Time of Death (10 page)

‘John?’ Helen gave him a quizzical look but he just shook his head.

‘It’s been on the TV,’ Amelia continued.

Not the kind of stuff we’ve been watching, Carlyle thought angrily.

‘On the news,’ she explained.

‘Yes.’

‘God knows what will happen to that poor boy. You’ve got to get him back.’

He took a moment to compose himself. ‘Who’s in charge of trying to find him?’ Amelia gave him a name. ‘Okay,’ Carlyle sighed, ‘I’ll have a word and see
what I can find out.’

‘You were supposed to have a word with Michael,’ she snapped.

‘I know, I know, I know,’ he said sharply. ‘Let me see what I can do. I will get back to you asap. Sit tight. It will be okay.’ Not waiting for a reply, he ended the
call.

‘What’s the matter?’ Helen asked.

‘The matter is,’ he groaned, ‘I’ve fucked up.’ As he said it, the mobile started vibrating again in his hand. ‘Shit!’ He lifted the handset to his ear.
‘Amelia . . .’ He tried not to sound too exasperated.

‘Inspector Carlyle?’

Carlyle recognised the voice and his heart sank even further. For the second time in less than five minutes, he should have let the call go to voicemail. ‘Yes?’

‘It’s Rosanna Snowdon.’

Snowdon was a presenter on the local BBC News in London. Their paths had crossed on a previous case and Carlyle owed her a favour, maybe more than one, after she had introduced him to the
politician Edgar Carlton. Two years earlier, when he had still been the Leader of the Opposition, Carlton had been caught up in a nasty little case involving rape and murder. Snowdon, a family
friend of the Carltons, had facilitated an introduction for Carlyle. Later, when the whole thing had come to a messy, inconclusive end, she had probably saved what remained of Edgar’s career
by stopping him from trying to air the story in the media.

Largely untouched by any hint of scandal, Carlton had gone on to become Prime Minister after a landslide election victory. Snowdon, meanwhile, was building her media career at a steady rate. As
well as the local news, she now presented a weekly show called
London Crime
, which did reconstructions of unresolved cases around the capital and appealed to the public for help in solving
them. A few months earlier, the show had featured one of Carlyle’s cases, a particularly vicious mugging of a young mother in Lincoln’s Inn Fields which had been linked to a series of
other attacks in and around the Holborn area. Snowdon had asked Carlyle to come on the show, but he felt embarrassed about begging for people’s help on television, and had sent Joe instead.
The piece generated seventy phone calls and no sensible leads. The amount of police time that had been wasted as a result was too big for Carlyle to even think about trying to calculate it.

The case, of course, remained unsolved.

Carlyle was extremely uncomfortable about owing Snowdon a favour. As far as he was concerned, she was a user – a hustler who saw every item, every victim, as another step towards a
celebrity presenter gig on national television, a rich banker husband and regular exposure in
Hello
magazine. But, however he felt about it, owe her he certainly did.

‘How are you?’ he asked, trying to inject some interest into his voice.

‘I wondered if I could talk to you about something,’ she said, not bothering with any preamble. ‘Maybe we could have a coffee together?’

‘This is not about the Mills case, is it?’ Carlyle enquired cautiously. He hadn’t seen it in the press yet, but it was only a matter of time.

‘What?’

‘Nothing. What’s it about, then?’

‘Don’t worry,’ she said rather brusquely, ‘it’s not about any of your cases. But I’d rather we talked face to face. Could you do nine o’clock tomorrow
morning?’

Carlyle sucked in a breath. He was curious to find out what was causing Rosanna such concern. Whatever it was, it would doubtless be more diverting than his rather banal domestic slaying. On the
other hand, she didn’t pay his wages, and he did have to get Henry Mills processed. ‘That would be tricky,’ he said finally. ‘Now is not a great time.’

‘Please,’ she said firmly, ‘it’s really quite important. It will only take half an hour and it would be a really big favour.’ There was a genuine nervousness in her
tone that he had never heard before. This was not the usual flirtatious Rosanna, the one that made him feel so uncomfortable. Stripped of its usual coating of ironic detachment, her voice sounded
strained. Compared to the super-assured alpha female that he was used to, it was almost endearing.

‘Well . . .’ His interest was aroused. She might be playing him along, but he didn’t think so. If nothing else, this could wipe the slate clean between them. Carlyle reflected
for a moment. ‘All right,’ he said finally. ‘Nine thirty.’

