Buckingham Palace Blues

by James Craig

  Simpson sneezed, bringing him back to the present.

  ‘Bless you.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She looked up, as if awaiting some barbed comment.

  Carlyle said nothing. Returning her gaze to the desk, she made a scribble on a memo. Arms folded, he waited for her to read the various reports and tried not to look bored.

  After a couple more minutes, she pulled a file from the bottom of the heap and flipped it open. Quickly, she scanned the text in the hope that it had somehow changed since she had read it last. It hadn’t. With a sigh, she closed the file and pushed it across the desk towards Carlyle. ‘We don’t have a lot, do we?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What other work have you got on at the moment?’ It was an admission of defeat.

  Trying not to smile, Carlyle ran through a dispiriting list of misdemeanours and anti-social behaviour that he was supposed to be sorting out.

  ‘Fine,’ Simpson said. ‘Go and talk to Superintendent Warren Shen in Vice. I’ve sent him a copy of your report. He’ll decide if there’s anything they can do. In the meantime, feel free to shake things up a bit. See what you can find.’

  ‘Okay.’ Carlyle grinned.

  ‘You are right,’ Simpson sniffed, ‘this is horrible. We should give it some of our time.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘But if you find you’re not getting anywhere,’ Simpson said flatly, ‘don’t drag it out.’

  SIX

  Carlyle walked out of the train station, heading in the direction of Windsor Castle. According to a tourist brochure he had read on the train, Windsor Castle was the Official Residence of Her Majesty the Queen and the oldest and largest still-occupied castle in the world. At the moment, however, the old girl wasn’t at home. Rather, she was on a state visit to Costa Rica, doing whatever it was that you did on state visits. During his time in Royal Protection, Carlyle had never travelled anywhere more exotic than Cardiff. That was more than far enough away from home, where he was concerned. Anyway, wasn’t Wales considered a kind of foreign country these days?

  It had turned cold. When the wind blew, Carlyle realised it was time to be breaking out his winter wardrobe. Walking through the town centre, he buttoned up his raincoat and lengthened his stride. After five minutes, he turned down Peascod Street and headed for the Royal Joker public house.

  The Royal Joker occupied the ground and lower-ground floors of a nondescript 1970s office block. Given that it was barely eleven o’clock in the morning, Carlyle was not surprised to find the place completely empty when he stepped inside the pub. On the wall at the back was a sign pointing to a games room and the beer garden. Nodding at the girl cleaning the tables, Carlyle went through the main bar and down some stairs into a large room that, if anything, seemed even colder than the street outside. At the far end, a pair of French windows led out on to a patio on which stood a few forlorn plastic tables. Inside, a couple of tatty leather sofas sat next to a wall. Above one was a large poster of Mount Iron in Wanaka, advertising holidays in New Zealand. In the middle of the room was a coin-operated, red-topped pool table. A handwritten sign on the side said £2 a game. Two half-empty pints of lager stood on the rim of the table, next to a small cube of blue chalk.

  Ignoring his arrival, two women were engrossed in a game that had clearly just started. The one leaning over the table was bulky, with a low centre of gravity. Her short dark curly hair and pained expression gave her more than a passing resemblance to Diego Maradona in his post-playing days. One foot off the ground, she bent forward, searching for the right angle for her next shot. Watching her intently was her companion, a tall, thin woman in black jeans and a black T-shirt. With too much make-up and violently black hair, she looked to Carlyle like a Goth pensioner. He was pretty sure she was the girlfriend. He remembered meeting her once or twice during his time in Royal Protection but couldn’t remember her name. Studiously ignoring him, she picked up her pint and took a dainty sip.

  With a grunt, the woman at the table over-hit her shot and watched the cue ball slam into the middle pocket and disappear. ‘Shit!’

  ‘Unlucky,’ Carlyle said, stepping towards the table.

  Alexa Matthews slid away from the table and turned to face him. ‘Fuck off.’

  Making an effort to almost smile, he looked her up and down. They were about the same height, but she was twice his width. Wearing a pair of biker boots, torn jeans and an Iron Maiden T-shirt, she looked every inch the off-duty copper that she was. Matthews had been dressing the same way for at least twenty years. In his opinion, the nose ring and the three piercings in each eyebrow didn’t really suit a woman in her late forties. Presumably she took them out when she went on duty.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she scowled, grasping her pool cue tightly.

