by James Craig
‘Isn’t that just the modern world in microcosm?’ Carlyle said.
‘You are absolutely right,’ Orb laughed. ‘Anyway,’ he took his hands from the rail and spread his arms wide, ‘you didn’t come here to listen to me being undiplomatic, Inspector. I am sure that you will ignore my indiscretion.’
Carlyle nodded. ‘Of course.’
‘The end of my career is looming,’ Orb said solemnly. ‘I don’t have to worry so much about my every utterance, but even so . . .’
‘I have no interest in causing you any embarrassment, sir,’ Carlyle said. ‘After all, that is not what I was seeking out your opinion on.’
‘Good,’ the Ambassador nodded. ‘Thank you. So . . . what is it that you want to talk about?’
‘Well,’ Carlyle looked at his shoes, which needed a polish, ‘I am conducting an investigation, which maybe has a Chilean angle, and I thought that you might be able to help me out with some advice.’
The Ambassador listened intently as Carlyle explained the Mills case, as well as the story of William Pettigrew and the belated attempt to bring his killers to justice. After the inspector had finished, he pondered for a while.
‘It sounds as if you have already done a good job, Inspector,’ Orb said eventually. ‘What help do you need from me?’
‘I was wondering whether there could be any credibility in Henry Mills’s claims about his wife having had enemies in Chile.’
‘We all have enemies.’
‘Enemies who might want her dead,’ Carlyle clarified.
Orb knitted his eyebrows, making him look older. ‘But I thought that the matter had been closed. You have charged the husband?’
‘Yes,’ he said, omitting to mention that the suspect was no longer on this earth.
Orb looked at him carefully. ‘Don’t you believe that he did it?’
Carlyle wasn’t going to share his personal concerns about the investigation with a man he had only just met. ‘I am just tying up some loose ends,’ he said, as casually as possible. ‘This is a very serious matter and I would not want a cynical defence lawyer to suggest that we had been less than thorough.’
‘Of course. Of course.’ Hand on chin, Orb struck a thoughtful pose. ‘I don’t know the particular individuals, obviously, but it is true that the particular chapter in our history to which you refer has not yet been fully closed. Plenty of people disappeared at that time, not just priests. Many of them have still not been found.’ He looked at Carlyle. ‘Can you imagine the anguish that must cause their families?’
Carlyle said nothing. That kind of pain, he didn’t want to imagine.
‘If, as you say,’ Orb continued, ‘there is a case like this coming to court back home, old wounds may well have been reopened. How could it be otherwise? We Chileans are only human, after all. It was a very difficult time.’
‘I understand.’
‘Look at the passions the Civil War in Spain still arouses, for example. That occurred a lot earlier than our . . . situation. But so long as there are generations still alive who were touched directly, it will always remain a very emotive subject.’
‘Emotive enough for people to kill?’ Carlyle asked.
‘That is a very difficult question to answer.’ The Ambassador ran a hand through his hair. ‘Theoretically, yes. But, in my experience, theory and practice can often be far removed from each other. It is indeed possible, but that is a long way from saying people would take the law into their own hands in such a way – especially so far from home. Times are different now, but back then . . .’ Orb’s voice trailed off as he scanned the river, maybe looking for a distraction. Finding none, he turned back to Carlyle. ‘Well, back then I would not have been so happy about helping a policeman with his enquiries.’
‘People could kill and get away with it?’ Carlyle asked.
‘Yes, they could. People like you.’
Carlyle smiled to show that he hadn’t taken offence. ‘I’m sure that you are right, but what about people like you?’
‘People like me?’ Orb frowned. ‘Oh, people like me never have to get our hands dirty.’
‘So you got through it all unscathed?’
‘Of course. It was a terrible time, but life goes on. You go to work, you have dinner parties at home, you take your children to the zoo; the world doesn’t stop turning because some people are being murdered in a football stadium a few blocks down the road. Even if you know about it, even if you can hear the shots, what can you do? Nothing. So you get on with your life. Hard to imagine now, but that was the case.’
