Then We Die

by James Craig

Slow on the uptake, Carlyle frowned.

  Abramyan’s smile grew wider. ‘I am not one to forgive and forget. And if you break your word, if you make an enemy of me, you will have a lot more to worry about than a divorce in the family.’

  Returning to his seat, Carlyle watched Sol Abramyan make his way through the lobby and head out onto the street. After checking that the pot was still hot, he poured himself a fresh cup of coffee and watched Dom demolish another Danish pastry. ‘That went well,’ he said, ‘I think.’

  Dom both nodded and swallowed at the same time. ‘Yes. You made quite an impression there. I think Sol likes you.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘If he didn’t, the meeting would have been over in less than thirty seconds. Sol is not the kind of guy who has to put up with people if he doesn’t want to.’

  Carlyle thought about that statement for a moment. ‘So what do we do now?’

  ‘We wait,’ said Dom cheerfully. ‘Sol will be in touch pretty quickly, I’d imagine.’

  ‘Do you think he really has got the guy who killed Joe?’

  ‘How would I know?’ Dom said. ‘But I hope that he does.’

  Carlyle took another mouthful of coffee. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because that’s the only way there will be any justice for Joe.’ Dom signalled to one of the waiters, who immediately brought over the bill, along with a hand-held card-reader.

  Carlyle half-heartedly reached for his wallet.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Dom, casually handing over a black credit card. ‘I’ve already got it.’

  Relieved, Carlyle put the wallet back in his jacket pocket. ‘I thought you had to pay for this place in advance?’

  ‘Not if you’re Sol Abramyan you don’t.’ After entering his PIN, Dom took both the card and the receipt and stuffed them inside his coat.

  ‘Thanks for that,’ said Carlyle, getting back to his feet.

  Dom held up a restraining hand. ‘There’s one more thing . . .’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Charlotte Gondomar.’

  ‘That’s all sorted. I spoke to Simpson last week. The IPCC investigation is basically a formality.’

  ‘I’m not worried about the bloody IPCC,’ Dom said quietly. ‘That was never going to be my problem. What I am rather interested in, however, is the Middle Market Drugs Project.’

  From the unhappy look on Dom’s face, Carlyle realized that he’d made a mistake here. He should have raised the Middle Market Drugs Project with Dom before Dom raised it with him.

  ‘I spoke to a guy called Sam Hooper at the same time as I was talking to the IPCC,’ Carlyle said evenly. ‘Hooper told me that he had been investigating Gondomar but was more interested in your fashion designer.’

  ‘Rollo?’

  Carlyle nodded. ‘He reckoned that Kasabian was involved in Lottie’s little scheme.’

  The frown on Dom’s face deepened. ‘And you didn’t think to tell me about this?’

  ‘As far as I could see, it wasn’t such a big deal,’ Carlyle explained. ‘Hooper was just fishing. Apart from anything else, your name didn’t come up. To be honest, with everything else going on, I simply forgot about it.’

  ‘What did you tell him?’

  Now it was Carlyle’s turn to frown. ‘What do you think I told him?’ he said, struggling to keep his annoyance in check. ‘Absolutely nothing.’

  The waiter reappeared and began clearing up, eager to get them moved on. Standing up, Dom chewed his lower lip for a moment as he stared into the middle distance. ‘Maybe,’ he said finally, ‘Hooper thinks that you’re bent.’

  ‘He can think what he likes,’ Carlyle snorted. ‘The one thing I am not is bent.’

  ‘But you are on his radar. Just be careful.’

  ‘I always am,’ Carlyle grinned, buttoning up his jacket. ‘I always am.’

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  ‘Of course, I never knew my grandfather.’ Perched on a stool, on the far side of the central workbench, Ana Borochovsky blew on her camomile tea.

  Sitting next to Carlyle, Roche gently nudged him in the ribs.

  ‘Uh?’ Carlyle finally stopped gawking at the size and opulence of Mrs Borochovsky’s kitchen, which was almost as big as his entire flat, and smiled weakly. ‘No, no, of course not.’

  Neither woman was fooled into believing that he had been paying any attention to their conversation.

