‘So I looked him in the eye,’ said Blitz, as they turned into
Gloucester Avenue, ‘and said “Marcus, you know I’m not going to sign that; don’t be so fucking stupid.” I knew that Gavin was going to be worth a hell of a lot more than that over the next ten years. I accepted that I might have to take a shoeing there and then but it would be worth it – as long as they didn’t actually kill me.’ Leaning forward, he rapped a knuckle on the glass window behind the driver’s head. ‘Anywhere here’s good – thanks, mate.’
Carlyle watched relieved as Blitz took out his wallet and removed a pair of crisp £20 notes to pay the fare.
‘How did you know that they wouldn’t kill you?’ he asked as the driver pulled up at the kerb.
‘I didn’t,’ Blitz shrugged. ‘But I had to take a punt, didn’t I? In the end, I didn’t even get thumped.’
‘So those weren’t the guys who shot at you, then,’ Carlyle asked, amused.
‘Nah. That was someone else. This time round, with the cash in the bag, it was just a lot of swearing and posturing. But that’s what you have to expect in this game.’ The driver stopped the meter at £27.80 and slid open the glass partition. Blitz slipped through the cash. ‘Thanks mate,’ he said cheerily. ‘Keep the change but give me a couple of blank receipts.’
‘I thought she was just some slapper.’ Slumped in a chair at the kitchen table, Gavin Swann looked down into his mug of tea. He was wearing jeans and a blue T-shirt with the legend
BENCH
emblazoned across the chest in white lettering. On his chin was a couple of days’ stubble, but he looked alert and relaxed. ‘Kelly brought her.’
Carlyle noticed the slightest grimace from Blitz. ‘Kelly?’
‘Kelly Kellaway,’ Swann explained, oblivious to his agent’s annoyance. ‘I’d hooked up with her a few times before she brought Sandy.’
‘I’ll give you her number,’ Blitz said, keen to move the conversation on. He was leaning against the sink, a tumbler of Grey Goose vodka in his hand, his half-smoked Romeo y Julieta smouldering in an ashtray nearby. Carlyle turned his attention back to Swann.
‘So you didn’t know that Sandy Carroll was the daughter of Dino Mottram?
Swann shook his head.
‘She was Dino’s step-daughter,’ Blitz corrected him. ‘From his first marriage. He gets through them at a steady rate. The last one was number three, I think. I hear he’s on the lookout for number four.’
Good luck, Commander Simpson
, Carlyle thought. Increasingly, he was struggling to understand why his boss was going out with the old rogue. Then again, her track record with men was uniformly bad, so why not?
‘Dino is a great guy,’ Blitz said, ‘but why he feels he has to marry every bird that he ever shags is beyond me.’
‘Never heard of him. Who is he?’ asked Swann.
‘Dino is the bloke who owns the football club you play for,’ Blitz told him gently.
‘The old bloke?’
‘Yeah.’
Swann frowned. ‘I thought that Ricky owned the club.’
Blitz sighed. ‘He’s the Chief Executive.’
Carlyle drummed his fingers on the table. ‘Getting back to the matter in hand . . .’
‘It was Paul,’ Swann bleated.
Carlyle looked at Blitz. ‘Who’s Paul?’
‘Paul Groom. He’s a reserve goalkeeper – third or fourth choice. Played in the first team just the once, for a grand total of ten minutes. Been out on loan at Gillingham earlier this season.’
Poor bastard
, Carlyle thought.
Finishing his vodka, Blitz stepped over to the fridge to retrieve the bottle. ‘Not a client of mine, in case you’re wondering.’
Carlyle looked at Swann. ‘What was he doing in your hotel room?’
Swann gave the question some thought. ‘Sometimes,’ he said finally, ‘we hang out together.’
Carlyle grinned. ‘And you like to share the ladies?’
Swann shrugged, as if he didn’t understand the point that the inspector was trying to make.
‘You shouldn’t read anything into it,’ Blitz said. ‘Team-mates like to hang out together. Groupies get handed round. It happens all the time.’
‘Groupies?’ Carlyle frowned. ‘I thought she was a hooker.’
Swann gave the impression of serious thought. ‘She wasn’t on the game.’
‘She just put herself about,’ Blitz explained. ‘They tend to call them “sport fuckers” these days.’
Charming
. ‘But she took money?’ Carlyle asked.
Swann thought about it some more. ‘Yeah, well, she would have done, I suppose.’
‘You suppose?’
Swann looked at the inspector earnestly. ‘Well, we didn’t get that far, did we?’
