London Calling (14 page)

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 is 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.’

‘Do we want to spend time checking on that?’ Carlyle asked.

‘It’s already in hand.’

Carlyle moved on down his mental checklist. ‘Did you see the note?’

‘Yes.’

‘What do you make of it?’

‘There’s a story here, obviously,’ said Joe. ‘The killer wants us to know
why
he did this.’

‘OK,’ said Carlyle, suddenly all business. ‘So have we come up with anything else involving a similar MO?’

Joe adopted a philosophical tone. ‘The modus operandi in this case appears to be fairly unique. There have been twenty-eight knife killings in London so far this year. There were eighty-six last year. Most are either domestics or kids stabbing each other on sink estates.’

Carlyle grunted. Crimes of passion or crimes of stupidity, both categories bored him silly.

‘We are checking out all of the rest,’ Joe continued, ‘but there appears to have been nothing similar so far … arse-wise.’

‘Have you viewed the CCTV pictures from the hotel?’ Carlyle asked.

‘Yeah.’ Joe took another slurp of his coffee. ‘Useless result, though some American boxer and his groupies got into a fight with the management, just before you turned up.’ He grinned. ‘One of the women had her top ripped off. Wearing no bra.’

Carlyle gave him a look that said:
Let’s focus on the matter in hand, shall we?

‘That was quite entertaining but caused chaos. I’ve got one of the lads back at the station having another look through, but I don’t bet on them finding anything useful.’

‘OK,’ Carlyle sounded disappointed. ‘Just make sure that they don’t stick the groupie’s tits on YouTube. In the meantime, what about the victim himself?’

Joe raised his eyes to the ceiling and began reciting from memory, rather like a third-former standing up in front of the whole class. ‘His name is Ian Blake, as you know. Forty-seven years old. Owns a flat in Chelsea – there’s a team investigating there now. He works in that most noble of professions, public relations, at a firm called Al … something.’ Joe paused the recitation and pulled a torn piece of paper out of his pocket to scan the notes scribbled on it. ‘Alethia. They have an office near Park Lane.’

‘Alethia was the goddess of truth,’ Carlyle explained. ‘Daughter of Zeus.’

Joe raised an eyebrow. ‘And we know that because?’

‘We know that because Alice explained it to me on our school run this morning.’

‘Top girl!’

‘Yeah,’ agreed Carlyle happily, ‘she certainly is. She’s into all that Greek mythology stuff, big time at the moment.’

‘It’s good to know that at least one member of the Carlyle family is showing an interest in culture,’ Joe smirked.

Carlyle feigned indignation. ‘I’m not taking any crap from someone whose kids spend all their time playing with their Nintendo DS,’ he grinned, ‘and who wouldn’t know a book if they were smacked in the face with one.’

‘They are just at one with the
Zeitgeist
, chief,’ Joe quipped serenely. ‘We don’t want them to get bullied in the playground, now, do we?’

‘I suppose not. Anyway, what about this Alethia?’

‘PRs,’ grunted Joe. ‘What a name, then! They really understand irony, don’t they?’

‘Yeah,’ Carlyle agreed. ‘Apate would have been a better choice.’

‘Because he is?’ Joe asked, happy to play along.

‘
She
was,’ said Carlyle pointedly, ‘the goddess of deceit.’

‘Ho-ho, very good. Anyway, as well as being incapable of irony, PRs also don’t know how to hide their light under a bushel. In present circumstances, this is a very good thing. It means we are making good progress in building up a picture of the victim.’

‘We are?’

Joe laughed. ‘Oh, yes. Blake’s picture and a short bio were prominent on his company’s website.’

‘I saw that.’

‘And he’s also on Facebook.’

‘Why am I not surprised?’ Carlyle grunted. ‘And what does that peerless source of information tell us?’

‘In a nutshell?’ Joe grinned.

‘Yes, please, Sergeant,’ Carlyle nodded, hoping for something good. ‘In a fucking nutshell.’