  ‘Ana was just explaining,’ Roche said, with a hint of exasperation in her tone, ‘how Julius Jubelitski was the father of three children. One of them, Tom, was Ana’s father.’

  ‘I was born in 1960,’ Ana Borochovsky explained.

  Carlyle did the maths in his head. That made her . . . a very good-looking middle-aged woman. ‘What do you know about your grandfather?’ he asked.

  ‘In terms of what he was doing during the war?’ she asked. ‘Not a lot really. It was deemed highly secret and my grandmother didn’t ask. We knew – we assumed – that he had been killed by the Nazis, but it was the war, after all, and details were impossible to come by. In the end, he was just one of many who went missing, whose fate was never uncovered.’

  How very stoical, Carlyle thought. On the other hand, it wasn’t as if the family had been offered a lot of choice in the matter.

  Mrs Borochovsky took a mouthful of tea. ‘We were all very proud of him.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ Carlyle smiled.

  ‘It’s wonderful that you’ve finally found out what happened to him. My grandmother is dead now, of course, but my father is extremely grateful.’

  ‘We’re delighted to have been able to help,’ Roche smiled. ‘Your grandfather’s remains will be handed over to the family in the next couple of days.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Ana Borochovsky gazed out through a set of French doors leading to her spacious Muswell Hill garden. A trampoline and a discarded football suggested the presence of small kids. Maybe, Carlyle thought, she has grandkids of her own now. He idly wondered if he would ever be a granddad, before sternly reminding himself that it was far too early to be thinking about things like that.

  ‘It all seems such a long time ago,’ the woman sighed.

  ‘It was a long time ago,’ Carlyle observed.

  ‘We were always a political family,’ Borochovsky mused, ‘probably not the smartest thing to say to the police . . .’

  Carlyle smiled but said nothing.

  ‘But Granddad was just one of a long line of anti-fascist activists.’ She sighed wistfully. ‘Even in my day, I remember getting involved in things like the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism – anti-apartheid too.’

  ‘I remember all that,’ said Carlyle.

  Borochovsky looked at Roche with a grin, before turning back to the inspector. ‘You were probably busy trying to truncheon people like me on the head.’

  ‘I’m not that old,’ he said stiffly.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Roche asked, laughing.

  ‘I was involved in the Miners’ Strike when I first started out in the police,’ Carlyle said, playing with his teacup, ‘but that’s the only major political issue I’ve really been involved in. There were the Poll Tax riots, of course, but that was just a few wasters pissing about.’

  ‘There aren’t really any big political issues to get worked up about any more, are there?’ Borochovsky said. ‘Not compared to my grandfather’s time, or even the battles of the 1970s.’

  ‘I don’t know about that.’ Carlyle gestured at their surroundings. ‘Maybe not for the likes of us, at least. You know what it’s like, you grow up, you have kids, responsibilities. Your priorities change.’ He looked towards Roche, as a representative of a younger generation.

  ‘People are more cynical these days,’ Roche said. ‘You might still want to campaign against globalization or global warming, or whatever, but basically it has become a lifestyle choice.’

  ‘Not enough lefties around to thwack,’ Carlyle grinned. ‘Sometimes people try to blur the edges between political activity and crim
e but usually it’s just as an attempt to justify what they’ve done.’ He rubbed his face. ‘I deal in crime, pure and simple.’

  As he spoke his phone started ringing. ‘Excuse me.’ He pulled it out of his pocket. ‘Hello?’

  The connection was poor, but the voice was all business. ‘It’s Sam Hooper here.’

  There was a pause.

  Carlyle volunteered nothing.

  ‘From the Middle Market Drugs Project.’

  I know where you’re from, Carlyle thought irritatedly, as he got out of his chair. ‘Hold on one minute.’ Opening one of the French doors, he stepped out into the back garden. The air was chilly, with the threat of rain. Carlyle waited until he was well out of earshot of the two women, before continuing. ‘What can I do for you?’ he asked as casually as he could manage.

  ‘I wondered if we could meet up?’

  Spit it out, Carlyle thought. ‘Well,’ he prevaricated, ‘I am rather busy right now.’

  ‘Tomorrow would be fine,’ Hooper said firmly. ‘Let’s say ten a.m. at Charing Cross. I want to pick your brains about a guy called Dominic Silver.’

