‘For fuck’s sake, John.’
Carlyle pulled the phone from his ear in shock. Simpson was usually sparing in her use of the f-word; he really must be pushing his luck. Returning the phone to his ear, he tried for what he hoped was a conciliatory voice. ‘We may be able to make an arrest.’
There was a pause on the line. ‘Get on with it then,’ she said impatiently, ‘and then come straight to my office.’
‘Of course.’ Ending the call, he pulled up his sergeant’s number.
Umar answered on the third ring.
‘Simpson’s on the warpath,’ he sniggered.
‘Don’t worry about that,’ Carlyle said sharply, giving him the address. ‘That’s the training ground for Swann’s club. Take a couple of uniforms. Go and pick up a guy called Paul Groom. Gavin Swann says he killed that hooker in the Garden Hotel.’
‘Gavin Swann?’ Umar cackled. ‘This is getting tasty!’
‘Bring him back to Charing Cross. I’ll be there in a couple of hours.’
‘Hold on, hold on, give me that address again.’
Sighing, Carlyle repeated the details.
‘Okay. Got it. On my way.’
‘Keep me posted.’ Ending the call, the inspector spent another couple of minutes looking in the estate agent’s window for a property that he could conceivably afford. Finding nothing, he shrugged and continued on his way to the underground.
With no intention of going to see Simpson, Carlyle sat on a Northern Line train as it trundled south and wondered just what he was going to do next. Getting out at Leicester Square, his dilemma was solved by a call from Dominic Silver.
‘We need to chat.’
Standing on the Charing Cross Road, Carlyle glared at an Italian tourist who walked into him while reading his A-Z. ‘Okay.’
‘Are you busy?’
‘Yes,’ Carlyle lied, ‘but I can always make time for you.’ He told Dom where he was.
‘Okay,’ Dom said cheerily. ‘Why don’t we go and get some culture? Take the Northern Line up to Euston and we’ll meet at the Wellcome Collection.’
‘Humankind cannot bear very much reality.’
And I cannot bear very much bullshit, Carlyle thought. Condemned to live in a wasteland of soundbites, jargon and empty words, he offered the most grudging of smiles. ‘What is that? The wit and wisdom of Dominic Silver?’
‘T. S. Eliot, actually.’ They were at the exhibition called ‘High Society: Mind-Altering Drugs in History and Culture’. Dom stepped in front of a poster for ‘Hall’s Coca Wine – The Elixir of Life’ and looked it up and down. A middle-class Victorian woman in a yellow cape and dress gazed into space, blissed out, clearly doped up to the eyeballs.
‘Whatever,’ Carlyle scowled, adopting the tone he used with Alice when she was pissing him off. Vague memories of double periods of English Lit at school flitted through his mind. Did they still teach poetry? He sincerely hoped not. What was it that Sherlock Holmes had said? ‘I crave for mental exultation.’ Something like that.
Carlyle leaned forward to read the caption next to the black-and-white drawing he’d been staring at vacantly for the last few moments. Struggling to get the text in focus, he stuck his hand inside his jacket pocket.
‘Shit!’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing,’ said Carlyle, cursing under his breath as he tried to remember where he had left his specs. The thought of three hundred quid being casually misplaced filled him with mortal terror but, try as he might, he couldn’t recall where he’d last seen them. Unable to do anything about it, he took a step closer to the picture and stuck his nose right in front of the description: A busy drying room in the opium factory in Patna, India, After W. S. Sherwill, lithograph, c. 1850. It looked like a multi-storey car park with no cars in it. A handful of workers were placing what looked like row after row of footballs on the floor. The print shows one of the stages in the processing of opium at the factory in Patna, the centre of the British East India Company’s opium plantations in Bengal. The raw opium was formed into a ball about 3½ lb in weight and wrapped in poppy petals to protect it from damage. The balls were then dried on shelves and boxed into chests each containing 25-40 balls before shipping to China and Europe.
Dom appeared at his side. ‘They could make the text a bit bigger,’ he said. ‘I’ve left my reading glasses at home.’
Grunting in sympathy, Carlyle eased himself back into a standing position. He tapped Dom on the arm. ‘I always said you were a man out of time.’
Guessing what was coming, Silver indulged his friend. ‘Go on.’
Carlyle pointed at the print. ‘A hundred and fifty years ago, you could have been a respectable businessman.’
Dom grinned. ‘I am a respectable businessman.’
‘Yeah, right.’ Carlyle felt his stomach grumble. ‘There’s a café back at the entrance. I could do with something to eat.’
‘Me too. Let’s go.’
After a sandwich, Carlyle was feeling just a little bit less grumpy. Dom sipped his green tea and graciously acknowledged his friend’s belated willingness to resume polite discourse.
‘Not bad here, is it?’ They’d chosen a table in the corner by the window, well away from other people and from the browsers in the adjacent bookshop.
Carlyle made the effort to agree. ‘Very interesting.’
‘And this exhibition,’ Dom grinned, ‘well, it could have been put on especially for me.’
‘I suppose so.’ It was true enough. The show looked at the use of drugs through the ages, from the Ancient Egyptians through to the British Empire. It was a reminder that prohibition was not always the status quo. Carlyle looked at the blurb on a flyer for the exhibition which had been left on their table: it informed him that alcohol, coffee and tobacco had all been illegal in the past. And the use of psychoactive drugs dated back millennia.
‘I love coming to this museum,’ Dominic said. ‘It’s probably my favourite in the whole of London; a haven for the incurably curious.’
On autopilot, Carlyle lifted the demitasse to his mouth even though it was empty. ‘Quite.’
‘Sir Henry Wellcome was a fascinating guy. The son of an itinerant preacher, he helped create one of the first multinational pharmaceutical companies, funded medical research and was a great collector. He was a great philanthropist too.’
‘You sound jealous.’
‘I am,’ Dom shrugged, ‘I don’t mind admitting it. It’s an amazing story.’
‘Yes, indeed,’ said Carlyle. In his book, amazing stories were ten a penny, but he didn’t want to rain on Dom’s parade. His friend had a point and Carlyle felt a bit of a philistine. The Wellcome Collection, hidden behind an imposing façade of what looked like an office building, stood on the six-lane, smog-choked Euston Road, opposite the eponymous station. It was maybe ten minutes’ walk from his home in Covent Garden and Carlyle was loath to admit to Dom that this was his first-ever visit. He was even more loath to admit that he was quite chuffed at being introduced to such a gem on his doorstep. He would have to bring Helen and Alice.
‘So,’ he said, placing his cup back in its saucer, ‘what did you want to talk to me about?’
‘The Samurai,’ Dom beamed.
‘The Samurai?’
Dom explained about Eli Wallach and Tuco, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and Forest Whitaker, in Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai and ‘the Samurai’.
Carlyle was puzzled. ‘So what’s his real fucking name?’ he asked quietly.
‘No idea,’ Dom replied. ‘I suppose he doesn’t really need one.’ Then he went on to explain about Alain Costello.
Carlyle poked a bony index finger in the direction of his friend. ‘You’ve got yourself into a really dodgy situation here.’
Dom ran a hand round the neck of his black T-shirt. It had a drawing of a guitar amplifier underneath the legend SAL’S TUBE AMP REPAIR. ‘That’s what Eva says.’