London Calling (38 page)

Lying about six feet away, his brother was also bound hand and foot, naked from the waist down. Edgar’s right buttock sported a nasty red burn about the size of a fifty-pence piece, clearly the result of William Murray’s casual deployment of the now lit cigar.

‘Help! Help! HELP!’ Edgar’s face turned crimson as he screamed with all his might. However, against the sound of Kylie Minogue thudding through the intervening wall from the party outside, it amounted to barely a squeak in his brother’s ears.

Xavier struggled to lift his head far enough from the floor to see Murray’s face. When his gaze reached the jagged neck of the bottle still clutched in Murray’s right hand, he felt his bladder spasm and a fearful warmth spread through the carpet beneath his groin. Scanning the boy’s face, he tried to make meaningful eye contact, while praying that someone else would finally wonder where they were and come to their aid.

‘What do you want?’ he gasped.

Murray stood between the two brothers, flushed, exultant, not flinching from Xavier’s gaze, but saying nothing. For a moment, the two men eyeballed each other, both ignoring the steady, heaving sobs of the soon-to-be prime minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Xavier realised that he had never really looked Murray up and down before. Now, on closer inspection, he realised that there really was nothing to the boy at all. Although he had been one of their inner circle, and a senior trusty, he was but one of dozens, if not hundreds, of similar helpers. If he were to leave tomorrow – and now, after this comical breakdown, he
would
be leaving tomorrow, if not sooner – there were plenty of others queuing up to take his place. All of them were young, bright, fiercely ambitious, and utterly disposable.

Utterly disposable.

Like a cheap razor. Or a tampon.

Xavier started laughing.

Maybe Murray had flipped simply because he was worried that he had already passed his sell-by date.

Maybe he’d just started partying too hard, too quickly. Maybe he had taken too much ecstasy and had suffered a brain meltdown. If that was the case, he certainly wouldn’t have been the first.

Maybe …

‘Oh my God!’ Looking deep into the boy’s eyes, Xavier suddenly realised what was going on. Struggling to breathe, his eyes misted up as he was transported back half a lifetime – to the true night of a lifetime.

Murray gave him a crooked smile.

‘Oh my God!’ Xavier repeated.

Murray took a contented puff on his cigar.

‘You!’ Xavier pulled ineffectually against his restraints. ‘It was you all along.’

Murray nodded.

Xavier let his forehead sink back to the floor: ‘Icarus, the boy who flew too close to the sun …’

‘Not a very original choice of name.’ Murray spoke quietly, flicking some ash on to the carpet, his words almost getting lost against the music. ‘Not
his
name, of course.’

‘Of course,’ Xavier nodded subconsciously.

Murray flicked some cigar ash towards Edgar, who had fallen silent. The shock had finally kicked in, and it looked as if he had passed out. Probably just as well, Xavier thought. Where the fuck was that useless fat bastard Trevor Miller? Probably out in the ballroom getting drunk and trying to grope one of the secretaries.

‘His name was Robert.’

‘Yes.’

‘The name of the man you killed was Robert Ashton.’

‘But—’

‘He was my father.’

Murray dropped to his knees and pulled Xavier’s head up by his hair, bringing the broken bottle neck close to his neck. For a few moments, the noise outside died down as Kylie’s singing gave way to another thumping dance track.

Out of nowhere, Xavier summoned some new reserves of spirit. ‘You’ll never get away with it!’ he hissed.

‘I don’t want to get away with it,’ Murray snarled. ‘I want everyone to know what you people did.’

‘It wasn’t me. I wasn’t even there,’ a voice snivelled. Edgar had obviously reawakened.

‘Yes, you were!’ Xavier retorted angrily. He wasn’t going to let this lunatic have the pleasure of watching either of the brothers grovel.

‘Only at the end,’ Edgar protested. ‘I didn’t—’

‘You didn’t fuck him,’ Xavier hissed. ‘Big deal, so what? You still got your rocks off. We all did.’ Craning his neck, he turned back to face Murray who had dropped the neck of the broken bottle on to the carpet and was now fumbling with a mobile phone.

Edgar grew even more agitated as Murray started filming the grotesque scene that he had staged.

Laughing, Murray gave him a sharp kick. ‘Keep it up,’ he jeered. ‘This will make for better viewing. You’ll be an internet sensation.’

Screaming like a stuck pig, Edgar obliged the crazed auteur. It struck Xavier that his brother looked like the victim in a splatter movie, which, in a sense, he was.

