Buckingham Palace Blues

The fixed-line telephone sitting on the windowsill next to Carlyle started ringing, causing them all to jump. He leaned over and picked up the receiver. ‘Yes?’ he demanded.

‘John?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s George Patrick. We’ve got a delivery down here for you at the desk.’

‘Yeah?’ Carlyle asked, surprised. The front desk never took deliveries.

‘Yeah,’ the desk sergeant replied, ‘a large box from Candy Cakes. Looks good.’

‘Cakes?’ Carlyle felt his stomach rumble.

‘It’s kosher,’ Patrick confirmed. ‘We’ve run it through the X-ray machine. There’s a note as well.’

‘Okay.’ Carlyle glanced at Joe who, perking up at the mention of food, gave him a hungry look. ‘I’ll be down in a minute.’

Standing at the front desk of the station, Carlyle looked at the dozen cupcakes in the box, each one topped with a different, brightly coloured icing, and smiled. He picked up an electric-blue one and took a bite. It was delicious and he finished it off in two quick mouthfuls under the wistful gaze of George Patrick and a loitering PCSO. Carlyle gestured towards the box. ‘Help yourself.’ After they had chosen, he picked out another three (one for Joe, one for Rose and another one for himself) and headed back towards the stairs.

‘Don’t forget the note,’ Patrick reminded him through a mouthful of bun.

‘Oh, yes.’ Carlyle did a quick U-turn. Careful not to drop any of his collection of cakes, he grabbed the small envelope that had been taped to the lid of the box, and stuffed it into his pocket.

Five minutes later, he had finished a second cake and was sitting back at his desk with a fresh cup of coffee. Joe and Rose could be left to their own devices; it was time for him to catch up with some of the paperwork he’d let slide in the last few weeks. Waiting for his computer to power up, he remembered the envelope in his pocket. On the front, it simply read Inspector Carlyle, carefully handwritten in black ink. Ripping it open, he pulled out a small piece of card, slightly bigger than the size of a cigarette packet. At the top was printed the Candy Cakes logo, a pink cake with a heart on it, along with their company’s website address and phone number. Written on the card, in the same script as the envelope, was a simple message: Check out the AUFS.

AUFS? Carlyle didn’t like puzzles. He didn’t like the sense that people were toying with him. If you have something to say, just fucking say it: that was his motto. Drumming his fingers on the desk, he watched the somersaulting hourglass on his screen, as the computer continued its struggle towards life. While he waited, he picked up the receiver on his desk phone and dialled the number printed on the card.

A cheery young female voice answered immediately. ‘Candy Cakes, Sarah speaking. How may I help you?’

Carlyle slowly and carefully explained who he was and the nature of his enquiry.

The cheeriness in the girl’s voice was immediately replaced by wariness. ‘Hold on, please.’

For almost a minute, he listened to the happy hubbub from the shop. Finding himself craving a third cake, he tried to think of something other than food.

Finally, a different voice came on the line. Older. Sterner. ‘Mr Carlyle?’

‘Inspector.’

‘Yes, of course. I am Julia Greene, the company’s owner. How can I help you?’

Hadn’t the girl who answered the phone — he had already forgotten her name — explained that? Carlyle gritted his teeth and repeated his query.

‘A lady came in this morning,’ said Greene smoothly, once he had finished, ‘and asked us to deliver the box to you. I hope you liked them?’

‘They were delicious.’ Carlyle smiled despite himself. ‘However, I forced myself to stop at two.’

‘Aha! I like a man who can show some discipline.’

Was she flirting with him? ‘What else can you tell me about the customer?’

‘A secret admirer, eh?’

Carlyle felt embarrassed. ‘Hardly.’

‘Well, she was tall, elegantly dressed, wore large sunglasses. Maybe in her early to mid thirties.’

Carlyle thought back to his meeting with Olga in the Garden Hotel. ‘Did she use a credit card?’

‘She paid cash, and she paid a tip in advance for the delivery girl, which was nice. Quite a few people don’t even bother these days. You’d be surprised.’

‘Was she English?’

‘No,’ Greene said firmly, ‘definitely not. Her English was good, but she had a strong accent. I assumed that she was Eastern European.’

Close enough, Carlyle thought. ‘That’s been very helpful, thank you. And thanks again for the cakes.’

‘It was our pleasure,’ Greene purred. ‘Come and visit us some time, Inspector. We’d be delighted to see you.’

‘I will, thank you.’ He put down the receiver just as the welcome screen finally appeared on his computer. Typing in his log-in and password, he went straight to Google. As someone who had struggled with a typewriter in his early years at work, Carlyle knew that he would always retain a small sense of wonder when it came to computers; even more so with the internet. The amount of useful information that was out there, just waiting to be grasped, was truly miraculous. All you had to do was type in the right things in the little search box.

Carlyle typed in ‘AUFS’.

50,300,000 results in 0.15 seconds.

Adelaide University Film Society.

Another Union File System.

Linux patch aufs package.

He scrolled down the first five or six pages of search results, finding nothing that seemed remotely relevant. He went back to the top of the page and hit the Advanced Search button.

Find web pages that have all these words. Slowly he typed in ‘AUFS and Falkirk and orphanage’.

74 results in 0.3 seconds.

That was more like it.

The first two, in Cyrillic script, he ignored. The third one down was a website for the Anglo-Ukrainian Friendship Society — AUFS. Carlyle clicked on the link. The front page displayed the Union Jack alongside the yellow and blue Ukrainian flag. Looking along the top, he hit the Directors button. In front of him suddenly appeared the smiling face of the Rt Hon. Gordon Elstree-Ullick, Earl of Falkirk, the society’s chairman. Carlyle sat back in his chair and pondered how much further this took him. Noticing a button called ‘Photos’, he clicked on that and scrolled down through a selection of events, including one entitled Sandokan International Children’s Camp.

On 7 September, Gordon Elstree-Ullick, Chairman, led an aid delegation to visit the camp. . Carlyle looked through multiple pictures of sad, pale-looking children receiving boxes of clothes and toys out of the back of an AUFS-branded lorry. At the bottom was a group photo of maybe seventy or eighty kids posed, along with the aid workers. In the middle, smiling for the camera, was Falkirk himself. Carlyle increased the size of the photo so that it filled the whole screen.

Peering at the computer, he tried to make out each child individually. However, it was a low-resolution image and therefore hard to focus on. I need to get glasses, he thought glumly. My eyesight is going. Leaning closer, he studied each face individually. Reaching the end, he went back to carefully study each one again. There were a couple of girls who maybe looked like Alzbetha, but he couldn’t be sure. He wondered if this Sandokan place would have proper records and whether he would be able to get hold of them. But that wasn’t the kind of information he could hope to access without Simpson’s help.

After sending a copy of the photo to a nearby printer, he looked along the line of adults on the back row. Three from the end, over on the right, he spotted someone who looked familiar.

A hungry-looking Joe Szyszkowski appeared at his side. ‘Got any more of those cakes?’

Ignoring the question, Carlyle pointed at the man in the picture. ‘Who does that look like to you?’

Joe peered at the screen for a couple of seconds. ‘No idea.’

‘That,’ said Carlyle, tapping the screen, ‘is Ihor Chepoyak. I’m sure of it.’