  ‘I wanted a word,’ Carlyle said evenly, glancing cautiously at the cue. ‘I left you a message.’

  ‘And I didn’t reply,’ Matthews said. ‘Didn’t that tell you something?’

  The other woman had retrieved the cue ball and proceeded to pot a couple of colours in quick succession.

  Matthews glanced at the table and grimaced. Turning back to Carlyle, her eyes narrowed. ‘And now you’ve put me off my game,’ she said, without even the hint of a smile.

  The other woman moved round the table for her next shot, gently shooing Matthews out of the way, forcing her to step closer to Carlyle.

  ‘Now that I’m here . . .’ he started.

  ‘You shouldn’t have come,’ Matthews hissed.

  ‘Now that I am here,’ he repeated, ‘I wanted to ask you about something important.’

  Matthews tossed her cue on to a nearby sofa and picked up her pint. ‘I don’t want to talk to you.’

  ‘It’s important,’ he repeated, not wanting to plunge into the details.

  ‘Maybe to you.’

  ‘Seriously.’

  ‘It was always important with you, Carlyle,’ Matthews sneered. ‘Wasn’t it?’

  Carlyle ignored the barb. ‘I just need some up-to-date information on SO14.’

  ‘What?’ Matthews snorted. ‘You still trying to fuck the unit up? I thought you’d given up on that one a long time ago.’ She grinned at her companion. ‘Around about the time you got your fucking head kicked in.’

  The other woman looked up from the table and laughed, before quickly potting a green.

  Carlyle gazed at his shoes in an attempt to hide a rueful grin. His mind went back to the night when a couple of his SO14 colleagues, incensed by his lack of ‘team spirit’, had dragged him out into the Palace stables for a good beating. They had just been working up a head of steam when Matthews had appeared with a couple of royal footmen, and hauled them off. Carlyle had been left with just a few cuts and bruises, and a medium-sized dent to his pride.

  The next day, he had gone to thank her, but she had waved him away. ‘I did it for them,’ she had said, ‘not for you. You’re not worth anyone risking their career for.’

  Matthews drained the last of her pint. ‘Just because I saved your arse that time doesn’t mean I’m your friend.’

  Carlyle held up a hand in supplication. ‘I know.’ He watched the other woman sink the last ball and drop her cue on the table.

  Matthews held out her empty glass and nodded towards the bar. ‘Why don’t you get me another one, Heather? I’ll be out in a minute.’

  Heather? That was it: Heather Ramen. Or Raven? Or Ramsden? Something like that. A ‘performance artist’ back in the day. Carlyle wondered if she still ‘performed’.

  Heather grunted as she took her pint pot and wandered off.

  Matthews waited until she had left the room before turning to Carlyle. ‘You always were a right cunt, causing trouble, winding everyone up.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Carlyle shrugged. ‘But things are getting worse in SO14, aren’t they?’

  Matthews picked up the cue ball and weighed it in her hand like she wanted to smash his skull with it. ‘What would you know about it?’
r />   ‘It’s come up during an investigation.’

  ‘Bollocks. You’re just shit-stirring.’ Matthews reluctantly tossed the ball back on the table. ‘You should leave SO14 alone. It’s not your problem any more. And it’s not mine either. I’m leaving. Transfer out next month.’ She pointed a stubby index finger at him. ‘So I don’t want any aggro.’

  Carlyle stood his ground. ‘This is a formal investigation, Alexa. I’m well within my rights to come and see you at work. Or at home.’

  She studied him doubtfully.

  ‘If I wanted to cause you and your girlfriend any aggro,’ Carlyle continued, ‘I wouldn’t have trundled all the way out here to make a discreet social call at eleven o’clock in the morning.’

  Matthews bristled. ‘Leave Heather out of this, you tosser. I’ve been out for a long time. Everyone knows I’m a dyke. So what?’

  ‘It wasn’t a threat,’ Carlyle said mildly.

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’ Matthews glanced in the direction of the bar. For a moment, she clearly turned something over in her mind.

