London Calling (11 page)

So, meanwhile, his family duties were clear. On the other hand, his brain was struggling to process the current situation and come up with an answer. Preferably the right answer.

Helen knew what this pause meant. ‘John?’

The threat of retaliation hung in the air, so he took a deep breath. ‘Sure. Give me half an hour or so. I’ll be there in plenty of time. I’ll even bring you a coffee.’

‘Good. Thanks.’ His wife sounded wary rather than grateful. ‘A latte would be great … and a pain au chocolat.’

‘No problem. See you soon.’ Carlyle switched the phone off and tossed it on the bed. With monumental force of will, he pushed himself off it and headed into the bathroom. Could he maybe take a shower? He hated the feeling of intense grubbiness that he was left with after a night spent on the job. In the end, he decided that would be taking a bit of a liberty. And also it would involve too much time. Instead, he made do with a long and satisfying piss. Afterwards, he looked in the bowl.
Too dark
, he thought.
I need to drink more water
. Zipping himself up, he took a half-step to the sink and splashed some tap water on his face. After drying himself, he took a look in the mirror, where the usual quizzical, plebeian features stared back at him. He pushed his shoulders back and made an effort to stand up straighter. Stroking the stubble on his jaw, he noticed that it was flecked with an increasing amount of grey.
I won’t bother shaving today
, he decided.
It’ll do my skin good
. Carlyle looked himself in the eye, holding his own gaze for several seconds. He was well aware that he was a man who often felt quite uncomfortable in his own skin, but not this morning. Now was not the time for any of that introspective bollocks. Despite the tiredness, he felt good. Not bad for someone who’s been up all night, he reckoned, lingering in front of the mirror. At any rate, not bad for someone of my age who’s been up all night.

Having made a half-hearted attempt to tidy up the remnants of his breakfast, Carlyle wheeled the trolley into the corridor and let the door close behind him. The door to 329 was also closed, with white-and-blue
Police – Do Not Cross
tape stuck across the surrounding frame. The police would keep the room for at least another few days, while the investigation progressed. It might even be a week or more before the hotel staff would be allowed to clean it up but, the economy and current occupancy rates being what they were, that was not really much of a problem. Carlyle glanced around the corridor one last time, before leaving. Silent and dark, it looked exactly the same as five hours ago, when he had first entered it.

Heading towards the lifts, Carlyle brought up a new number on his phone and hit ‘call’. There was a click and he waited for the inevitable voicemail. After the beep, he left a message: ‘Joe, it’s almost half-eight.
Wstawaj ty leniwy draniu!
Get up, you fat, lazy bastard. We have a new case. When you finally get out of bed, they’ll fill you in at the station. After that, can you give me a call? Things are under control, so I’m now leaving the scene, and will be back at Charing Cross in a few hours. Let’s catch up then. Otherwise, we could grab some lunch in Il Buffone. In the meantime, see if you can start chasing the obvious, and in particular any outstanding cases where the victim had a knife gratuitously stuck up his arse. That would be great. Say “Hi” to Anita and the kids for me. See you later.’

Shepherds Bush, London W12, March 1985

Slumped on the sofa, Carlyle tried to ignore Barbara Edwards, 1984’s Playmate of the Year, winking at him from the well-thumbed copy of
Playboy
resting next to his feet on the glass coffee table. With a heavy heart, he turned his gaze from Barbara’s incredibly perky breasts to a poster of the West Ham footballer Clyde Best on the wall behind the television, and then to the screen which was showing the BBC lunchtime news. The glum faces revealed that the miners’ strike was finally, officially, mercifully over. It had been a long slow death and the men trudging back to work could only muster the feeblest shouts of defiance. Having lost the war, they knew that they faced a slow, relentless defeat during the ensuing peace as well.

Not that the police were celebrating victory, for many officers had enjoyed the escape from home life, the camaraderie of the picket line and the excitement of the rucks. Even more of them had become nicely accustomed to the overtime pay. Now it was back to the basics of normal life.

At least, Carlyle thought dolefully, they had lives to go back to. Not all coppers could say that. A couple of days earlier, the Irish Republican Army had mortared a police station in Newry. Nine fellow officers from the Royal Ulster Constabulary had been killed. Northern Ireland was a long way off, but the IRA also regularly attacked London. There had been a steady stream of bombings in the city over the last few years, and the most recent, a car bomb at the Harrods department store in December 1983, had killed six innocent people. Being a policeman seemed more dangerous than ever.

