Acts of Violence (Inspector Carlyle) Read online

  James Craig has worked as a journalist and consultant for more than thirty years. He lives in Central London with his family. His previous Inspector Carlyle novels, London Calling; Never Apologise, Never Explain; Buckingham Palace Blues; The Circus; Then We Die; A Man of Sorrows; Shoot to Kill and Nobody’s Hero are also available from Constable.

  For more information visit www.james-craig.co.uk, or follow him on Twitter: @byjamescraig

  Praise for London Calling

  ‘A cracking read.’

  BBC Radio 4

  ‘Fast paced and very easy to get quickly lost in.’

  Lovereading.com

  Praise for Never Apologise, Never Explain

  ‘Pacy and entertaining.’

  The Times

  ‘Engaging, fast paced . . . a satisfying modern British crime novel.’

  Shots

  ‘Never Apologise, Never Explain is as close as you can get to the heartbeat of London. It may even cause palpitations when reading.’

  It’s A Crime! Reviews

  Also by James Craig

  Novels

  London Calling

  Never Apologise, Never Explain

  Buckingham Palace Blues

  The Circus

  Then We Die

  A Man of Sorrows

  Shoot to Kill

  Sins of the Fathers

  Nobody’s Hero

  Short Stories

  The Enemy Within

  What Dies Inside

  The Hand of God

  Acts of Violence

  James Craig

  Constable • London

  CONSTABLE

  First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Constable

  Copyright © James Craig, 2016

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978-1-47211-513-3

  Constable

  is an imprint of

  Little, Brown Book Group

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  An Hachette UK Company

  www.hachette.co.uk

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  For Catherine and Cate

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgements

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This is the tenth John Carlyle novel. Thanks for dragging it over the line go to: Michael Doggart, Krystyna Green, Clive Hebard and Joan Deitch.

  ONE

  Rush hour was over, but the relentless hum of traffic from the King’s Road – reassuring and irritating at the same time – never abated. From the direction of Brompton Oratory came the sound of angry horns, followed by the wail of a siren further in the distance – probably an ambulance heading in the direction of the Cromwell Hospital. Gazing up at the darkening sky, Michael Nicholson took a drag on his Rothmans King Size and wondered what exactly he was doing back in London. When he was growing up, the city had seemed impossibly alive and exciting; now, after almost a decade living in Shanghai, it seemed about as dynamic as Derby or Carlisle – and almost as alien.

  With a gentle nod of his head, Nicholson expelled the thought along with the smoke; he had never been given to introspection and his forties didn’t much seem like the time to start. Focusing his attention on the cigarette, he took a last drag, watching the end flare in the gloom before flicking the stub over the edge of the terrace and into the street below. Throwing back his head, he quaffed the gin and tonic he was holding in one hand, before wiping his mouth with the back of the other. It was his third gin of the night, so far, and he was beginning to feel pleasantly woozy. On average, he would get through six or seven gins, along with a bottle or two of wine over dinner, before falling into bed. It wasn’t so much that he was an alcoholic, more that he needed to self-medicate against the boredom.

  How long would he be stuck here?

  It was a question that was impossible to answer. Resisting the temptation to drop the empty glass into the street below, Nicholson watched one of the security team pass in front of the building. ‘One of Marvin Taylor’s finest,’ he hiccuped, as the man disappeared from view round the corner into the alleyway that led to the underground garage and the service entrance. ‘Trained killers, all of ’em.’ Stifling another hiccup, he tried to remember this particular guy’s name but it had gone. As far as he could see, each of the nine guys on Taylor’s crew were interchangeable – all in their early twenties, fresh-faced, with crew cuts and the pumped-up torsos of bodybuilders. God, they made him feel old, conscious of a steady decline when he should still be in his prime.

  Bastards.

  At least Marvin Taylor himself was a fair way down the same path towards decrepitude. A small, fifty-something black guy, Marvin liked to complain about his bad back. He looked as if he couldn’t fight his way out of a paper bag. His ‘boys’, however, were something else altogether.

  Taylor was an ex-policeman who ran his own security firm, promising ‘100 per cent professionalism and discretion’. Nicholson was less than impressed at their first meeting, but Taylor had been recommended by a former chum at Eton. Anyway, it wasn’t as if Nicholson had much to compare him with. After all, he didn’t go round hiring bodyguards every day of the week. And the testimonial from the pal, a rogue called Charlie Simmons, was genuine enough. Simmons was the kind of wheeler-dealer who made Nicholson look almost respectable by comparison. One particularly dodgy scheme left him on the wrong side of a bunch of Nigerian businessmen fearing for his life. In the end, Charlie had survived through a mixture of charm, cash stolen from his parents and Taylor-supplied muscle.