  Carlyle waited.

  Heather had decided to take her time. Matthews cursed under her breath.

  Carlyle looked at his shoes.

  ‘Joe Dalton,’ she said finally.

  ‘Joe Dalton?’ Carlyle made a face. ‘Who’s Joe Dalton?’

  Matthews pawed at a stain on the carpet with her boot. ‘Joe was in SO14. Did a bit of moonlighting in his brother’s taxi. Topped himself a couple of months ago.’ She rubbed her eyes. ‘Decapitated himself in his cab.’

  Carlyle thought about it for a moment. ‘How did he manage that?’

  ‘It was in the papers. You might have read about it.’

  Carlyle shook his head. ‘No, I don’t think so. What’s Dalton got to do with all the shenanigans going on at SO14?’

  She shot him a look. ‘That’s for you to work out. You’re the bloody detective. Jesus!’

  ‘Okay.’ Carlyle sighed. ‘If I’m the bloody detective, where should I start bloody looking?’

  Despite herself, Matthews grinned. ‘Go and talk to his girlfriend. A woman called Fiona Allcock.’ The grin stretched into a leer. ‘As in all-cock.’

  ‘Where do I find her?’

  ‘It shouldn’t be difficult to track her down. She’s famous.’

  ‘Famous?’

  ‘Just Google her.’

  Fucking Google. Suddenly it was the world’s number-one police tool. How did any criminals ever get caught before it existed? Carlyle thought about it. ‘It’s a fairly common name. How will I know if I’ve got the right Allcock?’

  ‘Jesus!’ Matthews groaned. ‘You’re still as annoying as ever.’ Then her grin reappeared, this time wider than before. ‘Try Googling ‘‘Allcock’’ and ‘‘animals’’. See what you get. Just don’t let the wife catch you doing it.’

  Carlyle raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Off you go.’ Matthews laughed, sticking a couple of coins in a slot in the table and releasing the balls for another game. ‘That’s your lot. And don’t come back here again. Next time I will brain you. And that’s a promise.’

  Superintendent Warren Shen was standing in the storeroom on the first floor, above the Vintage Magazine Shop in the heart of Soho. Yawning, he flicked the fringe of his shoulder-length blond hair out of his eyes. Six foot one inch tall, rake thin, dressed in jeans and a Bruce Lee Fists of Fury T-shirt, he looked like he was barely into his twenties when, in fact, he would reach forty in little more than six months’ time. A seventeen-year police career, the last six of them in Vice, had not yet eaten away at his boyish good looks. What it had done to him on the inside was, however, another matter entirely.

  Out of the window, Shen eyed the entrance to the Soho Parish Church of England primary school, on the other side of Great Windmill Street. It was coming up to leaving time and a small group of mothers, a couple of them minding younger children in pushchairs, were standing by the gate to collect their kids. Every couple of minutes, one of the girls from the Fun Palace strip club next door would venture out into the street and remonstrate with the waiting mothers, inviting them to fuck off lest they put off potential punters wandering up the street.

  This was a scene that Shen had witnessed many times before. The strip clubs, sex shops and hostess bars on Great Windmill Street regularly complained about the potential for the school run to interfere with their passing trade. With no obvious sense of irony, one of the shop-owners – Soho’s self-proclaimed number one dildo merchant – had complained to the local paper that the school ‘lowered the tone of the neighbourhood’. On the one hand, it was quite funny. On the other it made Shen pine for the good old days (approximately twenty or so years before he started on the Force) when you could simply round up the filth-peddlers and the perverts and haul them back to the cells for a good kicking.

  In the face of this onslaught, one of the mothers – an evangelical Christian called Mary Mack – once had the temerity to fight back. Mack organised a petition and launched a campaign for a fifty-yard ‘smut-free zone’ around the school. It was a good idea but, given the economic realities of the neighbourhood, one that never had the remotest chance of being realised. Instead, the poor misguided woman had found herself singled out for particular abuse.

  Only a week earlier, Mrs Mack had been sexually assaulted and pelted with dogshit by a group of disgruntled sex-industry workers. When the Evening Standard had put the story on its front page, it had caught the attention of someone sufficiently senior at New Scotland Yard for action to be demanded. Shen had been tasked with arresting the culprits and sending a clear signal to the good citizens of Soho that there were limits of indecent behaviour beyond which even they could not go without the risk of official sanction.

