Then We Die (30 page)

‘Now?’

‘No. Let’s leave her be for tonight. I’ll speak to her tomorrow, and then we’ll go to the school.’

Helen stepped over and gave him a hug. ‘Okay.’

‘These things happen. We’ll get it sorted out.’

‘This could kill her chances of an award.’ Helen sounded stressed.

Don
’
t I know it
, thought Carlyle bitterly. After struggling for several years to meet the costs of Alice’s private school, they had been hoping that she could finally win a scholarship. ‘Let’s worry about that later.’ He took his wife’s face in his hands and gave her a kiss on the lips. ‘Don’t raise it as an issue at the meeting, though.’ Before she could protest, he continued, ‘I will speak with her and then we will decide what we’re going to say.’

‘You mean how much grovelling we’re going to do?’

‘Yeah,’ he laughed, ‘exactly.’

‘The stupid thing is,’ Helen wiped her eyes, ‘it’s not even her dope.’ She tried to laugh but couldn’t quite manage it.

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, it’s not like she’s using it herself. At least I’m fairly sure that she’s not. It’s not even like she’s ever tried smoking a cigarette.’

‘As far as we know,’ Carlyle pointed out.

‘As far as we know,’ Helen reluctantly agreed. ‘But the only time she could have done anything like that is when she was with that bloody Stuart.’

‘You were the one who said he was a nice boy.’

She gave him a punch on the arm for being such a smug bastard.

‘I guess young Stuart won’t be coming round to dinner until this is all sorted out, then?’

Helen gave him a sheepish look. ‘I think dinner is off for the foreseeable future. I spoke to his mother . . .’

Uh
,
oh
, Carlyle thought.

‘The stupid bitch wouldn’t have anything to do with it,’ Helen told him. ‘She just didn’t want to know.’

Carlyle’s heart sank. ‘What did you say to her?’

‘I told her that Alice had been caught with her son’s dope and had been suspended from school.’

‘But you don’t know that it was his dope.’

‘Where else could she have got it from?’

Carlyle closed his eyes and began rubbing his temples.

‘To listen to Julie Wark, you’d think Stuart was training for the priesthood.’ Helen adopted a whiny, girly voice. ‘ “My son wouldn’t do that kind of thing. He doesn’t know anything about drugs.” ’

‘I’m going to run a bath,’ said Carlyle. ‘Let me talk to Alice in the morning, then we can worry about what to say to the school.
Then
we can worry about Mrs Wark.’

By the time he finished his bath, Helen was sitting in bed, doing a Sudoku puzzle in the evening paper. He slipped under the duvet and gave her a kiss on the cheek.

‘I went to see my mother,’ he told her. ‘She only reckons she’s got a new boyfriend.’

‘Bloody hell, that was quick!’ Helen tentatively wrote a number in one of the boxes.

‘She’s driving me round the bend.’

His wife smiled at him over her reading glasses. ‘That’s what mothers do. Who is he?’

‘Who?’

‘The boyfriend.’

Carlyle stretched out. ‘Dunno.’

‘What?’ Helen gave him a gentle thwack with the paper. ‘Did you even ask?’

‘No.’

‘For God’s sake, John,’ she sighed. ‘Sometimes you are just so clueless it’s not true.’

‘Dad’ll be beside himself.’

‘He should have thought about that before he shagged the woman next door.’

‘That was thirty years ago! Jesus.’

Helen tossed the paper onto the floor and put her pen on the bedside table. ‘Well, they’re having to deal with it now.’

‘I suppose so.’

She carefully removed her glasses and placed them next to the pen. ‘I wonder what Lorna’s new man is like?’

‘I don’t want to bloody know,’ Carlyle said grumpily.

‘Come on,’ she said kindly, ‘
you
have to be grown up about this.’

I don
’
t know about that
, Carlyle thought.

‘Anyway,’ said Helen, switching out the light, ‘if your mother’s happy, that’s got to be a good thing.’

‘But what about my dad?’

‘Well, we’ll just have to find someone for him, too.’

Alice slid into the back booth at Il Buffone and gave Carlyle a cheeky grin. ‘So is this me getting a monster bollocking?’

Marcello, hovering in front of the Gaggia coffee machine, laughed out loud.

God give me strength
, Carlyle thought. Glancing at the AC Milan team on the wall above Alice’s head, searching for inspiration, he was disappointed to see that the new poster was already grubby and torn. Someone had even scribbled over Fabio Capello’s face.

