Back in the Middle Ages, a barbican was a fortified gateway, the outer defence to a castle. They fell out of use in the fifteenth century, as military technology improved with the emergence of the mobile cannon. It made no particular sense therefore that the Barbican arts centre and housing estate was located in the middle of London, in an area bombed out during the Second World War. The City of London Corporation, the guys who ran the capital’s financial district, built the arts centre – opened by the Queen in 1982 – as the City’s gift to the nation. However, the 1980s was not a great decade for architecture and what they came up with was a concrete ziggurat, a terraced pyramid with a multi-level layout so complex that it required different coloured lines painted on the ground to help theatre goers and tourists from getting lost on its walkways. If ever a building had a personality bypass, this was it. To no one’s surprise, it was later voted London’s ugliest building.
None of this was of much interest to young Alice Carlyle, who knew exactly where she was going and didn’t need a yellow line to show her the way. Alice sucked greedily from a small carton of apple juice as she stood next to her father on a walkway thirty feet above the ground. Handing Carlyle the carton, she started happily munching on the last of the hoso-maki rolls from her tray of salmon nigiri that they had picked up from a sandwich shop. This was part of the usual breakfast-on-the-run routine, executed by either parent to Alice’s precise specifications for that particular day. The kindergarchy was alive and well in the Carlyle household, with Alice centre stage and Mum and Dad both fretting about being reduced to the role of indentured servants. As many parents knew, it was hard to break free from the dictatorship of the child, but at least they knew that it would pass soon enough.
Carlyle finished his skinny latte, which was, annoyingly, barely lukewarm despite him asking, as always, for it to be extra hot. Irritated by the failings of Bulgarian baristas in particular and the service economy in general, he leant over the balcony and looked down at the City of London School for Girls below. It was about two hundred and fifty yards away, on the far side of an ornamental pond half the size of a football pitch. ‘City’ as it was known, resembled a rather small 1970s comprehensive not unlike the one he had gone to himself, six miles, thirty years and several generations away. Why it had been plonked down in the middle of this rather drab piece of urban planning, Carlyle had no idea. But, watching the other kids make their way happily in, he was glad that it was.
Work-shift patterns and criminals willing, Carlyle managed to take his daughter to school maybe three or four times a month. He knew he should make the most of it. It was ‘free’ time, when they could just be together, and he enjoyed the school run more than just about anything else he could think of. As far as he could see, Alice didn’t think about it at all, but that was more than good enough for him. For kids there was only time; you either gave it to them or you didn’t. You had a short window of opportunity, and then they were off and you were back on your own. You couldn’t fake it by trying to split your life into quality and non-quality time. That was just middle-class bollocks. You either did it or you didn’t.
The fact that he had spent the previous night with a corpse made the morning – Alice munching, the sun shining and the city bustling – even more enjoyable than usual. He turned away from the balcony and ran an eye over a poster announcing the imminent arrival of an exhibition of work by Lithuania’s leading avant-garde fashion designers. Carlyle had never heard of Helmut amp; Karl. To him, they looked like a slightly hipper version of Gilbert amp; George, the aged English artists famous for a laugh-a-minute oeuvre with titles like Shit Faith, In the Shit, and Bloody Life. Letting his eyes slide down the poster copy, Carlyle saw that Helmut amp; Karl looked like a somewhat fluffier proposition:
Helmut amp; Karl are widely acknowledged to be the leading geniuses of the post-modern fashion industry. ‘The House of Helmut amp; Karl’ will show a selection of the designers’ leading signature pieces from 1984 to the present, reborn in a newly commissioned installation that dominates the entire Esterhaus gallery on the fourth floor of the Centre. Among the highlights will be the pair’s world-famous 1992 ‘Chinese Doll’ collection. For this exhibition, emerging supermodel Madison Smith will be dressed in a series of twelve jewel-encrusted dresses until she is wearing 250 pounds of haute couture worth more than $60 million. ‘What we are bringing to London is an ode to individuality and exclusivity,’ say the designers. ‘Unavailability is what gives fashion its aura. If it is too easy, too accessible, where is the art? We will show you the art.’
‘Exclusive’ and ‘unavailable’ took him back to the Garden hotel and the rather over-the-top claims in its brochure. There are, what, more than six billion people on the planet, Carlyle thought. So why do we all struggle so hard to be unique? One of his wife’s favourite phrases, taken from Freud, was ‘the narcissism of small differences’. She usually employed it when she was baiting him about the tribalism and stupidity of football fans like himself. Was narcissism the reason behind Ian Blake’s death? Some drive for an exclusive experience? Carlyle filed these thoughts away at the back of his mind and cast a final glance at Helmut amp; Karl. Not one for his own ‘must see’ list, he decided.
