The Circus

by James Craig

  Joe shrugged. ‘I got an hour’s sleep in one of the cells at the station.’

  ‘Comfortable?’

  ‘Very nice.’ Joe managed a tired smile. ‘They even brought me a cup of tea when it was time to get up.’

  ‘Mm.’ I’m too old for that kind of thing, Carlyle thought. ‘How did it go with the . . . ?’ He tried to remember the name of the family of the missing girl, but his mind was blank.

  ‘The Gillespies,’ Joe reminded him. ‘It went so-so. I spoke to them again about half an hour ago. Hannah still hasn’t turned up, but we haven’t hit the panic button just yet.’

  ‘Mm.’ That seemed about all that the inspector was able to manage at the moment.

  ‘It’s not great for the parents but we just have to wait.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We’ve done all the usual checks,’ Joe confirmed.

  ‘Okay.’ Parking the runaway teenager for the moment, Carlyle turned his attention to the gaunt man who sat behind a battered desk, busily tapping away at a computer keyboard.

  ‘This is Danimir Janko,’ Joe explained. ‘He’s the supervisor here.’

  ‘Bastards!’ Danimir hissed, apparently oblivious to the inspector’s arrival. He gestured at the screen. ‘See what they do?’

  ‘We’ve got the security images up,’ said Joe, as Carlyle walked round the desk to take a look. ‘You can see pretty well what happened.’

  ‘See?’ The twenty-inch screen was split into four quarters, each showing a different grainy, green-tinged still of the depot yard at night. Danimir pointed to the top-right quadrant and clicked on the mouse. As the video began running, two figures appeared out of the gloom. One was suited and booted while the other wore a hooded top, jeans and sneakers.

  ‘No prizes for guessing which one is the killer,’ said Joe as the hoodie pushed open the gate and the duo stepped into the depot.

  Carlyle leaned forward to get a closer view. ‘Wasn’t it locked?’

  ‘Vandals.’ Danimir shrugged. ‘It’s been broken for almost a month now, but the Council?’ He spoke wearily. ‘They do nothing.’

  Carlyle just about managed not to grin. On the screen, the two figures walked across the yard before disappearing between two trucks. ‘Is that it?’

  ‘Wait,’ said Danimir. ‘I speed it up.’

  It took only a few seconds to fast-forward through the next four minutes.

  ‘There!’ The hoodie reappeared and Danimir instantly returned the tape to normal speed. Carlyle watched as the man retraced his steps, exiting through the broken gate and disappearing back into the gloom.

  ‘Two go in,’ said Joe, ‘and one comes out. That’s our man.’

  ‘Presumably there are no images of what they got up to in the meantime?’ the inspector asked.

  ‘No.’ Danimir shook his head. ‘You can see the pair of them coming in from different angles, then heading across the yard, but once they go between those vehicles, there’s nothing. They’re hidden.’

  ‘That figures,’ Carlyle sighed. ‘Can we enhance the images to get a better look at the guy wearing the hood?’

  ‘They’ve already been sent over to SERIS,’ Joe told him. ‘They’re going to take a look today.’ SERIS – Specialist Evidence Recovery Imaging Services – was part of Specialist Crime Directorate 4, the Met’s Forensic Services Unit.

  ‘Good.’ Pointing at the time-code stamped in one corner of the screen, Carlyle looked up at his sergeant. ‘This wasn’t that late. What about witnesses?’

  ‘There aren’t that many residential properties around here,’ Joe replied. ‘It’s mainly offices but there’s a council block nearby. There’s also a pub round the corner, and a theatre. We’re getting some uniforms to go door-to-door right now, and again this evening.’

  ‘Okay.’ Carlyle straightened up. ‘The bin men are downstairs?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Joe nodded. ‘There’s a rest room on the ground floor.’

  ‘They’re not bin men,’ said Danimir huffily, looking up from his computer. ‘They’re Street Environment Officers.’

  ‘Whatever,’ said Carlyle, heading for the door.

  The Street Environment Officers had nothing of any use to tell him. After some desultory questioning, the inspector strolled across the depot yard where, having climbed into the back of the refuse truck, Susan Phillips was standing directly over the body.

