by James Craig
In front of the church’s outsized portico, an acne-scarred youth wearing last season’s Arsenal away shirt sat on the kerb, with his head buried in his hands. Oblivious to his suffering, a couple of insomniac pigeons pecked at the large pool of golden vomit shimmering under the orange street lights nearby. Behind him, a very young-looking girl in an insubstantial silver dress stood motionless, expressionless, apparently disinclined to comfort him or to leave him, as their night on the town struggled to die.
The pair paid Carlyle no heed as he walked on. For his part, Carlyle gave the girl a hard stare, saying a silent prayer that his own daughter wouldn’t be found in a similar situation in seven or eight years’ time.
Reaching the corner of Agar Street, Carlyle looked up and took in the hulking mass of Europe’s largest police station. Covering a whole block of some of the most expensive real estate in the world, it stood a couple of blocks north of the eponymous train station. It was a squat, featureless building, rising to six economical storeys, bristling with CCTV cameras on every corner, peppered with windows too small for its bulk; windows for seeing out of rather than for looking in through. The half a dozen old-fashioned blue police lamps placed in random locations around the building looked just as fake as they actually were. The same blue lamp used to be found outside every police station, reminding the public that the police were always ready to serve. Now they were just design accessories.
The station building was painted in an off-white colour that always looked grubby. The finishing touch was a small portico, as if copied from the nearby church in the piazza, framing the front entrance and making it look more like a provincial town hall than a major cop shop.
Charing Cross was one of a hundred and forty Metropolitan Police stations located across London, and Carlyle had been stationed at this one for almost ten years now, making it his longest posting by a considerable margin. In the previous decade and a half, he had made various random stop-offs around the capital in the fairly random circuit of stations that had constituted his ‘career’ – including Shepherds Bush, Southwark, Brixton, Paddington Green and Bethnal Green. He had moved slowly through the ranks, from constable to sergeant to inspector, having a go at most things: vice, drugs, fraud, homicide and even a short and inglorious spell at Buckingham Palace in the Royal Protection Unit.
Despite picking up more than his fair share of commendations, Carlyle knew that he had never really been considered as part of the team. He was not ‘one of us’, nor was he a ‘safe pair of hands’. Somehow, he had survived, though, without ever becoming part of the family. How had that happened? The powers that be were doubtless as surprised as Carlyle himself that he was still around. Over the years, he had evolved into a jack of all trades and master of none. He had put down roots of a sort, like a tree stuck in the pavement: stable but not necessarily happy.
Climbing the steps, he glanced at the rather modest Charing Cross Police Station sign, which sat below a small and very grubby royal crest. Above the crest, a chaotic rainbow-coloured flag hung limply from its pole, the usual Union Jack having been replaced in recognition of Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Month, whatever that was. Inside, the place was unusually empty, save for a lone figure slumped comatose in the corner.
Walter Poonoosamy, commonly known as ‘Dog’, was a drunk, a regular nuisance or a local mini-celebrity, depending on your point of view. Dog’s moniker came from his habit of approaching tourists who were aimlessly wandering about the piazza and asking for their help in finding his pet Labrador, called Lucky. Lucky, he explained, was his one companion in life, and as luck would have it he had gone missing that very day. As far as anyone knew, there never had been any such animal, but he fitted the stereotype of a down-and-out’s faithful friend, which, combined with Dog’s not inconsiderable acting ability and persistence in the face of a raging thirst, was usually sufficient to tug at the heartstrings of the gormless enough to easily cover the cost of a couple of 1.5 litre bottles of Diamond White cider, which was his preferred tipple. It was urban legend that one tear-stained performance had prompted a middle-aged American lady from Wyoming to hand over a fifty-pound note and tell the bemused tramp to ‘Go get yourself a new dog’.
Tonight, Carlyle could smell evidence of the comprehensive but unscheduled toilet stop which explained why no one had yet tried to move Dog on from his bench. Carlyle observed a sensible exclusion zone around the wino, as he stepped towards the desk where the duty sergeant – an amiable, middle-aged guy called Dave Prentice – was tossing a pair of latex gloves to a disgruntled, sleepy-looking PCSO whom Carlyle didn’t recognise. There was a large bottle of disinfectant on the desk, alongside a mop and a bucket of recently boiled water mixed with some industrial-strength disinfectant. The cleaners wouldn’t arrive until at least six-thirty, which meant a PCSO had to be press-ganged into action meanwhile. Police Community Support Officers were volunteers who signed on to help the regular police in their spare time, though, with no power to arrest suspected criminals, they were widely derided as ‘plastic policemen’. Bored and unmotivated, they were responsible for most cases of gross misconduct among Metropolitan Police staff, usually involving drinking offences and motoring crimes. Twenty or so got sacked each year and, in general, Carlyle tried to have as little to do with them as possible.
