James Craig - Buckingham Palace Blues

This was a scene that Shen had witnessed many times before. The strip clubs, sex shops and hostess bars on Great Windmill Street regularly complained about the potential for the school run to interfere with their passing trade. With no obvious sense of irony, one of the shop-owners — Soho’s self-proclaimed number one dildo merchant — had complained to the local paper that the school ‘lowered the tone of the neighbourhood’. On the one hand, it was quite funny. On the other it made Shen pine for the good old days (approximately twenty or so years before he started on the Force) when you could simply round up the filth-peddlers and the perverts and haul them back to the cells for a good kicking.

In the face of this onslaught, one of the mothers — an evangelical Christian called Mary Mack — once had the temerity to fight back. Mack organised a petition and launched a campaign for a fifty-yard ‘smut-free zone’ around the school. It was a good idea but, given the economic realities of the neighbourhood, one that never had the remotest chance of being realised. Instead, the poor misguided woman had found herself singled out for particular abuse.

Only a week earlier, Mrs Mack had been sexually assaulted and pelted with dogshit by a group of disgruntled sex-industry workers. When the Evening Standard had put the story on its front page, it had caught the attention of someone sufficiently senior at New Scotland Yard for action to be demanded. Shen had been tasked with arresting the culprits and sending a clear signal to the good citizens of Soho that there were limits of indecent behaviour beyond which even they could not go without the risk of official sanction.

Needing to catch the perpetrators in the act, Shen had been surprised and delighted when Mrs Mack agreed to come back for more punishment. Before she could change her mind, he had put in place a highly sophisticated sting operation that basically involved her lingering outside the school gate, waiting to be abused again.

Shen brought the Motorola radio to his mouth as he watched a fat peroxide blonde come out of the Fun Palace and on to the pavement. She was followed by one of the strip club’s bouncers, a skinny, shaven-headed bloke in a Britney Spears T-shirt.

‘Here we go. .’

As the duo headed towards their target, the other mothers moved quickly away. Shen watched the by now familiar angry exchange that followed. Waiting until the bouncer put his hand on Mack’s shoulder, he spoke into the radio: ‘Okay. Move in. Arrest them both. Make sure we try and keep them in custody longer this time.’

As the two miscreants were bundled into a police van, the kids began heading out through the school gates. Shen thought of his own kids safely ensconced in the South London suburbs, and gave a silent prayer of thanks. By all accounts, Soho Parish was a very good school. But you had to be a certain sort of parent to send your kid there and have to put up with all the neighbouring shit, both metaphorical and physical.

Shen turned to Carlyle who was sitting on a sofa, reading the evening freesheet and worrying about Fulham’s chances of avoiding relegation this season. ‘You live round here, don’t you?’

Carlyle nodded, but didn’t look up from the paper. ‘Yeah. About five minutes down the road. The other side of Cambridge Circus.’

‘Kids?’

‘One. A girl.’

Shen gestured in the direction of Soho Parish. ‘She didn’t go there, did she?’

‘No. The wife looked at it though.’

‘I wonder what all the kids make of it.’

Carlyle finally closed his paper, folded it up and stuck it in his jacket pocket. ‘What? All the sex shops and stuff?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I suppose what you know is what you know,’ Carlyle said. ‘If you make this neighbourhood boring and mundane, then it loses any glamour and attraction.’

‘It’s a theory, I suppose.’ Shen stepped away from the window and moved into the centre of the room. ‘Anyway, I read that report Simpson sent me. Interesting. . Do you really think the girl you found had been inside Buckingham Palace?’

Carlyle shrugged. ‘It’s a possibility.’

‘A rather far-fetched one.’

‘Maybe. I dunno.’ Carlyle stiffly pushed himself up out of the sofa and on to his feet. ‘The more I think about it, the more I think, Why not? Given all the other shit that people do there, it would make a perfect location for some evil bastard to get up to something like that.’

‘It would be a new one on me,’ Shen said. ‘But we’ll make some enquiries. Any leads on the girl?’

Carlyle shook his head. ‘Not yet.’

Both men knew it was a minor miracle that she had been found once. There was next to no chance now that she would ever be seen again.

‘What about the Ukrainian angle?’ Carlyle asked.

‘Obviously,’ Shen said, in the kind of flat tone you adopted when giving a speech to the local Residents Association, ‘we get a lot of Eastern Europeans — people-trafficking and prostitution. They come from all over, including the Ukraine. Kids are less common, but not unheard of.’ He coughed. ‘There is one guy we’ll go and talk to, name of Ihor Chepoyak.’

‘Who he?’ Carlyle asked.

‘A bad guy straight out of Central Casting. He is reputed, among other things, to have decapitated two of his girls with a blowtorch.’

‘Nice.’

‘Never been able to lay a finger on him,’ Shen said wistfully. ‘So far, at least.’

‘Do you think you’ll get anything out of him?’

‘No idea,’ Shen said, ‘but he’s just about the only Ukrainian I know.’

Carlyle gave Shen a quizzical look.

‘You’ve got to start somewhere.’ Shen grinned. ‘Anyway, how many Ukrainians do you know yourself?’

Fair point, Carlyle thought. ‘Can I tag along,’ he asked, ‘when you go and see him?’

‘Why not. I’ll let you know when I get an appointment.’

An appointment? Carlyle wondered.

‘Thanks.’

‘No problem.’ Shen patted the inspector on the shoulder and headed for the door. ‘Meantime, I need to go and sort out these shitheads we’ve just nicked.’

Sitting at his desk on the third floor of Charing Cross police station, Carlyle flicked through the autopsy report on Joe Dalton, the decapitated part-time cabbie. It was clear that the case had been written off as a straightforward suicide, so the investigation had been perfunctory in the extreme. Both cocaine and ecstasy had been found in Dalton’s system, but this had attracted no comment whatsoever, either from the pathologist or from the officer investigating the case. For his part, the inspector could let that slide. Getting coked up before you topped yourself seemed quite reasonable. The thing that really surprised Carlyle was that this case had been closed as a result of the intervention of SO14. Chief Superintendent Charlie Adam himself had signed off the final report, whereupon it had been completed and sent off to the central archive within less than a week.

Joe Szyszkowski ambled up to the desk, grazing on a chocolate doughnut. ‘I checked the newspapers,’ he explained, once the last of the sugary snack had been polished off and he’d licked his fingers clean in a frankly disagreeable manner. ‘There were a couple of mentions of the. .’ he paused, grasping for the right word ‘. . accident at the time when it happened. But no follow-up. And, bizarrely, no one mentioned that Dalton was a copper.’

‘It seems unusual that SO14 got involved in the investigation,’ Carlyle mused.

‘Very,’ Joe agreed.

‘Why not just leave it to the locals?’

‘Maybe they just wanted to sit on the drugs thing. That could have come back on them. I’m sure a spate of ‘‘random’’ drugs tests over at the Palace wouldn’t have gone down too well.’