  When pitching his services, Taylor was careful to imply that all of his employees were ex-Special Forces, or similar. That was highly questionable. Only some of the men was British; the rest were a random selection of men from around the globe. Perusing their résumés, Nicholson had joked to Wang Lei that they were getting the ‘United Colors of Close Protection’. All he got for his trouble was a blank look, quickly followed by a scowl that made Nicholson wince. He had faced up to the woman’s l
ack of a sense of humour a long time ago but it could still grate.

  Special Forces or not, the boys that Marvin Taylor had protecting the flat knew how to handle a gun. Each of them carried a Heckler & Koch MP5, the kind of weapon that every other policeman in London seemed to carry these days, as well as a Glock 22 pistol.

  Nicholson knew full well that it had to be illegal, armed private contractors wandering round SW7 like it was the Wild West, but Wang Lei was definitely impressed by the show of force. Initially, Nicholson had been determined to raise the issue with Taylor but, in the end, he had avoided the subject. Over the years, he had come to realize that one of his great skills was not asking questions.

  Turning his glass upside down, he let the ice and lemon follow the cigarette butt towards the street, just as a second guard appeared on the pavement below. As the man looked up, Nicholson hailed him with the empty glass and got the briefest of nods in return. They must get so bloody bored. Nicholson knew that there would be a third guy somewhere nearby. Marvin’s nine-man team was split into three groups, running eight-hour shifts.

  All of this at a cost of £12,000 a day.

  Twelve grand.

  Plus VAT.

  And expenses.

  Nicholson reflected that Taylor Security Services did not come cheap. Maybe I went into the wrong business. The whole set-up seemed to be more than a little over the top for Chelsea, but that wasn’t his call; Wang Lei, convinced that a bunch of killer ninjas were about to descend on them at any minute, had insisted that they invest in a full-on close protection service. To be fair, she was picking up the tab, although Nicholson could think of a lot of things that Wang would be better off spending her money on: him, for a start.

  A familiar sense of frustration washed over him as he fished a cigarette packet from the pocket of his cords. The light was fading now and the last warmth of the day had gone. Shivering in the cool night air, he took the last coffin-nail from the crumpled packet and stuck it between his lips, resisting the urge to head back inside.

  ‘Michael, Mother says “What are you doing?”’

  Making no effort to keep the annoyance from his face, Nicholson turned to confront the youth. ‘I was just having a smoke,’ he snapped, wondering where he’d left his lighter. Holding up his hand, he waved Exhibit A for the defence, the crumpled fag packet. ‘You know your mother doesn’t let me smoke in the house.’

  Under an unruly mop of jet-black hair, Ren Jiong grinned malevolently. In the sanctity of his bedroom, the boy could get away with smoking as much weed as he liked. Nicholson himself was kept on a much tighter leash.

  ‘The smoke upsets her.’

  Nicholson counted to ten. The idiot was the bane of his life; a spoiled brat with the emotional intelligence and maturity of a ten year old – a ten-year-old monkey, at that. Living in England had totally failed to smooth away the rough edges. Ren’s parents must have spent the best part of £600,000 in school fees alone, all of it wasted. The best education that money could buy had done nothing other than refine the youth’s taste in expensive booze, fast cars and even faster women. Not yet twenty, he already had the air of a second-rate playboy.

  And, Nicholson reflected, I should know all about that.

  The urge to slap the boy into the middle of next week was tempered by the fact that he was his meal ticket. Ren Junior had been his entrée to the Ren family. The extravagantly rich and powerful father, Ren Qi, and the bored and sexy mother Wang Lei, were like something out of a Chinese remake of a 1980s American soap opera. They were so two-dimensional that only by an immense act of willpower had Nicholson been able to convince himself that they were, indeed, real. Even now, their story was hard to credit. Ren Senior was a long-time political hack, the son of one of the ‘Eight Elders’ of the Communist Party, a ‘princeling’ of Chinese politics. His crass populism would have appeared commonplace in the West. In China, however, its novelty helped spur his rise, firstly as a provincial governor, then as a member of the Central Politburo. There was even talk of him getting the top job one day. Nicholson knew the fact that he was being mentioned at all probably meant it would never happen. These things were fairly random, like the election of a new Pope; luck and timing as always would play a decisive part. Even so, Ren Qi was definitely a man worth knowing.

  Wang Lei, meanwhile, was the youngest daughter of General Wang Dejiang, a prominent figure in the Red Army when the Party came to power in 1949. General Wang fell out of favour during the Cultural Revolution and his daughter was forced to work in a butcher’s shop. However, the family was rehabilitated and Wang studied as a lawyer before meeting her husband at the start of his political career. Ren Junior came along a couple of years later; their only child.

  When the time came to further the boy’s education, where better to send him than Eton, the home of elites from around the world? And who better to facilitate that than an Old Boy like Nicholson, a smooth fixer who worked in China and could bridge the cultural divide.