‘You don’t like it so much when the tables are turned, do you?’ Murray grinned, dancing about in front of them, as if he was in a trance.

To hell with it
, Xavier thought.
If I ever live through this, a bloody video will be the least of my worries
. Waiting until the camera was focused straight on him, he let rip. ‘You murdering bastard, I’m not ashamed of having buggered your old man.’ With a monumental effort, he adopted a leering grin. ‘We both enjoyed it at the time. And I have to say, William, your dad was a rather good shag.’

‘You total fucking bastards!’ Murray screamed, hurling the phone at Xavier’s head, but missing wildly. Tears poured down his face as he fumbled about on the carpet for the broken bottle. Grabbing it by the remaining neck, he rose slowly to his feet.

‘Now it’s your turn to die …’

The rest of his words were drowned out by a tidal wave of noise filling the room. To the soundtrack of The Prodigy’s ‘Omen’, the party’s election theme tune, Xavier watched open-mouthed as Trevor Miller slammed the door and launched himself through the air, taking Murray out with a tackle aimed at neck height. His head smashing against the wall, Murray collapsed to the floor, narrowly avoiding impaling himself on the jagged glass of the bottle still gripped in his hand.

Miller jumped up, kicking Murray’s weapon out of his grasp. He then crossed the room and locked the door. Taking a Swiss Army knife from his pocket, he hacked at the tape binding Xavier’s hands until he could pull them free. Leaving him to untie his own feet, he then moved on to Edgar.

Xavier winced as he pulled the tape from around his ankles, tugging away several follicles of hair in the process. Jumping up, he found his trousers and quickly pulled them on. Then he turned to watch Edgar, slowly struggling into his underwear with a glazed expression on his face.

‘Let’s get this sorted out,’ Xavier declared grimly.

Edgar did not respond.

Pulling on his shirt, Xavier shifted his gaze to Miller, who was now standing over the prostrate body of Murray. ‘Is he dead?’

Miller gave the body a firm kick, which managed to elicit a groan. ‘Sadly not.’

‘What shall we do with him?’ Xavier asked.

Miller shrugged. ‘Your call.’

Buttoning up his shirt, Xaxier stared Miller in the eye. ‘He cannot leave this room alive.’

After a moment’s reflection, Miller pulled aside the curtains covering most of the wall opposite the door. Behind them was a pair of sliding doors that gave access to a small balcony. Opening the doors, Miller stepped out on to the balcony itself, put his hands on the guard rail and peered over the edge. After checking that Murray was still immobile, Xavier headed over to do the same.

They were currently on the top floor, and the balcony overlooked a large atrium rising through the centre of the hotel. They were more than a hundred feet up, and only twenty feet below the atrium’s glass roof. This level of the hotel was deserted – all the neighbouring suites having been kept empty on security grounds.

After a few moments of silent contemplation, Miller turned to Xavier and grinned. ‘That’ll do nicely.’

Carlyle found his access to the Carlton brothers’ suite barred by Miller’s security men, who showed no interest in either his warrant card or any demands for them to step aside. With his adrenaline pumping, and in no mood for further argument or delay, he headed over to a nearby fire alarm and smashed the glass, setting off a hellish cacophony of alarms and bells.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’ One of the guards reached out to grab Carlyle by the throat.

Joe Szyszkowski rabbit-punched him on the back of his neck, then gave him a kick to the back of his left knee. ‘Consider yourself arrested, my friend.’ As the man sank to the carpet, Joe slapped on a pair of cuffs, and then gave him another kick for good measure.

‘Thank you,’ Carlyle smiled.

‘My pleasure,’ Joe replied cheerily.

As the bells continued to ring, people began leaving the ballroom, heading for the stairs as they evacuated the building.

The second guard looked from Joe to Carlyle, as if eyeing up which one of them to smack first.

Taking a step backwards, Joe pointed at a sign reading
Exit
. ‘It’s time for you to go.’

‘If you’re still here when I get back,’ Carlyle shouted over the noise, ‘you’ll be arrested for assault as well.’

Disgusted but impotent, the man shook his head and started for the stairs.

Carlyle jogged round a corner of the corridor just in time to see the door to the suite open and Edgar Carlton pop his head out. He looked very confused and didn’t seem to recognise the inspector. ‘What’s going on?’ he wailed, sounding as if he was about to burst into tears.

Lengthening his stride, Carlyle pushed his way through the door and on past the befuddled politician. ‘Just a false alarm,’ he smiled cheerily. ‘Nothing to worry about.’

