‘Anyway, you can ask him yourself. He has a flat in Covent Garden.’ She gave him an address on Maiden Lane, off Garrick Street, near the piazza.
‘Thanks. I won’t let slip where I got the information from.’ Umar turned away. He had the door half-open when he felt her hand on his shoulder.
‘Where are you going?’ she whispered. ‘There’s no rush. Clive will definitely still be asleep.’
Umar felt an unfamiliar sense of panic as she led him towards one of the back rooms. Pushing him through the nearest door, Christina ran her tongue along her bottom lip. ‘I came in early to try out a new routine. You can give me a hand.’
THIRTY-EIGHT
Sitting in the Box Café, Carlyle was enjoying a Coke when a call lit up his mobile. He eyed the machine suspiciously for several seconds before picking it up.
‘Carlyle.’
‘What the fuck do you think you are playing at?’
Pulling the phone away from his head, it took the inspector a moment to realize that the snarling voice on the other end belonged to Gavin Swann’s agent, Clifford Blitz.
Smiling, he put the handset back to his ear.
‘What’s the problem, Mr Blitz?’
‘You know damn well what the problem is!’ Blitz screamed at him. ‘I’ve had the Inland Revenue at my house since six o’clock this morning. They are hoovering up every bit of paper they can find and carting it off for forensic investigation, whatever the fuck that is.’
Struggling to keep the amusement from his voice, Carlyle cleared his throat. ‘I know nothing about this,’ he lied. ‘The Inland Revenue is nothing to do with me.’
‘Don’t fuck with me, Inspector,’ Blitz hissed. ‘We had a deal.’
‘We do, indeed,’ Carlyle agreed, ‘and as you know, I have been scrupulous in keeping to it. Mr Swann has been kept as far from my investigations as you could have hoped – further, in fact.’
Blitz made a noise that sounded like he was in pain.
‘Who is leading the HMRC investigation?’ Carlyle asked.
‘A woman,’ Blitz groaned, as if that somehow added insult to injury. ‘I’ve got a card here . . . Maria March, Special Investigations Department.’
Carlyle took a few seconds to give the impression of carefully searching through his mental contacts list. ‘Never heard of her,’ he said finally. The truth was rather different. The inspector had known Maria March for more than ten years. Back in 2004, as an ambitious young investigator for HM Revenue amp; Customs, she had been investigating a City scam of the type that came along with monotonous regularity. One of the traders caught in the HMRC web had walked in front of a number 19 bus travelling down Charing Cross Road rather than face the music. Carlyle remembered that his only real surprise at the time was that the bus had been going fast enough to actually kill the bloke, although – if his memory served him correctly – the trader only finally shuffled off this mortal coil after spending a week in a coma.
After his conversation with the Honeymann journalist Baseer Yazdani, the inspector had spent an hour in Maria’s tiny office in Somerset House, talking her through the alleged fraud involving Gavin Swann. Sitting in front of a floor-to-ceiling bookcase crammed with files, papers and various tax guides, Maria looked even smaller than her five foot two inches. A pretty, raven-haired woman now well into her forties, she had Italian parents and a French husband, with two kids who were Londoners through and through.
‘Okay. I see.’ Maria nodded thoughtfully all the way through Carlyle’s opening monologue, taking copious notes in a hard-backed A4 notebook.
When he couldn’t think of anything else to say, the inspector sat back in his chair, knocking a copy of Tolley’s Tax Guide from the table behind him.
‘Sorry.’
Maria rolled her hazel eyes. ‘Don’t worry about it.’
Carlyle picked the book off the floor and placed it back in its place. ‘So,’ he asked, ‘what do you think?’
‘Well,’ Maria looked at her notes, ‘this kind of thing is fairly common. I should imagine we know all of this stuff – and more – already. It’s clearly a grey area; the question is, how actively are we investigating it?’
‘I see,’ said Carlyle, unable to keep the disappointment from his voice.
‘Don’t worry,’ Maria smiled, ‘I’m sure we will be able to give this guy a hard time for you. My boss is a complerte media tart. He will love the publicity of such a high-profile target. He would have sex with his grandmother in Selfridges window for a couple of minutes on the Today programme.’
‘Urgh.’
‘His words, not mine.’
‘This has to be more than just a publicity stunt.’
She looked at him doubtfully.
‘Really.’
‘Okay. I understand. I’m sure if we put our minds to it we could probably come up with enough to put Mr Blitz away for a year or two, maybe more.’
‘Perfect,’ Carlyle smiled. ‘That would be great.’
‘Never heard of her?’ Blitz parroted, sensing that he was being given some flannel but unable to do anything about it.
‘No, sorry,’ Carlyle replied. ‘But let me see what I can find out.’
‘Appreciate it,’ Blitz said grudgingly.
‘Meantime,’ Carlyle continued, deciding to yank Blitz’s chain a bit more, ‘you can do something for me.’
There was a suspicious pause. ‘What would that be?’
‘I need to get in touch with Paul Groom’s agent.’
‘Hah!’ Blitz laughed. ‘Wayne Devine isn’t his agent any more.’
‘Oh? Who is?’
‘I am.’
Ending the call, Carlyle finished his drink and signalled to the waitress that he would like another. Then he called Baseer, gave him a mobile number for Maria March and told him he could finally write his Gavin Swann story.
‘She’ll “no comment” it for you,’ Carlyle said, ‘but she can’t deny it. I would have thought that should be enough to get it past your editors.’
‘I hope so,’ Baseer replied. ‘Thanks.’
‘No problem.’ Carlyle did a thumbs-up as the waitress placed a cold drink in front of him. ‘Let’s keep in touch.’
Dropping the phone onto the table, the inspector cracked open the can and took a swig of its contents. He was contemplating ordering a sandwich when someone pulled up a chair and sat down beside him. Looking up, he was surprised to see that it was Gideon Spanner.
Dropping a Nike holdall by his feet, Spanner carefully placed a copy of that afternoon’s Standard on the table, opened at page six and folded in half. Below the fold was a story headlined: WAR VETERAN KICKED TO DEATH BY THUGS. He tapped the story with his index finger, saying, ‘You were supposed to give me a heads-up on this.’
Picking up the paper, Carlyle scanned down the story. They had Gasparino’s name, some details of his service record, along with a quote from Dr Bell. In the last paragraph, a ‘Metropolitan Police source’ was quoted as saying: ‘The attackers left a lot of forensic evidence at the scene. On that basis, we would expect to make good progress in identifying them quite quickly.’ The inspector sighed heavily; it wasn’t the worst leak he had ever seen, or the quickest, but it was pretty bad. If Umar had anything to do with this, he thought, I will kick the smug bastard all the way back up to Manchester. He dropped the paper back onto the table and shrugged. ‘This doesn’t really help me, but I don’t think we’ll have too much trouble catching them – they’re just a bunch of kids. Idiots like that always get caught.’
Gideon gave him a stony look. ‘I want to deal with them.’
‘Don’t go all Charles Bronson on me, Gideon,’ Carlyle sighed. ‘They will get what’s coming to them. Leave it alone or I’ll end up having to arrest you.’
If the big man was at all perturbed by the prospect, it didn’t show as he gazed out of the window. ‘Who’s Charles Bronson?’