Next to the exhibition poster was an advert for Blossombomb, the first perfume created by the same dynamic duo. That was much more straightforward, featuring an almost naked woman waving a bottle of their product in a fairly unimaginative manner. After the bullshit, thought Carlyle, comes the hard sell. Is there anyone on the planet who doesn’t now have their own fragrance?
He looked over at Alice, still munching her sushi. Already, she had probably been exposed to more advertising than he had seen by the time he was thirty years old. It was relentless, indiscriminate, everywhere. What did she make of it all? Carlyle and Helen warned her that advertising was basically there to sell her crap she didn’t need. Sometimes that message seemed to get through, sometimes not. Blossombomb wasn’t yet the problem, but it – or something very much like it – would become one soon.
His watch said 8.52 a.m.. They had entered that ten-minute open zone before nine, when the girls could be dropped off in the school playground. Carlyle knew that they wouldn’t be late, but they wouldn’t be early either.
‘Come on,’ he said gently. ‘We’d better get down there.’
‘Yes, Dad,’ Alice nodded, handing him the now-empty plastic tray and taking her apple juice from his hand. Draining the last of the juice, she handed the carton back to her father, the walking dustbin. Picking up her backpack, she headed in the direction of the stairs.
Carlyle followed behind, hands full, no waste bin in sight – just in case some terrorist decided to hide a bomb in it, the better to take out the Helmut amp; Karl collection? ‘Careful on the stairs,’ he called automatically.
‘Yes, Dad!’ replied an exasperated little voice, as its owner disappeared from view.
Back on ground level, they stood in front of the extremely over-monikered St Giles-without-Cripplegate church. Named after the patron saint of beggars and cripples, it was one of the few medieval churches left in the City of London, having survived both the Great Fire of 1666 and the Blitz. Under the benign gaze of the saint himself, out of sight of the school gate, Carlyle gave his daughter kiss. This was the agreed spot for final shows of parental affection, being deemed far enough away from the entrance so that Alice wouldn’t be embarrassed in front of her friends.
‘Have a good time.’
‘Will you pick me up this afternoon?’ Alice asked, as she finished wiping the spot on her cheek where he had just kissed her.
‘No, I have to go back to work. I would love to be here, but things are a bit busy at work. It will have to be Mum.’
‘Good. I like it when Mum picks me up,’ said Alice happily, to Carlyle’s considerable disappointment. She skipped away, moving five yards towards the school before turning back to face him. ‘Was he dead?’
‘Who?’
‘The man last night. Mum says that’s why you didn’t come home.’
‘Yes.’ As usual in these situations, Carlyle kept it short, but he didn’t try to ignore her question or change the subject. Alice, like her mother, had little time for bullshit. She was a no-nonsense girl who, aged four, had informed her parents and, rather undiplomatically, her school chums that Santa was a ‘creature of myth and legend’. In terms of maturity and development, she was probably already three or four or five years ahead of where he’d been at a similar age. That was a hell of a big gap, and Carlyle knew that it would only get bigger.
‘Was he murdered?’ Her tone was matter-of-fact. Her look said: You can tell me the truth, it’s no big deal.
‘That’s TBC,’ Carlyle lied. ‘We don’t know yet.’
Alice looked at him more closely. ‘But you’ll find out?’
‘Yes.’
‘And then they’ll go to jail?’
‘The person who did it? Yes, that’s the idea.’
‘So that they can’t do it again?’
‘Yes,’ Carlyle nodded. ‘The idea is that they go to jail to protect the rest of us.’ He thought about it for a minute. ‘Maybe, when they are in jail, they learn that they did something wrong. That’s their best chance of making sure that they don’t do it again when they come out.’
Alice made a face. ‘But that doesn’t happen very often, does it?’
Carlyle laughed. ‘Hard to say, sweetheart. Hard to say.’
She thought about it some more. ‘It’s good that you’ll catch him. You can tell me about it tonight.’ She started moving away from him. ‘See ya!’
‘See ya!’
Alice skipped inside the school, waving at her teacher, Mrs Matterface, on duty at the front gate, while scanning the playground for any of her young friends. Carlyle stood there and watched his daughter go in, safe and sound. Sending Helen a text to say that he had successfully completed his mission, he loitered for a minute longer. A lone straggler managed to just sneak in before the front doors were ceremonially closed and the school day officially began. Feeling satisfied with a job well done, Carlyle turned away and headed off in the direction of the tube.
