Alexander didn’t look up from his pint. ‘Who’s playing?’
‘Villa.’
‘Ach. They’re rubbish.’
‘That’s why they’ve still got seats on sale. I can get a couple of tickets in the Home end.’ At fifty-five quid each. Plus a booking fee.
Alexander finally looked up, distinctly unimpressed. ‘I don’t know.’
Come on, show a bit of enthusiasm. ‘OK, let me know.’ Getting to his feet, Carlyle stretched. ‘I need to get going. I’ll see you soon.’
Standing by the window, Sergeant Alison Roche wearily shifted her weight on to her left foot, in order to prevent her SIG Pro pistol from digging into her side. Roche’s shift was coming to an end and she felt knackered. Standing around doing nothing was one of the most exhausting parts of the job, always had been. And she was no spring chicken these days either. Looking down the road, she wondered just how much life this particular crime scene had left in it. They had been here for hours now, and all of the standard protocols had been executed. Just beyond the police tape, she could see the bright lights of the last remaining TV crew broadcasting from the middle of the road. The journalists’ barely concealed delight at being able to report on the mayhem and misfortune suffered by others annoyed the hell out of her. She thought of them as vampires. Surely they had bled this story dry by now? Even the BBC had packed up and taken their toys off to Buckingham Palace, in toadying anticipation of the next royal sprog popping out.
‘Roche.’
The sergeant instantly recognized the reedy voice of her boss. ‘Sir.’ She turned and watched the Chief Inspector slouch down the corridor. He looked crumpled and not a little careworn. Your uniform could do with a press, she thought, looking him up and down like a mother inspecting the return of her offspring from a particularly hectic day at junior school.
As far as Roche was concerned, the problem with Chief Inspector Will Dick – or rather, one of the many problems with him – was that she just couldn’t take him seriously. The more the man tried to affect gravitas and establish his credentials as the Commanding Officer of SO15, the more the sergeant had him pegged as a complete bluffer. In fairness, he wasn’t the only one; the lack of proper leadership in the unit had been a major concern for Roche almost since her first day in the job. Staff rotated in and out with alarming regularity. After a while, she came to accept it as just one of those things. Thank God the place more or less ran itself.
All thinning hair and beseeching eyes, Dick was the unit’s third CO in as many years. He had arrived in London after a spell running a training college in some provincial police force. His appointment would have been genuinely baffling were it not for the fact that baffling appointments appeared to be the norm in the higher echelons of the Metropolitan Police Force. On a day-to-day basis, Roche worked hard at being phlegmatic. As long as she managed to keep her distance from the hapless Chief Inspector, why should she worry too much about his ineffectiveness? After all, his replacement would doubtless be along soon enough.
All of which made his current unexpected presence at the actual crime scene rather disconcerting. As he came closer, Roche patiently waited for the Chief Inspector to articulate what he wanted from her. When no explanation was forthcoming, she gave him a gentle prompt. ‘What can I do for you, boss?’
A pained expression crossed Dick’s face, as if he was suffering from the after-effects of a dodgy lunchtime curry. ‘Slacking off, Sergeant?’
What? Roche felt herself stiffen. Hardly. ‘No, sir,’ she said evenly. ‘Inspector Craven told me to keep this floor clear.’
‘Good.’ Inspector John Craven was the unit’s second-in-command and just about the only person in the unit prepared to kowtow to Dick. Both divorcés, the two men shared a rather sad enthusiasm for real ales and middle-class sports. To the general amusement of the rank and file, the pair played golf together out at Epping and were rumoured to be planning a hiking holiday in the Alps. All in all, their relationship looked like a fine bromance.
Roche gestured at the ceiling. ‘I think he’s upstairs.’
Dick looked puzzled. ‘Who?’
The man had the attention span of a goldfish. ‘Craven.’ In case you want to get on with your holiday planning, she thought sarkily.
‘Ah yes.’ Dick was a good two inches shorter than his sergeant. Unwilling to acknowledge this by looking her in the eye, he stared at his shoes. With his head bowed, Roche was gratified to see that the bald patch on the crown of his head was becoming more obvious.
‘Can I help you with something?’ she repeated.
‘No,’ Dick said stiffly, ‘not really. I’m just checking up on how things are progressing here. Need to be able to justify the use of the manpower – overtime and all that.’
‘And?’ Roche knew she should keep her mouth shut, but she couldn’t resist putting the little sod on the spot.
‘And what, Sergeant?’
‘How are things progressing, sir?’ she asked sweetly, as if genuinely interested in his answer.
For a couple of moments, the Chief Inspector seemed totally stumped by the question. ‘Satisfactorily,’ he said finally, lifting his gaze towards her ankles.
Roche waited patiently for him to look vaguely in the direction of her face. ‘It’s just that I was wondering,’ she continued, her voice containing just the right tone of innocent curiosity, ‘why exactly are we here?’ She was rewarded with another blank look. ‘I mean, why are we guarding an empty flat?’
‘Counter Terrorism Command has a broad remit,’ Dick replied, adopting the kind of tone you would use when doing community outreach at a sixth-form college or WI group, ‘and don’t forget, three people have died, one of whom was a former colleague.’ For a moment, it looked as though Dick was going to cross himself, but the Chief Inspector thought better of it at the last minute. News of Marvin Taylor’s decapitation had spread like wildfire; the poor man’s identity had been kept from the press so that the family could be informed, but his face would be on every website and TV news show in the next couple of hours. ‘He had a wife and child, so I hear.’ Dick shook his head mournfully. ‘It’s such a sad state of affairs.’
At least I’ve got no one to get too upset, Roche thought, if something like that were to happen to me. Feeling a twinge of discomfort in her lower back, the sergeant grimaced. It was the kind of niggling pain that she experienced more and more often these days. She regularly vowed to go and see someone about it but never managed to get round to it. ‘Yes, but-’
A mobile started ringing in Dick’s pocket. Roche recognized the theme from Mission: Impossible.
Original.
Holding up a hand, the Chief Inspector answered his phone. ‘Yes?’ Then, turning away from the sergeant, he marched back down the corridor without another word.
Rude. ‘I didn’t sign up for SO15 to act as a bloody security guard,’ Roche muttered after him. The truth was, after almost three years in CTC, she struggled to remember why she had wanted to join it in the first place. One thing was for sure, the supposed glamour of working for one of the Metropolitan Police’s elite units had failed to materialize. In a city like London, there just wasn’t enough drama to go round. There were at least half-a-dozen different units chasing after the sexy jobs, which was why you ended up standing in an empty corridor for an entire shift. Days like today left her thinking that it had been more fun being an ordinary plod.
The sergeant was wondering just how much longer she would be left here, guarding precisely fuck-all, when SO15’s newest recruit, a fresh-faced young officer called Oliver Steed, appeared from the nearby stairwell.
‘Ali . . .’ The boy, barely twenty-five, almost blushed as he approached her. It hadn’t escaped Roche’s attention – nor that of the rest of the unit – that Steed fancied her something rotten. Given that her would-be suitor was more than a decade her junior, most people assumed that the sergeant would be flattered by the attention. The reality, however, was that she found his interest embarrassing and annoying in equal measure. Roche had an iron rule: no boyfriends who were on The Job. It was a rule born out of bitter experience: she had learned all about the pitfalls of dating colleagues long before this particular one had finished school.