Nyc bowed so low that Carlyle feared he might bang his forehead on the table.
‘So I am just taking tea with some friends here.’
Nyc looked at the others, as if noticing Silver and Carlyle for the first time. Recognizing the inspector, he was unable to completely check the look of surprise that began creeping across his face. But, recovering well, he smiled obsequiously to all concerned, before beating a hasty retreat.
Abramyan supped a mouthful of tea. ‘My apologies, Inspector. Some people are just too intrusive. What were you about to say?’
Ignoring Dom’s amused expression, Carlyle explained about the annual ritual with his mother.
‘I like that,’ Abramyan said. ‘Sadly, my own mother passed away some time ago – as did my father. But your mother must be very proud to have such a dutiful son. It is good that you still do things together, talk together . . .’
Carlyle looked down at his empty coffee cup. ‘She told me she’s getting a divorce,’ he heard himself say.
‘Why?’ It was the first word Dom had spoken since he had made the introductions.
‘She found out that my father had had an affair,’ Carlyle explained, for some reason happy to discuss with an arms dealer and a drugs pusher certain things that he shied away from mentioning at home.
‘Ach!’ Abramyan objected. ‘These things happen. How long have they been married?’
‘Fifty years, give or take. The affair was thirty years ago, apparently.’
Dom failed to suppress a titter. Carlyle gave him a hard stare and he held up a hand. ‘Sorry.’
Abramyan plucked a pastry from the cake-stand in the centre of the table. ‘Your mother clearly is not one to forgive and forget,’ he remarked, dropping the pastry on his plate and daintily wiping his mouth with a napkin, ‘Normally, I like that robustness, especially in a woman. But in this case, well, what can she hope to achieve?’
Carlyle shrugged.
‘Except keep everyone in a state of prolonged unhappiness,’ Abramyan continued with a frown. ‘And then they die.’
Carlyle nodded. ‘That’s basically my thinking. But it looks like that’s the way it’s going to be.’
Abramyan gave him a sly look. ‘Maybe
I
could talk to her?’
Carlyle glanced at Dom, who now looked like he was going to piss himself with laughter. Aware that he’d let the conversation go too far off at a tangent, he held up a hand. ‘That’s okay. Thank you, though. They really need to sort it out among themselves. Anyway, it’s not really what we’re here to discuss.’
Abramyan’s eyes narrowed. ‘No, of course.’ Reaching across, he patted Dom gently on the shoulder. ‘Mr Silver here tells me that you’re a very interesting man, for a policeman.’
Now it was Carlyle’s turn to laugh. Catching Dom’s eye, he said, ‘Well, I do have some interesting friends.’
‘But you have no interest in me?’
Carlyle sat up straight and looked Abramyan directly in the eye. ‘No. My interest is in the man who murdered my sergeant in the street outside.’
Sol Abramyan folded his arms. ‘And I am relevant to all of this because?’
Carlyle knew that Dom had already taken Abramyan through all of this in some detail. And he also knew that Abramyan wouldn’t even be here if he hadn’t become caught up in this whole sorry mess. But slowly, clearly, he took it all from the top.
‘So you think I have this man, this Israeli killer?’ Abramyan asked, when Carlyle had finished.
‘He’s disappeared,’ Carlyle observed. ‘That’s all we know.’
Abramyan turned to Dominic and laughed. ‘That’s what these kind of people do. As I understand it, they disappear frequently.’
‘His last known whereabouts were inside your house,’ Carlyle persisted, leaning across the table and lowering his voice despite the background chatter, ‘where he killed one of your customers.’
‘All conjecture,’ Abramyan said.
‘The house was thoroughly searched, was it not?’
‘Yes.’
‘And what did you find?’
‘Not a lot,’ the inspector admitted.
‘Quite. So, as I said, all you have is conjecture.’
Dropping his napkin on the table, Abramyam quickly stood up. The bodyguards at the nearby table appeared instantly by his side. After shaking Dominic’s hand, he circled round the table to where Carlyle was now also on his feet. Abramyan offered his hand. When Carlyle accepted it, he pulled him closer and whispered in his ear: ‘If there is anything that I can do to help you, I will let you know.’
‘Thank you,’ Carlyle murmured.
‘And if I do help you, I expect to feel able to draw on your help in return sometime in the future. If I need it.’
‘Understood.’
‘Good.’ Abramyan took half a step back and smiled. ‘We have a deal.’
‘We do.’
