Carlyle thought about it for a minute. ‘How are they going to get him off?’
‘They’re discussing that with the pathologist and a forensics guy right now. It’s going to be tricky. They’ve already tried soap and water with no joy. Someone suggested nail-polish remover, but they don’t have any handy. Now they’re thinking of calling the Fire Brigade.’
‘That will go down well,’ said Carlyle wryly. ‘Let’s make sure we’re gone before those guys turn up.’
Carlyle felt his phone start buzzing in his jacket. He fished it out and glanced at the screen. There was no name or number; it just read ‘call’. Thinking that it was probably Simpson, he left it buzzing and dropped it back in his breast pocket. ‘How exactly did they manage to do it?’ he asked casually, nodding in the direction of the crime scene.
‘They smeared glue on his palms, then pressed them down on the bonnet,’ said Joe, who did not share Carlyle’s squeamishness. ‘And also on one side of his face.’
‘OK.’
‘And they glued his knob, too,’ gasped Joe, his shoulders bobbing as he finally lost the fight against mirth.
Despite the early hour, the smell, and everything else, Carlyle couldn’t help but smile too. ‘Seriously? His knob.’
‘Apparently,’ Joe coughed, wiping away a tear, ‘it’s stuck to the badge on the grille.’ He somehow managed to grin and grimace at the same time. ‘I didn’t look that closely myself, but I have it on good authority from those that have.’
Carlyle allowed himself another peek from a distance. It did indeed look like the guy was trying to fuck his Range Rover. What a shocking way to treat a seventy-grand motor.
One of the men in the group discussing the glue problem peeled away and came over.
‘Joe…?’
‘How’s it going, Matt?’ Joe replied. ‘This is my boss, Inspector John Carlyle. Boss, this is Sergeant Matt Parkin.’
‘Inspector.’ Parkin extended a hand.
‘Good to meet you,’ said Carlyle, ‘despite the circumstances.’
‘It is a bit of a mess,’ Parkin agreed.
‘Yes, Joe was telling me. What have you got?’
‘The body was found about two this morning,’ said Parkin. ‘The sick belongs to the woman who found him. She must have puked half her body weight.’
‘Nice,’ said Joe.
‘We’ve identified the man as Nicholas Hogarth, from some documents found in his car,’ Parkin continued. ‘He was on a flight from Moscow last night. Picked up his car from Heathrow and drove straight here.’
‘Do we actually know that he came straight here?’
‘Yeah,’ Parkin nodded, ‘we’ve got the timings down precisely. According to the Congestion Charge people, he entered central London just before midnight. According to the garage staff, he arrived here just after midnight.’
‘Where does the Hogarth family live?’ Carlyle asked.
‘Highgate.’
‘So this wasn’t exactly on his way home?’
‘No, clearly it looks like there was a bit of extracurricular going on. We found some tissues that suggest Mr Hogarth at least managed to get his rocks off before he expired.’
‘Good for him.’ Carlyle had seen enough. ‘Any sign of any drugs?’
‘Haven’t found anything yet.’
‘Apart from the woman who discovered him, did anyone else see anything?’
‘No witnesses, as far as we know. This place is pretty dead at that time of night.’
‘CCTV cameras?’
‘There are twelve on each level and also one in each of the three lifts. Three of them cover the spot where the Range Rover was parked, but the lenses on those three, plus in one of the lifts, were smeared with Vaseline. This was very carefully planned. We are checking all the other cameras, plus those in nearby streets, but it will take time.’
‘OK. It would be great if you could keep us posted.’
‘Of course,’ Parkin nodded. ‘The other thing we’ve got at the moment is this.’ He handed Carlyle a small, see-through plastic, Ziploc bag. Inside was a photograph, about the size of a playing card, with a white border. Slightly over exposed, it showed a smiling young man in a T-shirt and jeans, taken on a summer day somewhere in the countryside. ‘We found this under one of the windscreen wipers of the Range Rover.’
Carlyle looked it over and then handed it to Joe. He turned back to Parkin. ‘We’ll need some copies.’
‘No problem,’ Parkin replied.
‘I’ll give you a call this afternoon,’ Joe added.
Carlyle looked over at the body one last time. ‘Thanks for your help,’ he said. ‘Now, tell me, where can we get a decent cup of coffee round here, at this time of the morning?’
NINETEEN
Southwark, London, November 1985
Halfway between the Elephant and Castle and London Bridge, PC John Carlyle sat by the window in an all- night greasy spoon cafe, staring into space. The place was run by a Lebanese family who had escaped the civil war in Beirut five years earlier. After months patrolling the local streets of Southwark, the young constable wasn’t sure that they’d made the right choice.
Sitting on the opposite side of the table, his partner of the last three weeks, Constable Kevin Slater, an amiable idiot from Manchester, shoved a bacon roll into his mouth and began chewing noisily. Staring into his empty coffee cup, Carlyle tried to ignore the brown sauce that was trickling down Slater’s chin and dripping on to his uniform. The pair of them were six hours into a ten-hour shift. Once it was over, Carlyle would have three days off. Not just any three days, because a crucial weekend loomed. Carlyle was in love.
Crash, bang, fucking wallop. He was in luurve. Thinking back to how it happened made him smile. On a day off, a week or so earlier, he had been mooching around the West End with no money in his pockets, and no plan of action. He was standing in Leicester Square looking at a movie poster for Rocky IV, which was due to come to the Empire in January, when the heavens had opened. Running down St Martins Street in search of shelter, he ducked into Westminster Reference Library. Behind a pile of books at a desk near the door sat the prettiest girl he had ever seen in his life. She looked up as he walked in. Carlyle caught her eye, and for a moment he couldn’t move. It was as if he had stepped into a different universe. Trying to recover the power of motion, he almost immediately tripped over a waste basket. While the girl tried to stifle laughter, he stumbled over to a chair some way off and spent the next hour staring at her over the top of a three-month-old copy of Farmer’s Weekly. Finally, as she was getting ready to leave, he stood up and introduced himself.
As a result, he got a date. She was due to meet him outside Leicester Square tube station in about seventeen hours’ time. London was their oyster. Now he had to come up with something, something damn good. He could not, under any circumstances, fuck this up. If he did, he was convinced that Helen Kennedy would never give him a second chance.
A monster burp from his partner tore Carlyle away from his thoughts. Having finished his roll, Slater went off in search of another. ‘Sure you don’t want one?’ he asked, waving an empty plate in Carlyle’s direction. ‘They really are excellent.’
‘Nah.’ Shaking his head, Carlyle turned away from his partner and stared out of the window in search of romantic inspiration. But in the middle of the night, on Trinity Street in SE sodding 1, there was none to be found. The rundown street was a mix of small shops and workshops, all of them closed at this time of night. The place was deserted. Not a single car was parked at the roadside, and no one had driven past for over ten minutes.
These were hard, unforgiving streets, streets with a history of violence and no future to speak of. More than
