by James Craig
‘This is where it would be good to have a plan,’ he mumbled to himself. Back down the corridor, the cleaning lady moved into the next office. Inside Fort Knox, however, no one stirred. Carlyle responded with three further sharp blasts on the buzzer.
A few moments later, there was the sound of the lock releasing. Pulling open the door, the inspector stepped into a small lobby, not much bigger than a lift. Directly in front of him was another door. Next to the door was an unmanned counter. Behind the Perspex screen he could see into the depository proper; rows of different-sized lockers, like safety deposit boxes, lining the back wall, from floor to ceiling. Taped to the screen was a small notice, written in biro: RING FOR ASSISTANCE.
‘Fuck me,’ Carlyle grumbled, ‘I thought I just did that.’ Glued to the counter was a small white button, like someone’s frontdoor bell. ‘How very hi-tech!’ He stabbed it with his index finger and was immediately assailed by a shrill, high-pitched bell. He was still in shock when a small, silver-haired man shuffled into view behind the counter.
‘That’s a bit loud, isn’t it?’ Carlyle said.
‘Wakes me up if I doze off,’ the man explained, without any obvious sense of embarrassment. He tossed his newspaper on to a chair and addressed Carlyle. ‘What can I do for you?’
The inspector looked at the man’s navy and grey uniform. A name badge pinned to his chest bore the moniker Ben Wilkins. A casual observer might not realize it, but he wasn’t a policeman at all. Rather, the tiny logo on the badge indicated that Mr Wilkins worked for a ‘servicing and outsourcing company’ that had more than 150,000 employees and held public sector contracts for everything from rubbish collection to atomic weapons research. Evidence Management was just another of the Met’s services that had been efficiently and effectively outsourced. Carlyle wondered how long it would be until his job was handed to some bloke off the street earning £12.50 an hour. Hopefully not until after he had retired.
‘Well?’
‘Er . . . I need the evidence on the Sally-Anne Mason case.’ The inspector cringed when he contemplated the extent of his cunning plan: blag his way inside and then improvise. Anything relating to the Mason case – if there was anything relating to the Mason case – would have been dumped in a distant storage facility a very long time ago.
Wilkins ran a hand across his well-past-five-o’clock shadow. For someone who had such a stress-free job, his nails were badly chewed. ‘Reference number?’
‘Er . . .’ Carlyle tried to look even more clueless than he felt. ‘No idea, I’m afraid.’
Typical, Wilkins thought. The crap that he had to put up with was unbelievable. These cops, they were all halfwits, the whole lot of them. ‘You’ll need to look it up on the database.’
‘How do I do that?’
Wilkins opened a small window above the counter and pushed through a grubby sheet of paper on a clipboard. ‘Sign in and you can take a look at the computer. But hurry up, I go off shift in fifteen minutes. If it’s gonna take any longer than that, you’ll have to come back in the morning. We open at eight.’
Scrawling his details on the sheet, Carlyle offered up his friendliest smile. ‘Fifteen minutes will be more than enough.’
‘Just as well,’ Wilkins replied as he watched Carlyle complete the form.
‘There you go.’ Carlyle pushed the clipboard back through the open window. Without looking at it, Wilkins hung it on a nail on the wall. Then he padded over to the door, released the lock and ushered the inspector into the inner sanctum.
With one eye on the clock on the wall, Wilkins hovered at Carlyle’s shoulder. ‘Don’t you know how to use the system?’
The inspector tapped the keyboards aimlessly. In front of him was a sea of data that added up to a whole heap of nothing. ‘This is not usually my area,’ he admitted. Finding a search box, he typed in MASON, trying to look interested as seventeen different items came up. It was no surprise that none of them related to the widow from Mathias Mansions; there was nothing on the list that was more than two years old.
‘Looks like you’re out of luck,’ Wilkins commented, not sounding too disappointed about it.
‘Haven’t you got something to do?’ Carlyle muttered. Like file your nails or something?
‘Not really,’ Wilkins said cheerily. ‘It’s been very quiet today. All I’ve had is a wallet that was found on the street by a member of the public and a pair of specs that were taken from a pickpocket.’