  ‘Having fun?’ he asked.

  ‘Help me down.’

  Rather reluctantly, he held out a hand. Grasping it, the pathologist jumped back down on to the tarmac.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘No problem,’ Carlyle replied, carefully wiping his hand on the arse of his trousers.

  Phillips scratched her nose with a gloved finger. Like Joe, she didn’t smell too good but, ever the gentleman, the inspector once again said nothing. ‘Well,’ she said brightly, ‘there’s no doubt about what killed your victim; he was stabbed in the chest three times.’

  ‘Robbery?’

  ‘Doesn’t look like it. His wallet was still in his jacket pocket.’

  ‘Jolly good.’

  ‘There was quite a bit of cash in it – at least a couple of hundred, I’d say. He also had a fancy-looking watch which wasn’t taken.’ She gestured towards one of her assistants, who was standing in the middle of the yard surrounded by a collection of police-branded transparent plastic evidence bags of differing sizes. ‘Kara’s got it over there. The guy’s name was Duncan Brown. Looks like he was a journalist – there was a union card in his wallet.’

  ‘Journalists and policemen,’ Carlyle mused, ‘the only people who are still unionized these days.’ A Redskins song popped into his head – stop, strike, unionize – and he smiled. Forget The Jam, that really was punk rock.

  Post-punk punk.

  Or something like that.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Kicking the Redskins into touch, he gestured towards the back of the refuse truck. ‘This is all great information. Can you tell me who killed him, too?’

  ‘That’s your job. We’ll get him out of here first and I’ll do my report. But you know the basics.’

  ‘That’s great, Susan, thanks.’ The inspector pulled out his phone and found the number for the front desk at Charing Cross police station, where he and Joe worked. ‘Where are you taking him?’

  ‘Dunno. We haven’t found a free slab yet.’

  ‘Okay. Let me know when you do, and I’ll get a formal identification of the body.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘My pleasure. See you later.’ Walking away, he hit the call button and listened to it ring. After a few moments, the desk sergeant picked up. Explaining what he wanted, Carlyle listened to the guy bash away at a keyboard for a few seconds before coming back on the line.

  ‘We got a call at one thirty-two this morning from a Gemma Millington.’ He gave the inspector the woman’s contact details.

  ‘Thanks.’ Ending the call, Carlyle went to retrieve the victim’s effects from Kara.

  FIFTEEN

  Gemma Millington’s roots needed attention.

  ‘What?’ The tired-looking near-blonde had looked up from her steaming glass of jasmine tea and caught the inspector staring at the crown of her head.

  ‘Er . . . nothing. ‘ How many times was he going to get caught staring at women today? Carlyle placed his demitasse on the table and pulled up a red plastic chair. They were in the canteen on the top floor of the office block where she worked on Buckingham Palace Road. It was too early for the lunchtime rush, but the place was still fairly full. In the background, there was the clack of ball on ball as a couple of staffers played at one of the blue-baize billiards tables lined up at the far end of the room. To his left, the floor-to-ceiling windows gave an excellent view over the back gardens of the royal palace itself. ‘This is quite some place you have here.’

  ‘The Financial Times did a piece on it recently.’ She took a mouthful of tea. ‘They called it “a twenty-first-century play
school for grown-ups”, something like that.’

  ‘Nice.’ Trying not to make it too obvious this time, he gave her the once-over as he sipped his green tea. Late twenties slash early thirties, smartly dressed in a dark business suit and pale pink blouse, pretty enough but with a hard edge to her features that would, under different circumstances, have encouraged him to give her a wide berth.

  This morning, she looked pissed off rather than upset. Indeed, he had gained an impression that ‘annoyed’ was Gemma Millington’s default demeanour. London can do that to you, Carlyle thought. It puts you on your guard.

  At any rate, she did not look like the grieving girlfriend. In truth, that was a bit of a result. The inspector hated having to do the ‘my condolences’ routine with the friends and family of the victims of crime. The social-worker aspect of the job was something he had never been any good at.

