by James Craig
‘Don’t struggle, or you’ll do yourself some serious damage.’
As his eyes regained focus, he saw the knife resting on the windshield. Next to it was a small photograph. Unable to move his head, it was hard to make it out clearly – but he could guess. A hand snatched up the blade and Hogarth clenched his whole body, in anticipation of the imminent blow.
‘Help me,’ he whispered, but only so that he could hear the sound of his own voice one last time. ‘Please, help me.’
Hopping from foot to foot to try to stay awake, Carlyle stood as far away from the body as he reasonably could without looking too much like a wimp. He fiddled with his BlackBerry and looked over at Joe Szyszkowski, who was talking to one of the other policemen attending the scene. Even at this distance, the smell was appalling. He could feel the bile rising in his throat and he was only glad that his stomach was empty.
It was ten to five in the morning and he felt like shit. Those bastard students who rented the flat below him in Winter Garden House had woken him up at two a.m. with their bloody computer war games. It was the third or fourth time this had happened in recent weeks. They would stay up all night playing Mercenaries: World in Flames or Call of Duty: World at War. The first time it had happened, Carlyle literally thought that a bomb had gone off inside the building. It wasn’t much better once he realised that it was only a game. There would be stretches of silence and then a monumental explosion. It was like World War III was taking place right under his fucking bed. Every time Carlyle went to complain, they would sheepishly apologise and call it a night. Then a few days later they’d start again. The fact that he was a policeman didn’t seem to concern them in the slightest. He started giving serious consideration to having the little fuckers arrested for something. Better still, he would ask Dominic Silver to send someone round to trash their games consoles and break their fingers.
Carlyle really needed his sleep: anything less than seven hours and he was in bad shape for the next day. In the event, he had managed to grab less than an hour because, what had seemed like only two minutes after his eyes had finally closed, he had received the call about the body. Joe had picked him up just after four, and they reached the scene in less than ten minutes.
The body had been identified from a marketing brochure found inside the Range Rover. There was the by now familiar knife sticking out of his arse, and a pool of congealed blood extended several feet away from the body. Nearby, an extremely impressive stream of vomit had run almost the whole length of the vehicle.
Joe wandered over.
‘Why is he still here?’ Carlyle asked.
‘They superglued him to the car,’ Joe explained, trying to stifle a giggle. ‘The paintwork is going to be ruined.’
‘What?’
‘He is stuck to the bonnet. They found a jumbo bottle of Lockdown “brush on” superglue.’ He gestured to a small group of officers gathered by the car, lowering his voice a little.
‘Lovely.’ Carlyle already knew that superglue was a more common problem for the police than most people would imagine. Once, in East London, he had been called to a flat where a man in a wheelchair had starved to death after his upper and lower jaws were glued together. The coroner recorded an open verdict, but for a long time afterwards Carlyle wondered what had happened. Was it an accident? Or suicide? They were real teeth, so how could you glue them together by accident? If the guy had done it deliberately, then what a truly terrible way to kill yourself. Or maybe someone else had done it to him? Carlyle had lain awake at night trying to work it through, but a plausible explanation would always elude him. Another time he had to deal with a man suspected of breaking his bail curfew, who had glued himself to his girlfriend in an attempt to avoid being arrested. Carlyle packed both of them off to the station and had her charged with obstruction, before making himself scarce so that he didn’t have to hang around for the business of separating them.
‘Why do you think they did that?’ he asked Joe, gesturing towards the corpse.
‘Presumably to hold him in position,’ Joe replied, ‘so that we would find him exactly like this, with the knife sticking out of his arse.’
‘Just like Ian Blake. And similar to George Dellal.’
‘Yes, it’s the same MO – different type of knife, but clearly the same MO.’
Carlyle thought about it for a minute. ‘How are they going to get him off?’
‘They’re discussing that with the pathologist and a forensics guy right now. It’s going to be tricky. They’ve already tried soap and water with no joy. Someone suggested nail-polish remover, but they don’t have any handy. Now they’re thinking of calling the Fire Brigade.’
