James Craig: Then We Die

Dom led him to a pair of seats at the back, to the side of the runway. After they took their places, he pointed out a couple of celebrities and fashion editors, stern women with oversized sunglasses perched on their heads, who were sitting in the front row on the opposite side.

Carlyle grunted, unimpressed as he hadn’t heard of any of them. He jerked a thumb at a gaggle of snappers at the end of the runway, saying, ‘I don’t want any of those buggers getting a picture when I slap the cuffs on the lovely young drug-dealing model.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Dom. ‘It will all be done backstage after this has finished.’

‘The show must go on.’

‘Of course. But it makes sense for you, too. There’s half a kilo of coke in the girl’s bag.’

‘That’s handy.’

Silver ignored the insinuation.

‘How much is it worth?’ Carlyle wondered.

‘It varies,’ said Dom casually. ‘The middle-class clientele she serves more or less demand to get ripped off. Maybe quarter of a mil, give or take.’

Carlyle let out a low whistle.

‘Want to rip it off?’ Dom grinned. ‘Get me to sell it for you?’

‘Yeah, right.’ Carlyle shifted uneasily in his seat. After all these years, Dominic Silver’s willingness to dangle temptation in front of him continued to annoy and make him feel uncomfortable in equal measure.

Dom gave him a reassuring pat on the arm. ‘Don’t worry. There will be no cameras, no drama. Plenty of opportunity for you to make the collar with a minimum of fuss.’

‘No drama!’ Carlyle snorted. ‘Is that possible? With this lot?’

‘Rollo knows what he has to do. Anyway, I know that you’ve had quite your fill of excitement for one day.’

‘I certainly have,’ Carlyle replied.

‘It was all over the news. How is Joe? What’s the latest?’

‘No news yet,’ Carlyle mumbled. The truth was that he hadn’t yet spoken to the hospital. Having allowed himself to be diverted to the fashion show, the inspector was too scared to give the doctors a call. No news, he believed, really was good news. Bad news would find him soon enough.

Dom gestured to the plaster on Carlyle’s forehead. ‘Are you sure you’re okay?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘I’m sorry I was so bolshie on the phone earlier. I didn’t realize. .’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ Carlyle looked over at the runway. ‘You were right — we have to move on this now. Apart from anything else, Joe did a lot of work on this case.’

Dom nodded. ‘He’d want you to get the result.’

Carlyle made a face. ‘Right now, I don’t imagine he could give a toss. But I want to get a result.’ He gestured towards the empty runway. ‘This is the girl’s last show in London this week?’

‘Yeah. Then she’s booked on the lunchtime BA flight to Rio tomorrow.’

I wish I was flying down to fucking Rio , Carlyle thought sourly. He looked at his watch. ‘Shouldn’t this shebang have started by now?’

Dominic shrugged. ‘They’re always running late.’

‘Great.’ Carlyle looked at his shoes, knowing that he really should call the hospital.

He really should be at the fucking hospital.

‘How are the family?’ he enquired.

Dom turned and gave him a pained look. ‘Not great, to be honest.’

‘Oh.’ Carlyle was already wishing that he hadn’t asked that question.

‘You know we’ve had some problems with Marina?’

‘Er. . yes.’ Carlyle vaguely remembered Helen telling him, a while back, something about Dom’s youngest child needing to go into hospital for some tests.

Dom let out a long sigh. ‘The doctors think it’s something called Cockayne Syndrome.’

‘Uh-huh?’ Carlyle murmured, clueless.

‘Type One,’ Dom continued, sounding as if the words were seared into his brain. ‘The classic form: impairment of vision, of hearing, and the central and peripheral nervous systems progressively degenerate, until death occurs in the first or second decade of life.’

‘How old is she now?’

‘She was five only a month ago.’

‘Fu-uck.’

‘I know.’ Silver shook his head. ‘It’s a complete and utter fucker, a genetic disorder so rare that less than twenty other children in Britain have it. Just one in 186,000 people carry the gene. Both partners need to have the gene, and then there’s a one-in-four chance of them passing it on to the kid.’

You ’ ve beaten the odds big time, then , Carlyle thought, keeping his mouth firmly clamped shut. Silver and his partner Eva Hollander had five kids.

‘There’s talk of her taking part in a new drugs trial which could slow down her deterioration, but there’s no cure and, so far, there’s no treatment. All anyone can offer her is palliative care.’

‘That’s terrible,’ said Carlyle, wishing desperately that this bloody fashion show would start.

‘Eva’s in bits about it.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘I’m cutting back on my schedule, to spend more time at home.’

‘Of course.’

‘It’s lucky that I’m able to do that, I suppose.’

‘Yes,’ Carlyle nodded as the lights finally went down and the first model appeared on the runway wearing something that looked like a plastic bag, accompanied by the opening strains of U2’s ‘Beautiful Day’.

Charlotte Gondomar — ‘Lottie’ to her friends — had a perfectly symmetrical face, long black hair, cynical lips and honey-coloured eyes. From the photo on her agency calling card, she looked like the kind of girl who could have anything, or anyone, she wanted. The promo blurb on the back said that she liked Spiderman, Guinness and the poetry of Pablo Neruda. Now twenty-one years old, she had been a beauty queen back home in Brazil when she was only fourteen. A lingerie model since she was sixteen, she had been working the runways of Europe and North America for almost four years. According to Dominic Silver, she had been transporting cocaine from Rio de Janeiro into London, Paris, Milan and various other European cities for the last two.

Dom was a perfectly reasonable man, but he didn’t like someone else doing his job. He had acquired Rollo Kasabian’s fashion house as part of the ongoing diversification of his business interests. ‘This is definitely not a money-laundering ruse,’ he harrumphed when Carlyle had raised an eyebrow. ‘We have a five-year business plan, break-even targets, brand extension aspirations, the lot.’

While Dom was busy diversifying into legitimate areas of business, Lottie was going the other way. Using her fashion contacts, she had put together a small team of pretty and discreet girls to transport the product across the Atlantic. Almost every week, one or two of the crew would travel from Brazil to Spain, via Cancun. Each girl would have a small amount of drugs hidden in their luggage. . or somewhere more intimate. In one case, a make-up girl had apparently swanned through customs at Barcelona airport with 1.29 kilos of coke inside a pair of fake breast implants.

It was not so much the competition that annoyed Dominic Silver as the threat that Lottie presented to his business overall. He knew that the girl would come a cropper sooner rather than later. When she did, the subsequent spotlight on his operations could be uncomfortable, to say the least. Especially at a time when he had to focus on the needs of his family and let business largely take care of itself. After some deliberation, he had decided that the best course of action would be to pre-empt the situation. So he had called in his friend, Inspector Carlyle, to do something about Lottie’s little sideline.

‘Narco-trafficking is one area where women have definitely broken through the glass ceiling,’ Dom said with a smirk, when they had first discussed the matter a few weeks earlier, in a bar in Soho. ‘It started in Colombia in the 1980s with two high-flyers — can’t remember their names. One was known as La Viuda Negra — the Black Widow. She was a woman who gave her children the names of characters in The Godfather as a joke.’