  ‘Napoleon once said an army marches on its stomach,’ she remarked. ‘Here they just want us to stay inside the building – get more work done.’ This was clearly an opinion that she had expressed many times before.

  ‘And do you?’

  She looked at him blankly.

  ‘Stay inside the building.’

  ‘Yes. I mean, the food’s good.’ She gestured at the blackboard menu which covered most of one wall, listing a wide choice of dishes from sashimi and courgette tapenade to shepherd’s pie, each offering colour-coded with a little yellow, green or red dot. ‘And it’s all free.’

  ‘Free? Jesus, that must cost a fortune.’

  She gave him a look. ‘This company made more than two billion pounds in profit last quarter.’

  ‘I guess they can throw you the odd pie then.’ Carlyle pointed at the board. ‘What do the coloured dots mean?’

  ‘Everything is ranked by its nutritional value. Red essentially means pudding, cheesecake and stuff. Green is the healthy stuff. Yellow is somewhere in the middle.’

  ‘I’m a red man,’ Carlyle grinned.

  ‘Apart from the restaurant, downstairs in the basement there’s a newsagent, a chemist, and even a dry cleaner’s.’

  ‘Maybe I could come and work here,’ Carlyle quipped.

  ‘All the security is outsourced,’ she replied quickly.

  ‘It was a joke.’

  ‘Ah.’

  Carlyle finished his tea. ‘So, what is it that you do exactly?’

  ‘I’m one of the in-house legal team.’

  A lawyer and a journalist, Carlyle reflected. Her relationship with Duncan Brown must have been a barrel of laughs.

  She pulled a business card from the overstuffed handbag sitting on the table between them and handed it across. ‘I’m the sixth youngest VP of Legal that they’ve ever hired in Europe.’

  ‘Wow!’ Carlyle tried to look impressed. ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘I cover the whole waterfront: government relations, corporate development and new business development.’

  ‘I see. That sounds . . . interesting.’

  ‘This is a great place to be working – there is so much going on.’

  ‘I’m sure.’ He stuffed the card into his jacket pocket. ‘And you’re okay talking about Duncan here, at work?’

  She shrugged. ‘Might as well.’

  Definitely not seeming heartbroken.

  ‘Don’t want to take time off?’

  ‘No, not at all.’

  ‘Sure?’

  She gave him a hard stare. ‘My decision. Let’s just get on with it.’

  ‘Fine. They explained to you what happened?’

  ‘I got the basics from your colleague earlier. But you were there? You’ve actually seen him, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Carlyle nodded.

  ‘So why don’t you tell me what happened?’

  Carlyle replied, ‘That’s what I need to find out.’ He quickly ran through his visit to Cockpit Yard, not feeling any particular need to sanitize the story for the clearly robust Ms Millington’s benefit.

  ‘My God!’ Millington took another mouthful of tea. ‘Presumably it was some random nutter?’

  The inspector looked at her carefully. ‘Why would you say that?’

  ‘You should know about these things rather better than me, Inspector,’ she said somewhat reproachfully. ‘Duncan must just have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

  Carlyle thought back to the CCTV images.

  She had given up on the eye-contact now, allowing herself to be distracted by the guys playing billiards on the other side of the room. ‘I can’t see what else could have happened. What do you think?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’ Carlyle rummaged round in his jacket pocket and found a scrap of paper and a biro. This was supposed to be an interview, so he should at least pretend to take some notes.

  Millington tapped an expensively manicured finger on the screen of her BlackBerry, which sat on the table. ‘You must think I’m a really hard bitch,’ she said, as if challenging him to deny it.

  Just a bit. ‘No,’ he lied. ‘People react to this kind of situation in different ways. Not everyone automatically throws themselves to the ground and starts wailing. There are plenty of times when you just see people kind of closing down in front of you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Or they try to keep going as if nothing has happened – in some sort of denial. It’s all about individual coping mechanisms. There’s nothing wrong with being . . . detached.’

  For the first time, something approximating sadness crossed her face. ‘It doesn’t exactly feel real yet.’

  ‘These things can take time to sink in.’