A pair of specs? Carlyle recalled how much he had spent on his last pair of glasses. As he mused on the vagaries of opticians, another idea seeped into his brain. ‘What time did you come on shift?’
‘I started at three,’ Wilkins told him. ‘Why?’
Not furnishing an answer, Carlyle jumped up from the computer and grabbed the clipboard hanging from the wall. It confirmed what Wilkins had said: aside from J. Carlyle, only two officers had visited the locker in the last seven hours.
Neither of them was Noah Templeton.
‘You cheeky little wanker,’ Carlyle chuckled.
‘Eh?’
‘Not you.’ Putting the clipboard back on its nail, he hit the lock release and pulled open the door. ‘Thanks for your help.’
‘But you didn’t find anything.’
‘It’s okay,’ Carlyle said, already halfway to the outer door. ‘Thanks anyway. Now you can call it a day.’
When he made it back across the road to the café, Dom was busy chatting up the waitress.
‘I wouldn’t believe a word he says,’ Carlyle told the woman as he took his seat. ‘He has a wife and a dozen kids.’
‘Don’t exaggerate,’ Dom laughed. ‘There’s only ten of the little buggers.’
Not sure what to make of their comedy double act, the waitress went off to empty the dishwasher.
‘I suppose that was closer to “ten minutes” than last time,’ Dom said philosophically.
‘You know what they say,’ Carlyle shot back. ‘ “Life is short, but the day is long”.’
‘This day certainly is bloody long.’ Dom glanced around the nearby tables before lowering his voice. ‘Did you get it?’
‘Nope.’
Dom nodded. ‘Just as well. It would be a shame for you to get kicked off the Force for nicking drugs out of a police station. I always imagined you would get axed for something a bit more noble.’
‘Ha!’
‘Well, something a bit less grubby, if you prefer.’
Carlyle folded his arms. ‘I didn’t get the stuff because it wasn’t there. Your local bobby, PC Templeton, didn’t turn it in.’
Dom’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Interesting. Did you ask him about it?’
‘Didn’t get the chance. He’s left for the night.’
A broad grin spread across Dom’s face. ‘Just as well I know where he lives then, isn’t it?’
A liveried taxi barrelled down the road, its driver leaning forward in his seat, like an explorer in search of the next traffic jam. In the back, a banker-type, all slicked-back hair and pinstriped suit, chatted away blithely on his mobile phone. Standing under a sodium streetlight, the inspector stared at the screen of his BlackBerry. ‘Bloody web pages take forever to load on this thing.’
‘Should get an iPhone,’ Dom suggested smugly.
‘The Met doesn’t run to iPhones,’ Carlyle pointed out. ‘Anyway, I like my BlackBerry.’
‘It’ll be obsolete soon.’
‘Yeah, but still.’ The inspector liked to think of himself as technology neutral; neither an early adopter nor a Luddite. As a man who had spent the first ten years of his career bashing a typewriter, however, the little gadget in his hand could still inspire both wonder and affection.
When it worked.
Leaving the machine to its sedate progress, he kicked a discarded fast-food wrapper towards the gutter and gazed up at the squat, five-storey building on the other side of the street. ‘It looks like Hitler’s bunker.’
‘That’s a bit extreme,’ Dom
countered. ‘Hitler’s bunker was basically just a hole in the ground.’
‘After the Russians arrived.’
‘Well, as far as I know, the Red Army never made it to Pimlico.’
Carlyle gestured off to his left, in the vague direction of Chelsea. ‘Maybe not, but there are plenty of Russians just down the road these days.’
‘That’s progress, my friend,’ Dom smiled. ‘If you’re going to become the capital of the world, you have to let the world come and play. Who else would spend millions of their not-so-hard-earned cash on basement swimming pools? It gives them something to do, once they’ve finished raping and pillaging their own fair land.’ Dom waved a hand aimlessly in the air. ‘Such a cultured people. I quite like them.’
‘Got a load of Russian clients at the Gallery, eh?’
‘One or two,’ Dom grinned. ‘If they see something they like, the old Platinum Amex comes out and it’s bish-bash-bosh. All that money changing hands; it’s a better rush than any Class A, I can tell you.’
