by James Craig
‘He gave me a call at the office. He’s obviously worried about that cough of his.’ Helen gave Carlyle an admonishing look. Her own father had died years ago and she was close to Alexander, closer than Carlyle himself was, anyway.
‘He should go and see a bloody doctor, then.’
‘He’s got an appointment for the day after tomorrow.’ She took another sip of her tea. ‘I think you should go with him.’
‘I’ll see.’ The last thing Carlyle wanted to do was sit about in a doctor’s surgery for hours on end. If he wasn’t unwell when he went in, he would be when he came out. ‘Things are quite busy at the moment.’ A story about a footballer who had killed two guys in a car crash came on and, trying to let the conversation wither, he waved at the screen, saying, ‘Can you believe it? The bloody Prison Service released him by mistake. No wonder the families of the blokes who were killed are pissed off.’
‘John,’ she said, not interested in his diversionary tactics, ‘this is important. Your dad’s getting on. He needs our support.’
‘I’ll see,’ he repeated.
‘OK.’ Helen was clearly not happy with his response. ‘But you should do it.’
‘Yeah, yeah.’ Irritated, Carlyle tried to change the subject. ‘Does Alice still want to go on the school trip?’ Along with his father’s health, their daughter’s class study tour to the USA was another current bone of contention. Two weeks in America was all well and good, but how were they going to pay for it? It was hard enough coming up with the fees each term; the ‘extras’ were killing them. He had always felt somewhat ambivalent about sending his only child to a private school – Helen had insisted – but he realized that he mustn’t burden Alice with any of his concerns.
‘I think so. She understands that it’s expensive though.’
Lifting the remote, he switched the TV off again. ‘God, in my day we were lucky to get a trip to Margate. Now the kids are off to New York and Washington DC.’ Carlyle, who’d never been to America in his life, suddenly felt a pang of self-pity.
‘It’ll be good for her. All her friends are going.’
‘I know, I know.’ Placing the remote back on the coffee table, Carlyle forced himself to his feet and shuffled towards the door. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll sort it out. It’s just a question of money.’
Was he awake? Slowly coming to, he rolled on to his back and focused on getting his breathing right – deep and regular breaths – before reluctantly opening his eyes. Blinking, he gazed at the ceiling. It looked diseased. Dirty white emulsion was flaking off in various places and a thick crack ran from one corner towards the centre. Out of the crack a spider appeared, scuttling along its length before disappearing again.
‘Urgh.’
Lifting his head off the pillow, Michael Nicholson threw back the tatty duvet, slowly swung his legs over the side of the bed. For several moments, he dangled his bare feet over the linoleum floor, scratching his head while he checked that he still had the usual number of toes. Happy to confirm that was the case, he then inspected each hand in turn. A pedicure wouldn’t go amiss, but there were no digits missing. Finally, crucially, he stuck his hands down his trousers and gave his balls a vigorous scratch.
‘All present and correct,’ he mumbled. Yawning, he looked around. Directly in front of him was a small window, with bars on the outside. Through it, he could see that the sky was grey and the light was fading. Overhead was a light fitting but there was no bulb.
In the distance was the hum of traffic. Nicholson assumed that he was still in London but that was by no means certain. God knows how long he had been out for. They could have bundled him into a crate and taken him anywhere in the world. For all he knew, he could be back in China right now.
At least they hadn’t killed him.
Yet.
Running his tongue across his teeth, he realized that he had a low-level headache, caused by dehydration, and his mouth felt like it was full of cat litter. He tried in vain to raise some spit before noticing that a two-litre bottle of Evian had been placed in the far corner of the room, next to a large red plastic bowl and a roll of pale green toilet paper. Nicholson tutted unhappily. He had a thing about coloured toilet paper; if it wasn’t white, he couldn’t go. It was an immutable law that he’d learned to live with over the years. He looked at the bowl. ‘No matter,’ he said to himself, ‘I wouldn’t be able to crap in that, anyway.’
