‘You can fuck in hell or you can fuck in heaven,’ Dom continued. ‘Either way, the only person you’re fucking is yourself. Face it, Johnny, you’re not a team player.’ He smiled. ‘At least, not when it comes to the Police. So it’s just as well that I can offer you alternative employment.’
‘Doing what?’ Carlyle asked again. Again, he didn’t really want to know.
‘Just some organising, a bit of man management.’ Dom grinned. ‘This and that.’
Carlyle knew exactly what he was talking about.
‘It’s a chance for you to get in at the beginning of something big. Something lucrative.’ Dom raised his eyebrows. ‘What do you say?’
Carlyle looked at Dom, at his cheeky smile and dilated pupils. He needed a haircut and a shave. The man was right about Trevor Miller, but Carlyle knew that he would have to sort out his own mess. Going into business with a drug dealer was not the way to deal with that situation.
‘I’ve got to go,’ he said, smiling as best he could. ‘I’ll think about it.’
Dom shrugged. ‘Fair enough. Let me know before you go back to work.’
Carlyle headed for the door. ‘Sure.’
‘OK… great.’ Smiling, Dom saw him off with a friendly wave, both of them knowing that Carlyle wouldn’t meet Dom’s deadline.
Walking down Percy Road, Carlyle quickly realised that he had developed a splitting headache. The world was spinning gently. He stopped and tried to breathe in deeply though his mouth, but all he got for his trouble was the taste of car fumes.
ELEVEN
Back in the Middle Ages, a barbican was a fortified gateway, the outer defence to a castle. They fell out of use in the fifteenth century, as military technology improved with the emergence of the mobile cannon. It made no particular sense therefore that the Barbican arts centre and housing estate was located in the middle of London, in an area bombed out during the Second World War. The City of London Corporation, the guys who ran the capital’s financial district, built the arts centre – opened by the Queen in 1982 – as the City’s gift to the nation. However, the 1980s was not a great decade for architecture and what they came up with was a concrete ziggurat, a terraced pyramid with a multi-level layout so complex that it required different coloured lines painted on the ground to help theatre goers and tourists from getting lost on its walkways. If ever a building had a personality bypass, this was it. To no one’s surprise, it was later voted London’s ugliest building.
None of this was of much interest to young Alice Carlyle, who knew exactly where she was going and didn’t need a yellow line to show her the way. Alice sucked greedily from a small carton of apple juice as she stood next to her father on a walkway thirty feet above the ground. Handing Carlyle the carton, she started happily munching on the last of the hoso-maki rolls from her tray of salmon nigiri that they had picked up from a sandwich shop. This was part of the usual breakfast-on-the-run routine, executed by either parent to Alice’s precise specifications for that particular day. The kindergarchy was alive and well in the Carlyle household, with Alice centre stage and Mum and Dad both fretting about being reduced to the role of indentured servants. As many parents knew, it was hard to break free from the dictatorship of the child, but at least they knew that it would pass soon enough.
Carlyle finished his skinny latte, which was, annoyingly, barely lukewarm despite him asking, as always, for it to be extra hot. Irritated by the failings of Bulgarian baristas in particular and the service economy in general, he leant over the balcony and looked down at the City of London School for Girls below. It was about two hundred and fifty yards away, on the far side of an ornamental pond half the size of a football pitch. ‘City’ as it was known, resembled a rather small 1970s comprehensive not unlike the one he had gone to himself, six miles, thirty years and several generations away. Why it had been plonked down in the middle of this rather drab piece of urban planning, Carlyle had no idea. But, watching the other kids make their way happily in, he was glad that it was.
Work-shift patterns and criminals willing, Carlyle managed to take his daughter to school maybe three or four times a month. He knew he should make the most of it. It was ‘free’ time, when they could just be together, and he enjoyed the school run more than just about anything else he could think of. As far as he could see, Alice didn’t think about it at all, but that was more than good enough for him. For kids there was only time; you either gave it to them or you didn’t. You had a short window of opportunity, and then they were off and you were back on your own. You couldn’t fake it by trying to split your life into quality and non-quality time. That was just middle-class bollocks. You either did it or you didn’t.
