London Calling Page 22

  After a bit of random groping around, Joe located the on-switch for his machine. ‘I could always look at the hard copies, I suppose?’

  ‘You could,’ she called over, while scanning the words on her own screen, ‘but they’re not kept here. Some are in the library, but most are stored in a warehouse out of town somewhere. That could take a while.’

  In the end, accessing old copies of the newspaper proved much easier than he could have hoped. Not only had all the editions of Grantebrycge back to 1977 been put online, but an excellent search facility allowed him to compile lists of stories referencing both the Carltons and the Merrion Club. However, after more than an hour of scanning articles about binge drinking, trashing of restaurants, urinating in the street and other by now familiar types of student naughtiness, Joe was feeling quite fatigued, and fearful that he wasn’t really any further forward.

  ‘How’s it going?’ Sally asked. ‘I’m almost finished here.’

  ‘OK,’ said Joe, rubbing his eyes as he scanned a story from April 1985 headlined ‘Merrion legends a tough act to follow.’ He noted down the names of Edgar and Xavier’s successors without any great enthusiasm.

  ‘Got something?’

  ‘Not really. Joe pushed back his chair, rolled his shoulders and stretched. ‘I think I’m just about ready to wrap it up.’ He was hungry. Maybe he should offer Sally a bite to eat. ‘Fancy a drink?’

  Switching off her computer, Sally eyed him carefully. ‘Maybe a coffee.’

  ‘Great.’ Pulling his chair back towards the desk, he reached for the mouse and moved to hit the close button. Then he noticed the story next to the one that he had been reading.

  ‘Ready?’

  ‘One minute.’

  He rubbed his jaw and stared at the photograph appearing at the top of the piece. Then he scratched his head and stared at it some more. ‘Well, fuck me.’

  ‘What?’ said Sally McGurk, startled.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The general buzz of activity was punctuated by the regular clink of metal on metal and the occasional grunt of effort throughout the gym in Jubilee Hall, an old warehouse on the south side of Covent Garden’s piazza. The atmosphere was thick, steadily heading towards fetid. Though all the windows were open, the heat of the day was slow to dissipate, and it was still easily above eighty degrees inside. The heat, however, was not going to put Carlyle off. The double espresso he’d downed ten minutes earlier was kicking in, as planned, and he was good to go. His T-shirt stuck to his chest and he felt a bead of sweat descend the length of his spine. He mounted a Life Fitness cross trainer standing in the middle of a row of eight identical machines, and fiddled around with his iPod shuffle. A Christmas present from his wife, it made his exercising easier and had belatedly dragged him into the world of digital music, allowing him to return to some of the music of his youth as well as try out the odd new tune. It didn’t really matter what the music was, as long as it got him going. He skipped through six or seven tracks until he found something from Stiff Little Fingers that was guaranteed to get his blood pumping and his legs moving. He turned the volume up close to maximum, cutting out as much of the background noise as possible. ‘Nobody’s Hero’ began blasting into his brain. Gritting his teeth, he stomped down on the machine and sought out a rhythm. It was time to leave all the stresses of the Blake case behind, if only for a short while. With as much violence as he could muster, he chased that endorphin rush that would surely clear his head and reinvigorate his mind.

  Being given the brush-off by Edgar Carlton irritated him hugely. Worse, Carlton’s special adviser, William Murray, had still not come back to him with a time for their promised meeting. As Carlyle saw it, they were clearly playing for time. After the election was over, and they had their hands on all the levers of power, they could easily have the whole case buried.

  ‘Bastards!’ Carlyle grunted as he upped the pace on the cross trainer. ‘Fucking bastards!’ He hated being messed about by people who thought that they were somehow above the law. And, even more, he hated not being able to do anything about it.

  Showered and relaxed, Carlyle strolled out of the changing rooms, to find Joe Szyszkowski nursing a coffee in the gym’s café.

  ‘Helen told me you were here,’ explained Joe, by way of introduction. ‘I tried to ring your mobile earlier, but it went straight to voicemail.’

  ‘Do you want another drink?’ Carlyle asked, dropping his Adidas holdall on the floor next to a display for sports nutrition supplements with names such as Hurricane and Scorpion Extreme.

