by James Craig
It took a while for every man in the room to compose himself and return his attention to the matter in hand. Simpson let them settle. ‘Good afternoon, Rosanna,’ she said with an impressive faux familiarity. ‘Very nice to see you here today.’
Snowdon smiled, gave a little nod, and took a seat in the otherwise empty front row.
Simpson paused, quickly introduced her two colleagues, and then launched into the prepared statement. This managed to fill most of the remaining time allotted for the conference, while actually containing no new information whatsoever. The hacks scribbled away and nodded politely, apart from the Standard reporter who appeared to be either deaf or suffering from a serious attention-deficit disorder.
Once Simpson finished reading her statement, Snowdon immediately turned to Carlyle. ‘Is it true,’ she smiled sweetly, ‘that you were told about the body in a note, Inspector?’
Carlyle stiffened. ‘We are not adding to any detail we have already put out into the public domain,’ he heard himself say, robotically.
Snowdon came back at him gently. ‘But it has already been reported that there was a note … so any additional colour you can let us have on that would be most appreciated.’
Carlyle forced himself to smile. ‘I understand the need for colour in your story, Ms Snowdon,’ he replied evenly, ‘but I’ve got my job to do as well. We really have nothing to add at this stage.’ He could sense Simpson getting irritated, but felt that he had to stand his ground. This whole event was, nominally at least, supposed to be for the benefit of his investigation, after all.
The other journalists sat back, happy to see how far this gentle sparring would continue. Aware that they had ceded her the floor, Snowdon felt it was at least worth giving it one last go. ‘I’m sorry to have to repeat the question, Inspector …’
‘But you are going to anyway,’ Carlyle shot back.
At this point Simpson intervened, clearly having had enough of Carlyle spoiling her show. ‘I think we’ve already covered that,’ she declared, with a rictus grin. ‘Are there any more questions?’ she asked firmly, scanning the room. After the briefest of pauses, she moved on. ‘None? Good. Thank you all for coming. We will, of course, provide you with an update in due course. I will now happily make myself available for any radio and television interviews you might need.’ She scanned the audience, willing someone to take her up on her offer. ‘Shall we say BBC first?’
With no immediate takers coming forward, the superintendent almost sprinted to the back of the room to get herself in front of the cameras. Even so, the room had almost emptied by the time she got there. People were working on deadline and the ITV crew was busy breaking up its equipment. Their producer had already left, and it was now clear they didn’t want a one-on-one with Simpson.
Watching smugly from the platform, Carlyle caught a quizzical glance passing from the BBC cameraman towards Snowdon, asking her Do we need this? Snowdon gave him a quick nod and he made a face before resetting the camera for Simpson’s close-up. He was used to this: a ‘just in case’ interview, mainly conducted in order to keep the subject happy.
While the cameraman fussed about, Snowdon and Simpson exchanged business cards and chatted in a rather over-animated fashion. Carlyle wondered what they were talking about, but he knew that it wasn’t likely to be the Blake case. Snowdon was not a journalist in the ‘hard news’ sense. Indeed, she wasn’t really a journalist in any sense. In reality, she was just another hustler who saw every news item, every victim, as another step towards realising her destiny as a celebrity presenter on the main national network, with a smug banker husband and regular exposure in Hello! magazine. Similarly, Simpson wasn’t really a copper – he doubted if she had been out on the streets in the last ten or even twenty years. She was just a politician in uniform.
In short, they were both women in a hurry. Each recognised a kindred spirit in the other. This whole performance was more about networking than it was about the reporting the news or even solving a crime.
Stepping down off the platform, Carlyle moved closer to listen to the interview. For a couple of minutes, Snowdon lobbed a series of easy questions that allowed Simpson to reprise her comments from the press conference.
‘That’s great,’ said Snowdon, after Simpson had delivered the same soundbite for the third time in a row.
The superintendent beamed like a sixteen-year-old who’d just been told that she’d received twelve A grades at GCSE.
