James Craig - Acts of Violence

If only.

Phillips popped the last piece of fruit into her mouth and washed it down with a mouthful of her Americano. ‘So,’ she said brightly, dabbing the corners of her mouth with a paper napkin, ‘what can I do for you?’

Carlyle shot her a look of mock hurt. ‘Why does everyone think I only make an appearance when I want something?’

‘Because,’ she grinned, ‘you only make an appearance when you want something.’

‘Fair enough.’ They had known each other long enough; he didn’t feel that he had to mess about. ‘Tell me about Naomi Taylor.’

Phillips’s face fell. ‘She gave you a call, did she?’

‘Yeah.’ Carlyle’s foot was still playing up; he gingerly lifted it on to an empty chair next to him. ‘I met with her yesterday.’

‘Sorry if I dropped you in it.’

‘No, no,’ the inspector replied quickly. ‘I vaguely remember her old man, but I never really worked with him.’

‘I knew Marvin from when he was at Holborn,’ Phillips explained. ‘I was going out with a lawyer at the time – the four of us went out together a few times.’

Carlyle had long since given up trying to keep abreast of Phillips’s private life. Glamorous and single, she always seemed to be either just going into a relationship or coming out of one. As a bloke who hadn’t had to worry about the dating game for more than thirty years, he found it stressful even thinking about such things.

‘You know what it’s like,’ Phillips continued. ‘You socialize quite a lot over a relatively short period and then something happens and you don’t see them for a while. Of course, when Marvin left to set up his own business, I don’t think that he and Naomi had the time or the money to go out very much.’

‘No.’

‘And then their daughter was born. I don’t think I’d seen them for two or three years before Naomi called.’ She shook her head. ‘I’d been away with Danny in Istanbul for a few days.’

Danny?

‘And I hadn’t even realized that it was Marvin who . . . well, you know.’

‘Yes,’ said Carlyle, surprised. It was the first time he’d ever seen Phillips show any squeamishness around death.

Phillips cradled her coffee cup in both hands. ‘They say he was a terrible mess. Why would anyone do that to him?’

‘I don’t know,’ Carlyle admitted. A sour-looking woman with a pretzel in one hand and a coffee in the other appeared in front of him and gestured at the spare seat. Reluctantly, the inspector removed his sore foot. With a disgusted huff, the woman sat down. Edging away from her, the inspector turned back to Phillips.

‘Naomi is lovely,’ Phillips said. ‘She needs some help.’

Carlyle nodded. ‘I’m gonna see what I can do.’ Which is probably nothing.

‘Thanks.’

‘I just wanted to ask-’

A phone started ringing and the pathologist reached into her pocket. ‘One second.’ She answered, ‘Phillips. Yes?’

Tuning out of the conversation, Carlyle watched the woman next to him stick the last of the pretzel into her mouth before letting his gaze slide across the room. It was well past the rush hour, but people were still flooding through the door faster than the staff could serve them. How many of these places were there in London? he wondered. Fifty? A hundred? Whoever set this place up was obviously a genius. There was more money in coffee than there was in crack. Thinking of drugs, his mind turned to his old ally, Dominic Silver. A retired drug dealer, Dom was in the process of reinventing himself as an art dealer. Gazing out of the window, Carlyle attempted to get his bearings. Dom’s gallery wasn’t much more than a couple of minutes’ walk away. Maybe he should pop in and say ‘hello’. They were overdue a catch-up; like Phillips and Naomi Taylor, he and Dom had rather lost contact recently. With Dom’s career change, their professional interests no longer intersected in the same way and it was more of an effort to hook up. Did he feel sorry about that? Carlyle wasn’t sure.

‘Sorry, I’ve got to run,’ Phillips sighed. ‘One of those mornings.’

‘Yeah.’

‘What did you want to ask me about?’

It took Carlyle a second to get his brain back on the right page. ‘Oh, yes. Marvin Taylor.’

‘Yes?’

Carlyle looked around. Pretzel Woman was lingering over her coffee. Staring vacantly into space, she showed no interest in their conversation. He lowered his voice anyway. ‘Everyone agrees Marvin was a nice bloke. But was he bent?’

Resplendent in a pair of baggy shorts and a truly hideous pink and yellow Hawaiian shirt, Umar Sligo was standing on the bottom step of the entrance to the police station, smoking a cigarette as he chatted to a youngish bloke in a Nirvana T-shirt and scruffy jeans. Carlyle vaguely recognized the guy, an undercover officer working out of the Waterloo station who had spent the last three years spying on a bunch of hippies who were opposing the building of a new power station somewhere near the Kent coast. The rumour was that the guy had gone so deep undercover that he’d had kids by two different women in the group. There had to be some sort of law against it. No doubt the tree huggers would sue the arse off the Met in due course.

Seeing the inspector approach, Umar said something to the scruffy Lothario, who nodded before scuttling off in the direction of the Strand. Taking one last drag on his smoke, the sergeant let the stub fall onto the pavement, grinding it into the concrete under the toe of his Puma trainers.

‘Boss . . .’

‘I didn’t know you smoked,’ said Carlyle by way of a greeting.

‘Pressures of married life.’

‘Dirty habit.’

‘Aren’t they all? It helps me deal with the stress.’

Stress, what fucking stress? Carlyle thought irritably. Maybe if you stopped chasing every piece of skirt that crosses your path, life would be a little less fraught. He was finding Umar’s juvenile behaviour increasingly annoying. The guy was in his thirties now, he had a wife and a kid; surely it was time that he grew up a bit. Instead, he just drifted along, all ambition seemingly gone. The idea of becoming a house-husband had apparently turned his head. He probably fancies a few years hitting on the mums at the school gates . An image of Umar hosting a coffee morning for a bunch of yummy mummies appeared in his head and Carlyle let out a small yelp of amusement.

Umar shot him the pissed-off teenager look that he had been perfecting over the last few months. ‘What’s so funny?’

‘Nothing, nothing.’ Carlyle let the smile fall from his face. After a couple of years establishing a decent enough working relationship with his colleague, the inspector felt like things had gone into reverse. He was losing the boy. Worse, he didn’t know if he had the will or the ability to retrieve the situation. He contemplated his sergeant in all his finery. Today, Umar looked more like an extra from Miami Vice than one of the Met’s finest. The silly bugger had never been undercover in his life. If Simpson caught sight of him like that she’d have a total fit. At times like this, the inspector just wanted to give the berk a good slap. But he knew that would only get him the sack. So Carlyle kept his mouth firmly shut, telling himself that it really wasn’t his problem.

Feeling thoroughly fed up with the situation, he nodded at a couple of uniforms heading down the steps and out on patrol duty before turning his attention back to Umar. ‘Busy?’

‘Not really. I had to go and see Mrs Miller about her bomb this morning, but that’s about it.’

‘Oh yes?’ Agnes Miller had lived in the neighbourhood since just after World War II. Her fiancé, a young police constable from Islington called Eric Davis, had fought and died for the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. His body had never been found. Agnes had swallowed her grief and got on with her life as best she could. Now well into her nineties, and never married, she refused to be moved from her flat on the tenth floor of a block just off Kingsway on the grounds that ‘this is my home and I’m going to die here’ .