Then We Die

by James Craig

  Carlyle had heard enough. He grabbed the remote from Helen and switched over to Sky Sports News.

  ‘Hey!’ Helen complained. ‘Don’t you want to hear more?’

  ‘No, I bloody don’t,’ Carlyle grumbled, taking solace in the latest football trivia. ‘I’ve heard more than enough already.’

  ‘I thought you were going to phone your parents,’ she reminded him.

  ‘I am,’ he lied.

  ‘It’s already late.’

  ‘I know. By the way, who is the best person at your place to talk to about Gaza?’

  ‘Fucking hell, John.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I thought you said it was all over. There is no way that this can still be your case.’

  ‘No, no, of course not,’ he said quickly. ‘This is not even a police inquiry any more. It’s being handled by MI6.’ He recounted his meeting with Adam Hall, the youthful SIS guy, earlier in the day.

  ‘MI6?’ Helen snorted. ‘That’s great. That lot couldn’t find their way out of a paper bag.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, anyway. If it is Mossad behind it, the guys who did this are probably safely back in Tel Aviv by now. The Israelis will tell anyone who complains to fuck right off while they smile smugly and do their usual “We never confirm or deny anything” routine.’

  ‘So why do you want to speak to someone at Avalon?’

  ‘You could say I’ve recently developed an interest in the subject.’

  Helen let out the longest of sighs. ‘Well, our Gaza co-ordinator is a woman called Louisa Arbillot. She’s French and worked for Médecins Sans Frontières for years. She joined us about nine months ago.’

  ‘Can you get her to give me a call?’

  ‘She’s over there at the moment,’ Helen said, the lack of enthusiasm in her voice obvious, ‘but I’ll see what I can do. It might have to wait until she gets back next week.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I’m going for a bath,’ Helen yawned. ‘Remember to call your mother . . .’

  ELEVEN

  A couple of Ibuprofen and a large glass of Jameson whiskey ensured that Carlyle slept soundly. By the time he reached the office the next day it was after eleven. Roche was sitting at Joe’s desk when he arrived, staring intently at the computer screen. Carlyle paused a moment to check her out. She was dressed in washed-out grey jeans, Gola trainers and a blue, long-sleeved T-shirt. Her hair was pulled back and she wasn’t wearing any make-up. As her fingers danced across the keyboard, he idly noticed that she wasn’t wearing any wedding or engagement ring.

  ‘How’s it going?’ he asked, flopping into his chair.

  ‘Not bad,’ Roche replied, not looking up. ‘Got some interesting stuff back from Phillips.’

  Carlyle leaned back in his chair and yawned. ‘About the skeleton, you mean?’

  ‘No, that will still take a while. But she found a cartridge in the grave. Presumably the bullet that killed our victim.’ She swivelled in her seat to face Carlyle directly, a big grin on her face. ‘And she found the gun too.’

  Carlyle sat up.

  ‘Presumably what happened was that the guy was shot and dumped in the shallow grave. The killer couldn’t keep the weapon about his person so he tossed it in too.’

  ‘Thank you, Sherlock Holmes.’

  Carlyle saw her face darken and he quickly held up a hand. ‘Sorry, my sense of humour.’

  She gave him a sharp look.

  ‘Not always to everyone’s taste,’ he admitted. ‘Anyway, what else do we have?’

  ‘The gun is a . . .’ Roche looked back at the notes on the screen ‘. . . Walther P38.’

  ‘Never heard of it,’ Carlyle said.

  Roche squinted at the screen and read out: ‘ “It’s a nine-millimetre weapon that was developed as the service pistol of the Wehrmacht at the beginning of World War Two.’ She shrugged. ‘Dunno who the Wehrmacht are.’

  ‘The German army.’

  ‘Okay. So someone used a German pistol to shoot this man and bury him in a park in Central London.’

  ‘If it was during the war,’ Carlyle mused, ‘in a blackout, during the Blitz, that might explain how someone could easily get away with it. Bloody long time ago, though. How the hell are we going to find out who this guy was? It’ll be like looking for a needle in a haystack.’

