Time of Death

by James Craig

  ‘No?’ If I’d just lost a girlfriend like Rosanna Snowdon, Carlyle thought, grief-stricken wouldn’t be the half of it.

  ‘No,’ Singleton laughed. ‘It may have something to do with a story in the tabloids yesterday about him groping a couple of groupies in a nightclub while watching a dwarf-throwing competition.’

  ‘People deal with bereavement in different ways,’ Carlyle reflected. ‘Anyway, thanks for the call.’

  ‘No problem.’

  Carlyle studied the Simpson story once again, without finding out anything new. When he had finished, he looked at the clock behind the counter which told him that it was already almost four. No one had entered the café in the last twenty minutes and now Marcello was making a show of getting ready to close up. It was time for the inspector to take the hint and let the man get home.

  After paying for his lunch, he decided to go back into Winter Garden House. Alice would be home from school soon. It would be nice to be there to meet her and find out how her day had been. Carlyle’s own day was pretty much a write-off. A lot had happened but he’d achieved nothing. Sometimes you just had to quit while you were behind. Better now just to let things lie, then wait and see how they looked in the morning.

  Stepping out of the café, Carlyle almost walked straight into a couple strolling arm-in-arm along Macklin Street. ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled, keeping his eyes on the pavement.

  ‘Inspector!’

  Carlyle looked up to see Harry Ripley – Heart Attack Harry – with a homely looking woman who appeared to be in her early sixties. ‘Harry,’ he said, ‘how are you?’ He nodded at the woman.

  ‘This is Esther,’ the old soldier beamed, ‘Esther McGee. We met at a Residents’ Association coffee morning not long after . . . er, you and I last met.’

  Carlyle stuck out a hand. ‘Nice to meet you, Esther,’ he said. ‘I’m John Carlyle, one of Harry’s neighbours.’

  ‘Oh, yes, Inspector,’ the woman smiled. ‘Harry has told me all about you.’

  ‘I hope he’s looking after you well,’ Carlyle grinned, some of the couple’s obvious good spirits now rubbing off on him.

  ‘Oh, yes, he’s a right gentleman.’ A naughty twinkle appeared in Esther’s eye, as she pulled Harry close. ‘And still in such good shape,’ she winked, ‘if you know what I mean. There’s still plenty of lead in his pencil.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ Carlyle coughed, feeling himself blush. But that was nothing compared to Harry, who had gone a bright beetroot red. The old dog, Carlyle thought. But at least we don’t have to worry any more about him trying to top himself. Hoorah for the power of love, or whatever this is. ‘Nice to run into you both,’ he stammered. ‘I’m glad things are going so well, Harry.’

  It took the old man a few extra seconds to regain the power of speech. ‘Nice to see you, too, Inspector,’ he said finally. ‘And give my best to Helen and Alice.’

  ‘I will,’ Carlyle replied. ‘The pair of you must come round for tea some time soon.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Esther agreed, ‘that would be lovely.’

  ‘There you are, Harry,’ Carlyle smiled. ‘Speak to Helen and she can let you know when would be a good time.’ With that, he scuttled across the road and quickly retreated inside Winter Garden House.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Carole Simpson sat morosely at her kitchen table in Highgate, holding a very large glass of Langoa Barton 2001, while waiting for her £800-an-hour lawyer to call. When the call finally came, she pounced on the handset lying in front of her.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Carole, it’s John Lucas. I’ve just come out of Kentish Town police station.’

  ‘Yes.’ She could hear traffic noise in the background. Presumably the lawyer was walking along the road looking for a cab. Good luck to him, Simpson thought. Kentish Town was one of the neighbourhoods affected by the recent burst of rioting that had spread across the city before the Met had been able to react. Even at the best of times, it wasn’t the kind of place a man in a suit should be wandering around alone at night. She hoped that Lucas would find a taxi before he got mugged.

  As if to allay her fears, she heard Lucas suddenly bellow, ‘TAXI!’

