by James Craig
‘Sorry, mate,’ Umar said breezily, annoying the commuter even more. Taking a sip from his glass of Jameson’s whiskey, Carlyle stepped over and shrugged apologetically.
‘Sorry, but this is a private event.’
The man was about to protest when an enormous cheer went up. Turning to greet the new arrival, Carlyle joined in the applause as PC Lea appeared at the top of the stairs. Embarrassed, the constable did a small bow, soaking up the cheers of the twenty or so colleagues who were all now waving Earth Angel vibrators above their heads.
Carlyle watched with a certain sympathy as the commuter beat a hasty retreat downstairs. Then he turned to Umar and grinned. ‘Where the bloody hell did all those come from?’
‘There was a sale at the Ann Summers on Oxford Street,’ Umar explained. He slipped his arm round the waist of a pretty female constable called Wendy Saunders, who giggled appreciatively. ‘But wait till you see the best bit.’
A much louder roar went up as a green-haired Asian girl in a WPC’s uniform now appeared at the top of the stairs. The girl looked vaguely familiar but it took a moment for the inspector to place her.
Taking one of the Earth Angels from an officer in the crowd, the stripper licked the business end of it with gusto before rolling it across Lea’s crotch.
Oh shit, thought Carlyle nervously.
‘It’s the entertainment,’ Umar shouted in his ear. ‘We hired her from Everton’s.’
Not wishing to have to explain this when he got home, Carlyle quickly drained the last of his whiskey. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ he said hastily, as he began pushing his way towards the exit.
‘What?’ Umar frowned, but the inspector was already on his way. By the time he passed her, the girl had already shed her uniform and was down to an emerald green bra and G-string. Halfway down the stairs, another roar went up, suggesting that the underwear had now gone as well. Feeling hot and bothered, Carlyle fled into the night.
Adrian Gasparino looked at the blank screen on his MP3 player and sighed. How was he going to get the damn thing recharged? The music helped him get to sleep. Without it, he was in for a long night. Stuffing the machine into his coat pocket, Gasparino took a swig from his 700 ml bottle of Tesco Value Gin, feeling it slip all the way down his throat and into his empty stomach. Keeping the bottle close to his lips, he let out a small sigh as he lay back, lifting his hips off the ground and pulling his sleeping bag up around his waist. This doorway would be his bed for the night and he was glad to have found it. Out of the persistent, niggling rain, it was relatively dry. No one had pissed in it recently, which was another plus. But the clincher was the vent in the corner supplying a welcome stream of warm air from the building inside.
All in all, it could only be described as a desirable spot in a chichi Central London location. Certainly, it was the best place he had found on his travels so far. It hadn’t taken Gasparino long to realize that sleeping rough in the infantry was not the same as rough sleeping on the streets. This would be his third night on the street since leaving the hostel. On the first, he had sneaked into a car park on Shelton Street, near Covent Garden tube station. But he had been discovered sleeping underneath a Range Rover by a parking attendant, who’d kicked him out into the night at 4 a.m. The second night had been worse. Trying to claim a spot behind St Giles-in-the-Fields parish church, he had been attacked by a couple of junkies who had chased him off.
After days and nights of aimlessly trudging the streets, Gasparino felt weary to his very marrow. All he wanted was to be left alone and get something approximating a good night’s sleep. In the morning, he would head down to the toilets at Charing Cross railway station and have a wash and a shave. Maybe then he could come up with some kind of idea about what he should be doing.
Gasparino looked vacantly at the bottle. It was four-fifths empty and his head was already swimming. ‘No point in leaving the rest,’ he mumbled to himself, tipping his head back and pouring the last of the gin down his neck.
Wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve, he screwed the cap back onto the empty bottle, placing it in the side pocket of his rucksack, which was stuck behind his head as a pillow. Breathing through his mouth, Gasparino stared vacantly down the street. Despite the late hour, there were still plenty of people around, drunks and other revellers in no hurry to leave Central London and head back home to the suburbs. On the far side of the street, he watched a young woman, blind drunk, support herself against the back of a parked car. With her free hand, she hitched up her red skirt and pulled down her knickers, before squatting and aiming a stream of piss towards the tarmac. The pool of steaming urine made it a couple of inches away from the girl before the camber of the road sent it back towards her outsized platform shoes.