‘Just one final question.’
Simpson smiled even harder, nodding expectantly.
‘Have you spoken to the mayor about this?’
Simpson’s smile faded as a look of confusion spread across her face. ‘I’m sorry …’ Instinctively, she reached for the microphone, but stopped herself before she pulled it off her lapel.
‘That’s OK,’ said Snowdon, goading gently. ‘Let me ask that one again … The mayor was a close friend of the victim, so how did he take the news?’
Simpson looked blank. ‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated. ‘I don’t know anything about that.’
‘Fine,’ Snowdon glanced at the cameraman. ‘We’ll leave it there.’ She smiled at Simpson. ‘Thank you, that was great. Don’t worry about that last answer. I’ll take one from the top.’
A rather crestfallen Simpson nodded and shuffled off, carefully avoiding eye contact with Carlyle as she headed out of the room.
The Mayor of London, Carlyle thought. That’s the second time he’s come up, so far, in this investigation. That meant he had got to be part of the investigation. That means, John old son, you are going to have to tread carefully here. Very carefully indeed.
THIRTEEN
Cambridge University, March 1985
Robert Ashton closed his copy of The Rise of Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860–1914 and stood up from the desk. He felt a fierce thirst, but ignored the tall, narrow glass of water that stood on the corner of the table, next to a pile of textbooks and papers. A dull pain was building slowly behind his eyes. It mingled with the numbness that he still felt after all these months.
A pale shaft of sunlight struggled through the curtains, illuminating a small patch of the worn rug on the floor. Outside was a beautiful spring day: England as it was supposed to be, bright, fresh, almost warm in the sun. Laughter rose from the courtyard outside.
Room 12 was situated on the third floor of Darwin Hall, one of the halls of residence for undergraduate students at Cambridge University. It was basically a large, dark space that Ashton shared with another student, a French waster called Nicolas who had already left for Easter even though there were still ten days until the end of term. That suited Robert just fine, as he liked having the place to himself. Reaching across the table, he picked up the glass of water and stepped cautiously into the middle of the room, careful to avoid stepping on any of the books strewn across the floor. Having picked his spot, he gazed up at the oversized mirror that had been placed above the fireplace. His head cocked to one side, like a concerned fawn, he contemplated a face that he no longer recognised. Then, slowly, deliberately, he threw the glass into his reflection, smashing it to pieces. His heart racing, he stood there for a second, concentrating hard, making sure that the image was gone. After a moment, he realised that his cheek was stinging. Carefully, he extracted a small shard of glass from just below his left eye and dropped it in the fireplace, before wiping away the smallest drop of blood.
From down the hall, he could hear the strains of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 coming from the room of a seriously disturbed German theology student, who had been playing the same music almost non-stop since September. Turning back to the desk, Ashton extracted three envelopes from under his pile of books and placed them in a row, aligning their edges carefully with those of the table. The brown A4 manila envelope addressed to Professor Box contained his essay on the causes of World War One. It was a day late – the first time he had ever missed a deadline – but, still, he knew it was a good effort, probably deserving of an A, o
r an A – at the very least. A stickler for deadlines, Box would doubtless even refuse to look at it, but Ashton had finished it, so he might as well send it.
The other two envelopes were smaller, just big enough to contain a couple of the Howard Hodgkin postcards he had bought at the Fitzwilliam Museum a week before. The first envelope, containing an image of Hodgkin’s painting entitled Bleeding, was addressed to his shrink, a nervous woman who seemed even more disturbed about what had happened to him than he was himself. The envelope containing the second card, Mourning, was simply addressed to ‘Suzy’. Both cards had been left blank, and both were apologies of a sort. Both, he knew, were pitifully inadequate, not that he cared. They could decipher them or not.