‘Well, he’s a “spurmo”. Or, at least, he wants us to think he’s a spurmo.’

‘A what?’

‘Spurmos,’ Joe intoned, ‘are straight, proud, unmarried men over thirty.’

Carlyle yawned as he was introduced to yet another tedious media fabrication. ‘So that’s like a metrosexual?’

‘Maybe. Kind of. Perhaps. I have no idea.’

‘As opposed to a retrosexual,’ Carlyle smirked, ‘who hasn’t had any in years.’

‘Yes, well … we’ll leave your domestic problems out of this, shall we?’ Joe laughed. ‘It’s not always
all
about you, you know. If you were a bit more culturally literate, you would know that the spurmo god is George Clooney.’

‘OK,’ Carlyle reluctantly tried to get a bit more serious, ‘so straight and proud doesn’t seem to suggest a gay angle to this killing.’

Joe made a face. ‘He could have been in denial. Reluctant to come out of the closet? Maybe the whole spurmo thing was a front.’

‘Come on, no one is in the closet these days. Look at Saxonby’s mum.’

‘Yeah,’ Joe sniggered. Sergeant Chris Saxonby at the Savile Row police station had become an instant celebrity in the Met after his mother, seventy-one-year-old Agnes O’Halloran, had crossed over to the pink side, leaving his father – her husband of forty-five years – for a sixty-seven-year-old girlfriend. The shock of his parents new domestic arrangements almost killed poor Saxonby. He went off on sick leave for almost a year, before being granted early retirement on compassionate grounds. Even then, his leaving do had been held in the gayest gay pub in Soho.

‘Poor sod,’ Carlyle reflected, with feeling.

‘Worse things happen at sea,’ muttered Joe. ‘But, coming back to our Mr Blake, you shouldn’t be so binary in your thinking.’

‘Why not?’ Carlyle asked.

‘Because some people will fuck anything,’ said Joe philosophically.

‘Charming.’

‘I know.’

‘Still, it’s not looking too good for your theory.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Joe, reluctant to give up on his thesis so easily. ‘Maybe he was indulging his gay side, his spurmo side then reasserted itself, and there was a falling out. Maybe it was, like the paper says, a sex game that went a bit … wrong.’

‘That wouldn’t really sit alongside the note, though, would it?’

‘No …’ Joe pondered that for a second, ‘although that could just be something to throw us off the scent. A distraction?’

‘It suggests premeditation rather than a crime of passion.’

‘Not necessarily. Maybe the killer was a quick thinker.’

‘I don’t know,’ Carlyle was shaking his head. ‘It’s all guesswork. What else does Facebook tell us?’

‘Blake is basically a posh boy who never grew up. He’s pushing fifty, but acting like he’s twenty-five. He likes skiing, Kate Nash and mojitos …’

‘Who’s Kate Nash?’

Joe rolled his eyes to the heavens. ‘Please try and keep up, old man. She’s a singer-songwriter who was flavour of the month – or flavour of the nanosecond – a year or so ago.’

‘Never heard of her,’ said Carlyle, who couldn’t have named any female singer since Kate Bush.

‘I just know the name,’ said Joe. ‘The kids have got one of her CDs, I think, but I’ve never heard any of her stuff myself. Having said that, she’s probably already made more than you or I will earn in our lifetimes … combined.’

Carlyle grunted. He hated all the irrelevant crap from victims’ lives that passed before him in the course of an investigation. The way that people managed to waste time never ceased to amaze him. In the station, they had banned Facebook because too many staff were spending too much time on it, thus sucking up all of the station’s bandwidth. On two occasions, the computer network had crashed completely. That was presumably due to the support staff, or at least he hoped so. Wasn’t Facebook old-hat now, anyway? Helen, who saw herself as the most socially and technologically literate member of their family, had set up an account but lost interest after about a week. Carlyle was pleased with that, almost as pleased as he was with himself for never having signed up in the first place. He had enough problems with real life, so creating a virtual one would seem madness. The whole thing was bloody dangerous – one of their friends was now getting divorced because her husband had run off with some girl he had met online.

