The Circus

by James Craig

  Not that it really mattered when it was being aimed straight at your heart. A wave of angst and frustration washed over him as once more he asked himself: Why does this have to be my problem?

  ‘It’s okay,’ he repeated, now nervously eyeing the Rolex Submariner on his left wrist. Maybe he should just hand it over. ‘I’m going. I didn’t see anything.’

  ‘Good.’ Standing on the doorstep, the robber lifted his aim to Harrington’s head and fired.

  NINE

  Carlyle watched Joe Szyszkowski pacing the far side of the room, mobile glued to his ear, his free hand gesturing frantically.

  ‘I know – I know. Look, there’s nothing I can do . . . but yes, of course . . .’ Glancing over at the inspector, Joe made a face and slipped out of the room and into the hallway. He would be speaking to Anita, the inspector thought smugly – receiving another verbal beating from his missus. He himself, on the other hand, had avoided getting an earful from his wife by simply turning off both of the phones nestling in his jacket. Helen wouldn’t be happy, but at least she knew the score. Anyway, she would doubtless be fast asleep by now. They could talk in the morning, maybe over breakfast together.

  ‘How much longer?’

  Perched on the edge of the sofa, Carlyle gave Horatio Mosman a sympathetic smile. ‘Not long.’

  The two policemen had been less than three blocks away from the Mosman residence in Wellington Road when Joe’s phone had started going crazy. Energized, the inspector had shot off the Snowdons’ sofa, mouthing his apologies as he headed for the door. Happy to be rescued from his painful conversation with Rosanna’s parents, he was also curious to find out whether the 999 call about a kid with an alleged bomb fastened round his neck was – as he suspected – a hoax.

  Five minutes later, he knew for sure that it wasn’t.

  From the pavement, they entered through a metal gate with a well-tended eight-foot hedge on either side. Signalling for the uniforms and the paramedics to wait out on the street, Carlyle lifted the latch and stepped on through. Immediately he spotted the body of a man sprawled in front of the main door of the house. He had clearly been shot in the head.

  ‘Joe . . .’ Carlyle began, distracted by the blood seeping towards a nearby flowerbed.

  The sergeant appeared at his side. ‘Fuck.’

  ‘Good nutrition for the roses, I suppose.’

  Joe frowned. Neither of them had green fingers. ‘What about inside?’

  ‘No bang – yet. I’ll go in and take a look.’

  Joe eyed him doubtfully. ‘Okay.’

  ‘Go and call for some reinforcements and I’ll give you a shout in a minute.’

  I could really do with a piss and some fresh air, in that order, Carlyle thought. He had been trying to ignore the sour smell in the room for over an hour now.

  ‘Want something to eat?’ he asked. ‘They delivered your pizza a while back.’

  The youngster started to shake his head, then quickly thought better of it. ‘I’m not hungry.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ The inspector smiled at young Horatio. ‘You’re doing fine. I’m sure it won’t be too much longer.’

  ‘I want this bloody thing off!’ the teenager wailed.

  ‘We’ll be as quick as possible.’

  Horatio slumped back on the sofa in slow motion. ‘You don’t think it’ll go off, do you?’

  ‘Nah.’ This time Carlyle’s grin was genuine. ‘It’s a fake. There was something similar happened recently in – New Zealand, I think. Somewhere like that. It was just a bullshit attempt at extortion. A guy was arrested fairly quickly. I think he confessed.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ The boy sniffed, not really taking in what the policeman was saying.

  ‘Look on the bright side. Once you get out of here, you’ll be something of a celebrity. All the girls will want to know you.’

  ‘I’ll settle just for getting this off.’ Horatio gestured at the collar, where the little red light continued to blink menacingly.

  ‘Sure.’ Carlyle glanced at a couple of explosives officers from Specialist Operations who were talking quietly in a corner. ‘They just have to go through the set procedures for this kind of thing, simply to be on the safe side.’

  ‘But it’s been ages now,’ the boy whimpered.

  And it hasn’t gone off yet. Carlyle made a final effort at the big smile. ‘So far, so good.’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘These guys,’ Carlyle explained, ‘they have detailed procedures to follow, even when they think – even when they really know – that the bomb’s a fake. They always take it one step at a time. Better to be on the safe side.’

  ‘Okay.’ Horatio wanted to be convinced, but he couldn’t quite get there.

