Carlyle looked at Taylor, patiently waiting for him to finish the call. The disappointed look on her face made it clear that he should have left the phone unanswered. He felt like a heel. ‘Make it twenty.’ Ending the call, he dropped the phone back into his pocket. ‘Sorry,’ he repeated. ‘That was my boss.’
Taylor nodded. ‘You must be very busy.’
Not really. The inspector thought about the random odds and sods currently on his desk; nothing to get the adrenaline pumping. ‘Yes.’
‘I’m sorry to have taken up so much of your time this morning.’ She began fumbling in her bag for her purse. Carlyle leaned across the table and put a hand on her arm.
‘Don’t worry. I’ll get this. Tell me what I can do to help.’
She looked at him doubtfully.
Taking his hand from her arm, he said, ‘Marvin was a good bloke and a good colleague. If there is anything I can do to help you and your . . .’ Did they have a boy or a girl?
‘Daughter.’ It wasn’t so much a word as a cry.
‘Yes.’ The couple on the next table had tuned back into Carlyle’s conversation. He tried to ignore them.
‘Laurie.’
‘If there is anything I can do to help you and, er, Laurie, I am at your disposal.’
‘Well, if you could see what you could find out.’
He looked at the hope mingling with despair on her face and tried to smile. ‘About . . .’
‘About anything,’ she sniffed. ‘What happened, why someone did this to him, when we can have him back. Anything.’ From the pocket of her jacket she pulled a business card and handed it to him. ‘This is the person I’ve been dealing with so far. He’s been very nice but hasn’t been able to tell me much. That’s why I spoke to Susan and she suggested I get in touch with you.’
‘Yes.’ Putting his glasses on the top of his head, Carlyle scanned the card. Oliver Steed, Liaison Officer, SO15. Below the name and title, there was a landline number but no mobile, suggesting that Mr Steed didn’t really want to be contacted at all.
SO15? What did this have to do with Counter Terrorism?
What had Marvin bloody Taylor gotten himself into?
Taylor caught him frowning. ‘Do you know him?’
‘No.’ Carlyle carefully entered Steed’s details into his phone, handed back the card, and then took Taylor’s own numbers. ‘I do know some people in SO15 though,’ he added, still peering at the mobile’s screen. ‘So maybe I can find out something.’
For once, Simpson didn’t keep him waiting. Arriving at Paddington Green, he was ushered directly into the Commander’s office by her latest PA – a greasy-looking boy with too much fake tan – and offered a coffee, which he declined. After his meeting with Naomi Taylor, he had more than enough caffeine in his system already.
‘But we have some really nice Jamaican Blue Mountain roasted beans,’ the boy protested, fiddling with the collar of his fuchsia-coloured polo shirt. ‘I got it from Waitrose this morning.’
Waitrose? Jesus. Even Helen complained about the posh supermarket’s prices, and his wife rarely noticed such things. There were times when he wondered if the gentrification of his city had not gone too far. Carlyle shook his head. ‘I’m fine, thanks.’
Simpson appeared from behind her assistant and grinned. ‘Not like you to say no to a coffee, John.’
Not like you to offer me one, the inspector thought grumpily. ‘Helen’s been trying to get me to cut down for a while now. And, anyway, I just had one.’
‘Ah, yes.’ Simpson’s grin grew wider. ‘Your meeting.’ She looked up. ‘I’ll have half a cup, please, Jason. Black.’ The boy nodded and hurried out of the room.
‘New?’ Carlyle asked, happy to prolong the small talk for as long as possible.
‘I’ve had him about a month.’
‘Any good?’
‘We’ll see.’ Jason reappeared almost instantly, placing a faded London 2012 mug on the Commander’s desk, and retreated out of the door doing something that looked to Carlyle suspiciously like a moonwalk. If Simpson noticed, she didn’t let on. Taking a sip of her coffee, she gave a small nod of approval. ‘At least he can make a decent cup of coffee – and in double-quick time too. Not that it matters much, none of them last very long. I worked out recently that the average life expectancy of one of my PAs is about four months. I try not to get too attached to any of them.’
‘Very wise.’
‘So . . .’ Simpson smiled over the top of her mug in a way that was, frankly, unsettling. Trying to look at her without maintaining eye contact, the inspector noted that she looked tanned and relaxed; just back from holiday, perhaps, or a long weekend in the country. ‘Thank you for coming.’
‘My pleasure, boss.’ Carlyle braced himself, wondering what he was about to be carpeted for. He ran through his recent indiscretions. Nothing major sprang to mind, but he knew from painful experience that it was always the things you didn’t think of that caught you out.
Sensing his discomfort, the Commander said, ‘Don’t worry, John, you’re not here for a bollocking.’
‘No?’ he enquired, failing to keep the surprise from his voice.
‘No,’ Simpson replied firmly. ‘You’re here because of a woman called Barbara Hutton . . .’
‘OK.’ Sitting up straight, he placed his hands in his lap and adopted a formal paying attention pose.
‘. . . aka Sylvia Tosches. Maybe.’
‘Maybe?’
‘Hutton, maiden name Grozer – according to her papers at least. Born in Germany, a UK citizen living in a Georgian pile in Bloomsbury. Her husband is a lawyer.’
‘So far, so boring.’
‘Tosches, on the other hand, is a German national. Born in Frankfurt in 1949, she was a lesser light of the Baader-Meinhof gang, a terrorist group in the seventies.’
Carlyle held up a hand. ‘I know who they are. Helen took me on a date to see The Baader Meinhof Complex once.’
Simpson looked at him blankly.
‘It’s a movie.’
‘Ah, yes.’
‘Not exactly what you would call a date movie. It was her idea of a joke, I think.’
‘I see.’ Not unduly interested in the dynamics of the inspector’s marriage, Simpson moved swiftly on. ‘Tosches was believed to be involved in a bank robbery in Kassel and also in the kidnapping and murder of a businessman by the name of Uli Eichinger. She was arrested by the police but got away.’
‘And now she’s turned up in London forty-odd years later?’
‘Our colleagues in Berlin had a tip-off that Hutton is, in fact, Tosches. They have asked us to investigate.’
‘Now?’ Carlyle pursed his lips. Of all the weird stuff he’d had to deal with over the years, this was right up there with the strangest. ‘Almost half a century on?’
‘Eichinger’s body was found in a wood,’ Simpson said matter-of-factly. ‘His hands were bound and he had been shot in the back of the head. A bank teller was also killed in the robbery. Two murders. There’s no time limit on these crimes.’ She paused, reached for her mug and then thought better of it. ‘And apparently, Eichinger’s family have considerable political influence. Even after all this time, they continue to lobby hard for the cases not to be forgotten.’
Stands to reason, Carlyle thought. If it was just the bank teller we were talking about, no one would be interested.
‘They want justice,’ Simpson continued primly. ‘Which is understandable.’
Folding his arms, the inspector stared in the general direction of the window. ‘So what do you want me to do?’ he asked eventually. ‘Go and beat the truth out of some granny who may or may not have been there at the time?’
‘She’s not a grandmother,’ Simpson observed, ‘as far as we know.’
‘And what proof do we have that she is, in fact . . .’
‘Tosches. Sylvia Tosches. They don’t have any proof – but they can get some. Sylvia has a sister, a retired librarian living in Gelsenkirchen. They want to do a DNA test.’