Then We Die (6 page)

In the corridor, he walked straight into a large Asian bloke, six-foot-plus, with the over-developed torso of a bodybuilder. He had clearly been crying, and a flash of anger sparked in his eyes when he saw Carlyle.

‘You’re the bastard who got Joe killed!’

Before Carlyle could say or do anything, the guy took half a step backwards and unleashed a thunderbolt left hook that hit Carlyle squarely on the chin. For the second time that day, the inspector’s lights were well and truly extinguished.

Carlyle pushed away the smelling salts that Dr Taylor held under his nose.
I
’
m far too old for this
, he thought unhappily. Getting beaten up once was unfortunate – but twice in the same bloody day! His headache was now so bad that he could barely open his eyes under the harsh strip-lighting. Forcing himself to his feet, it took him a moment to realize that Simpson was still beside him in the corridor, while his assailant, staring defiantly into space as if he had nothing to do with any of this, was in handcuffs.

‘How did you manage that?’ Carlyle asked groggily, gesturing at the cuffs.

Simpson shrugged.

As the nausea passed, Taylor handed him a small bottle of Scottish spring mineral water and he took a large gulp. Screwing the lid back on the bottle, he turned again to Simpson. ‘Let him go.’

She gave him a frown. ‘There’s a van on the way to pick him up.’

Carlyle shook his head. ‘Stand them down.’

‘But—’

‘Let him go. It’s been an unbelievably shit day . . . for everyone.’ He gingerly felt his jaw. ‘It’s not a big deal. No one wants any more hassle. And he needs to help look after his sister and the kids.’

Sighing, Simpson did as he requested. After the cuffs were removed, the big guy glared at Carlyle before walking off slowly down the corridor without saying a word.

Carlyle watched him disappear round a corner.

‘Time to go home,’ he said.

‘Are you feeling okay?’ Taylor asked.

‘Yeah, fine.’ He turned to Simpson. ‘Let’s speak tomorrow. I need to go up to West End Central first, to give Chief Inspector French my statement, so I’ll swing over by Paddington after that.’

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Meantime, I’ll make sure all the necessary arrangements are being taken care of regarding the family.’

‘Thanks,’ said Carlyle, already turning away and heading off in search of an exit and some cold, fresh air.

He was vaguely aware of a phone vibrating somewhere in the bedroom.

‘Yes?’ Helen enquired. ‘Hold on.’ She bowled the phone underarm onto the duvet, where it landed next to his head. ‘It’s for you.’ It was an accusation rather than an observation.

You didn
’
t need to answer it
, he thought grumpily. Slowly, he opened his eyes to acknowledge another grey London morning. He looked at the alarm clock: 8.05 a.m. He had been asleep for barely two hours.

He picked up the phone. ‘Carlyle.’

‘Inspector, it’s Kevin Price from the station.’

Carlyle grunted. Price was the third desk sergeant they’d had working at Charing Cross police station in less than nine months. That kind of staff turnover was a real pain; it meant you never really got to know who you were dealing with. When Carlyle had first arrived at Charing Cross, Dave Prentice was the main man working the desk. He had been doing the job for ever, but once he’d retired, they couldn’t get anyone else to stay for more than two bloody minutes. All in all, Prentice had been a lazy so-and-so, but even Carlyle was beginning to miss him.

‘We’ve found a body.’

Fuck me
, Carlyle thought,
what is this? Wild West Week?
He pushed himself up into a sitting position. ‘Where?’

‘Are you still in bed?’ Price asked.

‘Where’s the fucking body?’ Carlyle said irritably, ignoring the question.

‘Lincoln’s Inn Fields,’ Price replied.

Lincoln’s Inn was one of the Inns of Court where barristers worked. The ‘fields’ referred to the park next door. ‘Maybe it’s a lawyer,’ the inspector quipped, ‘if we’re lucky.’

‘Huh?’

‘Never mind.’

‘They need you over there,’ Price persisted.

‘Okay.’ Carlyle jumped out of bed, scratching his balls with his free hand. He looked at Helen, who was in the middle of applying some lipstick, and realized that she was considering his naked form with something that seemed closer to amusement than admiration. ‘I’ll be there in ten minutes.’

The park was a short walk away from Carlyle’s flat in Covent Garden. After pulling on some jeans and a sweatshirt, he kissed his wife goodbye, grabbed his North Face Lightspeed jacket, and headed outside. Picking up a latte and an outsized raisin Danish from Marcello in Il Buffone, the tiny 1950s-style Italian café situated opposite his block of flats, he walked on down Macklin Street, eating his breakfast and wondering why he still couldn’t feel anything about Joe’s death. They had worked together for more than eight years. Standing in the middle of the roadway, he lifted his polystyrene coffee cup in a mock toast.

