Buckingham Palace Blues

by James Craig

  ‘Sorry,’ Carlyle grinned, ‘but I was still hungry.’ To his left, he noticed that the owner was placing a tray of Danish pastries on the counter. They looked good. Carlyle gestured at the tray. ‘I’ll have one of those and another coffee. Thanks.’ He turned back to the girl. ‘Would you like anything else?’

  She showed him another picture on the menu. ‘Ice cream.’

  What an interesting English vocabulary you have, Carlyle thought. He turned to the owner: ‘Ice cream for breakfast it is.’

  The owner nodded. ‘We have vanilla, strawberry, pistachio, chocolate . . .’

  ‘’

  ‘ Chocolate?’ The man smiled. ‘Okay . . . chocolate.’

  The girl slid out of her chair and the pair of them disappeared behind the counter. Carlyle heard boxes being shifted around and some giggling, before the girl returned triumphantly with three massive scoops of chocolate ice cream.

  He watched her demolish the first scoop before standing up and stepping over to the counter, where the owner was lifting his pastry from the tray.

  ‘What language was that you were speaking?’ Carlyle asked quietly.

  The man looked at him in surprise.

  Carlyle pulled his ID from his pocket but didn’t open it. ‘You know that I am police?’

  The man placed Carlyle’s Danish on the counter. ‘Yes.’

  ‘So where are you from?’

  The man turned to the Gaggia coffee-machine. ‘I am from the Ukraine. More than twenty years now. And so is the girl.’ He gave the policeman a stern look. ‘You should know that.’

  I do now, Carlyle thought. Thank you.

  By the time Carlyle returned to the table, the girl had finished her ice cream. He handed her a napkin and gestured for her to wipe her mouth. As she did so, his phone started vibrating. There was no number ID, but he picked it up anyway. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Inspector Carlyle?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘This is Hilary Green of Westminster Social Services. What are you doing?’ The woman sounded as annoyed as he himself felt.

  Waiting for you, love, Carlyle thought, as I have been for the last twelve bloody hours.

  ‘Where are you?’

  He bit his lip and took a deep breath simultaneously. Then he told Ms Green that they would be back at the station in two minutes.

  While he paid the bill, the girl re-opened the atlas and started flicking through the pages. She stopped at a map of the United Kingdom, surrounded by little drawings of famous landmarks. Holding up the book, she pointed to Buckingham Palace: ‘.’

  ‘What?’ Carlyle looked at the café-owner for help.

  ‘’ the girl yelled.

  ‘She’s a little princess,’ the café-owner laughed. ‘She says that she lives in Buckingham Palace!’

  THREE

  Standing on the steps of Charing Cross police station, Hilary Green’s eyes narrowed as she watched them come round the corner of Agar Street. The social worker tossed her cigarette on to the pavement and stubbed it out with the toe of her shoe before kicking it into the gutter. Glancing at her watch, she cursed the pair of them for destroying her Sunday.

  Carlyle watched her exhale the smoke she had been holding in her lungs and start coughing. Hilary Green looked to be in her mid-thirties, a fake blonde wearing too much make-up, with a face that would curdle milk. She was wrapped in an oversized winter coat and shivered noticeably as they came closer, even though it was barely autumn proper and the weather was still mild.

  Green observed them approach with an air of weary suspicion. The child had the kind of vacant, expressionless face that she had seen a million times before, and the policeman was just another copper who would be all too happy to dump this additional pile of shit in her lap.

  ‘Carlyle?’ she asked, as they reached the foot of the steps.

  The policeman nodded.

  Green looked the girl up and down. ‘Is this her?’

  No, Carlyle thought, I’ve got another one under my desk. ‘Yes.’ He gave the girl a gentle pat on the head and was gratified when she didn’t flinch. ‘Her name is Alzbetha or Elizabeth . . . I think. Something like that. She hasn’t said much.’

  ‘Hello, Elizabeth.’ Green greeted the child with no obvious enthusiasm.

  ‘She doesn’t have much English.’

  Green eyed him carefully. ‘But she has some?’

