London Calling (33 page)

‘What kind of law?’ he asked, tensing slightly.

‘Property. We mainly help investors buying and selling commercial property in London.’

How boring,
thought Carlyle, suppressing a smile. ‘Isn’t that quite tough at the moment?’ he asked.

‘It’s not as easy as it was, but at least my clients still have some cash. Thank God for dumb Arab money.’

‘Dumb?’

‘That’s the stereotype, that they always get suckered into paying tourist prices. In reality, they’re very smart; very smart indeed. They tend not to overpay and they now own large chunks of London lock, stock and barrel.’

Carlyle could not care less about that, one way or another. What he needed now was to get this conversation back on track. ‘I’ll need the precise dates of your business trips.’

‘Of course. Call me at my office in the morning and I can give you a full list.’

‘I’ll do that.’ Carlyle slipped the card into his jacket pocket.
Enough of the preliminaries,
he thought. ‘Tell me about Robert Ashton.’

This time she kept her eyes directly on him, as she took a large mouthful of wine. ‘What exactly do you want to know?’

‘Just let me hear your version of it.’

‘Well,’ she put her glass down on the floor, ‘I assume you know that Robert was my boyfriend at Cambridge.’

Carlyle said nothing.

‘We had been going out for a couple of years before he killed himself.’ She said it quietly but calmly, without any emotion in her voice.

Very controlled
, thought Carlyle,
but, then again, it’s been a long while.

‘We were going to get married.’ She snatched up the glass and took another slug of wine.

Fuck!
Carlyle thought.
It’s soap-opera time.

‘I was pregnant.’

Fuck! Fuck!
He quickly scanned the room. There were no photographs. No sign of any children. No sign of any family at all.

‘It was not a good time.’

‘I can imagine,’ said Carlyle gently. The reality was that he couldn’t begin to imagine, but what else could he say? He watched her drain her glass and fill it up immediately with the remainder of the bottle.
Keep on drinking
, he thought,
the more the better.
He waited to let her take another sip.

‘Why did he kill himself?’

A look of genuine surprise crossed her face. ‘Don’t you know by now?’ She put her glass back on the floor, next to the now-empty bottle. ‘I thought that’s why you were here.’

Me? I don’t have a clue
, he thought. ‘I want to hear it in your own words.’

‘They killed him.’

‘Who?’

‘The Merrion Club.’

Here we go
, thought Carlyle. He placed his coffee cup carefully on the arm of the sofa, trying not to look too keen to hear her story. ‘How?’

Suddenly, Susy Ahl looked quite pale, as if she was going to be violently sick. ‘Excuse me a minute,’ she said, standing up. ‘I just need to use the bathroom.’

As his hostess went up the stairs, Carlyle counted to five and quickly slipped into the kitchen. A quick look around showed it to be cramped and unremarkable, not much bigger than his own kitchen in Winter Garden House. The knife that Ahl had been brandishing when he arrived was now slotted in a glass and metal knife block, alongside four others. The brand on the blade read
‘evolution’,
which was different from the ones that they had found at the murder scenes. A quick look through various drawers didn’t offer up anything else of interest.
Face it
, he thought,
if she’s smart enough to get this far, she’s not going to make it that easy for me
. He stepped in front of half a dozen photographs stuck to the fridge door. Curiously, only one of them included Susy Ahl herself – Ahl from maybe ten or so years ago, posing in front of a pyramid alongside a young boy. Was that her son? Maybe, but it was impossible to tell.

The toilet flushed upstairs. Carlyle quickly retreated to the sofa. Less than a minute later, Susy Ahl was back in the armchair in front of him, looking more composed now. ‘So …where were we?’

‘You were explaining Robert Ashton’s involvement with the Merrion Club.’

‘Ah, yes,’ she said, trying to inject a little levity into her tone. ‘Robert, he was a brilliant student. A lovely, gentle boy but a little shy.’

Carlyle said nothing. He looked her directly in the eye, but didn’t move a muscle. It was now or never.

She picked up her wine glass, but didn’t drink from it. ‘We took a first-year philosophy class together. I had to almost force him out on our first date. If I’d waited for him to make the first move, it never would have happened.’

