Authors: James Craig
‘Can I help you?’ she asked.
Unconsciously, Joe pulled in his gut and pushed back his shoulders. He gestured at the front page displayed in the window.
‘I was hoping to speak to someone at the magazine about back issues.’
‘You can find those online,’ the girl replied.
‘I need to go back a long way, maybe twenty-five or thirty years.’
A look of understanding breezed across the girl’s face. ‘Ah, yes, back when you were a student?’
‘Jesus,’ said Joe, ‘do I really look that old?’
‘Sorry,’ said the girl. ‘We get a lot of people wandering through here trying to dig up old stories to prove that the good old days actually happened.’
‘I didn’t go to university,’ said Joe, a tad defensively.
‘OK.’
‘But, if I had, it wouldn’t have been much more than a decade ago.’
‘Sure,’ the girl said doubtfully.
‘Anyway …’ Joe then belatedly managed to explain who he was and, in broad terms, what he needed.
‘Well, you’re in luck,’ said the girl, after she’d taken a careful look at his warrant card. ‘I was just popping into the office now. This is probably the only time for the next two months that you’ll be able to get in.’
After unlocking the door and inviting him inside, she turned and said: ‘I’m Sally McGurk, by the way. I’m a research student in Accounting and Finance, and also the deputy editor of
Grantebrycge
.’
‘An accountant
and
a journalist.’ Joe grinned. ‘How schizophrenic.’
‘No prizes for guessing which career path my parents are keener on me pursuing,’ Sally laughed.
‘No,’ Joe smiled. ‘I’d be delighted if my two kids became bean counters.’
‘And if they turn out to be journalists, instead?’
‘I might have to drown them in the Thames.’
She pulled a memory stick out of her pocket and waved it at him. ‘Right now, I’m two weeks late with my MPhil dissertation.’
‘Is that a big deal?’
‘It sure is,’ she grimaced. ‘It’s thirty thousand words and it represents a third of my final mark. I need to get three copies on my professor’s desk by ten o’clock tomorrow morning, before he heads off to Umbria for the summer, or else I fail.’
‘Bummer.’
‘It’s no biggie. I need an hour or two on the computer here, and then I’ll be able to print them out in about ten minutes flat.’
‘Why not just go to the library?’
‘Too many distractions. Always someone wanting you to go for a coffee with them or chat about what a shit their latest boyfriend is.’
‘Ah.’ Joe tried his best to look knowing.
‘Here I get guaranteed peace and quiet.’ She tossed him another dazzling smile. ‘At least I did until you came along.’
‘Sorry,’ said Joe.
‘Don’t worry about it.’ She pointed towards a computer at the back of the room. ‘Park yourself over there and get it switched on. Then I’ll come and see if I can help you in the right direction. What years are you looking for?’
‘1981 to 1985,’ Joe replied. The Carlton brothers had been at Cambridge until 1984, but he thought he should allow himself a little extra room at the back end, in case they’d hung around after graduating.
By now, Sally was already bashing away at the keyboard of another machine by the door. She paused to explain, ‘I don’t know if we’ve got that stuff on the system yet. Last I’d heard, they’d got as far back as 1988, but that was a few months ago, so you never know.’
After a bit of random groping around, Joe located the on-switch for his machine. ‘I could always look at the hard copies, I suppose?’
‘You could,’ she called over, while scanning the words on her own screen, ‘but they’re not kept here. Some are in the library, but most are stored in a warehouse out of town somewhere. That could take a while.’
In the end, accessing old copies of the newspaper proved much easier than he could have hoped. Not only had all the editions of
Grantebrycge
back to 1977 been put online, but an excellent search facility allowed him to compile lists of stories referencing both the Carltons and the Merrion Club. However, after more than an hour of scanning articles about binge drinking, trashing of restaurants, urinating in the street and other by now familiar types of student naughtiness, Joe was feeling quite fatigued, and fearful that he wasn’t really any further forward.
‘How’s it going?’ Sally asked. ‘I’m almost finished here.’
‘OK,’ said Joe, rubbing his eyes as he scanned a story from April 1985 headlined ‘Merrion legends a tough act to follow.’ He noted down the names of Edgar and Xavier’s successors without any great enthusiasm.