‘I know,’ said Marcello, arriving at the table with a double macchiato for Carlyle and a hot chocolate for Alice. He gestured at the poster with his chin. ‘It’s a bloody shame.’

‘I’ll speak to Alison,’ Carlyle replied, ‘see if she can get a new one.’

‘Who’s Alison?’ Alice asked.

‘Sergeant Roche. She’s working with me at the station.’

‘Is she Joe’s replacement?’

Carlyle looked at Marcello, who just shrugged. ‘Yes.’

Alice bent down and took a slurp of her hot chocolate. ‘It must be a real bummer, getting shot like that.’

Carlyle was stunned by her apparent insouciance.

‘What would you like to eat?’ Marcello said quickly.

‘I’ll have some toast with honey, please, Marcello,’ she said brightly.

‘The usual,’ said Carlyle.

‘Coming right up.’ Marcello shuffled back behind the counter.

‘So,’ said Alice, taking another sip from her glass, ‘let’s get it over with.’

‘Don’t give me that attitude,’ Carlyle growled. He lifted the demitasse to his lips and drained the coffee in one. ‘Just tell me what happened.’

‘It was a fair cop,’ Alice sniggered.

‘I know that,’ Carlyle grinned, ‘but where did the dope come from?’

‘It wasn’t mine,’ she said hastily, stirring the remains of her hot chocolate with a spoon. ‘I don’t
do
drugs.’

‘Glad to hear it,’ Carlyle observed testily.

‘I was just holding it for someone.’

‘Who?’ he asked a bit too eagerly. ‘Stuart?’

‘No,’ she frowned. ‘It’s got nothing to do with him.’

‘Well, you’d better explain that to your mother. She’s got him firmly in her sights.’

‘She should mind her own bloody business!’ Alice complained.

‘She’s your mother,’ Carlyle responded, ‘so this
is
her business. Mine too.’

All he got by way of reply was a pout. As the silence started to lengthen, Marcello appeared with Alice’s toast and a huge raisin Danish for Carlyle, along with a second macchiato. For a couple of minutes, they focused on eating.

‘You know,’ said Carlyle, after swallowing the last of his pastry, ‘this is a serious business.’

Munching her toast, Alice eyed him doubtfully.

Carlyle grinned. ‘I have to go and see the bloody Headmaster tomorrow!’

‘Really?’ Alice giggled, propelling a mouthful of crumbs across the table.

‘It’s the first time I’ve been called in to see the Head since . . . oh, I dunno, something like 1979.’ He gave her a wink. ‘I was busted for drugs, too.’

Alice’s eyes grew wide. ‘Really?’

‘ ’Fraid so,’ Carlyle said. ‘I was a bit older than you, but not much. I got done for selling half a gram of speed to Kenny Morris from 5C.’ Carlyle tutted in mock amusement. ‘I was suspended for a fortnight.’

‘Wow!’

Carlyle shook his head at the memory. ‘And then the little bastard never paid me.’

‘Ha!’

He leaned over and kissed his daughter on the forehead. ‘There’s nothing new under the sun, sweetheart.’ While that last statement may well have been true, the rest of his story was a complete fabrication. The young Carlyle had never been a playground dope dealer. Kenny Morris did exist though; he had had his nose broken and his head held down a flushing toilet after stealing a tenner from Carlyle’s school bag. After the subsequent investigation, Carlyle was sent home for a week.

‘You did drugs?’

‘A little – for a while. Speed mainly. Dope wasn’t my thing.’

‘And Mum?’

‘Not as far as I know.’

‘Did you like it?’

Carlyle shrugged. ‘Speed was okay. It wasn’t that big a deal. It’s like most things, you grow out of it.’

Alice finished her toast. ‘I don’t do drugs.’

‘So where did the cannabis come from?’

‘Skunk.’

‘What?’

‘It was skunk.’

‘Whatever,’ Carlyle persisted, ‘where did it come from?’

Alice gave him a long hard look. In that moment, she looked so like her mother that he found it impossible not to smile.

‘Patricia Fine,’ she said finally.

Carlyle affected insouciance. ‘Who’s she?’

Alice sighed. ‘She’s two years above me. I just did it as a favour.’

‘Why did she want you to look after it for her?’

‘I don’t know,’ Alice hissed. ‘Stop being such a bloody policeman.’ She tried to slide out of the booth, but Carlyle put a hand on her arm.

‘Okay, okay,’ he said, ‘no more questions. I will go and take my punishment from the Headmaster.
And
I’ll get your mother to apologize to Stuart and his mum.’

