In short, he was not your average criminal.
At the heart of this success was a very pragmatic attitude to money. Dominic never spelled it out, but Carlyle was vaguely aware that he handed over a very high proportion of his take to his key suppliers, in exchange for protection. ‘I’m kind of freelance, kind of not,’ he once told Carlyle, ‘kind of independent, kind of not. Basically, they outsource this part of their operation to me. It’s like anything else — if I’m quicker, cheaper and less hassle, I get the job.’
Pragmatic and self-aware himself, Carlyle recognised that they had a lot in common. Indeed, there were many things about Dominic Silver that the inspector genuinely liked. Over the years, Dominic had shed his cheeky-chappy demeanour and become more serious. He had obtained a degree in Business and Management from Queen Mary College, and with his greying shoulder-length hair and rimless spectacles, he looked like a writer or an academic or maybe the keyboard player in some soft rock outfit like Genesis. For someone with a net worth that was probably heading towards fifty million, Dom enjoyed a very down-to-earth lifestyle. He wasn’t bling and kept an extremely low profile. He didn’t do drugs. He didn’t smoke, and only took the occasional drink. He went to the gym regularly and kept himself in shape — although he was almost six feet tall, he couldn’t weigh much more than seventy kilos.
In short, their relationship was both stable and cordial. It wasn’t complicated, but it wasn’t very clear either. Neither of them would necessarily have wanted to create it if it didn’t already exist, but they could both see its advantages as well as its drawbacks. Of course, Carlyle could never go after him, even if he wanted to: he would be compromised by the favours that Dominic had done for him in the past. But he was confident that he was not alone in that regard; for years, the rumour was that Silver had some fairly serious protection even further up the food chain, both inside the Met and outside. He also had a close-knit inner circle of advisers which Carlyle would join on an ad hoc basis, as part of the unspoken quid pro quo for Dominic’s help whenever he needed it.
Carlyle felt very ambivalent about their relationship. If someone chose to use it against him, he knew what it could do to his career and to his family. That did cause him concern, but the reality was that it was too late to do anything about it now.
Carlyle watched Dominic fiddle with his phone. Finally finding the clip he wanted, he hit the play button. ‘There’s a lot of crap at the beginning, but the party piece is worth waiting for.’
‘Mm.’ Dominic offered him the phone. ‘Go on, take a look.’
Taking the handset, Carlyle watched Alice race off through the middle of someone’s football game, followed by Tom and Oliver. He turned and eyed the video jerking across the mobile’s tiny screen, without focusing on it. In his book, phones were meant for voice calls. Since when did everyone suddenly need to make their own videos? He glanced back at the kids to make sure that they were not straying too far. ‘What’s that?’ he asked.
‘It’s a guy called Jerome Sullivan.’
‘Who’s he?’
‘He is — was — in the same business as me. Not really a competitor, but I’d met him a couple of times.’
‘What happened to him?’ Carlyle asked, wary now that they had moved on to business.
‘He shot himself in the head,’ said Dominic, amused.
‘What?’ Carlyle scrutinised the handset. ‘He filmed himself committing suicide? I didn’t think that people in your line of work tended to suffer from depression.’
‘Not exactly,’ Dominic grinned. ‘He was showing off to a mate and didn’t realise there was a round still in the breech.’
Carlyle watched Jerome put the gun to his head. ‘Darwinism in action.’
‘That isn’t what killed him, though,’ said Dominic cheerily. ‘The bullet kind of bounced off his skull and missed his brain.’
‘Which, presumably,’ Carlyle mused, ‘was tiny.’
‘Yeah.’ Dominic laughed. ‘What actually killed him was the hundred-foot fall off the top of his building.’
‘What an outstanding effort,’ Carlyle said, then: ‘How did you come by the video?’
‘Lots of people have it now,’ said Dominic. ‘Jerome’s acquaintances were unusually co-operative with the police. No one wanted to be accused of killing him.’
‘That’s understandable.’ When the video clip ended, Carlyle idly hit the play button and watched the final moments of Jerome Sullivan unfold again from the beginning. If you didn’t know what had happened, you wouldn’t have been able to say if the video was real or fake.
‘They’ll be wanting something to drink,’ Dominic said suddenly, nodding at the kids, who were running back towards them.
‘Yes,’ Carlyle agreed. But that thought was quickly pushed aside as something else popped into his mind. He halted the Sullivan video once again and went back to the start. Letting it run for about five or six seconds, he paused at the point where one of the other men on the roof stuck his hands in the air in mock surrender. Squinting, he brought the phone closer to his face, until it was only about four inches from his nose. The quality of the image was poor, but, if you knew who you were looking at, you could make out the man’s face.
‘Dominic,’ he asked, ‘what’s Michael Hagger doing in this video?’
TWENTY
Suffer the little children, thought Carlyle, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.
A-fucking-men to that.
Helen was been incandescent at having another Sunday interrupted. She had booked a yoga workshop for that afternoon and Carlyle had been supposed to take Alice to the zoo. But he had insisted, trying to explain to her that he was obliged to deal with this one. He had promised Amelia Jacobs that he would speak to Michael Hagger, to stop things getting out of control. But he hadn’t. And they had.
Jake had been picked up from nursery by his father almost a fortnight ago. Neither of them had been seen since. Except for Michael Hagger’s appearance in the video clip, which Carlyle now had stored on his phone. That afternoon he had spent some time in Kentish Town, trying to track Hagger down. Zero success. Now he had to go and face the music.
Sam Laidlaw lived less than five minutes’ walk away from Carlyle’s flat. Walking through Covent Garden, Carlyle counted nine A4-sized MISSING posters in shop windows or tied to lamp posts. The flyer had a blurred digital image of a frowning Jake Hagger, above a text that offered a?2,000 reward for information about the boy’s whereabouts. Carlyle had no idea who had put up the money, but he was fairly sure that it would never be claimed. Already, the posters had a grubby and forlorn look about them. Jake was a fairly nondescript kid, whose most memorable characteristic was that his mother was a hooker and his father an all-round, general purpose scumbag. He was most definitely not the kind of pretty, middle-class kid with articulate, professional parents who could drum up a large supply of media interest and public sympathy. His time in the media spotlight had been brief and perfunctory. Within a few hours, he was usurped in the news agenda by a mentally ill man who had climbed into the lion enclosure at London Zoo.
To the extent that it was doing anything at all, the police investigation was busy chasing dead ends. In any child disappearance case, 99 per cent of members of the public who came up with ‘information’ were simply time-wasters — psychics, visionaries, dreamers, nutters or ‘well-wishers’ who simply wanted to wallow in other people’s misery. Even these wretches had shown only a minimal interest in the disappearance of Jake Hagger. As far as the inspector was aware, there had been no decent leads at all. Sidestepping the tourists, and keeping out of the sun, Carlyle knew that those posters wouldn’t last another week.