For a nanosecond, he felt acutely jealous of Robert Ashton. No girl had ever forced Carlyle out on a date. He’d literally had to beg Helen to go to the cinema with him.

‘He lacked self-confidence,’ Ahl continued, ‘which at Cambridge was a very bad thing. I suppose it still is. You don’t get very far unless you think you’re God’s gift to the entire universe, and are not afraid to let everyone know it.’ She finally took another sip. ‘But they took him under their wing.’ A bigger sip this time. ‘I don’t know how it started, but he managed to become friends with a couple of them, Xavier Carlton in particular. He wasn’t a member of their club, but they kind of adopted him.’ This time she drained the last of the wine in one gulp. ‘For a while that seemed like a good thing. It boosted his confidence. He became less shy, but without becoming the kind of stereotypically smug little git which Cambridge is far too full of.’ She lifted the glass to her lips again, not seeming to realise that it was empty. ‘Then they destroyed him.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It was the end of the academic year in which Xavier and the others were graduating. They were going out in style with the party to end all parties, a monster binge lasting days. At the end of it, they were all off their heads on all kinds of drink and drugs … and they raped him.’

Looking at her sitting there with eyes now blazing, Carlyle tried to process what she had just told him and quickly put the pieces together. She was fast losing her composure, so he knew that he would only get away with a few more questions. There was a clock on the mantelpiece, and he watched the second hand count off a minute before he spoke again. ‘Who raped him? Xavier?’

‘All of them. They held him down and took turns. It was brutal. Xavier Carlton was the most vicious, apparently. He did the most damage. Robert was half-dead when I found him.’

‘Why did they do that to him?’

‘I don’t know. Because they could, I suppose. For fun, even? I spent a lot of time afterwards wondering whether it was already planned or just a spur-of-the-moment thing.’

‘Does that matter,’ asked Carlyle, ‘as far as you’re concerned?’

‘No,’ she said firmly.

‘Did you go to the police?’

‘When we got to the hospital, one of the nurses called the police. Robert was in such a terrible state, one of the doctors insisted that they got involved. After an hour or so, a couple of young constables arrived. They were even younger than us, and they treated it just like it was a joke. One of them whispered something about unsafe sex, then the other one got the giggles so badly he had to leave the room.’

Sounds about par for the course
, thought Carlyle.

‘Not that Robert would have made a complaint anyway. Under the circumstances, who would?’

‘No.’

‘I can understand his reasoning,’ she said. You’re not going to go up against guys like those. You’re not going to hold up your hand and admit to anyone that it happened. Everyone would assume – like those policemen at the hospital did – that you let it happen, even if you couldn’t have fought them off. They were leaving Cambridge, anyway, but
he
had to go back. And he did go back. I was very proud of him for that.’

‘Yes.’

‘I was proud of us for sticking together.’

‘I can understand.’

She looked as if she was desperate for another drink, but she kept going. ‘We had a quiet summer and put it behind us – or so I thought. When we returned in September, Robert had gone back into his shell, somewhat. He was a bit more clingy, but it wasn’t all that different to how he’d been before hooking up with those guys in the first place.’

Carlyle nodded to signal that he was keeping up.

‘I felt that he must be getting over it. He was attending all his classes, enjoying his studies. And we started having sex again.’

Carlyle blushed slightly. ‘Yes?’

‘Yes,’ she said, almost defiantly. ‘It wasn’t the full-on, greedy, needy fucking of the early days, but that goes anyway, doesn’t it?’

‘Er …’ Carlyle’s brain had temporarily stopped sending signals to his mouth, which remained stuck, immobile, in a slightly open position.

‘I always had to take the lead, and it took us about four or five months, but he was able to perform again. At least he made the effort, and we were getting back to something like you might call a normal relationship. Or so I thought. And then I found out that I was pregnant, during the January …’

She suddenly stopped.

Carlyle managed to re-establish lines of communications between his brain and his vocal cords, but he still couldn’t bring himself to ask about the kid.

‘So … when Robert dies …?’

She slowly met his gaze. ‘So, when he threw himself off that balcony, it was a hell of a shock, yes.’ She put her empty wine glass back on the floor and stood up.