‘I wouldn’t worry about that,’ Alice told him. ‘His mum can be a bit stuck-up. Stuart thought it was funny that they’d been arguing about it.’

‘Anyway,’ Carlyle said wearily, ‘I’ll get it sorted. Just don’t do anything like this again.’

Following all the domestic dramas, it was a blessed relief to get back to the station. After arriving at Charing Cross, Carlyle spent a happy hour reading the newspaper and surfing the internet for football gossip and other such chat. He was on his second cup of coffee by the time Roche arrived, grim-faced.

‘What’s the matter?’ Carlyle asked.

‘Nothing,’ she replied unconvincingly.

Suit yourself
, Carlyle thought. ‘I need to speak to Ronan. What’s he up to this morning?’

‘No idea,’ she said sharply, before stalking off in the direction of the coffee machine.

‘I’ll have an espresso,’ Carlyle shouted after her.

‘Get it yourself,’ was the terse reply.

Okay
, he shrugged,
I will
. Putting on the cheeriest expression he could manage, Carlyle followed her across the room. When he was halfway there, he stopped and watched in amusement as she jabbed a succession of buttons, then gave the machine a good slap.

‘For fuck’s sake!’ She gave the machine another slap, then a kick for good measure. As he reached her side, Carlyle saw the
Out of Order
notice flash across the small display screen.

‘Come on,’ he said, ‘let’s go out somewhere. That stuff’s shit anyway.’

Sitting in Starbucks on St Martin’s Lane, Carlyle sipped a double espresso and was happy to watch the world go by. He ignored his colleague as she gloomily drank her latte and picked at an orange and lemon muffin. Across the road, he noticed a pretty girl walk into the Garden Hotel and wondered what had happened to Sylvia Swain. The Canadian journalist appeared to have vanished off the face of the earth: there was no record of her having left the country, and a phone call to her editor had simply elicited a gruff response that she was ‘on assignment and not contactable’.
Fucking Canadians
, Carlyle thought.
What a Mickey Mouse country
. However, he realized that it wasn’t worth starting an international row to try and track her down. What with his confrontation with the Israeli Ambassador, he was doing enough for the UK’s international relations already.

Swain, whoever she was, was a minor player in this little drama. The inspector would be perfectly happy if she never resurfaced.

‘The fucking bastard!’

Carlyle was shaken out of his thoughts by Roche’s sudden outburst.

‘Pardon?’

‘The bastard was shagging his sister-in-law.’

Carlyle frowned. Had he missed something? What the hell was she talking about?

She looked at him like he was terminally stupid. ‘DI fucking Ronan. I caught him fucking his bastard sister-in-law – in our bed.’

Ronan
, Carlyle thought,
you dirty dog
. Returning his gaze to the window, he tried not to grin and said nothing.

‘He’s been banging her for months, apparently. The little bitch is only nineteen.’

‘I see,’ was all Carlyle could think of by way of reply.

‘I could have killed the little shit.’

‘But you didn’t?’

‘What?’ Roche gave him a funny look. ‘No, no.’ She laughed. ‘I did put the P30 to his head, though.’

‘A measured response,’ Carlyle acknowledged. He casually wondered if brandishing a Heckler & Koch P30 in front of his parents might help bring them to their senses. Somehow, he doubted it.

‘His skinny little girlfriend pissed herself when I flicked the safety.’

‘Literally?’

‘Yeah.’ Roche was grinning widely now.

And they send
me
to the shrink
, Carlyle thought to himself.

‘I thought Dave was going to shit himself.’

‘David,’ Carlyle corrected her.

‘What?’

‘Nothing. Do you need some time off?’

‘Nah.’ She shook her head. ‘I’ve already moved out.’

‘Okay.’

‘I’m staying with a friend until I find somewhere permanent. In the meantime, I just want to get on with things.’

‘Very sensible.’

‘I’m not the kind to mope about.’

‘Good,’ Carlyle smiled. He realized that he was beginning to really like Alison Roche. She was shaping up to be a worthy successor to Joe Szyszkowski. Just as long as he never gave her cause to pull a gun on him. Draining the final drops from his cup, he stood up. ‘Come on.’

Roche grabbed her bag and got to her feet. ‘Where are we going?’

‘You’ll see.’

Hilary Waxman gritted her teeth and forced something approaching a smile onto her lips.

‘Inspector . . .’

‘Carlyle.’

‘Inspector Carlyle, this is harassment. I have already lodged an official protest with the Foreign Office and I will be pressing them to take this up with your superiors at the earliest opportunity.’