‘Fantastic!’ she said with obvious feeling. ‘How about we go to Patisserie Valerie on Marylebone High Street?’

‘Fine,’ he said, heartened slightly by the prospect that he might at least get a good pastry out of it.

‘Good, I’ll see you there. Have a pleasant evening, Inspector.’

‘You too.’ Carlyle clicked off the phone and glanced at Helen, who was still engrossed in her television show. Luke Osgood was now dancing around his jungle clearing, wearing nothing
but a yellow posing pouch and a red cowboy hat. He had a bottle of wine in one hand and a cigar in the other. Whatever else Luke has had done recently, Carlyle thought, he hasn’t yet coughed
up for any liposuction. Disgusted, he pushed himself off the sofa and fled the room.

For almost two hours, he lay in bed, racing through the final hundred or so pages of an excellent detective novel by an Italian writer, whose hero found himself fighting his way through the mire
of ‘corruption, fraud, rackets and villainy’ with mixed success. Carlyle enjoyed it immensely. Finishing the last page, he closed the book and let it fall on the bedside table with a
satisfying thud. Books like that should be required reading in schools, he thought. They should be thrust into the hands of the so-called literary experts who imagined that crime novels were just
convoluted puzzles. Yawning, he stretched out under the duvet. For a short while, he enjoyed the luxury of letting his mind go blank, while staring at the ceiling. Then, giving up on any hope of
his wife’s imminent arrival, he switched off the light and prepared to dream of villains and villainy.

D
raining the last dregs from his 750 ml bottle of Tiger beer, Jerome Sullivan nodded his head in time to the beat of T.I.’s ‘Dead and Gone’, grinning
serenely, despite the music playing so loudly that the windows were shaking. No one within half a mile of his flat could possibly be getting any sleep, but the neighbours knew better than to
complain. Jerome was not good with criticism. The last person to complain about his anti-social behaviour had ended up in the Royal Free Hospital with two broken legs.

Running his operations out of the bunker-like Goodwin House, the thirty-one year old was the biggest skunk and ecstasy dealer in the N5, N7, NW5 and NW1 postcodes. The 1980s four-storey,
brown-brick building was perfectly designed for his business operations. It was almost as if Camden Council had built it to order. It even looked like a fortress. The windows were small and at
least twenty feet off the ground. More importantly, there was only one way in; even that was on foot – there was no vehicle access. Seeing its potential, Jerome had appropriated the top two
floors and set about strengthening the building’s defences, so that if the police ever tried to raid it, it would take them at least two hours to get in. Short of bringing a Challenger tank
down Marsden Street and pumping a couple of 120 mm rounds into the building, number 47 was impregnable.

Tossing the empty beer bottle onto the sofa, Jerome felt a sudden wave of boredom sweep over him. Reaching for his new toy lying on the coffee-table, he staggered to his feet and kicked at a
couple of the bodies slumped on the floor. ‘Get up!’ he shouted over the music. ‘Let’s go up on the roof.’

Two minutes later, he was waving a Glock 17 above his head as he swayed to the music blasting through the asphalt below his bare feet. The 9 mm semi-automatic pistol had arrived earlier in the
day, a present from a happy supplier; a reward for Jerome beating his sales targets for the first quarter of the year. The supplier – an Albanian people-trafficker who was diversifying into
drugs – had thrown in a couple of clips of ammunition as well. Jerome hadn’t realised that he had any sales targets, quarterly or otherwise, but he was delighted by the gift. He had
never owned a gun before, and he wasn’t sure what he was going to do with it.

But he knew he would do something.

By his standards, Jerome had been giving it some serious thought. The way he saw it, there was no point in having the gun, if you didn’t use it to shoot someone. But who? For the moment,
however, just holding it was enough. Wearing just a Nickelback T-shirt and a pair of ruby Adidas running shorts, he shivered in the night air. In the semi-darkness above the orange street lights he
could see the goosebumps on his arms, but the cold was overridden by the overwhelming sense of power flowing from the Glock as he gripped it tightly in his hand. Sticking his free hand down his
trousers, he gave his balls a vigorous scratch and felt a tingling in his groin. The Glock was giving him a chubby all right, and he hadn’t even fired it yet. ‘Oh man!’ he groaned
to himself. ‘This has gotta happen, just gotta . . .’

