and have a second one, if the opportunity presented itself.
This was a ritual definitely not to be rushed. As was his habit, Carlyle carefully cut the pastry into quarters, and took a further second to decide the order in which he was going to eat them. This was definitely going to require another coffee, so he emptied his demitasse and called to Marcello for another double macchiato. Once that had arrived, Carlyle reached for the first quarter of his pastry. It was already in his mouth when the door opened.
‘How’s the gay slaying coming along?’
Carlyle chewed, swallowed and smiled. ‘Afternoon, Joe.’ He looked up to watch Sergeant Joseph Szyszkowski flopping into the booth, opposite him. Joe had an early edition of the evening paper wedged under his arm, and an excited look in his eye. Exercising more than a little self-control, the inspector resisted the urge to demand where the hell he’d been for the last fourteen hours or so. ‘Want something to drink?’
‘What can I get you?’ Marcello piped up from behind the counter.
‘I’ve had lunch, thanks, Marcello,’ said Joe, ‘but a latte would be nice.’
‘Coming right up.’
‘Oh, before I forget,’ Joe said to his colleague, ‘I got a call from Valcareggi.’
‘And what did Edmondo have to say for himself?’ Carlyle asked, hoping that he wasn’t now going to have to chase down any more Italian mobsters.
‘Apparently the guy we arrested later got knifed in some prison outside Rome.’ Joe paused for dramatic effect. ‘They killed him.’
‘Pozzo?’ Carlyle sniffed. ‘At least he won’t have to worry about his weight any more, will he?’
‘I suppose not,’ Joe agreed. Picking up a copy of Marcello’s menu, he studied it carefully.
Carlyle gave his sergeant the once-over as he listened to the coffee machine burst into action. Joe was five foot ten, about a stone overweight, with long dark hair and a perpetually amused expression like a slightly bigger version of the actor Jack Black. They had been working together for more than four years now. Carlyle was notoriously uninterested in the backgrounds of any of his colleagues, but he had nevertheless gleaned quite a bit about Joe in their time working together. Joseph Leon Gorka Szyszkowski was second-generation Polish, born and brought up in Portsmouth before coming to London to study geophysics at Imperial College. For reasons Carlyle didn’t understand, he decided to join the Met after graduating with a good 2.1 degree.
In the wider world of London, Poles were now well established. Many were heading home, as the recession began to bite, but they were still considered the benchmark of quality, reliability and value for money in the plumbing, building and other sectors of the economy. They also provided the odd footballer and many, many Catholic priests. For any ethnic minority, however, it was harder to break into the relatively closed, conservative world of the police than to gain acceptance in civilian jobs. Carlyle had so far only ever come across one ‘Polish’ policeman in the Met, and that was Joe. To be fair, if it wasn’t for the name you would never guess his ethnic background. Joe was thoroughly assimilated, even if he would never be invited to join the Masons, that rather comical secret society (or ‘society with secrets’ as they preferred to be known) and home of the ‘all-seeing eye’ and the motto Ordo ab Chao, ‘Order out of Chaos’, which for some reason attracted policemen by the bus load.
There were about 21,700 sergeants employed in the UK police, and Carlyle knew the only one of them that could sing the English national anthem in both Polish and Hindi. Joe had an Indian wife, Anita, and together they had given their kids, William and Sarah, the most thoroughly English names that they could think of. Despite all this, there remained a strand of Joe’s DNA that was deeply and irredeemably Polish, i.e. dark, pessimistic and Catholic. This background contributed to a sense of detachment, irony and – perhaps just as important – fatalism, which Carlyle could relate to. The two got on well and trusted each other. Carlyle was happy about that.
‘What have they got?’ he asked, as he watched Joe theatrically unfold the newspaper and lay it out on the table in front of him.
‘What do you think they’ve got?’ Joe tossed his copy of the Evening Standard on to the surface.
‘Everything?’
Joe nodded. ‘Everything.’
He waited while Carlyle contemplated the 72-point headline on the front page which read: TOP HOTEL KNIFE HORROR.