‘That will go down well,’ said Carlyle wryly. ‘Let’s make sure we’re gone before those guys turn up.’
Carlyle felt his phone start buzzing in his jacket. He fished it out and glanced at the screen. There was no name or number; it just read ‘call’. Thinking that it was probably Simpson, he left it buzzing and dropped it back in his breast pocket. ‘How exactly did they manage to do it?’ he asked casually, nodding in the direction of the crime scene.
‘They smeared glue on his palms, then pressed them down on the bonnet,’ said Joe, who did not share Carlyle’s squeamishness. ‘And also on one side of his face.’
‘OK.’
‘And they glued his knob, too,’ gasped Joe, his shoulders bobbing as he finally lost the fight against mirth.
Despite the early hour, the smell, and everything else, Carlyle couldn’t help but smile too. ‘Seriously? His knob.’
‘Apparently,’ Joe coughed, wiping away a tear, ‘it’s stuck to the badge on the grille.’ He somehow managed to grin and grimace at the same time. ‘I didn’t look that closely myself, but I have it on good authority from those that have.’
Carlyle allowed himself another peek from a distance. It did indeed look like the guy was trying to fuck his Range Rover. What a shocking way to treat a seventy-grand motor.
One of the men in the group discussing the glue problem peeled away and came over.
‘Joe …?’
‘How’s it going, Matt?’ Joe replied. ‘This is my boss, Inspector John Carlyle. Boss, this is Sergeant Matt Parkin.’
‘Inspector.’ Parkin extended a hand.
‘Good to meet you,’ said Carlyle, ‘despite the circumstances.’
‘It is a bit of a mess,’ Parkin agreed.
‘Yes, Joe was telling me. What have you got?’
‘The body was found about two this morning,’ said Parkin. ‘The sick belongs to the woman who found him. She must have puked half her body weight.’
‘Nice,’ said Joe.
‘We’ve identified the man as Nicholas Hogarth, from some documents found in his car,’ Parkin continued. ‘He was on a flight from Moscow last night. Picked up his car from Heathrow and drove straight here.’
‘Do we actually know that he came straight here?’
‘Yeah,’ Parkin nodded, ‘we’ve got the timings down precisely. According to the Congestion Charge people, he entered central London just before midnight. According to the garage staff, he arrived here just after midnight.’
‘Where does the Hogarth family live?’ Carlyle asked.
‘Highgate.’
‘So this wasn’t exactly on his way home?’
‘No, clearly it looks like there was a bit of extracurricular going on. We found some tissues that suggest Mr Hogarth at least managed to get his rocks off before he expired.’
‘Good for him.’ Carlyle had seen enough. ‘Any sign of any drugs?’
‘Haven’t found anything yet.’
‘Apart from the woman who discovered him, did anyone else see anything?’
‘No witnesses, as far as we know. This place is pretty dead at that time of night.’
‘CCTV cameras?’
‘There are twelve on each level and also one in each of the three lifts. Three of them cover the spot where the Range Rover was parked, but the lens
es on those three, plus in one of the lifts, were smeared with Vaseline. This was very carefully planned. We are checking all the other cameras, plus those in nearby streets, but it will take time.’
‘OK. It would be great if you could keep us posted.’
‘Of course,’ Parkin nodded. ‘The other thing we’ve got at the moment is this.’ He handed Carlyle a small, see-through plastic, Ziploc bag. Inside was a photograph, about the size of a playing card, with a white border. Slightly over exposed, it showed a smiling young man in a T-shirt and jeans, taken on a summer day somewhere in the countryside. ‘We found this under one of the windscreen wipers of the Range Rover.’
Carlyle looked it over and then handed it to Joe. He turned back to Parkin. ‘We’ll need some copies.’
‘No problem,’ Parkin replied.
‘I’ll give you a call this afternoon,’ Joe added.
Carlyle looked over at the body one last time. ‘Thanks for your help,’ he said. ‘Now, tell me, where can we get a decent cup of coffee round here, at this time of the morning?’
