taking a bit of a liberty. And also it would involve too much time. Instead, he made do with a long and satisfying piss. Afterwards, he looked in the bowl. Too dark, he thought. I need to drink more water. Zipping himself up, he took a half-step to the sink and splashed some tap water on his face. After drying himself, he took a look in the mirror, where the usual quizzical, plebeian features stared back at him. He pushed his shoulders back and made an effort to stand up straighter. Stroking the stubble on his jaw, he noticed that it was flecked with an increasing amount of grey. I won’t bother shaving today, he decided. It’ll do my skin good. Carlyle looked himself in the eye, holding his own gaze for several seconds. He was well aware that he was a man who often felt quite uncomfortable in his own skin, but not this morning. Now was not the time for any of that introspective bollocks. Despite the tiredness, he felt good. Not bad for someone who’s been up all night, he reckoned, lingering in front of the mirror. At any rate, not bad for someone of my age who’s been up all night.
Having made a half-hearted attempt to tidy up the remnants of his breakfast, Carlyle wheeled the trolley into the corridor and let the door close behind him. The door to 329 was also closed, with white-and-blue Police – Do Not Cross tape stuck across the surrounding frame. The police would keep the room for at least another few days, while the investigation progressed. It might even be a week or more before the hotel staff would be allowed to clean it up but, the economy and current occupancy rates being what they were, that was not really much of a problem. Carlyle glanced around the corridor one last time, before leaving. Silent and dark, it looked exactly the same as five hours ago, when he had first entered it.
Heading towards the lifts, Carlyle brought up a new number on his phone and hit ‘call’. There was a click and he waited for the inevitable voicemail. After the beep, he left a message: ‘Joe, it’s almost half-eight. Wstawaj ty leniwy draniu! Get up, you fat, lazy bastard. We have a new case. When you finally get out of bed, they’ll fill you in at the station. After that, can you give me a call? Things are under control, so I’m now leaving the scene, and will be back at Charing Cross in a few hours. Let’s catch up then. Otherwise, we could grab some lunch in Il Buffone. In the meantime, see if you can start chasing the obvious, and in particular any outstanding cases where the victim had a knife gratuitously stuck up his arse. That would be great. Say “Hi” to Anita and the kids for me. See you later.’
TEN
Shepherds Bush, London W12, March 1985
Slumped on the sofa, Carlyle tried to ignore Barbara Edwards, 1984’s Playmate of the Year, winking at him from the well-thumbed copy of Playboy resting next to his feet on the glass coffee table. With a heavy heart, he turned his gaze from Barbara’s incredibly perky breasts to a poster of the West Ham footballer Clyde Best on the wall behind the television, and then to the screen which was showing the BBC lunchtime news. The glum faces revealed that the miners’ strike was finally, officially, mercifully over. It had been a long slow death and the men trudging back to work could only muster the feeblest shouts of defiance. Having lost the war, they knew that they faced a slow, relentless defeat during the ensuing peace as well.
Not that the police were celebrating victory, for many officers had enjoyed the escape from home life, the camaraderie of the picket line and the excitement of the rucks. Even more of them had become nicely accustomed to the overtime pay. Now it was back to the basics of normal life.
At least, Carlyle thought dolefully, they had lives to go back to. Not all coppers could say that. A couple of days earlier, the Irish Republican Army had mortared a police station in Newry. Nine fellow officers from the Royal Ulster Constabulary had been killed. Northern Ireland was a long way off, but the IRA also regularly attacked London. There had been a steady stream of bombings in the city over the last few years, and the most recent, a car bomb at the Harrods department store in December 1983, had killed six innocent people. Being a policeman seemed more dangerous than ever.
The terrorists might not be beaten, but at least the miners were. Carlyle himself had not been on a picket line since before Christmas, so already, the strike felt like a distant memory. After several months pounding the streets around Shepherds Bush and Hammersmith, he was finally beginning to feel like a normal copper. And now he was on the cusp of being transferred south of the river, to Southwark. That suited him fine, as a new beat would offer a welcome change.
Between his postings, Carlyle had a week’s leave to use up. Two days in, though, and he was bored and restless. So when he got a message from Dominic Silver, saying that he wanted ‘a chat’, Carlyle was perfectly happy to oblige. He hadn’t seen Dom for about six months.
The last time they had been together was outside Maltby Colliery, east of Rotherham. After a long, exhausting shift, they had played marbles on the pavement, like two kids just out of school. The recently acquired marbles already had a certain sentimental value, since they had been catapulted towards police lines by the strikers during one of the more vicious scuffles of their conflict.
‘This is great,’ Dom had laughed, as he won another game, taking a couple of quid off Carlyle in the process. ‘If marbles are all they can fight with, we’ve got absolutely nothing to worry about. They are really, truly fucked.’
Sitting in Silver’s new bachelor pad, enviously eyeing his stroke mags and watching his new twenty-inch Philips television, Carlyle wondered where the money to pay for all this luxury had come from. It certainly wasn’t from playing marbles, or even from police overtime payments. Carlyle himself was still living with his parents in Fulham, and couldn’t afford to buy as much as an outside toilet anywhere within two hundred miles of London. Renting wasn’t much easier. Dom’s place seemed way, way out of his league. Covering the top floor of a Victorian house, Carlyle reckoned that the flat must have cost him twenty grand, maybe more. That was a hell of a lot of money for a twenty-something kid. For sure, no one would give you a mortgage for that amount on a constable’s salary.
‘Stupid buggers. They should have seen the writing on the wall long ago.’ Dom stood in the doorway, wearing a Van Morrison Wavelength tour T-shirt, as he waved a large spliff in the direction of the television. It struck Carlyle that Dom was turning into a right old hippy bastard. What ever happened to punk? It was almost as if The Clash, still struggling along in name only, had never happened,
The smell was good, but Carlyle declined Dom’s offer of a toke. Dope wasn’t really his thing; invariably it would give him a splitting headache and make him puke. He liked his drugs to get him going, rather than slow him down.
Carlyle watched the embers glow as Dom took another greedy drag. Back in television land, one of the union leaders appeared on the screen and started talking about ‘dignity’, ‘solidarity’ and ‘the need to keep fighting’. The man looked haggard, and so haunted that you almost expected him to burst into tears at any minute.
‘Idiots!’ Dominic snarled. ‘Donkeys leading lions.’
‘If the lions really were lions,’ Carlyle asked, ‘would they really allow themselves to be led by donkeys?’
‘Smart-arse.’ Dom took another puff.
Carlyle shrugged.
Dom failed to blow a smoke ring and coughed. ‘Seriously though,’ he said through the haze, ‘that’s a bloody good question, Johnny boy… now shift up.’
Carlyle moved to one end of the sofa and Dom flopped down beside him. For the next few minutes, Dom stared at the television screen intently, without saying a word. Eventually the news bulletin moved on to other stories. Apparently, Nelson Mandela had refused a deal from the South African government which would see him released from jail in return for renouncing armed struggle.
‘Bad move, Nelson, old son,’ Dom remarked airily.
‘If he does a deal with them, it will damage his credibilty,’ Carlyle said earnestly.
‘Credibility’s overrated,’ said Dom sharply. ‘He’s been in jail for what… twenty years? He’s old… what, in his sixties?’
‘Something like that.’
Dom pointed the spliff at the screen. ‘Now he should get out while he’s got the chance. Once he’s out, Botha and his boys are finished. Even that bitch Thatcher won’t be able to stop him.’ He clenched his fist: ‘Nelson! You’re a lion! It’s time to roar!’
