London Calling

by James Craig

  ‘Have a good time.’

  ‘Will you pick me up this afternoon?’ Alice asked, as she finished wiping the spot on her cheek where he had just kissed her.

  ‘No, I have to go back to work. I would love to be here, but things are a bit busy at work. It will have to be Mum.’

  ‘Good. I like it when Mum picks me up,’ said Alice happily, to Carlyle’s considerable disappointment. She skipped away, moving five yards towards the school before turning back to face him. ‘Was he dead?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The man last night. Mum says that’s why you didn’t come home.’

  ‘Yes.’ As usual in these situations, Carlyle kept it short, but he didn’t try to ignore her question or change the subject. Alice, like her mother, had little time for bullshit. She was a no-nonsense girl who, aged four, had informed her parents and, rather undiplomatically, her school chums that Santa was a ‘creature of myth and legend’. In terms of maturity and development, she was probably already three or four or five years ahead of where he’d been at a similar age. That was a hell of a big gap, and Carlyle knew that it would only get bigger.

  ‘Was he murdered?’ Her tone was matter-of-fact. Her look said: You can tell me the truth, it’s no big deal.

  ‘That’s TBC,’ Carlyle lied. ‘We don’t know yet.’

  Alice looked at him more closely. ‘But you’ll find out?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And then they’ll go to jail?’

  ‘The person who did it? Yes, that’s the idea.’

  ‘So that they can’t do it again?’

  ‘Yes,’ Carlyle nodded. ‘The idea is that they go to jail to protect the rest of us.’ He thought about it for a minute. ‘Maybe, when they are in jail, they learn that they did something wrong. That’s their best chance of making sure that they don’t do it again when they come out.’

  Alice made a face. ‘But that doesn’t happen very often, does it?’

  Carlyle laughed. ‘Hard to say, sweetheart. Hard to say.’

  She thought about it some more. ‘It’s good that you’ll catch him. You can tell me about it tonight.’ She started moving away from him. ‘See ya!’

  ‘See ya!’

  Alice skipped inside the school, waving at her teacher, Mrs Matterface, on duty at the front gate, while scanning the playground for any of her young friends. Carlyle stood there and watched his daughter go in, safe and sound. Sending Helen a text to say that he had successfully completed his mission, he loitered for a minute longer. A lone straggler managed to just sneak in before the front doors were ceremonially closed and the school day officially began. Feeling satisfied with a job well done, Carlyle turned away and headed off in the direction of the tube.

  After dropping Alice off at school, Carlyle returned home in search of a couple of hours’ sleep. Home was a two-bedroom apartment, measuring eight hundred and ninety square feet, on the thirteenth floor of Winter Garden House, facing south towards the river, with decent views of the South Bank arts complex, the London Eye and Big Ben. WGH was a fifteen-storey, 1960s block housing thirty apartments, which sat on Macklin Street at the north end of Drury Lane. Their apartment had been bought by Carlyle’s father-in-law from Camden Council for sixteen thousand pounds in 1984. With an excellent sense of timing, he had keeled over with a massive heart attack just five months before Alice was born. Helen’s mother had been happy to give them the place, as she herself had moved out years earlier, about a week after her daughter had left school, dumping her husband and decamping to Brighton, the lively seaside town an hour out of London. If it hadn’t been for this happy set of circumstances, the family would have found itself living far from Covent Garden, and Carlyle would have been condemned to a lifetime of commuting on London’s chronically underfunded and unreliable public-transport system.

  Waking just before one o’clock, he lingered in bed for a while, thinking about nothing in particular. Eventually he got up, had a shower, got dressed and headed outside. Crossing the one-lane, one-way thoroughfare, he stepped into Il Buffone, a tiny 1950s-style Italian café on the other side of Macklin Street. Inside, there was just enough room for the counter and three shabby booths, each of which could sit four people – or six at a squeeze. It was then a case of risking a random dining companion inside or taking one of the small tables outside on the street, where the exhaust fumes came for free.

  Carlyle always preferred to stay inside, where he could sit under a crumbling poster of the Juventus Scudetto winning squad of 1984. That was the team of Trapattoni and Platini, higher beings from a different era. Even on the busiest of days, a few moments spent contemplating their achievements were, to Carlyle’s way of thinking, always time well spent.

