‘We?’
‘Yes, well, you obviously, O great one,’ Joe’s grin got wider, ‘but, as usual, I will probably have to help out… at least a little bit.’
Carlyle nodded formally in the sergeant’s direction. ‘You are too kind.’
‘No gratitude necessary,’ said Joe, bowing slightly in return. ‘We might as well try and get it sorted out as quickly as possible.’
‘Quite.’ Carlyle stroked his stubble and shot his sergeant a look of mock seriousness. ‘No one’s turned up to confess this morning?’
Joe Szyszkowski pretended to think about this for a minute, before delivering the inevitable reply, ‘No.’
‘Is there no hot lead that presented itself while I was in bed?’
Again, Joe pretended to think about it for a second, before shaking his head. ‘No.’
‘OK, OK, let’s get serious.’ With a tremendous effort of will, Carlyle summoned some enthusiasm for the matter in hand. ‘What about the knife, then?’
‘It’s a nice bit of kit. No prints. Could have been bought in several hundred locations across central London, assuming it was purchased recently, that is.’
‘Do we want to spend time checking on that?’ Carlyle asked.
‘It’s already in hand.’
Carlyle moved on down his mental checklist. ‘Did you see the note?’
‘Yes.’
‘What do you make of it?’
‘There’s a story here, obviously,’ said Joe. ‘The killer wants us to know why he did this.’
‘OK,’ said Carlyle, suddenly all business. ‘So have we come up with anything else involving a similar MO?’
Joe adopted a philosophical tone. ‘The modus operandi in this case appears to be fairly unique. There have been twenty-eight knife killings in London so far this year. There were eighty-six last year. Most are either domestics or kids stabbing each other on sink estates.’
Carlyle grunted. Crimes of passion or crimes of stupidity, both categories bored him silly.
‘We are checking out all of the rest,’ Joe continued, ‘but there appears to have been nothing similar so far… arse-wise.’
‘Have you viewed the CCTV pictures from the hotel?’ Carlyle asked.
‘Yeah.’ Joe took another slurp of his coffee. ‘Useless result, though some American boxer and his groupies got into a fight with the management, just before you turned up.’ He grinned. ‘One of the women had her top ripped off. Wearing no bra.’
Carlyle gave him a look that said: Let’s focus on the matter in hand, shall we?
‘That was quite entertaining but caused chaos. I’ve got one of the lads back at the station having another look through, but I don’t bet on them finding anything useful.’
‘OK,’ Carlyle sounded disappointed. ‘Just make sure that they don’t stick the groupie’s tits on YouTube. In the meantime, what about the victim himself?’
Joe raised his eyes to the ceiling and began reciting from memory, rather like a third-former standing up in front of the whole class. ‘His name is Ian Blake, as you know. Forty-seven years old. Owns a flat in Chelsea – there’s a team investigating there now. He works in that most noble of professions, public relations, at a firm called Al
… something.’ Joe paused the recitation and pulled a torn piece of paper out of his pocket to scan the notes scribbled on it. ‘Alethia. They have an office near Park Lane.’
‘Alethia was the goddess of truth,’ Carlyle explained. ‘Daughter of Zeus.’
Joe raised an eyebrow. ‘And we know that because?’
‘We know that because Alice explained it to me on our school run this morning.’
‘Top girl!’
‘Yeah,’ agreed Carlyle happily, ‘she certainly is. She’s into all that Greek mythology stuff, big time at the moment.’
‘It’s good to know that at least one member of the Carlyle family is showing an interest in culture,’ Joe smirked.
Carlyle feigned indignation. ‘I’m not taking any crap from someone whose kids spend all their time playing with their Nintendo DS,’ he grinned, ‘and who wouldn’t know a book if they were smacked in the face with one.’
‘They are just at one with the Zeitgeist, chief,’ Joe quipped serenely. ‘We don’t want them to get bullied in the playground, now, do we?’
‘I suppose not. Anyway, what about this Alethia?’
‘PRs,’ grunted Joe. ‘What a name, then! They really understand irony, don’t they?’
‘Yeah,’ Carlyle agreed. ‘Apate would have been a better choice.’
‘Because he is?’ Joe asked, happy to play along.
‘ She was,’ said Carlyle pointedly, ‘the goddess of deceit.’
‘Ho-ho, very good. Anyway, as well as being incapable of irony, PRs also don’t know how to hide their light under a bushel. In present circumstances, this is a very good thing. It means we are making good progress in building up a picture of the victim.’
‘We are?’
Joe laughed. ‘Oh, yes. Blake’s picture and a short bio were prominent on his company’s website.’
‘I saw that.’
‘And he’s also on Facebook.’
‘Why am I not surprised?’ Carlyle grunted. ‘And what does that peerless source of information tell us?’
‘In a nutshell?’ Joe grinned.
‘Yes, please, Sergeant,’ Carlyle nodded, hoping for something good. ‘In a fucking nutshell.’
‘Well, he’s a “spurmo”. Or, at least, he wants us to think he’s a spurmo.’
‘A what?’
‘Spurmos,’ Joe intoned, ‘are straight, proud, unmarried men over thirty.’
Carlyle yawned as he was introduced to yet another tedious media fabrication. ‘So that’s like a metrosexual?’
‘Maybe. Kind of. Perhaps. I have no idea.’
‘As opposed to a retrosexual,’ Carlyle smirked, ‘who hasn’t had any in years.’
‘Yes, well… we’ll leave your domestic problems out of this, shall we?’ Joe laughed. ‘It’s not always all about you, you know. If you were a bit more culturally literate, you would know that the spurmo god is George Clooney.’
‘OK,’ Carlyle reluctantly tried to get a bit more serious, ‘so straight and proud doesn’t seem to suggest a gay angle to this killing.’
Joe made a face. ‘He could have been in denial. Reluctant to come out of the closet? Maybe the whole spurmo thing was a front.’
‘Come on, no one is in the closet these days. Look at Saxonby’s mum.’
‘Yeah,’ Joe sniggered. Sergeant Chris Saxonby at the Savile Row police station had become an instant celebrity in the Met after his mother, seventy-one-year-old Agnes O’Halloran, had crossed over to the pink side, leaving his father – her husband of forty-five years – for a sixty-seven-year-old girlfriend. The shock of his parents new domestic arrangements almost killed poor Saxonby. He went off on sick leave for almost a year, before being granted early retirement on compassionate grounds. Even then, his leaving do had been held in the gayest gay pub in Soho.
‘Poor sod,’ Carlyle reflected, with feeling.
‘Worse things happen at sea,’ muttered Joe. ‘But, coming back to our Mr Blake, you shouldn’t be so binary in your thinking.’
‘Why not?’ Carlyle asked.
‘Because some people will fuck anything,’ said Joe philosophically.
‘Charming.’