Behind her, a girlfriend leaned against another parked car, laughing drunkenly. ‘You’re getting it on yourself!’
‘Piss off!’ the squatting woman grunted as she did a little jig, trying to avoid stepping in her own wee.
Shifting in his sleeping bag, Gasparino caught the eye of the standing woman. She was wearing a thin, sleeveless dress that ended about half-an-inch below her crotch. A small bag hung from her left shoulder. She had no jacket and her legs were bare. The regulation over-sized shoes were strapped to her feet. Intoxicated as he was, Gasparino imagined he could see the goose bumps on her arms, even from fifteen feet away.
Glassy-eyed, the shivering girl stared right through him, as if he was invisible. ‘C’mon, Jen,’ she shouted, ‘let’s get going.’
‘Hold on!’ the woman shrieked. ‘I’m almost done.’ Finally, she levered herself back into something approximating a standing position, pulling up her pants as she did so. Stepping over the lake she had just created, she wobbled towards her friend, who reached out with a supporting arm. ‘Will we make the train?’
‘Dunno.’
Gasparino watched the two of them stagger off down the road. You don’t know how lucky you are, he thought groggily, having somewhere to go, a bed to sleep in. As they disappeared round a corner, he closed his eyes, knowing that, for him, sleep was unlikely to come.
After more than twenty years in the Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment, serving in Saudi Arabia, Northern Ireland, Germany, Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan, it had taken barely a couple of weeks for his marriage to collapse and his life to unravel. Trying to ignore the pain in his leg, Adrian Gasparino picked up a grubby copy of a freesheet that had been discarded in the doorway. He checked the date on the front page. Maybe it was today; maybe it was yesterday. Thinking about it for a moment, he realized that, either way, his baby’s due date was only a couple of days away.
If it actually was his baby.
‘Hey! Mister!’
Gasparino looked up but said nothing.
‘Got any money?’ A tall skinny boy, wearing jeans and a red hoodie with the legend ANIMAL on the front, stepped towards him. He had a blank, acne-scarred face, with no obvious signs of intelligence behind his dead, dark eyes; the type of kid he’d last seen cowering in a compound in Helmand. Hovering behind him, Gasparino counted four others, all dressed in similar fashion, a posse of evil urchins.
‘Gimme your cash,’ the boy repeated, his scrunched-up mockney accent harsh and unforgiving.
Gasparino’s hand reflexively slipped inside his sleeping bag. In his trouser pocket he had twenty-three pounds and seventy-six pence. Twice, earlier in the day, he had counted it, each time coming up with the same number. He had no idea how long he would have to make it last.
The boy took a swing at the end of Gasparino’s sleeping bag with the toe of his Nike trainers. ‘Are you stupid?’
The sound of bovine laughter came from the boy’s mates.
‘I don’t have anything,’ Gasparino protested. He tried to struggle out of his sleeping bag but a kick in the stomach sent him back down.
‘Don’t take the fucking piss,’ the youth shouted. ‘Give us your fucking booze money.’
Gasparino felt a spasm of anger in
his chest. Why couldn’t people just leave him alone? ‘Fuck off, you little bastard!’ he hissed. Pulling his arms out of the bag, he grabbed the kid’s ankle and pulled his attacker towards him.
Unable to keep his balance, the boy fell on top of the ex-soldier, arms flailing. Blood pumping, Gasparino tried to get his hands round the kid’s neck before he could escape. The urge to do some serious damage to the little bastard was overwhelming. He got one hand over his Adam’s apple and squeezed. The kid let out a satisfying gurgling noise as his eyes rolled back in his head.
‘You little shits!’ Gasparino shouted, squeezing harder.
‘You cheeky cunt!’ someone shouted. Then they were all upon him, kicking, screaming and biting. He grabbed hold of an ear but couldn’t get a grip. Then a face appeared in front of him and for a moment he thought it was Justine. Confusion spread through his brain as someone ripped his hand from the kid’s throat, snapping a finger in two in the process.