‘It’s not that hard to imagine,’ Carlyle remarked.
‘What?’ Orb raised an eyebrow. ‘Here in England? One of the most civilised countries in the world? And you, a man who has never known war or serious civil unrest?’
‘I know,’ Carlyle said. ‘I am very lucky. But at least I know how lucky I am. I also know how quickly it can all fall apart. The veneer of civilised society is thin. Under the right circumstances – the wrong circumstances – what happened in Chile, what happened to William Pettigrew, can happen to anyone.’
‘Indeed,’ the Ambassador nodded.
The light was going. It was time for Carlyle to ask for what he really wanted. ‘Do you have a list of the people who were invited here tonight?’
‘Of course. My office was responsible for the invitations.’
‘Can I have a copy?’
‘Absolutely,’ the Ambassador said. ‘I will have it sent to you in the morning.’
‘Thank you.’ A thought suddenly struck Carlyle as he handed over a business card with his email address and fax number on it. ‘What were you doing back then?’
‘Me?’ A look of surprise spread across Orb’s face. ‘In seventy-three?’
‘Yes.’
The old man raised his gaze to the darkening sky. ‘Back in 1973, I was what you might call a rising star in the Christian Democratic Party. I taught Economics at the Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago. My specialism was agrarian reform.’ He sighed. ‘It’s a long time ago now.’
The man did not seem embarrassed about discussing his past, so Carlyle kept going. ‘Did you support Pinochet?’ he asked.
Orb shrugged. ‘It was not a question of being for or against him, Inspector. It happened. I made sure my family came through relatively unscathed.’
‘You’re a survivor.’
‘I’ve had a long career,’ Orb said to that. ‘Now I work for a Socialist president, who is also a woman. You never know how things will turn out, so it is better not to nail your colours too firmly to the mast.’ He touched Carlyle gently on the arm. ‘I’m sure you already know that well.’
‘Yes,’ said Carlyle, who had spent his whole life pointlessly nailing colours to masts, usually on ships that were already sinking. ‘I suppose that’s right.’
‘Now, if you’d excuse me,’ Orb held out his hand, ‘I must be going. I’m hosting a dinner with your multi-tasking Mayor.’ He grinned. ‘I will give him your best wishes, since I get the impression that you are a big supporter of his.’
NINETEEN
‘Take a look – this is really funny,’ said Dominic Silver.
Carlyle grunted non-committingly as he sucked down on a latte that was way too cold for his liking. He always asked for it ‘extra hot’ and the Brazilian/Indian/Ukrainian/whatever boy/girl behind the counter would nod happily and then serve him up something that was barely lukewarm. It drove him mad. Often he would take it back and complain; get them to make it again. One time he caused such a fuss that the manager followed him out into the street and threatened him with a good kicking. It was a great example of traditional British customer service at its finest. Carlyle would have happily arrested him on the spot if he hadn’t been late for a court appearance,
This morning, however, he refused to get angst-ridden about his coffee. Rather, he just wanted to get as much caffeine as possible into his system as quickly as possible, cold or not, to try and compensat
e for the fact that he wasn’t still tucked up in bed. Twenty yards away, Alice was squealing in delight as a couple of young boys chased her round a tree. When they caught her, she squealed even more. Carlyle felt a smile spreading across his face as he watched her. Whatever grumpiness he felt about standing here in the middle of Regent’s Park at ten o’clock on a Sunday morning was offset more than a hundredfold by his pleasure in witnessing his daughter’s uncomplicated delight in a simple game of tag on a fresh summer morning, when the world seemed full of promise. Not for the first time, he wondered how much she was missing out on, being an only child. Not that there was much they could do about that now.
The two boys, Tom and Oliver Silver, were a year older and younger respectively than Alice. They were the youngest of five children belonging to Dominic Silver and Eva Hollander. The fact that Dominic and Eva had managed to produce five kids only added to Carlyle’s worry about Alice not having any siblings. Helen, practical as always, suggested that they should just be grateful for those ready-made playmates.
