James Craig - The Circus

‘Hey!’ Panic rising, she hammered on the door with her fist. ‘Hey! Stop jerking around. Let me out!’

Getting no response, Hannah slumped back on to the bed. Closing her eyes, she fought back a sob.

‘Mum. .’ It came out like a whimper.

Outside, the traffic slipped past relentlessly.

‘MU. . UM!!’

No one came.

‘That was a good time to take a leak,’ Joe Szyszkowski observed, biting into a bacon sandwich.

‘Tell me about it.’ The inspector drained his demitasse and signalled to the waitress for another double espresso.

The girl gestured to a menu with her pen. ‘Would you like anything to eat?’

‘Nah, thanks.’ The caffeine was mixing with the adrenalin and Carlyle felt too pumped to contemplate any food. He looked up at the clock on the wall: 4.57 a.m. Just over three hours since Horatio Mosman had been blown to kingdom come.

Amazingly, no one else had been killed in the explosion. One of the explosives officers and a paramedic had been taken to the Royal Free Hospital with serious injuries, but the expectation was that they would survive. The ground floor of the house meanwhile was — well, it was like a bombsite. The living room was completely wrecked and the rest of the ground floor had suffered extensive blast damage. The device had clearly been designed to do more than simply remove the unfortunate teenager’s head from his shoulders. Forensics would be collecting bits of his body for days, if not weeks.

And yet the explosives officer — Carlyle struggled to remember his name — Baldwin had claimed it was a fake.

Bad call.

Bad, bad, bad call.

Was the guy just trying to keep the kid calm? Carlyle wondered. Surely not. How could he have got things so wrong? There were lots of questions but no answers. Anyway, that was something to worry about later. When Mr Baldwin came out of Intensive Care, it would be back to traffic duty for him, career over.

The waitress reappeared with his coffee and a smile. ‘Anything to eat with that?’ she asked again, placing the cup and saucer carefully on the table before removing the old one.

No, Carlyle thought, I haven’t changed my mind during the last minute. Irritated, he shook his head. ‘I’m okay.’

‘I’ll have another one of these, please,’ said Joe, with the polite reticence of the glutton. Stuffing the last of the sandwich in his gob, he handed the waitress the empty plate.

‘Sure. One bacon sandwich coming up.’ She turned on her heel, shouting out the order to the cook at the back as she retreated behind the counter.

Carlyle gave him a look of mock disgust. ‘That’s not going to help with the diet, is it?’

Joe gave him an As if I care grunt. Anita had placed him on an interactive, weight-loss programme almost a year ago. So far, the result was that Joseph Leon Gorka Szyszkowski had gained almost half a stone.

‘Think of your arteries.’

‘Gimme a break. I get enough of that stuff at home.’

‘Anita just wants to avoid you keeling over one day.’

Joe belched. ‘We’ll all keel over one day. Look at poor young. . What’s-his-name.’

‘Horatio.’

‘Christ, what kind of a name is that? Anyway, the poor little bugger didn’t even make it out of his teens.’ A terrible thought crossed his mind. ‘Probably never even got laid.’

‘Stop changing the subject. You know what I mean.’

‘Overall,’ Joe declared, ‘I’m in good shape. Better than you.’ He gestured at Carlyle’s battered visage. ‘At this precise moment in time, anyway.’

‘That wouldn’t be hard.’ The inspector took a sip of his coffee and gingerly felt the bump behind his left ear. It appeared to be growing in size, but wasn’t actually painful as long as he didn’t prod it.

Apart from smacking his head on the edge of the toilet bowl in the Mosmans’ guest bathroom, he had escaped without a scratch. After the explosion, he had been out cold for maybe thirty seconds. Even the raging headache that he had come round to had subsided through the help of four Ibuprofen tablets filched from the bathroom cabinet.

‘You were in just about the safest place in that house.’

Carlyle nodded. ‘Yeah.’ After washing down the painkillers with some tapwater, he had sat on the toilet seat and tried to take in the chaos unfolding around him: screaming alarms, groaning people, emergency sirens in the distance, getting closer. What struck him most, however, was the smell — the acrid stench of incinerated soft furnishings tinged with the aroma of charred flesh.

After several minutes, a face had appeared in the doorway. It took the inspector a moment to focus on her features. The young paramedic had clearly been investigating the carnage in the living room. The colour had drained from her face, making her look about twelve years old — a kid trying to play the part of an adult. She looked like she was going to throw up.

‘Are you okay?’ she asked in a shaky voice.

‘I’m fine,’ Carlyle smiled. ‘How about you?’

‘Fine.’ Taking a deep breath, she shot him a look that said Don’t question my professionalism , then stalked off.

‘See you later,’ Carlyle mumbled, giving her a little wave. He was quite happy just sitting there on the toilet seat and made no effort to get up until he was hit by a sudden thought: Where is Joe?

The waitress placed Joe’s bacon sandwich on the table and looked enquiringly at the inspector for a third time. Deeply irritated, Carlyle ignored her. How many times is she going to ask me if I want anything to eat? If I want any fucking food, I’ll say so .

He glanced around the cafe. The only other customers were a couple of cab drivers moaning about Arsenal’s wretched run of form while quickly demolishing large plates of bacon and eggs.

‘You were very lucky.’ Joe added some brown sauce to his sandwich before taking a bite.

‘Says the man who happened to walk out of the front door five seconds before the bloody thing went off,’ Carlyle snorted.

‘The other good thing is,’ Joe grinned, wiping some sauce from his chin, ‘I was standing behind a tree, otherwise I might have been hit by the flying glass.’

‘Survival instinct?’

‘Mm, I’ll need that when I get home.’

Carlyle laughed. ‘Well, you know what they say.’

‘No. What?’ Another couple of swift bites and Joe’s sandwich was gone.

‘Better to be lucky than smart.’

Joe wiped his hands on a paper napkin. ‘If Anita hadn’t been giving me such grief on the phone,’ he mused, ‘I could have still been standing right next to that kid.’

A grave expression descended on to the inspector’s face. ‘Don’t ever tell her that.’

‘No, of course not.’

‘And don’t spend too much time thinking about it either.’

Joe thought about that for a few moments. Then he remarked: ‘For one thing, dicing with death makes a bacon sandwich taste even better.’

Carlyle shook his head silently.

‘Who would do something like that?’ Joe wondered.

The inspector sucked the dregs of the coffee from his cup. ‘Someone with the skills and ability to shoot a man between the eyes at close range, vaporize a kid and then walk off down the road, apparently without a care in the world. Quite impressive when you think about it.’

‘Not many people like that around,’ Joe agreed.

‘Not on our patch, at least.’

‘So, who do you think did it?’

‘No idea.’ Carlyle yawned. The adrenalin was beginning to wear off and he wanted to go home, jump into bed and cuddle up to Helen for an hour before the working day formally began. Getting to his feet, he signalled to the waitress for the bill. ‘But that’s what we have to find out, sunshine.’