  It was now after two o’clock and the lunchtime rush was coming to a close, so Il Buffone was largely empty. A couple of businessmen lingered over their lattes, discussing the chances of some big order materialising. Each was puffing on a cigarette, in casual contravention of the smoking ban. Carlyle looked questioningly at Marcello, the owner, who just shrugged and turned to the Gaggia coffee machine.

  ‘Ciao. Buon giorno. Come stai?’

  ‘I’m good, Marcello,’ Carlyle replied to the back of the man’s head. ‘You?’

  ‘Fine,’ Marcello shouted back to him, over the hissing of the machine. ‘Cathy’s visiting her mother today, so I’m on my own, but it’s OK. What you havin’ now? Lunch or breakfast?’

  It was a difficult decision to make, for Carlyle was normally a morning visitor to the café, and choosing lunch would require some extra thought. He couldn’t be bothered with that, so he plumped for breakfast.

  ‘The usual?’ Marcello asked.

  ‘Si, grazie.’ Having now exhausted the complete range of his Italian vocabulary, built up painstakingly over the years, Carlyle nodded respectfully to Trapattoni and Platini and slid into the rear booth to wait for his regular daily rations comprising of a double macchiato with a chunky raisin Danish.

  Marcello Aversa had come to London more than thirty years earlier, for a week’s holiday. In that short time he’d managed to fall in love with an English girl, get engaged and find himself a job. Carlyle never ceased to feel impressed every time Marcello told the story. It must have been quite a trip. Thirty years on, still married to Cathy, he was coming to the end of a career that had seen him running various clubs, restaurants and bars in north London and the West End.

  Four years ago they had taken on a lease for the café, the idea being to give their youngest daughter a start in the business. However, the reality of five-thirty starts, five mornings a week, plus dealing with customers, the council and the health-and-safety people, had proved too much for the girl. She had chucked it in after less than a month and was last heard of backpacking around Chile. Marcello and Cathy were left trying to cover the final years of the lease, while hoping to get someone to take it off their hands.

  Carlyle’s wife and daughter were regulars here. Marcello and Cathy doted on Alice, which meant, inevitably, that Helen loved them. That meant, in turn, that Carlyle felt obliged to go in there at least once a day. His job was never mentioned but, over time, he was drawn into the role of problem solver in chief whenever the couple ran up against various bureaucratic problems, which they did with dispiriting regularity. The only bad thing about this situation was Marcello’s constant refusal of any payment. After eating, Carlyle regularly had to force him to take his money. It was embarrassing, but not as embarrassing as taking advantage of their kindness.

  Marcello dropped the coffee in front of him, along with a monster pastry, and then tactfully opened the windows at the front of the café in order to let the illegal smoke out. On his way back behind the counter, he swept up the almost empty cups sitting in front of the two businessmen, in a way that suggested it was time for them to leave, giving Carlyle a wink before he ducked into the microscopic kitchen at the rear.

  Carlyle took a sip of his macchiato and contemplated the pastry. It was a thing of beaut
y, almost the size of an old seven-inch vinyl single, but half an inch deep and covered in icing. Marcello ordered half a dozen each day from the north London kosher bakers Grodzinski, primarily for the benefit of Carlyle, who had been known to nip in and have a second one, if the opportunity presented itself.

  This was a ritual definitely not to be rushed. As was his habit, Carlyle carefully cut the pastry into quarters, and took a further second to decide the order in which he was going to eat them. This was definitely going to require another coffee, so he emptied his demitasse and called to Marcello for another double macchiato. Once that had arrived, Carlyle reached for the first quarter of his pastry. It was already in his mouth when the door opened.

  ‘How’s the gay slaying coming along?’

  Carlyle chewed, swallowed and smiled. ‘Afternoon, Joe.’ He looked up to watch Sergeant Joseph Szyszkowski flopping into the booth, opposite him. Joe had an early edition of the evening paper wedged under his arm, and an excited look in his eye. Exercising more than a little self-control, the inspector resisted the urge to demand where the hell he’d been for the last fourteen hours or so. ‘Want something to drink?’