  She waited as he clambered inside and told the driver to head for a restaurant in the West End, before restarting their conversation. ‘You were in the station a long time,’ she said, knowing what that must mean, waiting for the final confirmation of how completely her life had been demolished.

  ‘Yes,’ the lawyer said, sounding more chipper now that he was safely ensconced in the back of a black cab. ‘More than eight hours, in fact.’

  Simpson did the calculation in her head. Good God, she thought morosely, that’s more than six grand. She wondered how much money she had in her purse. £50? All of their bank accounts had been frozen. Would they find the money to pay the legal bills?

  ‘He’s confessed, Carole. He’s admitted to defrauding his investors.’

  ‘You told him to do that?’ she asked incredulously.

  ‘No, no,’ the lawyer said, shocked. ‘Of course not. I’m not even completely sure what exactly he’s confessing to, at this point. He was looking to wind the fund up, which isn’t really what you would expect of someone in these circumstances.’

  ‘What do you mean “in these circumstances”?’ she asked sharply.

  ‘Well . . .’ Lucas chose his words carefully, ‘in a so-called pyramid or ponzi scheme, things usually get to the point where the whole thing collapses as a result of too many people trying to take their money out at the same time. Here, it seems, Joshua was trying to give their money back to them – or at least part of it.’

  ‘Doesn’t that make him innocent?’ She used the word in the narrowest, legal sense.

  ‘By crystallising the losses,’ Lucas continued, not caring to answer the question, ‘he could have been hoping to share out the losses among everyone, rather than leaving the last ones left in holding the baby, and facing total financial ruin. If that was the thinking behind it, he would have known that there would still have been a big row about it, but the whole thing could have been represented as bad luck rather than actual fraud.’

  That made his damn letter even more stupid, Simpson decided.

  ‘At the moment,’ Lucan continued, ‘all this has to be argued over. We certainly don’t know what the authorities have as yet, in terms of developing a case. Given where we are at this stage, I told him to say nothing. He chose to ignore me.’

  ‘Not much use then, were you?’ Simpson said bitterly.

  The lawyer chose to ignore the barb. He’d been here many times before. One of his great strengths, so he liked to think, was an ability not to get wound up by clients who were, inevitably, having to operate under a great deal of pressure. ‘That is always the client’s prerogative,’ he said gently. ‘It may even be for the best, in the long run.’

  ‘How so?’ she asked, not prepared to believe it.

  ‘Well,’ the lawyer said, ‘this way we can avoid a trial and can negotiate a lesser sentence.’

  ‘So that’s it?’ she said, trying not to wail.

  ‘Goodness, no,’ said Lucas, trying to sound fatherly, even though he was at least five or six years younger than the woman struggling to hold it together on the other end of the line. ‘Not at all. Whatever Joshua has said, it is still very early days here.’

  ‘So what happens next?’

  ‘He’s going to be handed over to the City of London Police’s Economic Crime Directorate. In due course, they will probably look to charge him under the Fraud Act of 2006. I expect that they will claim he is guilty of either false representation, failing to disclose information and or abuse of position. However, there’s a long way to go yet. There are still various different possible outcomes, and we want to optimise the result for Joshua – and for you.’

  ‘Should I go and see him?’

  ‘Not yet,’ the lawyer said firmly. ‘Apart from anything else, they’ll probably move him about a bit, depending
on cell availability. You know what it’s like.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said icily, ‘I do.’

  ‘You don’t want to be rushing off on a wild-goose chase across London, especially if the media are on your tail.’

  ‘No, you’re right.’ Simpson thought about taking a slug of wine, and decided against it. Putting the glass on the table, she cut to the chase. ‘Will he go to jail?’

  Definitely, thought Lucas. And for quite some time. There had never been a worse time to be caught out as a financial crook. All it needed now was for the American authorities to get involved and the silly sod would have hit the jackpot. Those buggers would quite happily lock you up forever, with an extra hundred years on top, just to make them feel better. ‘That is a possibility,’ he replied cautiously, ‘maybe even a probability. But that is not what you should be worrying about now.’

  ‘No? What should I be worrying about?’

