Acts of Violence (Inspector Carlyle)

by James Craig

  Elmhirst gave him a funny look.

  ‘I know, I know. I’m a total dinosaur in so many ways. But look at it like this: Gregori, or Popp, whatever his name is, he could have killed Umar and me back at that farmhouse if he had wanted to. He has no intention of killing a cop.’

  ‘Another assumption.’

  ‘Another reasonable assumption.’

  Clearly not convinced, Elmhirst pondered different scenarios. ‘Even if that’s right, he could always shoot Kortmann . . . or himself.’

  ‘He won’t shoot Kortmann,’ Carlyle insisted. ‘He needs him – or at least, he thinks he does. He’s trying to find his mum, remember?’

  ‘I just hope that you’re right.’

  ‘I’m always right,’ Carlyle chuckled. ‘That’s how I made it to Inspector.’

  The sergeant failed to look impressed. ‘What if he shoots himself though?’

  ‘That’s not going to help him find his mum, is it?’

  ‘No, but he could do something stupid.’

  ‘Just for a change.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘Well,’ the inspector sniffed, ‘if he does do something stupid, he won’t get any complaints from me.’

  Elmhirst gave a despairing sigh. ‘Just be careful.’

  ‘I’m always careful.’

  As he stepped across the muddy entrance, Carlyle’s foot brushed against something metallic. Looking down, he saw that it was a length of half-inch pipe. Picking it up, he weighed it in his hand. It felt good. What was the saying? Speak softly and carry a big stick. That seemed as good a plan as any. Waving at Elmhirst with the pipe, he continued on his way.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  After five minutes of walking at a steady pace, Carlyle had completely lost his bearings. All of the plots on the abandoned development looked the same – square boxes squashed together, with barely enough space in between them to park a small family saloon. The only apparent difference was how far work had progressed on each unit. By the time the whole endeavour had come to a grinding halt, some were little more than a set of foundations, while others were almost a complete shell, with walls on both the ground and first floors. One or two even had the beginnings of a roof, a wooden skeleton waiting for tiles that would never be laid.

  The main road through the estate went in a circle, with groups of eight or ten houses set on a series of cul-de-sacs, spokes leading off from the hub. In the centre of the development was a long, featureless building, three storeys high. Those must be the flats, Carlyle presumed. Stopping for a moment, to try and better get his bearings, he looked around. The place was completely dark, with no signs of activity. A gust of wind whistled down the road, making him shiver. Regardless of the time of year, it was cold at night. Moreover, the inspector was dressed for the city, rather than the countryside. His jacket was thin and offered little warmth.

  Cursing to himself, Carlyle continued his slog round the site. After a couple of minutes largely spent trying not to fall into a series of large potholes, he caught a glimpse of a weak gleam coming from the ground floor of a property around 100 yards to his right.

  An owl hooted in the darkness and he almost jumped out of his skin.

  ‘Get a grip, you idiot.’ After waiting for his heart rate to return to normal, he glanced at his watch. He had already been creeping round this place for more than half an hour. ‘Get on with it,’ he mumbled to himself, tightly gripping the salvaged length of pipe. ‘You don’t want Gapper to have to rescue you again.’

  Cautiously approaching his target, the inspector saw that the light was coming from an empty window on the ground floor, gently illuminating the breezeblocks that formed the unfinished interior wall. As with its neighbours, the front of the property consisted of an area of deeply churned-up mud. Tiptoeing across this no man’s land, the inspector crouched below the empty window, listening for any evidence of human activity inside.

  The owl hooted again.

  Shut it.

  Holding his breath, he tried to block out extraneous distractions. A few moments later, proof of life from inside the house came in the unmistakable form of a loud, extended fart. This was followed by a second, much shorter expulsion of wind.

  The inspector resumed breathing, counted to ten and then slowly edged to the side of the window, before taking a peek inside.

  Well, bugger me. Although it pained him to admit it, it looked as if the Commander had been right. Lying under a dirty blanket on the concrete floor, surrounded by an array of empty pizza boxes and other fast-food packaging, Werner Kortmann had his back to the window. Despite the chain around his ankle, he semed to be sleeping soundly. There was no sign of Popp.