‘They’ve got the knife, the time of death, the note,’ Joe continued, ‘and they’re also speculating about the sexual nature of the crime.’ He picked the newspaper off the table and turned it around to scan the article. ‘And I quote: “Sources suggest that the frenzied attack bears the hallmarks of drug-fuelled sexual experimentation gone badly wrong.”’ He rolled the paper up and waved it at Carlyle. ‘Drug-fuelled sexual experimentation?’ He sighed theatrically. ‘Those were the days…’
‘Speak for yourself,’ Carlyle grinned.
‘This is top-notch journalism,’ Joe laughed. ‘You know, I reckon that this paper has got a lot better since that ex-KGB guy bought it.’
‘Better a propaganda vehicle for the Kremlin than one for our idiot mayor,’ Carlyle said sourly. ‘Who wrote that piece?’
Joe unrolled the paper and squinted at the byline. ‘Someone called Fiona Singer-Cavendish.’
‘Never heard of her.’
‘Me neither,’ Joe shrugged, ‘but she’s certainly on top of this one. I’m surprised that they don’t have a picture of you exploring the dead man’s orifice.’
‘Wait for the final edition,’ Carlyle joked. Bloody Alex Miles, he thought. The little bastard will have sold the lot just for a few hundred quid. He reflected a bit further. ‘Do they know about the note?’
‘They certainly know that there was a note,’ replied Joe. ‘They don’t seem to know that it was delivered to Charing Cross, thank God! They also don’t know – or aren’t disclosing – what it said.’
‘Do you really think there’s a gay angle to all this?’ Carlyle asked.
‘Maybe.’ Joe raised his eyes to the ceiling. ‘Why stick a kitchen knife up some poor bugger’s… no pun intended… behind if not to make a point of some crude sexual nature?’
Carlyle raised his eyebrows. ‘It could mean anything. Or nothing.’
‘Yeah, right,’ Joe scoffed. ‘Surely it’s saying: “I want to fuck you right up the arse”…’
‘Possibly.’ Carlyle went with the flow. With Joe in this kind of mood, that was always the best option. It was normally the only option.
‘… after you’re dead.’
‘It could make sense,’ Carlyle agreed, for want of anything else to say.
‘This,’ Joe smiled, ‘has gay hate crime written all over it.’
Marcello placed Joe’s latte on the table and retreated to a respectful distance. Carlyle thought about the story in the paper and suddenly felt his enthusiasm for the case desert him faster than an Old Compton Street hooker who’s been paid in advance. All he could see was the slog ahead of them. ‘Do we care, one way or another?’ he wondered out loud. ‘Gay or not, does it make much of a difference?’ The gay crimes taskforce had been disbanded three years earlier. Cases like this all went in the same pot now, in this case his pot.
Joe lent back in his chair and let out a deep breath. ‘Not really.’
‘What about the SCD? Could this be one for them?’
Of the Metropolitan Police’s eleven Specialist Crime Directorates, the Homicide and Serious Crime Command was SCD1. It usually dispatched a major investigation team or a homicide task force to sweep up all the interesting murder cases. By definition that meant virtually all those that were not solved within a matter of hours.
‘I wouldn’t bet on them bailing us out,’ Joe replied. ‘Homicide is seriously stretched at the moment. Half of them have been sent to Belgravia to deal with the Arab billionaire who took a dive off the balcony of his Mayfair penthouse, back in March.’
Carlyle nodded. He was aware of the case.
‘Lots of foreign travel involved with that one,’ Joe continued, ‘so everyone wants a piece of it. No one’s in a hurry to call it a day, either.’
‘I can imagine,’ said Carlyle. Lots of foreign travel meant time away from the family and lots of well-paid overtime. Even better, there was no real pressure to get a result. The established consensus was that it had been a professional hit, with the killer lurking somewhere back in the Middle East, untraceable and untouchable. All in all, it was a great case to be working on. Those involved would be fighting off volunteers with a stick.
‘Face it,’ said Joe, ‘it looks like we’re stuck with this one.’
