by James Craig
Actually, off duty, Carlyle had been here more than a few times with Helen before they were married. Back in the 1980s and early nineties, they had regularly come to visit the old Lumiere Cinema which had then resided in the basement of the hotel building. They had visited the hotel bar once, but the damage done to Carlyle’s wallet was so severe that he was never short of a credible alternative nearby thereafter. The thought of that one bill still made him shiver, more than twenty years after the event.
The Lumiere was another matter, however. He recalled it with affection, if not outright nostalgia. His now-wife would take him to see French movies like Betty Blue and Les Amants du Pont-Neuf. Waiting for the concierge, Carlyle thought about those days for the first time in ages. Early-afternoon matinees in an empty cinema. Perfect. Perfect and long gone, for now the Lumiere had been turned into a gym.
Patience was not Carlyle’s strong point. He quickly found himself tapping the ridiculously expensive floor with increasing fury, as the concierge still failed to appear. It had been more than five minutes now and he was getting ready to shout at someone, when Alex Miles finally appeared from behind one of the lobby’s pillars, offering a cautious hand and a pro-forma smile.
‘Inspector …’ the smile had drained from Miles’ face before the whole word was out. Dressed in a pair of polished brown brogues, freshly pressed blue jeans, a crisp white shirt and a Prince of Wales jacket (grey with tan and green in the check), Miles was thus signalling that he was off duty and therefore being even more gracious with his time than usual.
‘Alex …’ Carlyle eyed him blankly, signalling – as if it needed signalling at this time of night – that this was strictly business. More than that, it indicated that the very least he would be leaving with later this morning would be another debit written against Miles’ name in the Carlyle favour bank, the ongoing details of which were held in the policeman’s brain at all times.
‘Sorry to keep you waiting.’ Alex Miles bowed his head in supplication. ‘It’s all kicking off tonight. We had some problems with Carlton Jackson’s people …’
‘The boxer?’ Carlyle asked. Jackson was an American heavyweight recently arrived in London for a fight. Before the bout could take place, he had been arrested for being drunk and disorderly, and assaulting a police officer. ‘I thought he’d been deported.’
‘Not yet,’ Miles smiled. ‘Anyway, it’s sorted.’
‘Good,’ said Carlyle, impatiently. ‘Now, about the matter in hand …’
‘Yes.’ Miles bowed again. Carlyle wondered if he might have some Japanese blood in him somehow. More likely he was just taking the piss. Miles straightened up and started playing with a button on his jacket. ‘How can I help?’
As chief concierge at The Garden, Miles had acted as the hotel’s senior fixer for their more important and demanding guests for more than five years now. The Garden popped up on Carlyle’s radar once or twice a year and, consequently, their paths had crossed maybe three or four times. Miles was what Carlyle would describe as a low-level acquaintance. He operated in that grey area between upstanding citizen, usually of no use to Carlyle, and actual convicted criminal, the kind of person who kept the inspector in his job but was a pain in the arse at the same time.
Doubtless, Miles broke various laws of one sort or another, mostly relating to drugs and prostitution, on a daily basis. But he did so in a way, and in an environment, that meant his misdemeanours were of little or no concern to Carlyle. Both men understood that socially acceptable levels of behaviour were in a constant state of flux, and invariably strayed beyond the letter of the law.
Like Miles, Carlyle believed in self-interest, enlightened self-interest. This was as good a basis for their relationship as any, requiring no real thought and the minimum of action.
Like any good policeman, Carlyle very rarely concerned himself with the self-obsession and self-indulgences of the rich. He knew that, when it came to money, the law was only partially blind. Most of the time, the best way to deal with the well-off, with their acute sense of entitlement, was merely to ignore them. He always thought that he inherited such pragmatism from his father, who had never tired of advising his son: ‘Don’t get into pissing contests you can’t win.’ For Carlyle, after more than forty years on the planet and more than twenty years on the job, this rule only broke down with the extreme cases … like murder, for instance.
