The Circus (7 page)

Joe belched. ‘We’ll all keel over one day. Look at poor young . . . What’s-his-name.’

‘Horatio.’

‘Christ, what kind of a name is that? Anyway, the poor little bugger didn’t even make it out of his teens.’ A terrible thought crossed his mind. ‘Probably never even got laid.’

‘Stop changing the subject. You know what I mean.’

‘Overall,’ Joe declared, ‘I’m in good shape. Better than you.’ He gestured at Carlyle’s battered visage. ‘At this precise moment in time, anyway.’

‘That wouldn’t be hard.’ The inspector took a sip of his coffee and gingerly felt the bump behind his left ear. It appeared to be growing in size, but wasn’t actually painful as long as he didn’t prod it.

Apart from smacking his head on the edge of the toilet bowl in the Mosmans’ guest bathroom, he had escaped without a scratch. After the explosion, he had been out cold for maybe thirty seconds. Even the raging headache that he had come round to had subsided through the help of four Ibuprofen tablets filched from the bathroom cabinet.

‘You were in just about the safest place in that house.’

Carlyle nodded. ‘Yeah.’ After washing down the painkillers with some tapwater, he had sat on the toilet seat and tried to take in the chaos unfolding around him: screaming alarms, groaning people, emergency sirens in the distance, getting closer. What struck him most, however, was the smell – the acrid stench of incinerated soft furnishings tinged with the aroma of charred flesh.

After several minutes, a face had appeared in the doorway. It took the inspector a moment to focus on her features. The young paramedic had clearly been investigating the carnage in the living room. The colour had drained from her face, making her look about twelve years old – a kid trying to play the part of an adult. She looked like she was going to throw up.

‘Are you okay?’ she asked in a shaky voice.

‘I’m fine,’ Carlyle smiled. ‘How about you?’

‘Fine.’ Taking a deep breath, she shot him a look that said
Don’t question my professionalism
, then stalked off.

‘See you later,’ Carlyle mumbled, giving her a little wave. He was quite happy just sitting there on the toilet seat and made no effort to get up until he was hit by a sudden thought:
Where is Joe?

The waitress placed Joe’s bacon sandwich on the table and looked enquiringly at the inspector for a third time. Deeply
irritated, Carlyle ignored her.
How many times is she going to ask me if I want anything to eat? If I want any fucking food, I’ll say so
.

He glanced around the café. The only other customers were a couple of cab drivers moaning about Arsenal’s wretched run of form while quickly demolishing large plates of bacon and eggs.

‘You were very lucky.’ Joe added some brown sauce to his sandwich before taking a bite.

‘Says the man who happened to walk out of the front door five seconds before the bloody thing went off,’ Carlyle snorted.

‘The other good thing is,’ Joe grinned, wiping some sauce from his chin, ‘I was standing behind a tree, otherwise I might have been hit by the flying glass.’

‘Survival instinct?’

‘Mm, I’ll need that when I get home.’

Carlyle laughed. ‘Well, you know what they say.’

‘No. What?’ Another couple of swift bites and Joe’s sandwich was gone.

‘Better to be lucky than smart.’

Joe wiped his hands on a paper napkin. ‘If Anita hadn’t been giving me such grief on the phone,’ he mused, ‘I could have still been standing right next to that kid.’

A grave expression descended on to the inspector’s face. ‘Don’t ever tell her that.’

‘No, of course not.’

‘And don’t spend too much time thinking about it either.’

Joe thought about that for a few moments. Then he remarked: ‘For one thing, dicing with death makes a bacon sandwich taste even better.’

Carlyle shook his head silently.

‘Who would do something like that?’ Joe wondered.

The inspector sucked the dregs of the coffee from his cup. ‘Someone with the skills and ability to shoot a man between the eyes at close range, vaporize a kid and then walk off down the road, apparently without a care in the world. Quite impressive when you think about it.’

‘Not many people like that around,’ Joe agreed.

‘Not on our patch, at least.’

‘So, who do you think did it?’

‘No idea.’ Carlyle yawned. The adrenalin was beginning to wear off and he wanted to go home, jump into bed and cuddle up to Helen for an hour before the working day formally began. Getting to his feet, he signalled to the waitress for the bill. ‘But that’s what we have to find out, sunshine.’

A phone started bleeping. Carlyle reached into his jacket and pulled out not one but two handsets, looking at the screen of each in turn. ‘Not mine,’ he grunted.

