by James Craig
‘But presumably,’ Carlyle continued, ‘this latest shooting confirms that Sergeant Szyszkowski’s killer is still in town.’
‘Is that what Sky is saying?’
‘No,’ Carlyle sighed. ‘They’re not talking about him at all. As far as the media is concerned, Joe is ancient history already. They’re only focused on the guy in the cab.’
Hall lowered his voice: ‘It certainly looks like a Mossad hit squad is in London to take out some Hamas bigwigs.’
Bigwigs? That’s a rather archaic use of language, Carlyle thought. Presumably this boy went to a very expensive school. But Hall had at least started talking, so he waited silently for him to continue.
‘Your own guy was just unlucky to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.’
Tell me something I don’t know, Carlyle thought. ‘Why are these people bringing all their shit here to London?’ he asked.
Hall coughed. ‘We don’t know.’
‘And why haven’t they slithered back under their respective rocks after the first shooting?’
‘Things are just not clear,’ Hall replied limply.
‘It’s just as well that I’m here to help then,’ Carlyle said cheerily,
There was a pause while Hall stepped straight back into shot. Behind the tape, ten yards or so from the Sky camera, he stared towards the lens. ‘Can you help?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ Carlyle nodded at the screen. ‘I think I can.’
SIXTEEN
He found Alison Roche standing in the internal courtyard at Charing Cross police station. It was a grey day with more than a hint of rain in the air. Aside from a mechanic working under the hood of a police Skoda in the far corner, the place was empty. Wearing a thin navy cardigan over a black T-shirt, she shivered as she watched Carlyle approach.
‘Those things are bad for your health,’ he began, nodding at the cigarette in her hand. He hadn’t realized that she was a smoker. Smoking was a major character defect in Carlyle’s book, so he wondered if he’d been rather too hasty in trying to get her transferred. After all, he knew next to nothing about this woman — other than she was no good with dogs but she did know a bit about Italian football. And now, it appeared that she was stupid enough to smoke.
‘That’s what my boyfriend tells me,’ Roche grinned, taking a deep drag with relish.
She registered the curious look on Carlyle’s face as she slowly exhaled.
‘David Ronan,’ she added, taking another puff. ‘He’s a DI in SO15. We met when we were both working at Shoreditch. We’ve been going out for. .’ she thought about it for a moment ‘. . almost four years now.’
Too much information, Carlyle decided. If you’d been having this conversation with Helen, before you knew it she’d be on to wedding plans, thoughts on children and, most importantly, Ronan’s doubtless long list of bad habits. He sometimes suspected that his wife would have made the best copper in the Carlyle family; she was interested in people, whereas he was primarily interested in facts.
Fact: SO15 was the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command Unit.
Facts like that could be very useful.
‘How long has Dave-’
‘David,’ she corrected him, before taking one last lungful of poison and flicking the stub of her cigarette into the gutter.
‘I beg his pardon,’ Carlyle smiled. ‘How long has David been in CTC?’
‘Over a year now,’ she replied slowly, as if checking through the dates in her head. ‘Since February of last year.’
Carlyle squinted up at the sky as he felt the gentlest of raindrops land on his forehead. ‘And would he happen to know anything about Middle Eastern terrorism?’
‘I suppose he knows the basics,’ Roche shrugged. ‘Why?’
Carlyle felt a larger raindrop hit his head. And another. ‘Let’s go inside,’ he suggested.
Carlyle ushered her into one of the third-floor meeting rooms, before closing the door behind them. Placing her cigarettes and lighter on the table, Roche took a seat and looked up at him expectantly.
‘I want you to talk to David for me,’ Carlyle began, ‘but you both have to be extremely discreet.’
‘Sure,’ she said.
‘I mean it,’ he said, knowing he was sounding like an overbearing teacher. ‘This is a very delicate situation.’
Sitting up straighter in her chair, Roche cleared her throat. ‘I understand, Inspector.’
‘With a bit of luck, we might be working together for a while. .’