Like any good fixer, Miles knew where to get anything and everything. That was a basic requirement of the job, since the hotel’s ‘itinerant tribe’ could be very demanding. It was his ability to acquire specific, reliable, up-to-date information for his clients that became of occasional interest to Carlyle. Once Miles realised that the inspector was a pragmatist, and otherwise not in the least bothered about the needs of his ‘tribe’, he felt comfortable in doing business with him. As a result, the two men had casually established a modest relationship, just one of the hundreds that populated each man’s professional life.
There were now four of them standing around the concierge’s table. It was a mahogany Regency writing desk, largely hidden behind an oversized sofa in the left-hand corner of the lobby, and which did not fit in with the rest of the décor in any way, shape or form. Carlyle and Miles had now been joined by the obtuse porter, Brolin, and by PC Tim Burgess, a rather pretty but callow-looking youth who was currently half hiding behind a pillar.
Burgess had arrived with Carlyle from the station, but rather stood out here in his uniform, and also seemed rather overawed by his surroundings. Within two minutes of arriving in the lobby, the young constable had received an interested, wolfish glance from a clearly inebriated middle-aged woman wandering across the foyer from the bar towards the lifts. Carlyle was amused to see Burgess blush dramatically and he half expected the woman to come over, throw PC Burgess over one shoulder and carry him upstairs. Without a doubt, frozen with fright, Burgess would have been powerless to resist. Thank God I’ve got the help, Carlyle thought. Let’s hope the killer, if there is a killer, has already left the building. He tossed the brochure back on the desk and turned to focus on Miles.
‘Has Brolin told you about the note?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ Miles nodded. ‘How bizarre. Do you think it’s a joke?’
‘Probably,’ Carlyle smiled slightly, ‘knowing your clientele.’
Miles frowned. ‘That’s a bit harsh, Inspector. I’ve never experienced anything like this before.’
‘I suppose it makes a change from them trashing hotel rooms, shitting out of windows and beating up hookers,’ Carlyle mused, referring back to a previous incident, where one member of the entourage of a visiting American actor had ended up making the short trip from the care of Mr Miles into the care of Mr Carlyle, and back again … before either the judiciary or, more importantly the media, had become involved.
‘There’s not a lot of that kind of stuff either, these days.’ Miles sounded almost disappointed. ‘It’s one of the consequences of the credit crunch.’
‘I’ve read about that.’ Carlyle smiled the sickly smile of a public servant who knew that the shortcomings of the international credit markets remained someone else’s problem. At least until some bastard politician started hacking away at his pension. If this crash took some rich tossers down with it, that had to be a good thing. But the sense of schadenfreude was fleeting, knowing that people like that always seemed to get by. ‘It must be tough for your customers …’
Miles raised his eyes to the heavens. ‘It’s squeezing us quite hard.’
‘Anyway,’ Carlyle continued, ‘let’s keep it to ourselves ’til I’ve had a proper look. Who gave you the note?’
Miles jerked one shoulder in the direction of the desk. ‘It was left on the blotter. Twenty quid on top of it. I was in the bar at the time, so I didn’t see who put it there.’
‘Cameras?’ Carlyle asked. He couldn’t immediately see any, but there had to be some. ‘Will they have recorded anything?’
‘Maybe.’
>
Carlyle told Burgess to make a note about checking the closed-circuit television later, if it became necessary, and turned back to the concierge. ‘How long ago was this?’
Miles made a face. ‘Maybe a couple of hours.’
‘And you didn’t bother to read it.’
‘Never thought about it.’
‘No?’
‘No.’
‘A surprising lack of curiosity,’ Carlyle mused.
‘You get something like that,’ Miles reasoned, ‘how likely is it to be something that I am really going to want to know about?’
Carlyle acknowledged his point and changed tack. ‘So it took you an hour to get it round to us?’