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Dominic Silver sat in a chair on the second floor of his Soho townhouse, nursing the dregs of a Super Berry Smoothie. Yawning, he half-watched a rerun of an old Evander Holyfield–Mike Tyson fight that was playing on the 40-inch plasma screen in one corner of the room.

  ‘Which one is this?’

  ‘Ninety-six.’ Gideon Spanner, Dom’s senior lieutenant, shifted on the sofa and took another swig from his bottle of Sol. ‘The first one.’

  ‘So not the one where Tyson bites off his ear?’

  ‘Nah, that was a year later. This ends with a TKO for Holyfield in the eleventh round.’

  ‘Okay.’ Finishing the last of his juice, Silver slowly got to his feet. ‘I’ve got to get going.’

  Gideon grunted an acknowledgement.

  ‘Everything under control?’

  ‘Yup.’ Gideon placed his bottle on the floor and picked up the remote.

  ‘Good.’ Dom paused by the door. Starting to channel surf, Spanner looked up at his boss enquiringly.

  ‘There are a couple of things we might need to deal with,’ Dom said quietly. ‘You might want to think about which of the guys we could use for a potentially tricky situation.’

  ‘No problem,’ Gideon told him, flicking through the TV channels with increasing speed. ‘They’re all reliable, but I know who my first choice would be.’ Arriving at the Cartoon Channel, he found some vintage Tom & Jerry. ‘Cool,’ he grinned, tossing the remote onto the sofa and retrieving his beer.

  ‘Fine,’ said Dom as he slipped out of the door. ‘I’ll let you know how I want to proceed.’

  THIRTY-NINE

  Sitting in the Marquis pub, a couple of blocks from Charing Cross police station, Roche drank from a bottle of Peroni while Carlyle fiddled with his BlackBerry. Rather than reviewing his work emails, she could see that he was checking some football website. ‘That’s not exactly sociable behaviour, you know,’ she huffed.

  Carlyle looked up at her and replied, ‘You sound just like my wife.’ Logging off, he dropped the device on the table and took a swig of his beer.

  Weighing up whether to have another, Roche played with her beer bottle, turning it this way and that. ‘There’s a couple of new things that Simpson wants us to take a look at,’ she announced.

  ‘Mm.’ The inspector wondered if maybe his boss should take retirement after all. The last thing he wanted now was any more work. His desk was relatively clear at the moment, and he wanted to keep it that way. He eyed Roche with a pained expression, only to find that she was looking at someone behind him. Before he had time to turn around and check, a woman sat down next to him on the bench. Placing a large glass of white wine on the table, she deposited a red leather shoulder bag on the floor by her feet. Carlyle checked her out. Underneath a Burberry raincoat, she wore a pale blue V-neck sweater offering just the slightest hint of décolletage. At first glance, he’d say she was a foreigner, probably a tourist. A good-looking one too: slim, with long auburn hair and a pretty face, youthful-looking for someone Carlyle guessed to be somewhere in her mid-thirties.

  Turning to face him, she smiled and offered her hand. ‘Inspector Carlyle?’ she enquired in a vaguely American accent.

  ‘Yes,’ he said reluctantly, before shaking her hand limply.

  Roche waved her empty bottle at the new arrival. ‘And I’m Sergeant Roche,’ she said, not waiting to be introduced.

  The woman smiled blandly and moved closer to Carlyle. ‘I am Sylvia Swain,’ she said, taking out a business card and placing it on the table in front of him. Then she produced a small tape recorder and placed it next to the card. ‘I work for the Globe and Mail in Canada. I’m doing a piece on the current spate of political killings in London and their impact, both on people in the city and on the wider geopolitical situation.’

  Good for you.

  ‘And I wondered if I could possibly speak to you for a few moments about the murder of your partner?’

  The inspector picked up the card and scanned it slowly. Swain bore the title of Senior Foreign Correspondent and she had an office address in Toronto. A mobile started ringing. He recognized the opening bars of U2’s ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’ – as Roche began fumbling in the pocket of her jacket. Checking the number on the screen, she took the call, clamping the phone to one ear and sticking a finger in the other to block out the noise of the busy pub. ‘Hi!’ she shouted to the caller. ‘Hold on a minute.’ Giving him a crooked smile, she headed outside for the relative quiet of the street.