After dropping Alice off at school, Carlyle returned home in search of a couple of hours’ sleep. Home was a two-bedroom apartment, measuring eight hundred and ninety square feet, on the thirteenth floor of Winter Garden House, facing south towards the river, with decent views of the South Bank arts complex, the London Eye and Big Ben. WGH was a fifteen-storey, 1960s block housing thirty apartments, which sat on Macklin Street at the north end of Drury Lane. Their apartment had been bought by Carlyle’s father-in-law from Camden Council for sixteen thousand pounds in 1984. With an excellent sense of timing, he had keeled over with a massive heart attack just five months before Alice was born. Helen’s mother had been happy to give them the place, as she herself had moved out years earlier, about a week after her daughter had left school, dumping her husband and decamping to Brighton, the lively seaside town an hour out of London. If it hadn’t been for this happy set of circumstances, the family would have found itself living far from Covent Garden, and Carlyle would have been condemned to a lifetime of commuting on London’s chronically underfunded and unreliable public-transport system.
Waking just before one o’clock, he lingered in bed for a while, thinking about nothing in particular. Eventually he got up, had a shower, got dressed and headed outside. Crossing the one-lane, one-way thoroughfare, he stepped into Il Buffone, a tiny 1950s-style Italian cafe on the other side of Macklin Street. Inside, there was just enough room for the counter and three shabby booths, each of which could sit four people – or six at a squeeze. It was then a case of risking a random dining companion inside or taking one of the small tables outside on the street, where the exhaust fumes came for free.
Carlyle always preferred to stay inside, where he could sit under a crumbling poster of the Juventus Scudetto winning squad of 1984. That was the team of Trapattoni and Platini, higher beings from a different era. Even on the busiest of days, a few moments spent contemplating their achievements were, to Carlyle’s way of thinking, always time well spent.
It was now after two o’clock and the lunchtime rush was coming to a close, so Il Buffone was largely empty. A couple of businessmen lingered over their lattes, discussing the chances of some big order materialising. Each was puffing on a cigarette, in casual contravention of the smoking ban. Carlyle looked questioningly at Marcello, the owner, who just shrugged and turned to the Gaggia coffee machine.
‘Ciao. Buon giorno. Come stai?’
‘I’m good, Marcello,’ Carlyle replied to the back of the man’s head. ‘You?’
‘Fine,’ Marcello shouted back to him, over the hissing of the machine. ‘Cathy’s visiting her mother today, so I’m on my own, but it’s OK. What you havin’ now? Lunch or breakfast?’
It was a difficult decision to make, for Carlyle was normally a morning visitor to the cafe, and choosing lunch would require some extra thought. He couldn’t be bothered with that, so he plumped for breakfast.
‘The usual?’ Marcello asked.
‘Si, grazie. ’ Having now exhausted the complete range of his Italian vocabulary, built up painstakingly over the years, Carlyle nodded respectfully to Trapattoni and Platini and slid into the rear booth to wait for his regular daily rations comprising of a double macchiato with a chunky raisin Danish.
Marcello Aversa had come to London more than thirty years earlier, for a week’s holiday. In that short time he’d managed to fall in love with an English girl, get engaged and find himself a job. Carlyle never ceased to feel impressed every time Marcello told the story. It must have been quite a trip. Thirty years on, still married to Cathy, he was coming to the end of a career that had seen him running various clubs, restaurants and bars in north London and the West End.
Four years ago they had taken on a lease for the cafe, the idea being to give their youngest daughter a start in the business. However, the reality of five-thirty starts, five mornings a week, plus dealing with customers, the council and the health-and-safety people, had proved too much for the girl. She had chucked it in after less than a month and was last heard of backpacking around Chile. Marcello and Cathy were left trying to cover the final years of the lease, while hoping to get someone to take it off their hands.
Carlyle’s wife and daughter were regulars here. Marcello and Cathy doted on Alice, which meant, inevitably, that Helen loved them. That meant, in turn, that Carlyle felt obliged to go in there at least once a day. His job was never mentioned but, over time, he was drawn into the role of problem solver in chief whenever the couple ran up against various bureaucratic problems, which they did with dispiriting regularity. The only bad thing about this situation was Marcello’s constant refusal of any payment. After eating, Carlyle regularly had to force him to take his money. It was embarrassing, but not as embarrassing as taking advantage of their kindness.
Marcello dropped the coffee in front of him, along with a monster pastry, and then tactfully opened the windows at the front of the cafe in order to let the illegal smoke out. On his way back behind the counter, he swept up the almost empty cups sitting in front of the two businessmen, in a way that suggested it was time for them to leave, giving Carlyle a wink before he ducked into the microscopic kitchen at the rear.