  Roche tapped the keyboard on her desk with an index finger. ‘I’ve been taking a look through the Zella-Mehlis database.’

  ‘Have you indeed?’ Carlyle replied, not having the remotest clue what she was talking about.

  ‘Basically, in 2009, the Met digitized all of its still open Missing Person cases.’ She gave the keyboard another tap and a new screen popped up. To Carlyle it looked like just an endless list of words. Roche clicked on a name and a man’s photograph appeared. ‘This is just some guy I picked out at random, but you can do a search by various characteristics, date of birth, date reported missing and so on.’

  ‘Sounds good. Have you found any possibles yet?’

  Roche shook her head. ‘I’ve only just started. What I thought I would do is first search for anyone who went missing near Lincoln’s Inn Fields during the war.’

  ‘Won’t there be a lot of them?’

  ‘I’ll start off by looking for men between eighteen and thirty. Most of those otherwise would have been off fighting at that time.’

  ‘I suppose,’ said Carlyle vaguely. As far as he knew, no one in the Carlyle family had fought during the war, apart from some distant cousin of his grandfather, who had never come back from a prisoner-of-war camp in Burma. Not one to daydream, he pulled himself back into the present. All of this was basically of historical interest only, and he had work to do.

  And he needed another coffee.

  And he still had to phone his mother.

  He pushed himself out of the chair and headed for the door. ‘It’s all sounding very interesting,’ he said over his shoulder, leaving Roche to her databases. ‘Keep me posted.’

  At the front desk, Carlyle waited for Kevin Price to finish talking to a geography teacher from Doncaster who’d been relieved of £150 in a Soho clip joint. Carlyle watched the man slouch out of the station clutching a piece of paper containing his crime-identification number.

  ‘Will he be able to claim on his insurance?’ he asked.

  ‘He probably won’t even dare try,’ Price laughed, ‘in case his wife finds out what he’s been up to.’

  Price was a tall, thin man, with plenty of grey in his black hair and also in his badly groomed beard. He had recently started wearing reading glasses, and these, Carlyle thought, made him look like a psycho librarian.

  ‘Dirty little bugger,’ Price snorted. ‘Don’t they have any tarts up north?’ Without waiting for an answer, he pointed to a round tin at the far end of the desk. It was slightly taller than a soup can, and maybe twice as wide. On it, someone had stuck a label that simply said Joe S.

  Carlyle fished out his wallet and looked inside. He was rather surprised to see that it contained a twenty-pound note, along with a ten and a five. He pulled out the twenty and the ten, folding them twice before placing them carefully in the tin, which was already almost full.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Price stiffly. ‘The funeral has been arranged for a week from today, but I expect that you already knew that.’

  ‘No,’ Carlyle said quietly, ‘I didn’t. Thanks.’

  ‘No problem. Apparently it’s going to be a small family affair, but no doubt you’ll be going along.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And the boss.’

  ‘Simpson? I suppose so.’

  Price shook his head. ‘It’s a terrible thing. Especially with him having young kids.’

  ‘What’s the gossip in the station about it?’ Carlyle asked, as casually as he could manage.

  ‘You tell me.’ Price scratched his beard. ‘I haven’t heard anything at all.’

  Don’t be a sod, Carlyle thought. Desk sergeants hear everything. Just
tell me what people are saying. Do they think that Joe’s death was my fault? He waited for Price to say more, but the sergeant kept his counsel.

  ‘I haven’t heard anything either,’ Carlyle said finally. ‘I haven’t been around much.’

  ‘But you were there,’ Price was obviously keen to probe but didn’t want to be seen to be too interested in the juicy details, ‘when it happened.’

  Now it was Carlyle’s turn to remain unforthcoming. ‘It’s still all a bit of a blur really.’

  ‘I suppose it must be.’ Unhappy at being fobbed off, Price picked up some papers from the desk and stuffed them into a box-file. Wedging the file under his arm he then wandered off, leaving Carlyle none the wiser.

  Sitting in Visconti’s café on Maiden Lane, Carlyle sucked down a double espresso and pulled up the number for his parents on his mobile. Taking a deep breath, he hit the call button and waited to be connected.