‘It looks like it,’ she said. ‘Leyton told me this morning that I was to report here until further notice.’
‘Good,’ he nodded. ‘That’s good. But what I’m now going to tell you about is not a Charing Cross investigation.’
‘Joe Szyszkowski?’
‘Yes. It’s not even a police investigation.’
‘Oh?’
Pulling out a chair, Carlyle sat down opposite her. For the next ten minutes, he quietly went through what had happened on the afternoon Joe was shot, then his interview with Adam Hall of MI6, and the subsequent murder of Noor Gyula Teleki in the back of a London taxi.
Once he had finished, Roche stared at the table for five or six seconds.
‘How do you think David can help?’ she asked, looking up.
Good question, thought Carlyle, but now was not the time to let on that he was clutching at straws.
‘The murder of a London policeman is incidental to the MI6 investigation,’ he continued, wondering how he was going to finish this sentence, ‘but. .’
She watched him carefully. ‘Yes?’
‘I think that there is some reason why these guys are shitting on our doorstep. If we can discover exactly why they are here, then we might be able to track them down.’ As the words finally tumbled out, he wondered if they made any sense at all.
Roche’s expression suggested she wasn’t convinced.
Carlyle made a vague gesture with his hands. ‘MI6 can do the big picture, international stuff,’ he burbled, ‘but we have the local knowledge. There must be something very important happening in London, otherwise everyone would have split right after the first shootings at the Ritz.’
‘And they have asked for your help?’
Carlyle looked her straight in the eye and smiled. ‘Yes.’
Roche frowned. ‘Isn’t that what the security services are for? Surely that’s their job?’
For fuck’s sake, Carlyle thought, give me a break here. He forced his smile to widen. ‘They’re too busy trying to keep tabs on all the would-be suicide bombers in Bradford, apparently.’
Roche let out a long sigh. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘I’ll speak to David.’
‘Discreetly.’
‘Of course.’ She flashed him a cheeky grin. ‘It will be strictly pillow-talk, Inspector.’
Carlyle felt himself blush.
‘Don’t worry,’ Roche laughed. ‘We are both thoroughly professional. And anyway, it is the death of a policeman we are talking about here. I will find out what he says and report back.’
‘Thank you,’ said Carlyle, getting quickly to his feet.
‘Inspector?’
Carlyle, already at the door, turned back to face her. ‘Yes?’
‘The skeleton. .’
‘Huh?’
‘The skeleton that was dug up in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.’
‘Oh, yes, yes. .’
‘We’re still waiting for the forensic but, based on the criteria that we already set. .’
‘Yes?’ Carlyle tried to remember what those criteria were, but his mind came up with a complete blank.
‘. . I have come up with records for twenty-two men aged eighteen to thirty who were reported missing in that area during the Blitz i.e. September 1940 to May 1941 and never accounted for.’
‘Er. . good.’ Carlyle pulled the door open. ‘Talk to Phillips about it. See if you can narrow it down a bit further, and then we can review where we are.’ Without waiting for a reply, he slipped
out into the corridor and away.
SEVENTEEN
It wasn’t the Ritz, but at least he didn’t have to worry about an Israeli hit squad bursting through the door before his mother could finish her first scone. Working himself up to restart their earlier conversation, Carlyle watched a bored-looking yummy mummy pushing a pram down the Fulham Road. The look on the woman’s face suggested that she harboured more than a few regrets at having washed up on the dreary shores of SW6.
In the nondescript cafe, they had the place to themselves, apart from a pale kid in the back tapping away on his laptop. ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ was playing at a low volume through a couple of tinny speakers above the counter, to the irritation of Carlyle, who felt offended on Van Morrison’s behalf. The great man’s songs deserved a better environment than this. He took another sip of his coffee and grimaced. It was too weak and too cold. ‘Almost three quid and it is utter crap,’ he grumbled to himself. He thought about taking it back to the girl behind the counter and asking for a fresh cup, but somehow lacked the energy.