‘Just remember,’ Abramyan teased, ‘I am a little bit like your mother.’
Slow on the uptake, Carlyle frowned.
Abramyan’s smile grew wider. ‘I am not one to forgive and forget. And if you break your word, if you make an enemy of me, you will have a lot more to worry about than a divorce in the family.’
Returning to his seat, Carlyle watched Sol Abramyan make his way through the lobby and head out onto the street. After checking that the pot was still hot, he poured himself a fresh cup of coffee and watched Dom demolish another Danish pastry. ‘That went well,’ he said, ‘I think.’
Dom both nodded and swallowed at the same time. ‘Yes. You made quite an impression there. I think Sol likes you.’
‘How do you know?’
‘If he didn’t, the meeting would have been over in less than thirty seconds. Sol is not the kind of guy who has to put up with people if he doesn’t want to.’
Carlyle thought about that statement for a moment. ‘So what do we do now?’
‘We wait,’ said Dom cheerfully. ‘Sol will be in touch pretty quickly, I’d imagine.’
‘Do you think he really has got the guy who killed Joe?’
‘How would I know?’ Dom said. ‘But I hope that he does.’
Carlyle took another mouthful of coffee. ‘Why?’
‘Because that’s the only way there will be any justice for Joe.’ Dom signalled to one of the waiters, who immediately brought over the bill, along with a hand-held card-reader.
Carlyle half-heartedly reached for his wallet.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Dom, casually handing over a black credit card. ‘I’ve already got it.’
Relieved, Carlyle put the wallet back in his jacket pocket. ‘I thought you had to pay for this place in advance?’
‘Not if you’re Sol Abramyan you don’t.’ After entering his PIN, Dom took both the card and the receipt and stuffed them inside his coat.
‘Thanks for that,’ said Carlyle, getting back to his feet.
Dom held up a restraining hand. ‘There’s one more thing . . .’
‘Oh?’
‘Charlotte Gondomar.’
‘That’s all sorted. I spoke to Simpson last week. The IPCC investigation is basically a formality.’
‘I’m not worried about the bloody IPCC,’ Dom said quietly. ‘That was never going to be my problem. What I
am
rather interested in, however, is the Middle Market Drugs Project.’
From the unhappy look on Dom’s face, Carlyle realized that he’d made a mistake here. He should have raised the Middle Market Drugs Project with Dom before Dom raised it with him.
‘I spoke to a guy called Sam Hooper at the same time as I was talking to the IPCC,’ Carlyle said evenly. ‘Hooper told me that he had been investigating Gondomar but was more interested in your fashion designer.’
‘Rollo?’
Carlyle nodded. ‘He reckoned that Kasabian was involved in Lottie’s little scheme.’
The frown on Dom’s face deepened. ‘And you didn’t think to tell me about this?’
‘As far as I could see, it wasn’t such a big deal,’ Carlyle explained. ‘Hooper was just fishing. Apart from anything else, your name didn’t come up. To be honest, with everything else going on, I simply forgot about it.’
‘What did you tell him?’
Now it was Carlyle’s turn to frown. ‘What do you think I told him?’ he said, struggling to keep his annoyance in check. ‘Absolutely nothing.’
The waiter reappeared and began clearing up, eager to get them moved on. Standing up, Dom chewed his lower lip for a moment as he stared into the middle distance. ‘Maybe,’ he said finally, ‘Hooper thinks that you’re bent.’
‘He can think what he likes,’ Carlyle snorted. ‘The one thing I am
not
is bent.’
‘But you
are
on his radar. Just be careful.’
‘I always am,’ Carlyle grinned, buttoning up his jacket. ‘I always am.’
‘Of course, I never knew my grandfather.’ Perched on a stool, on the far side of the central workbench, Ana Borochovsky blew on her camomile tea.
Sitting next to Carlyle, Roche gently nudged him in the ribs.
‘Uh?’ Carlyle finally stopped gawking at the size and opulence of Mrs Borochovsky’s kitchen, which was almost as big as his entire flat, and smiled weakly. ‘No, no, of course not.’
Neither woman was fooled into believing that he had been paying any attention to their conversation.
‘Ana was just explaining,’ Roche said, with a hint of exasperation in her tone, ‘how Julius Jubelitski was the father of three children. One of them, Tom, was Ana’s father.’
‘I was born in 1960,’ Ana Borochovsky explained.
Carlyle did the maths in his head. That made her . . . a very good-looking middle-aged woman. ‘What do you know about your grandfather?’ he asked.
