‘And opening supermarkets in Croydon,’ Carlyle laughed.
‘Do they do that sort of thing any more?’ Helen asked.
‘I dunno,’ said Carlyle. ‘You would assume so. Opening supermarkets and churning out z-list celebrities are probably the only things that this country is good at any more.’
On the other side of the world, Luke Osgood swallowed the last worm and raised his arms in triumph. ‘Will he win?’ Carlyle asked.
‘No,’ Helen said with certainty. ‘Gay ex-policeman is too niche to win. He’s also too middle-class. People like him are the ones who get halfway on shows like this: not complete losers who get voted straight off, but not popular enough with the masses to get through to the very end. To do that, you either have to be a cheeky chappy soap star who gets the mums’ vote or a model with big boobs and a tiny bikini who gets the lads’ vote.’ She mentioned the names of a couple of people that Carlyle had never heard of. ‘One of those two will win.’
As they watched Osgood return to his jungle camp in triumph, Alice appeared in the doorway. She deftly tossed a mobile towards the sofa and retreated to her bedroom without saying a word. Carlyle caught the phone before it hit him on the head. He felt it vibrating in his hand and automatically hit the receive button. ‘Hello?’
‘Inspector, it’s Amelia Jacobs.’
Shit. He could immediately tell from the tension in her voice that it wasn’t good news. ‘Hi.’
‘That bastard’s taken Jake.’
That bastard. Michael Hagger. The bloke he was supposed to talk to. The bloke he was supposed to sort out.
‘He picked him up from the nursery.’
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
‘I was ten minutes late,’ her voice cracked slightly, ‘and they were gone.’
‘Uhuh.’ The inspector kicked out at the coffee-table in frustration. You fucking idiot, he told himself, why didn’t you just warn the guy off? They were depending on you.
‘John?’ Helen gave him a quizzical look but he just shook his head.
‘It’s been on the TV,’ Amelia continued.
Not the kind of stuff we’ve been watching, Carlyle thought angrily.
‘On the news,’ she explained.
‘Yes.’
‘God knows what will happen to that poor boy. You’ve got to get him back.’
He took a moment to compose himself. ‘Who’s in charge of trying to find him?’ Amelia gave him a name. ‘Okay,’ Carlyle sighed, ‘I’ll have a word and see what I can find out.’
‘You were supposed to have a word with Michael,’ she snapped.
‘I know, I know, I know,’ he said sharply. ‘Let me see what I can do. I will get back to you asap. Sit tight. It will be okay.’ Not waiting for a reply, he ended the call.
‘What’s the matter?’ Helen asked.
‘The matter is,’ he groaned, ‘I’ve fucked up.’ As he said it, the mobile started vibrating again in his hand. ‘Shit!’ He lifted the handset to his ear. ‘Amelia…’ He tried not to sound too exasperated.
‘Inspector Carlyle?’
Carlyle recognised the voice and his heart sank even further. For the second time in less than five minutes, he should have let the call go to voicemail. ‘Yes?’
‘It’s Rosanna Snowdon.’
Snowdon was a presenter on the local BBC News in London. Their paths had crossed on a previous case and Carlyle owed her a favour, maybe more than one, after she had introduced him to the politician Edgar Carlton. Two years earlier, when he had still been the Leader of the Opposition, Carlton had been caught up in a nasty little case involving rape and murder. Snowdon, a family friend of the Carltons, had facilitated an introduction for Carlyle. Later, when the whole thing had come to a messy, inconclusive end, she had probably saved what remained of Edgar’s career by stopping him from trying to air the story in the media.
Largely untouched by any hint of scandal, Carlton had gone on to become Prime Minister after a landslide election victory. Snowdon, meanwhile, was building her media career at a steady rate. As well as the local news, she now presented a weekly show called London Crime, which did reconstructions of unresolved cases around the capital and appealed to the public for help in solving them. A few months earlier, the show had featured one of Carlyle’s cases, a particularly vicious mugging of a young mother in Lincoln’s Inn Fields which had been linked to a series of other attacks in and around the Holborn area. Snowdon had asked Carlyle to come on the show, but he felt embarrassed about begging for people’s help on television, and had sent Joe instead. The piece generated seventy phone calls and no sensible leads. The amount of police time that had been wasted as a result was too big for Carlyle to even think about trying to calculate it.
The case, of course, remained unsolved.
Carlyle was extremely uncomfortable about owing Snowdon a favour. As far as he was concerned, she was a user — a hustler who saw every item, every victim, as another step towards a celebrity presenter gig on national television, a rich banker husband and regular exposure in Hello magazine. But, however he felt about it, owe her he certainly did.
‘How are you?’ he asked, trying to inject some interest into his voice.
‘I wondered if I could talk to you about something,’ she said, not bothering with any preamble. ‘Maybe we could have a coffee together?’
‘This is not about the Mills case, is it?’ Carlyle enquired cautiously. He hadn’t seen it in the press yet, but it was only a matter of time.
‘What?’
‘Nothing. What’s it about, then?’
‘Don’t worry,’ she said rather brusquely, ‘it’s not about any of your cases. But I’d rather we talked face to face. Could you do nine o’clock tomorrow morning?’
Carlyle sucked in a breath. He was curious to find out what was causing Rosanna such concern. Whatever it was, it would doubtless be more diverting than his rather banal domestic slaying. On the other hand, she didn’t pay his wages, and he did have to get Henry Mills processed. ‘That would be tricky,’ he said finally. ‘Now is not a great time.’
‘Please,’ she said firmly, ‘it’s really quite important. It will only take half an hour and it would be a really big favour.’ There was a genuine nervousness in her tone that he had never heard before. This was not the usual flirtatious Rosanna, the one that made him feel so uncomfortable. Stripped of its usual coating of ironic detachment, her voice sounded strained. Compared to the super-assured alpha female that he was used to, it was almost endearing.
‘Well…’ His interest was aroused. She might be playing him along, but he didn’t think so. If nothing else, this could wipe the slate clean between them. Carlyle reflected for a moment. ‘All right,’ he said finally. ‘Nine thirty.’
‘Fantastic!’ she said with obvious feeling. ‘How about we go to Patisserie Valerie on Marylebone High Street?’
‘Fine,’ he said, heartened slightly by the prospect that he might at least get a good pastry out of it.
‘Good, I’ll see you there. Have a pleasant evening, Inspector.’
‘You too.’ Carlyle clicked off the phone and glanced at Helen, who was still engrossed in her television show. Luke Osgood was now dancing around his jungle clearing, wearing nothing but a yellow posing pouch and a red cowboy hat. He had a bottle of wine in one hand and a cigar in the other. Whatever else Luke has had done recently, Carlyle thought, he hasn’t yet coughed up for any liposuction. Disgusted, he pushed himself off the sofa and fled the room.
For almost two hours, he lay in bed, racing through the final hundred or so pages of an excellent detective novel by an Italian writer, whose hero found himself fighting his way through the mire of ‘corruption, fraud, rackets and villainy’ with mixed success. Carlyle enjoyed it immensely. Finishing the last page, he closed the book and let it fall on the bedside table with a satisfying thud. Books like that should be required reading in schools, he thought. They should be thrust into the hands of the so-called literary experts who imagined that crime novels were just convoluted puzzles. Yawning, he stretched out under the duvet. For a short while, he enjoyed the luxury of letting his mind go blank, while staring at the ceiling. Then, giving up on any hope of his wife’s imminent arrival, he