  ‘What can I get you?’ Marcello piped up from behind the counter.

  ‘I’ve had lunch, thanks, Marcello,’ said Joe, ‘but a latte would be nice.’

  ‘Coming right up.’

  ‘Oh, before I forget,’ Joe said to his colleague, ‘I got a call from Valcareggi.’

  ‘And what did Edmondo have to say for himself?’ Carlyle asked, hoping that he wasn’t now going to have to chase down any more Italian mobsters.

  ‘Apparently the guy we arrested later got knifed in some prison outside Rome.’ Joe paused for dramatic effect. ‘They killed him.’

  ‘Pozzo?’ Carlyle sniffed. ‘At least he won’t have to worry about his weight any more, will he?’

  ‘I suppose not,’ Joe agreed. Picking up a copy of Marcello’s menu, he studied it carefully.

  Carlyle gave his sergeant the once-over as he listened to the coffee machine burst into action. Joe was five foot ten, about a stone overweight, with long dark hair and a perpetually amused expression like a slightly bigger version of the actor Jack Black. They had been working together for more than four years now. Carlyle was notoriously uninterested in the backgrounds of any of his colleagues, but he had nevertheless gleaned quite a bit about Joe in their time working together. Joseph Leon Gorka Szyszkowski was second-generation Polish, born and brought up in Portsmouth before coming to London to study geophysics at Imperial College. For reasons Carlyle didn’t understand, he decided to join the Met after graduating with a good 2.1 degree.

  In the wider world of London, Poles were now well established. Many were heading home, as the recession began to bite, but they were still considered the benchmark of quality, reliability and value for money in the plumbing, building and other sectors of the economy. They also provided the odd footballer and many, many Catholic priests. For any ethnic minority, however, it was harder to break into the relatively closed, conservative world of the police than to gain acceptance in civilian jobs. Carlyle had so far only ever come across one ‘Polish’ policeman in the Met, and that was Joe. To be fair, if it wasn’t for the name you would never guess his ethnic background. Joe was thoroughly assimilated, even if he would never be invited to join the Masons, that rather comical secret society (or ‘society with secrets’ as they preferred to be known) and home of the ‘all-seeing eye’ and the motto Ordo ab Chao, ‘Order out of Chaos’, which for some reason attracted policemen by the bus load.

  There were about 21,700 sergeants employed in the UK police, and Carlyle knew the only one of them that could sing the English national anthem in both Polish and Hindi. Joe had an Indian wife, Anita, and together they had given their kids, William and Sarah, the most thoroughly English names that they could think of. Despite all this, there remained a strand of Joe’s DNA that was deeply and irredeemably Polish, i.e. dark, pessimistic and Catholic. This background contributed to a sense of detachment, irony and – perhaps just as important – fatalism, which Carlyle could relate to. The two got on well and trusted each other. Carlyle was happy about that.

  ‘What have they got?’ he asked, as he watched Joe theatrically unfold the newspaper and lay it out on the table in front of him.

  ‘What do you think they’ve got?’ Joe tossed his copy of the Evening Standard on to the surface.

  ‘Everything?’

  Joe nodded. ‘Everything.’

  He waited while Carlyle contemplated the 72-point headline on the front page which read: TOP HOTEL KNIFE HORROR.

  ‘They’ve got the knife, the time of death, the note,’ Joe continued, ‘and they’re also speculating about the sexual nature of the crime.’ He picked the newspaper off the table and turned it around to scan the article. ‘And I quote: “Sources suggest that the frenzied attack bears the hallmarks of drug-fuelled sexual experimentation gone badly wrong.”’ He rolled the paper up and waved it at Carlyle. ‘Drug-fuelled sexual experimentation?’ He sighed theatrically. ‘Those were the days …’

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ Carlyle grinned.

  ‘This is top-notch journalism,’ Joe laughed. ‘You know, I reckon that this paper has got a lot better since that ex-KGB guy bought it.’

  ‘Better a propaganda vehicle for the Kremlin than one for our idiot mayor,’ Carlyle said sourly. ‘Who wrote that piece?’

  Joe unrolled the paper and squinted at the byline. ‘Someone called Fiona Singer-Cavendish.’