  ‘No, I’m good, thanks.’

  Pulling out a chair, Carlyle glanced up at a list of the day’s ‘specials’ chalked on a blackboard above the counter. He didn’t really need to look: they may still have been ‘special’ but he couldn’t remember the last time they had varied. Ordering an orange juice and a hummus wrap, he sat down at Joe’s table. The post-work rush hour was over by now, and the place was emptying quite quickly. Looking across the gym, Carlyle clocked a well-known actor hanging out by the free weights. He had appeared in a movie that Helen had brought home a few weeks ago, the details of which Carlyle had already forgotten before the final credits had finished running. The man was wearing a hooded top, baseball cap and sunglasses, which Carlyle thought was a bit over the top. Though he was not actually doing any lifting, he was making very sure that everyone noticed he was there.

  ‘Good session?’ Joe asked.

  ‘Not bad,’ Carlyle mumbled, in a way that he hoped said ‘Food first, talk later’.

  Plastered on the wall beside them were flyers announcing all different kinds of classes, from Kendo to Russian Military Fitness (Train the Red Army way, with genuine Spetsnaz instructors!) to Hot Bikram Yoga. There were also adverts for a number of one-on-one personal training services. One ad fascinated and appalled him in equal measure. ‘You’re never too old for a six-pack’, it proclaimed, over a stunning black-and-white picture of a smiling guy in his sixties with a set of abs of such perfect definition that they defied belief. Not for the first time, he felt awestruck and oppressed at the same time.

  Tired, wired and not particularly impressed with his boss’s apparent lack of interest in communicating, Joe tried to rouse Carlyle from his thoughts. ‘Did you get to speak to Carlton?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Carlyle, feeling the post-exercise hunger kick in now, and hoping that his food would hurry up. ‘For about ten seconds. The Rt Hon Edgar Carlton MP, Leader of the Opposition, told me he would deign to see me later.’

  ‘When?’ Joe asked.

  Carlyle adopted what he hoped was his most philosophical demeanour. ‘I have absolutely no idea.’

  Joe frowned. ‘Does he actually realise just how serious this is?’

  ‘Does he care, more to the point?’ Carlyle asked. ‘These people all see this as our problem, not theirs. They have other priorities, and they’re certainly not working to our timetable.’

  Joe lowered his voice slightly. ‘But we are talking about multiple murders here.’

  Carlyle glanced around. The actor was still gossiping away with one of the weightlifters. ‘I don’t notice that the world has stopped turning.’

  ‘Have you spoken to Simpson about it?’

  ‘I’ve left her a message, but what’s she going to do?’ Carlyle shrugged. ‘Probably, the way she sees it is that she works for them, we work for her. Who’s the dog here and who’s the tail? This is one of those situations where we’re just supposed to sit tight and do what we’re bloody told.’ The endorphins were fast wearing off and he felt a whole new type of fatigue. A good I’ve-got-off-my-arse-and-done-something type of fatigue, but a fatigue nevertheless. ‘Anyway, how was Cambridge?’

  Finally receiving his cue, Joe took up two pieces of paper that had been resting on his lap and handed them over. One of them was a copy of the photo they had seen so early in the morning at Horseferry Road car park. Carlyle, in fact, had another copy of the same picture in his pocket, which had been em
ailed over by Matt Parkin, the sergeant handling the Nicholas Hogarth crime scene, just before Carlyle had left the station. The other item was a short newspaper article, consisting of a single column underneath a photograph. It was no more than maybe a hundred and fifty or two hundred words. Carlyle scanned it, glanced at Joe, and perused it again, more slowly.

  By the time Carlyle had finished reading it the second time, his order had arrived. Thanking the waitress, he drained half of the orange juice and took a bite from the hummus wrap.

  ‘It’s the same guy,’ said Joe.

  Carlyle chewed carefully and swallowed. ‘Certainly looks like it.’

  ‘Could even be a cropped version of the same photo?’

  Carlyle looked again. ‘Yes, it could,’ he agreed. The photo featured in the newspaper was a head-and-shoulders shot with a clear sky in the background. It wasn’t great quality, but it looked very much as if it had been copied from the same photo left behind the windscreen wiper of Nicholas Hogarth’s Range Rover.