‘In terms of what he was doing during the war?’ she asked. ‘Not a lot really. It was deemed highly secret and my grandmother didn’t ask. We knew – we assumed – that he had been killed by the Nazis, but it was the war, after all, and details were impossible to come by. In the end, he was just one of many who went missing, whose fate was never uncovered.’
How very stoical
, Carlyle thought. On the other hand, it wasn’t as if the family had been offered a lot of choice in the matter.
Mrs Borochovsky took a mouthful of tea. ‘We were all very proud of him.’
‘I can imagine,’ Carlyle smiled.
‘It’s wonderful that you’ve finally found out what happened to him. My grandmother is dead now, of course, but my father is extremely grateful.’
‘We’re delighted to have been able to help,’ Roche smiled. ‘Your grandfather’s remains will be handed over to the family in the next couple of days.’
‘Thank you.’ Ana Borochovsky gazed out through a set of French doors leading to her spacious Muswell Hill garden. A trampoline and a discarded football suggested the presence of small kids.
Maybe
, Carlyle thought,
she has grandkids of her own now
. He idly wondered if he would ever be a granddad, before sternly reminding himself that it was far too early to be thinking about things like that.
‘It all seems such a long time ago,’ the woman sighed.
‘It
was
a long time ago,’ Carlyle observed.
‘We were always a political family,’ Borochovsky mused, ‘probably not the smartest thing to say to the police . . .’
Carlyle smiled but said nothing.
‘But Granddad was just one of a long line of anti-fascist activists.’ She sighed wistfully. ‘Even in my day, I remember getting involved in things like the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism – anti-apartheid too.’
‘I remember all that,’ said Carlyle.
Borochovsky looked at Roche with a grin, before turning back to the inspector. ‘You were probably busy trying to truncheon people like me on the head.’
‘I’m not that old,’ he said stiffly.
‘Are you sure?’ Roche asked, laughing.
‘I was involved in the Miners’ Strike when I first started out in the police,’ Carlyle said, playing with his teacup, ‘but that’s the only major political issue I’ve really been involved in. There were the Poll Tax riots, of course, but that was just a few wasters pissing about.’
‘There aren’t really any big political issues to get worked up about any more, are there?’ Borochovsky said. ‘Not compared to my grandfather’s time, or even the battles of the 1970s.’
‘I don’t know about that.’ Carlyle gestured at their surroundings. ‘Maybe not for the likes of us, at least. You know what it’s like, you grow up, you have kids, responsibilities. Your priorities change.’ He looked towards Roche, as a representative of a younger generation.
‘People are more cynical these days,’ Roche said. ‘You might still want to campaign against globalization or global warming, or whatever, but basically it has become a lifestyle choice.’
‘Not enough lefties around to thwack,’ Carlyle grinned. ‘Sometimes people try to blur the edges between political activity and crime but usually it’s just as an attempt to justify what they’ve done.’ He rubbed his face. ‘I deal in crime, pure and simple.’
As he spoke his phone started ringing. ‘Excuse me.’ He pulled it out of his pocket. ‘Hello?’
The connection was poor, but the voice was all business. ‘It’s Sam Hooper here.’
There was a pause.
Carlyle volunteered nothing.
‘From the Middle Market Drugs Project.’
I know where you
’
re from
, Carlyle thought irritatedly, as he got out of his chair. ‘Hold on one minute.’ Opening one of the French doors, he stepped out into the back garden. The air was chilly, with the threat of rain. Carlyle waited until he was well out of earshot of the two women, before continuing. ‘What can I do for you?’ he asked as casually as he could manage.
‘I wondered if we could meet up?’
Spit it out
, Carlyle thought. ‘Well,’ he prevaricated, ‘I am rather busy right now.’
‘Tomorrow would be fine,’ Hooper said firmly. ‘Let’s say ten a.m. at Charing Cross. I want to pick your brains about a guy called Dominic Silver.’
Dominic Silver sat in a chair on the second floor of his Soho townhouse, nursing the dregs of a Super Berry Smoothie. Yawning, he half-watched a rerun of an old Evander Holyfield–Mike Tyson fight that was playing on the 40-inch plasma screen in one corner of the room.
‘Which one is this?’
‘Ninety-six.’ Gideon Spanner, Dom’s senior lieutenant, shifted on the sofa and took another swig from his bottle of Sol. ‘The first one.’
‘So not the one where Tyson bites off his ear?’