NINETEEN
Southwark, London, November 1985
Halfway between the Elephant and Castle and London Bridge, PC John Carlyle sat by the window in an all-night greasy spoon café, staring into space. The place was run by a Lebanese family who had escaped the civil war in Beirut five years earlier. After months patrolling the local streets of Southwark, the young constable wasn’t sure that they’d made the right choice.
Sitting on the opposite side of the table, his partner of the last three weeks, Constable Kevin Slater, an amiable idiot from Manchester, shoved a bacon roll into his mouth and began chewing noisily. Staring into his empty coffee cup, Carlyle tried to ignore the brown sauce that was trickling down Slater’s chin and dripping on to his uniform. The pair of them were six hours into a ten-hour shift. Once it was over, Carlyle would have three days off. Not just any three days, because a crucial weekend loomed. Carlyle was in love.
Crash, bang, fucking wallop. He was in luurve. Thinking back to how it happened made him smile. On a day off, a week or so earlier, he had been mooching around the West End with no money in his pockets, and no plan of action. He was standing in Leicester Square looking at a movie poster for Rocky IV, which was due to come to the Empire in January, when the heavens had opened. Running down St Martins Street in search of shelter, he ducked into Westminster Reference Library. Behind a pile of books at a desk near the door sat the prettiest girl he had ever seen in his life. She looked up as he walked in. Carlyle caught her eye, and for a moment he couldn’t move. It was as if he had stepped into a different universe. Trying to recover the power of motion, he almost immediately tripped over a waste basket. While the girl tried to stifle laughter, he stumbled over to a chair some way off and spent the next hour staring at her over the top of a three-month-old copy of Farmer’s Weekly. Finally, as she was getting ready to leave, he stood up and introduced himself.
As a result, he got a date. She was due to meet him outside Leicester Square tube station in about seventeen hours’ time. London was their oyster. Now he had to come up with something, something damn good. He could not, under any circumstances, fuck this up. If he did, he was convinced that Helen Kennedy would never give him a second chance.
A monster burp from his partner tore Carlyle away from his thoughts. Having finished his roll, Slater went off in search of another. ‘Sure you don’t want one?’ he asked, waving an empty plate in Carlyle’s direction. ‘They really are excellent.’
‘Nah.’ Shaking his head, Carlyle turned away from his partner and stared out of the window in search of romantic inspiration. But in the middle of the night, on Trinity Street in SE sodding 1, there was none to be found. The rundown street was a mix of small shops and workshops, all of them closed at this time of night. The place was deserted. Not a single car was parked at the roadside, and no one had driven past for over ten minutes.
These were hard, unforgiving streets, streets with a history of violence and no future to speak of. More than eighty years earlier, during the General Strike, the police had fought pitched battles with the workers only a stone’s throw from where he was sitting. Barely two months ago, just down the road in Brixton, prison riots had left one person dead and fifty injured; more than two hundred were arrested. The trouble there had been sparked by the accidental police shooting of a Jamaican mother of six, who was left paralysed below the waist. North of the river, the Broadwater Farm housing estate in Tottenham was still under martial law after riots there resulted in the murder of a police constable, a forty-year-old father of three. Another policeman had been shot. Meanwhile, a local politician had crowed that the police had received ‘a bloody good hiding’. The shit never fucking stopped.
Carlyle had turned all this over in his head, time and again, as he walked his beat. It had been almost nine months since he had visited Dominic Silver. He hadn’t taken up the offer of a job, of course, but he couldn’t help remembering Dom’s words: ‘There will always be an “enemy within” … You’ll be doing someone else’s dirty work forever.’ Carlyle had to admit, if only to himself, that it was looking as if like Dominic bloody Silver was right.
Slater returned with his second bacon roll and a mug of tea, just as two white youths came into view, walking at a steady pace towards the café. They were big blokes, easily six foot plus, broad as well as tall. Stopping in front of the window, they stared at the two policemen inside. It was only then that Carlyle realised that one of them had a brick in his hand. A second later, the window exploded and he was covered in glass. Without letting go of his roll, Slater toppled backwards in his chair. Leaving him on the floor, and abandoning his helmet and radio on the table, Carlyle rushed out of the café door and gave chase.
