City of London, having survived both the Great Fire of 1666 and the Blitz. Under the benign gaze of the saint himself, out of sight of the school gate, Carlyle gave his daughter kiss. This was the agreed spot for final shows of parental affection, being deemed far enough away from the entrance so that Alice wouldn’t be embarrassed in front of her friends.
‘Have a good time.’
‘Will you pick me up this afternoon?’ Alice asked, as she finished wiping the spot on her cheek where he had just kissed her.
‘No, I have to go back to work. I would love to be here, but things are a bit busy at work. It will have to be Mum.’
‘Good. I like it when Mum picks me up,’ said Alice happily, to Carlyle’s considerable disappointment. She skipped away, moving five yards towards the school before turning back to face him. ‘Was he dead?’
‘Who?’
‘The man last night. Mum says that’s why you didn’t come home.’
‘Yes.’ As usual in these situations, Carlyle kept it short, but he didn’t try to ignore her question or change the subject. Alice, like her mother, had little time for bullshit. She was a no-nonsense girl who, aged four, had informed her parents and, rather undiplomatically, her school chums that Santa was a ‘creature of myth and legend’. In terms of maturity and development, she was probably already three or four or five years ahead of where he’d been at a similar age. That was a hell of a big gap, and Carlyle knew that it would only get bigger.
‘Was he murdered?’ Her tone was matter-of-fact. Her look said: You can tell me the truth, it’s no big deal.
‘That’s TBC,’ Carlyle lied. ‘We don’t know yet.’
Alice looked at him more closely. ‘But you’ll find out?’
‘Yes.’
‘And then they’ll go to jail?’
‘The person who did it? Yes, that’s the idea.’
‘So that they can’t do it again?’
‘Yes,’ Carlyle nodded. ‘The idea is that they go to jail to protect the rest of us.’ He thought about it for a minute. ‘Maybe, when they are in jail, they learn that they did something wrong. That’s their best chance of making sure that they don’t do it again when they come out.’
Alice made a face. ‘But that doesn’t happen very often, does it?’
Carlyle laughed. ‘Hard to say, sweetheart. Hard to say.’
She thought about it some more. ‘It’s good that you’ll catch him. You can tell me about it tonight.’ She started moving away from him. ‘See ya!’
‘See ya!’
Alice skipped inside the school, waving at her teacher, Mrs Matterface, on duty at the front gate, while scanning the playground for any of her young friends. Carlyle stood there and watched his daughter go in, safe and sound. Sending Helen a text to say that he had successfully completed his mission, he loitered for a minute longer. A lone straggler managed to just sneak in before the front doors were ceremonially closed and the school day officially began. Feeling satisfied with a job well done, Carlyle turned away and headed off in the direction of the tube.
After dropping Alice off at school, Carlyle returned home in search of a couple of hours’ sleep. Home was a two-bedroom apartment, measuring eight hundred and ninety square feet, on the thirteenth floor of Winter Garden House, facing south towards the river, with decent views of the South Bank arts complex, the London Eye and Big Ben. WGH was a fifteen-storey, 1960s block housing thirty apartments, which sat on Macklin Street at the north end of Drury Lane. Their apartment had been bought by Carlyle’s father-in-law from Camden Council for sixteen thousand pounds in 1984. With an excellent sense of timing, he had keeled over with a massive heart attack just five months before Alice was born. Helen’s mother had been happy to give them the place, as she herself had moved out years earlier, about a week after her daughter had left school, dumping her husband and decamping to Brighton, the lively seaside town an hour out of London. If it hadn’t been for this happy set of circumstances, the family would have found itself living far from Covent Garden, and Carlyle would have been condemned to a lifetime of commuting on London’s chronically underfunded and unreliable public-transport system.
Waking just before one o’clock, he lingered in bed for a while, thinking about nothing in particular. Eventually he got up, had a shower, got dressed and headed outside. Crossing the one-lane, one-way thoroughfare, he stepped into Il Buffone, a tiny 1950s-style Italian cafe on the other side of Macklin Street. Inside, there was just enough room for the counter and three shabby booths, each of which could sit four people – or six at a squeeze. It was then a case of risking a random dining companion inside or taking one of the small tables outside on the street, where the exhaust fumes came for free.
Carlyle always preferred to stay inside, where he could sit under a crumbling poster of the Juventus Scudetto winning squad of 1984. That was the team of Trapattoni and Platini, higher beings from a different era. Even on the busiest of days, a few moments spent contemplating their achievements were, to Carlyle’s way of thinking, always time well spent.
It was now after two o’clock and the lunchtime rush was coming to a close, so Il Buffone was largely empty. A couple of businessmen lingered over their lattes, discussing the chances of some big order materialising. Each was puffing on a cigarette, in casual contravention of the smoking ban. Carlyle looked questioningly at Marcello, the owner, who just shrugged and turned to the Gaggia coffee machine.
‘Ciao. Buon giorno. Come stai?’
‘I’m good, Marcello,’ Carlyle replied to the back of the man’s head. ‘You?’
‘Fine,’ Marcello shouted back to him, over the hissing of the machine. ‘Cathy’s visiting her mother today, so I’m on my own, but it’s OK. What you havin’ now? Lunch or breakfast?’
It was a difficult decision to make, for Carlyle was normally a morning visitor to the cafe, and choosing lunch would require some extra thought. He couldn’t be bothered with that, so he plumped for breakfast.
‘The usual?’ Marcello asked.
‘Si, grazie. ’ Having now exhausted the complete range of his Italian vocabulary, built up painstakingly over the years, Carlyle nodded respectfully to Trapattoni and Platini and slid into the rear booth to wait for his regular daily rations comprising of a double macchiato with a chunky raisin Danish.
Marcello Aversa had come to London more than thirty years earlier, for a week’s holiday. In that short time he’d managed to fall in love with an English girl, get engaged and find himself a job. Carlyle never ceased to feel impressed every time Marcello told the story. It must have been quite a trip. Thirty years on, still married to Cathy, he was coming to the end of a career that had seen him running various clubs, restaurants and bars in north London and the West End.
Four years ago they had taken on a lease for the cafe, the idea being to give their youngest daughter a start in the business. However, the reality of five-thirty starts, five mornings a week, plus dealing with customers, the council and the health-and-safety people, had proved too much for the girl. She had chucked it in after less than a month and was last heard of backpacking around Chile. Marcello and Cathy were left trying to cover the final years of the lease, while hoping to get someone to take it off their hands.
Carlyle’s wife and daughter were regulars here. Marcello and Cathy doted on Alice, which meant, inevitably, that Helen loved them. That meant, in turn, that Carlyle felt obliged to go in there at least once a day. His job was never mentioned but, over time, he was drawn into the role of problem solver in chief whenever the couple ran up against various bureaucratic problems, which they did with dispiriting regularity. The only bad thing about this situation was Marcello’s constant refusal of any payment. After eating, Carlyle regularly had to force him to take his money. It was embarrassing, but not as embarrassing as taking advantage of their kindness.
Marcello dropped the coffee in front of him, along with a monster pastry, and then tactfully opened the windows at the front of the cafe in order to let the illegal smoke out. On his way back behind the counter, he swept up the almost empty cups sitting in front of the two businessmen, in a way that suggested it was time for them to leave, giving Carlyle a wink before he ducked into the microscopic kitchen at the rear.
Carlyle took a sip of his macchiato and contemplated the pastry. It was a thing of beauty, almost the size of an old seven-inch vinyl single, but half an inch deep and covered in icing. Marcello ordered half a dozen each day from the north London kosher bakers Grodzinski, primarily for the benefit of Carlyle, who had been known to nip in