The terrorists might not be beaten, but at least the miners were. Carlyle himself had not been on a picket line since before Christmas, so already, the strike felt like a distant memory. After several months pounding the streets around Shepherds Bush and Hammersmith, he was finally beginning to feel like a normal copper. And now he was on the cusp of being transferred south of the river, to Southwark. That suited him fine, as a new beat would offer a welcome change.

Between his postings, Carlyle had a week’s leave to use up. Two days in, though, and he was bored and restless. So when he got a message from Dominic Silver, saying that he wanted ‘a chat’, Carlyle was perfectly happy to oblige. He hadn’t seen Dom for about six months.

The last time they had been together was outside Maltby Colliery, east of Rotherham. After a long, exhausting shift, they had played marbles on the pavement, like two kids just out of school. The recently acquired marbles already had a certain sentimental value, since they had been catapulted towards police lines by the strikers during one of the more vicious scuffles of their conflict.

‘This is great,’ Dom had laughed, as he won another game, taking a couple of quid off Carlyle in the process. ‘If marbles are all they can fight with, we’ve got absolutely nothing to worry about. They are really, truly fucked.’

Sitting in Silver’s new bachelor pad, enviously eyeing his stroke mags and watching his new twenty-inch Philips television, Carlyle wondered where the money to pay for all this luxury had come from. It certainly wasn’t from playing marbles, or even from police overtime payments. Carlyle himself was still living with his parents in Fulham, and couldn’t afford to buy as much as an outside toilet anywhere within two hundred miles of London. Renting wasn’t much easier. Dom’s place seemed way, way out of his league. Covering the top floor of a Victorian house, Carlyle reckoned that the flat must have cost him twenty grand, maybe more. That was a hell of a lot of money for a twenty-something kid. For sure, no one would give you a mortgage for that amount on a constable’s salary.

‘Stupid buggers. They should have seen the writing on the wall long ago.’ Dom stood in the doorway, wearing a Van Morrison Wavelength tour T-shirt, as he waved a large spliff in the direction of the television. It struck Carlyle that Dom was turning into a right old hippy bastard. What ever happened to punk? It was almost as if The Clash, still struggling along in name only, had never happened,

The smell was good, but Carlyle declined Dom’s offer of a toke. Dope wasn’t really his thing; invariably it would give him a splitting headache and make him puke. He liked his drugs to get him going, rather than slow him down.

Carlyle watched the embers glow as Dom took another greedy drag. Back in television land, one of the union leaders appeared on the screen and started talking about ‘dignity’, ‘solidarity’ and ‘the need to keep fighting’. The man looked haggard, and so haunted that you almost expected him to burst into tears at any minute.

‘Idiots!’ Dominic snarled. ‘Donkeys leading lions.’

‘If the lions really were lions,’ Carlyle asked, ‘would they really allow themselves to be led by donkeys?’

‘Smart-arse.’ Dom took another puff.

Carlyle shrugged.

Dom failed to blow a smoke ring and coughed. ‘Seriously though,’ he said through the haze, ‘that’s a bloody good question, Johnny boy … now shift up.’

Carlyle moved to one end of the sofa and Dom flopped down beside him. For the next few minutes, Dom stared at the television screen intently, without saying a word. Eventually the news bulletin moved on to other stories. Apparently, Nelson Mandela had refused a deal from the South African government which would see him released from jail in return for renouncing armed struggle.

‘Bad move, Nelson, old son,’ Dom remarked airily.

‘If he does a deal with them, it will damage his credibilty,’ Carlyle said earnestly.

‘Credibility’s overrated,’ said Dom sharply. ‘He’s been in jail for what … twenty years? He’s old … what, in his sixties?’

‘Something like that.’

Dom pointed the spliff at the screen. ‘Now he should get out while he’s got the chance. Once he’s out, Botha and his boys are finished. Even that bitch Thatcher won’t be able to stop him.’ He clenched his fist: ‘Nelson! You’re a lion! It’s time to roar!’

Dominic’s political stance was at least as surprising as his property ownership, since Carlyle had never previously heard him speak of anything other than football and girls. Even if it was the dope talking, which Carlyle was sure it was, he sounded nothing like the Dom he thought that he knew. He certainly sounded nothing like a copper. Carlyle wondered for a minute if he might suddenly whip a pile of newspapers from behind the sofa and try to sell him a copy of
Socialist Worker
.

