‘They’ve got his boyfriend waiting for him at a nearby hotel,’ Helen replied. ‘He’s quite cute.’
Carlyle frowned. ‘Luke Osgood? Cute?’
‘No!’ Helen giggled. ‘The boyfriend. He’s called Gianluca.’ She arched her eyebrows theatrically. ‘Quite the Italian stallion.’
Carlyle chose to ignore his wife’s professed admiration for the hunky Gianluca, keeping his focus on Osgood, who was now well on the way to finishing his wormy snack. ‘But why is he bothering with all this?’ he asked. ‘He can’t need the money.’
‘I think he’s got a taste for it.’
Carlyle frowned again. ‘For what? Worms?’
‘No,’ Helen gave him a firm poke with her foot, ‘for being a celeb. His ego is finally being allowed to run free. He’s unleashed his frivolous side after a lifetime of being submerged in the system.’
‘I see,’ said Carlyle. He made a grab for her foot, but she pulled it away. ‘Just be happy that I manage to stay submerged in the system. Letting my ego run free wouldn’t put any bread on the table.’
‘If you could make as much money as Sir Luke,’ Helen grinned, ‘you have my permission to eat as many bugs as you like. You can even take an Italian boyfriend.’
Carlyle gave her a funny look.
‘Only joking. But there’s plenty of money in all this for Lucky Luke. Apparently, he’s getting paid a hundred and twenty thousand to do this show. With all his other work, he’s making something like three-quarters of a million a year now.’
‘Jeez.’ Carlyle let out a long, low whistle. Seven hundred and fifty thousand would be three times what Osgood was getting as Metropolitan Police Commissioner. What a world, he thought; what a fucking stupid world. You could earn?250,000 a year, be responsible for 50,000 people and a budget of?3.5 billion, not to mention having to deal with the politicians and all their crap — or, indeed, the safety of some 7 million Londoners. Alternatively, you could triple your money for sitting about talking rubbish and eating worms. He had to admit that it was not really such a difficult decision. ‘But what about his dignity?’ he asked lamely.
‘What about it?’ Helen snorted, tiring of the repeated interruptions. ‘How much did he have left when the Mayor sacked him? Anyway, how much is your dignity worth?’
Carlyle didn’t need to think about it for long to conclude that the answer was a lot less than?750,000. ‘God, all that cash! Could you imagine?’
‘Don’t feel too bad about it,’ Helen said. She gave him another poke with her toe, but this time it was gentler. ‘Osgood’s only got a limited window of opportunity.’ She disengaged her foot from his ribs and waved it at the screen. ‘How many times can he do stuff like this? It’s downhill all the way from here.’
‘I suppose you’re right,’ said Carlyle.
‘Before you know it,’ Helen said, ‘he’ll be reduced to selling security shutters on late-night TV.’
‘And opening supermarkets in Croydon,’ Carlyle laughed.
‘Do they do that sort of thing any more?’ Helen asked.
‘I dunno,’ said Carlyle. ‘You would assume so. Opening supermarkets and churning out z-list celebrities are probably the only things that this country is good at any more.’
On the other side of the world, Luke Osgood swallowed the last worm and raised his arms in triumph. ‘Will he win?’ Carlyle asked.
‘No,’ Helen said with certainty. ‘Gay ex-policeman is too niche to win. He’s also too middle-class. People like him are the ones who get halfway on shows like this: not complete losers who get voted straight off, but not popular enough with the masses to get through to the very end. To do that, you either have to be a cheeky chappy soap star who gets the mums’ vote or a model with big boobs and a tiny bikini who gets the lads’ vote.’ She mentioned the names of a couple of people that Carlyle had never heard of. ‘One of those two will win.’
As they watched Osgood return to his jungle camp in triumph, Alice appeared in the doorway. She deftly tossed a mobile towards the sofa and retreated to her bedroom without saying a word. Carlyle caught the phone before it hit him on the head. He felt it vibrating in his hand and automatically hit the receive button. ‘Hello?’
‘Inspector, it’s Amelia Jacobs.’
Shit. He could immediately tell from the tension in her voice that it wasn’t good news. ‘Hi.’
‘That bastard’s taken Jake.’
That bastard. Michael Hagger. The bloke he was supposed to talk to. The bloke he was supposed to sort out.
‘He picked him up from the nursery.’
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
‘I was ten minutes late,’ her voice cracked slightly, ‘and they were gone.’
‘Uhuh.’ The inspector kicked out at the coffee-table in frustration. You fucking idiot, he told himself, why didn’t you just warn the guy off? They were depending on you.
‘John?’ Helen gave him a quizzical look but he just shook his head.
‘It’s been on the TV,’ Amelia continued.
Not the kind of stuff we’ve been watching, Carlyle thought angrily.
‘On the news,’ she explained.
‘Yes.’
‘God knows what will happen to that poor boy. You’ve got to get him back.’
He took a moment to compose himself. ‘Who’s in charge of trying to find him?’ Amelia gave him a name. ‘Okay,’ Carlyle sighed, ‘I’ll have a word and see what I can find out.’
‘You were supposed to have a word with Michael,’ she snapped.
‘I know, I know, I know,’ he said sharply. ‘Let me see what I can do. I will get back to you asap. Sit tight. It will be okay.’ Not waiting for a reply, he ended the call.
‘What’s the matter?’ Helen asked.
‘The matter is,’ he groaned, ‘I’ve fucked up.’ As he said it, the mobile started vibrating again in his hand. ‘Shit!’ He lifted the handset to his ear. ‘Amelia…’ He tried not to sound too exasperated.
‘Inspector Carlyle?’
Carlyle recognised the voice and his heart sank even further. For the second time in less than five minutes, he should have let the call go to voicemail. ‘Yes?’
‘It’s Rosanna Snowdon.’
Snowdon was a presenter on the local BBC News in London. Their paths had crossed on a previous case and Carlyle owed her a favour, maybe more than one, after she had introduced him to the politician Edgar Carlton. Two years earlier, when he had still been the Leader of the Opposition, Carlton had been caught up in a nasty little case involving rape and murder. Snowdon, a family friend of the Carltons, had facilitated an introduction for Carlyle. Later, when the whole thing had come to a messy, inconclusive end, she had probably saved what remained of Edgar’s career by stopping him from trying to air the story in the media.
Largely untouched by any hint of scandal, Carlton had gone on to become Prime Minister after a landslide election victory. Snowdon, meanwhile, was building her media career at a steady rate. As well as the local news, she now presented a weekly show called London Crime, which did reconstructions of unresolved cases around the capital and appealed to the public for help in solving them. A few months earlier, the show had featured one of Carlyle’s cases, a particularly vicious mugging of a young mother in Lincoln’s Inn Fields which had been linked to a series of other attacks in and around the Holborn area. Snowdon had asked Carlyle to come on the show, but he felt embarrassed about begging for people’s help on television, and had sent Joe instead. The piece generated seventy phone calls and no sensible leads. The amount of police time that had been wasted as a result was too big for Carlyle to even think about trying to calculate it.
The case, of course, remained unsolved.
Carlyle was extremely uncomfortable about owing Snowdon a favour. As far as he was concerned, she was a user — a hustler who saw every item, every victim, as another step towards a celebrity presenter gig on national television, a rich banker husband and regular exposure in Hello magazine. But, however he felt about it, owe her he certainly did.