James Craig - Time of Death

‘Fuck!’

Ending the call, he redialled immediately. And got the same message.

‘Bastard fucking phone!’

And again.

And again.

At the fifth or six attempt, he got through. After barely two rings, his daughter’s voicemail kicked in. Hi! This is Alice. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you. Bye!

‘Alice,’ he said as calmly as he could manage, ‘it’s Dad. Call me when you get this.’

Keeping the phone in his hand, he walked up to a sergeant standing by the police tape. Flashing his ID, he got a nod of recognition.

‘Where are the schoolkids?’ Carlyle asked.

‘Gone to the RV points, sir,’ the sergeant said in a practised manner.

‘And where are the RV points?’

‘Er . . .’ The officer shrugged.

Carlyle was just about to slap him, when they were interrupted by a middle-aged woman with a clipboard. ‘Which class?’ she asked Carlyle briskly.

‘Er . . .’ Now it was Carlyle’s turn to show his ignorance.

The woman hid her frown behind her clipboard. ‘Teacher?’

‘A man, I think,’ was as much as Carlyle could manage.

This time the woman made no attempt to hide her contempt for his ignorance.

Summoning up the patience of a saint, she gave him one last try. ‘Upper or Lower school?’

‘Lower,’ Carlyle said decisively. He knew he had to have a fifty-fifty chance of being right on that one at least.

‘They will have gone to Monkwell Square.’

Carlyle looked at her blankly.

‘It’s just next to the Ironmongers’ Hall,’ the woman said.

‘Just back the way you came, sir,’ the sergeant said helpfully. ‘Head towards St Paul’s – it’s just before you get to London Wall. Should only take you about five minutes, maximum.’

‘Thanks,’ Carlyle replied through gritted teeth. Turning on his heels, he headed at a trot back through the gawkers and the randomly parked police cars.

It took him only a couple of minutes to find the Square. The place was full of girls in uniform gossiping in small groups, lounging about on the grass and generally looking quite pleased at the prospect of the afternoon off. Quite a few were smoking and he was shocked to see one girl, who looked to be even younger than Alice, taking a casual drag on a cigarette as she sat under a tree. How would he react if he found his own daughter smoking? He would cross that bridge if and when he came to it.

First he had to find her. It took him another few minutes to locate someone who looked like a teacher – a tall man in a suit, also brandishing a clipboard. Careful not to tread on any of the pupils, Carlyle stepped forward and introduced himself.

The man nodded. ‘John Doherty, Deputy Head of the Lower School.’ When Carlyle explained that he was looking for his daughter, he frowned. ‘There’s no need to overreact.’

Overreact?

‘It’s probably just a false alarm,’ Doherty continued. He looked as if he was in his early thirties, but with his floppy straw hair and boyish features he managed to look younger than many of the girls. ‘Everyone has been accounted for. We’ve told all the ones that don’t normally get picked up that they can go home.’

Before Carlyle could respond, the phone started vibrating in his hand. It was a text message from Alice: At home. All ok. x

A mixture of relief and frustration washed over him. He looked up, but the teacher had already walked off. For a few seconds, Carlyle stood there, feeling like a spare part. Then he called his wife and left the Square, heading west.

The bell rang, shortly followed by a low rumble of excited chatter. Michael Hagger leaned against a pillar outside the entrance to Coram’s Fields Nursery. Trying to look like the kind of bloke who would regularly pick his kid up from playschool, he watched the children start to stream out, still happily playing, stuffing their faces with snacks, or chatting about the day. Mostly it was women – mothers or childminders – doing the collecting, but there was the odd father here and there making the effort to be part of the post-school run.

Once he was sure that home-time was in full swing, Hagger slipped past a woman struggling with a buggy and went inside the building. Smiling at the girls in reception, he casually walked down the corridor towards Jake’s classroom.

Wearing jeans, trainers and a Thomas the Tank Engine T-shirt, the boy sat at a desk, drawing on a piece of paper with a green crayon. He was concentrating hard, with his tongue poking out of one corner of his mouth. For the first time, it struck Hagger that he was a good-looking lad. Must get it from me, he thought. A teaching assistant stood at a sink in the far corner of the room, tidying away a selection of paints and brushes. She had her back to them and didn’t turn round when he entered the room.

Jake saw him and made a face. ‘What are you doing here?’

Hagger forced a small smile. ‘I’ve come to pick you up.’

Jake looked confused. ‘You never pick me up.’

‘Well, I am today,’ Hagger replied through gritted teeth.

‘Where’s Mum?’

Hagger reached over and patted him on the head.

‘I’m picking you up today,’ he repeated. ‘I thought it would be nice.’

The teaching assistant was still busy putting caps back on tubes of paint.

‘Mum always picks me up,’ the boy said stubbornly. ‘Or Amelia.’

A right pair of useless, lazy bitches, Hagger decided. ‘They said I could come and get you today.’

‘Mum says you’re a complete bastard,’ Jake said casually, lowering his gaze and pressing the crayon harder into the paper. ‘And a total cunt,’ he added, swapping his green crayon for a red one.

‘Does she now?’ Hagger bristled.

‘What is a cunt, anyway?’

‘Nothing.’

The boy looked up. ‘It’s a bad word, isn’t it?’

‘She’s only joking.’ Hagger grinned nervously. He glanced towards the back of the room but the teaching assistant clearly hadn’t heard. She had the taps running now, washing out some pots.’

‘Amelia too.’

‘They love me really. Just like you, eh?’

Jake still didn’t look up. ‘I want to wait for Mum.’

Hagger had expected this reaction from the boy. He knew that he had to be quick. He couldn’t afford a scene. Dropping a small bag of jelly babies on the desk, he whispered, ‘I thought we could go and get an ice cream.’

The boy grabbed the sweets and stood up. ‘Okay,’ he said, tearing open the packet. He looked up at his father. ‘Then can I go and see Mum?’

‘Of course.’

Happy to be on his own for once, Dominic Silver relaxed on a couch in his house on Meard Street in Soho. Gideon Spanner, his eyes and ears on the street, was out on his rounds and so Silver had the place to himself. The room was silent apart from the hum of traffic outside, interrupted by the occasional burst of a police siren. He had muted the television, on which was playing a rerun of Evander Holyfield’s 1989 fight with Michael Dokes, to focus on a report in the Evening Standard . It was the unremarkable story of two drug dealers who were due to be sent down for up to twenty-seven years after police found two holdalls containing 50 kilograms of heroin in the boot of their car. The report claimed that the ‘haul’ was worth almost £5 million ‘on the street’. I’m not sure what street you’re thinking about, mate, Dom sniffed. Off the top of his head, he estimated that anyone would do well to generate three and a half million from such a load in these straitened times. Still a tidy sum, but well below peak prices. The deepening recession was savaging all types of discretionary spending; even the drugs business, which had held up better than most for longer than most, was now seriously feeling the pinch. Austerity was the name of the game now, even when it came to getting wasted.