  Moving away from the window, Carlyle cautiously slunk around to the doorway and stepped inside. ‘Hey. It’s the police.’ Lifting a foot an inch off the ground, he prodded Kortmann with his toe.

  ‘Geh zum Teufel.’ Kortmann brushed away the inspector’s boot and sat bolt upright. ‘Wer bist du?’

  ‘The po-lice,’ Carlyle repeated, waiting for the guy to come to, recognize him and switch into his better-than-native English.

  Kortmann obliged on all three fronts almost immediately. ‘Well, get me out of here,’ he snapped, yanking at his chain.

  ‘Erm, yes.’ Carlyle gave the chain a few desultory thwacks with the length of pipe he had discovered at the entrance to the site.

  Kortmann grimaced at the sudden, discordant noise. ‘That’s not going to do it,’ he shouted, ‘is it?’

  ‘No, I suppose not.’ The inspector tossed the pipe into the corner of the room and looked around in the vain hope of finding a handy axe, or a pair of bolt cutters, nearby.

  ‘Hurry up.’

  Carlyle swiftly concluded that his search was not going to glean so much as a paper clip. Perhaps Gapper might have something handy in the boot of the Astra. Digging out his mobile, he was about to call the driver when he remembered he was in the middle of nowhere, with no signal. Scratching his head, he smiled weakly. ‘I’m afraid this might take a little while.’

  ‘Schwachkopf.’

  From Kortmann’s angry stare, Carlyle didn’t feel the need to ask for a translation. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll get it sorted.’

  The German said nothing. Distracted by a noise from the darkness, he turned his attention to a point somewhere behind the inspector’s head.

  ‘Now, now,’ said an amused voice from the doorway. Footsteps tapped across the concrete. ‘That’s no way to speak to the good inspector.’

  The inspector looked longingly in the direction of his discarded weapon. ‘Marcus Popp, I presume.’

  ‘Good, good. Very good.’

  Werner Kortmann’s angry gaze flashed from the policeman to the kidnapper and back again. It was hard to determine which of the two wretched specimens standing in front of him the old man found the more annoying. ‘Popp?’ he thundered. ‘Is that this criminal’s real name?’

  Carlyle made a face. ‘It’s kind of complicated.’

  ‘Everything’s complicated to you, isn’t it, Mr Policeman?’ Taking a step away from the inspector, Popp’s eyes gleamed with a demented amusement. In the half-light, he looked like some kind of drugged-up Manga hoodlum. ‘Maybe you should take a rest. Sit down.’

  Reluctantly, Carlyle did as he was told, parking his backside a couple of feet from Kortmann.

  Popp waved the gun at his two captives. ‘Closer.’ As Carlyle shuffled towards the grumpy businessman, Popp fumbled in his pocket, coming up with a short length of chain – like the kind of thing you might use to attach a bicycle to a lamppost – and a padlock. ‘Here,’ he tossed the chain towards the inspector. ‘Tie yourself up, like Werner there.’

  Catching the padlock in front of his face, the inspector did as he was told, tying the chain around his ankle and then running it carefully through the hook on the floor. ‘What’s the plan then, Marcus?’

  ‘You’ll see. It will be a surprise.’

  Great, Carlyle thought glo
omily, I love surprises. His analysis of Popp as a harmless nutter was now looking rather cavalier. Even the intervention of the local plod would have been welcome at this point. Some robust ribbing at the hands of a provincial flatfoot would be a price worth paying if they could get him out of this alive.

  ‘Hurry up.’

  ‘OK, OK.’ Carlyle fiddled ineffectually with the chain. ‘Locks were never really my strong point.’ Simpson would have a fit when she heard about this, no matter that this whole fiasco had been her bloody idea in the first place. He knew that everything would get twisted, so that it ended up as his fault.

  Feeling rather sorry for himself, he stared out into the darkness, wondering if Elmhirst had already set off on her mission to find Gapper. If nothing else, Carlyle was confident that he could rely on the up-and-coming young sergeant to follow his instructions. Whether those instructions would prove enough to save him, however, was another matter entirely.

  ‘That’s one of the things I was wondering about,’ Popp chuckled. ‘What exactly is your strong point, Inspector?’