His wife had arranged this particular play-date with Eva earlier in the week, but Carlyle had only been told about it the night before – so that he couldn’t come up with an excuse for not going along. He wondered if the same had happened to Dominic. People in Dominic’s line of work weren’t known for their early morning starts, but Dominic was a big family man, so Carlyle expected that he was similarly philosophical about being here. The women were both probably still enjoying a lie-in, but each man recognised that you just had to accept being outmanoeuvred by your other half more often than not.
Happy to let the kids run off as much energy as possible, the two men took up residence on a bench and contemplated the view in comfortable silence, looking west across the playing-fields towards the London Central Mosque. They knew each other well enough not to worry about small talk. In fact, their relationship went all the way back to their Metropolitan Police training at Hendon College in the early 1980s.
Dominic was a genuine, 100 per cent cockney. He came from East London and was a West Ham fan. Carlyle came from West London and supported Fulham. Straight out of college, they had worked the bitter Miners’ Strike together. They had spent much of the time speeding their tits off on the picket line together, courtesy of Dominic’s ready supply of amphetamines. They had both been outsiders, piss-takers, awkward-question-askers. They were chippy bastards – but solid chippy bastards always willing to do more than their share of the dirty work, and more than happy to do extra overtime. There was enough common ground for them to build a solid friendship during the fourteen-hour shifts far from home.
Once the strike was over, Dom didn’t take to the relatively sedate life of a policeman back on the beat. There was an entrepreneurial spirit gnawing away inside him, and in the end he had just too much get-up-and-go for the Force to satisfy him. Within a year of the strike ending, he left the Metropolitan Police and went into business for himself. Once, in the early days, he had asked Carlyle to join him. But then, as now, Carlyle couldn’t see himself working for a drug dealer. Even if he was rather ambivalent about what Dominic did for a living, he certainly didn’t want to get involved.
Over the following years, their paths had crossed many times since, sometimes by accident, sometimes by one seeking the other out. That was not so surprising: they had a lot of mutual interests, given what Dominic Silver did for a living. Almost three decades later, while Carlyle was merely an undistinguished career cop, Dominic Silver had become something of a legend among certain sections of the Metropolitan police force. The son of a policeman, the nephew of a policeman, he was the archetypal good boy turned bad, but with an honesty and a style that gleaned a little goodwill from even the most hard-nosed copper. Even now there was still a part of Dom that remained ‘one of us’ in the eyes of many police officers of a certain age.
However, there was also a large part of Dominic Silver that had left his life in uniform a very long way behind indeed. Now at his professional peak, Silver was maybe in the third or fourth tier of drug dealers across the whole of London. This was not a bad place to be, reasonably comfortable, avoiding the problems facing those higher up the ladder as well as those below him. His operation was turning over maybe low millions each year, with clients including a swathe of minor celebrities and some of the newer entries in Who’s Who. He even had a couple of corporate clients who still bought on account, despite the recession.
Dominic had built up his business slowly, one step at a time, always avoiding conflicts and solving problems without resorting to violence, wherever possible. As the years turned into decades, his reputation grew. In a business where to survive three years was rare, to have survived three decades was a major miracle. He had never been arrested, never mind convicted, of any offence. He was not some nut job who’d let success and so-called ‘easy’ money go to his head. Nor did he dabble in all the nasty related shit that was associated with his business, notably prostitution, modern-day slavery and people-trafficking.
In short, he was not your average criminal.
At the heart of this success was a very pragmatic attitude to money. Dominic never spelled it out, but Carlyle was vaguely aware that he handed over a very high proportion of his take to his key suppliers, in exchange for protection. ‘I’m kind of freelance, kind of not,’ he once told Carlyle, ‘kind of independent, kind of not. Basically, they outsource this part of their operation to me. It’s like anything else – if I’m quicker, cheaper and less hassle, I get the job.’