Carlyle took a sip of his macchiato and contemplated the pastry. It was a thing of beauty, almost the size of an old seven-inch vinyl single, but half an inch deep and covered in icing. Marcello ordered half a dozen each day from the north London kosher bakers Grodzinski, primarily for the benefit of Carlyle, who had been known to nip in and have a second one, if the opportunity presented itself.
This was a ritual definitely not to be rushed. As was his habit, Carlyle carefully cut the pastry into quarters, and took a further second to decide the order in which he was going to eat them. This was definitely going to require another coffee, so he emptied his demitasse and called to Marcello for another double macchiato. Once that had arrived, Carlyle reached for the first quarter of his pastry. It was already in his mouth when the door opened.
‘How’s the gay slaying coming along?’
Carlyle chewed, swallowed and smiled. ‘Afternoon, Joe.’ He looked up to watch Sergeant Joseph Szyszkowski flopping into the booth, opposite him. Joe had an early edition of the evening paper wedged under his arm, and an excited look in his eye. Exercising more than a little self-control, the inspector resisted the urge to demand where the hell he’d been for the last fourteen hours or so. ‘Want something to drink?’
‘What can I get you?’ Marcello piped up from behind the counter.
‘I’ve had lunch, thanks, Marcello,’ said Joe, ‘but a latte would be nice.’
‘Coming right up.’
‘Oh, before I forget,’ Joe said to his colleague, ‘I got a call from Valcareggi.’
‘And what did Edmondo have to say for himself?’ Carlyle asked, hoping that he wasn’t now going to have to chase down any more Italian mobsters.
‘Apparently the guy we arrested later got knifed in some prison outside Rome.’ Joe paused for dramatic effect. ‘They killed him.’
‘Pozzo?’ Carlyle sniffed. ‘At least he won’t have to worry about his weight any more, will he?’
‘I suppose not,’ Joe agreed. Picking up a copy of Marcello’s menu, he studied it carefully.
Carlyle gave his sergeant the once-over as he listened to the coffee machine burst into action. Joe was five foot ten, about a stone overweight, with long dark hair and a perpetually amused expression like a slightly bigger version of the actor Jack Black. They had been working together for more than four years now. Carlyle was notoriously uninterested in the backgrounds of any of his colleagues, but he had nevertheless gleaned quite a bit about Joe in their time working together. Joseph Leon Gorka Szyszkowski was second-generation Polish, born and brought up in Portsmouth before coming to London to study geophysics at Imperial College. For reasons Carlyle didn’t understand, he decided to join the Met after graduating with a good 2.1 degree.
In the wider world of London, Poles were now well established. Many were heading home, as the recession began to bite, but they were still considered the benchmark of quality, reliability and value for money in the plumbing, building and other sectors of the economy. They also provided the odd footballer and many, many Catholic priests. For any ethnic minority, however, it was harder to break into the relatively closed, conservative world of the police than to gain acceptance in civilian jobs. Carlyle had so far only ever come across one ‘Polish’ policeman in the Met, and that was Joe. To be fair, if it wasn’t for the name you would never guess his ethnic background. Joe was thoroughly assimilated, even if he would never be invited to join the Masons, that rather comical secret society (or ‘society with secrets’ as they preferred to be known) and home of the ‘all-seeing eye’ and the motto Ordo ab Chao, ‘Order out of Chaos’, which for some reason attracted policemen by the bus load.
There were about 21,700 sergeants employed in the UK police, and Carlyle knew the only one of them that could sing the English national anthem in both Polish and Hindi. Joe had an Indian wife, Anita, and together they had given their kids, William and Sarah, the most thoroughly English names that they could think of. Despite all this, there remained a strand of Joe’s DNA that was deeply and irredeemably Polish, i.e. dark, pessimistic and Catholic. This background contributed to a sense of detachment, irony and – perhaps just as important – fatalism, which Carlyle could relate to. The two got on well and trusted each other. Carlyle was happy about that.
‘What have they got?’ he asked, as he watched Joe theatrically unfold the newspaper and lay it out on the table in front of him.
‘What do you think they’ve got?’ Joe tossed his copy of the Evening Standard on to the surface.
‘Everything?’
Joe nodded. ‘Everything.’
He waited while Carlyle contemplated the 72-point headline on the front page which read: TOP HOTEL KNIFE HORROR.
‘They’ve got the knife, the time of death, the note,’ Joe continued, ‘and they’re also speculating about the sexual nature of the crime.’ He picked the newspaper off the table and turned it around to scan the article. ‘And I quote: “Sources suggest that the frenzied attack bears the hallmarks of drug-fuelled sexual experimentation gone badly wrong.”’ He rolled the paper up and waved it at Carlyle. ‘Drug-fuelled sexual experimentation?’ He sighed theatrically. ‘Those were the days…’
‘Speak for yourself,’ Carlyle grinned.