‘Hurry up and get him out of here,’ Prentice grumbled to the PCSO, knowing that there was no question of Dog going into a cell tonight. Ever since a report from the Metropolitan Police’s Custody Directorate had calculated that a night spent in the slammer cost a whopping?667, considerably more than the likes of the Dorchester Hotel (?395) and the Ritz (?390), the pressure was on to keep as many of them empty as possible. The hospitality at Charing Cross was therefore reserved for celebrities (C-list and above) and serious criminals only. Definitely no drunks, therefore. Equally, no local hospital would admit Dog, so it was a matter of finding somewhere else to sleep off his stupor.
‘Just get him round the corner and stick him in a doorway,’ Prentice suggested. ‘He’ll find his way home soon enough.’
The PCSO grunted and pulled on the latex gloves. He didn’t even acknowledge Carlyle as he moved gingerly towards the snoring wino. Carlyle mentally wished him luck and headed in the opposite direction.
Prentice eyed him quizzically as he approached the front desk. ‘Back already, John?’
Carlyle made a face. ‘Forgot my bloody keys.’
For a man who could really not care less, Prentice did a good job of managing a small grimace of sympathy. ‘Unlucky.’
‘Yeah, I know. I got almost all the way home before I realised,’ Carlyle replied, sounding suitably sorry for himself. ‘If I buzzed the front door, Helen would go bananas,’ he added, ‘even if I didn’t wake Alice up, too, what with her having school in the morning.’
Prentice nodded sympathetically. He had three kids himself, two girls and a boy, and knew all about the ups and downs of family life. At the same time, he lived near Theydon Bois, a village on the north-east periphery of London, near Epping Forest, which was famous for not possessing any street lights. Fifteen miles from Charing Cross, it took the best part of an hour on the Central Line for Dave to get home, so he would have had no qualms about waking the kids and getting his missus out of bed if he found himself stuck on the doorstep in deepest, darkest Essex.
Conscious of someone behind him, Carlyle turned to see a skinny, blond-haired, twenty-something man approaching the desk. He wore a pained expression – all cheekbones and attitude – and was fashionably dressed in an expensive-looking, two-button, single-breasted black suit and a crisp white shirt. As he reached the desk, Carlyle could read the legend The Garden in tiny grey script on his breast pocket. The Garden was an upmarket ‘boutique’ hotel only two minutes’ walk away, on St Martin’s Lane, just up the road from Trafalgar Square. It was a haunt of minor celebrities and gossip columnists, always full of self-important people doing self-important things.
The young man ignored Carly
le. Without saying a word, he handed Prentice a white envelope and turned to leave.
‘Hold on, there.’ Carlyle placed a gentle hand on the visitor’s shoulder. ‘What is this?’
The man stopped, turned and gave him a neutral look. ‘I guess it’s a letter.’
‘I can see that, sir,’ Carlyle said, with considerable effort, not least because ‘sir’ was not a word he felt comfortable in using. He took the envelope from Prentice and looked at the address in black capitals on the front: BY HAND – FAO THE DUTY OFFICER, CHARING CROSS POLICE STATION. He glanced back at the young man. ‘Who gave you this?’
‘The chief concierge at the hotel.’ The man shrugged, like that should be obvious.
Carlyle felt his mood harden. He could be obtuse himself often enough, when he felt like it, but he didn’t like it in others. Not when he was on the receiving end. He glared at the man, who took a step backwards till he was leaning against the desk.
‘What’s your name?’ Carlyle growled.
‘Anders.’
‘Second name?’
‘Brolin. Anders Brolin. I am from Sweden.’
‘No shit,’ Carlyle looked at Prentice and grunted, ‘straight out of central casting.’ Prentice raised his eyebrows but said nothing.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Nothing.’ Carlyle looked the young man up and down. ‘Where in Sweden are you from?’
‘Skane.’
That didn’t mean anything to Carlyle. ‘Where?’
‘It’s in the south of the country,’ the man said slowly, clearly, to accommodate both the geographical ignorance of the English and the fact that he was talking to a couple of policemen. ‘I am from a town called Ystad.’
‘Never heard of it.’
Brolin seemed to perk up a little at the thought of home. ‘It’s nice but very quiet. Nothing ever happens there.’ He almost smiled, then thought better of it. ‘It’s a good place to be a policeman.’
‘Not like London.’
‘Not like London, no. Here there are too many…’ Brolin paused.
Carlyle stepped in: ‘Too many wankers?’
‘Yes,’ Brolin gave a tired smile, ‘far too many.’
‘So,’ Carlyle waved the envelope gently in the air, ‘what about this?’
‘This is nothing to do with me,’ Brolin said, making an involuntary jerk of the head in the direction of the front door. ‘I just do what I am told.’
‘Don’t we all.’ Prentice chuckled.
‘Anyway, my shift is finishing soon,’ Brolin added. ‘Why don’t you just see what it says?’
