James Craig - Then We Die

‘The German army.’

‘Okay. So someone used a German pistol to shoot this man and bury him in a park in Central London.’

‘If it was during the war,’ Carlyle mused, ‘in a blackout, during the Blitz, that might explain how someone could easily get away with it. Bloody long time ago, though. How the hell are we going to find out who this guy was? It’ll be like looking for a needle in a haystack.’

Roche tapped the keyboard on her desk with an index finger. ‘I’ve been taking a look through the Zella-Mehlis database.’

‘Have you indeed?’ Carlyle replied, not having the remotest clue what she was talking about.

‘Basically, in 2009, the Met digitized all of its still open Missing Person cases.’ She gave the keyboard another tap and a new screen popped up. To Carlyle it looked like just an endless list of words. Roche clicked on a name and a man’s photograph appeared. ‘This is just some guy I picked out at random, but you can do a search by various characteristics, date of birth, date reported missing and so on.’

‘Sounds good. Have you found any possibles yet?’

Roche shook her head. ‘I’ve only just started. What I thought I would do is first search for anyone who went missing near Lincoln’s Inn Fields during the war.’

‘Won’t there be a lot of them?’

‘I’ll start off by looking for men between eighteen and thirty. Most of those otherwise would have been off fighting at that time.’

‘I suppose,’ said Carlyle vaguely. As far as he knew, no one in the Carlyle family had fought during the war, apart from some distant cousin of his grandfather, who had never come back from a prisoner-of-war camp in Burma. Not one to daydream, he pulled himself back into the present. All of this was basically of historical interest only, and he had work to do.

And he needed another coffee.

And he still had to phone his mother.

He pushed himself out of the chair and headed for the door. ‘It’s all sounding very interesting,’ he said over his shoulder, leaving Roche to her databases. ‘Keep me posted.’

At the front desk, Carlyle waited for Kevin Price to finish talking to a geography teacher from Doncaster who’d been relieved of?150 in a Soho clip joint. Carlyle watched the man slouch out of the station clutching a piece of paper containing his crime-identification number.

‘Will he be able to claim on his insurance?’ he asked.

‘He probably won’t even dare try,’ Price laughed, ‘in case his wife finds out what he’s been up to.’

Price was a tall, thin man, with plenty of grey in his black hair and also in his badly groomed beard. He had recently started wearing reading glasses, and these, Carlyle thought, made him look like a psycho librarian.

‘Dirty little bugger,’ Price snorted. ‘Don’t they have any tarts up north?’ Without waiting for an answer, he pointed to a round tin at the far end of the desk. It was slightly taller than a soup can, and maybe twice as wide. On it, someone had stuck a label that simply said Joe S .

Carlyle fished out his wallet and looked inside. He was rather surprised to see that it contained a twenty-pound note, along with a ten and a five. He pulled out the twenty and the ten, folding them twice before placing them carefully in the tin, which was already almost full.

‘Thank you,’ said Price stiffly. ‘The funeral has been arranged for a week from today, but I expect that you already knew that.’

‘No,’ Carlyle said quietly, ‘I didn’t. Thanks.’

‘No problem. Apparently it’s going to be a small family affair, but no doubt you’ll be going along.’

‘Of course.’

‘And the boss.’

‘Simpson? I suppose so.’

Price shook his head. ‘It’s a terrible thing. Especially with him having young kids.’

‘What’s the gossip in the station about it?’ Carlyle asked, as casually as he could manage.

‘You tell me.’ Price scratched his beard. ‘I haven’t heard anything at all.’

Don’t be a sod , Carlyle thought. Desk sergeants hear everything. Just tell me what people are saying. Do they think that Joe’s death was my fault? He waited for Price to say more, but the sergeant kept his counsel.

‘I haven’t heard anything either,’ Carlyle said finally. ‘I haven’t been around much.’

‘But you were there,’ Price was obviously keen to probe but didn’t want to be seen to be too interested in the juicy details, ‘when it happened.’

Now it was Carlyle’s turn to remain unforthcoming. ‘It’s still all a bit of a blur really.’

‘I suppose it must be.’ Unhappy at being fobbed off, Price picked up some papers from the desk and stuffed them into a box-file. Wedging the file under his arm he then wandered off, leaving Carlyle none the wiser.

Sitting in Visconti’s cafe on Maiden Lane, Carlyle sucked down a double espresso and pulled up the number for his parents on his mobile. Taking a deep breath, he hit the call button and waited to be connected.

After the third ring, he relaxed slightly, thinking that it would now go to voicemail.

‘Hello?’

Shit .

‘Ma? It’s John.’

‘Master John Carlyle,’ his mother replied, ‘how good of you to call. I assumed that you had simply vanished off the face of the earth.’

In his mind’s eye, he could see her standing by the phone in the hallway of the Fulham flat that he’d grown up in, the same flat she had lived in for so many years. Pursing her lips, she would be wondering what she’d done to deserve such an errant son. He forced himself into grovelling mode. ‘I’m really sorry, Ma.’

Lorna Gordon wasn’t one to acknowledge apologies. ‘Running off on me like that,’ she said, her disappointed tone rolling back the years, ‘and leaving me to pay the bill.’

Carlyle had paid the bill himself, in advance over the internet, but he let that matter slide. ‘I know, I know. But there was a serious problem and I had to try and deal with it. It was all in the news.’

‘Nasty business,’ his mother mused. ‘The poor policeman. . getting killed like that. What a terrible thing to happen!’

‘Yes,’ Carlyle agreed, his desire to talk about it rapidly evaporating. ‘It certainly was.’

‘I hope they catch the people who did it.’

‘So do I.’

‘Isn’t that your job?’ she scolded.

‘It isn’t my investigation.’

‘It might not be your investigation , John,’ she said, her voice rising slightly, ‘but surely it is still your responsibility?’

You ’ re right about that , Carlyle thought. He caught sight of his reflection in the cafe window. Despite everything, he was smiling. His mother could always cut straight to the heart of an issue. Pissing about around the edges of any problem was not Lorna Gordon’s style. It was one of the things he loved about his mother, that same characteristic he was glad to have inherited from her.

‘Well?’

‘We should meet up again,’ he said, getting back to the point of his phone call, ‘and finish our discussion.’

‘You’re the one with the busy schedule,’ she groused.

Carlyle shook his head, but, once again, didn’t rise to the bait. Once they had agreed a time and a place, he said goodbye and hung up, relieved that the conversation was over.

As soon as he put the mobile on the table, it started vibrating again. Noting that the call was from Simpson, he picked it up.

‘Commander?’

‘Inspector,’ she said evenly. ‘How are you?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Have you spoken to the IPCC yet?’

‘No.’ Carlyle had forgotten all about the Independent Police Complaints Commission. ‘Not heard a dicky-bird. Nothing from those other guys either.’