Sins of the Fathers (16 page)

‘What?’

‘He stayed on for another drink.’ Flopping on to the sofa beside his wife, Carlyle explained about their trip to the Light Bar.

Helen muted the sound on the TV. ‘You left him with some Japanese guy?’

Carlyle shrugged. ‘He seems nice enough.’

‘But isn’t that against the rules?’

‘Huh?’

‘Taking your dad to talk to a . . . I don’t know . . . what would you call him?’

‘Who, Ninomiya? I dunno, a client?’ He chuckled disapprovingly as he contemplated the police force as a twenty-first century service industry. The world had changed in so many ways since he had joined the Met in the 1980s, not all of it for the better. Back then, the idea that they could ever become service providers, complete with KPIs, CRM systems and ‘client focus metrics’ was simply beyond the ken of most officers. Now the jargon was everywhere. Meaningless words – corrosive, too, reducing the police to the level of burger flippers. The bloody customers were never going to be satisfied. People always needed something to moan about, whether there was any justification for it or not: if you spent too much time worrying about that you would never do your job.

‘Yeah, I suppose it’s against protocol,’ he said grudgingly, ‘but so what? They seemed to get on okay; just two lonely old guys having a chat over a beer.’

‘Mm.’ But Helen sounded unsure.

Carlyle gently nudged her in the ribs with his elbow. ‘You know what they say.’

‘No. Tell me, Inspector,’ Helen grinned, ‘what
do
they say?’

‘A disappointment shared is a disappointment halved.’

‘Hardly.’

A soon-to-be-retired news anchor appeared on the screen. Struggling through the script on his autocue, he looked like he was stoned.
He sounds as pissed as my old man
, Carlyle thought. He grabbed the remote from his wife and switched over to Sky News, where a pretty blonde presenter was standing outside Charing Cross police station. At the bottom of the screen, a caption read:
Rugby star arrested
. Carlyle gestured at the screen with the remote. ‘This is what I did at work today.’ He gave Helen a quick run-through of events as the report showed a younger-looking Simon Collingwood scoring a try in a game played in an almost empty stadium.

‘The poor man.’ Helen shook her head sadly.

‘He did kill four people with an axe,’ Carlyle reminded her.

‘What terrible pressure,’ Helen clucked. ‘He must feel like his head is exploding.’

‘It’s other people’s heads that exploded,’ Carlyle chortled.

‘John,’ she scolded, ‘that’s in very bad taste.’

‘He seemed very calm and collected when I spoke to him earlier.’ The news report ended and on came the weather. Apparently it was going to rain tomorrow. Carlyle made a mental note to wear his raincoat. He was always getting the weather wrong.

‘He must be in a right state,’ Helen murmured.

Carlyle pulled her close and slipped an arm around her shoulder. ‘You sound like his lawyer.’

‘He’s admitted it?’ she asked.

‘They want us to agree to a manslaughter plea. I don’t know if the CPS will go for it.’ With the Crown Prosecution Service, you never knew. A single mum who hadn’t paid her TV licence could get chased relentlessly through the courts at huge expense while an axe murderer could walk free for a whole variety of reasons.

‘Under the circumstances . . .’ Helen shrugged.

‘Under the circumstances they might smell blood. I think it would be dangerous, though. He’s bound to get a lot of sympathy from a jury.’

She looked at him. ‘Do you reckon?’

‘Sure, given what happened to his daughter.’

‘And what about his wife?’

‘Apparently she’s been under heavy sedation since the daughter died. I’m not sure that she even knows what’s been going on.’

Helen unwrapped his arm and pushed herself up on the sofa. ‘Well,’ she said grimly, ‘if those guys raped that girl, they deserved everything they got.’

Carlyle laughed. ‘Listen to you.’

‘Well,’ she protested, ‘they did.’

‘And here was I thinking that you were the liberal conscience of this family,’ he teased.

She gave him a playful smack on the arm. ‘Liberal doesn’t mean weak.’

‘You reckon?’

‘Seriously, though, John, if that had happened to Alice, you’d want to do something about it, wouldn’t you?’

Carlyle fell backwards on the sofa, staring at the ceiling. His head was buzzing and he ached with tiredness, so much so that he realized that sleep would almost certainly not come. And he still hadn’t spoken to his daughter about the death of her grandma.

Getting to her feet, Helen prodded him with a toe. ‘Well, wouldn’t you?’

