‘Haven’t the police got better things to do,’ the blonde girl harrumphed, ‘than harass people for smoking a joint?’
‘My point is that you need to be aware of the potential consequences,’ Carlyle repeated. ‘You’ve heard of the phrase,
the law is an ass?
’ Much nodding. ‘Well, whether it is or not really doesn’t matter. The law is the law. Under the Misuse of Drugs Act, you can go to jail. And lots of people do. Penalties range from life imprisonment for supply of Class A drugs like heroin, to two years for possession of less dangerous Class C drugs.’
‘What a waste of our taxes,’ someone complained.
Don
’
t you mean ‘our parents’ taxes’?
‘Our priority,’ Carlyle said evenly, ‘is to target the organized criminal groups involved in drug trafficking and confiscate their ill-gotten gains. Local dealers, crack-houses and cannabis factories are other targets. So, if you find yourself in a crack-house, watch out.’
As the girls started laughing, Dr Myers looked like he was about to have a coronary. In the corridor a bell sounded, followed almost immediately by the sound of hundreds of pairs of feet making a dash for freedom. The room emptied in barely five seconds, leaving Carlyle with the Headmaster, who was slowly regaining his composure.
‘What a nice bunch of kids,’ Carlyle smiled, relieved that it was all over. ‘That was really interesting. Let me know if I can come again.’
‘That is very kind of you, Inspector,’ Myers said, leading him quickly towards the door. ‘We will certainly bear it in mind.’
On his desk, back at the station, was a thick file of documents with a Post-it note stuck on the top. In blue biro, Roche had written neatly:
background reading on Leyne
. Moving the file to one side, Carlyle reached across the desk and picked up the phone. Dialling Roche’s mobile, he let it ring six times, before hanging up and calling the front desk downstairs. The sergeant on duty confirmed that Dyer had given Roche a name for his accomplice. She had taken a team up to Wood Green to raid an address near Alexandra Palace.
Putting the phone down, Carlyle checked his mobile. There were no missed calls. He felt a pang of disappointment that she hadn’t bothered to keep him in the loop, and had an unhappy sense of missing out on the action. But it quickly passed as he realized that she was more than capable of handling the situation without him. Anyway, there would be plenty of other doors to kick in; he could afford to miss out on this one.
‘Fuck it,’ he mumbled to himself, ‘time to go home.’ Sticking the Leyne file under his arm, he headed for the stairs.
TWENTY-TWO
At home, he found Helen on the sofa, sipping some
Rooibos
tea and doing
The Times
Sudoku puzzle. Making himself a cup of green tea, he flopped down beside her. ‘Going well?’
She scribbled a couple of numbers on the page and tossed the paper and the pen on the floor with a satisfied smirk. ‘Done it! The Super Fiendish, too.’
‘Nice one,’ Carlyle grinned, not having the remotest idea what the ‘Super Fiendish’ actually was.
‘How did it go at the school?’ Helen asked, cuddling up to him.
Sticking an arm round her, Carlyle recounted his triumph with the fourth form. ‘All in all, I think it went rather well.’
Helen’s face darkened and she pushed him away. ‘Why did you have to be such a bloody smartarse?’
With a sinking feeling in his stomach, Carlyle placed his mug on the coffee table. Too late, he realized that he had made a terrible error of judgement. Trying not to panic, he played dumb. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked, smearing an approximation of a confused look across his face.
‘Bloody hell, John,’ she complained. ‘All you had to do was go in and say the usual stuff about how drugs are dangerous and you could go to prison and so on. How difficult could it have been?’
‘But—’
‘Why did you have to go in and try to be like the
too cool for school
policeman?’
‘I didn’t.’
She looked as if she was about to cry. ‘It was a bunch of teenage girls and the bloody Headmaster! What will he think of Alice now? What will he think of our promise to keep her away from more dope?’
Carlyle took a deep breath. ‘I tried to treat them like young adults.’ Reaching over, he ignored her protests and kissed her on the forehead. ‘We had an interesting discussion.
And
I offered to go back. I think the Headmaster felt it went well.’
She looked at him, unconvinced.
‘Alice will be judged on whether she goes around carrying any more cannabis in her bag – which she won’t – not because of what Dr Myers thinks of my talk. It will all be fine. We know that she’s doing well.’ Pulling his wife closer, he again put his arm round her shoulder. ‘Anyway, we have other things to focus on.’