  Annoyed at being abandoned by his colleague, he turned to face the journalist, who was waiting politely for him to respond to her question. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but this is an ongoing investigation. I am not at liberty to discuss it.’

  Swain took a mouthful of wine and nodded. ‘I completely understand.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  However, she went on: ‘But you worked closely with Sergeant Sy . . .’

  Carlyle glanced at the tape machine, double-checking that it was switched off. ‘Szyszkowski. Joe Szyszkowski.’

  ‘Interesting name. Where was he from?’

  ‘He was English,’ said Carlyle, not wishing to elaborate.

  ‘Could you at least tell me what kind of an officer he was?’ She noticed Carlyle again eyeing the machine on the table. ‘Don’t worry, Inspector,’ she said, reaching over and tapping him gently on the arm. ‘I am not recording this. This is all background. I will not quote you on anything.’ Picking the machine up off the table, she dropped it into her bag, before pulling out a small Moleskine notebook and a cheap biro in its place.

  Carlyle sighed. ‘Joe Szyszkowski was an experienced officer,’ he said quickly, ‘a very dedicated officer who worked extremely hard on behalf of the people of London. He left a wife and two kids, and the very least that they deserve is that his killer should be brought to justice.’ While the journalist scribbled down what he had just said, Carlyle glanced outside. Roche was standing on the far side of the road, still chatting away on her mobile. He felt weary and had developed an overwhelming need to go home.

  Swain finished writing. Pen hovering over the page, she looked up expectantly, as if waiting for more.

  ‘That’s it,’ said Carlyle, as he rose to his feet. ‘I have to go now.’

  ‘Thank you for your time, Inspector,’ Swain told him. ‘I appreciate it, and I will send you a copy of my story.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘If you could let me have your email address?’

  ‘Oh – right.’ Carlyle dug out one of his cards. ‘I look forward to reading it,’ he lied, walking away.

  FORTY

  ‘Get on with it.’

  Snivelling like a beaten child, Rollo Kasabian gingerly fingered the electrical cable looped around his neck. Clenching his buttocks tightly, he tried to swallow, but his mouth was t
oo dry.

  ‘Just take the photo and hit the Send button.’ The voice behind him was calm but insistent. ‘The sooner you do that, the sooner I can get you down.’

  Rollo wobbled on the chair and felt the cable dig into the flesh underneath his chin. Regaining his balance, he carefully extended his arm, so as to position the camera on his phone directly in front of his face.

  ‘Good man.’

  Tears streaming down his cheeks, Rollo hesitated. A small voice in the depths of his brain was urging him not to take the picture. But he had been standing this way in the middle of his living room for almost an hour now, till his whole body ached with tiredness. He needed rest, lots of rest. All he wanted to do was to get down from here and crawl into bed. As his hand started to shake, he pressed the button. Flipping the camera round, he stared at the grotesque image of his bloated face on the screen. It looked like he was already dead.

  ‘Send it.’

  Fumbling with the handset, Rollo pulled up the number from his contacts book and pressed Send. The image disappeared from the screen and he let the handset slip from his fingers. Hitting the parquet floor hard, it disintegrated into a mess of plastic and metal components.

  ‘Thank you.’ The big man with the shaven head stepped in front of the fashion designer and smiled. ‘That wasn’t too difficult, was it?’

  ‘Get me down!’ Rollo gasped.

  The man’s smile grew wider. Stepping forward, he kicked away the chair, leaving the fat man clawing at thin air.

  This time, Sam Hooper didn’t bother to knock. A couple of swift kicks sent Rollo Kasabian’s front door flying open, and the sudden stench led him straight to the living room, where the fashion designer was hanging from a noose that had been rigged from the light fitting in the centre of the ceiling.

  Hooper didn’t bother checking for a pulse. ‘You useless fat fucker,’ he hissed. ‘You could have waited till I’d finished with you.’ Pulling out his mobile, he hesitated before summoning an ambulance, knowing that he should give the flat a quick once-over first.

  ‘Drop the phone,’ a voice ordered.