‘Bastard!’ Again, he tried to struggle to his feet but two of them had him pinned down against his rucksack.
‘Fucker!’
The last thing Adrian Gasparino remembered seeing before the lights went out was the dirty sole of a boot heading for his face.
‘What the hell are you doing, representing Clive Martin?’
A dark look passed across Abigail Slater’s face. ‘Surely,’ she glowered at her lover sitting opposite, ‘I have discretion – total discretion – when it comes to deciding on the clients that I choose to take on.’
‘Well, yes,’ Christian Holyrod stammered, ‘but come on. On the one hand I’m trying to clean things up, and here you are, getting in the way.’
Slater placed her knife and fork carefully on her plate and looked slowly round the restaurant. For an evening early in the week, The Triangle was doing more than brisk business. There was not an empty table in sight and a growing crowd at the bar, waiting to be seated. You would hardly think they were in the middle of the worst recession since the Second World War. Then again, economic austerity was for the little people. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, one of Christian’s more lame-brained colleagues, famously said, ‘We’re all in it together’; what he meant was, ‘You’re on your own, losers’. The little berk had last been seen on the slopes of some swish Swiss resort, enjoying a ten-grand skiing break, while his minions were busy trying to cut all the social services they could. Politicians, Slater thought contemptuously, they were such useless cretins. For a moment, she tried to remember why she was having a relationship with one. Nothing came to mind.
‘What’s so funny?’ Christian asked, a sour look upon his face as he played with his glass of Vega Sicilia Unico 1996.
‘Nothing.’ Slater cut a large slice off her mound of beef tartare. Popping it into her mouth, she chewed lasciviously, licking her lips as she swallowed. The look on Christian’s face signalled the rush of blood to his crotch, amusing her even more.
‘He’s a very interesting and articulate guy.’ Slater washed down the steak with a mouthful of wine.
‘Who – Martin?’
Slater nodded. ‘He talks well about the grotesque sexualization of our society.’ Slipping off one of her pumps, she inserted her foot between Holyrod’s legs and began gently massaging his groin with her toes.
The Mayor’s eyes widened. After a moment, his mouth opened slightly but no sound came out.
‘The way he explains it,’ Slater continued, feeling him stiffen under the arch of her foot, ‘we’re all in the sex industry, one way or another. Sex is used to sell everything – films, music, cars . . . even Entomophagous Industries.’
‘What do you mean?’
Slater put her cutlery back on the plate and pushed the half-finished meal away. ‘Have you seen the latest corporate advertising?’
Holyrod, rapidly losing interest in the conversation, shook his head.
‘There was a full-page ad for Entomophagous in the Economist, the Journal and the Herald Tribune. It was a picture of a naked woman,’ Slater explained, ‘or I should say “girl”, she looked about fifteen at best, sitting on a horse in a field with a slogan that said something like “beauty and strength”, something like that.’
Pulling her foot away from him, she slipped it back into her shoe. ‘So don’t come all high and mighty with me. And don’t try and tell me who I should choose as my clients.’
Slater dropped her napkin on her plate and sprang to her feet. Leaning over the table, she patted the Mayor on the cheek.
‘You never know,’ she smiled maliciously. ‘Maybe if you go home, your wife will let you fuck her tonight.’
Not very likely, Holyrod mused, trying to recall the last time they’d had sex.
‘Or,’ Slater continued, ‘maybe you could just wank off to one of your ads . . . if you like that sort of thing.’ Stepping away from the table, she headed off to get her coat.
Holyrod quickly pulled himself together as a hovering waitress approached the table.
‘Was the meal all right, sir?’
‘Fine, fine,’ said Holyrod brusquely as he watched his mistress disappear into the night. Maybe he would go home and fuck his wife, just to spite her. ‘Just get me the bill and a large glass of the twenty-year-old Pittyvaich.’
TWENTY
Carlyle wondered how long it might be before he could slink off and get a cup of coffee. He thought about the dozens of different cafés within a five-minute walk of the crime scene. As he went through the list, most of them were immediately ruled out on quality grounds. This was not the kind of morning when any old rubbish would do. He definitely was not in the mood for flavourless generic offerings doled out by some grumpy East European who hadn’t yet realized she should have stayed at home, rather than running off to a city that even he, a resident here all his life, found dirty, expensive and unforgiving.
