The Circus (27 page)

‘What we are saying is that all everyone wants is for Hannah to get in touch with her parents as soon as possible.’ He jumped to his feet, signalling for Joe to follow. ‘So, if there are no more questions, let’s leave it there. Thank you for your time. We will let you know of any further developments in due course.’

Not waiting for any additional responses, he skipped off the platform and ducked through the door, heading for the lift.

The inspector picked up the business card and made a show of reading it carefully.
Charles W. Ross, Life President, Wickford Associates
. What did the W stand for? Carlyle wondered. He let a somewhat uncharitable but appropriate word float through his brain as he considered the address underneath. An office on New Bond Street in the West End: the same address as on a similar card he’d taken from the envelope of goodies that Duncan Brown’s girlfriend, Gemma Millington, had recovered from her flat.

Well, well, well
.

Sitting in a fourth-floor meeting room, Charlie Ross eyed the inspector carefully while sipping slowly from an outsized Starbucks beaker. Happy to have escaped the press conference, Carlyle could do with a coffee himself. He placed the card back on the table and looked up.

‘Do you remember me?’ he asked.

Ross fixed him with a sharp gaze. Well into his eighties, his blue eyes were still clear and alert behind a pair of fashionable rimless glasses. ‘Aye, son, I remember you well.’

Happy to go along with the fiction, Carlyle nodded.

‘At Cortonwood and Orgreave,’ the old man continued.

‘Right.’

‘That business with Trevor Miller.’

‘Indeed.’ Maybe the old sod genuinely did remember. Or maybe he’d done some homework before bowling up here.

‘Bloody hell!’ Charlie chuckled. ‘That was something like thirty years ago now. I was still a young man back then – almost.’

‘Time is a bastard,’ Carlyle agreed. ‘You’re looking good though.’ It was true. On first inspection, apart from the fact that his hair was now pure white, Sergeant Charlie Ross didn’t appear that much older than when he was dodging half-bricks on the Yorkshire picket lines. Indeed, tanned, relaxed and carrying a
few extra pounds, he looked considerably healthier than Carlyle remembered him back then. The expensive-looking suit he was wearing only added to an overall impression of well-being and prosperity.

‘Thanks.’ The old man grinned ruefully. ‘I wish I could say the same for you.’

Carlyle smiled. This was still the same old Charlie: always in your face. Born in Burnbank, South Lancashire, Charlie Ross’s police career had been going nowhere until it was given a late lease of life by the 1980s miners’ strike. For John Carlyle, a young PC dumped out in the provinces to take on a paramilitary role on behalf of an extremist government only too keen to go to war against the ‘enemy within’, it was an uncomfortable education in more ways than one. For Charlie Ross, with almost twenty-five years’ service under his belt, it had instead been a memorable swansong.

‘We gave those bastards a right shoeing,’ Ross recalled happily, his harsh accent defiantly unaffected by more than fifty years of living in London.

‘Mm, what can I do for you, Charlie?’

Placing his cup on the table, Ross sat back in his chair and folded his arms. The look on his face said
Don’t fuck about with me, son
. For someone who was an old man, he still managed to create an air of menace – especially when he smiled. ‘I thought I’d come and see you before you came to see me.’

‘Oh?’

‘In fact, I’m surprised you haven’t been over to see us already.’

‘I’ve had a lot on.’

‘I bet you have. And I thought I might be able to help you in that regard.’

‘That’s very kind of you.’

‘My company has nothing to hide.’

Your
company, the inspector wondered. I thought it belonged to Trevor Miller? It was a detail that he let slide. ‘That’s good to know.’

‘I’m assuming that you know all about our connection to Duncan Brown and the Zenger Corporation?’

Carlyle nodded.

‘That is all in the public domain. Like I say, we have nothing to hide. If there has been any breach of our well-documented procedures and guidelines, then we will take all the appropriate steps to weed out the guilty parties and do everything necessary to beef up our systems and processes.’

Spare me the corporate bullshit
.

‘As you would expect, we are already cooperating fully with Operation Redhead and your friend Russell Meyer.’

‘He is not my friend,’ Carlyle snapped, his meagre reserves of patience already used up.

‘Whatever you say.’ Ross held up his hands in supplication. ‘You have, however, compared notes, I take it?’

‘That is
my
business,’ said Carlyle huffily. He really needed some caffeine. ‘What exactly do you want?’

