Sins of the Fathers, page 6
part #9 of Inspector Carlyle Series
NINE
Paul Fassbender sat in the darkness in his study, steadily sipping from a large measure of Lagavulin Distillers Edition, a copy of The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa lying unopened on his lap. In the distance, he could hear the wind whipping across Lake Garda and the Sirmio peninsula. Not yet 10 p.m. and Sirmione was closed for the night. Not for the first time, Fassbender asked himself why he had retired to Italy. It had been his wife’s idea – the folly of letting a woman tell you what to do. These days, she spent more time in Marbella with her sister than she did with him. All alone in Lombardy, he sometimes wondered if he was not dead already.
His morbid musings were interrupted by what he imagined was the sound of footsteps in the hallway. Getting old was a bastard; his hearing, like all of his senses, played tricks on him on a regular basis.
The footsteps came closer. Taking a large mouthful of whisky, Fassbender slowly turned his head towards the door just as it creaked open.
He squinted at the shadow in the doorway. ‘Who are you?’
The man stepped into the room. He didn’t look like much, but he had youth on his side.
Half-rising from his seat, Fassbender hurled his glass towards the intruder, covering himself in Lagavulin in the process.
The man easily ducked away from the missile. ‘You are the doctor?’ he reached forward and placed a firm hand on Fassbender’s shoulder, pushing him back down into his chair.
‘I was a doctor,’ Fassbender snapped, his English barely accented. ‘I have been retired for several years now.’ Nodding, the man took a step back, reaching into the breast pocket of his jacket as he did so.
‘What do you want?’ With his eyes accustomed to the darkness, Fassbender had no difficulty in making out the small syringe in the man’s hand. A sick grin crept across his face. ‘That stupid old fool,’ he hissed. ‘He sent you, didn’t he?’ Once again, he tried to force himself out of the chair, only for the younger man to hold him down with his free hand.
‘No more questions,’ he said calmly. ‘You need to relax.’
Fassbender hardly felt the needle as it sank into his thigh. Damn Italy, he thought bitterly, it really was like being dead already.
When the phone began ringing, Daniel Sands fumbled with the handset, almost dropping it. Recovering his composure, he was able to reply, ‘Yes?’
‘We have taken delivery of the package.’
Did he recognize the voice? He wasn’t sure.
‘Do you understand?’ the caller asked.
‘Yes, good. Thank you. This is quicker than I expected.’
‘You will receive another call in two days,’ came the terse instruction.
Daniel felt his hand shake violently. ‘I will be ready.’
Out on the street, the inspector made his way towards the Piazza, weaving through the thinning crowds in front of St Paul’s Church. Known as ‘the Actors’ Church’, it was currently flanked on one side by a sunglasses store, and on the other by a bank. Inigo Jones, the architect, would doubtless be proud, Carlyle thought, to see his celebrated creation now keeping such august company. God would probably be quite chuffed, too.
Cutting across the Covent Garden Piazza, he passed an imposing mansion standing in the north-west corner, at number 43 King Street. Back in the nineteenth century, it had been one of London’s first boxing venues. Then, as now, the fight game was so bent that many of the bouts descended into farce. One of the most famous King Street matches ended in chaos with both boxers taking a dive even before a single punch had been thrown. Not surprisingly, the disgruntled punters sought to take their frustrations out on the two pugilists, one of whom had the presence of mind to feign blindness in order to escape a beating from the mob. Legend had it that the ‘blind’ boxer was declared the winner and awarded the purse as well.
Carlyle spotted a poster of Iggy Pop advertising car insurance and tutted to himself. Whatever happened to live fast, die young? he wondered to himself as he thrust his hands in his pockets and upped his pace.
It took him less than five minutes to make the journey from police station to home, a two-bedroom apartment on the thirteenth floor of Winter Garden House, near Holborn tube station, at the north end of Drury Lane. Pulling the key from the lock, he stepped into the hallway, quietly closing the door behind him. From the far end of the hall, behind Alice’s bedroom door, he could make out the strains of the Clash’s version of ‘Police on My Back’. A couple of years ago, Alice had borrowed all of his old Clash CDs. Now she knew their back catalogue far better than he did. Carlyle wondered what her friends at school made of it. Smiling proudly, he slipped off his shoes.
