‘Just a routine exercise,’ the sergeant explained. ‘A bit of PR to show the public we’re earning our corn.’
‘Yes.’
‘Anyway,’ said Roche, ‘what do you want?’ There was no malice in her voice, just a recognition that her ex-boss wouldn’t drop in on her without a reason. The concept of a social call was alien to Carlyle. And anyway, it wasn’t yet a quarter to seven in the morning.
Out of habit, Carlyle looked around, checking that no one was paying any attention to their conversation. ‘Marvin Taylor,’ he said quietly.
‘The guy who got his head chopped off?’
Carlyle nodded. ‘I used to work with him.’
Fifteen yards down the road, a taxi driver started arguing with one of the two officers who were checking his car. The second officer stepped over to support his colleague but the driver was a big guy who would be more than capable of giving the pair of them a run for their money. Roche’s expression suggested she would like nothing better than to put a couple of 9mm rounds through the cabbie’s windscreen.
‘His wife came to see me,’ Carlyle went on. ‘She isn’t being kept in the loop.’
‘And what makes you think I can help?’ Roche asked, keeping her eyes on the argument.
‘You were at the scene,’ Carlyle said evenly.
Roche shrugged.
‘And your boyfriend is the family’s liaison.’
Her face darkened. ‘My boyfriend?’
‘Oliver Steed,’ Carlyle replied cautiously, suddenly not so sure about the quality of the intel he’d gleaned from the station grapevine.
‘He’s not my boyfriend,’ she snapped. ‘He’s just a kid who fancies me.’ Her face set into the hard mask that he remembered from their time working together in Charing Cross. It was the kind of expression so many women in the Force adopted when they had to be more macho than the men they worked with. ‘He’s clueless. Probably still a bloody virgin.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with that. You could be a . . . whats-itsname,’ an image of a well-preserved American actress with over-inflated boobs popped into the inspector’s head, ‘a cougar.’
‘Ha.’ Roche snorted. ‘What would that make you, Grandad?’
‘An old git,’ Carlyle smiled, happy that he could still get on the right side of her.
‘No change there then.’ Down the road, the taxi driver had been coaxed back into his cab and sent on his way. One of the officers at the roadblock checked his watch and waved Roche over. ‘I’m up,’ she said. ‘Gotta go.’
‘Taylor,’ Carlyle reminded her.
‘I’m off at one. You can buy me lunch.’ They agreed a venue and she walked quickly off.
‘Try not to shoot anyone,’ Carlyle shouted after her.
‘I’ll do my best,’ she replied over her shoulder.
Fortified by a cooked breakfast at the Pitstop, a former public convenience that had been converted into a café, Carlyle sauntered through St James’s Park, wondering how best to utilize his morning. Reluctant to put in an appearance at the police station, he ran through the ‘to do’ list in his head. The number of overdue reports with his name next to them was getting longer by the day, but they could wait. The thought of giving himself over to paperwork for a few hours was so unpleasant that he had to stop at the next park bench. Sitting down beside a well-groomed woman reading a copy of the Financial Times, the inspector pulled out his BlackBerry and began scrolling through his email contacts. Finding the name he was looking for, he composed a short message and fired it off into the ether. To his surprise and delight he got a reply almost instantly. Stifling a burp, he ignored the irritated look of the businesswoman and got to his feet, heading past the Canadian War Memorial, in the direction of Lower Regent Street.
‘You were quick.’ Looking over the top of her iPad, Susan Phillips gave him a warm smile. She was standing in the middle of the lobby of a bank on Regent Street. The place had been cleared and they were alone, apart from the body wedged between two ATM machines.
‘I was in the neighbourhood,’ Carlyle explained, watching bemused as the pathologist began waving the tablet in front of her face. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m trying to connect to the Cloud,’ she explained.
Carlyle looked up at the ceiling. ‘What cloud?’
‘The Cloud, with a capital “C”.’ Phillips lifted the device higher. ‘It’s where we store our crime-scene data these days – some of it, at least. I can’t seem to get a bloody connection.’
Not having a clue what she was talking about, Carlyle watched as a couple of paramedics appeared from outside and set up a portable trolley. On Phillips’s nod, they lifted the corpse on to the trolley and wheeled it out to a waiting ambulance.
Giving up on the Cloud, Phillips let the tablet fall to her side. ‘I’ve been here since four this morning,’ she yawned.
‘Bummer. What happened?’
‘Guy comes in to get some money. Doesn’t realize that a dosser is sleeping in the lobby. Dosser wakes up. Whacks man over the head for his cash. Hits him a bit too hard. Man smacks head against side of cash machine as he goes down. Smashes his skull and has a heart attack. Dosser goes back to sleep until police turn up some time later.’
‘Sounds like my kind of case, nice and simple.’
‘When they found him, he had the bloke’s money and his ATM card in his pocket.’
‘Even better.’
‘Still the same amount of paperwork though.’ Phillips gestured towards the congealed blood that had pooled on the floor. ‘Poor bloke was from Belgium.’
‘The tramp? Or the tourist?’
‘The tourist. The tramp is from Osterley, apparently.’
‘A well-known den of thieves,’ Carlyle observed. ‘Then again, you shouldn’t really be wandering around here in the middle of the night.’ He recalled the tagline for a recent movie: same streets, different city.
‘No, I suppose not.’ Phillips dropped the iPad into a holdall near her feet. ‘Have you had breakfast?’
Still feeling rather over-full, Carlyle patted his belly. ‘Yep, afraid so.’
‘Well, I’m starving.’ Picking up the bag, Phillips marched towards the door. ‘Come on. You can watch me eat.’
Resisting the temptation to scoff a second breakfast, Carlyle daintily sipped on a peppermint tea as he watched Phillips polish off some mango slices from a small plastic pot. They were sitting in an insanely busy branch of an ubiquitous café chain, just off Piccadilly. Behind the tills, a group of eight staff expertly relieved customers of their money, while a couple of baristas behind them frantically worked massive coffee machines to deliver the orders of an ever-lengthening line of jumpy, caffeine-deprived customers. Carlyle grinned at the sight of one man, a youngish guy in a grey pinstripe suit, hopping from foot to foot as he waited impatiently for his beverage, desperate to be on his way. Surely, he thought, this place should have more people making coffee and fewer people taking money.
If only.
Phillips popped the last piece of fruit into her mouth and washed it down with a mouthful of her Americano. ‘So,’ she said brightly, dabbing the corners of her mouth with a paper napkin, ‘what can I do for you?’
Carlyle shot her a look of mock hurt. ‘Why does everyone think I only make an appearance when I want something?’
‘Because,’ she grinned, ‘you only make an appearance when you want something.’
‘Fair enough.’ They had known each other long enough; he didn’t feel that he had to mess about. ‘Tell me about Naomi Taylor.’
Phillips’s face fell. ‘She gave you a call, did she?’
‘Yeah.’ Carlyle’s foot was still playing up; he gingerly lifted it on to an empty chair next to him. ‘I met with her yesterday.’
‘Sorry if I dropped you in it.’
‘No, no,’ the inspector replied quickly. ‘I vaguely remember her old man, but I never really worked with him.’