‘This is top-notch journalism,’ Joe laughed. ‘You know, I reckon that this paper has got a lot better since that ex-KGB guy bought it.’
‘Better a propaganda vehicle for the Kremlin than one for our idiot mayor,’ Carlyle said sourly. ‘Who wrote that piece?’
Joe unrolled the paper and squinted at the byline. ‘Someone called Fiona Singer-Cavendish.’
‘Never heard of her.’
‘Me neither,’ Joe shrugged, ‘but she’s certainly on top of this one. I’m surprised that they don’t have a picture of you exploring the dead man’s orifice.’
‘Wait for the final edition,’ Carlyle joked. Bloody Alex Miles, he thought. The little bastard will have sold the lot just for a few hundred quid. He reflected a bit further. ‘Do they know about the note?’
‘They certainly know that there was a note,’ replied Joe. ‘They don’t seem to know that it was delivered to Charing Cross, thank God! They also don’t know – or aren’t disclosing – what it said.’
‘Do you really think there’s a gay angle to all this?’ Carlyle asked.
‘Maybe.’ Joe raised his eyes to the ceiling. ‘Why stick a kitchen knife up some poor bugger’s… no pun intended… behind if not to make a point of some crude sexual nature?’
Carlyle raised his eyebrows. ‘It could mean anything. Or nothing.’
‘Yeah, right,’ Joe scoffed. ‘Surely it’s saying: “I want to fuck you right up the arse”…’
‘Possibly.’ Carlyle went with the flow. With Joe in this kind of mood, that was always the best option. It was normally the only option.
‘… after you’re dead.’
‘It could make sense,’ Carlyle agreed, for want of anything else to say.
‘This,’ Joe smiled, ‘has gay hate crime written all over it.’
Marcello placed Joe’s latte on the table and retreated to a respectful distance. Carlyle thought about the story in the paper and suddenly felt his enthusiasm for the case desert him faster than an Old Compton Street hooker who’s been paid in advance. All he could see was the slog ahead of them. ‘Do we care, one way or another?’ he wondered out loud. ‘Gay or not, does it make much of a difference?’ The gay crimes taskforce had been disbanded three years earlier. Cases like this all went in the same pot now, in this case his pot.
Joe lent back in his chair and let out a deep breath. ‘Not really.’
‘What about the SCD? Could this be one for them?’
Of the Metropolitan Police’s eleven Specialist Crime Directorates, the Homicide and Serious Crime Command was SCD1. It usually dispatched a major investigation team or a homicide task force to sweep up all the interesting murder cases. By definition that meant virtually all those that were not solved within a matter of hours.
‘I wouldn’t bet on them bailing us out,’ Joe replied. ‘Homicide is seriously stretched at the moment. Half of them have been sent to Belgravia to deal with the Arab billionaire who took a dive off the balcony of his Mayfair penthouse, back in March.’
Carlyle nodded. He was aware of the case.
‘Lots of foreign travel involved with that one,’ Joe continued, ‘so everyone wants a piece of it. No one’s in a hurry to call it a day, either.’
‘I can imagine,’ said Carlyle. Lots of foreign travel meant time away from the family and lots of well-paid overtime. Even better, there was no real pressure to get a result. The established consensus was that it had been a professional hit, with the killer lurking somewhere back in the Middle East, untraceable and untouchable. All in all, it was a great case to be working on. Those involved would be fighting off volunteers with a stick.
‘Face it,’ said Joe, ‘it looks like we’re stuck with this one.’
‘We?’
‘Yes, well, you obviously, O great one,’ Joe’s grin got wider, ‘but, as usual, I will probably have to help out… at least a little bit.’
Carlyle nodded formally in the sergeant’s direction. ‘You are too kind.’
‘No gratitude necessary,’ said Joe, bowing slightly in return. ‘We might as well try and get it sorted out as quickly as possible.’
‘Quite.’ Carlyle stroked his stubble and shot his sergeant a look of mock seriousness. ‘No one’s turned up to confess this morning?’
Joe Szyszkowski pretended to think about this for a minute, before delivering the inevitable reply, ‘No.’
‘Is there no hot lead that presented itself while I was in bed?’
Again, Joe pretended to think about it for a second, before shaking his head. ‘No.’
‘OK, OK, let’s get serious.’ With a tremendous effort of will, Carlyle summoned some enthusiasm for the matter in hand. ‘What about the knife, then?’