Satisfied that everything was finally in place, Robert Ashton stepped through some curtains and opened the door that led on to the small balcony overlooking the quadrangle. He was wearing just a thin black T-shirt the chill in the air made him shiver. The sun was rapidly sinking in the sky, and already beginning to disappear behind the buildings on the far side of the quadrangle. Squinting, he held up his hand to shield his eyes from the sun’s glare. The stone parapet in front of him was about four feet high and maybe ten inches wide. Yawning, he pulled himself up on to it and stood shakily surveying his domain. Forty feet below, people were going about their business, still heading to and from lectures. In the middle of the square was a large oak tree. Near the tree, a fantastically pretty girl was sitting on the grass, lapping up the attention she was getting from two would-be suitors competing for her attention.
For what seemed like an eternity, Ashton waited for the girl to look up and catch his eye. When she finally did so, he pulled back his shoulders and held his arms outstretched. Overwhelmed by a huge sense of relief, he listened to her scream of alarm fade away on the breeze.
Then he stepped off the wall and into space.
FOURTEEN
Carlyle prided himself on not paying much attention to politicians, but even he knew chapter and verse on Christian Holyrod. Known as ‘the Holy Rod’, ‘the Rod’, ‘Hot Rod’ or ‘the hero of Helmand’, depending on the mood of the tabloid newspapers on any given day, Holyrod had been enjoying the kind of press that other politicians could only dream of. Two years earlier, he had been Major Holyrod, commander of the 2nd Battalion of the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment (motto: Virtutis Fortuna Comes, or ‘Fortune Favours the Brave’). It was one of the first British battle groups to go into Helmand in south-west Afghanistan, with a mandate to give ‘Terry Taliban’ hell.
Holyrod’s journey from unsung hero to big-time politician began when an American documentary crew arrived to film the story of Operation Clockwork Orange, a mission to capture a terrorist commander inside his mud compound in the middle of nowhere. The mission was a total fiasco, Holyrod’s boys were ambushed and a swift retreat followed, but the firefights and general chaos that followed made for great television. Shaky, hand-held pictures of the Major shouting, ‘Contact, contact, contact!’, while squeezing off rounds from his SA80-A2 assault rifle and trying to drag a wounded squaddie back to his truck, were as gripping as anything that Hollywood could have come up with. They made all the major news bulletins back home in Britain even before the programme was aired in the USA. For almost two days it was the most watched video on YouTube, with more than forty-five million hits around the world. Holyrod became an instant celebrity. He was offered his own radio talk show, signed up to do a newspaper column, acquired an agent and received more than one hundred offers of marriage.
For its part, the Ministry of Defence was, initially, more than happy to let a stream of journalists beat a path to the Major’s door, given their desperation for any kind of ‘good news’ out of a story that had been a complete disaster from day one. Holyrod quite enjoyed the attention, but he was increasingly worried that the MoD had seriously underestimated the task in hand, i.e. fighting the enemy. The tone of his interviews became more and more downbeat as he contemplated ‘the big picture’. After telling a very nice girl from the Sunday Express that ‘the whole thing’s gone to rats’, he was hauled back to London ‘for discussions’. His return to the front line was then cut short after he was caught, on camera, berating the Foreign Secretary, who was in the middle of a four-hour ‘tour’ of the troops, about Her Majesty’s Government’s lack of support for ‘his boys’.
Of course, the media lapped it all up. So did the public. Opinion polls suggested that Holyrod’s approval rating had reached the high eighties. No politician could compete with him. The Major’s window of opportunity had arrived, and now he had to decide what to do with it.
It was at this point that Holyrod’s political contacts came into play. His brother-in-law was one Edgar Carlton MP, leader of the opposition and, by common consent, prime minister in waiting. After some detailed discussions with his pollsters, Edgar persuaded his old pal to cash in his chips and take the fight to the real enemy – those disgusting, spineless liberals that had taken over Whitehall in recent years.
