‘I know.’
‘Still, it’s not looking too good for your theory.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Joe, reluctant to give up on his thesis so easily. ‘Maybe he was indulging his gay side, his spurmo side then reasserted itself, and there was a falling out. Maybe it was, like the paper says, a sex game that went a bit… wrong.’
‘That wouldn’t really sit alongside the note, though, would it?’
‘No…’ Joe pondered that for a second, ‘although that could just be something to throw us off the scent. A distraction?’
‘It suggests premeditation rather than a crime of passion.’
‘Not necessarily. Maybe the killer was a quick thinker.’
‘I don’t know,’ Carlyle was shaking his head. ‘It’s all guesswork. What else does Facebook tell us?’
‘Blake is basically a posh boy who never grew up. He’s pushing fifty, but acting like he’s twenty-five. He likes skiing, Kate Nash and mojitos…’
‘Who’s Kate Nash?’
Joe rolled his eyes to the heavens. ‘Please try and keep up, old man. She’s a singer-songwriter who was flavour of the month – or flavour of the nanosecond – a year or so ago.’
‘Never heard of her,’ said Carlyle, who couldn’t have named any female singer since Kate Bush.
‘I just know the name,’ said Joe. ‘The kids have got one of her CDs, I think, but I’ve never heard any of her stuff myself. Having said that, she’s probably already made more than you or I will earn in our lifetimes… combined.’
Carlyle grunted. He hated all the irrelevant crap from victims’ lives that passed before him in the course of an investigation. The way that people managed to waste time never ceased to amaze him. In the station, they had banned Facebook because too many staff were spending too much time on it, thus sucking up all of the station’s bandwidth. On two occasions, the computer network had crashed completely. That was presumably due to the support staff, or at least he hoped so. Wasn’t Facebook old-hat now, anyway? Helen, who saw herself as the most socially and technologically literate member of their family, had set up an account but lost interest after about a week. Carlyle was pleased with that, almost as pleased as he was with himself for never having signed up in the first place. He had enough problems with real life, so creating a virtual one would seem madness. The whole thing was bloody dangerous – one of their friends was now getting divorced because her husband had run off with some girl he had met online.
Carlyle stood up, pulled out his wallet and handed over a fiver to Marcello. He waited for the change, and then dropped it in the tips tin. ‘OK,’ he said, turning back to Joe. ‘We’re making some progress. Let’s get over to Blake’s flat.’
‘Not possible.’ Joe shook his head. ‘By the time we got there, we’d have to come straight back again.’
Carlyle made a face. ‘Why?’
‘For the press conference.’
Carlyle gave him a dirty look. ‘What fucking press conference?’
‘Oh, yes.’ Joe’s eyes sparkled as he also got to his feet, and spread his arms wide. ‘Why do you think I’m looking so smart today?’
Carlyle looked his colleague up and down for a second time. Belatedly he noticed that Joe’s usual outfit – a grubby jeans and T-shirt combo – had been replaced by his basic courtroom attire: a dark-grey Marks amp; Spencer suit, crumpled white shirt and a maroon tie.
Buttoning up his jacket, Joe made a show of looking his boss up and down, too. ‘Not a match on the Paul Smith, of course. That is quality.’
Damn right, Carlyle thought. Glancing at his reflection in the window, he gave a nod of approval. His own suit was a very nice navy, three-button, single-breasted Paul Smith number that he had acquired a few years ago for seventy-five quid from the Oxfam shop just down the road, on Drury Lane. The one item in his wardrobe that he looked after carefully, it was still in reasonable nick. Given the turn of events, he was glad he hadn’t gone with his alternative outfit of The Clash T-shirt and jeans. If you looked carefully, you could see that the Paul Smith was a bit worn in places, but it was still several notches above the rest of his wardrobe, fitting in well with the Met Comissioner’s new ‘anti-scruffy’ campaign.
‘You should have shaved,’ Joe observed.
‘You should have shaved better,’ Carlyle deadpanned in response.
Joe grinned. ‘What about a tie?’
‘Don’t push your luck,’ Carlyle growled. He then closed his eyes. ‘Why do we need a press conference?’
‘Because Simpson says so.’
Superintendent Carole Simpson was their boss. She was based at Paddington Green Police Station, appearing in Charing Cross when a problem – or an opportunity – presented itself. A woman in a hurry, she was five or six years younger than Carlyle and, unlike him, could still realistically eye another three – or even four – rungs of the career ladder before her time was up.
Carlyle had known Simpson for almost ten years now. Apparently untroubled by any ‘history’, she had arrived on the scene not long after his own move to Charing Cross. She was, he had to admit, a hell of an operator. Political to her fingertips, she only ever looked upwards, and she had taken to what was essentially a management role like a duck to water. She could be charming too – if you were a man of a certain age (i.e. ten to fifteen years older than her) and she wanted something from you.
But Superintendent Carole Simpson rarely wanted anything from Inspector John Carlyle. In fact, they had an uncomfortable, difficult relationship. She was frustrated by what she saw as his stubborn refusal to play the game, and his inability to hide his feelings towards her. In turn, he hated that sense of being co-opted on to her mission for personal glory.
Simpson, in fact, left Carlyle cold. Somehow, the collective good always seemed to be neatly aligned with the interests of the superintendent. He found her approach to the job completely introverted, indeed almost demented: she was far too busy climbing the greasy pole to worry about anything else. As far as he could see, Simpson combined utter selfishness with the self-awareness of a goldfish. Either way, Carlyle eyed her with a mixture of extreme distrust and antipathy. However, he had to be professional and, with discipline and concentration, he could just about tolerate her so long as their paths did not cross too often. Whenever they did coincide, he always felt as if he was getting too close to speaking his mind in a way that would fatally undermine any hope of maintaining even the most perfunctory of working relationships.
‘Why does Simpson want a presser?’ Carlyle began massaging his temples firmly, in the hope that maybe the headache that he knew was on the way wouldn’t actually arrive.
‘Who knows?’ Joe raised his hands as if in supplication. ‘The media have already got the story, so she probably wants to ride the wave.’
Carlyle looked hard at Joe. ‘So, if the press has got everything already, what do we hope to achieve with a bloody press conference?’
Joe shrugged. ‘You know what she’s like.’
Carlyle nodded. ‘Oh, yes.’
‘For Carole there is no such thing as bad publicity.’
Carlyle looked at his watch. ‘What time is it scheduled for?’
‘Three-thirty,’ Joe replied. ‘They’ve already been told that you’ll be there. I’m just a little bonus.’
Carlyle ground his teeth in frustration. Toying with the media circus would only make their job harder. Press conferences were the first refuge of the brainless and the desperate. As of right now, however, they were a long way from being either. ‘What are we meant to be saying?’ he asked.
Joe drained the last of his coffee. ‘Just the basics. Telling them what they already know. Asking the perpetrator of this horrific crime to give himself up. Calling for witnesses. Yada, yada, yada. Reassuring the public.’
‘Do they need reassurance?’
‘Probably not.’
‘No sign yet of mass panic?’
‘No.’