  After the third ring, he relaxed slightly, thinking that it would now go to voicemail.

  ‘Hello?’

  Shit.

  ‘Ma? It’s John.’

  ‘Master John Carlyle,’ his mother replied, ‘how good of you to call. I assumed that you had simply vanished off the face of the earth.’

  In his mind’s eye, he could see her standing by the phone in the hallway of the Fulham flat that he’d grown up in, the same flat she had lived in for so many years. Pursing her lips, she would be wondering what she’d done to deserve such an errant son. He forced himself into grovelling mode. ‘I’m really sorry, Ma.’

  Lorna Gordon wasn’t one to acknowledge apologies. ‘Running off on me like that,’ she said, her disappointed tone rolling back the years, ‘and leaving me to pay the bill.’

  Carlyle had paid the bill himself, in advance over the internet, but he let that matter slide. ‘I know, I know. But there was a serious problem and I had to try and deal with it. It was all in the news.’

  ‘Nasty business,’ his mother mused. ‘The poor policeman . . . getting killed like that. What a terrible thing to happen!’

  ‘Yes,’ Carlyle agreed, his desire to talk about it rapidly evaporating. ‘It certainly was.’

  ‘I hope they catch the people who did it.’

  ‘So do I.’

  ‘Isn’t that your job?’ she scolded.

  ‘It isn’t my investigation.’

  ‘It might not be your investigation, John,’ she said, her voice rising slightly, ‘but surely it is still your responsibility?’

  You’re right about that, Carlyle thought. He caught sight of his reflection in the café window. Despite everything, he was smiling. His mother could always cut straight to the heart of an issue. Pissing about around the edges of any problem was not Lorna Gordon’s style. It was one of the things he loved about his mother, that same characteristic he was glad to have inherited from her.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘We should meet up again,’ he said, getting back to the point of his phone call, ‘and finish our discussion.’

  ‘You’re the one with the busy schedule,’ she groused.

  Carlyle shook his head, but, once again, didn’t rise to the bait. Once they had agreed a time and a place, he said goodbye and hung up, relieved that the conversation was over.

  As soon as he put the mobile on the table, it started vibrating again. Noting that the call was from Simpson, he picked it up.

  ‘Commander?’

  ‘Inspector,’ she said evenly. ‘How are you?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Have you spoken to the IPCC yet?’

  ‘No.’ Carlyle had forgotten all about the Independent Police Complaints Commission. ‘Not heard a dicky-bird. Nothing from those other guys either.’

  Whatever they were called.

  ‘That’s a bit surprising. You would have expected them to have been in touch by now.’

  ‘They know where to find me.’

  ‘Let me know how things go.’

  ‘Of course.’ Carlyle signalled to the girl behind the counter for another double espresso. ‘Any news from Joe’s family?’

  ‘No. I expect that it is very hard for them,’ Simpson sighed. ‘Things are bound to be tough.’

  ‘I hear that the funeral is next week.’

  ‘Yes – that’s what I wanted to speak to you about. Look, John, there’s no easy way to say this, but they don’t want you to attend.’

  The girl placed a fresh demitasse in front of him, scooped up the empty cup and went scuttling back behind the counter.

  ‘I know that must be difficult news for you to hear.’

  Carlyle took a sip of the fresh coffee. ‘No, no.’ He shook his head. ‘That’s fine. I understand. It’s got to be Anita’s decision. I don’t want to cause any problems.’

  The man who dodged the bullet that killed her husband.

  ‘That’s good of you, John,’ said Simpson. ‘Thank you.’ He could hear the tension ebbing from her voice as, for once, a tricky conversation went better than might have been expected.

  ‘Will you be going?’

  ‘Yes. I will represent the Force at the service. But it will be family only at the graveside.’

  ‘Okay.’ Thinking about it, Carlyle was really quite relieved. He had been to more than his share of funerals over the years. He certainly didn’t need any more.

  ‘There will, of course, be a memorial service at a later date.’

  ‘Yes.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘How are things going with your skeleton?’ Simpson asked finally.

  ‘Roche is making some progress,’ Carlyle said. ‘We think it might be some bloke who died during the Blitz.’