‘First,’ he pointed out, ‘nothing like that is going to happen to Alice.’

‘But—’

He held up a hand. ‘Look at the maths. Statistically it’s not going to happen. Even if it did, she has her Brown Belt and would happily kick the crap out of anyone trying to lay a finger on her.’ For more than ten years now, they had insisted that their daughter attend weekly karate lessons in Jubilee Hall, on the south side of the Piazza. Packing a fearsome punch, Alice was now well on the way to becoming a Black Belt, to the immense delight of both her parents.

‘There were four of them.’

‘Second,’ said Carlyle angrily, ‘if something like that
did
happen, I would know exactly what to do. No one would find any of the bits and I wouldn’t bloody confess, either.’

‘I’m glad we sorted that out.’ Helen helped him to his feet. ‘Now let’s go to bed.’

It seemed like he had only been asleep for half an hour. Forcing his eyes open, Carlyle squinted at the radio alarm clock by the bed. Even in his myopic state, he could make out the fuzzy green numbers glowing in the dark.

1.52 became 1.53.

He
had
only been asleep for half an hour.

Nooo.

The next problem: whose phone was going off? He desperately hoped it was Helen’s but knew perfectly well that it wasn’t.

So did his wife.

‘Shut that thing up.’ Giving him a firm kick, Helen pulled a pillow over her head.

Sitting up, Carlyle grabbed his specs and looked around. He finally located his phone, blinking violently under a copy of
L.A. Requiem
by Robert Crais that he had been slowly rereading.

‘Sorry,’ he mumbled, grabbing the phone and scuttling into the bathroom. Sitting on the edge of the bath, he looked at the screen.

Two missed calls.

Alex Miles.

Alex Miles’s message.

Damn.

He hit the number.

The chief concierge at the Garden Hotel answered immediately.

‘What’s so urgent,’ Carlyle hissed, ‘that you’re calling me at two o’clock in the morning?’

‘I know what time it is,’ said Miles testily. ‘At least you were able to go to bed.’

‘Okay, okay. What’s the problem?’

‘There’s a Scottish bloke here claiming to be your father.’ Miles gave him a quick description.

Carlyle stared into the darkness. ‘He
is
my father.’

‘In that case,’ Miles said, ‘you need to get over here right now.’

In little more than ten minutes, the inspector was back at the hotel. As he scurried through the lobby, Alex Miles appeared from behind the reception desk. Waving a pass key in his hand, Miles greeted him with a curt nod.

‘First floor.’

They rode the elevator in silence. Outside Room 185 stood a tall, thin man, suited and booted, with sleepy eyes and a shaven head. He eyed the inspector warily.

‘Tony McDowell,’ Miles explained, ‘our new head of security.’

Carlyle grunted a greeting of sorts. McDowell looked at him blankly. His eyes were sunken and he had excessively prominent cheekbones and looked like he needed a good feed.

Miles gestured for McDowell to move away from the door. ‘I told you about the inspector. He works round the corner.’

McDowell grunted back.

Placing a hand on his arm, Miles shot Carlyle a look. ‘We have an understanding.’

Carlyle cleared his throat. ‘Yes, we do.’ Miles and McDowell were both doing him a big favour. At some stage in the future he would have to pay the bill without any quibbles. He placed his hand on the door handle. ‘Are they inside?’

‘Yeah.’ McDowell grinned nastily. ‘The party’s over, though.’

‘There was a hell of a lot of shouting going on when we arrived,’ Miles explained. ‘They woke up half the people on this floor.’

Wishing he was still in bed, Carlyle took a deep breath. ‘Okay. Let’s sort it out.’

*   *   *

It had been quite a party, by the look of things. Leaning against the window with his arms crossed, Alexander Carlyle glanced up as his son walked into the room. ‘Oh great,’ he groaned. ‘Look who’s here. Dixon of Dock Green!’

The only person in the room to understand the antiquated reference, Carlyle looked his father up and down. The old fella looked haggard, green around the gills, while retaining the alertness of a man who realized he had dropped himself into some deep shit and was casting around desperately for a means of escape.

‘What are you doing here?’

What the hell do you think?
Carlyle thought angrily. Ignoring his father, he looked around the suite. Large by the Garden’s standards, with six people now crowded inside, it was standing room only.