‘Where the hell have you been?’
Carlyle smiled wanly at his wife who had appeared in the living-room doorway. Arms folded, she had a face like thunder.
‘Tough day,’ he told her.
Helen couldn’t have looked any less sympathetic as she ground out, ‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you for hours.’
For God’s sake, he thought, give me a break. Gritting his teeth, he said, ‘I know, sorry. But I—’
Not interested in his explanation, she turned and stalked off.
Down the hall, Joe Strummer had moved on to ‘Midnight Log’.
Rubbing his eyes, Carlyle counted to ten and followed his wife into the living room.
‘John.’ Alexander Carlyle placed his half-empty bottle of Peroni beer on the coffee table.
‘Dad.’ Carlyle looked his old man up and down. Short and wiry, he was clean-shaven, with his white hair longer than Carlyle remembered it. Wearing jeans and a grey Fred Perry polo shirt that Helen had bought for his last birthday, he looked considerably younger than his seventy-odd years. The inspector thought back to the last time he had seen him – not since a Fulham game at Craven Cottage before Christmas. A listless Fulham had been thumped by another bunch of no-hopers. His dad had insisted on leaving twenty minutes before the end. They had gone for a drink in the Lemon Tree on the New King’s Road but the conversation had been sparse and they had spent most of their time watching the football reports on the pub’s TV. There had been a mass brawl in the Man United–Arsenal game and the referee had sent off three players.
It’s funny what sticks in your memory.
Had he spoken to the old fella since then? Once, twice tops. Not about anything of note.
‘John,’ Alexander repeated, struggling out of the sofa.
‘What brings you here?’ It had to be more than a year since his father’s last visit to Covent Garden, despite the fact that he lived only twenty-five minutes away, in West London.
The old man stepped forward and placed a hand on his son’s shoulder. ‘It’s about your mother.’
Carlyle glanced at Helen, who was still scowling in the corner. She was his usual source of information about Lorna Gordon, his mother. As far as he was aware, his parents, who had divorced a few years earlier, hadn’t even spoken to each other for more than six months.
Alexander cleared his throat. ‘She’s dead, son.’
Carlyle looked at him blankly. There had been nothing wrong with his mother. She kept herself in reasonable shape and she had the best part of a decade to go, statistically speaking, before her time was supposed to be up.
‘What happened?’
Biting down on her annoyance, Helen came over and gave him a hug. ‘She had a heart attack.’
His father hovered close by. ‘She didn’t suffer.’
Feeling incredibly self-conscious, Carlyle stared at the floor. What was he supposed to do? Burst into tears? He just couldn’t play that game.
Alexander picked up his bottle and drained the last of the beer. ‘I’m about to get all the arrangements in hand.’
Stepping free from his wife, Carlyle smiled at his father. ‘Of course.’ In that moment, he felt a huge affection for the old man; the practical Scotsman getting on and dealing with the situation. He took the empty bottle from his father. ‘I think I’ll have a beer myself. Want another one?’
Alexander thought about it for a moment. ‘Just the one more,’ he said finally. ‘Thank you.’
Helen followed Carlyle into the kitchen. ‘Are you okay, John?’ she asked, watching him pull a couple of beers from the fridge.
‘Yes.’ Carlyle found a bottle-opener in the cutlery drawer and prised open the two bottles. ‘I’m sorry it took me so long to get back.’
She reached over and kissed him on the cheek, all anger now gone. ‘I understand.’
‘And I’m sorry to leave you stuck with all of this.’
‘It’s fine. Your father has been great.’
Leaning against the fridge, Carlyle sucked down a mouthful of beer. ‘So what happened?’
‘I got a call at about five o’clock this afternoon.’ Helen lowered her voice, ‘From Ken Walton.’
Carlyle was surprised. ‘Ken Walton?’ The latter had been his mother’s – well, boyfriend, when she had split from his father. As he recalled, Walton had ditched her after about six months. ‘I didn’t know that they were still seeing each other.’