Helen dropped her head onto his shoulder. ‘You don’t have to come. All they will do is take some blood. We won’t get any results.’
‘I know,’ he replied, giving her a gentle squeeze. ‘But I want to be there. We can go for a coffee, or at least a green tea, afterwards.’
‘Yeah.’
Carlyle smiled to himself. The promise of a decent cappuccino was usually a winner where Helen was concerned. For several minutes they sat there in silence, listening to each other’s breathing. After a while, Carlyle found himself idly fondling Helen’s right breast. She tut-tutted her displeasure but made no effort to push his hand away. Almost immediately, he felt himself begin to stiffen. With his free hand, he reached down and unbuttoned the top of her jeans.
‘Hey,’ she whispered, looking at her watch, ‘Alice will be home in five minutes.’
‘Five minutes,’ Carlyle grinned, ‘is gonna be more than enough.’
Feeling rather pleased with himself, Carlyle had been sitting on the sofa for almost ten minutes by the time the door went and Alice finally appeared in the doorway.
‘Hi, Dad,’ she smiled, ‘where’s Mum?’
Carlyle yawned. ‘She’s having a bath. How was school today?’
Alice’s grin grew wider. ‘I should be asking
you
that question. I hear you made quite an impression on 4G.’
‘I did?’
‘Yeah. One of the girls said you asked the Headmaster in front of the whole class if he’d ever done drugs. Old Myers wasn’t happy at all.’
Oh shit
, Carlyle thought,
please don’t tell your mother that
. ‘But did they think the talk was any good?’
‘They liked the bit about you being, like, a
junkie
when you were younger,’ Alice said, eyes wide in mock horror.
Carlyle’s heart sank even further. ‘I didn’t—’
‘I know,’ she sighed, ‘I know. You were just being a know-it-all, as usual.’
Conversation over, she skipped down the hall. Carlyle listened to her bedroom door slam shut, followed almost immediately by the strains of some anaemic pop music. He sat in silence, wondering how he could pull himself out of this latest hole. Failing to come up with a solution, he turned with some reluctance to the Leyne file.
On closer inspection it was basically a series of press cuttings that didn’t really tell him anything that he hadn’t learned from his trip to see Professor Webb at the LSE. The only new information was a single sheet of A4 paper containing the names and contact details of the academic’s three wives. Next to two of the names, Roche had written in capitals:
NOT YET INFORMED
. However, the third, a Christine Donovan, had a big tick, which Carlyle presumed meant he could call with relative confidence.
Donovan had an overseas number with a 213 dialling code which he vaguely thought must be somewhere in America. It took what seemed like an eternity to get a connection but once the phone started ringing, someone picked up almost immediately.
‘Donovan residence,’ said a sleepy-sounding Hispanic voice. ‘How may I help you?’
‘Good afternoon,’ said Carlyle in his most official manner. ‘Could I speak to Ms Donovan, please?’
There was an extended pause. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ the voice said finally. ‘Could you repeat that, please?’
‘I am calling from London,’ Carlyle said slowly, trying not to shout. ‘I would like to speak to Ms Christine Donovan.’
‘Hold the line, please.’
After what seemed like an eternity, Carlyle was about to hang up when there was some rustling on the end of the line and someone picked up. ‘Hi!’ said a chirpy teenage voice. ‘This is Christie.’
Confused, Carlyle was momentarily struck dumb. He looked at his notes: Christine Donovan and Roger Leyne were married almost twenty-five years ago, divorced after barely ten months, before this kid could even have been born.
‘Hello?’
‘Yes,’ he said quickly, ‘my name is Inspector John Carlyle from the Metropolitan Police in London. I am looking to speak to Christine Donovan.’
‘Cool!’ the girl squealed. ‘Has Mom done something bad?’
‘No, no,’ he stammered, as the conversation spiralled out of control. With her usual immaculate timing, Helen wandered into the living room. With a big grin on her face, she pulled open her bathrobe and flashed him. Aroused and confused, he felt his brain melt.
He was saved by the American teenager more than five thousand miles away. ‘Do you want to speak to her?’
‘Yes,’ he nodded, watching Helen cover herself up. ‘Yes please, if she’s around.’