‘It’s a nice bit of kit. No prints. Could have been bought in several hundred locations across central London, assuming it was purchased recently, that is.’
‘Do we want to spend time checking on that?’ Carlyle asked.
‘It’s already in hand.’
Carlyle moved on down his mental checklist. ‘Did you see the note?’
‘Yes.’
‘What do you make of it?’
‘There’s a story here, obviously,’ said Joe. ‘The killer wants us to know why he did this.’
‘OK,’ said Carlyle, suddenly all business. ‘So have we come up with anything else involving a similar MO?’
Joe adopted a philosophical tone. ‘The modus operandi in this case appears to be fairly unique. There have been twenty-eight knife killings in London so far this year. There were eighty-six last year. Most are either domestics or kids stabbing each other on sink estates.’
Carlyle grunted. Crimes of passion or crimes of stupidity, both categories bored him silly.
‘We are checking out all of the rest,’ Joe continued, ‘but there appears to have been nothing similar so far… arse-wise.’
‘Have you viewed the CCTV pictures from the hotel?’ Carlyle asked.
‘Yeah.’ Joe took another slurp of his coffee. ‘Useless result, though some American boxer and his groupies got into a fight with the management, just before you turned up.’ He grinned. ‘One of the women had her top ripped off. Wearing no bra.’
Carlyle gave him a look that said: Let’s focus on the matter in hand, shall we?
‘That was quite entertaining but caused chaos. I’ve got one of the lads back at the station having another look through, but I don’t bet on them finding anything useful.’
‘OK,’ Carlyle sounded disappointed. ‘Just make sure that they don’t stick the groupie’s tits on YouTube. In the meantime, what about the victim himself?’
Joe raised his eyes to the ceiling and began reciting from memory, rather like a third-former standing up in front of the whole class. ‘His name is Ian Blake, as you know. Forty-seven years old. Owns a flat in Chelsea – there’s a team investigating there now. He works in that most noble of professions, public relations, at a firm called Al
… something.’ Joe paused the recitation and pulled a torn piece of paper out of his pocket to scan the notes scribbled on it. ‘Alethia. They have an office near Park Lane.’
‘Alethia was the goddess of truth,’ Carlyle explained. ‘Daughter of Zeus.’
Joe raised an eyebrow. ‘And we know that because?’
‘We know that because Alice explained it to me on our school run this morning.’
‘Top girl!’
‘Yeah,’ agreed Carlyle happily, ‘she certainly is. She’s into all that Greek mythology stuff, big time at the moment.’
‘It’s good to know that at least one member of the Carlyle family is showing an interest in culture,’ Joe smirked.
Carlyle feigned indignation. ‘I’m not taking any crap from someone whose kids spend all their time playing with their Nintendo DS,’ he grinned, ‘and who wouldn’t know a book if they were smacked in the face with one.’
‘They are just at one with the Zeitgeist, chief,’ Joe quipped serenely. ‘We don’t want them to get bullied in the playground, now, do we?’
‘I suppose not. Anyway, what about this Alethia?’
‘PRs,’ grunted Joe. ‘What a name, then! They really understand irony, don’t they?’
‘Yeah,’ Carlyle agreed. ‘Apate would have been a better choice.’
‘Because he is?’ Joe asked, happy to play along.
‘ She was,’ said Carlyle pointedly, ‘the goddess of deceit.’
‘Ho-ho, very good. Anyway, as well as being incapable of irony, PRs also don’t know how to hide their light under a bushel. In present circumstances, this is a very good thing. It means we are making good progress in building up a picture of the victim.’
‘We are?’
Joe laughed. ‘Oh, yes. Blake’s picture and a short bio were prominent on his company’s website.’
‘I saw that.’
‘And he’s also on Facebook.’
‘Why am I not surprised?’ Carlyle grunted. ‘And what does that peerless source of information tell us?’
‘In a nutshell?’ Joe grinned.
‘Yes, please, Sergeant,’ Carlyle nodded, hoping for something good. ‘In a fucking nutshell.’
‘Well, he’s a “spurmo”. Or, at least, he wants us to think he’s a spurmo.’
‘A what?’
‘Spurmos,’ Joe intoned, ‘are straight, proud, unmarried men over thirty.’
Carlyle yawned as he was introduced to yet another tedious media fabrication. ‘So that’s like a metrosexual?’
‘Maybe. Kind of. Perhaps. I have no idea.’
‘As opposed to a retrosexual,’ Carlyle smirked, ‘who hasn’t had any in years.’
‘Yes, well… we’ll leave your domestic problems out of this, shall we?’ Joe laughed. ‘It’s not always all about you, you know. If you were a bit more culturally literate, you would know that the spurmo god is George Clooney.’