Joe already had his mobile against his ear. ‘Yeah, okay. Where? . . . Yeah, I know it.’ Carlyle’s heart sank. ‘Don’t worry, I was up anyway . . . Yeah, he’s here . . . Yeah, okay. Shouldn’t take us long to get there – maybe twenty minutes.’ Ending the call, he put the phone back in his pocket and finished the last of his coffee.

‘That sounds like good news,’ Carlyle said wearily.

‘Missing teenager,’ Joe told him.

‘We’ve had more than enough teenage trouble for one night. Can’t someone else deal with it?’

‘Apparently not. ‘

‘Fuck’s sake.’

‘They’ve sent a WPC over to babysit the worried parents. Maude Hall.’ Joe grinned.

Carlyle looked blank. The name meant nothing to him.

‘She’s very cute.’

The inspector grunted. As an old married man, he had long since realized that it was better not to notice such things. Or, at least, not to comment on them. There were lots of pretty girls in the world and none of them had anything to do with him.

‘Anyway,’ Joe continued, ‘it’s probably something and nothing. The parents are in a bit of a state though, as you can imagine.’ Pushing his chair back, he got to his feet. ‘Don’t worry, I can handle it.’

‘You’re a good man, Joe.’ Carlyle looked past his colleague, towards the counter. Now that he actually wanted her attention, the waitress had disappeared. Pulling a crumpled tenner from his pocket, he dropped it on the table. ‘I’ve done my share of social-worker shit for one night. Now, I need to get to my bed.’

The mornings were getting colder and darker. Winter was on the way and London would spend the next six or seven months in its default state – fifty shades of grey, damp and chilly. Zipping up his overalls, Ryan Davison climbed the steps to the office of the Street Environment Service Depot. Inside, he nodded to the supervisor, a permanently exhausted-looking man called Danimir who had fled from the civil war in the Balkans in the 1990s. For his part, Ryan had fled from the bone-crushing tedium of provincial life in the West Midlands. Both of them had found what they needed in London, more or less.

Hopping from foot to foot, Ryan watched as the clerk checked and rechecked his list with an exaggerated caution that suggested a task considerably more complex than the daily Cockpit Yard refuse-collection rota. Every day they went through this same mini-pantomime before Ryan was allocated his truck for the day. Downstairs, his crew would be getting annoyed by the delay. The sooner they started, the sooner they finished. Working on a ‘task-to-finish’ basis was one of the perks of the job, along with a £4,000 annual ‘productivity bonus’ for undertaking the weekly recycling collection.

Ryan’s five-man unit – a driver and four loaders – was one of twenty crews working out of this Camden depot. Their route took them from Covent Garden in the west, to the edge of the City of London, emptying the oversized green bags full of old newspapers, glass and plastic bottles that households had left out
for them. In the three months since he’d been promoted to driving the truck, Ryan had managed to get their daily run down to just under five hours. That meant that, with a bit of luck, he could be home in time to catch a
CSI
rerun on Sky before taking his afternoon kip. They were showing series six at the moment, which suited Ryan fine. He only watched up to series nine; after that, it wasn’t worth watching. In his opinion, the whole thing had taken a nosedive once William Petersen had left.

Ryan believed in time management, especially when it came to getting his truck out of the depot. A good start was essential; they had to get in and out of the West End while most people were still in their beds, otherwise they would get snarled up in the morning rush-hour.

‘Come on, Dan, we’re ready to go.’

‘Patience, patience.’ Danimir didn’t look up as he scratched the tip of his nose with the end of his blue biro.

Bloody bureaucrat!
Ryan glanced at the row of keys lined up on the desk. Each was attached to a key-ring. Each key-ring had a number. ‘Give me number six.’

‘Six needs to go to the garage.’ Danimir tapped his left index finger on the top of the desk for a moment, weighing up all the options before coming to a decision. He picked up a key and tossed it to Ryan. ‘Take number four. It was fixed last week.’

‘Great.’ Ryan caught the key with a sigh. Once a truck went into the garage, it was pretty much guaranteed never to run properly again. He thought about making a grab for one of the other keys. ‘What about . . . ?’

‘What about you get outta here?’ Danimir waved him away with an angry frown. ‘Take four, like I tell you.’ He fixed the young Englishman with a hard stare. ‘Why are you never happy with what you get? Now, leave me to sort out the rest.’