  As if on cue, the officers finished their conversation. One of them slipped out of the room while the other stepped over towards Carlyle and the boy.

  ‘Inspector?’

  ‘Yeah?’ Carlyle looked up at the squat, well-built guy with a regulation number-one haircut that showed a hint of grey at the temples. The dark rings under his flat brown eyes made him look – to the inspector’s mind – a bit like a vampire. The name stencilled on the breast pocket of his uniform said Baldwin.

  ‘Well?’ Carlyle prompted.

  ‘We’re good.’ Baldwin reached across and patted Horatio on the shoulder. ‘We’ll have it off you in a few minutes.’

  ‘Yeah!’ Horatio clenched a fist in triumph.

  ‘Thank God for that.’ Grimacing, Carlyle got to his feet and indulged in a stretch. ‘I need a comfort break.’ The last thing he wanted was to do a Gerard Dépardieu and piss himself in public.

  Grinning, Horatio pointed to the door. ‘There’s a guest bathroom just down the hall.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Carlyle replied. ‘I’ll only be a minute.’

  Zipping himself up, the inspector squirted a blob of liquid soap on to his hands and turned on the wash-basin tap. After rinsing his hands, he splashed a little cold water on his face, before drying it off with a towel. It was well past midnight but the adrenalin rush had yet to wear off and he was still buzzing. ‘Good effort tonight,’ Carlyle told his reflection in the mirror. He could have been blown to bits out there, but he hadn’t bottled it. Helen would give him shit but that was nothing new. Bottom line, he was only doing his job. He flashed himself a cheesy smile. ‘When the going gets tough . . .’

  He was still grinning at the mirror when there was an almighty explosion somewhere nearby.

  ‘Fuck!’ Carlyle automatically threw his hands up to protect his face as the bathroom door flew open and the false ceiling fell in on him. Losing his footing, he felt his head bounce off something cool and smooth before he landed in a heap on the floor.

  Then there was only darkness.

  Where the hell am I?

  Blinking in the gloom, Hannah Gillespie lay staring at the ceiling, listening as the pounding in her head alternated with the hum of traffic outside. After a while, she pushed aside the grimy duvet. Heaving herself up, she slowly swung her legs over one side of the bed. Head bowed, she tried to remember the events of the previous evening, but it was all a blank. She felt dizzy and there was a chalky taste in her mouth. Suddenly nauseous, she tried to throw up, but nothing came out.

  What time was it? There was no clock, but from the daylight filtering into the room, Hannah guessed that she was already late for school. Shit! She hadn’t written that bloody essay either. Bloody hell, girl, she thought ruefully, you’ve really overdone it here. You’ll have a job to talk your way out of this one.

  A tentative sniff of her T-shirt suggested a shower was in order and she also needed to pee. Grabbing her jeans from the floor, she quickly pulled them on, before shoving her feet into her trainers. Rushing over to the door, she yanked the handle. It was locked.

  ‘Hey!’ Panic rising, she hammered on the door with her fist. ‘Hey! Stop jerking around. Let me out!’

  Getting no response, Hannah slumped back on to the bed. Closing her eyes, she
fought back a sob.

  ‘Mum . . .’ It came out like a whimper.

  Outside, the traffic slipped past relentlessly.

  ‘MU . . . UM!!’

  No one came.

  TEN

  ‘That was a good time to take a leak,’ Joe Szyszkowski observed, biting into a bacon sandwich.

  ‘Tell me about it.’ The inspector drained his demitasse and signalled to the waitress for another double espresso.

  The girl gestured to a menu with her pen. ‘Would you like anything to eat?’

  ‘Nah, thanks.’ The caffeine was mixing with the adrenalin and Carlyle felt too pumped to contemplate any food. He looked up at the clock on the wall: 4.57 a.m. Just over three hours since Horatio Mosman had been blown to kingdom come.

  Amazingly, no one else had been killed in the explosion. One of the explosives officers and a paramedic had been taken to the Royal Free Hospital with serious injuries, but the expectation was that they would survive. The ground floor of the house meanwhile was – well, it was like a bombsite. The living room was completely wrecked and the rest of the ground floor had suffered extensive blast damage. The device had clearly been designed to do more than simply remove the unfortunate teenager’s head from his shoulders. Forensics would be collecting bits of his body for days, if not weeks.