Lorna Gordon ignored her son’s incoherent mumbling. After carefully cutting the scone in half, she buttered each section and applied a modest amount of raspberry jam. Lifting the first piece to her mouth, she took a dainty nibble and began chewing it slowly.
Carlyle waited for her to swallow. ‘So,’ he said, conscious of the nervousness in his voice. ‘You were talking about Dad.’
Lorna gave him a careful look. ‘The divorce, you mean?’
Carlyle glanced back towards the street, but the yummy mummy was gone. ‘Well, yes,’ he stammered.
‘You are not going to change my mind, John,’ she said firmly, wiping an imaginary crumb from one side of her mouth before picking up another piece of scone.
‘No, no.’ He held up his hands in mock surrender. ‘I’m not trying to do that. I just want to understand the reason.’
Lorna next took a sip of her tea. Placing the cup back on the saucer, she gazed directly at her son. ‘Your father,’ she said quietly, ‘has had an affair.’
‘Ah.’ Carlyle lifted his cup to his lips but didn’t drink. His mother had given him more than enough information already, and his only concern now was to end this conversation as quickly as possible.
Looking embarrassed but determined, his mother gazed at a spot somewhere above his head. ‘I was visiting your gran when she was ill.’
‘Gran’s ill?’ Carlyle frowned. He hadn’t seen his grandmother — now well into her nineties and living in sheltered accommodation in the Partick district of Glasgow — for almost a year, and he wasn’t even aware that she had been unwell.
‘This was a while ago,’ his mother explained.
Carlyle suddenly felt a strong urge for a glass of Jameson Irish whiskey. A double; served straight, with no ice and no water. He looked longingly over at the Three Monkeys pub on the other side of the road.
‘You had only just qualified as a policeman at that time.’
‘But,’ Carlyle did the maths, ‘that’s almost thirty years ago!’
‘As far as I’m concerned,’ Lorna Gordon said tartly, ‘there is no statute of limitations on infidelity.’
Scratching his neck, Carlyle shifted uneasily in his seat.
‘Do you remember a woman called Maureen Sullivan?’
Carlyle thought about it for a few moments and was relieved to come up blank. ‘No,’ he said. ‘The name’s not ringing any bells.’
‘Well,’ his mother mused, ‘maybe she only arrived on the scene after you had left home. She was a downstairs neighbour for a while. Anyway, I was up in Scotland, looking after Gran when she broke her arm. .’
‘I remember that,’ Carlyle chipped in, happy that not every detail of their family life at the time had passed him by.
‘I ended up staying in Scotland for a month. Your father huffed and puffed, claimed he wasn’t at all happy about it but that it was the right thing for me to do.’
‘Why has this become an issue now?’ Carlyle asked, keen to skip over further historical detail.
His mother sighed and took another sip of tea. ‘We had a big argument a fortnight ago. About nothing particularly important, but things got heated and he dropped that bombshell on me. I’ve thought about it a lot since, and I can only assume that he wanted to tell me. He was always rather boastful, and this was his way of putting me in my place.’
Looking Lorna Gordon up and down, Carlyle resisted the urge to smile. His mother would never let anyone put her down. She was the first in a long line of strong women who had kept him in his place all his life, and he realized that it had been the same for his father too. He knew that he had to talk to his dad — there always being two sides to every story — but he didn’t think it would have any impact on the outcome. ‘So what happens now?’ he asked.
‘I’ve spoken to a lawyer. As long as your father doesn’t contest it, the divorce should be sorted out fairly quickly.’
‘And will he?’
‘Will he what?’
‘Contest it.’
She gave him a look that reminded Carlyle of his days as a naughty eight year old, caught stealing wine gums from the corner shop. ‘I would have thought that would be very difficult, given that he has already confessed to being an adulterer.’
Staring out of the window, Carlyle tried to make some sense of this mess. It was typical of his parents that, with divorce rates at a thirty-year low, they had nevertheless found a way to tear their marriage apart over some long-past misdemeanour. Ever the pragmatist, he knew that he should really try to help them patch things up. However many years of active retirement each of them had left, divorce would not make things any happier or more comfortable. Ever the pragmatist, however, he also knew that this was ultimately not his fight. ‘Okay,’ he said finally, ‘what do you want me to do?’
