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The waitress reappeared with his coffee and a smile. ‘Anything to eat with that?’ she asked again, placing the cup and saucer carefully on the table before removing the old one.

No, Carlyle thought, I haven’t changed my mind during the last minute. Irritated, he shook his head. ‘I’m okay.’

‘I’ll have another one of these, please,’ said Joe, with the polite reticence of the glutton. Stuffing the last of the sandwich in his gob, he handed the waitress the empty plate.

‘Sure. One bacon sandwich coming up.’ She turned on her heel, shouting out the order to the cook at the back as she retreated behind the counter.

Carlyle gave him a look of mock disgust. ‘That’s not going to help with the diet, is it?’

Joe gave him an As if I care grunt. Anita had placed him on an interactive, weight-loss programme almost a year ago. So far, the result was that Joseph Leon Gorka Szyszkowski had gained almost half a stone.

‘Think of your arteries.’

‘Gimme a break. I get enough of that stuff at home.’

‘Anita just wants to avoid you keeling over one day.’

Joe belched. ‘We’ll all keel over one day. Look at poor young. . What’s-his-name.’

‘Horatio.’

‘Christ, what kind of a name is that? Anyway, the poor little bugger didn’t even make it out of his teens.’ A terrible thought crossed his mind. ‘Probably never even got laid.’

‘Stop changing the subject. You know what I mean.’

‘Overall,’ Joe declared, ‘I’m in good shape. Better than you.’ He gestured at Carlyle’s battered visage. ‘At this precise moment in time, anyway.’

‘That wouldn’t be hard.’ The inspector took a sip of his coffee and gingerly felt the bump behind his left ear. It appeared to be growing in size, but wasn’t actually painful as long as he didn’t prod it.

Apart from smacking his head on the edge of the toilet bowl in the Mosmans’ guest bathroom, he had escaped without a scratch. After the explosion, he had been out cold for maybe thirty seconds. Even the raging headache that he had come round to had subsided through the help of four Ibuprofen tablets filched from the bathroom cabinet.

‘You were in just about the safest place in that house.’

Carlyle nodded. ‘Yeah.’ After washing down the painkillers with some tapwater, he had sat on the toilet seat and tried to take in the chaos unfolding around him: screaming alarms, groaning people, emergency sirens in the distance, getting closer. What struck him most, however, was the smell — the acrid stench of incinerated soft furnishings tinged with the aroma of charred flesh.

After several minutes, a face had appeared in the doorway. It took the inspector a moment to focus on her features. The young paramedic had clearly been investigating the carnage in the living room. The colour had drained from her face, making her look about twelve years old — a kid trying to play the part of an adult. She looked like she was going to throw up.

‘Are you okay?’ she asked in a shaky voice.

‘I’m fine,’ Carlyle smiled. ‘How about you?’

‘Fine.’ Taking a deep breath, she shot him a look that said Don’t question my professionalism, then stalked off.

‘See you later,’ Carlyle mumbled, giving her a little wave. He was quite happy just sitting there on the toilet seat and made no effort to get up until he was hit by a sudden thought: Where is Joe?

The waitress placed Joe’s bacon sandwich on the table and looked enquiringly at the inspector for a third time. Deeply irritated, Carlyle ignored her. How many times is she going to ask me if I want anything to eat? If I want any fucking food, I’ll say so.

He glanced around the cafe. The only other customers were a couple of cab drivers moaning about Arsenal’s wretched run of form while quickly demolishing large plates of bacon and eggs.

‘You were very lucky.’ Joe added some brown sauce to his sandwich before taking a bite.

‘Says the man who happened to walk out of the front door five seconds before the bloody thing went off,’ Carlyle snorted.

‘The other good thing is,’ Joe grinned, wiping some sauce from his chin, ‘I was standing behind a tree, otherwise I might have been hit by the flying glass.’

‘Survival instinct?’

‘Mm, I’ll need that when I get home.’

Carlyle laughed. ‘Well, you know what they say.’

‘No. What?’ Another couple of swift bites and Joe’s sandwich was gone.

‘Better to be lucky than smart.’

Joe wiped his hands on a paper napkin. ‘If Anita hadn’t been giving me such grief on the phone,’ he mused, ‘I could have still been standing right next to that kid.’

A grave expression descended on to the inspector’s face. ‘Don’t ever tell her that.’

‘No, of course not.’

‘And don’t spend too much time thinking about it either.’

Joe thought about that for a few moments. Then he remarked: ‘For one thing, dicing with death makes a bacon sandwich taste even better.’

Carlyle shook his head silently.

‘Who would do something like that?’ Joe wondered.

The inspector sucked the dregs of the coffee from his cup. ‘Someone with the skills and ability to shoot a man between the eyes at close range, vaporize a kid and then walk off down the road, apparently without a care in the world. Quite impressive when you think about it.’

‘Not many people like that around,’ Joe agreed.

‘Not on our patch, at least.’

‘So, who do you think did it?’

‘No idea.’ Carlyle yawned. The adrenalin was beginning to wear off and he wanted to go home, jump into bed and cuddle up to Helen for an hour before the working day formally began. Getting to his feet, he signalled to the waitress for the bill. ‘But that’s what we have to find out, sunshine.’

A phone started bleeping. Carlyle reached into his jacket and pulled out not one but two handsets, looking at the screen of each in turn. ‘Not mine,’ he grunted.

Joe already had his mobile against his ear. ‘Yeah, okay. Where?. . Yeah, I know it.’ Carlyle’s heart sank. ‘Don’t worry, I was up anyway. . Yeah, he’s here. . Yeah, okay. Shouldn’t take us long to get there — maybe twenty minutes.’ Ending the call, he put the phone back in his pocket and finished the last of his coffee.

‘That sounds like good news,’ Carlyle said wearily.

‘Missing teenager,’ Joe told him.

‘We’ve had more than enough teenage trouble for one night. Can’t someone else deal with it?’

‘Apparently not. ‘

‘Fuck’s sake.’

‘They’ve sent a WPC over to babysit the worried parents. Maude Hall.’ Joe grinned.

Carlyle looked blank. The name meant nothing to him.

‘She’s very cute.’

The inspector grunted. As an old married man, he had long since realized that it was better not to notice such things. Or, at least, not to comment on them. There were lots of pretty girls in the world and none of them had anything to do with him.

‘Anyway,’ Joe continued, ‘it’s probably something and nothing. The parents are in a bit of a state though, as you can imagine.’ Pushing his chair back, he got to his feet. ‘Don’t worry, I can handle it.’

‘You’re a good man, Joe.’ Carlyle looked past his colleague, towards the counter. Now that he actually wanted her attention, the waitress had disappeared. Pulling a crumpled tenner from his pocket, he dropped it on the table. ‘I’ve done my share of social-worker shit for one night. Now, I need to get to my bed.’

ELEVEN

The mornings were getting colder and darker. Winter was on the way and London would spend the next six or seven months in its default state — fifty shades of grey, damp and chilly. Zipping up his overalls, Ryan Davison climbed the steps to the office of the Street Environment Service Depot. Inside, he nodded to the supervisor, a permanently exhausted-looking man called Danimir who had fled from the civil war in the Balkans in the 1990s. For his part, Ryan had fled from the bone-crushing tedium of provincial life in the West Midlands. Both of them had found what they needed in London, more or less.