‘The skeleton . . .’
‘Huh?’
‘The skeleton that was dug up in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.’
‘Oh, yes, yes . . .’
‘We’re still waiting for the forensic but, based on the criteria that we already set . . .’
‘Yes?’ Carlyle tried to remember what those criteria were, but his mind came up with a complete blank.
‘. . . I have come up with records for twenty-two men aged eighteen to thirty who were reported missing in that area during the Blitz i.e. September 1940 to May 1941 and never accounted for.’
‘Er . . . good.’ Carlyle pulled the door open. ‘Talk to Phillips about it. See if you can narrow it down a bit further, and then we can review where we are.’ Without waiting for a reply, he slipped out into the corridor and away.
It wasn’t the Ritz, but at least he didn’t have to worry about an Israeli hit squad bursting through the door before his mother could finish her first scone. Working himself up to restart their earlier conversation, Carlyle watched a bored-looking yummy mummy pushing a pram down the Fulham Road. The look on the woman’s face suggested that she harboured more than a few regrets at having washed up on the dreary shores of SW6.
In the nondescript café, they had the place to themselves, apart from a pale kid in the back tapping away on his laptop. ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ was playing at a low volume through a couple of tinny speakers above the counter, to the irritation of Carlyle, who felt offended on Van Morrison’s behalf. The great man’s songs deserved a better environment than this. He took another sip of his coffee and grimaced. It was too weak and too cold. ‘Almost three quid and it is utter crap,’ he grumbled to himself. He thought about taking it back to the girl behind the counter and asking for a fresh cup, but somehow lacked the energy.
Lorna Gordon ignored her son’s incoherent mumbling. After carefully cutting the scone in half, she buttered each section and applied a modest amount of raspberry jam. Lifting the first piece to her mouth, she took a dainty nibble and began chewing it slowly.
Carlyle waited for her to swallow. ‘So,’ he said, conscious of the nervousness in his voice. ‘You were talking about Dad.’
Lorna gave him a careful look. ‘The divorce, you mean?’
Carlyle glanced back towards the street, but the yummy mummy was gone. ‘Well, yes,’ he stammered.
‘You are not going to change my mind, John,’ she said firmly, wiping an imaginary crumb from one side of her mouth before picking up another piece of scone.
‘No, no.’ He held up his hands in mock surrender. ‘I’m not trying to do that. I just want to understand the reason.’
Lorna next took a sip of her tea. Placing the cup back on the saucer, she gazed directly at her son. ‘Your father,’ she said quietly, ‘has had an affair.’
‘Ah.’ Carlyle lifted his cup to his lips but didn’t drink. His mother had given him more than enough information already, and his only concern now was to end this conversation as quickly as possible.
Looking embarrassed but determined, his mother gazed at a spot somewhere above his head. ‘I was visiting your gran when she was ill.’
‘Gran’s ill?’ Carlyle frowned. He hadn’t seen his grandmother – now well into her nineties and living in sheltered accommodation in the Partick district of Glasgow – for almost a year, and he wasn’t even aware that she had been unwell.
‘This was a while ago,’ his mother explained.
Carlyle suddenly felt a strong urge for a glass of Jameson Irish whiskey. A double; served straight, with no ice and no water. He looked longingly over at the Three Monkeys pub on the other side of the road.
‘You had only just qualified as a policeman at that time.’
‘But,’ Carlyle did the maths, ‘that’s almost thirty years ago!’
‘As far as I’m concerned,’ Lorna Gordon said tartly, ‘there is no statute of limitations on infidelity.’
Scratching his neck, Carlyle shifted uneasily in his seat.
‘Do you remember a woman called Maureen Sullivan?’
Carlyle thought about it for a few moments and was relieved to come up blank. ‘No,’ he said. ‘The name’s not ringing any bells.’
‘Well,’ his mother mused, ‘maybe she only arrived on the scene after you had left home. She was a downstairs neighbour for a while. Anyway, I was up in Scotland, looking after Gran when she broke her arm . . .’
‘I remember that,’ Carlyle chipped in, happy that not every detail of their family life at the time had passed him by.
‘I ended up staying in Scotland for a month. Your father huffed and puffed, claimed he wasn’t at all happy about it but that it was the right thing for me to do.’
