‘Of course,’ Martin said smoothly.
‘Good,’ said Carlyle. ‘In that case, do not waste my time again. Or I might just make it my business to come and visit all of your establishments on a regular basis.’ Shoving his chair out of the way, he stormed out of the room and headed back upstairs.
NINETEEN
It was already standing room only in the tiny first-floor bar of the Chandos pub, just north of Trafalgar Square. David Guetta’s ‘Who’s That Chick?’ was blasting out of a couple of tiny speakers hanging from the ceiling while an Arsenal game played mutely on a TV screen on the far wall. Carlyle felt a trickle of sweat run down his back as he watched a middle-aged man in a pinstripe suit glare angrily at Umar as the young sergeant brushed past him, carelessly knocking a quarter of an inch of London Pride from the pint.
‘Sorry, mate,’ Umar said breezily, annoying the commuter even more. Taking a sip from his glass of Jameson’s whiskey, Carlyle stepped over and shrugged apologetically.
‘Sorry, but this is a private event.’
The man was about to protest when an enormous cheer went up. Turning to greet the new arrival, Carlyle joined in the applause as PC Lea appeared at the top of the stairs. Embarrassed, the constable did a small bow, soaking up the cheers of the twenty or so colleagues who were all now waving Earth Angel vibrators above their heads.
Carlyle watched with a certain sympathy as the commuter beat a hasty retreat downstairs. Then he turned to Umar and grinned. ‘Where the bloody hell did all those come from?’
‘There was a sale at the Ann Summers on Oxford Street,’ Umar explained. He slipped his arm round the waist of a pretty female constable called Wendy Saunders, who giggled appreciatively. ‘But wait till you see the best bit.’
A much louder roar went up as a green-haired Asian girl in a WPC’s uniform now appeared at the top of the stairs. The girl looked vaguely familiar but it took a moment for the inspector to place her.
Taking one of the Earth Angels from an officer in the crowd, the stripper licked the business end of it with gusto before rolling it across Lea’s crotch.
Oh shit, thought Carlyle nervously.
‘It’s the entertainment,’ Umar shouted in his ear. ‘We hired her from Everton’s.’
Not wishing to have to explain this when he got home, Carlyle quickly drained the last of his whiskey. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ he said hastily, as he began pushing his way towards the exit.
‘What?’ Umar frowned, but the inspector was already on his way. By the time he passed her, the girl had already shed her uniform and was down to an emerald green bra and G-string. Halfway down the stairs, another roar went up, suggesting that the underwear had now gone as well. Feeling hot and bothered, Carlyle fled into the night.
Adrian Gasparino looked at the blank screen on his MP3 player and sighed. How was he going to get the damn thing recharged? The music helped him get to sleep. Without it, he was in for a long night. Stuffing the machine into his coat pocket, Gasparino took a swig from his 700 ml bottle of Tesco Value Gin, feeling it slip all the way down his throat and into his empty stomach. Keeping the bottle close to his lips, he let out a small sigh as he lay back, lifting his hips off the ground and pulling his sleeping bag up around his waist. This doorway would be his bed for the night and he was glad to have found it. Out of the persistent, niggling rain, it was relatively dry. No one had pissed in it recently, which was another plus. But the clincher was the vent in the corner supplying a welcome stream of warm air from the building inside.
All in all, it could only be described as a desirable spot in a chichi Central London location. Certainly, it was the best place he had found on his travels so far. It hadn’t taken Gasparino long to realize that sleeping rough in the infantry was not the same as rough sleeping on the streets. This would be his third night on the street since leaving the hostel. On the first, he had sneaked into a car park on Shelton Street, near Covent Garden tube station. But he had been discovered sleeping underneath a Range Rover by a parking attendant, who’d kicked him out into the night at 4 a.m. The second night had been worse. Trying to claim a spot behind St Giles-in-the-Fields parish church, he had been attacked by a couple of junkies who had chased him off.
After days and nights of aimlessly trudging the streets, Gasparino felt weary to his very marrow. All he wanted was to be left alone and get something approximating a good night’s sleep. In the morning, he would head down to the toilets at Charing Cross railway station and have a wash and a shave. Maybe then he could come up with some kind of idea about what he should be doing.
Gasparino looked vacantly at the bottle. It was four-fifths empty and his head was already swimming. ‘No point in leaving the rest,’ he mumbled to himself, tipping his head back and pouring the last of the gin down his neck.
Wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve, he screwed the cap back onto the empty bottle, placing it in the side pocket of his rucksack, which was stuck behind his head as a pillow. Breathing through his mouth, Gasparino stared vacantly down the street. Despite the late hour, there were still plenty of people around, drunks and other revellers in no hurry to leave Central London and head back home to the suburbs. On the far side of the street, he watched a young woman, blind drunk, support herself against the back of a parked car. With her free hand, she hitched up her red skirt and pulled down her knickers, before squatting and aiming a stream of piss towards the tarmac. The pool of steaming urine made it a couple of inches away from the girl before the camber of the road sent it back towards her outsized platform shoes.
Behind her, a girlfriend leaned against another parked car, laughing drunkenly. ‘You’re getting it on yourself!’
‘Piss off!’ the squatting woman grunted as she did a little jig, trying to avoid stepping in her own wee.
Shifting in his sleeping bag, Gasparino caught the eye of the standing woman. She was wearing a thin, sleeveless dress that ended about half-an-inch below her crotch. A small bag hung from her left shoulder. She had no jacket and her legs were bare. The regulation over-sized shoes were strapped to her feet. Intoxicated as he was, Gasparino imagined he could see the goose bumps on her arms, even from fifteen feet away.
Glassy-eyed, the shivering girl stared right through him, as if he was invisible. ‘C’mon, Jen,’ she shouted, ‘let’s get going.’
‘Hold on!’ the woman shrieked. ‘I’m almost done.’ Finally, she levered herself back into something approximating a standing position, pulling up her pants as she did so. Stepping over the lake she had just created, she wobbled towards her friend, who reached out with a supporting arm. ‘Will we make the train?’
‘Dunno.’
Gasparino watched the two of them stagger off down the road. You don’t know how lucky you are, he thought groggily, having somewhere to go, a bed to sleep in. As they disappeared round a corner, he closed his eyes, knowing that, for him, sleep was unlikely to come.
After more than twenty years in the Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment, serving in Saudi Arabia, Northern Ireland, Germany, Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan, it had taken barely a couple of weeks for his marriage to collapse and his life to unravel. Trying to ignore the pain in his leg, Adrian Gasparino picked up a grubby copy of a freesheet that had been discarded in the doorway. He checked the date on the front page. Maybe it was today; maybe it was yesterday. Thinking about it for a moment, he realized that, either way, his baby’s due date was only a couple of days away.
If it actually was his baby.
‘Hey! Mister!’
Gasparino looked up but said nothing.
‘Got any money?’ A tall skinny boy, wearing jeans and a red hoodie with the legend ANIMAL on the front, stepped towards him. He had a blank, acne-scarred face, with no obvious signs of intelligence behind his dead, dark eyes; the type of kid he’d last seen cowering in a compound in Helmand. Hovering behind him, Gasparino counted four others, all dressed in similar fashion, a posse of evil urchins.