Pragmatic and self-aware himself, Carlyle recognised that they had a lot in common. Indeed, there were many things about Dominic Silver that the inspector genuinely liked. Over the years, Dominic had shed his cheeky-chappy demeanour and become more serious. He had obtained a degree in Business and Management from Queen Mary College, and with his greying shoulder-length hair and rimless spectacles, he looked like a writer or an academic or maybe the keyboard player in some soft rock outfit like Genesis. For someone with a net worth that was probably heading towards fifty million, Dom enjoyed a very down-to-earth lifestyle. He wasn’t bling and kept an extremely low profile. He didn’t do drugs. He didn’t smoke, and only took the occasional drink. He went to the gym regularly and kept himself in shape – although he was almost six feet tall, he couldn’t weigh much more than seventy kilos.
In short, their relationship was both stable and cordial. It wasn’t complicated, but it wasn’t very clear either. Neither of them would necessarily have wanted to create it if it didn’t already exist, but they could both see its advantages as well as its drawbacks. Of course, Carlyle could never go after him, even if he wanted to: he would be compromised by the favours that Dominic had done for him in the past. But he was confident that he was not alone in that regard; for years, the rumour was that Silver had some fairly serious protection even further up the food chain, both inside the Met and outside. He also had a close-knit inner circle of advisers which Carlyle would join on an ad hoc basis, as part of the unspoken quid pro quo for Dominic’s help whenever he needed it.
Carlyle felt very ambivalent about their relationship. If someone chose to use it against him, he knew what it could do to his career and to his family. That did cause him concern, but the reality was that it was too late to do anything about it now.
Carlyle watched Dominic fiddle with his phone. Finally finding the clip he wanted, he hit the play button. ‘There’s a lot of crap at the beginning, but the party piece is worth waiting for.’
‘Mm.’ Dominic offered him the phone. ‘Go on, take a look.’
Taking the handset, Carlyle watched Alice race off through the middle of someone’s football game, followed by Tom and Oliver. He turned and eyed the video jerking across the mobile’s tiny screen, without focusing on it. In his book, phones were meant for voice calls. Since when did everyone suddenly need to make their own videos? He glanced back at the kids to make sure that they were not straying too far. ‘What’s that?’ he asked.
‘
It’s a guy called Jerome Sullivan.’
‘Who’s he?’
‘He is – was – in the same business as me. Not really a competitor, but I’d met him a couple of times.’
‘What happened to him?’ Carlyle asked, wary now that they had moved on to business.
‘He shot himself in the head,’ said Dominic, amused.
‘What?’ Carlyle scrutinised the handset. ‘He filmed himself committing suicide? I didn’t think that people in your line of work tended to suffer from depression.’
‘Not exactly,’ Dominic grinned. ‘He was showing off to a mate and didn’t realise there was a round still in the breech.’
Carlyle watched Jerome put the gun to his head. ‘Darwinism in action.’
‘That isn’t what killed him, though,’ said Dominic cheerily. ‘The bullet kind of bounced off his skull and missed his brain.’
‘Which, presumably,’ Carlyle mused, ‘was tiny.’
‘Yeah.’ Dominic laughed. ‘What actually killed him was the hundred-foot fall off the top of his building.’
‘What an outstanding effort,’ Carlyle said, then: ‘How did you come by the video?’
‘Lots of people have it now,’ said Dominic. ‘Jerome’s acquaintances were unusually co-operative with the police. No one wanted to be accused of killing him.’
‘That’s understandable.’ When the video clip ended, Carlyle idly hit the play button and watched the final moments of Jerome Sullivan unfold again from the beginning. If you didn’t know what had happened, you wouldn’t have been able to say if the video was real or fake.
‘They’ll be wanting something to drink,’ Dominic said suddenly, nodding at the kids, who were running back towards them.
‘Yes,’ Carlyle agreed. But that thought was quickly pushed aside as something else popped into his mind. He halted the Sullivan video once again and went back to the start. Letting it run for about five or six seconds, he paused at the point where one of the other men on the roof stuck his hands in the air in mock surrender. Squinting, he brought the phone closer to his face, until it was only about four inches from his nose. The quality of the image was poor, but, if you knew who you were looking at, you could make out the man’s face.