by James Craig
‘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 i
n 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.’
TWELVE
The ‘media centre’ at Charing Cross Police Station was a large, windowless basement that no one had ever found another use for. It was always cold and filled with the smell of stale food from the canteen next-door. The harsh strip lighting further helped ensure that no member of the media ever wanted to hang around too long. There were twenty chairs arranged theatre-style, facing a slightly raised platform that could sit up to six people. Behind the stage was displayed a large Met logo, with the legend Working together for a safer London spelt out in foot-high letters underneath. At the back of the room, there was space for television cameras, and in one corner a carefully branded mini-studio set where one-on-one interviews could be conducted after the press conference, like those interviews given by a football manager after a game.
Simpson’s press conference had drawn a reasonable crowd. They included a crime reporter from the Evening Standard, a reporter from one of the local freesheets, a guy from the PA newswire and a local radio reporter. Television was represented by ITV’s London Tonight and BBC London. As usual, they were all willing to hype it up in the hope of breathing some new life into a story that, after fifteen hours, was almost past its sell-by date. At the same time, with what they had so far, none of the journalists was getting over-excited. London might not be the murder capital of the world, but equally it was not the kind of place where a killing, per se, merited too much interest. When it came to getting the journalistic juices flowing, death was necessary but not sufficient. News editors needed a juicy angle involving sex, race, drugs, children or – the mother-lode these days – celebrity, to give the story legs.
Five minutes after the appointed starting time, Simpson, Szyszkowski and Carlyle entered the room by a door behind the platform. They were greeted with indifference by the small gathering in front of them – who continued chatting, talking on their mobiles, filling in their sudoku puzzles or, in one case, actually dozing. Simpson tentatively tapped on the microphone in front of her, but it appeared to be switched off. She raised her voice slightly to compensate. ‘Good afternoon, everybody…’
She was interrupted by another door opening at the back of the room. Heads turned, and stayed turned, in recognition of a star suddenly in their midst. In her Chanel suit, BBC reporter Rosanna Snowdon was far too well dressed for her surroundings. Her tan (maybe fake, but not obviously so), hard brown eyes and big blond hair gave her the look of an upmarket 1980s soap star. Carlyle pegged Snowdon at just north of thirty. After a well-publicised skiing accident that had kept her off the air and out of the gym for a month earlier in the year, it looked as if she was now quite a few pounds overweight. But she carried it in a healthy, knowing way that said: I don’t have to be thin to be sexy. She possessed what he thought of as a ‘neutral’ face, not friendly, not hostile, always ready to adapt to the situation. Not a chameleon, though, because she was always too focused on the matter in hand – self-promotion – to adapt too much to external circumstances. Nothing was for nothing, and everything was calculated.
It took a while for every man in the room to compose himself and return his attention to the matter in hand. Simpson let them settle. ‘Good afternoon, Rosanna,’ she said with an impressive faux familiarity. ‘Very nice to see you here today.’
Snowdon smiled, gave a little nod, and took a seat in the otherwise empty front row.
Simpson paused, quickly introduced her two colleagues, and then launched into the prepared statement. This managed to fill most of the remaining time allotted for the conference, while actually containing no new information whatsoever. The hacks scribbled away and nodded politely, apart from the Standard reporter who appeared to be either deaf or suffering from a serious attention-deficit disorder.
Once Simpson finished reading her statement, Snowdon immediately turned to Carlyle. ‘Is it true,’ she smiled sweetly, ‘that you were told about the body in a note, Inspector?’
Carlyle stiffened. ‘We are not adding to any detail we have already put out into the public domain,’ he heard himself say, robotically.
Snowdon came back at him gently. ‘But it has already been reported that there was a note… so any additional colour you can let us have on that would be most appreciated.’
Carlyle forced himself to smile. ‘I understand the need for colour in your story, Ms Snowdon,’ he replied evenly, ‘but I’ve got my job to do as well. We really have nothing to add at this stage.’ He could sense Simpson getting irritated, but felt that he had to stand his ground. This whole event was, nominally at least, supposed to be for the benefit of his investigation, after all.
The other journalists sat back, happy to see how far this gentle sparring would continue. Aware that they had ceded her the floor, Snowdon felt it was at least worth giving it one last go. ‘I’m sorry to have to repeat the question, Inspector…’
‘But you are going to anyway,’ Carlyle shot back.
At this point Simpson intervened, clearly having had enough of Carlyle spoiling her show. ‘I think we’ve already covered that,’ she declared, with a rictus grin. ‘Are there any more questions?’ she asked firmly, scanning the room. After the briefest of pauses, she moved on. ‘None? Good. Thank you all for coming. We will, of course, provide you with an update in due course. I will now happily make myself available for any radio and television interviews you might need.’ She scanned the audience, willing someone to take her up on her offer. ‘Shall we say BBC first?’