‘OK,’ Carlyle reluctantly tried to get a bit more serious, ‘so straight and proud doesn’t seem to suggest a gay angle to this killing.’
Joe made a face. ‘He could have been in denial. Reluctant to come out of the closet? Maybe the whole spurmo thing was a front.’
‘Come on, no one is in the closet these days. Look at Saxonby’s mum.’
‘Yeah,’ Joe sniggered. Sergeant Chris Saxonby at the Savile Row police station had become an instant celebrity in the Met after his mother, seventy-one-year-old Agnes O’Halloran, had crossed over to the pink side, leaving his father – her husband of forty-five years – for a sixty-seven-year-old girlfriend. The shock of his parents new domestic arrangements almost killed poor Saxonby. He went off on sick leave for almost a year, before being granted early retirement on compassionate grounds. Even then, his leaving do had been held in the gayest gay pub in Soho.
‘Poor sod,’ Carlyle reflected, with feeling.
‘Worse things happen at sea,’ muttered Joe. ‘But, coming back to our Mr Blake, you shouldn’t be so binary in your thinking.’
‘Why not?’ Carlyle asked.
‘Because some people will fuck anything,’ said Joe philosophically.
‘Charming.’
‘I know.’
‘Still, it’s not looking too good for your theory.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Joe, reluctant to give up on his thesis so easily. ‘Maybe he was indulging his gay side, his spurmo side then reasserted itself, and there was a falling out. Maybe it was, like the paper says, a sex game that went a bit… wrong.’
‘That wouldn’t really sit alongside the note, though, would it?’
‘No…’ Joe pondered that for a second, ‘although that could just be something to throw us off the scent. A distraction?’
‘It suggests premeditation rather than a crime of passion.’
‘Not necessarily. Maybe the killer was a quick thinker.’
‘I don’t know,’ Carlyle was shaking his head. ‘It’s all guesswork. What else does Facebook tell us?’
‘Blake is basically a posh boy who never grew up. He’s pushing fifty, but acting like he’s twenty-five. He likes skiing, Kate Nash and mojitos…’
‘Who’s Kate Nash?’
Joe rolled his eyes to the heavens. ‘Please try and keep up, old man. She’s a singer-songwriter who was flavour of the month – or flavour of the nanosecond – a year or so ago.’
‘Never heard of her,’ said Carlyle, who couldn’t have named any female singer since Kate Bush.
‘I just know the name,’ said Joe. ‘The kids have got one of her CDs, I think, but I’ve never heard any of her stuff myself. Having said that, she’s probably already made more than you or I will earn in our lifetimes… combined.’
Carlyle grunted. He hated all the irrelevant crap from victims’ lives that passed before him in the course of an investigation. The way that people managed to waste time never ceased to amaze him. In the station, they had banned Facebook because too many staff were spending too much time on it, thus sucking up all of the station’s bandwidth. On two occasions, the computer network had crashed completely. That was presumably due to the support staff, or at least he hoped so. Wasn’t Facebook old-hat now, anyway? Helen, who saw herself as the most socially and technologically literate member of their family, had set up an account but lost interest after about a week. Carlyle was pleased with that, almost as pleased as he was with himself for never having signed up in the first place. He had enough problems with real life, so creating a virtual one would seem madness. The whole thing was bloody dangerous – one of their friends was now getting divorced because her husband had run off with some girl he had met online.
Carlyle stood up, pulled out his wallet and handed over a fiver to Marcello. He waited for the change, and then dropped it in the tips tin. ‘OK,’ he said, turning back to Joe. ‘We’re making some progress. Let’s get over to Blake’s flat.’
‘Not possible.’ Joe shook his head. ‘By the time we got there, we’d have to come straight back again.’
Carlyle made a face. ‘Why?’
‘For the press conference.’
Carlyle gave him a dirty look. ‘What fucking press conference?’
‘Oh, yes.’ Joe’s eyes sparkled as he also got to his feet, and spread his arms wide. ‘Why do you think I’m looking so smart today?’
Carlyle looked his colleague up and down for a second time. Belatedly he noticed that Joe’s usual outfit – a grubby jeans and T-shirt combo – had been replaced by his basic courtroom attire: a dark-grey Marks amp; Spencer suit, crumpled white shirt and a maroon tie.
Buttoning up his jacket, Joe made a show of looking his boss up and down, too. ‘Not a match on the Paul Smith, of course. That is quality.’
