NINETEEN
‘Take a look — this is really funny,’ said Dominic Silver.
Carlyle grunted non-committingly as he sucked down on a latte that was way too cold for his liking. He always asked for it ‘extra hot’ and the Brazilian/Indian/Ukrainian/whatever boy/girl behind the counter would nod happily and then serve him up something that was barely lukewarm. It drove him mad. Often he would take it back and complain; get them to make it again. One time he caused such a fuss that the manager followed him out into the street and threatened him with a good kicking. It was a great example of traditional British customer service at its finest. Carlyle would have happily arrested him on the spot if he hadn’t been late for a court appearance,
This morning, however, he refused to get angst-ridden about his coffee. Rather, he just wanted to get as much caffeine as possible into his system as quickly as possible, cold or not, to try and compensate for the fact that he wasn’t still tucked up in bed. Twenty yards away, Alice was squealing in delight as a couple of young boys chased her round a tree. When they caught her, she squealed even more. Carlyle felt a smile spreading across his face as he watched her. Whatever grumpiness he felt about standing here in the middle of Regent’s Park at ten o’clock on a Sunday morning was offset more than a hundredfold by his pleasure in witnessing his daughter’s uncomplicated delight in a simple game of tag on a fresh summer morning, when the world seemed full of promise. Not for the first time, he wondered how much she was missing out on, being an only child. Not that there was much they could do about that now.
The two boys, Tom and Oliver Silver, were a year older and younger respectively than Alice. They were the youngest of five children belonging to Dominic Silver and Eva Hollander. The fact that Dominic and Eva had managed to produce five kids only added to Carlyle’s worry about Alice not having any siblings. Helen, practical as always, suggested that they should just be grateful for those ready-made playmates.
His wife had arranged this particular play-date with Eva earlier in the week, but Carlyle had only been told about it the night before — so that he couldn’t come up with an excuse for not going along. He wondered if the same had happened to Dominic. People in Dominic’s line of work weren’t known for their early morning starts, but Dominic was a big family man, so Carlyle expected that he was similarly philosophical about being here. The women were both probably still enjoying a lie-in, but each man recognised that you just had to accept being outmanoeuvred by your other half more often than not.
Happy to let the kids run off as much energy as possible, the two men took up residence on a bench and contemplated the view in comfortable silence, looking west across the playing-fields towards the London Central Mosque. They knew each other well enough not to worry about small talk. In fact, their relationship went all the way back to their Metropolitan Police training at Hendon College in the early 1980s.
Dominic was a genuine, 100 per cent cockney. He came from East London and was a West Ham fan. Carlyle came from West London and supported Fulham. Straight out of college, they had worked the bitter Miners’ Strike together. They had spent much of the time speeding their tits off on the picket line together, courtesy of Dominic’s ready supply of amphetamines. They had both been outsiders, piss-takers, awkward-question-askers. They were chippy bastards — but solid chippy bastards always willing to do more than their share of the dirty work, and more than happy to do extra overtime. There was enough common ground for them to build a solid friendship during the fourteen-hour shifts far from home.
Once the strike was over, Dom didn’t take to the relatively sedate life of a policeman back on the beat. There was an entrepreneurial spirit gnawing away inside him, and in the end he had just too much get-up-and-go for the Force to satisfy him. Within a year of the strike ending, he left the Metropolitan Police and went into business for himself. Once, in the early days, he had asked Carlyle to join him. But then, as now, Carlyle couldn’t see himself working for a drug dealer. Even if he was rather ambivalent about what Dominic did for a living, he certainly didn’t want to get involved.
Over the following years, their paths had crossed many times since, sometimes by accident, sometimes by one seeking the other out. That was not so surprising: they had a lot of mutual interests, given what Dominic Silver did for a living. Almost three decades later, while Carlyle was merely an undistinguished career cop, Dominic Silver had become something of a legend among certain sections of the Metropolitan police force. The son of a policeman, the nephew of a policeman, he was the archetypal good boy turned bad, but with an honesty and a style that gleaned a little goodwill from even the most hard-nosed copper. Even now there was still a part of Dom that remained ‘one of us’ in the eyes of many police officers of a certain age.