  ‘We need to have a meeting in the morning. In the meantime, you should start thinking about the practicalities.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Well, remember the good news here – the very good news – which is that there is no suggestion that you were party to any of this.’

  ‘I wasn’t.’ Simpson picked up the wine glass and this time drank about half of its contents.

  ‘No,’ the lawyer said hastily, ‘of course not. But you know what it’s like in these situations.’

  Simpson drained the remaining wine in the glass, and resisted the urge to smash it against the wall. ‘No, I don’t actually,’ she bristled, all her desire to be rational, to be reasonable, slipping away.

  ‘Well,’ Lucas summoned up extra reserves of empathy and patience, ‘as his wife, you will find that there will always be gossip and speculation. But you are not under investigation and there is not, as things stand, any . . . direct threat to your job. In the first instance, however, you need to consider various aspects of your relationship with your husband and in particular the distribution of your respective assets.’

  After a day of feeling numb, Simpson suddenly recoiled as if she had been slapped in the face. ‘Are you saying that I should divorce him?’

  ‘Not at all,’ Lucas said calmly. ‘It is not my place to give any such advice. And, remember, technically, I am Joshua’s lawyer, not yours. You should, of course, get your own representation. However, for the moment at least, there is a great commonality of interest here.’

  ‘For the moment?’

  Lucas gritted his teeth. He was getting increasingly irritated by Simpson’s verbal tic of echoing what he said. But, once again, he ploughed on. ‘Let us assume, for the moment, that the authorities will want to try and recover as much of Joshua’s assets as possible. You will need to prove to them that anything you keep is not something that was gained as a result of his schemes.’

  ‘Christ!’ Simpson muttered as she grabbed the wine bottle and refilled her glass.

  ‘Stop here!’ Lucas told the cab driver. Before clambering out, he returned to his call: ‘Remember, Carole, that you are a very successful professional in your own right. What’s more, you have dedicated your entire career to public service. It should not be difficult to demonstrate that you have built up a reasonable portfolio of legitimately acquired assets over several decades. Draw up a list this evening, and we can discuss it in my office in the morning.’

  ‘Fine,’ Simpson sighed.

  ‘Shall we say eleven?’

  ‘I will see you there.’

  ‘Good,’ the lawyer replied. ‘Until tomorrow then.’

  With a click, the line went dead. Simpson tossed the phone back on the table. For the next few minutes she sat in silence, going over their conversation in her head. Then she pulled some paper and a pen from her bag, and began jotting down numbers.

  Carlyle dropped his biography of the football manager Brian Clough on the coffee-table and glanced over at Helen, who was sitting on the other end of the sofa. A dispiriting sense of déjà vu overwhelmed him. His wife was still engrossed in her celebrities-in-the-jungle television show that seemed to have been running for months already. Carlyle was even more amazed to note that former Metropolitan Police Commissioner Luke Osgood was still hanging in there with a chance of winning. Osgood had made it down to the last three of the competition, along with a stripper (or, rather, ‘burlesque performer’) called Tizzy McDee and a nondescript-looking soap actor called Kevin. Carlyle tried to avert his eyes from the screen, particularly when Osgood appeared, but the sight of the pneumatic Tizzy, wearing a bikini that would have been too small even for young Alice, was predictably hypnotic.

  Mercifully, a commercial break arrived. Helen pulled the remote out from under a cushion and muted the sound. ‘Osgood’s done well to get this far,’ she said, ‘but he’s not going to win.’

  ‘So it’s between the soap star and the stripper?’ Carlyle remarked, curious despite himself.

  ‘Yes,’ his wife replied, with all the seriousness appropriate to a discussion about a general election, ‘but the actor is more likely to win. Once Osgood is out, he can combine the gay vote with the housewives’ vote. There aren’t enough teenage boys who can be bothered enough to ring in to vote for Tizzy over the line.’

  ‘They’ve all got their hands full already, I expect,’ Carlyle joked.

  Helen shot him a sour look. ‘Moving away from events in the jungle,’ she said, ‘I have some more news.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ he said warily, expecting anything from a demand for money to an announcement that his mother-in-law would be paying them a visit.