‘OK.’ Carlyle sighed, recalling that his own shift had finished over an hour ago. This is what happens when you dick around, he told himself. He’d forgotten his keys two or three times recently. Maybe his mind was going: short-term memory loss. Maybe he should start carrying a spare set at all times. That was a good idea. He’d just have to try to remember it.
Into his head popped a mental image of his wife snoring happily under the duvet in his beautiful warm bed. Then it slowly, cruelly, receded into the distance until it faded to black. With a sigh, he tore open the envelope and pulled out a single sheet of paper. ‘Let’s see what this says and then we can both go home,’ he murmured. Dropping the empty envelope on the desk, he unfolded the sheet of paper and scanned the contents.
It was a standard piece of hotel stationery, but good quality, heavy grey paper with the hotel name and email address embossed at the top. The same writing as on the envelope simply stated: BODY IN 329. NOT THE FIRST amp; NOT THE LAST. Beneath the text there was a couple of dark splashes that looked like blood. They had soaked into the paper but hadn’t yet dried.
Carlyle waved the handwritten note first at Prentice, then at Brolin. ‘Know anything about this?’
‘No,’ said Brolin sulkily, ‘I told you I didn’t.’
This note was, Carlyle already knew, 99.9 per cent certain to be time-wasting bollocks. A body in a hotel room, if there even was one, would be suspicious, but not necessarily criminal. Charing Cross Police Station had registered seven ‘suspicious’ deaths last year, five of which were subsequently deemed murder or manslaughter. All of those cases had been duly solved, and none of them had involved tourists or hotels. Halfway through the current year and they had already had six suspicious deaths, five of which were criminal, with the other one still a matter of some debate. The law of averages told Carlyle that this note was someone’s idea of a joke. People, as he knew only too well, did some incredibly stupid things. And, as he knew even better, they usually got away with it, leaving other people chasing their tails or cleaning up the mess.
Of course, bollocks or not, he now would have to go and look for himself, just in case. Carlyle saw several hours of time wasting ahead of him and felt his body sag. He gritted his teeth to help keep hold of his anger.
‘This,’ he said, pointing a finger at Brolin, ‘had better not be one of your fucked-up guests pissing about.’ Aching with tiredness, Carlyle could feel himself starting to go off on one, but he was saved by Prentice putting a hand on his arm, gently telling him to give it a rest. It was a timely intervention, and Carlyle acknowledged it with a nod. He understood the sergeant’s point: don’t shoot the messenger – even if he does appear to be a moron.
Brolin held up his hands in supplication. ‘All I did was bring you the letter.’
Carlyle scratched his head. ‘OK, fair enough.’ He took a deep breath and tossed the sheet of paper next to the envelope lying on the desk. ‘Better bag those up, Dave, just in case this is for real. Get one of the constables down here now, and then we’ll go and take a look.’ He turned to Brolin: ‘You wait here. I’ll be back in a second, once I’ve collected my keys.’
SEVEN
The Garden Hotel on St Martin’s Lane, just north of Trafalgar Square, was a 1960s office block which had been bought by in the early 1990s by Mexican billionaire Jeronimo Borgetti. Borgetti had then hired an uber-cool American designer called Alan Wall to turn it into a luxury boutique hotel. For the billionaire, it was a nice addition to his global property portfolio, as well as somewhere to stay whenever he too was in town. It was one of those places that always made Carlyle uncomfortable, however. The place tried soooo hard to be soooo stylish that mere mortals like him could never hope to keep up. He always had to first ask the price, and so could never afford the product.
Waiting for the chief concierge to arrive, Carlyle stood in the pale yellow and green light of the lobby, thinking again how he really should be in bed. Even at this hour, a regular stream of people moved in and out of the place. To Carlyle, they all looked too confident, too complacent. The sound of laughter drifted over from the Light Bar at the rear of the building, where there was still half an hour to go until closing time. What kind of people go out drinking at two-thirty on a Monday morning, Carlyle wondered sourly. Young and rich, he supposed, the kind of people who didn’t have to worry about going off to work in an hour or two.
Tapping a shoe on the immaculate Portuguese Moleanos honed beige limestone, Carlyle picked up a copy of the hotel brochure and instinctively sniffed it. It smelled expensive and felt heavy in his hand. Flipping through the pages, he smiled at the marketing copy which spoke of ‘an utterly original urban resort’, ‘a new paradigm’, and ‘a manifestation of the cultural Zeitgeist’. The expensively printed booklet just confirmed that The Garden was not his kind of place, not that its owners would be losing any sleep over that. A rather shabby, middle-aged policemen was definitely not the kind of target customer for a high-end establishment aimed at an ‘itinerant “tribe” of world travellers who routinely stop off between the twenty-four-hour international gateway cities of London, Paris, Milan, New York, Los Angeles, Miami and the like…’
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 h
otel 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.