‘Why has this become an issue now?’ Carlyle asked, keen to skip over further historical detail.
His mother sighed and took another sip of tea. ‘We had a big argument a fortnight ago. About nothing particularly important, but things got heated and he dropped that bombshell on me. I’ve thought about it a lot since, and I can only assume that he
wanted
to tell me. He was always rather boastful, and this was his way of putting me in my place.’
Looking Lorna Gordon up and down, Carlyle resisted the urge to smile. His mother would never let anyone put her down. She was the first in a long line of strong women who had kept him in his place all his life, and he realized that it had been the same for his father too. He knew that he had to talk to his dad – there always being two sides to every story – but he didn’t think it would have any impact on the outcome. ‘So what happens now?’ he asked.
‘I’ve spoken to a lawyer. As long as your father doesn’t contest it, the divorce should be sorted out fairly quickly.’
‘And will he?’
‘Will he what?’
‘Contest it.’
She gave him a look that reminded Carlyle of his days as a naughty eight year old, caught stealing wine gums from the corner shop. ‘I would have thought that would be very difficult, given that he has already confessed to being an adulterer.’
Staring out of the window, Carlyle tried to make some sense of this mess. It was typical of his parents that, with divorce rates at a thirty-year low, they had nevertheless found a way to tear their marriage apart over some long-past misdemeanour. Ever the pragmatist, he knew that he should really try to help them patch things up. However many years of active retirement each of them had left, divorce would not make things any happier or more comfortable. Ever the pragmatist, however, he also knew that this was ultimately not his fight. ‘Okay,’ he said finally, ‘what do you want me to do?’
‘Do? I don’t want you to
do
anything, John. I just wanted to make sure that you understood what was going on between your father and me.’
‘Helen is really quite worried about you,’ he said.
I
,
on the other hand
, he thought,
am just totally bemused by the whole business
.
‘Well, tell her that there’s absolutely nothing to worry about,’ his mother said sharply. ‘I’m fine.’
‘And what about Dad?’
‘He can speak for himself,’ she harrumphed.
‘What will happen if – once the divorce goes through?’
‘He’ll have to find somewhere else to live,’ she said. ‘At the moment, he’s sleeping in your old room, but that is only temporary.’
‘Where? How will he be able to afford somewhere else in London?’
‘That’s his problem,’ she said calmly, turning her attention back to the remains of her scone.
The clock on the dashboard said 2.37 a.m. Adam Hall yawned and squirmed uncomfortably in his seat, wondering when he was going to get the chance to relieve himself. His bladder had been uncomfortably full for over an hour, and he cursed himself for not nipping round the corner earlier. There was absolutely no way he was going to try and piss into his empty Starbucks cup, not with his boss, Gillian Strauss, sitting in the passenger seat next to him.
Gritting his teeth, Adam tried to grin and bear it. He knew that sod’s law meant that, the moment he went off for a piss, the subject would walk out of the door of number 17 Peel Street, twenty yards up on the other side of the road from where they were sitting. It stood in the middle of a row of expensive houses just south of Notting Hill Gate, a few blocks to the west of Hyde Park and Kensington Palace.
He glanced over at Strauss and felt the discomfort in his crotch increase further. With her head in the confidential reports on Al-Amour that he had lovingly collated for her, Strauss studiously ignored him, so Adam allowed his gaze to linger on her. Mid-thirties, short blonde hair, ultra-fit, she was a Home Counties beauty who, even in jeans and a fleece, was more glamorous than anyone else in MI6 by a factor of at least 100. The monster rock on her wedding finger, courtesy of the stereotypically wretched merchant banker husband, did not make her any less of a young spook’s wet dream. Hall had been assigned to work with her in his first week on the job and he now lived in mortal terror of being moved on to another boss. When he realized that they would be spending the night together, even if it was only in the confines of a grubby Ford Focus, Adam had initially found some difficulty in breathing.
Underneath the fleece, Strauss was wearing a white blouse with the top two buttons undone. As she shifted in her seat, Adam caught the merest glimpse of décolletage, and had to stifle a low groan in his throat.
Strauss gave him a quizzical look over the top of her papers. ‘Are you okay?’