‘Do? I don’t want you to do anything, John. I just wanted to make sure that you understood what was going on between your father and me.’
‘Helen is really quite worried about you,’ he said. I, on the other hand, he thought, am just totally bemused by the whole business.
‘Well, tell her that there’s absolutely nothing to worry about,’ his mother said sharply. ‘I’m fine.’
‘And what about Dad?’
‘He can speak for himself,’ she harrumphed.
‘What will happen if — once the divorce goes through?’
‘He’ll have to find somewhere else to live,’ she said. ‘At the moment, he’s sleeping in your old room, but that is only temporary.’
‘Where? How will he be able to afford somewhere else in London?’
‘That’s his problem,’ she said calmly, turning her attention back to the remains of her scone.
EIGHTEEN
The clock on the dashboard said 2.37 a.m. Adam Hall yawned and squirmed uncomfortably in his seat, wondering when he was going to get the chance to relieve himself. His bladder had been uncomfortably full for over an hour, and he cursed himself for not nipping round the corner earlier. There was absolutely no way he was going to try and piss into his empty Starbucks cup, not with his boss, Gillian Strauss, sitting in the passenger seat next to him.
Gritting his teeth, Adam tried to grin and bear it. He knew that sod’s law meant that, the moment he went off for a piss, the subject would walk out of the door of number 17 Peel Street, twenty yards up on the other side of the road from where they were sitting. It stood in the middle of a row of expensive houses just south of Notting Hill Gate, a few blocks to the west of Hyde Park and Kensington Palace.
He glanced over at Strauss and felt the discomfort in his crotch increase further. With her head in the confidential reports on Al-Amour that he had lovingly collated for her, Strauss studiously ignored him, so Adam allowed his gaze to linger on her. Mid-thirties, short blonde hair, ultra-fit, she was a Home Counties beauty who, even in jeans and a fleece, was more glamorous than anyone else in MI6 by a factor of at least 100. The monster rock on her wedding finger, co
urtesy of the stereotypically wretched merchant banker husband, did not make her any less of a young spook’s wet dream. Hall had been assigned to work with her in his first week on the job and he now lived in mortal terror of being moved on to another boss. When he realized that they would be spending the night together, even if it was only in the confines of a grubby Ford Focus, Adam had initially found some difficulty in breathing.
Underneath the fleece, Strauss was wearing a white blouse with the top two buttons undone. As she shifted in her seat, Adam caught the merest glimpse of decolletage, and had to stifle a low groan in his throat.
Strauss gave him a quizzical look over the top of her papers. ‘Are you okay?’
Adam pushed open the door. ‘Sorry,’ he said, swinging his feet onto the tarmac, ‘I need a comfort break. Won’t be a sec.’
Without waiting for a response, he stepped out of the car, closed the door, without letting it click shut, and began jogging down the street.
Halfway down the road he found an alley. It was a ten-foot-wide gap between two houses, and ran into Campden Street to the south. The place was well-lit but there was no sign of any CCTV and anyway Adam was by now in a major hurry. Stepping into the alley, he unzipped his trousers just at the moment where his bladder was about to give out. Picking his spot on the wall in front of him, he let fly.
‘Aaahhh!!’
A sense of immense satisfaction and well-being pervaded his whole body, followed by the thought that his bladder capacity must be greater than he had previously thought. The flow was just starting to weaken when Adam became conscious of movement at the far end of the alley. He looked up to see that a man had entered from Campden Street, and was walking towards him with a big smile on his face.
Pushing hard, Adam tried to hurry things up, but his bladder decidedly wasn’t finished yet.
‘I bet that feels good!’ the man laughed. His English was good, but he clearly wasn’t a native. Adam couldn’t identify the accent.
The young spook grunted in acknowledgement as the stream of piss finally subsided to a dribble and died. With a sigh of relief, Adam gave himself a final shake.
