James Craig: Man of Sorrows

‘Huh?’ Paula looked back at the two men to see the white guy pointing a pistol at her. The black guy also had a gun, with which he was gesturing to Mohammed to get away from the door.

‘Hands where I can see ’em!’ the white guy shouted. ‘Stay well away from the panic button.’ Luckman did as he was told in the blink of an eye. Paula felt stupid putting her hands in the air, but duly followed suit. ‘Good,’ the white guy smiled. ‘Now we don’t want to stay too long, so let’s start with the expensive stuff, shall we?’

Keen to avoid Father McGowan’s lawyer, Roche frogmarched Carlyle out of the station and took him off to do some interviews relating to a fraud case they had been ignoring for too long. Eventually, they ended up all the way across Covent Garden at Il Buffone, the tiny 1950s-style Italian café, on Macklin Street, at the north end of Drury Lane. It stood opposite the block of flats where Carlyle lived and was therefore deep in ‘home’ territory. At this time of the day, the place was empty.

As they walked in, Marcello Aversa looked up from behind the counter and smiled. Normally, the place would have been shut by now. But Marcello and his wife were having to work ever longer hours to try to keep the place afloat. ‘Ciao!’ their host shouted over the noise of the ancient Gaggia coffee machine which laboured behind the counter.

‘Two espressos please, Marcello,’ Roche said, pushing Carlyle into the back booth, under the poster of AC Milan’s ’94 Champions League winning team, a present from Roche which had place of honour on the wall, next to the counter.

‘I’ll have a green tea,’ Carlyle corrected her.

Roche looked at the inspector then laughed. ‘What? Are you ill or something?’

‘Wife’s orders,’ Marcello chuckled.

Changing the subject, Carlyle pointed at Donadoni, Maldini and the rest. ‘You got a new poster!’ He had been quite impressed when Roche had found a copy for Marcello the first time. When that had been defaced by yobs, he was even more impressed by her ability to come up with a replacement.

‘Si,’ Marcello shouted happily. ‘Otherwise, I was going to have to put up one of the Azzurri.’

‘Jesus!’ Carlyle threw up his hands in mock horror. ‘That would simply not do.’ The Italian national team, world champions not so long ago, was going through one of its periodic troughs. The star players had stayed on too long past their peak and stopped the next generation coming through.

‘No, I know,’ Marcello agreed with regret. ‘They don’t deserve the place of honour on my wall.’

Roche nodded. ‘Too old.’

‘I know the feeling,’ Carlyle joked.

‘Me too,’ said Marcello. ‘This job is getting too tough for me.’

Carlyle felt a ripple of panic in his chest. Christ on a bike, not more change . He had been coming to Il Buffone most days for more than a decade. The place was a delight, a throwback to the days when cafés had an individual identity. Walking five minutes in any direction, you could probably find close to a hundred other cafés, most of them part of big chains. Some franchises had maybe four or five branches in and around Covent Garden alone. But there was only one Il Buffone.

And, sadly, it was up for sale.

Carlyle looked at Marcello. The old man did appear more tired than usual. ‘You haven’t found a buyer, have you?’ he asked warily.

‘I wish,’ Marcello sighed, wiping his hands on the dishcloth hanging over his left shoulder. ‘Now it’s getting to the point where I’m basically trying to pay someone to take it off my hands. There are a couple of people interested. We’ll see.’ He smiled at Roche. ‘But don’t worry, I’ve told ’em that the poster has to stay.’

‘I’m glad to hear it, Marcello.’ Reading the unhappiness on Carlyle’s face, Roche slipped into the seat opposite him. ‘We have to talk about what happened back at the station this morning,’ she said quietly but firmly, ‘and how it will never, ever happen again.’

Placing the drinks on the table, Marcello registered the tone of Roche’s grim ‘thank you’ and beat a hasty retreat.

‘What the hell do you think you were doing with McGowan?’

Carlyle stared into his mug.

‘He’s an old man,’ Roche continued.

‘He’s a fucking paedophile,’ Carlyle hissed, turning round to check that no one was listening to the conversation, almost embarrassed to say the word.

‘Whatever he is,’ Roche said icily, ‘you cannot lose control like that. You could have bloody killed him.’

Carlyle grunted in a way that suggested the idea of a swift and violent end for Father Francis McGowan did not totally displease him. ‘I didn’t lose control,’ he said, trying to keep his voice even, his words clipped and precise. ‘He knows now that we are serious.’

‘He knows that we are dangerous,’ Roche snapped back.

I wasn’t the one who smacked him about, bringing him into the station, Carlyle thought, his anger more than tempered by the knowledge that he should have done that job himself and not dumped it on his sergeant. ‘Look, I want to find the boy,’ he said. ‘I know that I have dragged you into this and I’m sorry-’

Roche dismissed his apology with a curt shake of the head.

‘- but if there are any repercussions, they will come back on me, not you.’

‘His lawyer is bound to make a complaint.’

‘Any complaint will focus on what happened in the interview room,’ Carlyle insisted. ‘That falls on me. You are in the clear, I promise.’

‘It’s not even our bloody case.’

Fumbling in his jacket pocket, Carlyle pulled out a small photograph, barely twice the size of a passport mug shot, and dropped it on the table. ‘Simon Murphy.’

Roche sighed. ‘I know who he is.’

‘Twelve years old. He was taken into care when he was two.’

‘I know the story.’

‘Moved in and out of various foster-homes for more than twelve years. Expelled from three different Camden schools before he was ten. Dumped into a Boys’ Club run by a sixty-three-year-old priest who has not one but two banning orders which are supposed to prevent him working with children.’

Roche smacked her fist on the table. ‘John, I know all this – you’ve told me already.’

‘Six complaints from children who have come into contact with McGowan in the last five years. Two have withdrawn their statements, three are pursuing civil claims against the Church and one committed suicide. Simon is the best, if not the only chance of bringing a criminal conviction against this scumbag. And now he’s vanished.’

Pushing a strand of red hair behind her ear, she sat back on the bench and folded her arms. ‘We have no evidence that McGowan has anything to do with his disappearance. The kid has run away before.’

‘You saw that sick old bastard in there,’ Carlyle said. ‘He thinks he’s untouchable. He thinks he’s put the boy beyond our grasp.’

‘Listen to yourself,’ she scolded him. ‘What happened to John Carlyle the arch pragmatist?’

Not meeting her gaze, the inspector looked to Marcel Desailly – on the wall behind Roche’s head – for inspiration. None was forthcoming. He had put himself on the hook and she wasn’t going to let him wriggle off. They had been working together for less than a year but Roche had quickly come to understand how his mind worked. He was getting used to her often disarmingly accurate commentaries on his moods and the contradictions in his behaviour.

‘You have to get a grip – put the chimp back in its box.’

He looked up. ‘Eh?’

‘It’s a psychological model,’ she explained briskly. ‘The chimp is your emotional side. In difficult situations you have to keep it under control or you will make mistakes. In a stressful situation, like the one with McGowan, you have to stop your chimp from preventing you dealing with the problem logically.’