  Wristwatches had provided Nicholson with his big break into the wider Chinese establishment. He had been selling off a small selection of Breitlings, Rolexes and Omegas for a fellow ex-pat with liquidity problems following a nasty divorce involving a transvestite cabaret singer and a bitter custody battle over the family Shih Tzu. Ren Qi, a connoisseur of such items, had heard of the sale and arranged for a private viewing of the collection at his Beijing home. After inspecting the goods, Ren had handed Nicholson a large tumbler of BenRiach and an envelope filled with cash.

  ‘Will twenty thousand US be enough?’ the politician asked.

  Nicholson knew better than to check the money. ‘I’m sure that is more than sufficient.’ Not least as he had told the seller the best he could hope for was $14k. He lifted the glass to his lips and took a mouthful, letting the single malt linger on his tongue as he watched Ren slip a GMT-Master on to his wrist.

  ‘I like a man who delivers,’ Ren smiled, still staring at the timepiece.

  ‘That’s me,’ Nicholson smirked, ‘always at your disposal.’

  ‘There is one other thing . . .’ Ren reached for his glass.

  ‘Yes?’ Trying not to seem too eager, Nicholson slowly drained his glass.

  ‘My wife tells me you went to Eton . . .’

  Getting Ren Junior into Eton had been a breeze, on the back of a large donation to the school’s social fund. Keeping him there was more of a struggle. Nicholson had to work tirelessly to ensure that the boy avoided expulsion, despite Junior’s complete lack of interest in his studies and a steady stream of extra-curricular indiscretions.

  This babysitting role meant that Nicholson was spending more time in England than he had done in decades. His profile in China duly suffered; to Nicholson’s mind, Ren Senior had not kept his end of the bargain – the anticipated contracts and fees simply never materialized. Increasingly, the family had used him as a glorified servant, little more than an English butler.

  Now, under virtual house arrest, Nicholson wondered where it had all gone wrong.

  Probably should have kept my hands off the missus.

  In the first few years, Wang Lei had never looked at him twice. But then she started spending more and more time in the UK, to be close to the boy, and, well, things had just happened. The lady of the house exercised her droit du seigneur. The husband, busy climbing the greasy pole in China, may or may not have known what was going on. Either way, he didn’t seem to care. Not until the relationship became so open that it was deemed to be a threat to his political career.

  Over the last year or so, Nicholson had grown profoundly weary of the whole carry-on. Endless angry phone calls between London and Beijing, Wang refusing to let her son return to China and, now, the paranoid fear that their lives were under threat from some kind of Red Army hit squad. Why didn’t they just get a divorce, like normal people did? Nicholson himself had been divorced twice already; it was no big deal.

  All he wanted now was to get back to his current wife and family; get ba
ck to his rather modest existence in Shanghai in a gated community of cookie cutter houses that were supposed to mimic Prince Charles’s idea of a typical English village, complete with cobbled streets, mock Tudor houses and a local pub called the Green Giant which, bizarrely, served only Guinness, Foster’s and Coke. The place was deadly dull, home only to a handful of ex-pats who spent most of their time there hiding from the droves of Chinese tourists who came to have their photographs taken in front of the red telephone box (with no phone inside) or the black cab that didn’t go anywhere as it didn’t have an engine.

  Despite its shortcomings, as soon as things settled down, Nicholson was going to head back there like a shot. He would put the whole Ren episode behind him and return to the safer business of selling watches and other luxury items to less well-connected locals.

  From somewhere overhead came the whine of a Jumbo’s engines as it made its final descent towards Heathrow.

  ‘Michael, come inside.’

  It was an order, rather than a request.

  Gripping his glass tightly, Nicholson resisted the temptation to smash it down on the kid’s head. The need for more nicotine came over him in a rush. Where was his bloody lighter? He must have left it inside. ‘I’m just coming.’

  ‘Hurry up.’ Ren turned and disappeared through the sliding doors into the living room.

  ‘Fuck off, you little shit,’ Nicholson hissed, once he was sure that the boy was safely out of earshot. Tossing the empty cigarette packet over the railings, he watched it float down towards the street. For the briefest moment, he toyed with the idea of throwing himself off the terrace, ending it all here. But the thought quickly passed. There was no way he felt suicidal, he was simply not the type. Anyway, it was time for another G&T; a bloody large one. Yawning, he ran a hand through his greased-back hair and reluctantly wandered inside.

  TWO

  Sitting in the cab of his Nissan van, Marvin Taylor watched Michael Nicholson disappear back inside the penthouse apartment four floors above. Finishing off his can of Coke, Taylor stuffed the last mouthful of Coronation Chicken wrap into his mouth. Chewing contentedly, he thought back to a conversation with his daughter in the supermarket earlier in the day.