‘Got something?’
‘Not really. Joe pushed back his chair, rolled his shoulders and stretched. ‘I think I’m just about ready to wrap it up.’ He was hungry. Maybe he should offer Sally a bite to eat. ‘Fancy a drink?’
Switching off her computer, Sally eyed him carefully. ‘Maybe a coffee.’
‘Great.’ Pulling his chair back towards the desk, he reached for the mouse and moved to hit the close button. Then he noticed the story next to the one that he had been reading.
‘Ready?’
‘One minute.’
He rubbed his jaw and stared at the photograph appearing at the top of the piece. Then he scratched his head and stared at it some more. ‘Well, fuck me.’
‘What?’ said Sally McGurk, startled.
TWENTY-SEVEN
The general buzz of activity was punctuated by the regular clink of metal on metal and the occasional grunt of effort throughout the gym in Jubilee Hall, an old warehouse on the south side of Covent Garden’s piazza. The atmosphere was thick, steadily heading towards fetid. Though all the windows were open, the heat of the day was slow to dissipate, and it was still easily above eighty degrees inside. The heat, however, was not going to put Carlyle off. The double espresso he’d downed ten minutes earlier was kicking in, as planned, and he was good to go. His T-shirt stuck to his chest and he felt a bead of sweat descend the length of his spine. He mounted a Life Fitness cross trainer standing in the middle of a row of eight identical machines, and fiddled around with his iPod shuffle. A Christmas present from his wife, it made his exercising easier and had belatedly dragged him into the world of digital music, allowing him to return to some of the music of his youth as well as try out the odd new tune. It didn’t really matter what the music was, as long as it got him going. He skipped through six or seven tracks until he found something from Stiff Little Fingers that was guaranteed to get his blood pumping and his legs moving. He turned the volume up close to maximum, cutting out as much of the background noise as possible. ‘Nobody’s Hero’ began blasting into his brain. Gritting his teeth, he stomped down on the machine and sought out a rhythm. It was time to leave all the stresses of the Blake case behind, if only for a short while. With as much violence as he could muster, he chased that endorphin rush that would surely clear his head and reinvigorate his mind.
Being given the brush-off by Edgar Carlton irritated him hugely. Worse, Carlton’s special adviser, William Murray, had still not come back to him with a time for their promised meeting. As Carlyle saw it, they were clearly playing for time. After the election was over, and they had their hands on all the levers of power, they could easily have the whole case buried.
‘Bastards!’ Carlyle grunted as he upped the pace on the cross trainer. ‘Fucking bastards!’ He hated being messed about by people who thought that they were somehow above the law. And, even more, he hated not being able to do anything about it.
Showered and relaxed, Carlyle strolled out of the changing rooms, to find Joe Szyszkowski nursing a coffee in the gym’s café.
‘Helen told me you were here,’ explained Joe, by way of introduction. ‘I tried to ring your mobile earlier, but it went straight to voicemail.’
‘Do you want another drink?’ Carlyle asked, dropping his Adidas holdall on the floor next to a display for sports nutrition supplements with names such as Hurricane and Scorpion Extreme.
‘No, I’m good, thanks.’
Pulling out a chair, Carlyle glanced up at a list of the day’s ‘specials’ chalked on a blackboard above the counter. He didn’t really need to look: they may still have been ‘special’ but he couldn’t remember the last time they had varied. Ordering an orange juice and a hummus wrap, he sat down at Joe’s table. The post-work rush hour was over by now, and the place was emptying quite quickly. Looking across the gym, Carlyle clocked a well-known actor hanging out by the free weights. He had appeared in a movie that Helen had brought home a few weeks ago, the details of which Carlyle had already forgotten before the final credits had finished running. The man was wearing a hooded top, baseball cap and sunglasses, which Carlyle thought was a bit over the top. Though he was not actually doing any lifting, he was making very sure that everyone noticed he was there.
‘Good session?’ Joe asked.
‘Not bad,’ Carlyle mumbled, in a way that he hoped said
‘Food first, talk later’.
Plastered on the wall beside them were flyers announcing all different kinds of classes, from Kendo to Russian Military Fitness (
Train the Red Army way, with genuine Spetsnaz instructors!