‘Is it about her ex-husband?’
Fuck me
, Carlyle despaired,
does everybody have to know everything about my business?
‘Yes,’ he sighed, ‘it is. Is she available?’
He listened to the phone being put down again and a voice in the background shout: ‘
Mom! It
’
s for you. It
’
s the London po-lice. They want to talk to you about that guy
’
s murder.
’
After a few moments, a rather haughty voice came on the line. ‘This is Christine Donovan.’
‘My name is—’
‘My daughter explained who you are,’ Donovan said sharply. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘I was wondering – when was the last time you saw your ex-husband?’
Her laughter cut through the time delay on the line. ‘You’re kidding, right? I mean, I’m in LA, for Christ sakes. How could I have killed the bum?’
Carlyle said nothing.
Donovan sighed. ‘Twenty years ago, I would have happily killed Roger. Hell, even ten years ago I might have happily nailed his smug limey ass.’
Limey?
‘How did you two meet?’ he asked.
‘I went to study in London in the eighties and Roger, quite literally, charmed the pants off me. Goodness, I was a right idiot. That phony took me to the cleaners. My dad went crazy because I refused to have a pre-nup agreement. In the end, that marriage cost me about five million dollars. But I got over it.’
Jeez
, Carlyle thought,
why couldn
’
t you have bumped into me back then?
‘Who do you think might er . . . want to kill Professor Leyne
now
?’
‘Inspector,’ she said firmly, ‘I haven’t seen Roger for more than twenty years. I haven’t been to England for more than ten. How the hell would I know who wanted to kill him?’
‘Fair point,’ Carlyle admitted, ‘but I have to ask.’
‘Sure, sure. I found out soon enough that Roger was good at annoying people. No doubt if you dig around, you’ll manage to find plenty of suspects.’
‘That’s extremely helpful,’ Carlyle said sarcastically.
‘He’s been married twice since me,’ Donovan said, apparently oblivious to his tone. ‘I’m sure that would be a good place to start.’
‘I will,’ he said, crossing her name off the list. ‘Thank you for your time.’ He waited for her to say ‘
have a nice day
’, or something similar, but after a moment, he realized that she had simply hung up. Tossing the mobile on to the sofa, he let out a massive yawn. It was time to call it a day.
Perched on the edge of a desk, Roche took a long, hard drag from her bottle of Budweiser as she watched the party mood around her grow. The raid had been a spectacular success, with Colin Dyer’s partner, Damien Samuels, taken into custody, along with a quantity of jewellery and a Smith & Wesson Model 909. Tests on the automatic pistol wouldn’t take place until the morning, but she was sure it would turn out to be the gun that killed Paula Coulter. Samuels was toast. It was a major fucking result.
Finishing the beer, Roche placed the bottle down on the desk beside her. The adrenaline rush from the raid was wearing off and she ached with tiredness. One of the grinning uniforms walked past, gave her a high five and handed her another beer. Roche nodded her thanks and took a swig from the new bottle. Getting a healthy beer buzz now, she knew she was going to get blasted. Her mobile buzzed angrily in the back pocket of her jeans. Assuming that it was Carlyle, she pulled it out and opened the message. However, it was only her boyfriend.
Gone to bed
,
don
’
t wake me up when (if?) you get in.
Roche sighed. Martin’s moaning was beginning to get on her nerves. More to the point, she wondered, where the hell was the inspector?
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Dugdale in his uniform – did he ever wear anything else? – appear on the floor. She was surprised to see that he still had the PR woman – what was her name? Judith something – still in tow. Why would she still be following him around at this time of night? The idle thought that he might be fucking her drifted through Roche’s brain as she finished the beer.
The Commander helped himself to a couple of beers and headed towards her. As he approached, she saw him sway alarmingly, his face flushed.
You’re well ahead of me
, she thought, giving him a tired smile.
Dugdale handed her a fresh beer. ‘Well done.’ He tried to smile, but it was more like a leer. ‘That was excellent work this evening.’
‘Thanks.’ She placed the beer on the table next to the empties. Seeing Dugdale had rather tempered her desire to get hammered. ‘It’s nice when things work out.’
Dugdale lifted the bottle to his lips. ‘You’ve done a fantastic job on this one, Alison.’