  You’ll find out when I’m giving you a good hiding, you little wanker. Leaving the chain as loose as possible, he snapped the padlock shut and tossed the key back to his captor, deliberately sending it high and wide so that it flew past Popp’s right shoulder. The gunman made a half-hearted attempt to catch it, but in the event seemed happy enough to let it bounce off the concrete, landing somewhere in the shadows.

  Stepping forward, Popp inspected the chain from a safe distance. ‘OK,’ he said finally. ‘You two sit tight, I won’t be long.’

  Watching Popp disappear through the doorway, Carlyle shifted on the concrete. His left buttock ached and the pain in his foot had returned. After a few moments of ineffectually rattling his chain, he lay down flat.

  ‘It’s no good,’ Kortmann said bossily. ‘You’re not going to get comfortable.’

  ‘Thanks for pointing that out.’

  ‘I’ve been here for the last two days.’ Kortmann scooped up his blanket and wrapped it tightly around his shoulders. ‘I feel as if I’ve been run over by a truck’

  Carlyle looked over at the dishevelled figure. ‘You’ve been taken for a ride here, haven’t you?’

  Kortmann frowned. ‘Taken for a ride?’

  ‘Conned.’ He gestured towards the darkness. ‘This guy Popp has taken you for a right fool.’

  ‘You don’t say,’ Kortmann responded drily, apparently no longer particularly interested in his captor’s true identity. ‘Thank God you managed to see through him and rescue me from this rather unfortunate situation.’

  ‘Is that an attempt at irony?’ Sticking his hands behind his head, Carlyle stared up at the rusting metal rods sticking out of the ceiling. ‘It’s hardly my fault you ended up in this mess, is it?’

  For several moments, they glared at each other.

  Finally, the inspector asked: ‘How did you end up on this wild-goose chase?’

  Hawking up a gob of phlegm, Kortmann energetically spat it across the room into the gloom. Most of his anger seemed to go with it. When he spoke again, his tone was quieter, more reflective. ‘We have been looking for Sylvia Tosches for decades. Well, I say “we” but I really mean “I”. The rest of the family gave up long ago. After a few years, they wanted to forget all about what happened to Uli.’

  ‘So why did you keep going?’

  Kortmann allowed himself a grim chuckle. ‘You know, that is the funny thing. I have been sitting here asking myself that very question.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And I can’t really remember.’ Extending his leg, he listlessly pawed at the concrete with his boot. ‘After all these years, it’s just become a habit, I suppose.’ He turned and looked at Carlyle. ‘I don’t expect you found her, did you?’

  ‘Barbara Hutton? Er, no. She hasn’t turned up yet. When she does though, how do you expect to prove if she is Tosches or not?’ For a moment, he thought about his own question. ‘Assuming that she won’t confess, or voluntarily let us take a DNA sample.’

  Kortmann simply grunted and stared off into space.

  ‘God knows, if it was me, I wouldn’t.’

  Still the old man said nothing.

  ‘Glad we sorted that out,’ Carlyle mumbled. Closing his eyes, he tried to imagine he was somewhere – anywhere – other than lying on a slab of cold concrete in the middle of a field. ‘Now I can get back to my beauty sleep.’

  Running, running, running. He was being chased down a dimly lit city street. Who was chasing him? All he knew was that he couldn’t stop or something terrible would happen. Slowly, he became aware of shouting in the distance. A moment later, someone kicked his leg. Carlyle tried to shuffle away from his assailant – but all he got for his trouble was another kick, harder this time.

  ‘Hey,’ Kortmann grunted, ‘policeman, wake up.’

  ‘Fuck off,’ Carlyle scowled. ‘I was asleep.’

  Waving away his protests, the German pointed towards the window. ‘Listen . . .’

  Shaking himself awake, the inspector realized that the voices were real, albeit indistinct as they ebbed and flowed on the wind. The rapid succession of gunshots that followed – one, two, three – were clear enough, however. In the subsequent silence, he glanced at Kortmann, who looked every inch a man who was resigned to his fate, before struggling to his feet. Still chained to the floor, he could make it almost to the doorway. Hands on hips, he stood and waited.