) to Hot Bikram Yoga. There were also adverts for a number of one-on-one personal training services. One ad fascinated and appalled him in equal measure. ‘You’re never too old for a six-pack’, it proclaimed, over a stunning black-and-white picture of a smiling guy in his sixties with a set of abs of such perfect definition that they defied belief. Not for the first time, he felt awestruck and oppressed at the same time.
Tired, wired and not particularly impressed with his boss’s apparent lack of interest in communicating, Joe tried to rouse Carlyle from his thoughts. ‘Did you get to speak to Carlton?’
‘Yeah,’ said Carlyle, feeling the post-exercise hunger kick in now, and hoping that his food would hurry up. ‘For about ten seconds. The Rt Hon Edgar Carlton MP, Leader of the Opposition, told me he would deign to see me later.’
‘When?’ Joe asked.
Carlyle adopted what he hoped was his most philosophical demeanour. ‘I have absolutely no idea.’
Joe frowned. ‘Does he actually realise just how serious this is?’
‘Does he care, more to the point?’ Carlyle asked. ‘These people all see this as our problem, not theirs. They have other priorities, and they’re certainly not working to our timetable.’
Joe lowered his voice slightly. ‘But we are talking about multiple murders here.’
Carlyle glanced around. The actor was still gossiping away with one of the weightlifters. ‘I don’t notice that the world has stopped turning.’
‘Have you spoken to Simpson about it?’
‘I’ve left her a message, but what’s she going to do?’ Carlyle shrugged. ‘Probably, the way she sees it is that she works for them, we work for her. Who’s the dog here and who’s the tail? This is one of those situations where we’re just supposed to sit tight and do what we’re bloody told.’ The endorphins were fast wearing off and he felt a whole new type of fatigue. A good
I’ve-got-off-my-arse-and-done-something
type of fatigue, but a fatigue nevertheless. ‘Anyway, how was Cambridge?’
Finally receiving his cue, Joe took up two pieces of paper that had been resting on his lap and handed them over. One of them was a copy of the photo they had seen so early in the morning at Horseferry Road car park. Carlyle, in fact, had another copy of the same picture in his pocket, which had been emailed over by Matt Parkin, the sergeant handling the Nicholas Hogarth crime scene, just before Carlyle had left the station. The other item was a short newspaper article, consisting of a single column underneath a photograph. It was no more than maybe a hundred and fifty or two hundred words. Carlyle scanned it, glanced at Joe, and perused it again, more slowly.
By the time Carlyle had finished reading it the second time, his order had arrived. Thanking the waitress, he drained half of the orange juice and took a bite from the hummus wrap.
‘It’s the same guy,’ said Joe.
Carlyle chewed carefully and swallowed. ‘Certainly looks like it.’
‘Could even be a cropped version of the same photo?’
Carlyle looked again. ‘Yes, it could,’ he agreed. The photo featured in the newspaper was a head-and-shoulders shot with a clear sky in the background. It wasn’t great quality, but it looked very much as if it had been copied from the same photo left behind the windscreen wiper of Nicholas Hogarth’s Range Rover.
‘The article comes from the Cambridge University newspaper,’ said Joe. ‘It was published in April 1985, almost a year after our friends sat their finals.’
In order to appear suitably impressed, Carlyle read the story a third time:
Student Suicide Tragedy
Family and friends of Robert Ashton are struggling to come to terms with the popular third-year Law student’s tragic death. Ashton, 21, jumped from the balcony of his room on the top floor of Darwin Hall on 3 March. According to media reports, a suicide note was subsequently found. The police have said that they are not looking for anyone else in connection with the incident.
University friends were shocked by the terrible news. Some have reportedly claimed that Ashton was behaving strangely in recent months, but he had a one hundred per cent class-attendance record and tutors described his work as ‘outstanding’. His parents have issued a short statement celebrating ‘a wonderful loving son with his whole life ahead of him’ and thanking people for their support at this difficult time.
There will be a memorial service for Robert Ashton at St Mungo’s Church on Boot Street on 2 May at 4.30 p.m. The family has asked for no flowers, and anyone wishing to make a charitable donation is requested to support the NSPCC.