SIXTEEN

Carlyle slurped at a cup of lukewarm black coffee, and happily munched on the pastry he’d saved from earlier in the day. The third floor of the police station was deserted apart from a couple of cleaners who were wandering from desk to desk, waving some feather dusters around in a desultory fashion, like a pair of bored performance artists from the piazza nearby. Dropping the remains of his Danish on a napkin, he picked up the pen lying on an A4 notepad next to his keyboard. At the top centre of the page, he wrote IAN BLAKE, drawing a neat box around the name. Below the box he wrote the name of Christian Holyrod.

For several seconds, he studied the yellow paper, searching for inspiration. It was time to start putting the pieces together, and this was the part of the job he liked almost more than any other. After all his time on the Force, he still got a buzz of excitement as he embarked on that voyage of discovery that would inevitably take him to the heart of his case. How he conducted that journey – whether from behind a desk or out on the street – didn’t matter just as long as it took place.

‘Right …’ He pushed the remainder of the Danish into his mouth, washed it down with the last of his coffee, and started bashing the keyboard. Clicking on to Google, he typed in BLAKE+HOLYROD. The legend ‘Results 1–10 of about 12,000 (0.09 seconds)’ popped up and Carlyle reflexively hit on the first link, which was a newspaper article entitled The Merrion Club: Young, rich and drunk. Carlyle waited for the story to load before scanning it quickly. It informed him that Blake and Holyrod had both been members of an ultra-exclusive Cambridge University fraternity famous in equal measure for its hard drinking and bad behaviour. For reasons that were not explained, the club was named after the Dublin street in which the Duke of Wellington had been born. The story was a trail of booze-fuelled vandalism and famous old boys. Near the bottom of the piece, a quote from a hanger-on caught his eye: ‘It wasn’t considered a proper night out until a restaurant had been trashed. A night in the cells was par for the course for a Merrion man. So, too, was the debagging of anyone who incurred the irritation of the Club.’

What was a ‘debagging’? Carlyle decided he could guess. He now contemplated the accompanying group photograph. Standing on the front steps of some stately pile, all floppy hair, morning suits and sophisticated sneers, they looked like extras from a Spandau Ballet video. In fact, he thought that they looked as though they were boys from a departed era. The picture was taken less than thirty years earlier but it could just as easily have been a hundred and thirty. The caption beneath the image listed the members of the Merrion Club of 1984: George Dellal, Ian Blake, Nicholas Hogarth, Edgar Carlton, Xavier Carlton, Christian Holyrod, Harry Allen, Sebastian Lloyd.

Carlyle read and reread the eight names on the list. ‘Well, fuck me sideways!’ He continued to stare at the image for a long time.

There was Blake at the back, over to the right. Holyrod, London’s current mayor, stood in the middle, waving a cigar. In front of him, the leader of the opposition, Edgar Carlton, was standing next to his brother Xavier, who, if Carlyle remembered correctly, was the shadow foreign secretary. Fuck knows who the rest of them are, Carlyle thought. At this rate, he wouldn’t have been surprised if the rest of them included the new Pope and some minor European royalty. He understood that the Establishment was tightly knit – after all, that’s what made it the Establishment – but this was surely ridiculous.

Quickly scribbling those six new names on his pad, he added little crosses beside the Carltons and Holyrod. Switching his attention back to the keyboard and clicking out of the internet, Carlyle paused to roll up his sleeves. Taking a couple of deep breaths, he prepared to do battle with the Force’s internal IT network. The British police were notorious for their terrible computer systems, which were commonly assumed to have let an unknown number of serious criminals slip through the net over the years. A few years earlier, the high-profile failure to vet a school caretaker who subsequently murdered two schoolgirls had encouraged the introduction of a Police National Database linking all forty-three forces in England and Wales. But that was still quite some way off and, knowing that trying to search the whole country was too ambitious, Carlyle decided to stick to London – even if it was hard enough trying to extract information from the different computer systems run by the Metropolitan Police. Many old-school coppers simply could not be bothered trying to access them, but Carlyle realised that, for all their failings, they offered him access to a treasure trove of information of the kind that had helped him solve many cases in the past.

Typing in a second username and password, he accessed a Met database that allowed him to view basic details of all the capital’s outstanding homicide cases. Blake he knew about, along with the Carlton brothers and Holyrod, who were all still very much alive. So, one by one, he slowly typed in the other four names: ‘Delal, Hogarth, Allen, Lloyd’. Asking for anything showing from the last six months, he waited five, six, seven seconds before NO RESULTS flashed up on the screen.

Carlyle leaned back in his chair. Then he tried again, extending the search parameters, to cover the last two years.

Another short wait.

Again NO RESULTS appeared on the screen.

So much for a quick hit. Carlyle looked at the clock and realised it was way past Alice’s bedtime, so it looked as if he wouldn’t be seeing her this evening. Don’t rush it, he told himself. This could crack the whole thing open. He remembered the note: ‘not the first and not the last’. Someone mentioned in this database had to be connected to Blake. It was worth the effort to try to find them. He pulled his mobile out of his jacket and sent Helen a text saying that he would be working a while longer, before getting up and going for a piss. After fetching another coffee from the machine, he walked twice around the office to stretch his legs and clear his head, before returning to his desk.

Carlyle felt extremely tired but he forced himself to concentrate. ‘Third time lucky,’ he mumbled to himself, as he looked again at the scrawl on his pad. The handwriting was appalling, almost illegible even to himself. He flipped back to the newspaper story on the internet and ran his finger down the names, double-checking the spellings. With a groan, he realised that he’d missed one l out of the name Dellal. Quickly, he punched the correct spelling back into the database, and hit send. He was still cursing his carelessness when it popped up in front of him:

‘Sam fucking Sparrow,’ Carlyle smiled, ‘come on down …’

Inspector Sam Sparrow worked out of the Enfield station in north London. He was a straightforward, no-nonsense policeman maybe five or six years younger than Carlyle, with almost as many commendations and considerably better career prospects. The two men had worked together in the late 1990s, when Sparrow had been leading an investigation into Turkish drug dealers in the Wood Green neighbourhood of north London. After the Turks had begun invading rivals’ turf to the east, Carlyle, stationed at Bethnal Green at the time, had been drawn into what became a violent and bloody mess, with body parts randomly strewn across both neighbourhoods. Sparrow had proved very easy to work with, and Carlyle had come out of six months’ hard slog with both a 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:

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.’

‘Something like that.’

‘Well, well, well,’ Joe chuckled. ‘Edgar Carlton and Christian Holyrod? The joint dream ticket of dream tickets.’

‘Maybe,’ Carlyle snorted, ‘if you’re a mentally incontinent, Daily Mail-reading fascist.’

‘Hey,’ Joe chided him, ‘Anita reads the Mail.’

‘She should know better,’ Carlyle growled.

‘What are the odds of those ending up in our investigation?’ Joe asked, moving the conversation on.

‘About as good as our own chances of getting murdered,’ said Carlyle glumly.

‘Simpson will most definitely not be happy,’ Joe pointed out.

‘A silver lining,’ Carlyle agreed, ‘however faint.’

‘So what do we do now?’ Joe asked.

‘Let’s sleep on it,’ said Carlyle. ‘Keep all this strictly to yourself, for now. We will have to be extremely discreet, especially when it comes to writing things down. No written reports, no emails … at least until we know what the fuck is going on here.’

‘Of course.’

‘I’ll go and see Simpson tomorrow. It’s better to do it face to face. Then we’ll have to reach out to the gentlemen in question, and see if they can shed any light on why someone might want them dead.’