  And yet the explosives officer – Carlyle struggled to remember his name – Baldwin had claimed it was a fake.

  Bad call.

  Bad, bad, bad call.

  Was the guy just trying to keep the kid calm? Carlyle wondered. Surely not. How could he have got things so wrong? There were lots of questions but no answers. Anyway, that was something to worry about later. When Mr Baldwin came out of Intensive Care, it would be back to traffic duty for him, career over.

  The waitress reappeared with his coffee and a smile. ‘Anything to eat with that?’ she asked again, placing the cup and saucer carefully on the table before removing the old one.

  No, Carlyle thought, I haven’t changed my mind during the last minute. Irritated, he shook his head. ‘I’m okay.’

  ‘I’ll have another one of these, please,’ said Joe, with the polite reticence of the glutton. Stuffing the last of the sandwich in his gob, he handed the waitress the empty plate.

  ‘Sure. One bacon sandwich coming up.’ She turned on her heel, shouting out the order to the cook at the back as she retreated behind the counter.

  Carlyle gave him a look of mock disgust. ‘That’s not going to help with the diet, is it?’

  Joe gave him an As if I care grunt. Anita had placed him on an interactive, weight-loss programme almost a year ago. So far, the result was that Joseph Leon Gorka Szyszkowski had gained almost half a stone.

  ‘Think of your arteries.’

  ‘Gimme a break. I get enough of that stuff at home.’

  ‘Anita just wants to avoid you keeling over one day.’

  Joe belched. ‘We’ll all keel over one day. Look at poor young . . . What’s-his-name.’

  ‘Horatio.’

  ‘Christ, what kind of a name is that? Anyway, the poor little bugger didn’t even make it out of his teens.’ A terrible thought crossed his mind. ‘Probably never even got laid.’

  ‘Stop changing the subject. You know what I mean.’

  ‘Overall,’ Joe declared, ‘I’m in good shape. Better than you.’ He gestured at Carlyle’s battered visage. ‘At this precise moment in time, anyway.’

  ‘That wouldn’t be hard.’ The inspector took a sip of his coffee and gingerly felt the bump behind his left ear. It appeared to be growing in size, but wasn’t actually painful as long as he didn’t prod it.

  Apart from smacking his head on the edge of the toilet bowl in the Mosmans’ guest bathroom, he had escaped without a scratch. After the explosion, he had been out cold for maybe thirty seconds. Even the raging headache that he had come round to had subsided through the help of four Ibuprofen tablets filched from the bathroom cabinet.

  ‘You were in just about the safest place in that house.’

  Carlyle nodded. ‘Yeah.’ After washing down the painkillers with some tapwater, he had sat on the toilet seat and tried to take in the chaos unfolding around him: screaming alarms, groaning people, emergency sirens in the distance, getting closer. What struck him most, however, was the smell – the acrid stench of incinerated soft furnishings tinged with the aroma of charred flesh.

  After several minutes, a face had appeared in the doorway. It took the inspector a moment to focus on her features. The young paramedic had clearly been investigating the carnage in the living room. The colour had drained from her face, making her look about twelve years old – a kid trying to play the part of an adult. She looked like she was going to throw up.

  ‘Are you okay?’ she asked in a shaky voice.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Carlyle smiled. ‘How about you?’

  ‘Fine.’ Taking a deep breath, she shot him a look that said Don’t question my professionalism, then stalked off.

  ‘See you later,’ Carlyle mumbled, giving her a little wave. He was quite happy just sitting there on the toilet seat and made no effort to get up until he was hit by a sudden thought: Where is Joe?

  The waitress placed Joe’s bacon sandwich on the table and looked enquiringly at the inspector for a third time. Deeply irritated, Carlyle ignored her. How many times is she going to ask me if I want anything to eat? If I want any fucking food, I’ll say so.

  He glanced around the café. The only other customers were a couple of cab drivers moaning about Arsenal’s wretched run of form while quickly demolishing large plates of bacon and eggs.

  ‘You were very lucky.’ Joe added some brown sauce to his sandwich before taking a bite.

  ‘Says the man who happened to walk out of the front door five seconds before the bloody thing went off,’ Carlyle snorted.