The inspector muttered something to himself before returning to the matter in hand. The relevant Heritage Explorer web page had finally come up on his BlackBerry. ‘Darbourne House,’ he intoned, reading from the screen. ‘A block of fourteen three-bedroom flats, three one-bedroom flats and three studios . . . part of the Blefuscu Gardens Estate, designed in 1962 by Sidney and Hermione Less for Westminster City Council.’
‘Less is more,’ Dom quipped.
Groaning, Carlyle continued: ‘Blefuscu was one of the first low-rise, high-density public housing schemes to be built in London. It helped prove that low-rise flats with an interesting design could accommodate as many people as tower blocks. It influenced the style of the city’s council housing from the mid-1960s until the early 1980s. The scheme won many awards, including a Ministry of Housing Award for good design in 1971 and a Commendation in the Royal Society of Architects’ New Communities Awards Scheme of 1974.’ He looked up from the screen at the forbidding structure on the other side of the road. ‘Grim.’
‘It’s not that bad,’ Dom reflected. ‘Nicer than Winter Garden House for a start.’
‘You’re right there,’ the inspector agreed without rancour. Winter Garden House, where Carlyle lived with Helen and Alice, was a featureless tower block near Holborn tube station. Its only redeeming quality was the location, in the north-east corner of Covent Garden, five minutes’ walk from Charing Cross police station; right in the heart of the city, in the heart of the action.
‘Not really my cup of tea.’ Dom, happily camped up in Highgate in a six-million-pound Huf Haus, liked to think of himself as something of an architecture buff. ‘Looks like it’s stood the test of time well enough though.’
Carlyle finished reading and dropped the BlackBerry back into his pocket. ‘There are two thousand folk on the estate. How are we going to find Noah bloody Templeton?’
‘There can’t be more than thirty flats in Darbourne House,’ Dom calculated. ‘And Fiona says he lives on the top floor. That narrows it down even further.’
‘Good old Fiona.’ Carlyle had to admit he felt a grudging respect for the young constable’s attempts to chat up Dom’s rather forbidding receptionist. ‘I still can’t believe that she went out with him.’
‘It was just a drink in a pub round the corner. When he suggested they get some chips and go meet his mum, Fiona made her excuses and left. For most of the conversation she said that he seemed more interested in trying to get information on me and the gallery than he was in her.’
‘That would have gone down well.’
‘Fiona was amused, rather than annoyed. Her take on it was that he was smart enough to realize that she was rather out of his league. That makes him smarter than most blokes.’
‘Good for her.’ Carlyle shivered at the brutality of the twenty-first-century dating game. It had been hard enough thirty years ago.
‘Anyway, Fiona’s love-life is more than complicated enough already.’
‘Oh?’ The inspector tried not to sound too interested.
‘From what I can gather,’ Dom confided, happy to fan the fires of his pal’s prurience, ‘she is caught up in what you might call a four-way love, er, rectangle with one of her tutors – a married guy in his fifties – a fellow student and a Dutch girl she met on holiday in Ibiza.’
Sticking out his bottom lip, Carlyle contemplated this state of affairs for several moments.
‘Like I said,’ Dom grinned, ‘we are very lucky to have her.’
‘I can see how she might struggle to fit young Noah into her busy social schedule.’ Off to his right, Carlyle saw an elderly couple emerge from the main entrance to Darbourne House. Slipping between two parked cars, he jogged across the road to catch the iron gate before it slammed shut, waiting patiently while Dom followed after him in a more leisurely fashion.
Eschewing the lift, they took the stairs to the top floor. Half a dozen flats were laid out along an external walkway which was decorated by an impressive collection of colourful hanging baskets and flower boxes.
‘Very nice,’ Dom observed, bending down to smell some lavender.
Carlyle, who wasn’t really a flower man, grunted as he went from door to door, checking the name-plates by the buzzers. ‘Here we go.’ Ringing the bell, Carlyle stood back from a door that looked like it had been recently painted in a colour that he would describe as Racing Green. The door opened and a woman stood on the threshold.
‘Yes?’
Her expression was neither welcoming, nor hostile. Carlyle guessed that she was in her fifties, with grey hair, cut short, and a lined face. In her hand was a mug bearing the Metropolitan Police logo.