  ‘Interesting.’

  ‘Not really,’ Carlyle laughed, ‘but we’ll see what else we can find out. By the way, am I getting Roche for long?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Simpson said evenly. ‘Do you want her?’

  ‘She seems okay.’

  ‘Fine. I’ll speak to her CO at . . .’

  ‘Leyton.’

  ‘. . . and see what I can do.’

  ‘Can’t say fairer than that.’ Ending the call, Carlyle finished his coffee, paid the girl behind the counter and headed back outside.

  TWELVE

  The woman sent by the Independent Police Complaints Commission was a doddle. The kind of bored bureaucrat who gave box-ticking a bad name, she skipped through the necessary forms with a minimum of fuss. Keen to get out of the interview room as quickly as possible, she gave no indication that she was in the least bit interested in what had happened to Lottie Gondomar. As she flitted from one form to another, Carlyle looked her up and down: colourless hair, featureless face, indeterminate age, dressed by Marks & Spencer; a mere cipher of an individual. He couldn’t even remember what she’d said her name was. He watched her sign the bottom of the last form with a flourish and scrawl a large X next to the line below.

  ‘Sign here,’ she mumbled, shovelling the paper across the desk, without even looking up.

  Carlyle accepted the pen she offered and obediently made his scrawl.

  Grabbing the form back, the woman gave a thin smile. ‘Thank you,’ she said, her voice still completely lacking in any conviction. ‘We’ll be in touch with you.’

  Carlyle forced a smile in response. ‘No problem. I’m sure it’s all completely straightforward – as far as I’m concerned, at least.’

  Mistaking his small talk for real interest, the woman’s smile widened. ‘We’ll see what happens next.’

  ‘After all,’ Carlyle said cheerily, ‘it’s not like this is another Jean Charles de Menezes, is it?’

  It was a deliberately low blow, and delivered with a modicum of relish. Jean Charles de Menezes was the innocent Brazilian shot seven times in the head by police marksmen while sitting on a tube train at Stockwell station. It was two weeks after the London bombings of 7 July 2005, which had cost fifty-six lives. Apparently, the police had mistaken de Menezes for a suicide bomber.

  The
woman stuffed her documents back into a plastic bag and stood up.

  ‘I mean,’ Carlyle continued, ‘how badly can you fuck this one up?’

  Looking like she was going to be sick over the desk, the woman fled without saying another word.

  Folding his arms, Carlyle sat back in his chair. ‘One down,’ he said to himself, ‘one to go.’

  If the woman from the IPCC had been instantly banished from his thoughts, Inspector Sam Hooper was another matter entirely. Sitting in the same interview room in Charing Cross police station, Carlyle was this time on high alert. The man from the Middle Market Drugs Project could pose a serious threat to his career. Every word had to be weighed carefully, but uttered instantly, particularly if the conversation turned to Dominic Silver.

  As far as he could tell, the interview was not being recorded. And Hooper had said nothing about the basis of the conversation – whether it was on the record or not. On balance, Carlyle took comfort from the vague nature of the conversation: it was shaping up to be a glorified fishing exercise. Take control from the outset, he told himself as he watched Hooper take out a file of papers and a notepad from his briefcase. Make the other man do the talking. It was a simple rule. The less you said, the less likely you were to trip yourself up.

  ‘So,’ he asked, ‘what exactly is the Middle Market Drugs Project?’

  Hooper looked at him blankly. ‘I thought Commander Simpson would have told you about that.’

  Carlyle shrugged. ‘Not really.’

  Hooper pulled a pen from the pocket of his jacket. ‘We are looking at bringing down drug dealers of significance across the capital. That way, we can make seizures of a decent size and also disrupt supplies to the sellers out on the street.’

  ‘And have you uncovered much?’ Carlyle asked, in a tone that suggested a casual yet professional interest.

  Hooper made a show of trying to size him up.

  Carlyle made sure he kept their eye-contact until the man across the table was forced to break it off.

  ‘Has it been successful?’ Carlyle asked again.

  ‘Very.’ Hooper bowed his head slightly, and Carlyle felt irritated by his false modesty.