  ‘Not really,’ Carlyle said. ‘I’ll put it in my report.’ He felt the girl step closer to him and reach for his hand. There was a look of boundless resignation in her grey eyes and his heart sank. He turned to the social worker. ‘Have you spoken to Dr Weber yet?’

  ‘Not yet,’ the woman said defensively.

  ‘You should.’ He gestured towards the girl. ‘She’s been badly abused.’

  Green nodded, like that was fairly normal in her line of work. It probably was.

  Inside, Carlyle sat at his desk watching Green laboriously fill in a series of forms.

  Finally, with the tiniest of flourishes, she finished the last sheet of paper. ‘Right, you just need to sign here . . .’

  Carlyle looked at the girl – playing intently on a nearby computer – and then he looked at Green. Did he really want Social Services to walk off with the kid? Green sensed his hesitancy and looked at him, her expression defiant. They both knew that he had no choice. Carlyle took her pen and limply scribbled the remotest approximation of his signature he could manage on the line next to where the social worker had made a little cross.

  ‘Thank you,’ Green said, scooping up the pile of papers and dropping them into her bag. She stood up and turned to the girl. ‘Elizabeth, we need to go now.’

  You don’t even know for sure that’s her name, Carlyle thought. He felt sick. ‘Where are you taking her?’ he asked quietly.

  Green looked vaguely annoyed at the question. ‘I need to go back to my office, and then we can see if we can allocate her a place in an interim facility.’

  Interim facility? How cosy.

  ‘It depends where we’ve got some space,’ Green continued.

  ‘Let me know.’

  Green zipped up her bag. ‘Of course.’

  Carlyle ticked off the To Do list in his head. ‘I need to file my report, look at the findings of Dr Weber and also locate an interpreter.’ He wondered about going back to the guy at the Box café, but that would fall foul of Social Service protocol. ‘I assume that the council has Ukrainian speakers on its books?’

  Green shrugged.

  ‘The Met,’ Carlyle said, gesturing at his computer, ‘has two. One has been off sick for three months. The other is away on holiday. Maybe you could help us out on that score?’

  ‘Inspector,’ she said sharply, her mouth curling up at the edges, ‘I have to look after almost a hundred kids at any one time. I reckon that an average group of children speaks something like twenty different languages.’

  ‘Wow!’ Carlyle made a belated and insincere stab at empathy.

  ‘With Ukrainian, make that twenty-one,’ Green went on. ‘Working on the basis of limited communication is normal. I will do my best.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘What we really need to do is find someone in the girl’s family.’

  ‘Of course.’ Yawning, he opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out a small box of business cards. Removing a couple, he stood up and handed one to Green. ‘Call me when you know where she is going to stay. I will come and visit her this afternoon.’

  The woman dropped the card in a pocket, saying nothing.

  Carlyle went over to the girl and crouched beside her. When she kept her eyes firmly on the computer screen, he touched her shoulder. ‘This lady,’ he said softly, when he had her attention, ‘is going to find you somewhere to stay.’ He tried to smile. ‘Somewhere nicer than this.’

  The girl’s eyes began to well up, and Carlyle had to grit his teeth to stop from doing the same. It was one of those relatively rare moments during his professional life when he
felt totally inadequate as opposed to just inadequate. He had found her and now he was abandoning her. She had become his responsibility, and here he was passing the buck.

  ‘Here . . .’ his hand trembled slightly as he handed over his card. ‘This is me.’

  She held the card between her thumb and forefinger, without looking at it. He gently took it back from her and put it carefully in the pocket of her jeans. Sensing Green hovering impatiently behind him, he gave the girl a pat on the arm. ‘Don’t forget your books. I will come and see you this afternoon and bring you some pens, I promise.’

  Slowly the girl slid off her chair and followed the social worker to the stairs.

  With a mighty sigh, he watched them go.