  ‘The other good thing is,’ Joe grinned, wiping some sauce from his chin, ‘I was standing behind a tree, otherwise I might have been hit by the flying glass.’

  ‘Survival instinct?’

  ‘Mm, I’ll need that when I get home.’

  Carlyle laughed. ‘Well, you know what they say.’

  ‘No. What?’ Another couple of swift bites and Joe’s sandwich was gone.

  ‘Better to be lucky than smart.’

  Joe wiped his hands on a paper napkin. ‘If Anita hadn’t been giving me such grief on the phone,’ he mused, ‘I could have still been standing right next to that kid.’

  A grave expression descended on to the inspector’s face. ‘Don’t ever tell her that.’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘And don’t spend too much time thinking about it either.’

  Joe thought about that for a few moments. Then he remarked: ‘For one thing, dicing with death makes a bacon sandwich taste even better.’

  Carlyle shook his head silently.

  ‘Who would do something like that?’ Joe wondered.

  The inspector sucked the dregs of the coffee from his cup. ‘Someone with the skills and ability to shoot a man between the eyes at close range, vaporize a kid and then walk off down the road, apparently without a care in the world. Quite impressive when you think about it.’

  ‘Not many people like that around,’ Joe agreed.

  ‘Not on our patch, at least.’

  ‘So, who do you think did it?’

  ‘No idea.’ Carlyle yawned. The adrenalin was beginning to wear off and he wanted to go home, jump into bed and cuddle up to Helen for an hour before the working day formally began. Getting to his feet, he signalled to the waitress for the bill. ‘But that’s what we have to find out, sunshine.’

  A phone started bleeping. Carlyle reached into his jacket and pulled out not one but two handsets, looking at the screen of each in turn. ‘Not mine,’ he grunted.

  Joe already had his mobile against his ear. ‘Yeah, okay. Where? . . . Yeah, I know it.’ Carlyle’s heart sank. ‘Don’t worry, I was up anyway . . . Yeah, he’s here . . . Yeah, oka
y. Shouldn’t take us long to get there – maybe twenty minutes.’ Ending the call, he put the phone back in his pocket and finished the last of his coffee.

  ‘That sounds like good news,’ Carlyle said wearily.

  ‘Missing teenager,’ Joe told him.

  ‘We’ve had more than enough teenage trouble for one night. Can’t someone else deal with it?’

  ‘Apparently not. ‘

  ‘Fuck’s sake.’

  ‘They’ve sent a WPC over to babysit the worried parents. Maude Hall.’ Joe grinned.

  Carlyle looked blank. The name meant nothing to him.

  ‘She’s very cute.’

  The inspector grunted. As an old married man, he had long since realized that it was better not to notice such things. Or, at least, not to comment on them. There were lots of pretty girls in the world and none of them had anything to do with him.

  ‘Anyway,’ Joe continued, ‘it’s probably something and nothing. The parents are in a bit of a state though, as you can imagine.’ Pushing his chair back, he got to his feet. ‘Don’t worry, I can handle it.’

  ‘You’re a good man, Joe.’ Carlyle looked past his colleague, towards the counter. Now that he actually wanted her attention, the waitress had disappeared. Pulling a crumpled tenner from his pocket, he dropped it on the table. ‘I’ve done my share of social-worker shit for one night. Now, I need to get to my bed.’

  ELEVEN

  The mornings were getting colder and darker. Winter was on the way and London would spend the next six or seven months in its default state – fifty shades of grey, damp and chilly. Zipping up his overalls, Ryan Davison climbed the steps to the office of the Street Environment Service Depot. Inside, he nodded to the supervisor, a permanently exhausted-looking man called Danimir who had fled from the civil war in the Balkans in the 1990s. For his part, Ryan had fled from the bone-crushing tedium of provincial life in the West Midlands. Both of them had found what they needed in London, more or less.

  Hopping from foot to foot, Ryan watched as the clerk checked and rechecked his list with an exaggerated caution that suggested a task considerably more complex than the daily Cockpit Yard refuse-collection rota. Every day they went through this same mini-pantomime before Ryan was allocated his truck for the day. Downstairs, his crew would be getting annoyed by the delay. The sooner they started, the sooner they finished. Working on a ‘task-to-finish’ basis was one of the perks of the job, along with a £4,000 annual ‘productivity bonus’ for undertaking the weekly recycling collection.