Carlyle stood up, pulled out his wallet and handed over a fiver to Marcello. He waited for the change, and then dropped it in the tips tin. ‘OK,’ he said, turning back to Joe. ‘We’re making some progress. Let’s get over to Blake’s flat.’

‘Not possible.’ Joe shook his head. ‘By the time we got there, we’d have to come straight back again.’

Carlyle made a face. ‘Why?’

‘For the press conference.’

Carlyle gave him a dirty look. ‘What fucking press conference?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Joe’s eyes sparkled as he also got to his feet, and spread his arms wide. ‘Why do you think I’m looking so smart today?’

Carlyle looked his colleague up and down for a second time. Belatedly he noticed that Joe’s usual outfit – a grubby jeans and T-shirt combo – had been replaced by his basic courtroom attire: a dark-grey Marks & Spencer suit, crumpled white shirt and a maroon tie.

Buttoning up his jacket, Joe made a show of looking his boss up and down, too. ‘Not a match on the Paul Smith, of course. That is quality.’

Damn right
, Carlyle thought. Glancing at his reflection in the window, he gave a nod of approval. His own suit was a very nice navy, three-button, single-breasted Paul Smith number that he had acquired a few years ago for seventy-five quid from the Oxfam shop just down the road, on Drury Lane. The one item in his wardrobe that he looked after carefully, it was still in reasonable nick. Given the turn of events, he was glad he hadn’t gone with his alternative outfit of The Clash T-shirt and jeans. If you looked carefully, you could see that the Paul Smith was a bit worn in places, but it was still several notches above the rest of his wardrobe, fitting in well with the Met Comissioner’s new ‘anti-scruffy’ campaign.

‘You should have shaved,’ Joe observed.

‘You should have shaved better,’ Carlyle deadpanned in response.

Joe grinned. ‘What about a tie?’

‘Don’t push your luck,’ Carlyle growled. He then closed his eyes. ‘Why do we need a press conference?’

‘Because Simpson says so.’

Superintendent Carole Simpson was their boss. She was based at Paddington Green Police Station, appearing in Charing Cross when a problem – or an opportunity – presented itself. A woman in a hurry, she was five or six years younger than Carlyle and, unlike him, could still realistically eye another three – or even four – rungs of the career ladder before her time was up.

Carlyle had known Simpson for almost ten years now. Apparently untroubled by any ‘history’, she had arrived on the scene not long after his own move to Charing Cross. She was, he had to admit, a hell of an operator. Political to her fingertips, she only ever looked upwards, and she had taken to what was essentially a management role like a duck to water. She could be charming too – if you were a man of a certain age (i.e. ten to fifteen years older than her) and she wanted something from you.

But Superintendent Carole Simpson rarely wanted anything from Inspector John Carlyle. In fact, they had an uncomfortable, difficult relationship. She was frustrated by what she saw as his stubborn refusal to play the game, and his inability to hide his feelings towards her. In turn, he hated that sense of being co-opted on to her mission for personal glory.

Simpson, in fact, left Carlyle cold. Somehow, the collective good always seemed to be neatly aligned with the interests of the superintendent. He found her approach to the job completely introverted, indeed almost demented: she was far too busy climbing the greasy pole to worry about anything else. As far as he could see, Simpson combined utter selfishness with the self-awareness of a goldfish. Either way, Carlyle eyed her with a mixture of extreme distrust and antipathy. However, he had to be professional and, with discipline and concentration, he could just about tolerate her so long as their paths did not cross too often. Whenever they did coincide, he always felt as if he was getting too close to speaking his mind in a way that would fatally undermine any hope of maintaining even the most perfunctory of working relationships.