  When he got home, there was a note from Helen saying that she had gone out with Alice to meet some friends at Coram’s Fields, a playground for children up towards King’s Cross. He thought about heading up there to meet them but now exhaustion got the better of him. Taking off his shoes, he collapsed on to the bed, still fully clothed. Keeping his eyes tightly shut, he tried to clear his mind and get some rest. Sleep, however, would not come. After about twenty minutes, he bowed to the inevitable and got up again. Following a shave and a change of shirt, he made himself a couple of slices of toast with marmalade. Washing them down with a cup of coffee, he planned out the remainder of his day.

  Returning to the station, he typed up his report. It didn’t take long – there really wasn’t much to say. He had just printed out a hard copy when an email from Thomas Weber pinged into his inbox. With some trepidation, Carlyle opened the attachment and read the doctor’s own report following his session with the girl the night before. Weber had been far more detailed than Carlyle; indeed, Weber was far too detailed for Carlyle, whose squeamishness had, if anything, become worse over the years. A quick scan showed that all of his worst fears had been realised. The girl had been physically and sexually abused, probably over a period of several months. Her right forearm had been broken too, an injury that had only recently healed. He felt a surge of adrenaline and hatred for the people who had done this. Someone has to pay, he thought. This is not something that you can just let slide.

  After correcting a few typos in his own report, he attached both documents to an email and sent it to his boss, Commander Carole Simpson, along with a covering note that said he would give her a call to discuss things later in the day. Next, he called Hilary Green; her voicemail kicked in immediately and he asked her to call him with the address where the girl was staying. Finally, he Googled various translation services looking for someone who could speak Ukrainian. He tried a couple of numbers, but no one was picking up on a Sunday.

  Putting down the phone, he sat back in his chair and closed his eyes. Where do you go from here? he wondered. He laid out the events of the last eighteen hours in sequence: the girl, the posh bloke, the evident abuse – no Missing Person report.

  Mm.

  No immediate lines of enquiry popped into his head. This type of thing really wasn’t his area of expertise. He would need some help – but who could he reach out to? For want of anything better to do, he picked up the phone and called his sergeant, Joe Szyszkowski.

  Joe was, as far as Carlyle knew, the only Polish sergeant working in the Metropolitan Police. At least, Joseph Leon Gorka Szyszkowski was second-generation Polish, having been born in the UK. Brought up in Portsmouth, he came to London to study geophysics at Imperial College. For reasons Carlyle didn’t understand, he decided to join the Met after graduating with a good 2:1 degree. More British than Carlyle was (or, at least, felt), Joe had an Indian wife, Anita, and a couple of quintessentially English kids, William and Sarah. However, despite all of this, there was still a strand of the sergeant’s DNA that was deeply, irredeemably Polish i.e. dark, pessimistic and Catholic. This contributed to a sense of detachment, irony and, perhaps just as important, fatalism, which for Carlyle made Joe a perfect colleague.

  Joe picked up after four or five rings. ‘Boss . . .’ he began warily.

  ‘Joe,’ Carlyle replied, ‘sorry to disturb you on a Sunday.’

  ‘No worries.’ Joe lowered his voice. ‘We’ve got the in-laws round, so disturb away.’

  ‘Do you know anyone working in Vice at the moment?’

  There was a dramatic pause. ‘You haven’t been caught with your pants down, have you?’

  ‘Seriously . . .’

  ‘One or two,’ Joe laughed. ‘Why?’

  Carlyle outlined the situation. There was another pause.

  Like Carlyle, Joe was a family man. He knew how seriously his boss would take this case. ‘Let me make a few calls.’

  ‘Thanks, Joe. I appreciate it.’

  ‘Do you want me to come in?’

  ‘Maybe later. At the moment, I’m just trying to work out a plan of action.’

  ‘Sounds like it will end up on Vice’s desk, anyway,’ Joe mused.

  ‘I don’t care whose fucking desk it ends up on,’ Carlyle said firmly. ‘I will see this one through to the bitter end.’

  A couple of minutes later, Carlyle’s mobile started vibrating in his hand. ‘That was quick!’ he said.

  ‘Eh?’ It was Helen.

  ‘Sorry,’ Carlyle said quickly. ‘I thought you were Joe.’

  ‘Sorry to disappoint.’ Her voice was tart.