Damn right, Carlyle thought. Glancing at his reflection in the window, he gave a nod of approval. His own suit was a very nice navy, three-button, single-breasted Paul Smith number that he had acquired a few years ago for seventy-five quid from the Oxfam shop just down the road, on Drury Lane. The one item in his wardrobe that he looked after carefully, it was still in reasonable nick. Given the turn of events, he was glad he hadn’t gone with his alternative outfit of The Clash T-shirt and jeans. If you looked carefully, you could see that the Paul Smith was a bit worn in places, but it was still several notches above the rest of his wardrobe, fitting in well with the Met Comissioner’s new ‘anti-scruffy’ campaign.
‘You should have shaved,’ Joe observed.
‘You should have shaved better,’ Carlyle deadpanned in response.
Joe grinned. ‘What about a tie?’
‘Don’t push your luck,’ Carlyle growled. He then closed his eyes. ‘Why do we need a press conference?’
‘Because Simpson says so.’
Superintendent Carole Simpson was their boss. She was based at Paddington Green Police Station, appearing in Charing Cross when a problem – or an opportunity – presented itself. A woman in a hurry, she was five or six years younger than Carlyle and, unlike him, could still realistically eye another three – or even four – rungs of the career ladder before her time was up.
Carlyle had known Simpson for almost ten years now. Apparently untroubled by any ‘history’, she had arrived on the scene not long after his own move to Charing Cross. She was, he had to admit, a hell of an operator. Political to her fingertips, she only ever looked upwards, and she had taken to what was essentially a management role like a duck to water. She could be charming too – if you were a man of a certain age (i.e. ten to fifteen years older than her) and she wanted something from you.
But Superintendent Carole Simpson rarely wanted anything from Inspector John Carlyle. In fact, they had an uncomfortable, difficult relationship. She was frustrated by what she saw as his stubborn refusal to play the game, and his inability to hide his feelings towards her. In turn, he hated that sense of being co-opted on to her mission for personal glory.
Simpson, in fact, left Carlyle cold. Somehow, the collective good always seemed to be neatly aligned with the interests of the superintendent. He found her approach to the job completely introverted, indeed almost demented: she was far too busy climbing the greasy pole to worry about anything else. As far as he could see, Simpson combined utter selfishness with the self-awareness of a goldfish. Either way, Carlyle eyed her with a mixture of extreme distrust and antipathy. However, he had to be professional and, with discipline and concentration, he could just about tolerate her so long as their paths did not cross too often. Whenever they did coincide, he always felt as if he was getting too close to speaking his mind in a way that would fatally undermine any hope of maintaining even the most perfunctory of working relationships.
‘Why does Simpson want a presser?’ Carlyle began massaging his temples firmly, in the hope that maybe the headache that he knew was on the way wouldn’t actually arrive.
‘Who knows?’ Joe raised his hands as if in supplication. ‘The media have already got the story, so she probably wants to ride the wave.’
Carlyle looked hard at Joe. ‘So, if the press has got everything already, what do we hope to achieve with a bloody press conference?’
Joe shrugged. ‘You know what she’s like.’
Carlyle nodded. ‘Oh, yes.’
‘For Carole there is no such thing as bad publicity.’
Carlyle looked at his watch. ‘What time is it scheduled for?’
‘Three-thirty,’ Joe replied. ‘They’ve already been told that you’ll be there. I’m just a little bonus.’
Carlyle ground his teeth in frustration. Toying with the media circus would only make their job harder. Press conferences were the first refuge of the brainless and the desperate. As of right now, however, they were a long way from being either. ‘What are we meant to be saying?’ he asked.
Joe drained the last of his coffee. ‘Just the basics. Telling them what they already know. Asking the perpetrator of this horrific crime to give himself up. Calling for witnesses. Yada, yada, yada. Reassuring the public.’
‘Do they need reassurance?’
‘Probably not.’
‘No sign yet of mass panic?’
‘No.’
‘OK, OK.’ Carlyle thought about this further. Ten years ago, maybe even five years ago, he would have thought Fuck it and bunked off, leaving Simpson to deal with the journalists on her own. But the new, mature Carlyle was more sanguine, or maybe just warier. He knew that there was now a limit to what you could get away with before the myriad of disciplinary processes kicked in and your professional life was strangled before your eyes. Therefore, he would go to the press conference, while vowing to let Simpson do the talking. It was her show, her glory. Let her have it, if that’s what she wanted.
‘Let’s get back to the station,’ he said. ‘After the presser, we’ll head off to Blake’s place. I can read all the necessary stuff in the meantime.’
A long evening stretched ahead, therefore sustenance would be required. Carlyle peeked over the counter and smiled. ‘Marcello,’ he said, ‘bag me up that last pastry, please. I’ll take it with me.’