‘I think they met up now and again,’ Helen said evasively.
Carlyle grunted. Under the circumstances, it didn’t really matter.
‘Ken called your dad.’
Maybe it did matter. ‘Christ.’
‘He’s okay about it.’
Carlyle took another swig from his beer bottle. ‘I bet.’
Helen patted him on the arm. ‘Anyway, we need to get on.’
‘Yes.’ Carlyle gazed out of the kitchen window, across the Thames, towards the lights of the South Bank. He had a sudden, overwhelming urge to step out into the night, get pissed and explore the city’s bounty. Waiting for it to pass, he turned back to his wife. ‘How is Alice taking it?’
‘She was a bit upset, but she’ll be fine. She’ll miss her grandma, of course, but they didn’t see each other that much any more. I think she found Lorna too overbearing as she got older.’
I know the feeling. Carlyle just managed to avoid turning the thoughts into words. ‘I’ll go and have a chat with her.’
‘Leave her.’ Helen pointed to the clock on the wall by the door. ‘It’s a school night. Let her get to sleep. You should speak to your dad.’
Carlyle made a face.
‘I thought he could stay here tonight,’ Helen continued.
‘Good idea.’
‘I’ll make a bed up for him on the sofa.’
‘Okay.’ Carlyle finished his beer and grabbed another from the fridge. Then, with a fresh bottle in each hand, he went off to talk to his dad.
TEN
‘Come on, man, this has gone beyond a joke.’ Calvin Jacobs hawked up a large gob of phlegm and spat it out onto the concrete floor. He had been kneeling on that floor for more than an hour now and his knees ached terribly. But the pain in his legs wasn’t what was causing Calvin such immediate concern.
Nor was it the fact that his hands had been tied behind his back with plastic cuffs so tightly that he could no longer feel his fingers.
What was really stressing Calvin out was the blade hovering in front of his face, so close that he could clearly make out the logo: Fiskars Splitting Axe X25. Looking up at the hulking figure in front of him, Calvin tried not to burst into tears again. ‘It wasn’t me, man. I wasn’t even there.’
The blade appeared three inches in front of his nose. It didn’t appear very sharp. The man smiled maliciously, as if he was reading Calvin’s mind. ‘Don’t worry,’ he whispered. ‘Fiskars have been making tools like these since 1649; it will get the job done.’
‘I wasn’t there,’ Calvin wailed.
The man took a half-step forward, wiggling the axe handle as if he was lining up a particularly tricky golf shot. ‘Don’t lie to me, Calvin. You lie to me, I get mad. I get mad, I lose my concentration.’
Calvin felt the tears come again, hot and sticky, running down his cheeks and dripping off his chin. ‘Please.’
The man stuck his tongue between his teeth, his eyes nothing more than two dark holes that had receded into the back of his skull. ‘I get this right, your head comes all the way off, first time. Minimizes any pain. You probably won’t even know what happened.’ The tongue disappeared back inside his mouth. ‘But if I don’t get a clean shot, need to hack at it a few times – well, I’m afraid that all bets are off.’
Calvin tried to scream but all that came out was a shrivelled groan. Anyway, he knew it was pointless. He’d spent the last hour shouting his head off and no one had paid any notice. That was the thing about this damn city, someone could be committing a murder twenty feet away and everyone ignores it; nobody cares. Bastards.
‘Okay. Let’s see how this goes.’
The blade disappeared from his line of vision. Closing his eyes as tightly as he could, Calvin Jacobs cried for his mother.
Careful not to steal the whole duvet, Carlyle rolled over and squinted at the clock on the table by his side of the bed.
2.12 a.m.
He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt this wide awake. The adrenaline was coursing round his body and he knew that sleep would not come before dawn. Beside him, Helen started softly snoring. He gave her a gentle dig in the ribs and the snoring stopped.
2.13.
In a situation like this, he would normally slip into the living room and watch Sky Sports News for a while until he felt his eyelids begin to droop. Tonight, however, with his father on the sofa, that was not an option. Scratching his head, he stared at the ceiling.