‘We were busy. A party of Chinese tourists arrived late, after their plane was delayed six hours. Their luggage was sent to Reykjavik, and the Heathrow Express was up the spout. You know the sort of thing.’
‘I suppose so,’ said Carlyle, who cared not a jot about the totally shit nature of Britain’s transport infrastructure. Rising from the recesses of his memory, Gang of Four’s ‘At Home He’s A Tourist’ started playing in his head. Leave home to see the sights and you’re asking for trouble. The sensible thing was just to stay at home, surely there was more than enough for them to see in the People’s Republic – was it still a People’s Republic? – anyway. He looked expectantly at Miles. ‘Have you still got the twenty?’
Miles shook his head. ‘I nipped up the road to Epoca for a quick macchiato and bought a packet of Marlboro at the same time.’
Par for the course, thought Carlyle. It would have been far too straightforward for him to have just kept the bloody thing. At least it should still be in the café’s cash register, as no one would be asking for a twenty in change at this time of night. He quickly despatched Burgess to try to recover the note from Epoca. It was only twenty yards down the road, so hopefully the young PC would not get lost, mugged, raped, or otherwise distracted on the way.
Carlyle watched Burgess leave the premises and then looked around the lobby one more time. It was fairly quiet now. The noise from the Light Bar had subsided to a gentle murmur, and even the party animals seemed to have called it a day. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘let’s go see the manager.’
Miles danced around from behind the desk and led Carlyle past the sofa and the pillar, and various other eclectic furnishings, as he headed further into the lobby. ‘The night manager is Anna Shue,’ he said, nodding in the direction of a tired-looking brunette in the hotel’s uniform, who was just coming out of the lifts. She had her hair pulled back in a ponytail, making her look quite austere, and her lack of make-up – a big plus in Carlyle’s book – added to this overall effect.
Carlyle stepped forward. ‘Fine. Stay down here. Make sure that Brolin stays, too … and keeps his mouth shut.’ He put on a frown. ‘If this is a load of bollocks, we’ll forget all about it and you’ll just owe me another favour.’
Miles took a theatrical step backwards and put on his best bemused expression. ‘Another favour?’
‘Yes, indeed,’ Carlyle nodded.
‘And if it’s not bollocks?’ Miles asked.
‘It’ll be a lot more than one favour.’
Miles sighed. ‘Understood.’
‘Good man! That’s the spirit.’ Carlyle gently punched him on the shoulder. ‘Go and have a cigarette. If I’m not back in five minutes, it means we’ll have to start conducting some formal interviews.’
Looking tired and hassled, Anna Shue did not seem surprised by Carlyle’s sudden appearance in front of her. Doubtless, Alex Miles had already tipped her off about what was going on. Not that it mattered anyway, but it annoyed him. Why did people find it so hard to keep their mouths shut? This was just another way in which Alex Miles’ unreliability shone through.
After the introductions, Carlyle followed Shue back over to the reception desk, which was now manned by a younger, prettier blond girl. Shue spoke brusquely to the girl in something that wasn’t English, but instead might have been Russian or Polish, or maybe even Finnish. The girl promptly disappeared, leaving the night manager to tap a few keys on the computer. After staring at the screen for a few seconds, she picked up a telephone receiver and hit 329. After letting it ring for a good fifteen seconds, she put the phone down again and looked up at Carlyle.
‘No reply?’ he asked.
She nodded. ‘Probably asleep.’
Carlyle frowned. He didn’t like bullshit. ‘Surely the call would wake him up?’
Shue thought about that for a second. ‘Not if he’s taken something. Or he could be … busy.’
‘But he checked in alone?’
Shue glanced at the screen again. ‘Yes.’
Carlyle waited for Shue to say more, but she just stood there silently. ‘And?’
Shue snapped to attention. ‘Number 329 is registered to a Mr Ian Blake. He booked in for just the one night. He checked in at seven twenty-five last night, had some food and champagne delivered just after nine, which he signed for. He has an alarm call booked for seven-thirty tomorrow or, rather, this morning.’