The smoke was making Carlyle feel giddy. Getting slowly up from the sofa, he went to the window. Opening it, he felt the cold air sneak into the room and inhaled it deeply.

Dominic looked him up and down. ‘I’m leaving the Force,’ he announced though the haze.

Carlyle almost banged his head against the window frame. ‘You’re doing what?’

‘I’ve had enough of all this bollocks,’ Dom replied, looking round for an ashtray. ‘It’s not for me. I’m packing it in.’

‘Your family won’t like that,’ Carlyle said, knowing that Dom’s dad was a policeman. So, too, was his uncle. Blokes couldn’t do anything else in the Silver household.

‘It’s my decision,’ Dom said firmly, stubbing out the remainder of his joint on a saucer that he had finally discovered under the sofa.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I’m going into business,’ he said. ‘Or, rather, I am going to focus on my existing business interests full time.’

‘And what might those “business interests” be?’ Carlyle asked warily, not really wanting to know the answer.

‘I’m looking for some help.’

Trying not to feel flattered, Carlyle asked a question that he did now quite want an answer to, even if he might not like it. ‘Why me?’

‘Why not?’ Dom stared into space, and then wound up his short sales pitch. ‘I know you. I know you’re straight. I know you’re dependable. I know that you’re not cut out to be a copper.’ That he had clearly anticipated the question wasn’t as surprising as his ability to push the right buttons.

‘What do you mean, cut out to be a copper’?’

Dom grinned slyly. ‘Come on, John. Coming from me that’s hardly a criticism, is it? Neither of us fits in. We can both see past the bullshit. I can’t play the game, and neither can you. If you stay, they’ll piss all over you – even more than they’ve done already.’

Carlyle leant against the windowsill. ‘I
am
a copper,’ he said, more for his own benefit than for Dom’s.

‘Yeah … right.’

‘It was my decision,’ Carlyle said, trying to sound convincing, ‘and I have no regrets.’ He already had his doubts – plenty of them – but he wasn’t going to share them with anyone. ‘Now all this coal bollocks is over, I’m enjoying it a lot more. It’s fine.’

Dom swung his legs on to the sofa and stretched them out like a cat. ‘Don’t you realise, though? This is what it’s always going to be like. There will always be something else. Last time it was the miners, next time it’ll be the steel workers, or the dockers, or the anti-apartheid mob or students or … whatever. There will always be an “enemy within”. We –
they
– can’t do without them. There always has to be someone to fight.’

‘Maybe,’ Carlyle said doubtfully, ‘but nothing as big as what we’ve had to deal with during this last year. Not like Orgreave.’ Without thinking, he raised a hand to his forehead and touched the small scar that remained from the flying brick that had caught him on the picket line.

‘Face it, you’ll be doing someone else’s dirty work forever.’ Dom picked the roach out of the saucer and rolled it between his fingers. He glanced over at Barbara and smiled a proprietorial smile. ‘How’s the Miller thing going?’

His question surprised Carlyle. He hadn’t thought about Trevor Miller for months. And he wasn’t aware that Dom had heard about their little run-in the previous summer, or its unresolved aftermath.

To Carlyle’s dismay, the woman in the garden that day at Orgreave, called Jill Shoesmith, had launched civil action and was claiming damages for the assault. She had tracked Miller down through Carlyle (unluckily, she had remembered his surname). Being the only witness, Carlyle’s statement was crucial. The obvious thing – the expected thing – was to clear Trevor from the off, but he was reluctant to do that, basically because Trevor was such a total cunt. Letting him get off would have meant some careful ‘interpretation’ of what had happened that day, and for a more sympathetic colleague, he could easily have managed it. Even for Miller, he could have been persuaded – not by the useless great lump himself, of course, but by others on The Job.

The Job, however, didn’t want to know. When Carlyle sought out his commanding officer at Shepherds Bush for some advice, the man was evasive and non-committal. The longer the conversation went on, the more the look on his superior’s face was that of a man who had just seen a stinking pile of dog shit dragged into his office. After a couple of minutes, however, he managed a lame smile, said that he knew that Carlyle would make ‘the right decision’ about what to say, and unceremoniously ushered him out the door, shutting it quickly behind him. This was Carlyle’s introduction to (non) man management, Metropolitan Police style.