Getting to his feet, Nicholson felt dizzy, but the feeling quickly passed. It took him two steps to cross the room. Picking up the bottle, he checked the seal then unscrewed the top. Lifting the water to his mouth, he gargled, spitting it out into the bowl before taking a second mouthful and swallowing. Replacing the cap, he put the bottle back on the floor and took a cautious stretch. Pushing back his shoulders, he rotated his head and tried to massage his neck with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand as he recalled what had happened at the flat in Chelsea.
What was the last thing he could remember? Stepping through the sliding doors, in search of the gin, to be confronted by two large figures in black, like something out of a James Bond movie. He froze. Ren Jiong and Wang Lei were nowhere to be seen. Without Ren’s rap music blasting from the bedroom, the place seemed eerily quiet. On the muted TV, two middle-aged women were comparing carriage clocks on the Antiques Roadshow, one of Wang’s favourite programmes.
One of the intruders approached Nicholson, a syringe in his hand. The businessman opened his mouth in protest, but no sound came out. He watched as the needle was thrust into his arm and the plunger pressed down. For a moment . . . nothing; and then everything went black.
And now he was here.
As the crappy B-movie in his head came to an end, Nicholson chuckled grimly. Wang Lei might have been paranoid, but she had been right. They had come for them and they had taken them. When things got tricky, the expensive security she had hired hadn’t been worth shit. Twelve bloody grand a day. The thought of all the money that could have been going into his pocket made him want to cry.
Putting his own frustrations to one side, Nicholson fleetingly wondered what his captors had done with Wang, and with the boy. Quickly, however, he returned to his main interest: himself. If he made it out of here, wherever ‘here’ was, he renewed his vow that he would head back to Shanghai for good and opt for the quiet life.
Having sorted out the rest of his life, Nicholson looked slowly round the room. Apart from the bed, there was no furniture. Decoration was limited to a faded poster of the Victoria Falls advertising the Zimbabwe Tourism Authority. To his right was a door; he knew it would be locked but he stepped over and tried the handle anyway. When it didn’t open he gave it a couple of desultory slaps and listened for any activity on the other side. There was none. Nicholson hit the door again, harder this time.
‘Hello? Hello . . . HELLO!’
Mumbling to himself, he counted to a hundred.
Five hundred.
A thousand.
No one came. Sitting back down on the bed, Nicholson realized that he was quite relieved about that. No doubt, someone would check on him soon enough. In the meantime, he was in no particular hurry to find out what they would do to him next.
EIGHT
A mixture of amusement and dismay washed over Alison Roche’s face as she watched the familiar figure approach from behind a police car that had been lazily parked at a thirty-degree angle to the kerb.
‘Inspector.’
‘Long time no see,’ Carlyle said.
‘Yeah.’ The sergeant eased her forefinger off the trigger of the MP5 slung over her shoulder and gazed down the Horseferry Road. ‘And I suppose you were just passing?’
Carlyle stared at the tarmac. His stomach rumbled; leaving home in a rush, he hadn’t had any breakfast and was feeling more than a little hungry. What he really needed was a good greasy spoon but the places he’d passed on his way over from St James’s Park were not yet open. ‘This is my patch,’ he observed, ‘kind of.’
&n
bsp; ‘How are things at Charing Cross?’
‘You know – same old, same old.’ Looking up, Carlyle gestured at the roadblock that was stopping cars in both directions. ‘What’s all this about?’
‘Just a routine exercise,’ the sergeant explained. ‘A bit of PR to show the public we’re earning our corn.’
‘Yes.’
‘Anyway,’ said Roche, ‘what do you want?’ There was no malice in her voice, just a recognition that her ex-boss wouldn’t drop in on her without a reason. The concept of a social call was alien to Carlyle. And anyway, it wasn’t yet a quarter to seven in the morning.
Out of habit, Carlyle looked around, checking that no one was paying any attention to their conversation. ‘Marvin Taylor,’ he said quietly.
‘The guy who got his head chopped off?’
Carlyle nodded. ‘I used to work with him.’
Fifteen yards down the road, a taxi driver started arguing with one of the two officers who were checking his car. The second officer stepped over to support his colleague but the driver was a big guy who would be more than capable of giving the pair of them a run for their money. Roche’s expression suggested she would like nothing better than to put a couple of 9mm rounds through the cabbie’s windscreen.