The cretin was beginning to wear him out. Carlyle took a deep breath. ‘Why do you even have to pay for it, anyway?’
‘Kids today,’ Blitz laughed. ‘They’re not like us, Inspector. They’re all watching porn on the internet by the time they’re five and fucking around by thirteen.’
Carlyle thought of Alice and shuddered.
‘It’s a completely different game from when we were kids. None of this sticking your hand down a girl’s bra and maybe up her skirt if you were really lucky. Now it’s all gang bangs and aping the shit they see online. If you don’t scream the place down, you’re not doing it right. So a girl you’ve just met lets you have sex with her and you hand over a bit of cash at the end of it, so what? It’s the same for all of them, not just celebs like Gavin.’
‘We are all prostitutes,’ Carlyle mused.
Swann looked at him blankly.
‘The Sex Pistols.’ The inspector could hear ‘Anarchy in the UK’ filling his head.
Swann made a face.
‘Sid Vicious . . . Johnny Rotten?’ Carlyle tried.
Still no sign of any recognition.
‘John
Lydon
.’
‘Who?’
Jesus Christ! The kid was a black hole of stupidity.
‘You’re wasting your time,’ Blitz chuckled.
‘Looks like it,’ Carlyle sighed. He said to Swann: ‘What kind of music do you listen to?’
‘Dunno,’ Swann mumbled, before reeling off three or four names that Carlyle had never heard of.
Now it was the inspector’s turn to look blank.
‘You need to get some of your younger colleagues to fill you in on the ways of the modern world, I think,’ said Blitz.
‘We’re not just talking about changes in musical tastes here,’ Carlyle replied.
‘That’s what I just said,’ Blitz smiled. ‘You’ve got to realize that there’s no stigma attached to anything.’
Carlyle shot him a look. ‘Even murder?’
‘Okay.’ Blitz held up a hand. ‘There’s no stigma attached to
almost
anything. Short of something like murder, there’s not much that can’t be squared away when you’re earning millions.’
That’s why you’re so fucking scared of this
, Carlyle thought.
It’s one of the few things that could derail the gravy train
. ‘I suppose not,’ he said ruefully. ‘Okay, moving on, what happened when Sandy Carroll was in the room? How come she got killed?’
As Swann raised his gaze, his eyebrows knitted together, giving him a rather constipated look. ‘Paul wanted to have sex with the girl. She didn’t want to and he went mad, kicking her and hitting her.’
How very convenient. ‘Why didn’t you stop him?’ Carlyle asked evenly.
Swann looked over to his agent. Refilling his glass, Blitz gave him the slightest of nods.
‘I tried,’ Swann continued, ‘but he elbowed me in the face and I fell down.’
Now Carlyle went for a slightly doubtful look. The boy’s face did not have a mark on it.
‘He’s a big lad,’ Swann explained. ‘Anyway, as I got up, he caught
her smack in the face with a right hook and she just kinda . . . collapsed.’
‘Why did you run away?’
‘He called me,’ said Blitz, putting the vodka back in the fridge, ‘and I told him to come here.’
Carlyle gazed out of the kitchen window at a garden that had to be at least seventy-five feet long. In Primrose bloody Hill! God knows how many millions this place must have cost. He watched Blitz tuck away another slug of booze. ‘Leaving the scene of a crime is a serious offence.’
‘We have a deal,’ Blitz said firmly.
‘We do,’ Carlyle conceded, ‘so we’ll park that. What I need to know is: where can I find Mr Groom?’
Ambling back towards Camden Town tube station, Carlyle stopped in front of an estate agent’s office while he sent Umar an email, asking him to track down Ms Kellaway. After hitting Send, he lingered in front of the window, scanning the properties on view and eventually caught sight of one that looked similar to Blitz’s place.
‘Six point five million.’ Carlyle let out a low whistle. ‘Fuck me sideways.’ His phone went off. Lost in a sea of envy, he answered it without thinking.
‘Carlyle.’
‘Where the hell have you been, Inspector?’
Simpson sounded extremely pissed off. It always amused him when she was like this and he had to make an effort not to laugh.
‘I . . .’
‘And why haven’t you been answering your phone?’
‘Well . . .’ struggling to get his story straight, he thought about ending the call.
‘I had to do
your
press conference on my own.’
Oops
.
‘With no idea what I was supposed to be saying.’
Carlyle remembered the days when Simpson, still climbing up the greasy pole, loved nothing better than a good presser. Back in the day, when she was one of the pushiest bastards around, she couldn’t wait to get her face on the telly. ‘Did you get a good turnout?’