  ‘N-no, it’s not like that,’ he stammered, trying to keep the irritation from his voice. ‘It’s just that it was a difficult night.’

  ‘That’s okay,’ she said, adopting a more conciliatory tone. ‘You can tell me about it tonight. I’ll make us a family dinner once we get home. Alice fancies pancakes.’

  ‘Nice!’ Carlyle smiled. He always fancied pancakes.

  ‘I just wanted to tell you that we are going to stay out for a while longer,’ Helen continued, ‘seeing as it’s such a nice afternoon.’

  ‘It is?’ All Carlyle could see out through his window was a sooty brick wall.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ she laughed. ‘You should get out more.’

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘I should.’

  His wife sighed. ‘Whatever you’re up to, don’t overdo it, John.’

  ‘Me? Never.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘Yes, yes. Don’t worry. I’m fine.’

  ‘Good. We’ll see you later.’

  FOUR

  Carole Simpson walked out through the gates of Opel Open Prison and gazed in the general direction of the sea, breathing in deeply. The sea air outside the prison fence was just the same as that on the inside, but somehow it felt better . . . much better. Another visit over, she could get back to the ‘normal’ part of her life. The routine of visiting her husband was now well ingrained but it still made her feel uncomfortable. Every second Sunday, she would make the trek down from London to the South Downs to spend a couple of hours walking around the prison grounds with Joshua, talking about their respective jobs – hers running a pool of seventy detectives for the Metropolitan Police, his teaching fellow inmates mathematics – and their plans for rebuilding their life together once he got out.

  Release for Joshua Hunt – aka Mr Carole Simpson – was still quite a way off. He was almost eighteen months into a seven-year stretch for fraud, conspiracy to defraud and embezzlement. Even with time off for good behaviour, it would be at least another year, more likely two, before he could begin to think about parole. However long it was, she could wait. Alone in the outside world, Simpson was surviving perfectly well – far better than she might have imagined back when Joshua’s investment firm had collapsed and he was arrested.

  When they’d seized his assets and hit him with a £15 million fine, she had been forced to radically downsize, moving from an elegant house in Highgate to a modest two-bedroom flat in Hammersmith. The fancy restaurants, the charity dinners and the celebrity ‘friends’ were a thing of the past as well, along with the expensive holidays in the Caribbean, Italy and South Africa. But the new reduced lifestyle didn’t bother her in the
least. The most important thing was that she was still working; she had kept her rank and most of her responsibilities. As a commander, she was still one of the thirty or so most senior women on the Force. There would be no more promotions – the dream of making deputy commissioner was over – but she hadn’t been kicked out.

  That had been a major surprise. On the one hand, she had not been involved in any of her husband’s financial misdeeds. On the other hand, she had become a major embarrassment to the Met. As such, she had been expecting the boot. But they had bottled it, and Simpson had gruffly declined to fall on her sword.

  Walking away with her tail between her legs would have been seen as an admission of guilt. More importantly, it would have left her with nothing to do. Simpson knew that retirement would have bored her out of her skull. Barely into her fifties, she had a good decade of productive working life left in the tank. By standing her ground, she would at least be allowed to retire at a time of her own choosing, which would be as late as possible.

  Even the annoyance of being dubbed ‘the clueless copper wife of Britain’s biggest conman’, as one tabloid newspaper so elegantly put it, had dissipated over time. The world still kept turning. The thing was, Simpson realised, that she still didn’t really know if Joshua was a fraudster or not. As far as she could make out, he had been doing the same things all through the good years, when he was hailed as a hero and a genius, as he had when things went south. It was just that the market had gone bad. No one had cared what he had been up to when he was making them money.

  When the market crashed, however, the hunt was on for someone to blame. What was the saying? When the tide goes out, you see who’s been swimming naked. Well, Joshua, it seemed, was wearing not a stitch. But then neither were plenty of other people. Now the whole world had seen his hairy arse. Well, so be it. He was her husband. She was sticking with him the same way she was sticking with the job; she had too much of her life invested in their marriage – almost twenty-five years – to cut and run now.