‘God bless you, Joe Szyszkowski,’ he roared, ‘you stupid bastard!’

A woman walking past gave him a concerned look.

Carlyle sucked down more coffee and walked on.

The chill wind helped bring him back to the land of the living. It was the kind of unpleasant, all too bloody common London day that made you fantasize about emigrating to Australia. Pulling up the hood on his jacket, he dropped into Parker Street, and then on to Kingsway. Waiting to cross the road, he attacked the remains of his pastry with gusto, relying on the trusty mix of sugar and caffeine to get him properly going.

London’s largest public square, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, wasn’t much of a park but it was the only green space near where he lived, and so Carlyle liked it well enough. Allegedly the inspiration for New York’s Central Park, it consisted merely of a couple of scruffy patches of grass, a decaying bandstand and some tennis courts. In the 1990s, a group of homeless people set up home there, leading the council to close it for the best part of a year. These days, the vagrants only appeared in ones and twos to sit on the park benches, congregating en masse only at dusk, when a mobile soup kitchen made its nightly appearance.

Tossing his breakfast rubbish in a bin, Carlyle entered by the north-west corner of the park just after eight-thirty. A couple of joggers were moving slowly around the path that followed the perimeter fence while a handful of workers went scurrying, heads down, to their nearby offices. A few familiar faces from the halfway house on Parker Street already occupied various benches. Otherwise, the space was almost deserted.

The small white tent set up by a tree at the far end, next to a small digger, showed him where he was going. A group of technicians were working behind a blue tape, while a uniform chatted to a gaunt-looking woman out walking her dog. Another day at the office beckoned. Carlyle’s bones ached with fatigue, and he felt a sudden keen desire for a second cup of coffee. Ignoring the craving, he thrust his hands into his pockets and marched on.

Approaching the blue and white police tape, he was stopped by a woman in her thirties. She was almost as tall as him, a tired-looking redhead enveloped in an outsize puffa jacket.

She gave him the once-over with her dull green eyes. ‘Inspector Carlyle?’

‘Yes,’ he admitted, without any enthusiasm.

She held out a hand. He shook it limply.

‘Alison Roche. They’ve sent me over from the Leyton station to stand in for Joseph Siz . . .’

‘Joe – Joe Szyszkowski.’

‘Yes.’ Roche blushed, gazing down at the grey mud under her feet. ‘How’s he doing?’

Carlyle looked at his own shoes sinking into the mush. ‘Didn’t make it. Heart attack.’

‘Oh – I’m sorry.’

Carlyle nodded towards the tent. ‘What have we got here?’

‘Man shot in the head.’

Carlyle let out a deep breath. ‘Have you spoken to the other people in the park yet?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’ Carlyle snapped, getting ready to take an instant dislike to Ms Roche.

‘Because all we’ve got back there is a skeleton. The man – or woman – has been dead for maybe fifty years.’

Fifty years? How could you leave a body in a park in the middle of London for fifty bloody years? Only if no one cared about the poor bugger who had died, for a start. Even then, wouldn’t some sodding dog have started digging up the bones?

This wasn’t a case; this was just paperwork. Carlyle’s interest level went straight down to zero. Mentally, he was already back in bed. ‘Who’s the pathologist?’

‘Phillips.’

Ah! Some good news at last
. He perked up imperceptibly.

‘Excellent,’ he said cheerlessly. ‘I’d better go and have a word with her.’

Susan Phillips worked out of Holborn police station on Lamb’s Conduit Street, less than ten minutes’ walk from the park. She had been a staff pathologist with the Met for the best part of twenty years. Slim, blonde, with a healthy glow and a cheery smile, she brought a smidgen of much-needed glamour to The Job. More to the point, she was quick, no-nonsense and dependable – just what Carlyle liked in a colleague. They had worked together many times and he was always pleased to see her present at a crime scene.

Carlyle strode away from Roche, stepped under the tape and walked over to the small white tent, which stood about eight foot tall and six foot wide, barely bigger than two large wardrobes placed back to back.

He stuck his head inside and clocked Phillips on her knees, holding a skull up to the light.

‘ “Alas, poor John Doe,” ’ he quipped.

She turned to face him and smiled. ‘ “Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment?” ’

Touché
, thought Carlyle. Having already exhausted his knowledge of the Bard, he stepped halfway inside the tent.

Phillips’ smile faded. ‘I’m sorry about Joe.’

Carlyle grunted.

‘He was a good guy.’

