carlyle’s cv.

  ‘No, no,’ he said hurriedly, trying not to sound too defensive. ‘I’m off to the station.’

  ‘Good,’ she said, reaching up on to her toes and giving him a kiss on the lips. ‘I’ll see you later.’

  Standing on the pavement, the inspector watched a group of four white guys unload the back of an open-topped lorry on the opposite side of the street. They were fitting out what had been Il Buffone, the café that Carlyle would visit most days for his breakfast. The owner, Marcello Aversa, would have a double macchiato and outsized raisin Danish on the table in front of him almost before Carlyle had slipped into the back booth where he liked to sit, contemplating the day ahead under a crumbling poster of the 1984 Juventus scudetto winning squad, the team of Trapattoni and Platini, higher beings from a different time. With Marcello retired, Carlyle knew that the place would never be the same. But a man still had to eat and he was prepared to give the new establishment a go.

  Slowly, a couple of the men began lifting the new sign into place above the front door. Carlyle’s jaw dropped. ‘You’re fucking kidding!’ he wailed. ‘A kebab shop?’ One of the men gave him a dirty look. Carlyle glared back at him before turning on his heel and heading quickly in the direction of Holborn tube, his stomach grumbling noisily. Ten minutes later, he was sitting in the basement of Cornwell & Black Opticians, trying to guess the blurred letters that were being flashed up on the screen in front of him.

  ‘Your eyes are fine, Inspector.’ Denzil Taleb swivelled on his stool and scribbled some notes in Carlyle’s file. ‘You are just a bit short-sighted.’

  Carlyle grunted the most reluctant of acknowledgements.

  Denzil, a small, wiry man in his sixties, sporting a pair of thick black Prada frames which kept slipping down his nose, smiled happily, safe in the knowledge that there would never be a lack of demand for his services. ‘We all need glasses as we get older, it’s just a fact of life.’ Sliding off the stool, he moved to the door. ‘Let’s go upstairs and find a nice pair for you.’

  Extracting himself from the examination chair, Carlyle followed. Ten minutes later, he had chosen a pair of half-rimmed, gunmetal grey Police frames. Effortlessly relieving him of £300, Denzil cheerily informed the inspector that his new glasses would be ready the next day.

  ‘How is your wife getting on with her reading spectacles?’ Denzil asked, as he walked Carlyle out.

  ‘Fine,’ the inspector smiled wanly, still feeling the pain
in his Visa card. He didn’t have the heart to tell the optician that Helen had lost her glasses again.

  ‘Pass on my regards,’ Denzil said, giving him a gentle pat on the back. ‘We’ll let both of you know when it’s time for your regular examinations.’

  Great, Carlyle reflected; something else to relieve us of our cash. He shook the optician’s outstretched hand. ‘Thanks,’ he said insincerely. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  Belatedly realizing that they were a long way from home turf, Dominic Silver watched the silver-haired gentleman standing next to him flick off the safety on the Italian pistol that nestled all too comfortably in his right hand. Taking a deep breath, he glanced over at the impassive face of Gideon Spanner. Sticking his hands into the back pockets of his Firetrap jeans, Spanner gave the slightest of shrugs. All they could do was indulge their host.

  In front of them stood three guys – teenagers, Dom guessed – in regulation hoodies and sweat pants. All three had been relieved of their shoes and socks. And beaten, badly beaten. One had his left eye almost completely closed by a massive shiner. Another had blood still spilling from his left ear. Indeed, it looked as if the ear had been half-sliced off. Silver was mesmerized by it, even as he wanted to look away. As the forlorn trio stood, heads bowed, shifting from foot to filthy foot on the cold, clammy concrete floor, he wondered how much of this show was for his benefit. Maybe about half, he concluded. There would be others who were meant to get the message as well. Dom sighed; he wasn’t a fan of violence. Invariably, he had found it to be unnecessary, if not counter-productive. But, in the business that he was in, he knew that it was often unavoidable.

  The barrel of the gun was pointed casually at the middle hoodie. ‘Lorsque vous devez tirer, tirez – n’en parlez pas.’

  Silver and Spanner exchanged another look.

  The old man with the gun glanced over at Silver. ‘Do you speak French, Dominic?’