After a few phone calls, a bit of arm twisting and the promise of a few peerages, Holyrod was installed as Carlton’s choice for Mayor of London. After six months of campaigning under the party slogan, Change That Keeps Changing, he won a landslide victory over the incumbent, an immensely tired-looking woman with the air of someone who couldn’t get out of the job fast enough. The only time Holyrod ever saw her smile was on the night of the election itself, immediately after it was announced that she had lost.
According to received wisdom, the first hundred days are crucial for any newly elected official. That’s when the new broom can sweep clean, and you make your mark. After that it’s all downhill. For more than three months, Holyrod went in to work each day with a nagging feeling that he should be doing something significant. What, though, he had no real idea. Meanwhile, the less he did, the higher his poll ratings climbed; and the higher his ratings went, the more he was seen as providing the template for Edgar Carlton’s first national government, which was just around the corner. As the national election loomed, Holyrod’s job was to provide living, breathing proof that the party was fit to govern.
After the cameraman had taken the disc out of his camera, and was again breaking up his kit, Carlyle wandered over to join Rosanna Snowdon.
Snowdon watched him approach with a wry smile. ‘You don’t want us to do you as well, do you, Inspector?’
Carlyle held up his hands. ‘No, no,’ he said, stepping closer. ‘Not my kind of thing.’ As discreetly as possible, he breathed in her luxurious perfume. ‘I leave that to others.’
‘Very wise.’
‘I just wondered,’ Carlyle probed, as casually as possible, ‘about the connection between Mr Blake and the mayor …?’
‘It’s not a big deal,’ Snowdon said, stuffing her notebook into an oversized handbag and pulling out a very bling mobile. ‘They know each other from university. Just a minor detail, so not something you guys would necessarily have picked up on at this stage.’
‘And how do you yourself know that?’
She shrugged. ‘It’s just one of those things one knows.’
Carlyle considered asking her about the Mayor’s Office using Alethia, Blake’s PR firm, but decided to hold back. ‘Will that be part of your story?’
‘I doubt it. I wondered if it might make a nice angle, but maybe not. It’s a bit contrived and I probably won’t get anything like enough time to squeeze it in, anyway.’ She grabbed the handles of her bag and hoisted it over her shoulder, before holding out a hand. ‘Nice to meet you, Inspector,’ she said, pulling up a number on her mobile with her free hand, ‘but I’ve got to rush back to the edit suite. I hope that you’ll like the piece.’
Before Carlyle had the chance to reply, she was off, already talking into her phone and leaving only a fading whiff of scent in her wake.
FIFTEEN
Carlyle sat on a very nice two-seater cream sofa in the living room of Ian Blake’s small but perfectly presentable one-bedroom
flat in Lennox Gardens in Chelsea. One of the most upmarket neighbourhoods in the city, it was only a mile, give or take, from where Carlyle himself had been born. The flat was smaller than Carlyle’s present home, but it was easily worth two or even three times as much. Even with the recent sharp fall in house prices, the place had to be worth around a million quid. Solid, understated, it was the type of property that would never go out of fashion.
The policemen and technicians who had spent the last three hours going over the place had packed up and headed back to the station. They had given no indication of finding anything of note, but they would be doing their job thoroughly and diligently, all the same. In line with the toxicology report on the corpse, they had found a small stash of cannabis which had been inexpertly hidden in a shoebox in the closet. There was nothing to suggest that Mr Blake was anything other than a standard middle-class dabbler.
Last night’s exertions were catching up with Carlyle and his attention wandered. He tried to focus on what he might want for dinner since, by the time he got home, Helen and Alice would have eaten and he would be fending for himself. He went through a mental list of what was stored in the fridge, and the likelihood of it still being there when he returned. Nothing grabbed his attention, so it looked like a trip to the supermarket beckoned.
In the corner of the room, a large plasma screen flickered silently, the sound muted while Carlyle waited for the local news to appear. The sofa was very comfortable. Sitting back, he yawned and closed his eyes.
‘Wake up! It’s on.’ Joe grabbed a large remote control from the coffee table and turned up the sound. He flopped down next to Carlyle and dropped the remote in the space between them.