by James Craig
‘What do you mean, cut out to be a copper’?’
Dom grinned slyly. ‘Come on, John. Coming from me that’s hardly a criticism, is it? Neither of us fits in. We can both see past the bullshit. I can’t play the game, and neither can you. If you stay, they’ll piss all over you – even more than they’ve done already.’
Carlyle leant against the windowsill. ‘I am a copper,’ he said, more for his own benefit than for Dom’s.
‘Yeah… right.’
‘It was my decision,’ Carlyle said, trying to sound convincing, ‘and I have no regrets.’ He already had his doubts – plenty of them – but he wasn’t going to share them with anyone. ‘Now all this coal bollocks is over, I’m enjoying it a lot more. It’s fine.’
Dom swung his legs on to the sofa and stretched them out like a cat. ‘Don’t you realise, though? This is what it’s always going to be like. There will always be something else. Last time it was the miners, next time it’ll be the steel workers, or the dockers, or the anti-apartheid mob or students or… whatever. There will always be an “enemy within”. We – they – can’t do without them. There always has to be someone to fight.’
‘Maybe,’ Carlyle said doubtfully, ‘but nothing as big as what we’ve had to deal with during this last year. Not like Orgreave.’ Without thinking, he raised a hand to his forehead and touched the small scar that remained from the flying brick that had caught him on the picket line.
‘Face it, you’ll be doing someone else’s dirty work forever.’ Dom picked the roach out of the saucer and rolled it between his fingers. He glanced over at Barbara and smiled a proprietorial smile. ‘How’s the Miller thing going?’
His question surprised Carlyle. He hadn’t thought about Trevor Miller for months. And he wasn’t aware that Dom had heard about their little run-in the previous summer, or its unresolved aftermath.
To Carlyle’s dismay, the woman in the garden that day at Orgreave, called Jill Shoesmith, had launched civil action and was claiming damages for the assault. She had tracked Miller down through Carlyle (unluckily, she had remembered his surname). Being the only witness, Carlyle’s statement was crucial. The obvious thing – the expected thing – was to clear Trevor from the off, but he was reluctant to do that, basically because Trevor was such a total cunt. Letting him get off would have meant some careful ‘interpretation’ of what had happened that day, and for a more sympathetic colleague, he could easily have managed it. Even for Miller, he could have been persuaded – not by the useless great lump himself, of course, but by others on The Job.
The Job, however, didn’t want to know. When Carlyle sought out his commanding officer at Shepherds Bush for some advice, the man was evasive and non-committal. The longer the conversation went on, the more the look on his superior’s face was that of a man who had just seen a stinking pile of dog shit dragged into his office. After a couple of minutes, however, he managed a lame smile, said that he knew that Carlyle would make ‘the right decision’ about what to say, and unceremoniously ushered him out the door, shutting it quickly behind him. This was Carlyle’s introduction to (non) man management, Metropolitan Police style.
In the end, Carlyle fell back on his father’s advice – don’t tell a lie but don’t tell the whole truth either – and provided the investigation with a statement that was as short and factual as possible. His angst was tempered by the belief that the Met would just bung the Shoesmith woman a few quid and get the matter over with as quickly and quietly as possible. He was surprised and horrified, a few weeks later, when his Federation rep told him that was not going to happen, and that the action would be allowed to run its course. Jill Shoesmith would have her day in court and Trevor would have to face a formal disciplinary hearing. The whole thing could take months, or even years. Worse, Miller could lose his job. If Carlyle wasn’t worried about that outcome for Trevor’s sake, he was certainly worried about it for his own. Getting another policemen sacked would destroy any nascent reputation that he might hope to cultivate within the Force. Never mind Trevor bloody Miller, it could easily kill Carlyle’s own career before it had even started.
Whatever was happening, however, Carlyle wasn’t now about to give Dom a blow-by-blow account of how he was managing to fuck his own career in slow motion. ‘I gave them a statement, and that’s it, I think,’ he said non-committally.
A drug-induced grin spread across Dom’s face. ‘And what did you say in your statement?’
‘I simply told them what I saw: Trevor pawing the woman’s chest and the woman running away.’
‘Crap answer!’ Dom shook his head. ‘You should have let it go, John.’
Carlyle shrugged, knowing Dom was right and – not for the first time – cursing himself for being so stupid. ‘It’s what I saw,’ he said lamely.
‘He could have been arresting her.’
‘He could have been, but he wasn’t. He was trying to pull her tits off. You normally have to go to Amsterdam to see that sort of thing!’ Like he would know.
Dom pushed himself up on his elbows. ‘So you’re the white knight for this slag?’ he shook his head. ‘How fucking noble of you.’
Carlyle had now had enough of being patronised. ‘You don’t know she’s a slag,’ he protested, ‘and even if she was, so what? I just said what I saw. I didn’t make any speculation or add anything that would cause the dickhead any more trouble than he’d already brought upon himself.’
Dom jumped off the sofa and started waving his arms about. ‘You didn’t watch his back, you idiot.’
‘No one else has mentioned it,’ Carlyle said sulkily, still knowing that he was right.
‘Word gets around. Your card will be well and truly marked, my son.’
‘Miller is an arsehole. He went too far.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Dom said. ‘If you don’t get that, you shouldn’t be on The Job. It’s their game, their rules. Anyway, I hear he’s up for a promotion.’
‘What?’ Carlyle gasped. ‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding.’
Dom gave him a bemused ‘stoner’ look. ‘Why would I joke about something as serious as this? Trevor Miller, useless shithead that he is, came out of the strike with two commendations. He has friends.’
‘Friends?’
‘Yes, friends. Friends that will make sure this whole little mess gets quietly forgotten, whether your slag gets bought off or not. Trevor will come out of this smelling of roses. Unlike you.’
‘Fucking hell!’
‘You can fuck in hell or you can fuck in heaven,’ Dom continued. ‘Either way, the only person you’re fucking is yourself. Face it, Johnny, you’re not a team player.’ He smiled. ‘At least, not when it comes to the Police. So it’s just as well that I can offer you alternative employment.’
‘Doing what?’ Carlyle asked again. Again, he didn’t really want to know.
‘Just some organising, a bit of man management.’ Dom grinned. ‘This and that.’
Carlyle knew exactly what he was talking about.
‘It’s a chance for you to get in at the beginning of something big. Something lucrative.’ Dom raised his eyebrows. ‘What do you say?’
Carlyle looked at Dom, at his cheeky smile and dilated pupils. He needed a haircut and a shave. The man was right about Trevor Miller, but Carlyle knew that he would have to sort out his own mess. Going into business with a drug dealer was not the way to deal with that situation.
‘I’ve got to go,’ he said, smiling as best he could. ‘I’ll think about it.’
Dom shrugged. ‘Fair enough. Let me know before you go back to work.’
Carlyle headed for the door. ‘Sure.’
‘OK… great.’ Smiling, Dom saw him off with a friendly wave, both of them knowing that Carlyle wouldn’t meet Dom’s deadline.
Walking down Percy Road, Carlyle quickly realised that he had developed a splitting headache. The world was spinning gently. He stopped and tried to breathe in deeply though his mouth, but all he got for his t
rouble was the taste of car fumes.
ELEVEN
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.