On the nearside of the bed sat the two hookers he had seen earlier. Each of them had a mobile stuck to her ear, squawking away in stereo in staccato Russian. They looked tired and very pissed-off.

‘Ladies.’

The unhappy duo stared at Carlyle sullenly while continuing with their conversations. On the TV a porno film was playing with the sound muted. A couple of actresses were getting very familiar in the back of a taxi. Unable to spot the remote control, the inspector carefully stepped over the scattered remains of the minibar and switched it off at the power point.

In the far corner of the room, Naohiro Ninomiya slowly rose from his chair. ‘I am sorry,’ he said quietly.

Carlyle bit his tongue.

‘It is my fault,’ the man explained. ‘My credit card didn’t work.’

Still yakking away on the phone, one of the girls, the redhead, pulled a handheld chip and pin terminal from a bag at her feet and waved it at Carlyle. ‘Is not working. The network go down or something.’

The brunette smacked her colleague on the shoulder with her mobile phone and muttered something indecipherable.

Carlyle looked at Miles.

The concierge grinned. ‘The hazards of working in the service economy.’

‘They owe us eight hundred fifty pounds. Five hundred for sex, three hundred fifty for blow job,’ the redhead continued. ‘No discounts for cash.’

Bloody hell
, thought Carlyle,
that’s an expensive blow job
. Glancing at his father, he wondered which service he had gone for and from which hooker, before pushing the prurient thought from his mind.

‘We take euros,’ said the brunette, somewhat optimistically.

‘You’ll take a trip to the police station if you don’t behave,’ said Carlyle irritably. Pulling a couple of business cards out of his pocket, he handed one to each girl.

The brunette stared at the card, shouted something down the phone and ended her call. ‘I suppose you want freebie too?’ she snapped.

Miles was grinning like a Cheshire cat and it occurred to Carlyle that he would have already tried what was on offer; Miles was known for making a point of personally checking out all of the girls who worked in his hotel. ‘What I want,’ he told them, ‘is for you ladies to leave quietly. That way, you will avoid arrest.’ The redhead opened her mouth in protest, but Carlyle held up a hand. ‘You also have my card. If I can help you with anything in the future, call the mobile number on there.’

The girls looked at Miles, unconvinced.

The concierge tried to appear thoughtful before speaking. ‘I think that is a reasonable deal.’

‘Andrei will still want to be paid,’ the brunette pouted.

Andrei would be their pimp, probably one of the men who had been in the Light Bar earlier.

‘Let me deal with that,’ said Miles hastily, not wanting to be discussing his business in front of the policeman. ‘I will speak to Andrei. It will be okay.’

Realizing that there was no room to negotiate, the brunette stood up. The redhead, still talking on the phone, followed suit.

Unsmiling, Miles gestured towards the door. ‘It’s the best way.’

Pushing her friend in that direction, the redhead pointed an accusing finger at Carlyle’s father, muttering something in Russian. She turned to Carlyle, a nasty glint in her eye. ‘This old bastard – he can’t even get it up.’

Catching a glimpse of his dad, head hung in shame, looking like he wanted the ground to open up and swallow him whole, Carlyle felt a wave of embarrassment wash over him. ‘Listen to me,’ he hissed at her. ‘I can be your friend or I can be your enemy. You walk out of this room and everything is forgotten – then I am your friend and you can ask for my help when you need it. Otherwise, I am your sworn enemy. I will make it my number one priority to have you deported back to Siberia, along with your friend, plus your pimp and whichever bastard he’s working for, too.’

For a moment the girl stared at him, nonplussed. Then she burst into laughter. ‘I come from Bataysk.’ She pointed at her pal. ‘So does she. It is nowhere near Siberia.’

‘And you want to go back there?’ Carlyle asked.

‘Okay, okay.’ The redhead headed for the door. ‘We have deal. Do not forget.’

Outside, father and son walked in silence back towards the Piazza. It was after two thirty and the streets were almost deserted. The city was theirs, not that either man wanted it right now. On Garrick Street, Carlyle stopped. His brain was hyperactive. There would be no point in going back to bed now. He gestured towards the Strand.

‘I’m going back to the station.’

Standing in the middle of the road, Alexander contemplated his shoes.

At least he has the decency to look ashamed of himself
, Carlyle thought. ‘Don’t wake Alice or Helen when you get in.’

His father looked at him sheepishly. ‘You won’t tell them, will you?’