  Needing to catch the perpetrators in the act, Shen had been surprised and delighted when Mrs Mack agreed to come back for more punishment. Before she could change her mind, he had put in place a highly sophisticated sting operation that basically involved her lingering outside the school gate, waiting to be abused again.

  Shen brought the Motorola radio to his mouth as he watched a fat peroxide blonde come out of the Fun Palace and on to the pavement. She was followed by one of the strip club’s bouncers, a skinny, shaven-headed bloke in a Britney Spears T-shirt.

  ‘Here we go . . .’

  As the duo headed towards their target, the other mothers moved quickly away. Shen watched the by now familiar angry exchange that followed. Waiting until the bouncer put his hand on Mack’s shoulder, he spoke into the radio: ‘Okay. Move in. Arrest them both. Make sure we try and keep them in custody longer this time.’

  As the two miscreants were bundled into a police van, the kids began heading out through the school gates. Shen thought of his own kids safely ensconced in the South London suburbs, and gave a silent prayer of thanks. By all accounts, Soho Parish was a very good school. But you had to be a certain sort of parent to send your kid there and have to put up with all the neighbouring shit, both metaphorical and physical.

  Shen turned to Carlyle who was sitting on a sofa, reading the evening freesheet and worrying about Fulham’s chances of avoiding relegation this season. ‘You live round here, don’t you?’

  Carlyle nodded, but didn’t look up from the paper. ‘Yeah. About five minutes down the road. The other side of Cambridge Circus.’

  ‘Kids?’

  ‘One. A girl.’

  Shen gestured in the direction of Soho Parish. ‘She didn’t go there, did she?’

  ‘No. The wife looked at it though.’

  ‘I wonder what all the kids make of it.’

  Carlyle finally closed his paper, folded it up and stuck it in his jacket pocket. ‘What? All the sex shops and stuff?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I suppose what you know is what you know,’ Carlyle said. ‘If you make this neighbourhood boring and mundane, then it loses any glamour and attraction.’

  ‘It’s a theory, I suppose.’ Shen stepped away from the w
indow and moved into the centre of the room. ‘Anyway, I read that report Simpson sent me. Interesting . . . Do you really think the girl you found had been inside Buckingham Palace?’

  Carlyle shrugged. ‘It’s a possibility.’

  ‘A rather far-fetched one.’

  ‘Maybe. I dunno.’ Carlyle stiffly pushed himself up out of the sofa and on to his feet. ‘The more I think about it, the more I think, Why not? Given all the other shit that people do there, it would make a perfect location for some evil bastard to get up to something like that.’

  ‘It would be a new one on me,’ Shen said. ‘But we’ll make some enquiries. Any leads on the girl?’

  Carlyle shook his head. ‘Not yet.’

  Both men knew it was a minor miracle that she had been found once. There was next to no chance now that she would ever be seen again.

  ‘What about the Ukrainian angle?’ Carlyle asked.

  ‘Obviously,’ Shen said, in the kind of flat tone you adopted when giving a speech to the local Residents Association, ‘we get a lot of Eastern Europeans – people-trafficking and prostitution. They come from all over, including the Ukraine. Kids are less common, but not unheard of.’ He coughed. ‘There is one guy we’ll go and talk to, name of Ihor Chepoyak.’

  ‘Who he?’ Carlyle asked.

  ‘A bad guy straight out of Central Casting. He is reputed, among other things, to have decapitated two of his girls with a blowtorch.’

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘Never been able to lay a finger on him,’ Shen said wistfully. ‘So far, at least.’

  ‘Do you think you’ll get anything out of him?’

  ‘No idea,’ Shen said, ‘but he’s just about the only Ukrainian I know.’

  Carlyle gave Shen a quizzical look.

  ‘You’ve got to start somewhere.’ Shen grinned. ‘Anyway, how many Ukrainians do you know yourself?’

  Fair point, Carlyle thought. ‘Can I tag along,’ he asked, ‘when you go and see him?’

  ‘Why not. I’ll let you know when I get an appointment.’