Umar wiped the corners of his mouth with a paper napkin, sending crumbs cascading on to his Kasabian T-shirt. ‘Just making conversation,’ he mumbled.
‘Better get on.’ Not wishing to discuss the matter any further, Carlyle got up and headed for the lifts.
FIVE
Reaching the third floor, Carlyle passed a red collection bucket that had been chained to an empty desk. A notice next to it read: Collection for family of Marvin Taylor (Charing Cross 2008- 2010) who died last week. Please give generously. Sighing, he took out his wallet and removed a twenty-pound note. Folding it up, he pushed it through the slot, while eyeing the anti-tamper seal on the lid suspiciously. I hope that holds up, he thought. I wouldn’t trust the buggers round here for a minute.
Umar appeared at his shoulder and scanned the notice. ‘Who’s Marvin Taylor?’
‘He was a sergeant here,’ Carlyle explained. ‘Nice guy. Took redundancy in one of the rounds of cost-cutting we had and went off to set up his own security business.’
‘OK. So what happened to him?’
‘Someone sawed his head off in Chelsea the other night.’
‘Ah,’ Umar replied, ‘so he was one of the guys in the massacre?’
‘The what?’
‘That’s what they’re calling it on TV – the Chelsea Massacre.’
‘Wankers,’ Carlyle hissed. ‘I bet they pissed themselves with excitement when they found out what had happened.’
‘That’s the media for you,’ said Umar philosophically.
‘Yes, it is,’ Carlyle agreed, heading for his desk. ‘But Marvin was a good guy, a family man, so put some money in the collection.’
‘Eh?’ A look of consternation crossed Umar’s face. ‘But I never knew the bloke; he was before my time. And, besides, I’m skint.’
‘Twenty quid minimum,’ the inspector added, dismissing his protests with a wave of the hand. ‘You never know, we might be doing it for you one day.’ Stumbling into his chair, he reached across the desk to switch on his PC, grabbing a Post-it note that had been stuck to the screen before slumping back into his seat. If anything, the pain in his sprained ankle was getting worse. He lifted his foot on to the table and tentatively wiggled his toes in the hope that it would somehow ease his discomfort.
‘You should get that seen to, you know.’ Standing at the next desk, Umar began sifting through a pile of mail that had been left in his in-tray.
‘Thank you, Dr Findlay.’
‘Who?’
‘Never mind.’ Eschewing his glasses, Carlyle squinted at the square of yellow paper in his hand. Naomi 0203 405 5958.
Naomi? His foot throbbed angrily as he tried to put a face to the name.
Naomi? Who the fuck was Naomi?
Giving up, he turned back to his sergeant. ‘Do we know a Naomi?’
Umar thought about it for a moment and chuckled. ‘I don’t know about you, but I know a couple.’
Exasperated, the inspector waved the Post-it note at his minion. ‘I mean, professionally speaking. Some woman called Naomi wants me to give her a call.’
‘Give her a call then,’ Umar shrugged, going back to his mail.
‘I’ll give her a call then,’ Carlyle parroted. With his computer still struggling to come to life, he reached across the desk and picked up the receiver on his landline and punched in the woman’s number. The call was answered on the second ring.
‘Naomi?’ Carlyle demanded, settling back into his seat.
‘Yes.’ The voice sounded small and distant.
‘This is Inspector John Carlyle at Charing Cross police station. I got a message to give you a call.’
‘Yes.’
And? His hackles rising, Carlyle said nothing.
‘You don’t remember me, do you?’
‘Should I?’ Carlyle asked, his voice rather more brusque than he intended.
‘I am . . . was Naomi Sage. I’m a friend of Susan Phillips.’
‘Ah, yes,’ Carlyle nodded, none the wiser. Susan Phillips, a police pathologist working out of the Holborn station, was an old friend. He couldn’t place the other woman, however.
‘Susan suggested that I give you a call.’
‘OK,’ said Carlyle warily, wondering what he was going to be lumbered with now. His computer finally made it through its start-up routine and a prompt appeared on the screen demanding his username and password. His mind ran through the overdue reports that needed to be written and the other crap that he should be dealing with.
‘My married name is Taylor,’ her voice wavered.
Taylor. The inspector glanced across the room in time to see one of the uniforms drop a handful of coins into the collection bucket.
‘You worked with Marvin, didn’t you?’
‘Er, yes,’ Carlyle coughed, ‘yes, I did.’
‘I’m his wife.’
Putting down the phone, the inspector scratched his head. Feeling listless and unable to focus on matters of a professional nature, he pondered a quick return to the café for another snack but ruled it out on the grounds that he wasn’t hungry in the slightest. Looking across the room, he was dismayed to see his sergeant hard at work on his Facebook page.
Crime-fighting really can be a bitch. He was just about to chide Umar when he was distracted by a whiff of expensive perfume. Sniffing the air like some small animal in the desert, he watched Amelia Elmhirst float by.
Carlyle cleared his throat. ‘Morning.’
‘Good morning, Inspector.’ She eyed him with the wry amusement of someone who knew that she would be the boss around here soon enough, before taking up a perch on the corner of Umar’s desk. Sergeant Amelia Elmhirst was the talk of the Charing Cross station. Six foot one, blonde, with deep blue eyes, the sergeant had the kind of über-healthy, Leni Riefenstahl-approved look that belonged on a catwalk, rather than walking the beat on the grimy streets of WC2. A graduate of King’s College, with a first in Psychology and an MA in Social Anthropology, Elmhirst was being fast-tracked through a graduate trainee programme that would see her make inspector well before her thirtieth birthday. The fact that she lived with her long-term boyfriend – a social media entrepreneur called Simon – in a loft in Shoreditch did nothing to stop her from being an object of desire for every man in the station.
‘Hi, Amelia,’ Umar grinned, quickly abandoning Facebook in order to give the new arrival his full attention.
Careful, Carlyle thought, you don’t want your tongue dragging on the floor.
Never slow when it came to the opposite sex, Umar was a man on a mission. At a conservative estimate, the inspector calculated that around a quarter of his sergeant’s working day was currently devoted to flirting with his colleague or devising strategies to try and get into her knickers. ‘How’s it going?’
‘Fine. Nothing particularly exciting.’ Pushing a strand of hair behind her ear, Elmhirst glanced at Carlyle, who was settling in to shamelessly eavesdrop on their conversation. Keen to assess the state of Umar’s quest, the inspector smiled sweetly, making no effort to pretend to be working. ‘Had to deal with a landlord yesterday, who tried to evict his tenant by shooting him.’
‘It’s a way of speeding things up, I suppose,’ Carlyle quipped.
Umar shot him a look that said Get lost.
‘Anyway, he missed. Or things could have been much worse.’ Elmhirst turned away from Carlyle to give Umar her full attention. ‘About that photo . . .’
‘Did you like it?’ Umar grinned.
Leaning forward, Elmhirst lowered her voice. ‘Don’t do it again. If Si saw it, he would have a fit.’
‘I thought he was in San Francisco,’ Umar protested.
‘Yeah, but if he came back and picked up my iPhone . . .’ Elmhirst got to her feet. ‘I’ve deleted it, but just don’t do it again. It’s not very funny. And,’ she giggled, ‘I was really quite surprised. It’s not very big, is it?’