‘Did you make another complaint after his death?’ Carlyle asked, trying to move the narrative along.

‘I made as much fuss as I could, but I was in a bit of a state.’

‘Not surprising.’

‘And then I thought to hell with it. One morning, I just got up, packed my bag and left Cambridge. It took me a while to get my act together, but the baby helped. After our son was born, I was able to move forward. Eventually, I went back to university.’

‘To Cambridge?’

‘No, I couldn’t face going back there, so I ended up studying Law at UCL. Being in London was a lot easier, and I was able to get on with my life.’

‘And now?’

‘And now,’ she smiled, ‘I have a very boring life.’

‘And your son?’ Carlyle asked casually.

‘Travelling.’ She eyed him carefully.

‘Where?’

She smiled. ‘Right this moment, I’m not exactly sure. Somewhere in Thailand, I expect.’

Another Trustafarian waster, no doubt
, Carlyle thought. He changed tack. ‘Do you have any photos of Robert?’

‘Just the one. I keep it upstairs in my bedroom.’

‘Can I see it?’

‘Of course.’

What she handed him a couple of minutes later was a slightly faded photograph in a simple oak frame. It showed a younger, slimmer Susy Ahl sitting outside a café with Robert Ashton, his pretty-boy good looks preserved there for all time. She had one arm round his shoulders and they were laughing in a way that didn’t look at all posed for the camera. It was clearly not the same photograph that had been left beside Nicholas Hogarth’s corpse.

‘That was the Easter before it all happened,’ she explained, as Carlyle handed the picture back to her. ‘We took a holiday in France, near Lake Annecy. It was incredibly beautiful and serene – the Venice of the Alps and all that. We had the most perfect time.’ She gave him a fleeting, fragile smile. ‘It was probably the happiest moment of my life, but I suppose you don’t realise things like that ’til much later, do you?’

‘No.’ Carlyle left her reflection on the transient nature of happiness hanging in the air for a few seconds. Now it was time for the sharp end of the conversation. ‘And, with what happened afterwards, the past is the past?’

‘The past is the past,’ she agreed.

‘And your son?’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘What about him?’

‘Does he know about what happened to his father?’

Susy Ahl blanched, but quickly composed herself. ‘He knows about Robert’s suicide, yes.’

‘And the rest?’

‘No,’ she said sharply, ‘absolutely not. What would be the point of that?’

‘I understand,’ Carlyle nodded.

‘That is the one thing I ask of you, Inspector,’ she said slowly. ‘He is a sensitive boy, like his father in many respects. I do not want him to have to face all that being dug up after all this time.’

‘I understand,’ Carlyle repeated.
Good luck
, he thought. ‘So what about the Merrion Club now?’ he asked, edging the conversation forward.

‘What about them?’

‘It’s the General Election tomorrow,’ Carlyle mused.

‘So?’

‘It must be galling to see Robert’s attackers having such power, sitting smugly there at the top of the tree.’

She grimaced. ‘Let them do what they like. The past always catches up with people, don’t you think?’

‘Do you want them dead?’ he asked quietly.

She stared at him quizzically. ‘Do you expect me to answer that?’

‘Yes,’ he said firmly, ‘I do.’

‘Am I a suspect?’

‘I should say so,’ Carlyle said gently. ‘You are connected to all the people involved, and you have a motive. A very good motive, if I may say so.’

‘I do?’ she said, almost coyly.

‘If revenge is a dish best served cold,’ said Carlyle, ‘it might appear that you are taking your meal out of the freezer.’

‘What a tortuous metaphor, Inspector.’

It struck Carlyle how people always addressed him as ‘Inspector’ when they were patronising him. He took a deep breath and vowed to rise above any slight. ‘Let me ask it another way,’ he continued. ‘Do you care that some of them are dead?’

‘No.’ She did not flinch from the question. ‘It really doesn’t make any difference to me.’

‘And if the others were to be killed?’

‘The same.
Inshallah
, as my Arab clients might say. It is the will of God.’

‘That is not an answer that encourages me to look elsewhere for suspects,’ he reproached her, as sternly as he could manage.

‘I guess you have to use your professional judgement,’ she sighed.

‘Yes, yes, I do.’