Eric Christian, one of Jerome’s key associates, a friend since their second year at nearby Gospel Oak Primary School, stumbled through the doorway and on to the roof. He was followed by a
couple of hangers-on who didn’t know the end of a party when they saw one. Eric looked at Jerome and grinned. ‘Careful you don’t walk right off the edge, man,’ he drawled,
trying – and failing – to light a large blunt with a Harley-Davidson lighter.

‘No worries, dude,’ Jerome grinned. He brought the gun down to eye level, gripped it double-handed and pointed it at Eric.

Eric’s eyes widened as the blunt fell from his lips. ‘Whoa, maaaan!’ he drawled, trying to keep the nervous laugh out of his voice. ‘Tell me that thing’s not
loaded.’

‘Nah.’ Jerome’s eyes lost their focus. He pulled the gun to his chest and pointed the barrel skyward, like a man about to participate in an old-style duel. ‘I took the
clip out before. It’s downstairs somewhere.’

The music beneath them reached a crescendo. Starting to dance again, Jerome pointed the Glock past Eric at the other two guys who had joined them. He remembered them now. They were pondlife:
sometimes they did little jobs for him, sometimes they were customers. Both of them looked like they were going to shit themselves; one even stuck his hands up, like they did in the movies. Jerome
thought this was hilarious and burst out laughing, thinking that if the gun were loaded, he might just pull the trigger. He turned back to Eric. ‘We’ll have to try it out soon,
though.’

‘Sure thing,’ said Eric, laughing too. Pulling a mobile out of his back pocket, he began filming his friend. Panning across the roof, he zoomed in on Jerome before focusing on the
Glock. ‘Go for it, man. Let’s make a movie!’

Jerome shrieked with delight. ‘This one’s for YouTube,’ he shouted at the tiny camera. ‘Comin’ to get ya, baby!’

‘You the man, Jerome,’ shouted one of the losers.

‘I’m a killer, man!’ Jerome stepped closer to the camera and put the gun to his head, grinning like a maniac. ‘This is how you muthafuckin’ kill someone!’ he
screamed, eyes blazing. ‘Just
sqeeeeeze
.’ His index finger jerked back the trigger. There was a muffled crack and his eyes rolled back into his head. For a second, time stood
still. Then, still holding the gun, he did a little sideways dance before stepping off the side of the building and disappearing from view.

Eric stood there, the background hum of the late-night traffic in his ears, trying to work out how his mate had done such a cool trick.

‘Wow!’ said a voice behind him. ‘Did you get all that?’

T
he number 25 bus travelled west along Oxford Street, bouncing past the clothes stores, mobile-phone booths, cafés and sex shops at an average speed of about three miles
an hour. It would probably have been quicker just to walk all the way, but he couldn’t be bothered. The top deck provided a dirty and depressing vista, an unappealing mix of third-world
squalor and first-world weather. It was one of the few parts of his home city that made Carlyle feel ashamed, so he always did his best to ignore it.

This morning, on his way to his breakfast meeting with Rosanna Snowdon, he sat at the very front of the bus, with his head stuck firmly in
The Times
. On page three, he contemplated a
story about a man in Wales who had spent thirty years in prison after having been wrongly convicted of the murder of a young woman. New DNA tests had shown that he could not have been the killer.
The Criminal Cases Review Commission was rushing to have the guy freed.

Reading the article, Carlyle began to feel a physical pain in his chest. The whole thing was so depressingly familiar. The ‘murderer’ was described as being mentally ill. That was no
big surprise – doubtless he had been an easy way of getting a serious case off someone’s desk and a grieving family off someone’s back. At the trial, the jury had returned a
unanimous guilty verdict in double-quick time. The trial judge had thrown in his tuppenceworth as well, proclaiming: ‘
I have no doubt whatsoever that you were guilty of this appalling,
horrible crime
.’

No doubt whatsoever. They just couldn’t wait to throw away the key. How very satisfying. An appeal was refused. Only years later, when a new solicitor pushed for another look, did the
Forensic Science Service test the bodily fluids collected from the crime scene.

In short, the case had been a total fucking mess, a serving policeman’s worst nightmare. It also raised serious concerns about the integrity of dozens of other murder convictions which
would now have to be similarly reviewed. The man’s solicitor spelled it out for hopeful lags up and down the country: ‘
Anyone who believes that they’ve been wrongly convicted,
and thinks DNA tests would help, should contact a lawyer immediately.
’