The working day had started as he was brushing his teeth. Standing naked in the bathroom, he was wondering whether his gut was expanding as the desk sergeant phoned and informed him of the homicide. An unidentified tramp had been kicked to death in a doorway at the back of the London Coliseum, home of the English National Opera, not much more than fifty yards from the police station at Charing Cross.
‘Not so good for the crime statistics,’ the sergeant reflected.
Not so good for the poor bugger who is dead, Carlyle replied silently, holding his mobile to his ear while he continued brushing his teeth.
‘And just round the corner from where I’m standing,’ the sergeant sighed. ‘Doesn’t look too clever, does it?’
Still looking in the mirror, sucking in his stomach, Carlyle told him, ‘I’ll be there in ten minutes or so.’ Ending the call, he reached for the mouthwash.
Helen appeared behind him. Stepping out of her pyjama bottoms, she sat down on the toilet and began to pee. She gestured at the mobile as he set it down by the side of the bath. ‘Work?’
Carlyle nodded as he gargled. Spitting the mouthwash into the sink, he took the T-shirt that had been warming on the radiator and put it on. ‘Yeah. Dead tramp. Nice way to start the day.’
‘Ah well,’ she said, ‘good luck.’
‘Thanks.’ He kissed her gently on the top of the head. ‘I’ll tell you about it tonight.’
Umar Sligo turned up the collar of his raincoat and flashed a cheesy smile at the pretty blonde WPC standing by the police tape. He was sure he hadn’t seen her before; if he had, he would have remembered. Umar prided himself on always remembering a pretty face. Tossing her head, the girl looked away. Umar didn’t mind. Making a note of the number on her epaulette, he knew he would have her mobile number by the end of the day, no problem.
‘Sergeant . . .’
Turning back to face his boss, Umar gestured at the Fulham FC baseball cap pulled down low, with the brim concealing most of John Carlyle’s face. ‘Nice hat, Inspector.’
Stepping out of the rain, Carlyle tugged the brim down even further and grunted. The downpour was getting heavier but in t
he enclosed space of the doorway there was no chance that the stink of death was going to be washed away any time soon.
It wasn’t much of a crime scene, just a pair of battered Gola trainers sticking out from a heap of smelly clothes. If it wasn’t for the congealed blood spreading along the grimy concrete, you would assume the guy – Carlyle assumed that the victim was a man – was just another sleeping dosser of the kind that were to be found sprinkled around Covent Garden at any time of the day or night.
Nameless people living in a different world on the same streets.
‘Any ID?’
‘Nah.’ Umar shook his head. ‘They took everything.’
‘They?’
‘The techies reckon four or five people were involved. Anyway, they cleaned him out, took whatever money and possessions he had. All he had left were his clothes and the sleeping bag.’
‘Great.’ Turning away from Umar, Carlyle watched the pathologist, a small bearded guy called Evan Milch whom he hadn’t worked with much before, snap off his latex gloves and drop them into his bag. Closing the bag, he stretched and shook out his shoulders, catching Carlyle’s eye as he did so.
‘Nasty,’ said the pathologist.
Carlyle nodded.
‘We have just about finished here, I think.’ Milch wiped his hands on his green corduroy jeans. ‘I will let you have some initial thoughts by close of play.’
Someone kicked the poor bastard to death, Carlyle thought. What’s to know? He smiled thinly. ‘Thanks.’
‘My pleasure.’ Zipping up his padded green Barbour jacket, Milch gave a small bow and moved off the pavement, heading for the far side of the police tape and the peace of his mortuary.
As he watched him go, Carlyle stared vacantly at the corpse. For no particular reason, his mind alighted on a memory of Walter Poonoosamy, a local drunk known as ‘Dog’ on account of the fictitious pet he used to panhandle money from tourists. For a while, a few years back, Walter had been a local micro-celebrity, a regular fixture in the waiting room of Charing Cross police station. Then he disappeared, his fate unknown. Or, rather, the details of his fate were unknown. But, for a while at least, Walter had a name, an identity of sorts.