  ‘The funny thing is, when he abandoned me in the theatre, I made a decision there and then to dump him. It had been such an effort to get him to come along at all, and then he buggered off before we even got to the interval.’ She gave the inspector a shamefaced smile. ‘Makes me a terrible person, eh?’

  ‘Not really.’ Carlyle adopted a sympathetic expression. ‘Happens all the time.’

  She gave him a puzzled look.

  ‘Girls dumping their boyfriends, that is. Not the boyfriends getting stabbed and thrown in the back of a rubbish truck.’

  She sighed. ‘We were together for eighteen months. The relationship was just getting into a rut. Neither of us was prepared to compromise enough to move things on. I felt that if I didn’t pull the plug now, things were only going to get worse. I didn’t want my whole life to start ebbing away.’

  ‘Right.’

  Millington was staring off into space. ‘Anyway,’ she said quietly, ‘I’ve been seeing someone else for a while.’

  Carlyle tried to scribble on the scrap of paper but found that the biro was out of ink. He tossed it on to the table in disgust.

  ‘He’s a lawyer, like me.’ She noticed the sudden look in the inspector’s eye. ‘He’s been in Brussels all this week,’ she added hastily.

  Handy, Carlyle thought, but hardly a perfect alibi seeing as it’s only a couple of hours away on the Eurostar. ‘I’ll need his details all the same.’

  ‘Fine.’ She picked up her BlackBerry, and Carlyle recited his own email address. A couple of taps on the smartphone and it was done. ‘I’ve sent you his v-card.’

  ‘Thanks.’ He made a mental note to get Joe to check the guy out.

  ‘These things happen,’ she said – then seeing the scepticism in his face, she held up a hand. ‘Duncan was a nice guy.’

  Nice?

  ‘But he was very narrow in his focus.’

  Unlike you, Ms VP Legal.

  ‘He liked to describe himself as a good, old-fashioned hack.’

  ‘What did he mean by that?’

  ‘Basically, as far as I could tell, it meant he would spend as much time as possible in pubs, talking to his “sources”.’ Millington let out a hollow laugh. ‘He thought he was fighting against the idea that journalists should be chained to their desks twenty-four seven, simply rehashing stories from the internet.’

  Carlyle glanced aroun
d. Now lunchtime was approaching, a steady stream of people began coming into the canteen to check out the chestnut mushroom, chard and pearl-barley stew and the smoked haddock. Feeling more than peckish, he wondered if his host would do the right thing and feed him. ‘So . . . what kind of stuff did Duncan write about?’

  Millington exhaled. ‘A wide range of stuff really.’ She reeled off a number of topics that covered a depressingly banal list of celebrities, reality-TV shows and politicians.

  Doesn’t seem such a wide range of things to me, Carlyle thought sourly, just the same old shit. As far as he could see, newspapers in general were now totally redundant, and Sunday newspapers were the most redundant of the lot. He would quite happily never buy another newspaper again. Helen, however, for reasons best known to herself, bought the Sunday Mirror, which seemed to be pitched at people with a mental age of eight. Every weekend he picked it up and then vowed never to read it again.

  ‘It didn’t much matter what it might be,’ Millington continued, ‘Duncan always said that as long as you got something you could stick an exclusive tag on, you were sorted.’

  ‘So he’d sell his granny for a story, eh?’

  She stared at him blankly. ‘He didn’t have a granny. Both of them are long dead.’

  Lawyers, so fucking literal! ‘What about his work colleagues?’

  ‘I didn’t meet very many of them.’ She made a show of considering it for a moment. ‘Maybe only one or two.’

  ‘I’ll need their names.’

  ‘Okay. But Duncan didn’t really spend much time hanging out with anyone from his work. I think he got on okay with the people there but it was a very competitive place. They didn’t do team spirit at the Sunday Witness.’

  ‘Mm.’ Something else for Joe to follow up. The boy was going to be busy. Maybe he could get WPC Hall to help him. Anita would like that.

  Right on cue, his phone started ringing.

  ‘Joe.’

  ‘How’s it going?’

  Carlyle looked at Millington. ‘I’m speaking to the girlfriend now.’

  ‘Ex-girlfriend,’ she mumbled.