James Craig - London Calling

Without waiting for a reply, Holyrod turned on his heel and headed for the exit. Carlyle listened to footsteps echoing on the stone floor as Holyrod marched out of the church. After the mayor had gone, he quietly said to himself: ‘Well done, John, that worked perfectly. Exactly as planned. Another triumph beckons.’

Trevor Miller gently returned the phone to its cradle and looked up. ‘OK,’ he said quietly, ‘we’ve found her.’

‘You know what you’ve got to do?’ Edgar Carlton inquired dreamily.

‘Yes.’

‘Good. That’s very good.’

Passing the Garden Hotel, Carlyle glanced inside and caught sight of the concierge, Alex Miles, making a fuss of some newly arrived guest. It was little more than a fortnight since Ian Blake’s body had been found in a hotel room upstairs. Carlyle tried to recall the details. What was the number of the room? How many people had slept in there since? He also wondered if they had installed a new bed; they would have had to replace the mattress at the very least.

He tried to remember what it had been like on walking through that door to see the blood, the empty eyes, to smell the stench of death. None of it came back to him. Nothing had lingered in his memory any longer than last night’s television. Already, Ian Blake had become a dim and distant memory, a minor footnote in his own murder investigation. After only a couple of weeks, did anyone miss him? Did anyone even remember that he had ever existed? The inspector felt a sense of melancholy descend on him that he knew would be hard to shake. Don’t be a victim, he thought to himself as he hurried on. Don’t ever be a victim.

Avoiding a return to the Station, he went home, had a shower and then a cheese sandwich. When Helen got home from work, they took Alice to the polling station at Dragon Hall, just off Macklin Street. It was something of a family tradition that they all went voting together: Alice would hand over the polling cards and collect the voting papers, then she would take each of her parents in turn into the booth and put a cross beside their chosen candidate. Then she would fold the papers and put them in the ballot box. The place was quite empty when they arrived, so they were in and out of there in minutes. Carlyle had very mixed feelings about the whole thing: he knew that his vote counted for nothing; on the other hand, he didn’t want his daughter to grow up as cynical as himself.

He left them at the door to Winter Garden House, with a hug and a kiss.

‘When will you be home?’ Helen asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Carlyle shrugged. ‘Late… maybe very late.’

‘OK,’ she sighed. ‘Do what you have to do, but be careful.’

‘I will,’ he said, shuffling off round the corner, into Drury Lane.

It was well after six o’clock when he got back to Charing Cross Police Station. Joe Szyszkowski had not yet reappeared, so Carlyle sat at his desk and watched the BBC’s rolling news on a monitor suspended from the ceiling. The sound was off, but subtitles scrolled across the bottom of the screen, allowing him to follow what was being said. The stock market wasn’t waiting for the result of the election, before it collapsed. Some know-nothing news pixie was explaining how share prices were plunging, the capitalist system was doomed, and everyone would be living in caves by Christmas.

‘You don’t want to listen to that rubbish,’ said Joe, wandering across his line of vision. ‘It’ll only make you depressed.’

‘There’s never been a better time to be poor,’ Carlyle said mirthlessly, grabbing a remote from the desk behind his own and turning the news pixie to black, with a flourish.

‘That’s handy,’ Joe grinned.

Carlyle tossed the remote back on his desk just as he felt his mobile start vibrating in his pocket. For once he had managed to pick up a call! Recognising Ahl’s mobile number on the screen, he hurriedly pushed the receive button.

‘Hello?’

The line immediately went dead.

He rang back but got a ‘network busy’ signal.

Bastards!

He tried again, but got the same thing.

Bastards! Fucking shit technology!

He somehow resisted the temptation to throw the handset at the wall. At the third attempt, he got through, but it went straight to voicemail. Once again, he didn’t leave a message. Why was she ringing him? Maybe she had come to terms with the fact that the game was up.

In anticipation of their evening’s work, Joe had booked a Mitsubishi Shogun from the station garage. The previous user had still to bring it back in, however, and the car pool was empty apart from a couple of Smart electric cars that were currently being trialled by the Met. No self-respecting copper, including Carlyle and Joe, would be seen dead in one. Carlyle thought about catching the tube, but he couldn’t be arsed to slog his way through the rush hour. Anyway, they still needed a car to bring Ahl back to the station. It was time to wait.

Waiting had always been a key part of the job, and by now Carlyle was quite good at it. For the next hour and a half, he and Joe kicked the case around, looking at what they had, what they lacked and what they had missed. In the end, they called a halt, finding themselves back where they had started. As far as anyone could tell, Susy Ahl had killed three members of the Merrion Club in revenge for what they had done to Robert Ashton all those years ago.

Was the woman crazy? That was for a doctor to decide. It was not for Carlyle himself to judge. Crazy or not, he had to admit that taking down four members of the Merrion Club was a hell of a result, far better than a lone, middle-aged, female lawyer could have hoped for at the outset of her killing spree. The icing on the cake would be to destroy the political careers of the Carltons and also Holyrod. To do that, she needed to be caught. She wanted her fifteen minutes of fame.

And who, Carlyle thought, are we to deny her that?

The journey across London had taken the best part of an hour, so it was after 8 p.m. when they parked on Atlanta Street, at the south end of Fulham Cemetery. With the end now in sight, Carlyle felt shattered. He got out of the car and stamped the ground, trying to rid his body of the lethargy. The street was quiet and the air was still. The edge had come off the mugginess and the sky was getting darker by the minute. That meant it was going to rain very soon. Unprepared, as usual, he knew that a soaking beckoned.

Atlanta Street was just across the Fulham Palace Road from Susy Ahl’s house on Harboro Street. Access to Harboro Street itself was blocked by roadworks. A twenty-yard stretch of it was littered with the usual items of machinery scattered around a trench about a foot wide and three feet deep, which had been cut into the tarmac along the middle of the road. It was all cordoned off behind temporary metal fencing on which hung a notice informing them that the thoroughfare would remain closed until late July. Pedestrians could still squeeze past by using a three-foot gap left open on the pavement to his right.

Carlyle heard a growl of thunder. It was quickly followed by a large raindrop landing on his head. Cursing, he tried to shrink inside his jacket, while lengthening his stride. Almost immediately, the rain came spearing down, bouncing off the road and drenching him. He had planned on making his dramatic entrance rather differently, but nothing could be done about that now. Trusting that Joe was keeping pace behind him, he began jogging towards the house.

Only when he was about fifty yards away from his destination did he look up. The rain had driven everyone from the street except for a couple of kids and an old bloke sheltering under a tree with its roots in the pavement. One of the kids was using his mobile phone to record video of an ambulance as it slowly pulled up at the kerb, the siren off but its blue lights illuminating the gloom. Switching the lightbar off, the paramedics pulled on their anoraks. They showed no desire to get out of the cab in a hurry, which told Carlyle that they were not here to deal with a living patient. Eventually, they stepped down into the street and jogged back to the vehicle’s rear. Opening the doors with a flourish, they pulled out a trolley and carried it past the thoroughly pissed-off-looking constable still standing at the front gate.