‘Sergeant.’
‘Huh?’ He felt a hand on his shoulder.
‘Sergeant, wake up.’
Slowly opening his eyes, Umar focused on the WPC standing over him. She was neither blonde, nor smiling. Fortunately, she didn’t seem to notice the monster erection in his jeans as she stepped away from him.
‘Sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘I just dozed off.’
‘Don’t worry, you haven’t missed much. But it looks like problem solved. They’re just about to get Belsky out of the panic room. The engineering guy says it should be open in a couple of minutes.’
‘Good. Thanks. I’ll be there in a moment.’ Waiting for the uniform to turn away and head back towards the cartoonist’s study, Umar pushed himself up from the sofa and got unsteadily to his feet. Half-lifting an arm, he tentatively sniffed his armpit. Urgh, not good. His body ached with tiredness and all he wanted was a piss and a drink, in that order. Both, however, would have to wait.
Pulling out his phone, he checked the time, calculating that he’d managed about forty minutes’ sleep. Tapping a few buttons, he checked his missed calls. There were two from Christina but none from Carlyle. Umar shook his head.
Big surprise. The boss was happy enough to hide when it suited him.
Pulling up Carlyle’s number, Umar hit call.
He was still waiting for the inspector’s voicemail to kick in when the WPC reappeared in the doorway with an excited look on her face. ‘We’re on.’
‘Okay. I’m coming.’ Quickly ending the call, Umar followed her inside.
At least his erection had quickly subsided. Too tired to feel frustrated, Umar let the Senior Security Director of Triple RXD Security Systems explain at some length the reasons for the unfortunate technical fault that had resulted in Joseph Belsky being locked in his panic room overnight. None of it made any sense to the policeman but the guy – a small bloke with a nervous twitch that was exacerbated by a lack of sleep and too much caffeine – clearly had to get it off his chest.
‘So,’ the policeman asked when the man finally stopped spouting technical gibberish laced with excuses, ‘is it open?’
‘It is now.’ With a flourish, the engineer tapped a couple of keys on a temporary pad that had been wired up to the door. After a moment’s silence, there was a satisfying metallic click, signalling that the lock had finally disengaged.
The director let out a long breath. ‘Thank Christ for that.’
‘Better late than never,’ Umar quipped.
‘At least we didn’t have to try and go in through the wall,’ said the director, wiping his brow with a paper napkin from a nearby café. ‘That could have taken days.’
‘Always good to look on the bright side,’ said Umar, trying to keep the sarcasm from his voice. Stepping past the engineer, he carefully pulled open the door a couple of inches.
‘Mr Belsky,’ he said gently, ‘it’s the police. Apologies for the delay in getting you out of here. Apparently it was caused by some kind of computer glitch that kept the lock . . . er, locked.’
‘A computer error that was not something we could have anticipated,’ the director piped up from behind him. ‘It was just a very unfortunate set of circumstances.’
That’ll be a matter for your lawyers to sort out, thought Umar, irritated by the guy’s intervention. Shuffling forward, he put his head closer to the crack in the door. From inside the bathroom he could hear the sound of a tap running. ‘Mr Belsky?’ Turning away, he signalled for the WPC to clear the room. Once he was alone, he took a deep breath to prepare himself. Then, pulling the door properly open, he stepped up to the threshold and looked inside.
‘Oh shit . . .’
FOURTEEN
She wanted to move.
She couldn’t.
The ceiling, however, was moving – gently lurching from side to side, as if she was on a ship, rocking up and down on a gentle swell. With a shudder, Carole Simpson realized that she was going to throw up. Tossing back the duvet, she jumped out of bed and sprinted into the bathroom. Making it just in time, she deposited the remains of last night’s partially digested risotto capesante into the empty bath in a series of satisfying retches. Turning to the basin, she rinsed her mouth with water from the tap before slumping on to the cool tiled floor.
Resting her forehead against the rim of the tub, she listened to the blood throbbing in her temples. It had been the kind of heavy night that took her back to her university days – well, almost. Had it been fun? Or just an embarrassment? She was too wasted to tell. Trying to tune out the headache that was relentlessly building from the base of her skull, she took a couple of slow, deep breaths and waited.
After throwing up for a second time, the Commander was reasonably confident that there was nothing more to come from her stomach. Reaching for the shower attachment, she carefully washed away her vomit, before stepping into the bath and taking a quick, lukewarm shower. Feeling marginally better, she padded back into the bedroom encased in a hotel bathrobe. Her new friend was still face down in the bed, snoring loudly. Catching sight of his hairy back, she feared that she might throw up again. When the moment passed, she allowed herself a wry smile. ‘In the end, you couldn’t get it up,’ she mumbled to herself, ‘could you?’
By way of reply, the Deputy Chief Constable issued a loud fart and pulled a pillow over his head. With an amused sigh, Simpson began recovering her clothing from the floor. She had just put on her bra and was looking for her knickers when the strains of ‘I Vow To Thee My Country’ began issuing from her DKNY leather clutch.
‘Damn.’ Glancing at the bed, she grabbed her bag and quickly retreated back into the bathroom. Pushing the door closed, she perched on the lid of the toilet seat and answered her BlackBerry, cutting off Katherine Jenkins in full flow.
I must change my ringtone, she thought. ‘Hello?’
‘Carole,’ came the brusque voice down the line, ‘it’s Dudley Whitehead.’
Whitehead was her line manager, one of the Met’s Deputy Assistant Commissioners. What the hell did he want? The Commander suddenly felt a desperate urge to pee. Sliding off the seat, she opened the lid and tried to go as quietly as possible.
‘Carole?’
‘Yes?’
‘Where are you?’
‘I’m . . .’ for a moment, her mind went completely blank. ‘I’m at the Home Office conference. The one at . . .’ she struggled to remember the name of the hotel ‘. . . the one on Park Lane.’
Whitehead thought about that for a second. ‘Good. Be in my office in thirty minutes.’
So much for the bloody case being closed. Umar had been sent home to get a couple of hours’ sleep and the inspector was back in charge of the scene. Ignoring the ambulance crew hovering behind him, Carlyle stood in the middle of Joseph Belsky’s study, staring into space as he waited for Susan Phillips to emerge from the bathroom. In his mind he was going through a checklist of all the people he needed to speak to in the light of this most unfortunate development. Each addition to the list added a notch to his level of frustration.
How had something so simple managed to become so complicated?
After a few minutes, the pathologist appeared in the doorway and gave him a rueful smile. Dressed in faded jeans and a crisp white shirt, with her hair pulled back into a girlish ponytail, she was looking good.
‘We’ve got to stop meeting like this,’ he quipped.
‘Hm.’ Phillips’ smile quickly ebbed away. ‘Nico isn’t best pleased. He had plans for today.’
Nico? That must be the current boyfriend. Carlyle didn’t ask – there would be another one along in a minute. Phillips was high maintenance. Unlike Helen. He thought of his wife and gave silent thanks for her many qualities.
‘We were supposed to be going to the races.’