  ‘Never heard of her.’

  ‘Me neither,’ Joe shrugged, ‘but she’s certainly on top of this one. I’m surprised that they don’t have a picture of you exploring the dead man’s orifice.’

  ‘Wait for the final edition,’ Carlyle joked. Bloody Alex Miles, he thought. The little bastard will have sold the lot just for a few hundred quid. He reflected a bit further. ‘Do they know about the note?’

  ‘They certainly know that there was a note,’ replied Joe. ‘They don’t seem to know that it was delivered to Charing Cross, thank God! They also don’t know – or aren’t disclosing – what it said.’

  ‘Do you really think there’s a gay angle to all this?’ Carlyle asked.

  ‘Maybe.’ Joe raised his eyes to the ceiling. ‘Why stick a kitchen knife up some poor bugger’s … no pun intended … behind if not to make a point of some crude sexual nature?’

  Carlyle raised his eyebrows. ‘It could mean anything. Or nothing.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ Joe scoffed. ‘Surely it’s saying: “I want to fuck you right up the arse” …’

  ‘Possibly.’ Carlyle went with the flow. With Joe in this kind of mood, that was always the best option. It was normally the only option.

  ‘… after you’re dead.’

  ‘It could make sense,’ Carlyle agreed, for want of anything else to say.

  ‘This,’ Joe smiled, ‘has gay hate crime written all over it.’

  Marcello placed Joe’s latte on the table and retreated to a respectful distance. Carlyle thought about the story in the paper and suddenly felt his enthusiasm for the case desert him faster than an Old Compton Street hooker who’s been paid in advance. All he could see was the slog ahead of them. ‘Do we care, one way or another?’ he wondered out loud. ‘Gay or not, does it make much of a difference?’ The gay crimes taskforce had been disbanded three years earlier. Cases like this all went in the same pot now, in this case his pot.

  Joe lent back in his chair and let out a deep breath. ‘Not really.’

  ‘What about the SCD? Could this be one for them?’

  Of the Metropolitan Police’s eleven Specialist Crime Directorates, the Homicide and Serious Crime Command was SCD1. It usually dispatched a major investigation team or a homicide task force to sweep up all the interesting murder cases. By definition that meant virtually all those that were not solved within a matter of hours.

  ‘I wouldn’t bet on them bailing us out,’ Joe replied. ‘Homicide i
s seriously stretched at the moment. Half of them have been sent to Belgravia to deal with the Arab billionaire who took a dive off the balcony of his Mayfair penthouse, back in March.’

  Carlyle nodded. He was aware of the case.

  ‘Lots of foreign travel involved with that one,’ Joe continued, ‘so everyone wants a piece of it. No one’s in a hurry to call it a day, either.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ said Carlyle. Lots of foreign travel meant time away from the family and lots of well-paid overtime. Even better, there was no real pressure to get a result. The established consensus was that it had been a professional hit, with the killer lurking somewhere back in the Middle East, untraceable and untouchable. All in all, it was a great case to be working on. Those involved would be fighting off volunteers with a stick.

  ‘Face it,’ said Joe, ‘it looks like we’re stuck with this one.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Yes, well, you obviously, O great one,’ Joe’s grin got wider, ‘but, as usual, I will probably have to help out … at least a little bit.’

  Carlyle nodded formally in the sergeant’s direction. ‘You are too kind.’

  ‘No gratitude necessary,’ said Joe, bowing slightly in return. ‘We might as well try and get it sorted out as quickly as possible.’

  ‘Quite.’ Carlyle stroked his stubble and shot his sergeant a look of mock seriousness. ‘No one’s turned up to confess this morning?’

  Joe Szyszkowski pretended to think about this for a minute, before delivering the inevitable reply, ‘No.’

  ‘Is there no hot lead that presented itself while I was in bed?’

  Again, Joe pretended to think about it for a second, before shaking his head. ‘No.’

  ‘OK, OK, let’s get serious.’ With a tremendous effort of will, Carlyle summoned some enthusiasm for the matter in hand. ‘What about the knife, then?’

  ‘It’s a nice bit of kit. No prints. Could have been bought in several hundred locations across central London, assuming it was purchased recently, that is.’