None of the other crews have managed to turn up yet, thought Ryan, frustrated by his boss’s pedantry, so what does it matter which one I take? But the clock on the wall told him that it was
almost 6 a.m. He had to get going right now or the whole day would be buggered.

Danimir gave him a searching look. ‘Okay?’

‘Okay,’ Ryan agreed, turning and reaching for the door handle.

‘And don’t miss out Doughty Street this time,’ Danimir called after him. ‘I don’t want that bloody woman at number twenty-nine ringing me up again. Pain in the arse says she’s going to write to the bloody Mayor.’ Danimir shook his head at the injustice of it all.

‘A lot of good that will do her,’ Ryan laughed.

‘Bloody woman! Just make sure you empty her bag properly, put it back where she left it, and don’t leave a mess.’

‘Sure thing, boss.’ Ryan grinned. He would make sure to tell the lads to leave number 29’s recycling untouched for another week.

Halfway down the outer stairs, Ryan pointed towards the hulking Dennis Elite 2 parked at the end of a row of trucks on the far side of the yard. ‘We’ve got number four,’ he shouted to one of his loaders, Steve McKitten, a Camden veteran with more than twenty years on the bins. Giving his driver a thumbs-up, McKitten jogged over to the truck indicated.

Ryan nodded to two of the other loaders – a Hungarian and a Welshman – and headed for the driver’s cab. Grabbing the door handle, he was just about to pull himself up when McKitten popped his head round the side of the vehicle. ‘Ryan!’ he yelled. ‘You’d better come and see this.’

I knew it! Ryan thought angrily. That Serbian twat’s given us a knackered truck. Jumping back down on to the tarmac, he jogged round to the rear.

‘Look.’ Steve pointed at the pair of legs sticking out from under a pile of soggy cardboard boxes in the loading hopper.

‘Holy shit.’ Ryan realized immediately that there would be no early start for them today. He wouldn’t be getting home in time to catch a
CSI
rerun, even if it was one of the proper ones with
William Petersen in it. He scratched his head, wondering what to do. ‘Stay here,’ he eventually told McKitten. ‘Don’t touch anything. I’ll go and tell Dan.’

‘She’s never done anything like this before.’ Alison Gillespie stared at Joe Szyszkowski as if daring him to contradict her.

‘No.’ The sergeant glanced at WPC Hall, who was sitting next to Mrs Gillespie on the sofa. At this time of the morning, the sergeant decided, she didn’t look quite so cute. With nothing else to do, he stared at his notes.

Hannah Gillespie. Fourteen. Five foot two. Eight stone or thereabouts. One sister, safely tucked up in bed. Attends St Marylebone C of E, a good school. Good student. No obvious problems. No boyfriend (according to her parents). Went out to see a friend but never turned up. Not answering her mobile. A list of other friends who she hadn’t gone to see either
.

Joe sighed. His handwriting really was terrible.

So, what about young Hannah? It was probably something and nothing. On his way over, he had checked whether the kid had turned up at a local A&E or police station. Nothing. She was probably just partying somewhere with a boyfriend that her parents didn’t know about.

The parents seemed a fairly nondescript pair. Their anxiety was real enough, however.

‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ Roger Gillespie asked for the third time in the last ten minutes.

Joe held up a hand. ‘I’m fine, sir, thanks all the same.’ Flipping his notebook closed, he replaced it in the back pocket of his jeans. ‘And thank you for your time. We have all the details and we will now see what we can do. I’ll be in touch as soon as possible. Of course, if Hannah does turn up, let us know straight away.’ A familiar look of dismay passed across the faces of both parents, and he offered them what he hoped might pass for a comforting smile. ‘I’m sure there’s a simple explanation,’ he added gently. ‘We see this kind of thing all the time. Maybe
Hannah’s staying with a different friend and her mobile’s simply died.’

‘But . . .’ Roger Gillespie wanted to protest, but he didn’t quite know how.

Joe beckoned to Hall. As the WPC jumped to her feet, he handed the father a business card with his mobile number on it. ‘Let us know
immediately
if –
when
– Hannah comes home,’ he repeated.

‘Yes.’ Gillespie stared intently at the card as if in search of something – hope, maybe.

‘Good.’ Stifling a yawn, the sergeant stepped towards the door. ‘Otherwise, I will give you a call later in the day for a catch-up.’ Ducking into the hall, he quickly opened the front door and disappeared down the communal stairs before they could think of anything else to ask him.