James Craig: Then We Die

‘So you think you got it wrong?’

He let out a terrible sigh. ‘What did we achieve in the end?’

‘Oh, John.’ Stepping towards him, Helen buried her face in his chest.

‘Look,’ he said quietly, ‘you are a small charity. You do great work all over the world. There is never going to be any shortage of places for your people to go and things for you to do. You have to live to fight another day.’

‘I suppose so,’ she sniffed.

‘The other thing to remember is that it won’t be you who’s sitting in some shitty jail, wondering if you’ll ever get home again. You can’t play politics with other people’s lives.’

She looked up at him. ‘Haven’t I heard that somewhere before?’

‘Probably,’ he grinned.

‘There’s an emergency board meeting at nine a.m. tomorrow to discuss what to do,’ she said. ‘I think that there will be a fairly energetic debate.’

‘I bet there will.’

‘But we will make a decision.’

‘Good.’

‘Then I have to leave at lunchtime, to go to Louisa’s funeral in Reims.’

Carlyle had completely forgotten about that commitment.

‘I catch the Eurostar at two-fifteen. The funeral is at eleven the next morning. I’ll be back around seven in the evening.’

‘Okay.’

‘Alice has promised to look after you while I’m away.’

‘Great. How are things with her boyfriend?’

Helen raised her eyes to the ceiling. ‘Don’t ask.’

‘Like that, eh?’

‘All part of growing up,’ Helen sighed.

A thought popped into his head. ‘Is Louisa being buried with Fadi?’

‘No. Her parents didn’t approve of the marriage, so that was a non-starter. I was told that he was cremated.’

‘And will his ashes be returned to his family?’

She shrugged. ‘I hope so, but that will be a matter for the Foreign Office.’

Carlyle shook his head. ‘Poor bugger.’

‘That’s exactly why we have to fight for these people,’ Helen reminded him.

‘Fight and lose,’ he said sadly. ‘Fight and lose.’

Sitting in the same basement interview room where they had met previously, Carlyle watched Ambrose Watson happily polish off a jumbo croissant before picking up a sheet of IIC-headed paper and then passing it across the desk.

The inspector quickly scanned the tiny font. ‘What’s this?’

Ambrose said, as if it should be blindingly obvious, ‘It’s the form you need to sign to say that you have voluntarily agreed to take part in this investigation, that you understand its conclusions and that you agree to undertake any suggested remedial actions relevant to yourself. There’s a copy for us and a copy for you.’

‘What remedial actions?’

‘Nothing really.’ Ambrose scratched his nose. ‘Just that you agree to continue seeing the psychiatrist that Commander Simpson has arranged for you.’

‘For how long?’ So far, Carlyle had endured three follow-up visits to Dr Wolf, and the novelty had long since worn off.

‘That’s hardly for me to say, now, is it?’ Ambrose chided. ‘That is something you will have to agree with the good doctor in due course. The Met is by no means prescriptive in these things. It just wants what is best for you.’

‘Right.’

Ambrose handed Carlyle a biro and pointed at the two small x s pencilled at the foot of the page. ‘Just sign here and here.’

Carlyle frowned. ‘And if I don’t?’

‘Inspector,’ Ambrose sighed, ‘you really can get too suspicious sometimes. Normally when I hand over an X 37/C, people can’t sign it quickly enough.’

‘What’s an X37/ C?’

‘It’s the form that you’ve now got in front of you,’ Ambrose replied tartly. ‘It’s our standard investigation-completed form. In this case, it’s a bit of a miracle that it’s ever got to see the light of day. With so many bloody corpses, I would have expected the investigation to run for years, if not decades.’

‘So what happened?’ Carlyle asked innocently.

‘It was dealt with at a higher level,’ was all Ambrose would say.

‘Okay.’ Carlyle scribbled something approaching his signature in the appropriate places and returned the form to Ambrose

‘Thank you.’ Ambrose took back his pen and gave Carlyle his personal copy of the document. ‘If you don’t mind me saying so, I think you’ve been more than a little lucky in all of this.’

Carlyle grunted.

‘It could have hung over your career like a big black cloud for a very long time.’

Tell me something I don ’ t know , Carlyle thought.

Stuffing his papers back into his briefcase, Ambrose got to his feet. ‘Well, Inspector,’ he said, ‘that concludes our business on this occasion. Please don’t take it the wrong way if I say that I hope our paths don’t cross again for a while.’

‘Amen to that,’ said Carlyle, smiling.

After Ambrose had left, he sat for a while with his mind empty, simply enjoying the silence.

Carlyle took his seat by the side of the runway, rather disappointed that he hadn’t been invited backstage to get another chance to gawp at the naked models getting ready to showcase the final collection from the late, lamented Rollo Kasabian, whose giant portrait now hung above the entrance to the runway. All the talk this evening was of Rollo and his genius, but Dominic Silver had decreed that tonight’s show, being held in a disused railway station, would be a benefit for the family of Lottie Gondomar, the model who had hanged herself in the police cells at Charing Cross. Closing his eyes, Carlyle spent several minutes trying to recall the girl’s face, but his mind remained blank.

The business was now being run by one of Rollo’s erstwhile assistants, a dour fellow by the name of Karl Auclair. Before putting him in charge, Dom had Auclair checked out by a firm of private investigators, who had given the young man a clean bill of health, or had at least reported that his drug use was within socially acceptable limits and that his sexual appetites were modest and dull. Noting that they were now almost thirty minutes late in getting started, Carlyle presumed that good timekeeping had not been a key part of the job description.

It was decidedly chilly on the station platform and Carlyle wished that he had brought along a coat. He idly watched the seats around him fill up till finally the lights dimmed and a bombastic rock track that he didn’t recognize began blaring out of the speakers positioned beside the runaway. Moments later, the first model sauntered into view, wearing what looked to Carlyle suspiciously like a bog-standard kaftan.

Dom slipped into the seat beside him. ‘What do you think so far?’

Carlyle shrugged. ‘It’s only just started.’

Dom punched him gently on the shoulder. ‘Don’t sound too excited, will you.’

‘Would you wear that?’ Carlyle grunted, pointing to the kaftan.

‘You’ve got to broaden your horizons, Johnny boy,’ said Dom, waving a hand in the air. ‘You’ve got to broaden your horizons.’

At least the show was mercifully brief. Passing on Auclair’s afterparty, the pair of them headed for a quiet bar half a block away.

‘Do people actually buy that stuff?’ Carlyle stared into his glass of Jameson whiskey.

‘There’s no accounting for taste.’ Dom took a swig from his bottle of Peroni beer. ‘And don’t forget this is Rollo’s swansong; the last ever Kasabian collection. The fashion editors can’t get enough of it. The fat, rent-boy-loving, drug-snorting fuck-up has been offi-cially rebranded a genius.’

Carlyle laughed.

‘Now, you know and I know that genius ,’ Dom continued, ‘is almost certainly the most over-used word in the English language. But the point is that his legend has already been written. Anything with his name on it will now sell like hot cakes.’