Ross held his gaze for one, two, three seconds. ‘What I want, son,’ he said finally, ‘is to give you Trevor Miller’s head on a fucking plate.’

Unsure what to make of his conversation with Charlie Ross, Carlyle watched the old man skip down the front steps of Charing Cross police station and slip into the back seat of a black Lexus sedan which had been ostentatiously idling in front of a
No Parking
sign.

‘Who was that?’ Maude Hall appeared at his shoulder, carrying a file stuffed with documents. Wearing jeans and a washed-out red T-shirt under a grey cardigan, she looked about sixteen.

‘His name is Charlie Ross,’ said Carlyle, watching the Lexus nose out into the traffic. ‘He works with Trevor Miller.’

‘I met Miller yesterday.’

‘Oh?’ Trying not to look concerned, the inspector took a half-step backwards.

‘Yeah. Simon Shelbourne introduced us.’

‘Mm.’ Maybe sending the girl to spy on the Commissioner’s PR man hadn’t been such a good idea, after all. ‘Let’s go to the canteen and get a coffee,’ he suggested. ‘Then you can tell me what happened.’

Three small crumbs were all that remained of his chocolate doughnut. Feeling better and worse at the same time, Carlyle looked guiltily at his plate before finishing off his coffee. Munching on an apple, Hall said nothing.

‘So,’ he said, waiting for her to finish chewing, ‘how did it go with Shelbourne?’

‘What a creep!’ Dropping the apple core on her plate, Hall wiped her hands on a paper napkin. ‘He was obviously pissed and offered to give me the guided tour of his club. They have bedrooms on the top floor, and he thought . . .’

A couple of male officers at the next table began tuning into their conversation, so Carlyle signalled for Hall to lower her voice.

‘He thought,’ she whispered, ‘that I would go up there with him and – well, you know.’

Gritting his teeth, Carlyle told himself,
Sending Hall off to act as your spy was definitely not one of your better ideas
. Apart from anything else, Simpson would have a fit if she ever found out.

‘Not that I was falling for that,’ she grinned. ‘I let him show me round quickly, and then legged it.’

‘Good for you.’

‘My dad boxed for the Army. I can look after myself.’

‘I’m sure you can,’ Carlyle nodded, not sure what the connection there was.

Her grin widened. ‘And then, of course, there is the Krav Maga.’

‘Yes.’ Carlyle smiled, remembering the unfortunate Francis Clegg. Hall’s obvious ability to look after herself made him feel
a little better about having sent her to try and butter up the deeply unpleasant Simon Shelbourne. ‘What did you two talk about? Did he tell you anything useful?’

Hall shook her head. ‘Not really. He moaned about Miller being on his case the whole time, clearly because of the phone-hacking business, but he didn’t go into any details. Oh, and apparently Sir Chester’s stay in a health farm is costing almost thirty grand.’

‘Thirty grand?’

‘I know. Simon says he’s particularly keen on the colonic irrigation, and he’s also having kriotherapy for his back twice a day.’

‘What’s that?’

‘No idea. Just some kind of treatment.’

‘So how can Sir Chester afford thirty k?’

‘He doesn’t have to. The guy who owns the health farm is letting Sir Chester and his wife stay for free.’

‘Interesting.’ Pushing back his chair, the inspector got to his feet. ‘Do you know when he’s back at work?’

‘Probably sometime next week. Depends on how his recovery is coming along.’

‘Have you told anyone else about the thirty grand?’

Hall looked vaguely affronted. ‘No.’

‘Good. Then keep it to yourself.’

‘Okay.’

Carlyle wondered if she would really be able to keep her mouth shut. In his experience, coppers were terrible when it came to gossiping. ‘Right, go and see what Joe needs help with. We really have to find Monty Laws. Now that Hannah Gillespie has hit the press, we’ll have to keep feeding the beast.’

Not really sure what the inspector was wittering on about, Hall nodded enthusiastically.

‘And let’s give Shelbourne a wide berth for a while.’

‘With pleasure!’

‘Tell Joe I’ll catch up with you guys later on.’ Should he have
another doughnut? Unable to make his mind up, Carlyle sent Hall on her way. At least he would have some more caffeine. Heading back to the coffee machine, he pressed the button for a double espresso and waited.