Not wanting to talk about it, Carlyle gestured towards the skull. ‘I hear that we’re dealing with ancient history. Do I really need to bother with this one?’

‘That’s up to you, good Inspector,’ Phillips replied evenly, sticking the index finger of her right hand into a perfectly circular hole in the back of the skull. ‘But I would say fairly conclusively that death here was not by natural causes. This guy was obviously shot in the back of the head.’

‘How do you know it’s a bloke?’

‘Fifty-fifty chance.’ Then, seeing his expression: ‘No, not really. I do this for a living, so I know it’s male. The skull has three points in determining gender – the ridges located above the eyes, the bone situated just below the ear, and the occiput, the bone located at the lower back of the skull.’ For the benefit of her colleague, Simpson pointed out each in turn. ‘The occiput has been badly damaged, but the bone below the ear is a muscle attachment site, more prominent in men and indicating greater physical strength.’

‘I see,’ said Carlyle, enjoying this quick reminder of why he’d never had any interest in O-level Biology at school.

Phillips nodded in the direction of the plaster over his eye. ‘How’s your head?’

‘It’s fine.’ Carlyle gestured towards the skull. ‘Better than his, anyway.’

‘He was found by some council workmen who were digging up this corner of the park to build a kiddies’ playground.’

Carlyle didn’t remember seeing any workmen hanging around outside. ‘Where are they now?’

‘Roche took their statements while she was waiting for you, and then she let them go home. One of them seemed quite upset.’

‘Upset?’ Carlyle scoffed. ‘It’s only the bloody skeleton of some poor sod who’s been dead for fifty years. What is there to get upset about?’

Phillips ignored his little outburst. ‘He may well have been buried here for
more
than fifty years,’ she observed.

Carlyle wished more than ever that he had stayed at home in bed. Why did Helen decide to answer his damn phone?

‘I need to get him back to the lab to do some proper tests,’ Phillips continued.

‘No need to go all trainspotter-ish on me,’ Carlyle grunted.

‘You are in
such
a good mood this morning,’ Phillips teased, bouncing the skull gently in her hand. ‘No wonder they call you the rudest cop in Westminster.’

‘Do they fuck,’ Carlyle retorted, not even stopping to consider who, in this instance, ‘they’ might be.

‘If you say so,’ Phillips teased. ‘Anyway, this guy could have been buried here for seventy or eighty years, maybe more.’

‘Excellent,’ Carlyle sighed. ‘Just what I need – a fucking historical murder mystery.’

‘It makes an interesting change,’ Phillips mused, ‘from teenagers knifing each other, or husbands trying to batter their wives.’

‘I don’t know about that.’

‘Come on, John,’ she chided. ‘Aren’t you even a little curious about how this guy got here? He must have an interesting story to tell.’

Her forced good humour was making him feel grumpier by the second. ‘I’m a copper,’ he complained, ‘not a sodding archaeologist.’

‘But still—’

‘I bet you love that show on the telly . . .’ He struggled to think of the name but couldn’t dredge it up from the back of his mind. Helen watched it sometimes; she would watch any old crap.

‘
Time Team
? I watch it now and again,’ Phillips admitted.

‘Gripping stuff,’ Carlyle said sarkily. ‘Anyway, I need to speak to those workers from the council.’

Getting to her feet, Phillips placed her hand on his forearm and said gently, ‘You should relax a bit. It’s not a big deal. What are they going to tell you that they didn’t already tell Roche? They came in, started digging up the grass – and found some bones.’

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ Carlyle held up a hand, finally conceding defeat. ‘Okay, Tony bloody Robinson, let me have the report when you’re done.’

‘Of course,’ Phillips smiled. ‘It may take a little while, though.’

‘No rush,’ said Carlyle, exiting the tent. ‘No rush at all.’

‘Hey, Marcello! Where have Trapattoni and Platini gone?’

Carlyle returned to Il Buffone just as the breakfast rush hour was coming to a close, allowing him and Alison Roche to grab the tatty booth at the back, next to the counter. Looking up, he realized that the crumbling poster of the 1984 Juventus scudetto winning squad had disappeared, leaving a lighter patch on the back wall. Torn and faded, curling at the edges and only held together with Sellotape, it had enjoyed pride of place in the café for as long as he could remember. Over the years, Marcello had tried to replace Juve on several occasions, most recently with the Italian World Cup winning team of 2006. Always, however, the protests of Carlyle and of a few other regulars who knew their football forced him to return the team of Trapattoni and Platini to their rightful place. A few moments spent contemplating their achievements were, to Carlyle’s way of thinking, always time well spent. Apart from anything else, that team would have beaten Marcello Lippi’s Azzurri hands down.