However, there was also a large part of Dominic Silver that had left his life in uniform a very long way behind indeed. Now at his professional peak, Silver was maybe in the third or fourth tier of drug dealers across the whole of London. This was not a bad place to be, reasonably comfortable, avoiding the problems facing those higher up the ladder as well as those below him. His operation was turning over maybe low millions each year, with clients including a swathe of minor celebrities and some of the newer entries in Who’s Wh o. He even had a couple of corporate clients who still bought on account, despite the recession.
Dominic had built up his business slowly, one step at a time, always avoiding conflicts and solving problems without resorting to violence, wherever possible. As the years turned into decades, his reputation grew. In a business where to survive three years was rare, to have survived three decades was a major miracle. He had never been arrested, never mind convicted, of any offence. He was not some nut job who’d let success and so-called ‘easy’ money go to his head. Nor did he dabble in all the nasty related shit that was associated with his business, notably prostitution, modern-day slavery and people-trafficking.
In short, he was not your average criminal.
At the heart of this success was a very pragmatic attitude to money. Dominic never spelled it out, but Carlyle was vaguely aware that he handed over a very high proportion of his take to his key suppliers, in exchange for protection. ‘I’m kind of freelance, kind of not,’ he once told Carlyle, ‘kind of independent, kind of not. Basically, they outsource this part of their operation to me. It’s like anything else — if I’m quicker, cheaper and less hassle, I get the job.’
Pragmatic and self-aware himself, Carlyle recognised that they had a lot in common. Indeed, there were many things about Dominic Silver that the inspector genuinely liked. Over the years, Dominic had shed his cheeky- chappy demeanour and become more serious. He had obtained a degree in Business and Management from Queen Mary College, and with his greying shoulder-length hair and rimless spectacles, he looked like a writer or an academic or maybe the keyboard player in some soft rock outfit like Genesis. For someone with a net worth that was probably heading towards fifty million, Dom enjoyed a very down-to-earth lifestyle. He wasn’t bling and kept an extremely low profile. He didn’t do drugs. He didn’t smoke, and only took the occasional drink. He went to the gym regularly and kept himself in shape — although he was almost six feet tall, he couldn’t weigh much more than seventy kilos.
In short, their relationship was both stable and cordial. It wasn’t complicated, but it wasn’t very clear either. Neither of them would necessarily have wanted to create it if it didn’t already exist, but they could both see its advantages as well as its drawbacks. Of course, Carlyle could never go after him, even if he wanted to: he would be compromised by the favours that Dominic had done for him in the past. But he was confident that he was not alone in that regard; for years, the rumour was that Silver had some fairly serious protection even further up the food chain, both inside the Met and outside. He also had a close-knit inner circle of advisers which Carlyle would join on an ad hoc basis, as part of the unspoken quid pro quo for Dominic’s help whenever he needed it.
Carlyle felt very ambivalent about their relationship. If someone chose to use it against him, he knew what it could do to his career and to his family. That did cause him concern, but the reality was that it was too late to do anything about it now.
Carlyle watched Dominic fiddle with his phone. Finally finding the clip he wanted, he hit the play button. ‘There’s a lot of crap at the beginning, but the party piece is worth waiting for.’
‘Mm.’ Dominic offered him the phone. ‘Go on, take a look.’
Taking the handset, Carlyle watched Alice race off through the middle of someone’s football game, followed by Tom and Oliver. He turned and eyed the video jerking across the mobile’s tiny screen, without focusing on it. In his book, phones were meant for voice calls. Since when did everyone suddenly need to make their own videos? He glanced back at the kids to make sure that they were not straying too far. ‘What’s that?’ he asked.
‘It’s a guy called Jerome Sullivan.’
‘Who’s he?’
‘He is — was — in the same business as me. Not really a competitor, but I’d met him a couple of times.’