Carlyle thought about that. The information was useless: it told him nothing. They were just putting off the inevitable visit upstairs. He took a deep breath: ‘OK, let’s go and pay Mr …’
‘Blake.’
‘Mr Blake … let’s go and pay him a visit. I need to take a look inside room 329.’
Shue frowned. ‘Are you sure, Inspector?’
This was a necessary part of the job, trampling over people’s reluctance to get involved, dragging them unhappily into a little bit of the mess that comprised his regular working life. Sometimes he did it with relish, but not tonight. Tonight he was painting by numbers.
She pulled a key card out of a drawer behind the desk and held it up for him to inspect. ‘Well …’
Are you sure? Carlyle looked down at his shoes, trying not to smile. He’d been asked that question a million times before. He was a policeman, for fuck’s sake. Of course, he was sure.
‘… we could end up getting a guest out of bed by mistake.’
‘Yes,’ he nodded, ‘we could.’
Her face brightened slightly, as she mistakenly assumed that he was considering her point of view.
‘Or,’ Carlyle met her gaze with a grin, ‘we could be ignoring something serious – maybe a murder.’
‘Um.’ She took a step backwards, with a look of annoyance as if he’d just tried to grab her arse.
Carlyle ignored her irritation. ‘So,’ he said firmly, ‘do you see where the balance of risk lies here?’
They rode the elevator to the third floor in silence. Stepping out, Shue led him along a silent corridor that was lit by low-wattage lighting at floor level, like the emergency lights on a plane. Their footsteps were hushed by a deep blue carpet and, with even the normal background hum of the city for once blocked out, the silence had a strange completeness to it. The scene, Carlyle reckoned, had that ‘middle of the night in the big city’ feel to it, although, with no windows to look out of, it could just as easily have been the middle of the day.
At the end of the corridor, Shue turned right into a shorter corridor, which led to a dead end. She came to a stop outside door 329 in the middle of a cluster of six rooms, three ranged on either side, towards the back of the hotel building. Outside the door, the remains of the room-service order were stacked neatly on a tray, beside an empty champagne bottle.
Shue nodded at the label. ‘Krug. From the 1995 vintage; the good stuff. It costs five hundred pounds a bottle.’
Carlyle shrugged.
For a moment, she just stood there, pass key in hand. ‘God,’ she whispered, turning to Carlyle, ‘I hope you’re right about this.’
‘What?’ Carlyle asked, with gentle amusement. ‘You mean that you’re hoping that he’s really dead?’
‘No.’ Shue smiled weakly. ‘You know what I mean. If he’s asleep … or shagging or something …’ Her unease seemed genuine.
Despit
e his aching tiredness, and against his natural instinct, Carlyle took a deep breath and summoned up the energy to try some empathy: ‘You must have seen all sorts in your time?’
‘No.’ She took a step away from him, looking strangely put out. ‘No, not really. I’ve only been doing this for six months.’
Giving up on the small talk, Carlyle pulled his shoulders back and assumed his most official tone, the one that didn’t normally sound like him. ‘Don’t worry. This is formal police business and I will take full responsibility for upsetting your guests.’ He rapped gently on the door and counted to ten. There was no response from inside. He knocked on the door, harder this time, before again counting to ten. Still nothing. He gave Shue a knowing smile. ‘Please, unlock the door and then stand back.’
The night manager did as requested. Carlyle opened the door firmly but slowly. Without saying anything, he stepped inside the tiny vestibule. To his left was an empty wardrobe; on the right was an equally empty bathroom. Ahead of him extended the room proper. It was illuminated only by the light from a floor lamp in the far corner, and Carlyle could see one foot dangling off the end of the bed. There was no snoring to be heard, and there were no noises suggesting than any sexual activity was in progress either.
Closing the door behind him, he took two steps into the room proper, in order to confirm what he already knew.
