commendation and a promotion. For a while, he was on a roll. It even looked as if all his ‘career issues’ might have been sorted out for good. A subsequent run-in with a particularly stupid superintendent quickly put paid to that hope, but it still ranked as Carlyle’s most successful period on the force and he remembered it fondly.
He brought up Sparrow’s mobile number, and listened to it ringing.
‘Yes?’ a voice asked sharply.
‘Sam?’
‘Yes.’ There were voices in the background: kids, maybe a television.
‘It’s John Carlyle. Sorry to bother you at home.’
‘No problem. How are you?’ Sparrow sounded tired, distracted.
‘Fine. And you?’
‘All good. What can I do for you?’
Carlyle could sense that it was not a good time, so he got straight to it. ‘George Dellal.’
Sparrow waited for more. When it didn’t come, he asked: ‘What about him?’
‘I might have something similar.’
‘Oh?’ Sparrow gave no indication of being in any way intrigued.
‘Yes… this Blake thing?’
‘Sorry,’ said Sparrow wearily, ‘I’ve been off the last few days. The mother-in-law’s been in hospital. Family drama.’
‘Sorry to hear that.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Sparrow, with the air of a man who wished he was busy raking through other people’s shit rather than dealing with his own. ‘These things happen. What’s the Blake thing?’
Carlyle wanted to keep it vague, hedging his bets. ‘Basically, it’s another knife murder. What’s the background to Dellal?’
Carlyle listened to Sparrow breathing down the line as he parked his domestic drama for a moment and slowly dredged the basic details of that earlier case out of his memory. ‘George Dellal. Found dead in his flat. The neighbours reported the smell. It was very messy.’ Sparrow paused as if he’d run out of things to say.
Carlyle prompted him gently. ‘I don’t remember reading about it in the papers.’
‘We kept it low-key. It only made the local paper and a couple of paras in the Standard. Since then there’s been nothing. Happily, the family didn’t want to make a meal of it in the press.’
Again, Sparrow stopped abruptly. Carlyle knew that, if that case was still open, it couldn’t be looking too good. He didn’t want to rub Sparrow’s nose in it – no one wanted to be associated with any of the small minority of murders that didn’t get solved – but he wanted to elicit what he could. ‘How’s it looking now?’ he asked, gently.
‘No weapon. No leads. We haven’t made much progress, so we haven’t exactly been shouting about it from the rooftops.’
‘No,’ said Carlyle. You’re lucky you don’t have Simpson hovering at your shoulder, he thought. Sparrow’s boss, Superintendent Jack Izzard, was far less high-maintenance. ‘One other thing,’ he asked, as casually as possible, ‘was there a note?’
Sparrow laughed. ‘It definitely wasn’t a suicide,’ he said, misunderstanding the question. ‘No, there wasn’t a note.’
‘OK.’
‘Is there a possible connection with your guy?’ Sparrow asked.
The noise in the background increased. Carlyle could clearly hear a child crying and a woman shouting at it to go to bed. ‘I dunno,’ he said.
‘Look, John,’ Sparrow said hurriedly, ‘I gotta go. I’ll be back at work in a couple of days. If you need anything, you know where to find me. And if you find out anything interesting, let me know. Good luck.’
‘Thanks.’ Carlyle put down the phone and scribbled three points on his pad:
1. Merrion Club
2. 6 possibles – Carlton?2, Holyrod, Sebastian Lloyd, Nicholas Hogarth, Harry Allen
3. Total shitstorm
Then he called Joe Szyszkowski.
After five, six, seven rings, Joe answered. ‘Hello, boss.’
‘Are you sitting down?’ Carlyle asked.
‘Sure. Why?’ Joe sounded relaxed, as if he’d had a glass or two of wine with dinner. Unlike the Sparrow call, there was no background noise. Joe’s kids would be in bed by now.
‘Things have moved on a bit,’ Carlyle said. ‘There’s good news and bad news.’
‘I’ll have the good news first, then, please,’ said Joe cheerily.
‘We know who the next victim will be.’
‘Excellent!’ said Joe, waiting patiently. He knew that Carlyle would get to the point eventually and, relaxing at home, he didn’t feel the need to hurry him along.
‘At least,’ Carlyle continued, ‘I can narrow it down to six people.’
‘From seven million to just six, that’s not bad,’ Joe agreed, suspending his disbelief. ‘So what’s the bad news?’
‘One of them is the mayor.’
‘The mayor?’ Joe groaned. ‘Of London?’
‘No, the mayor of fucking Cairo,’ Carlyle deadpanned. ‘Of course, the Mayor of London!’
‘The Mayor of London.’
‘That’s what I said.’
‘Tell me that you’re joking,’ said Joe, ‘ please.’
‘Sadly not, and-’
‘Jesus,’ Joe cut in, ‘there’s an and?’
‘Of the six,’ Carlyle said slowly, ‘one of them is our own dear mayor. Another – according to current opinion polls – is our next prime minister.’
‘Are you sure this isn’t a wind-up?’ Joe asked. ‘How do we know all this?’
‘Ian Blake went to Cambridge University, right?’
‘Right,’ Joe agreed. ‘He got a 2.1 in PPE, Philosophy, Politics and Economics, the standard-issue degree of our governing classes.’
‘Good for him,’ said Carlyle. ‘Beats my A level in General Studies. Anyway, while he was stuffing his head full of knowledge en route to obtaining that excellent qualification, he was a member of something called the Merrion Club.’
‘Never heard of it,’ said Joe.
‘Me neither until about fifteen minutes ago,’ said Carlyle.
‘I’m guessing it’s not the kind of club we’d get invited to join.’
‘No, the Merrion Club was – is, for all I know – a drinking club for rich young wankers.’
‘Rules us out, then.’
‘Damn right. In this case, rich means really rich, as in absolutely fucking loaded.’
‘Lovely.’
‘The aim was to get blind drunk, have a food fight, smash some furniture and maybe fuck the hired help, if they could still get it up later in the evening. At the end of it all, they’d pay for all the damage with fifty-pound notes.’
‘When was this?’
‘The early eighties.’
‘Blake graduated in 1984?’
‘Right. The Merrion class of ’84 included Blake and a guy called George Dellal. Plus Holyrod and the Carlton brothers and a few others. Dellal got chopped up in similar fashion to Blake a few months ago.’
‘Coincidence?’ Joe asked.
‘Hardly,’ Carlyle replied. ‘You’ve got a 1-in-25,000 chance of being murdered in this city, in any given year. What we have here is two out of this group of eight getting brutally murdered in less than six months.’
‘So what have we got?’ Joe asked. ‘Sounds like Brideshead Revisited meets Friday the 13th.’