  ‘About Agatha Mills,’ Helen said, rolling back on the sofa and pulling her knees up to her chest.

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘Well . . . Agatha and Sandra Groves did know each other.’

  Carlyle yawned. ‘You told me that already.’

  Helen rose above the rebuke. ‘They were both involved in a Daughters of Dismas campaign against the arms trade. Their particular interest was in British military aid to Chile. Apparently it was being used to finance mercenaries in Iraq.’

  Carlyle let this new information sink in. ‘Does this come from the woman that you spoke to before?’

  ‘Yes.’ Helen glanced at the television screen to make sure that the adverts were still running and that she wasn’t missing any of her jungle fun. ‘I spoke to Clara again this morning, and she put me on to a couple of other people she knows. They say that the two of them were quite active about it.’

  ‘Was there anyone else involved?’ Carlyle asked.

  ‘Dunno,’ Helen shrugged.

  ‘Well, you’d better get your friend to check,’ he chided her. ‘These two have ended up dead, which means any of their chums could now be at risk. They need to get in touch with me straight away.’

  ‘I will pass the message on,’ Helen said coolly. She picked up some papers that were lying on the floor. ‘They were targeting a company called LAHC.’

  ‘Which stands for?’

  Helen quickly scanned the text. ‘I don’t know. It was reportedly using men and equipment, paid for by British money, as so-called private security guards. Some of those guards are accused of human rights violations.’

  ‘I get accused of human rights violations,’ Carlyle snorted, ‘on a fairly regular basis.’

  ‘Not including murder,’ Helen said bluntly. ‘This isn’t a laughing matter.’

  ‘I was just—’ Before he could finish his sentence, she dropped the sheaf of papers into his lap, restoring the television’s sound just as her programme resumed.

  If anything, the stripper’s bikini seemed to have shrunk during the commercial break. Her nipples, meanwhile, seemed to have grown massively. Through great force of will, Carlyle managed to tear his eyes away from the screen and scan the documents that Helen had handed him. Much of the material was in Spanish, but one thing he could read was a Daughters of Dismas press release entitled Time To Act Against Iraq Mercenaries. Keeping one eye on the stripper’s tits
, Carlyle scanned the text. Mercenary recruitment agencies are sending former soldiers to Iraq . . . human rights abuses . . . unauthorised use of Army weaponry . . . assault . . . murder. He read on: American private security companies who recruit guards at the request of the US government to send into armed conflict zones, to protect strategic installations and military convoys, tend to subcontract to South American firms like LAHC Consulting. The owner of LAHC is Gomez Gori, a retired admiral of the Chilean navy who played a leading role in overthrowing the democratically elected Chilean government in 1973.

  Gomez Gori? Well, well, well. At that very moment, however, Tizzy McDee stepped into a shower. Her bikini became transparent and he completely lost his train of thought.

  It took him several minutes to return to his reading. The only other item in English was a newspaper cutting from a year earlier:

  IRAQ: CHILEAN MERCENARIES IN THE LINE OF FIRE

  by Daniel Franklin

  SANTIAGO, 9 March (CNW) The 150 former members of the Chilean military who are working as private security personnel in Iraq are potential targets of the resistance there, as indicated by the gruesome murders of three security contractors a week ago.

  The former Chilean commandos are reported to work for the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). They are hired by private military firms that are benefiting from the lucrative contracts for the stabilisation and reconstruction of Iraq financed by the United States at an average monthly cost of four billion dollars.

  Last November, a discreet ad was placed in the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio inviting ex-commandos who could speak English, to sign up to provide security services abroad at the tempting pay of 18,000 dollars for just six months’ work.

  The ad, placed by LAHC, awakened the interest of at least 400 Marines and ‘Black Berets’ – the Chilean army’s special operations forces who retired early in the past few years.

  The recruitment effort in Chile included a pre-selection of 400 men, who then participated in military exercises in San Bernardo, south of Santiago. That annoyed the Defence Ministry, which ordered an investigation into possible violations of Chile’s law on weapons control.