  ‘The article comes from the Cambridge University newspaper,’ said Joe. ‘It was published in April 1985, almost a year after our friends sat their finals.’

  In order to appear suitably impressed, Carlyle read the story a third time:

  Student Suicide Tragedy

  Family and friends of Robert Ashton are struggling to come to terms with the popular third-year Law student’s tragic death. Ashton, 21, jumped from the balcony of his room on the top floor of Darwin Hall on 3 March. According to media reports, a suicide note was subsequently found. The police have said that they are not looking for anyone else in connection with the incident.

  University friends were shocked by the terrible news. Some have reportedly claimed that Ashton was behaving strangely in recent months, but he had a one hundred per cent class-attendance record and tutors described his work as ‘outstanding’. His parents have issued a short statement celebrating ‘a wonderful loving son with his whole life ahead of him’ and thanking people for their support at this difficult time.

  There will be a memorial service for Robert Ashton at St Mungo’s Church on Boot Street on 2 May at 4.30 p.m. The family has asked for no flowers, and anyone wishing to make a charitable donation is requested to support the NSPCC.

  Carlyle took another bite of his wrap, saw that there was not much of it left, so stuck it all in his mouth.

  ‘Not going to win a Pulitzer Prize, this piece, is it?’

  Joe ignored his boss’s sarcasm. ‘The police investigation was literally open and shut. The coroner’s verdict was “killed himself whilst the balance of the mind was disturbed”.’

  ‘That’s the standard verdict,’ Carlyle remarked. ‘What’s his connection to the Merrion Club?’

  ‘We don’t know,’ Joe replied. ‘He doesn’t seem to have been a member, but Paul Hawley said that that they sometimes co-opted lesser mortals.’

  ‘What was he like?’

  ‘Hawley, you mean? He wasn’t much use really: a bit of a moaner always straying off the point. He did put me on to the university newspaper, though.’

  Carlyle thought about it all a bit more. ‘A suicidal would-be lawyer doesn’t seem much like proper Merrion material.’

  ‘No, not really,’ Joe agreed, ‘Of course, the whole thing could be a false trail.’

  ‘False or not, it’s the only one we’ve got. Is there anything else of interest about this guy Ashton that might be relevant?’

  Joe shook his head. ‘There was nothing else I could find out today.’

  ‘Do we know if he had any previous problems?’

  ‘I don’t think so. He’d had no run-ins with the local police, at least.’

  ‘What about his academic record?’

  ‘Haven’t been able to check that out yet,’ said Joe. ‘But, if that article is anything to go by, it should have been fine.’

  Carlyle finished his orange juice, and took the empty glass and plate back to the counter. He was still hungry, so he ordered a double espresso and a slice of fruit cake, before heading back to their table.

  ‘He was an only child,’ Joe continued. ‘Seems that his parents never got over it.’

  ‘Well, you wouldn’t, would you?’

  ‘The mother had a stroke a year later and the father spent years fighting colon cancer. He died in 1997.’

  ‘The poor bastard,’ said Carlyle, as he eyed a very attractive redhead, cheeks flushed from her workout, sauntering towards the exit. ‘The poor fucking bastard.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘The father.’ Carlyle paused to acknowledge the arrival of his coffee and cake. He took a mouthful of the latter, and continued: ‘Imagine losing your kid and your wife like that, so close together, and then getting fucking cancer.’

  ‘Maybe the stress brought it on.’

  ‘Quite possibly,’ Carlyle mused. He nibbled at the cake approvingly. It was dark, moist and heavy, just the way it should be. He dropped the rest of it back on the plate, just to stop himself scoffing the lot in one go. ‘What else did you find out in Cambridge?’

  ‘That’s about it.’ Watching Carlyle stuff his face was making Joe hungry, too. His wife had sent him a text earlier to say that she had made them a curry. He hoped that the kids had left him some, and wanted to get home to find out. ‘Everyone’s buggered off for the summer holidays. The “Come back in two months” signs are out.’