Perspiration beading on his brow, a grim smile spread across Trevor Miller’s face as his eyes flicked between Carlyle and the sergeant. ‘Oh, look,’ he snarled, ‘it’s the fucking cavalry!’

The first thing Carlyle noticed in the room was the smell: a strange mixture of cigar smoke, piss and burning flesh. ‘Fuck me,’ he quipped, ‘this place smells worse than a kebab shop on Tottenham Court Road!’

Not for the first time in his life, he saw a joke fall flat. Carlyle didn’t even have time to laugh at his own gag before being rendered speechless by the scene in front of him.

‘Fuck me!’ Joe echoed from the doorway.

Miller stood on a balcony, holding a bruised and bloodied William Murray in a headlock. Up against the bulk of the ex-policeman, Murray seemed almost like a child. His eyes were glazed and he barely seemed conscious. Unable to put up any resistance, his face was turning red as the air was choked out of him.

‘What are you doing, Trevor?’

Miller automatically took a step backwards, thus propping Murray up against the balcony rail. ‘Just fuck off out of it,
Inspector
,’ he snarled.

Signalling for Joe to stay back, Carlyle took a careful step forward, then another. His mouth was dry and his heart was pounding. For the briefest moment, it was just like the old days, when he was speeding his tits off on the picket line. He felt giddy, almost euphoric.

‘What happened here?’ he asked gently. ‘What did he do, Trevor?’

‘He’s our man.’ As Miller eased his grip slightly, Murray started twitching.

‘I know,’ said Carlyle, edging towards the balcony. ‘That’s why we’re here.’ The pair of them were only ten or eleven feet away from him now, but Carlyle realised that he had no room for manoeuvre. ‘That’s why you have to hand him over to me.’

‘You haven’t learned very much over the years, have you?’ Miller looked past Carlyle, in the direction of the Carltons, who were both hovering in a corner.

‘What do you mean?’

‘What I mean is …’ Miller was in mid-sentence as Murray’s eyes opened wide and he started struggling. ‘Fuck!’ Miller started punching the aide in the face with his spare fist, eventually smashing his nose and showering them both with blood.

Jumping forward, Carlyle made a grab for Murray, but a brutal smack across the face from Miller stopped him in his tracks. As he staggered backwards, it felt as if he had been hit by a frying pan, and Carlyle was sure that the ringing in his head wasn’t just the fire alarm.

‘Boss?’ Joe asked, moving to Carlyle’s shoulder. In the distance, they could make out sirens. The police and the fire brigade would be here within minutes at most.

‘It’s OK.’ Carlyle straightened himself up, anger mixing with the agony. ‘I’m OK.’ Waiting for his head to clear, he eyed Miller and smiled. ‘That’s it, Trevor. Time to hand him over.’

A strangulated squeak emerged from Murray.

‘I don’t think so,’ Miller hissed, tightening his grip.

‘Trevor …’

‘Fuck off, Carlyle.’ Pulling Murray upwards and backwards, Miller flipped both of them over the guard rail.

For a split second, Carlyle stood there staring at the vacant space where the two men had been.

‘Shit!’ Rushing over to the rail, he peered down in time to see the two bodies hit the surface of what looked like a small swimming pool below. From the balcony, the splash sounded like a gentle ripple of applause.

Joe appeared at Carlyle’s side and looked down. ‘Ouch!’ he grinned. ‘That’s got to hurt.’

Carlyle turned quickly away and scanned the room. Both politicians had disappeared. On the carpet, amidst the broken glass, was a smouldering cigar. Stepping in from the balcony, he stamped it out with the toe of his shoe. As he did so, he caught sight of a light flashing under the sofa. Dropping to his knees, he pulled out an expensive-looking mobile phone, quickly dropping it in the pocket of his jacket before he stood up.

Joe was still peering over the rail. ‘Looks like there’s some kind of movement down there.’

‘Come on,’ Carlyle groaned, ‘let’s see if the fuckers can swim.’

Fighting their way past the stragglers on the stairs, it took the two policemen the best part of ten minutes to make it down to the basement. At least the alarms had stopped by the time that they reached the swimming pool. Finding the entrance locked, Carlyle pressed his ear to the door and listened. Other than the hum of the air-conditioning, there was nothing. Once, twice, three times he tried and failed to kick the door in. For a moment, he stood there catching his breath, trying to ignore the pain in his right foot and glaring at Joe, who was struggling to stifle a laugh. ‘You try it then, you fat bastard,’ Carlyle snapped, stepping away from the door.