James Craig - Acts of Violence

‘Boss.’ Giving Elmhirst a sideways glance, Roche commented, ‘I’d be careful. He gets through sergeants at quite a rate of knots, does the inspector.’

Elmhirst frowned but said nothing. For a moment, there was an awkward silence. Was there a bit of tension between the two women? Or was that just wishful thinking on his part?

‘How’s the beekeeping going?’ he asked.

‘It seems more like hard work than anything else,’ Roche said truthfully, ‘but I’ll stick with it for a while.’

‘Good for you.’

Nonplussed at the chit chat, Elmhirst stepped between them and thrust a sheet of paper into Carlyle’s hand. ‘I think you’d better take a look at this.’

Carlyle checked out the picture of an innocent-looking young man with thinning hair and a pair of John Lennon specs. He was smiling comfortably while looking directly into the camera. ‘What’s this?’

‘That’s Sebastian Gregori.’

‘Eh?’ Carlyle did a double take. The guy in the picture looked nothing like the man he knew.

‘I printed it off his company’s website,’ Elmhirst said. ‘Maybe we should have taken a look at that earlier.’ We as in you .

Maybe I should, Carlyle thought glumly.

‘I spoke to his boss in Berlin,’ Elmhirst continued. ‘Apparently he is with a client in South Africa right now. Has been for the last three weeks.’

‘Ah.’ Blushing, Carlyle refused to meet Roche’s quizzical gaze.

‘Once they check my bona fides, they will ask him to give me a call.’

Yes, yes, Carlyle thought, all right. Don’t rub it in. But Elmhirst was already heading back down the stairs in triumph.

‘I’ll leave you two to chat ,’ was her parting shot.

‘Quite a woman,’ was Roche’s only comment as Elmhirst disappeared from view.

‘You’re not here to beat me up as well, are you?’ Carlyle asked.

‘Me?’ Roche widened her eyes in mock horror. ‘Would I ever?’

He raised his eyebrows. ‘So what can I do for you?’

Roche gestured towards his desk. ‘Grab your coat. We’re going out.’

Once they made it on to Chandos Place, Roche directed him towards a red Alfa Romeo.

‘Nice car,’ said Carlyle, as he slid into the passenger seat. ‘Nothing but the best for SO15, eh?’

Roche mumbled something rude as she started the engine and pulled away from the kerb. Reaching the Strand, they made a right turn and were held up in a line of traffic at a red light.

‘So where are we going?’ he asked, finally tiring of waiting for an explanation.

‘I thought we would go and see Gerald Howard,’ she said, in a tone that suggested a casual social visit.

It took the inspector a moment or two to place the name. ‘The drunk who saw the ninjas?’

‘That’s right.’

The lights changed and they began edging forward. At this rate, he reckoned they might make it under Admiralty Arch in about an hour. ‘Any particular reason?’

‘They found Michael Nicholson last night.’

Tallow Business Services. Sonia Coverdale’s client.

‘Yes, indeed.’

Roche kept her eyes firmly on the road ahead, even though they were travelling at barely five miles an hour. ‘He was found in the back of a burned-out Porsche Cayenne up in Camden.’

‘How did you identify him so quickly?’

‘We didn’t,’ Roche said tartly. ‘Some computer did. You find an incinerated corpse, you automatically cross-check it against the Missing Persons list. Nicholson was near the top, given he’s so recent, and his dental records checked out.’

Carlyle nodded. ‘Impressive.’

‘Not as impressive as the way in which it’s being buried.’ She sent him a sideways glance. ‘For some reason, not obviously apparent to the likes of me, SO15 has dropped this like a steaming dog turd. They just want it all to go away as quickly as possible.’

‘So you came to me,’ Carlyle groaned.

‘Of course,’ Roche said cheerily. ‘I know that you’ll want to get to the bottom of this. You don’t look the other way.’ Seeing the doubtful expression on his face, she added: ‘Well, most of the time anyway.’

Carlyle thought about that for a moment. The pieces were slowly coming together. ‘Ren Qi,’ he said, as they finally made it past Nelson’s Column.

‘Who?’

The inspector ran through what the posh pimp Harry Cummins had told him about Ren Qi, aka Li Hang.

‘OK, Mr Bond,’ Roche said, changing gear, ‘explain to me why some Chinese big shot wants to assassinate a small-time London businessman?’

‘It might explain Mr Howard’s ninjas,’ he countered. ‘This guy Ren does seem to have quite an interesting entourage. If we make a working assumption that his people are responsible for what happened in Chelsea, then we can move on to their motives. That, in turn, will lead us to why SO15 want to look the other way.’

‘Simple, really.’ Spotting a gap in the traffic, Roche stomped on the accelerator and they shot on to The Mall.

‘Policework usually is,’ Carlyle said.

‘I’m not sure poor old Umar would agree,’ Roche sniggered as they headed towards Buckingham Palace.

‘Poor old Umar, my arse,’ the inspector snorted. As they reached the next line of stationary traffic, he told Roche about his sergeant’s photographic exploits.

Laughing, Roche shook her head. ‘No way!’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘Just as well the silly sod didn’t send me anything like that.’

‘Maybe he feels that your relationship hasn’t quite reached the right level yet,’ Carlyle chortled. Then: ‘All joking aside, it’s got serious consequences. It looks very much as if he’s for the high jump. Even getting shot won’t be enough to save him from the HR mullahs.’

‘That’s the problem with all this digital technology,’ Roche observed, ‘it allows boys to be even more badly behaved than they were before. In my day, they’d just sit in their bedrooms, playing with themselves. Now they want to share what they get up to with the world.’

‘He’s hardly a boy,’ Carlyle corrected her.

‘We live in an infantilized culture.’

‘But why would you take pictures of your willy and send them to people you barely know?’

‘Because you can.’

‘I just don’t get it.’

‘Just as well,’ were Roche’s final words on the subject.

For a while, they sat in silence.

Heading along Constitution Hill, the inspector watched a steady stream of joggers making their way through Green Park. A statuesque blonde accelerated past a fat man who looked like he was about to have a heart attack, while an angry-looking bloke in a Radiohead T-shirt stopped by a tree to do a set of squats, moving up and down too quickly for the exercises to be of any use. Carlyle’s mind drifted back to an evening, years earlier, when he himself had been jogging past that very tree. It was late in the day as the inspector stumbled across a young girl, alone and seemingly lost. The child spoke no English. Eventually, he discovered that her name was Alzbetha. She had been brought to London from the Ukraine by people traffickers. After he had placed her in the care of Social Services, the criminals had snatched her back.

Carlyle was not the kind of man who believed in things like ‘fate’ or ‘destiny’. The fact that he had been in that park at the same time as the girl had temporarily eluded her captors was nothing more than a coincidence. Even so, from the first moment that he had come across her, something deep inside the inspector’s being screamed that he had been meant to find this child. Having done so, it was his duty to look after her, keep her safe and do what he could to see that she had at least a chance of something approaching a decent life.