‘OK,’ said Joe, rubbing his eyes as he scanned a story from April 1985 headlined ‘Merrion legends a tough act to follow.’ He noted down the names of Edgar and Xavier’s successors without any great enthusiasm.
‘Got something?’
‘Not really. Joe pushed back his chair, rolled his shoulders and stretched. ‘I think I’m just about ready to wrap it up.’ He was hungry. Maybe he should offer Sally a bite to eat. ‘Fancy a drink?’
Switching off her computer, Sally eyed him carefully. ‘Maybe a coffee.’
‘Great.’ Pulling his chair back towards the desk, he reached for the mouse and moved to hit the close button. Then he noticed the story next to the one that he had been reading.
‘Ready?’
‘One minute.’
He rubbed his jaw and stared at the photograph appearing at the top of the piece. Then he scratched his head and stared at it some more. ‘Well, fuck me.’
‘What?’ said Sally McGurk, startled.
TWENTY-SEVEN
The general buzz of activity was punctuated by the regular clink of metal on metal and the occasional grunt of effort throughout the gym in Jubilee Hall, an old warehouse on the south side of Covent Garden’s piazza. The atmosphere was thick, steadily heading towards fetid. Though all the windows were open, the heat of the day was slow to dissipate, and it was still easily above eighty degrees inside. The heat, however, was not going to put Carlyle off. The double espresso he’d downed ten minutes earlier was kicking in, as planned, and he was good to go. His T-shirt stuck to his chest and he felt a bead of sweat descend the length of his spine. He mounted a Life Fitness cross trainer standing in the middle of a row of eight identical machines, and fiddled around with his iPod shuffle. A Christmas present from his wife, it made his exercising easier and had belatedly dragged him into the world of digital music, allowing him to return to some of the music of his youth as well as try out the odd new tune. It didn’t really matter what the music was, as long as it got him going. He skipped through six or seven tracks until he found something from Stiff Little Fingers that was guaranteed to get his blood pumping and his legs moving. He turned the volume up close to maximum, cutting out as much of the background noise as possible. ‘Nobody’s Hero’ began blasting into his brain. Gritting his teeth, he stomped down on the machine and sought out a rhythm. It was time to leave all the stresses of the Blake case behind, if only for a short while. With as much violence as he could muster, he chased that endorphin rush that would surely clear his head and reinvigorate his mind.
Being given the brush-off by Edgar Carlton irritated him hugely. Worse, Carlton’s special adviser, William Murray, had still not come back to him with a time for their promised meeting. As Carlyle saw it, they were clearly playing for time. After the election was over, and they had their hands on all the levers of power, they could easily have the whole case buried.
‘Bastards!’ Carlyle grunted as he upped the pace on the cross trainer. ‘Fucking bastards!’ He hated being messed about by people who thought that they were somehow above the law. And, even more, he hated not being able to do anything about it.
Showered and relaxed, Carlyle strolled out of the changing rooms, to find Joe Szyszkowski nursing a coffee in the gym’s cafe.
‘Helen told me you were here,’ explained Joe, by way of introduction. ‘I tried to ring your mobile earlier, but it went straight to voicemail.’
‘Do you want another drink?’ Carlyle asked, dropping his Adidas holdall on the floor next to a display for sports nutrition supplements with names such as Hurricane and Scorpion Extreme.
‘No, I’m good, thanks.’
Pulling out a chair, Carlyle glanced up at a list of the day’s ‘specials’ chalked on a blackboard above the counter. He didn’t really need to look: they may still have been ‘special’ but he couldn’t remember the last time they had varied. Ordering an orange juice and a hummus wrap, he sat down at Joe’s table. The post-work rush hour was over by now, and the place was emptying quite quickly. Looking across the gym, Carlyle clocked a well-known actor hanging out by the free weights. He had appeared in a movie that Helen had brought home a few weeks ago, the details of which Carlyle had already forgotten before the final credits had finished running. The man was wearing a hooded top, baseball cap and sunglasses, which Carlyle thought was a bit over the top. Though he was not actually doing any lifting, he was making very sure that everyone noticed he was there.
‘Good session?’ Joe asked.
‘Not bad,’ Carlyle mumbled, in a way that he hoped said ‘Food first, talk later’.
Plastered on the wall beside them were flyers announcing all different kinds of classes, from Kendo to Russian Military Fitness ( Train the Red Army way, with genuine Spetsnaz instructors!) to Hot Bikram Yoga. There were also adverts for a number of one-on-one personal training services. One ad fascinated and appalled him in equal measure. ‘You’re never too old for a six-pack’, it proclaimed, over a stunning black-and-white picture of a smiling guy in his sixties with a set of abs of such perfect definition that they defied belief. Not for the first time, he felt awestruck and oppressed at the same time.
Tired, wired and not particularly impressed with his boss’s apparent lack of interest in communicating, Joe tried to rouse Carlyle from his thoughts. ‘Did you get to speak to Carlton?’
‘Yeah,’ said Carlyle, feeling the post-exercise hunger kick in now, and hoping that his food would hurry up. ‘For about ten seconds. The Rt Hon Edgar Carlton MP, Leader of the Opposition, told me he would deign to see me later.’
‘When?’ Joe asked.
Carlyle adopted what he hoped was his most philosophical demeanour. ‘I have absolutely no idea.’
Joe frowned. ‘Does he actually realise just how serious this is?’
‘Does he care, more to the point?’ Carlyle asked. ‘These people all see this as our problem, not theirs. They have other priorities, and they’re certainly not working to our timetable.’
Joe lowered his voice slightly. ‘But we are talking about multiple murders here.’
Carlyle glanced around. The actor was still gossiping away with one of the weightlifters. ‘I don’t notice that the world has stopped turning.’
‘Have you spoken to Simpson about it?’
‘I’ve left her a message, but what’s she going to do?’ Carlyle shrugged. ‘Probably, the way she sees it is that she works for them, we work for her. Who’s the dog here and who’s the tail? This is one of those situations where we’re just supposed to sit tight and do what we’re bloody told.’ The endorphins were fast wearing off and he felt a whole new type of fatigue. A good I’ve-got-off-my-arse-and-done-something type of fatigue, but a fatigue nevertheless. ‘Anyway, how was Cambridge?’
Finally receiving his cue, Joe took up two pieces of paper that had been resting on his lap and handed them over. One of them was a copy of the photo they had seen so early in the morning at Horseferry Road car park. Carlyle, in fact, had another copy of the same picture in his pocket, which had been emailed over by Matt Parkin, the sergeant handling the Nicholas Hogarth crime scene, just before Carlyle had left the station. The other item was a short newspaper article, consisting of a single column underneath a photograph. It was no more than maybe a hundred and fifty or two hundred words. Carlyle scanned it, glanced at Joe, and perused it again, more slowly.
By the time Carlyle had finished reading it the second time, his order had arrived. Thanking the waitress, he drained half of the orange juice and took a bite from the hummus wrap.
‘It’s the same guy,’ said Joe.
Carlyle chewed carefully and swallowed. ‘Certainly looks like it.’
‘Could even be a cropped version of the same photo?’
Carlyle looked again. ‘Yes, it could,’ he agreed. The photo featured in the newspaper was a head-and- shoulders shot with a clear sky in the background. It wasn’t great quality, but it looked very much as if it had been copied from the same photo left behind the windscreen wiper of Nicholas Hogarth’s Range Rover.
‘The article comes from the Cambridge University newspaper,’ said Joe. ‘It was published in April 1985, almost a year after our friends sat their finals.’