‘Mrs Templeton?’ Carlyle took out his Warrant Card and held it up for her to inspect.
‘Noah’s not in,’ she said, not waiting for him to explain his presence on her doorstep. ‘He’s gone to get some fish and chips. Shouldn’t be too long though, I don’t think.’ Turning round, she disappeared back down the hallway, leaving the door open. Taking that as an invitation, Carlyle and Dom followed her inside.
The Templetons’ living room reminded the inspector of the Carlyle family home when he was a kid growing up in Fulham. Clean, sparse and relatively timeless. An old-style cathode ray tube TV squatted in the corner. On top of it was the room’s only photograph, a young Noah Templeton standing on a beach, sandwiched between his mum and a bloke, presumably the boy’s dad.
Mrs Templeton followed his gaze. ‘That was taken in Brighton,’ she explained. ‘Twenty-odd years ago.’
Carlyle nodded. Although not a great fan of the place, the inspector was a frequent visitor to the seaside town. His mother-in-law had decamped there after separating from Helen’s father.
Taking a seat on the sofa, Dom made himself comfortable. ‘So how long have you been here, love?’
With Carlyle still on his feet, Mrs Templeton hovered by the empty fireplace. ‘Ooh, now, we moved here in . . . ninety-four – something like that. Just after Noah was born, anyway.’
1994! Carlyle hated the little sod for being so young. ‘I was wondering, why did you call him Noah?’
‘Eh?’ The woman was still trying to formulate a reply when the sound of a key in the front door came from the hallway.
‘I’m back, Ma!’ Noah Templeton appeared in the doorway. In a pair of torn jeans and a grey T-shirt, he looked even younger than he had appeared when in uniform. In his arms, he cradled a paper bag containing his dinner.
‘Mum?’ Noah’s gaze shifted from his mother to Carlyle and then to Dom. For a moment, he froze. Then he threw his fish and chips at the inspector and ducked back down the hall. Dodging the flying food, Carlyle chased after him. As his chest started to burn the inspector wished that he had been a bit more diligent when it came to visiting the gym.
He was about to give up the chase when he heard a crash, followed by a stream of curses.
Jogging over to the stairs, Carlyle started to laugh.
‘Fuck off,
’ Noah hissed. ‘It’s not funny.’ Forcing himself upright, he touched the large gash across his forehead and winced.
Kicking the scattered flowers out of the way, the inspector ventured down a couple of steps and offered him a hand. ‘You’ve got to watch out for those flower boxes,’ he observed, pulling the boy to his feet. ‘They can be really quite dangerous.’
TWENTY
Noah Templeton trooped disconsolately into the living room, head bowed, looking every inch the naughty schoolboy that he undoubtedly was.
‘Try not to bleed on your mother’s carpet,’ Carlyle advised.
Mrs Templeton had not moved from the fireplace. Looking at her son’s face, she exclaimed. ‘Goodness, Noah! What happened?’
‘He tripped over some of your flowers,’ Carlyle told her, ‘and fell down the stairs.’
‘Fell down the stairs?’
The young constable gave a whimper of confirmation.
‘You never learn, do you?’ With the air of a woman who had seen it all before, Mrs Templeton shuffled towards the door. ‘Let me get some TCP. I hope we’ve got some plasters that are big enough.’ Pausing to peer at the wound on the boy’s scalp, she added. ‘That looks deep. You might have to go to A and E.’
‘Ma!’
‘I think he’ll be fine,’ Carlyle offered. ‘Just a bump and a bit of a headache.’
Tut-tutting to herself, Mrs Templeton disappeared in the direction of the bathroom.
‘Just take a couple of ibuprofen and have a lie-down.’ Rummaging in the parcel on his lap, Dom pulled out a chip and stuck it in his mouth.
‘That’s my tea,’ the boy whined.
‘I’ve only nicked a few chips.’ Dom lifted up the greasy parcel and dumped it on the coffee table. ‘Stop complaining. After all, it’s not as if some little wanker stole your stash and locked you up in a cell for four hours.’ There was an edge to his voice that Carlyle didn’t like. The inspector wondered if he might not have been better off coming here on his own.