‘His wife came to see me,’ Carlyle went on. ‘She isn’t being kept in the loop.’
‘And what makes you think I can help?’ Roche asked, keeping her eyes on the argument.
‘You were at the scene,’ Carlyle said evenly.
Roche shrugged.
‘And your boyfriend is the family’s liaison.’
Her face darkened. ‘My boyfriend?’
‘Oliver Steed,’ Carlyle replied cautiously, suddenly not so sure about the quality of the intel he’d gleaned from the station grapevine.
‘He’s not my boyfriend,’ she snapped. ‘He’s just a kid who fancies me.’ Her face set into the hard mask that he remembered from their time working together in Charing Cross. It was the kind of expression so many women in the Force adopted when they had to be more macho than the men they worked with. ‘He’s clueless. Probably still a bloody virgin.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with that. You could be a . . . whats-itsname,’ an image of a well-preserved American actress with over-inflated boobs popped into the inspector’s head, ‘a cougar.’
‘Ha.’ Roche snorted. ‘What would that make you, Grandad?’
‘An old git,’ Carlyle smiled, happy that he could still get on the right side of her.
‘No change there then.’ Down the road, the taxi driver had been coaxed back into his cab and sent on his way. One of the officers at the roadblock checked his watch and waved Roche over. ‘I’m up,’ she said. ‘Gotta go.’
‘Taylor,’ Carlyle reminded her.
‘I’m off at one. You can buy me lunch.’ They agreed a venue and she walked quickly off.
‘Try not to shoot anyone,’ Carlyle shouted after her.
‘I’ll do my best,’ she replied over her shoulder.
Fortified by a cooked breakfast at the Pitstop, a former public convenience that had been converted into a café, Carlyle sauntered through St James’s Park, wondering how best to utilize his morning. Reluctant to put in an appearance at the police station, he ran through the ‘to do’ list in his head. The number of overdue reports with his name next to them was getting longer by the day, but they could wait. The thought of giving himself over to paperwork for a few hours was so unpleasant that he had to stop at the next park bench. Sitting down beside a well-groomed woman reading a copy of the Financial Times, the inspector pulled out his BlackBerry and began scrolling through his email contacts. Finding the name he was looking for, he composed a short message and fired it off into the ether. To his surprise and delight he got a reply almost instantly. Stifling a burp, he ignored the irritated look of the businesswoman and got to his feet, heading past the Canadian War Memorial, in the direction of Lower Regent Street.
‘You were quick.’ Looking over the top of her iPad, Susan Phillips gave him a warm smile. She was standing in the middle of the lobby of a bank on Regent Street. The place had been cleared and they were alone, apart from the body wedged between two ATM machines.
‘I was in the neighbourhood,’ Carlyle explained, watching bemused as the pathologist began waving the tablet in front of her face. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m trying to connect to the Cloud,’ she explained.
Carlyle looked up at the ceiling. ‘What cloud?’
‘The Cloud, with a capital “C”.’ Phillips lifted the device higher. ‘It’s where we store our crime-scene data these days – some of it, at least. I can’t seem to get a bloody connection.’
Not having a clue what she was talking about, Carlyle watched as a couple of paramedics appeared from outside and set up a portable trolley. On Phillips’s nod, they lifted the corpse on to the trolley and wheeled it out to a waiting ambulance.
Giving up on the Cloud, Phillips let the tablet fall to her side. ‘I’ve been here since four this morning,’ she yawned.
‘Bummer. What happened?’
‘Guy comes in to get some money. Doesn’t realize that a dosser is sleeping in the lobby. Dosser wakes up. Whacks man over the head for his cash. Hits him a bit too hard. Man smacks head against side of cash machine as he goes down. Smashes his skull and has a heart attack. Dosser goes back to sleep until police turn up some time later.’
‘Sounds like my kind of case, nice and simple.’
‘When they found him, he had the bloke’s money and his ATM card in his pocket.’
‘Even better.’