The fact that he had spent the previous night with a corpse made the morning – Alice munching, the sun shining and the city bustling – even more enjoyable than usual. He turned away from the balcony and ran an eye over a poster announcing the imminent arrival of an exhibition of work by Lithuania’s leading avant-garde fashion designers. Carlyle had never heard of Helmut amp; Karl. To him, they looked like a slightly hipper version of Gilbert amp; George, the aged English artists famous for a laugh-a-minute oeuvre with titles like Shit Faith, In the Shit, and Bloody Life. Letting his eyes slide down the poster copy, Carlyle saw that Helmut amp; Karl looked like a somewhat fluffier proposition:
Helmut amp; Karl are widely acknowledged to be the leading geniuses of the post-modern fashion industry. ‘The House of Helmut amp; Karl’ will show a selection of the designers’ leading signature pieces from 1984 to the present, reborn in a newly commissioned installation that dominates the entire Esterhaus gallery on the fourth floor of the Centre. Among the highlights will be the pair’s world-famous 1992 ‘Chinese Doll’ collection. For this exhibition, emerging supermodel Madison Smith will be dressed in a series of twelve jewel-encrusted dresses until she is wearing 250 pounds of haute couture worth more than $60 million. ‘What we are bringing to London is an ode to individuality and exclusivity,’ say the designers. ‘Unavailability is what gives fashion its aura. If it is too easy, too accessible, where is the art? We will show you the art.’
‘Exclusive’ and ‘unavailable’ took him back to the Garden hotel and the rather over-the-top claims in its brochure. There are, what, more than six billion people on the planet, Carlyle thought. So why do we all struggle so hard to be unique? One of his wife’s favourite phrases, taken from Freud, was ‘the narcissism of small differences’. She usually employed it when she was baiting him about the tribalism and stupidity of football fans like himself. Was narcissism the reason behind Ian Blake’s death? Some drive for an exclusive experience? Carlyle filed these thoughts away at the back of his mind and cast a final glance at Helmut amp; Karl. Not one for his own ‘must see’ list, he decided.
Next to the exhibition poster was an advert for Blossombomb, the first perfume created by the same dynamic duo. That was much more straightforward, featuring an almost naked woman waving a bottle of their product in a fairly unimaginative manner. After the bullshit, thought Carlyle, comes the hard sell. Is there anyone on the planet who doesn’t now have their own fragrance?
He looked over at Alice, still munching her sushi. Already, she had probably been exposed to more advertising than he had seen by the time he was thirty years old. It was relentless, indiscriminate, everywhere. What did she make of it all? Carlyle and Helen warned her that advertising was basically there to sell her crap she didn’t need. Sometimes that message seemed to get through, sometimes not. Blossombomb wasn’t yet the problem, but it – or something very much like it – would become one soon.
His watch said 8.52 a.m.. They had entered that ten-minute open zone before nine, when the girls could be dropped off in the school playground. Carlyle knew that they wouldn’t be late, but they wouldn’t be early either.
‘Come on,’ he said gently. ‘We’d better get down there.’
‘Yes, Dad,’ Alice nodded, handing him the now-empty plastic tray and taking her apple juice from his hand. Draining the last of the juice, she handed the carton back to her father, the walking dustbin. Picking up her backpack, she headed in the direction of the stairs.
Carlyle followed behind, hands full, no waste bin in sight – just in case some terrorist decided to hide a bomb in it, the better to take out the Helmut amp; Karl collection? ‘Careful on the stairs,’ he called automatically.
‘Yes, Dad!’ replied an exasperated little voice, as its owner disappeared from view.
Back on ground level, they stood in front of the extremely over-monikered St Giles-without-Cripplegate church. Named after the patron saint of beggars and cripples, it was one of the few medieval churches left in the