  Behind him, Kortmann also pulled himself up on his feet. ‘I hope that the little shit only has one bullet left,’ he snorted, ‘and that he shoots you with it.’

  Just as long as he leaves you here to endure a slow, painful, lonely death, the inspector thought. A shadow appeared out of the darkness. He felt his heart get ready for take-off as the shadow moved towards them.

  This is it.

  ‘Inspector?’

  Blinking, he slowly realized that the figure in front of him was not the psychotic Popp but, rather, the amused Elmhirst.

  ‘What happened to you?’ the sergeant grinned.

  Carlyle simply stared at the semi-automatic hanging from her left hand.

  ‘Just because you haven’t been on the firearms course,’ she explained, ‘doesn’t mean I haven’t. I came third in my year in Hendon when it came to shooting.’

  ‘Good for you,’ the inspector responded tersely. Lifting his leg, he gave his chain a little jangle and pointed towards the corner of the room with his foot. ‘Now, just get me the fucking key for this thing.’

  THIRTY-SIX

  Carlyle gazed at the framed film poster on the kitchen wall as he tentatively sipped his oily coffee. Under the headline Leisure Rules a youthful Matthew Broderick grinned back at him. The inspector vaguely remembered seeing the movie, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, decades earlier; an eighties comedy about a slacker school kid bunking off.

  Quite appropriate for our Mr Umar Sligo, he thought.

  Moments later, the sergeant himself shuffled through the doorway, pulling a Green Day T-shirt over his head.

  ‘Good morning,’ said Carlyle cheerily.

  ‘I hear that things went tits up again with that crazy German,’ Umar yawned. ‘Again.’ Reaching for the kettle, he dumped some hot water into a mug. Adding a heaped teaspoon of Nescafé, he gave it a stir. ‘Where’s Christina?’

  ‘She took Ella to the park.’

  ‘Fair enough. This place is very small if we’re all here all the time.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘One and a half bedrooms, £825 a month.’ He shook his head. ‘Shocking.’

  The inspector mumbled something sympathetic.

  ‘It’s a long way from the station. Takes me more than an hour to get in, most days.’

  ‘It took me something like that to get here.’ Carlyle suddenly felt vaguely guilty about his own daily ten-minute walk to work.

  ‘So, why are you here, boss?’ Umar asked suddenly.

  Carlyle shifted uneasily in
his seat. It was a good question, to which he had no particular answer. ‘Oh, you know. I just wanted to see how you were getting on.’

  ‘I’m fine. It’s you who’s been pushing your luck. Again.’

  ‘Hardly.’

  ‘Don’t you think he would have killed you?’

  ‘Marcus Popp? Nah.’

  ‘He might have done.’

  ‘Not worth speculating about, really.’

  ‘I suppose not.’ There was a lull in the conversation before Umar said: ‘This time it was Amelia Elmhirst who saved your bacon.’

  ‘Not really,’ said Carlyle tartly, irked that the latest gossip had made it all the way from WC2 to SE12 so speedily.

  Umar started to pick his nose, then remembered his manners. ‘At least she didn’t get shot,’ he observed, wiping a finger on his T-shirt.

  ‘How is the leg?’

  Resting his backside against the sink, Umar placed his mug on the draining board and folded his arms. ‘I’ll make a full recovery.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘It’s basically fine now, to be honest.’ Recovering his mug, Umar took a slurp of his coffee. ‘But there’s no real need to hurry back, is there?’

  Carlyle imagined Ferris Bueller giving them a cheeky wink. ‘No, I suppose not.’

  Umar gestured towards the letter lying on the kitchen table, the MPS logo at the top. ‘Did you know about that?’

  Having already seen the disciplinary hearing notice, Carlyle didn’t bother trying to lie. ‘Simpson mentioned it.’

  Accepting this, Umar nodded. Then he asked: ‘Want some toast?’

  ‘Nah, I’m good, thanks.’

  Reaching over to the bread bin, the sergeant removed a couple of slices of white bread, dropped them into the toaster and switched it on. ‘It was only ever supposed to be a bit of fun.’ Opening the fridge door, he took out the remains of a block of salted butter and a jar of marmalade. ‘It’s what people do these days; not a big deal.’