‘Still the same amount of paperwork though.’ Phillips gestured towards the congealed blood that had pooled on the floor. ‘Poor bloke was from Belgium.’
‘The tramp? Or the tourist?’
‘The tourist. The tramp is from Osterley, apparently.’
‘A well-known den of thieves,’ Carlyle observed. ‘Then again, you shouldn’t really be wandering around here in the middle of the night.’ He recalled the tagline for a recent movie: same streets, different city.
‘No, I suppose not.’ Phillips dropped the iPad into a holdall near her feet. ‘Have you had breakfast?’
Still feeling rather over-full, Carlyle patted his belly. ‘Yep, afraid so.’
‘Well, I’m starving.’ Picking up the bag, Phillips marched towards the door. ‘Come on. You can watch me eat.’
Resisting the temptation to scoff a second breakfast, Carlyle daintily sipped on a peppermint tea as he watched Phillips polish off some mango slices from a small plastic pot. They were sitting in an insanely busy branch of an ubiquitous café chain, just off Piccadilly. Behind the tills, a group of eight staff expertly relieved customers of their money, while a couple of baristas behind them frantically worked massive coffee machines to deliver the orders of an ever-lengthening line of jumpy, caffeine-deprived customers. Carlyle grinned at the sight of one man, a youngish guy in a grey pinstripe suit, hopping from foot to foot as he waited impatiently for his beverage, desperate to be on his way. Surely, he thought, this place should have more people making coffee and fewer people taking money.
If only.
Phillips popped the last piece of fruit into her mouth and washed it down with a mouthful of her Americano. ‘So,’ she said brightly, dabbing the corners of her mouth with a paper napkin, ‘what can I do for you?’
Carlyle shot her a look of mock hurt. ‘Why does everyone think I only make an appearance when I want something?’
‘Because,’ she grinned, ‘you only make an appearance when you want something.’
‘Fair enough.’ They had known each other long enough; he didn’t feel that he had to mess about. ‘Tell me about Naomi Taylor.’
Phillips’s face fell. ‘She gave you a call, did she?’
‘Yeah.’ Carlyle’s foot was still playing up; he gingerly lifted it on to an empty chair next to him. ‘I met with her yesterday.’
‘Sorry
if I dropped you in it.’
‘No, no,’ the inspector replied quickly. ‘I vaguely remember her old man, but I never really worked with him.’
‘I knew Marvin from when he was at Holborn,’ Phillips explained. ‘I was going out with a lawyer at the time – the four of us went out together a few times.’
Carlyle had long since given up trying to keep abreast of Phillips’s private life. Glamorous and single, she always seemed to be either just going into a relationship or coming out of one. As a bloke who hadn’t had to worry about the dating game for more than thirty years, he found it stressful even thinking about such things.
‘You know what it’s like,’ Phillips continued. ‘You socialize quite a lot over a relatively short period and then something happens and you don’t see them for a while. Of course, when Marvin left to set up his own business, I don’t think that he and Naomi had the time or the money to go out very much.’
‘No.’
‘And then their daughter was born. I don’t think I’d seen them for two or three years before Naomi called.’ She shook her head. ‘I’d been away with Danny in Istanbul for a few days.’
Danny?
‘And I hadn’t even realized that it was Marvin who . . . well, you know.’
‘Yes,’ said Carlyle, surprised. It was the first time he’d ever seen Phillips show any squeamishness around death.
Phillips cradled her coffee cup in both hands. ‘They say he was a terrible mess. Why would anyone do that to him?’
‘I don’t know,’ Carlyle admitted. A sour-looking woman with a pretzel in one hand and a coffee in the other appeared in front of him and gestured at the spare seat. Reluctantly, the inspector removed his sore foot. With a disgusted huff, the woman sat down. Edging away from her, the inspector turned back to Phillips.
‘Naomi is lovely,’ Phillips said. ‘She needs some help.’
Carlyle nodded. ‘I’m gonna see what I can do.’ Which is probably nothing.
‘Thanks.’
‘I just wanted to ask—’
A phone started ringing and the pathologist reached into her pocket. ‘One second.’ She answered, ‘Phillips. Yes?’