2.14.
He thought he could make out a scuffling noise. It sounded like the mice were back. A ubiquitous problem for Londoners, rodents were something that Carlyle had always happily ignored until one evening a fearless little creature had darted up onto the sofa to enjoy an episode of The Killing. Carlyle had jumped a foot into the air and immediately got on the phone to the council. A few days later a man came round with some traps and some poison and there had been no more sightings for a while. But, deep down, Carlyle knew that where there was one, there would always be more. And they would never be gone for good.
2.15.
Ignoring the scuffling, he tried to focus on the hum of traffic outside. If you concentrated, you could just about make out the steady stream of traffic that headed up and down Kingsway, despite the late hour. Should he get up? Or should he just lie here, still, hoping that sleep might eventually come?
A memory of his mother drifted into his mind. He must have been fifteen or sixteen; they were standing in the kitchen of the family’s council flat in Fulham. Carlyle was wondering how he was going to scrape together the cash for a cassette of the new Clash album before it went off special offer at the Our Price record store on the Fulham Road. His mother, meanwhile, was wondering why he couldn’t grow up.
Arms folded, scowling, Lorna Gordon adopted a familiar pose. She was wearing a truly horrible blue and white knitted sweater that his father had bought as a Christmas present. She hated the sweater but wore it anyway. Looking her son up and down, the annoyance on her face was obvious. ‘You’ll be leaving school before you know it.’ The last vestiges of the Glasgow accent mixed with the anger in her voice.
Carlyle gripped a rolled-up copy of the New Musical Express tightly in his left hand, the ink seeping into his fingers. He had bought the NME earlier in the day. It looked good – Paul Weller, Richard Hell, Iggy Pop and Bruce Springsteen – and he wanted to head off to his bedroom to read it in peace. ‘I know.’ He knew that his parents wanted him to settle on a career as early as possible, but life wasn’t like that any more. There were no more jobs for life, wasn’t that what everyone was saying? Joe Strummer screaming ‘Career Opportunities’ blasted into his head and he laughed.
Lorna looked at him in horror. ‘What’s so funny, boy?’
Boy.
Jesus.
The truth was, Carlyle had been thinking about what he might do when he left school. He was spending time in the Careers Office there – something not totally unconnected to the fact that it was run by the sultry Mrs Jennings – and he even had a list of possible vocations. He’d ruled out university on the grounds that even if his grades were good enough, his motivation to spend another three years in a classroom was lacking. He’d had an uncle in the Army but that seemed either too boring (like school, but with guns) or too dangerous. He wasn’t going to let himself get blown up by some crazy Irish terrorist complaining about what happened to his ancestors three hundred years ago.
Joe Strummer sang on, listing all the other things he didn’t want to do.
One thing young John was thinking about was the police force. Thinking about it seriously, too. But he didn’t want to get into that with his mother right now.
Lorna leaned against the sink and lifted her mug of Tetley’s tea to her lips. ‘It’s always going to be a struggle for you, son, isn’t it?’ She blew on the tea and took a sip.
Staring at the floor, Carlyle banged his copy of the NME against his leg.
‘You have to get on, life won’t wait for you.’
‘No, Ma. I know it won’t.’
‘You’re living in a dream world.’
2.18.
More scuttling noises came from the darkness. Realizing that he had been holding his breath, Carlyle exhaled deeply. Even after all this time, he still felt embarrassed by the conversation with his mother. Somehow, he felt ashamed.
With a small cry of complaint, Helen turned back towards him and stuck a warm arm across his bare chest. ‘Upset about your mum?’ she asked, her voice thick with sleep.
‘Nah.’ He kissed her. ‘Just restless. Go back to sleep.’
She nuzzled closer, her hand slipping between his legs as she made a half-hearted attempt to take his mind off things, not protesting when he moved it away. ‘I’m sorry, sweetheart.’
Carlyle kissed her again. ‘I’m fine. Go back to sleep.’ Not needing a second invitation, Helen grunted as she pulled the duvet over her head. Soon the gentle snoring resumed.