‘What?’
‘Nothing, nothing.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Look, things are
moving on quickly. We should talk face-to-face but there are a couple of things I need to do first.’
‘For fuck’s sake, John.’
Carlyle pulled the phone from his ear in shock. Simpson was usually sparing in her use of the f-word; he really must be pushing his luck. Returning the phone to his ear, he tried for what he hoped was a conciliatory voice. ‘We may be able to make an arrest.’
There was a pause on the line. ‘Get on with it then,’ she said impatiently, ‘and then come straight to my office.’
‘Of course.’ Ending the call, he pulled up his sergeant’s number.
Umar answered on the third ring.
‘Simpson’s on the warpath,’ he sniggered.
‘Don’t worry about that,’ Carlyle said sharply, giving him the address. ‘That’s the training ground for Swann’s club. Take a couple of uniforms. Go and pick up a guy called Paul Groom. Gavin Swann says he killed that hooker in the Garden Hotel.’
‘Gavin Swann?’ Umar cackled. ‘This is getting tasty!’
‘Bring him back to Charing Cross. I’ll be there in a couple of hours.’
‘Hold on, hold on, give me that address again.’
Sighing, Carlyle repeated the details.
‘Okay. Got it. On my way.’
‘Keep me posted.’ Ending the call, the inspector spent another couple of minutes looking in the estate agent’s window for a property that he could conceivably afford. Finding nothing, he shrugged and continued on his way to the underground.
With no intention of going to see Simpson, Carlyle sat on a Northern Line train as it trundled south and wondered just what he was going to do next. Getting out at Leicester Square, his dilemma was solved by a call from Dominic Silver.
‘We need to chat.’
Standing on the Charing Cross Road, Carlyle glared at an Italian tourist who walked into him while reading his A–Z. ‘Okay.’
‘Are you busy?’
‘Yes,’ Carlyle lied, ‘but I can always make time for you.’ He told Dom where he was.
‘Okay,’ Dom said cheerily. ‘Why don’t we go and get some culture? Take the Northern Line up to Euston and we’ll meet at the Wellcome Collection.’
‘Humankind cannot bear very much reality.’
And I cannot bear very much bullshit
, Carlyle thought. Condemned to live in a wasteland of soundbites, jargon and empty words, he offered the most grudging of smiles. ‘What is that? The wit and wisdom of Dominic Silver?’
‘T. S. Eliot, actually.’ They were at the exhibition called ‘High Society: Mind-Altering Drugs in History and Culture’. Dom stepped in front of a poster for ‘Hall’s Coca Wine – The Elixir of Life’ and looked it up and down. A middle-class Victorian woman in a yellow cape and dress gazed into space, blissed out, clearly doped up to the eyeballs.
‘Whatever,’ Carlyle scowled, adopting the tone he used with Alice when she was pissing him off. Vague memories of double periods of English Lit at school flitted through his mind. Did they still teach poetry? He sincerely hoped not. What was it that Sherlock Holmes had said? ‘I crave for mental exultation.’ Something like that.
Carlyle leaned forward to read the caption next to the black-and-white drawing he’d been staring at vacantly for the last few moments. Struggling to get the text in focus, he stuck his hand inside his jacket pocket.
‘Shit!’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing,’ said Carlyle, cursing under his breath as he tried to remember where he had left his specs. The thought of three hundred quid being casually misplaced filled him with mortal terror but, try as he might, he couldn’t recall where he’d last seen them. Unable to do anything about it, he took a step closer to the picture and stuck his nose right in front of the description:
A busy drying room in the opium factory in Patna, India, After W. S. Sherwill,
lithograph, c. 1850
. It looked like a multi-storey car park with no cars in it. A handful of workers were placing what looked like row after row of footballs on the floor.
The print shows one of the stages in the processing of opium at the factory in Patna, the centre of the British East India Company’s opium plantations in Bengal. The raw opium was formed into a ball about 3½ lb in weight and wrapped in poppy petals to protect it from damage. The balls were then dried on shelves and boxed into chests each containing 25–40 balls before shipping to China and Europe.
Dom appeared at his side. ‘They could make the text a bit bigger,’ he said. ‘I’ve left my reading glasses at home.’
Grunting in sympathy, Carlyle eased himself back into a standing position. He tapped Dom on the arm. ‘I always said you were a man out of time.’
Guessing what was coming, Silver indulged his friend. ‘Go on.’