James Craig - London Calling

Brolin held up his hands in supplication. ‘All I did was bring you the letter.’

Carlyle scratched his head. ‘OK, fair enough.’ He took a deep breath and tossed the sheet of paper next to the envelope lying on the desk. ‘Better bag those up, Dave, just in case this is for real. Get one of the constables down here now, and then we’ll go and take a look.’ He turned to Brolin: ‘You wait here. I’ll be back in a second, once I’ve collected my keys.’

The Garden Hotel on St Martin’s Lane, just north of Trafalgar Square, was a 1960s office block which had been bought by in the early 1990s by Mexican billionaire Jeronimo Borgetti. Borgetti had then hired an uber-cool American designer called Alan Wall to turn it into a luxury boutique hotel. For the billionaire, it was a nice addition to his global property portfolio, as well as somewhere to stay whenever he too was in town. It was one of those places that always made Carlyle uncomfortable, however. The place tried soooo hard to be soooo stylish that mere mortals like him could never hope to keep up. He always had to first ask the price, and so could never afford the product.

Waiting for the chief concierge to arrive, Carlyle stood in the pale yellow and green light of the lobby, thinking again how he really should be in bed. Even at this hour, a regular stream of people moved in and out of the place. To Carlyle, they all looked too confident, too complacent. The sound of laughter drifted over from the Light Bar at the rear of the building, where there was still half an hour to go until closing time. What kind of people go out drinking at two-thirty on a Monday morning, Carlyle wondered sourly. Young and rich, he supposed, the kind of people who didn’t have to worry about going off to work in an hour or two.

Tapping a shoe on the immaculate Portuguese Moleanos honed beige limestone, Carlyle picked up a copy of the hotel brochure and instinctively sniffed it. It smelled expensive and felt heavy in his hand. Flipping through the pages, he smiled at the marketing copy which spoke of ‘an utterly original urban resort’, ‘a new paradigm’, and ‘a manifestation of the cultural Zeitgeist’. The expensively printed booklet just confirmed that The Garden was not his kind of place, not that its owners would be losing any sleep over that. A rather shabby, middle-aged policemen was definitely not the kind of target customer for a high-end establishment aimed at an ‘itinerant “tribe” of world travellers who routinely stop off between the twenty-four-hour international gateway cities of London, Paris, Milan, New York, Los Angeles, Miami and the like…’

Actually, off duty, Carlyle had been here more than a few times with Helen before they were married. Back in the 1980s and early nineties, they had regularly come to visit the old Lumiere Cinema which had then resided in the basement of the hotel building. They had visited the hotel bar once, but the damage done to Carlyle’s wallet was so severe that he was never short of a credible alternative nearby thereafter. The thought of that one bill still made him shiver, more than twenty years after the event.

The Lumiere was another matter, however. He recalled it with affection, if not outright nostalgia. His now-wife would take him to see French movies like Betty Blue and Les Amants du Pont-Neuf. Waiting for the concierge, Carlyle thought about those days for the first time in ages. Early-afternoon matinees in an empty cinema. Perfect. Perfect and long gone, for now the Lumiere had been turned into a gym.

Patience was not Carlyle’s strong point. He quickly found himself tapping the ridiculously expensive floor with increasing fury, as the concierge still failed to appear. It had been more than five minutes now and he was getting ready to shout at someone, when Alex Miles finally appeared from behind one of the lobby’s pillars, offering a cautious hand and a pro-forma smile.

‘Inspector…’ the smile had drained from Miles’ face before the whole word was out. Dressed in a pair of polished brown brogues, freshly pressed blue jeans, a crisp white shirt and a Prince of Wales jacket (grey with tan and green in the check), Miles was thus signalling that he was off duty and therefore being even more gracious with his time than usual.

‘Alex…’ Carlyle eyed him blankly, signalling – as if it needed signalling at this time of night – that this was strictly business. More than that, it indicated that the very least he would be leaving with later this morning would be another debit written against Miles’ name in the Carlyle favour bank, the ongoing details of which were held in the policeman’s brain at all times.

‘Sorry to keep you waiting.’ Alex Miles bowed his head in supplication. ‘It’s all kicking off tonight. We had some problems with Carlton Jackson’s people…’

‘The boxer?’ Carlyle asked. Jackson was an American heavyweight recently arrived in London for a fight. Before the bout could take place, he had been arrested for being drunk and disorderly, and assaulting a police officer. ‘I thought he’d been deported.’

‘Not yet,’ Miles smiled. ‘Anyway, it’s sorted.’

‘Good,’ said Carlyle, impatiently. ‘Now, about the matter in hand

…’

‘Yes.’ Miles bowed again. Carlyle wondered if he might have some Japanese blood in him somehow. More likely he was just taking the piss. Miles straightened up and started playing with a button on his jacket. ‘How can I help?’

As chief concierge at The Garden, Miles had acted as the hotel’s senior fixer for their more important and demanding guests for more than five years now. The Garden popped up on Carlyle’s radar once or twice a year and, consequently, their paths had crossed maybe three or four times. Miles was what Carlyle would describe as a low-level acquaintance. He operated in that grey area between upstanding citizen, usually of no use to Carlyle, and actual convicted criminal, the kind of person who kept the inspector in his job but was a pain in the arse at the same time.

Doubtless, Miles broke various laws of one sort or another, mostly relating to drugs and prostitution, on a daily basis. But he did so in a way, and in an environment, that meant his misdemeanours were of little or no concern to Carlyle. Both men understood that socially acceptable levels of behaviour were in a constant state of flux, and invariably strayed beyond the letter of the law.

Like Miles, Carlyle believed in self-interest, enlightened self-interest. This was as good a basis for their relationship as any, requiring no real thought and the minimum of action.

Like any good policeman, Carlyle very rarely concerned himself with the self-obsession and self-indulgences of the rich. He knew that, when it came to money, the law was only partially blind. Most of the time, the best way to deal with the well-off, with their acute sense of entitlement, was merely to ignore them. He always thought that he inherited such pragmatism from his father, who had never tired of advising his son: ‘Don’t get into pissing contests you can’t win.’ For Carlyle, after more than forty years on the planet and more than twenty years on the job, this rule only broke down with the extreme cases… like murder, for instance.

Like any good fixer, Miles knew where to get anything and everything. That was a basic requirement of the job, since the hotel’s ‘itinerant tribe’ could be very demanding. It was his ability to acquire specific, reliable, up-to-date information for his clients that became of occasional interest to Carlyle. Once Miles realised that the inspector was a pragmatist, and otherwise not in the least bothered about the needs of his ‘tribe’, he felt comfortable in doing business with him. As a result, the two men had casually established a modest relationship, just one of the hundreds that populated each man’s professional life.