He shouted for the youths to stop. Unsurprisingly, they ignored him. Trying to run in his standard police-issue boots was agony. Almost immediately, his chest felt tight and he was struggling for breath. You need to start exercising some more, Carlyle told himself. Breathing through his mouth, he kicked on, pushing himself harder. He wasn’t gaining on the two men, but they weren’t losing him either. Fifty yards down the road, he saw them duck into an alley to his right. Looking over his shoulder, he could not see Slater anywhere. He felt a surge of annoyance, but there was nothing he could do about that now. Head down, he took the corner at speed and tripped straight over an outstretched foot, crashing headlong into a pile of rubbish bags that had been stacked against the alley wall. Carlyle flipped himself on to his back and just lay there, catching his breath. In the gutter, he thought, looking up at the stars. Or where the stars should be. Aware of the shadows moving just beyond the edge of his vision.
Someone took a step closer. There was the dull clink of metal on brick. ‘Get up!’
Slowly, Carlyle worked himself into a sitting position. One of the bags had burst and some spoiled fruit had spilled out. He plucked a rotten banana skin from his tunic and, as casually as he could manage, tossed it in the direction of the voice. Pushing himself out of the garbage, he stood up, looking at a third man now in front of him, with the two he had been chasing leaning against the wall further back.
‘Hello, Trevor.’
Trevor Miller tapped the length of lead pipe against the leg of his jeans. In the semi-darkness, he looked bigger and uglier than Carlyle remembered. ‘I warned you, Carlyle. Why did you go and talk to that tart’s lawyer? Why did you put me in the frame?’
Carlyle could feel his heart going like the clappers under his uniform. ‘Why didn’t you leave her alone?’
Without replying, Miller stepped forward and chopped the pipe into Carlyle’s ribs. A searing pain shot through his torso and he went down again. ‘My career could have been fucked because of you.’
‘You’re a big boy, Trevor,’ Carlyle said, struggling to his feet and glancing back down the alley. ‘You have to take responsibility for your own actions. Anyway, I don’t think you were ever going to make Commissioner.’
&nbs
p; Trevor had caught his glance, and also looked back towards the street. ‘No one’s going to come and help you,’ he spat, waving the pipe in front of his face. ‘Everyone knows you’re a complete cunt. When I fuck you up, loads of people will be cheering. You have to take it.’
Carlyle decided that his only chance was to run for it. There was only Miller between him and the entrance to the alley. The other two were maybe ten yards further back, each enjoying a cigarette, neither paying a great deal of attention. If I could sell Trevor a dummy, Carlyle thought, I might get a couple of yards start. Who knows? That dickhead Slater might even put in an appearance. At the very least, he could have called for assistance.
Carlyle knew that he might not be able to outrun all three of them, but worrying about that wouldn’t help. He sprang forward, feinting to Miller’s right, before pushing off with his left foot and sprinting, head down, arms pumping, to his left. Miller, momentarily wrong-footed, screamed in fury. Carlyle felt the pipe whistle past his head before clattering to the ground. Reflexively he ducked but didn’t stop running. Bloody hell, he thought as he reached the mouth of the alley, I’m going to make it! Then his right foot went down and gave way beneath him as he slipped on the same discarded banana skin. Careering into a wall, Carlyle fell in a heap by the side of the road.
The footsteps behind him stopped and were replaced by mocking laughter. Someone kicked him in the back, and then he took a boot between the legs that, literally, made him see stars. Dazed, he was dragged by his legs back into the darkness of the alley. This time, all he could do was curl up as tightly as possible and wait for his beating. The next blow hit him behind the left ear. His last thought before blacking out was that he still had no idea where he should take Helen on their first date.
TWENTY
‘Who is in charge of the police investigation?’
‘Err …’ William Murray glanced at his boss, who nodded his approval, before leaning forward and speaking slowly into the star-shaped conference phone in the centre of the table. ‘He’s called …’ he checked his notes, ‘Inspector Carlyle. He works out of the Charing Cross station.’