  ‘Well, hopefully, we’ve got what we need from up there already,’ said Carlyle, draining his coffee. ‘Well done, Joe. Not a bad day’s work.’ He stood up and reached into the inside pocket of his jacket, searching for his wallet. ‘Now we think we know who this is about, maybe tomorrow we’ll find out why.’

  ‘Maybe the killer will send us a note explaining it all,’ Joe smiled.

  ‘His continued help would be very nice,’ Carlyle agreed. ‘After all, it’s just about the only way we’ve been able to make any progress in this fucking case, so far.’

  Carlyle was brushing his teeth when he heard an electronic yelp from the bedroom. Still brushing, he wandered out of the bathroom and picked up the mobile from the small table on his side of the bed. Without checking who it was, he hit the receive button.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘John? It’s Carole Simpson. Apologies for not returning your call earlier. I was caught up in a budget meeting that went on for more than six hours.’

  ‘No problem,’ said Carlyle, as he headed back into the bathroom and dropped the toothbrush in the handbasin.

  ‘So where are we now on the investigation?’ Simpson asked.

  Carlyle spent the next couple of minutes filling her in on recent developments.

  After he was done, she said: ‘Progress at last. Well done. It sounds like Joe Szyszkowski has done a good job here.’

  Szyszkowski? Carlyle thought. That pseudo-Polish bastard? What about me? But he restricted himself to a clipped, ‘Thank you.’

  ‘And where do we go from here?’

  Carlyle perched himself on the side of the bath. ‘As you can imagine, I really need to speak to the two Carltons and Christian Holyrod, now more than ever. I saw Edgar Carlton very briefly yesterday, but I still haven’t had a time arranged for a proper meeting. One of his advisers, a guy called Murray, is supposed to be getting back to me.’

  ‘I know William Murray,’ Simpson said, ‘or, rather, I’ve met him a couple of times. My husband says he’s one to watch – a potential rising star.’

  ‘Someone ready to cover up his boss’s dirty work?’ Carlyle suggested.

  ‘Someone who is very bright and has worked incredibly hard to get to the position where he is now,’ Simpson replied sharply. ‘Apparently he went to school at some troubled inner London comprehensive, but still got a first in Political History from Cambridge. He’s seen as a poster boy for the non-privileged wing of the party.’

  ‘Good for him,’ Carlyle sneered.

  ‘I will speak to Murray or someone in Edgar’s office, and get this moving,’ she sai
d firmly, choosing to ignore the inspector’s petulance. ‘This has taken too long. I want to get it resolved as quickly as possible.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Carlyle was surprised by the note of determination in her voice. Maybe she was feeling some pressure as well.

  ‘In the meantime,’ she added, ‘we have to keep an open mind. The Merrion Club may end up having nothing at all to do with this case. Once you’ve spoken to them, let me know how it went.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Carlyle ended the call and went back to brushing his teeth. He had barely finished that when his mobile went again.

  ‘Inspector Carlyle?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘This is William Murray.’

  Jesus, that was quick, Carlyle thought. He assumed his most official tone. ‘Yes, Mr Murray, what can I do for you?’

  ‘Would eleven a.m. be possible for your meeting with Edgar Carlton?’

  ‘Eleven tomorrow, you mean?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That would be fine.’ Only two days before the election, Carlyle reflected. That is a turn-up.

  ‘Good,’ Murray purred. ‘The meeting will take place at the offices of Badajoz Consulting, 132 Half Moon Street, just off Piccadilly.’

  ‘Who are Badajoz Consulting?’

  ‘They are … advisers to the Carltons.’

  Carlyle snorted. ‘I thought that was your job.’

  There was a pause, then, ‘Inspector, if you are preparing to run the country, you really do need the broadest range of top advisers.’

  ‘I’m sure you do,’ Carlyle agreed.

  ‘132 Half Moon Street.’

  ‘Hold on a second.’ Carlyle went back into the bedroom, found a pen in his jacket pocket. ‘Half …’

  ‘… Moon Street.’

  ‘Got it.’ He jotted the address down above a half-finished Sudoku puzzle that Helen had left beside the bed. ‘I’ll see you there.’