Adam pushed open the door. ‘Sorry,’ he said, swinging his feet onto the tarmac, ‘I need a comfort break. Won’t be a sec.’
Without waiting for a response, he stepped out of the car, closed the door, without letting it click shut, and began jogging down the street.
Halfway down the road he found an alley. It was a ten-foot-wide gap between two houses, and ran into Campden Street to the south. The place was well-lit but there was no sign of any CCTV and anyway Adam was by now in a major hurry. Stepping into the alley, he unzipped his trousers just at the moment where his bladder was about to give out. Picking his spot on the wall in front of him, he let fly.
‘Aaahhh!!’
A sense of immense satisfaction and well-being pervaded his whole body, followed by the thought that his bladder capacity must be greater than he had previously thought. The flow was just starting to weaken when Adam became conscious of movement at the far end of the alley. He looked up to see that a man had entered from Campden Street, and was walking towards him with a big smile on his face.
Pushing hard, Adam tried to hurry things up, but his bladder decidedly wasn’t finished yet.
‘I bet that feels good!’ the man laughed. His English was good, but he clearly wasn’t a native. Adam couldn’t identify the accent.
The young spook grunted in acknowledgement as the stream of piss finally subsided to a dribble and died. With a sigh of relief, Adam gave himself a final shake.
* * *
Ryan Goya waited for the young guy to put his pathetic-looking tool back in his trousers before he pulled the Barak from the back of his jeans. He watched him fiddle with his zip, head lowered.
‘Hey!’
Adam Hall looked up, and barely had time to register the gun before the first .40 S&W round shattered his breastbone and sent him sprawling back on the pavement. He was dead by the time Goya stepped across and put a second cartridge between his eyes – just to be sure – before heading out of the alley to deal with the boy’s good looking colleague.
The MI6 woman didn’t even realize that Goya was standing there next to the car, before he sent a bullet into the side of her skull. Sticking the Barak through the shattered window, he fired a second one into her head as a matter of routine, although it was clear that she was already dead. Looking swiftly up and down the street, he confirmed that no one was watching, then jogged quickly across the road, heading for the house where the man travelling under the name of Lefter Sporel would be waiting.
Using a key that had been stolen from the cleaning firm which looked after the house for its peripatetic owner, he opened the door and slipped inside. Keeping the semi-automatic out of sight behind him, he walked carefully down the hallway towards the kitchen, the only light source in the house.
Seated at the kitchen table, Sporel looked up as Goya appeared in the doorway. He smiled nervously. ‘Are you with Sol?’ he asked, in heavily accented English.
‘Yes,’ Goya nodded.
‘Where is he?’
‘He will be here very soon,’ Goya replied, glancing back down the hall. ‘Where are the others?’
‘It is just me,’ the man shrugged, ‘but I can still do the necessary business with Sol.’
‘What happened?’
‘We have had some problems . . . with the Israelis.’
‘Tsk,’ Goya hissed, ‘those bastards never let go.’ Lifting the Barak to chest level, he gave Sporel a moment to understand what was going on before he jerked the trigger, sending him on the way to his heaven . . . or his hell.
Conscious that time was not on his side, Goya scurried round the house, looking for cash, documents or anything else that might be of use. Finding nothing, he was just about to leave when he heard a key in the lock. Not waiting to see who was coming through, he squeezed off a couple of rounds into the front door.
There was a pause. Then the door swung slowly open, and the wall above Goya’s head exploded as someone returned fire. ‘Damn!’ he grunted, quickly dropping into a crouch and then backtracking down the hallway. In the kitchen, he skipped over the pool of congealing blood on the floor, wrenched open the back door and rushed outside.
The garden looked about thirty feet long. At the bottom was a stone wall, maybe eight feet tall. Next to the wall was a small white plastic stool. Slipping the Barak into the back of his jeans, Goya jumped onto the stool and began hauling himself up. He was just about to swing a leg over the top of the wall when he felt a hand seize him by the collar and pull him backwards. Goya tried to grab for his gun but it was gone. Once, twice, his face was unceremoniously slammed into the brickwork. Dazed, with blood filling his mouth, he offered little resistance as he was flipped round and a massive fist smashed into his stomach. Collapsing, he tried to cover his head as a succession of well-controlled blows rained down on his body.