The BBC’s news channel was showing live coverage of the House of Commons’ Select Committee hearing into the slowly emerging phone-hacking scandal. Yawning, the inspector was surprised to see Margaretha Zelle’s pixellated face suddenly appear on the TV screen. ‘What the fuck’s she doing?’

‘Playing the victim.’ Leaning across the sofa, Dominic Silver picked up the remote control from the floor and muted the sound. Sitting in an armchair in the far corner of the room, Gideon Spanner momentarily looked up from his book – a paperback copy of
GB84
, David Peace’s novel about the miners’ strike – before returning to his reading without otherwise acknowledging the inspector’s arrival. Spanner, an ex-soldier, was Dom’s right-hand man, and he was not the kind of guy to waste his words.

‘Talking a load of rubbish,’ Dom continued, ‘as per usual. Lots of guff about how she’s been violated by the invasion of her privacy . . . yada, yada, yada. All that happened was someone listened in to her poxy messages.’

‘Why do people bother?’ Carlyle wondered aloud. ‘Half the time, I can’t be bothered to listen to my own bloody messages.’

‘Half the time you don’t
remember
to listen to your own bloody messages,’ Dom chided him.

‘Fair point,’ Carlyle conceded.

Dom waved airily at the screen. ‘Just as well for her that the media didn’t hack any of her messages from me,’ he chortled.

The inspector raised an eyebrow. ‘She’s a client?’

‘Now and again,’ Dom sighed. ‘A pain in the arse, basically.’

‘I can imagine,’ said Carlyle sympathetically.

‘Having given it some thought, I would have to say that she is one of the most stupid, self-obsessed people that I’ve ever met in my life.’

‘That must be saying something.’

‘And I find it impossible to believe that she’s ever had any conversation worth listening in to, ever.’

‘Phone hacking is a serious crime,’ Carlyle mused, slipping into an empty chair, ‘apparently.’

Silver shot him the kind of amused stare that had been perfected over several decades. A former policeman turned drug dealer, he had a somewhat ambivalent attitude towards matters of law and order. In that respect, he wasn’t so different from Carlyle himself. ‘Now that we’ve cleared
that
up, Inspector, what is it that I can do for you?’

‘Trevor Miller.’

A look of disgust swept across Silver’s face. ‘That wanker! What’s he up to now?’

While Margaretha Zelle prattled away silently, Carlyle quickly ran through a potted history of the Duncan Brown case and its connection to Operation Redhead, omitting the bit about Miller turning up at his block of flats to give him a shoeing.

‘It’s amazing what people get wound up about,’ was Dom’s only response.

‘Yeah. But at the end of the day, we are talking about murder,’ Carlyle reminded him.

‘Of a bloody
journalist
,’ Dom sniffed. ‘Mitigating circumstances personified.’

‘Journalists have rights too,’ the inspector said primly.

On the TV, Ms Zelle pulled a handkerchief from the sleeve of her jacket and wiped away a tear. Dom waved an exasperated arm at the sobbing celeb. ‘This shows what a fucked-up society we are. In other places, when journalists get killed it’s because
they are trying to uncover some big story, trying to shine a spotlight on some social injustice, or whatever. A newspaper editor in Mexico was decapitated last week for trying to write about the drugs war.’

‘Mm.’ Where did that come from? Carlyle wondered. And aren’t you with the other side in that particular war? But their successful long-standing relationship was built on an understanding, among other things, that life was full of ironies.

‘Over here, on the other hand,’ Dom complained, ‘journalists are just lobotomized morons. Everything’s just about who’s fucking whom or promoting whatever shit show is on the telly on Saturday night.’

‘That’s just the way of the world.’ Leaning forward in his chair, Carlyle held up a hand. He didn’t have time for his mate going off on one about the shortcomings of contemporary British society. In small doses, Dom’s drug-dealer-as-sociologist shtick was interesting enough – but there was a time and a place. ‘Do you remember Charlie Ross?’

Dom thought about it for a moment. ‘Sergeant Charlie Ross?’

‘The self-same,’ Carlyle nodded.

‘Rucking at Orgreave Colliery.’

‘Amongst other places.’

‘Hard bastard.’

‘I reckon he’s somewhere in his eighties now, but still looking good. He came to see me this morning. Said he could offer me Miller’s head on a plate.’

‘What’s he got to do with Trevor?’

‘They run a private security and investigations firm together, called Wickford Associates.’

‘So why would good old Charlie want to fuck over his business partner?’