Sins of the Fathers (5 page)

A couple of minutes later, he reached the ambulance parked outside the Sadler’s Wells theatre. Carlyle stepped off the pavement and looked up and down the avenue. The traffic had been stopped in both directions; the bleating of the horns dying away as drivers realized that no one was paying any attention to their predicament. A handful of passers-by stood behind the tape, chatting amongst themselves, watching what was going on as if they were a bunch of tourists watching one of the performance artists in the Piazza in Covent Garden. Feeling suitably disgusted, Carlyle pushed his way past and ducked under the tape.

In the middle of the road, a red Royal Mail van stood inside the cordon. In front of the van, two paramedics – a man and a woman – were working on a girl sprawled on the tarmac. As he approached, Carlyle could see that they were working slowly and methodically. There was no urgency in their actions and they were grimly silent. It was clear that they had not been able to save the child.

Carlyle took a deep breath. He felt a hand on his shoulder.

‘Inspector.’

Turning, he faced a short blonde woman. He was fairly sure that she was a sergeant at the Holborn station but her name escaped him.

She offered her hand. ‘Jill Hughes. I did a stint at Charing Cross last year. I work out of Tolpuddle Street.’ She pointed up the road in the general direction of Islington.

‘Of course.’ Shaking her hand, Carlyle realized that he must have been thinking of someone else.

The paramedics carefully lifted the girl onto a gurney, covered her with a blanket and wheeled her towards the ambulance. Hands on hips, Hughes said sadly, ‘Fifteen years old – bloody hell.’

Not my girl
, Carlyle thought.
Thank God. Way too old
. He took another swig from his water bottle in a futile attempt to keep his headache at bay. This was shaping up to be one of those days you spent chasing your tail across the city to no effect whatsoever.

‘The driver had just come out of Mount Pleasant,’ Hughes continued.

‘Yeah.’ Largely disinterested now, Carlyle could make out the sorting office at the top of the road. An identical red van came out of the front gate and edged into the traffic that was now backed up along Farringdon Road, heading for King’s Cross.

She gestured towards the ambulance. ‘He says the girl just walked straight out between a couple of parked cars.’

Carlyle caught sight of the driver, a young white guy, unshaven with straggly brown hair down to his shoulders; his sky-blue Royal Mail shirt was heavily creased and open at the neck. A packet of Drum rolling tobacco was sticking out of the breast pocket of the shirt. Leaning against the side of his van, the driver was playing a game on his mobile phone, oblivious to the body being loaded onto the ambulance a few yards away.

‘It’s always easy to blame the victim,’ the inspector mused, ‘especially when they’re dead.’

‘Excuse me, sir.’ A uniform ushered Carlyle out of the way as he moved the police tape to allow the ambulance to head off down the now-empty southbound lane.

‘Going to Barts?’ St Bartholomew’s Hospital was a five-minute drive away.

‘I expect so.’ The constable put the tape back in place, to the annoyance of the waiting drivers.

Carlyle finished the last of his Evian and crunched the plastic bottle in his fist. His head was pounding and he felt sick. It would take him about half an hour to walk back to the station at Charing Cross. Public transport would take twice as long. At least. All he wanted to do was take three Ibuprofen tablets and lie down in a dark room with an ice pack on his forehead. Crossing to the far side of the street in search of some shade, he walked wearily away.

The earlier rain had cleaned the streets, washing away the lingering odour of piss from the doorway of the boarded-up betting shop on Agar Street, at least for the time being. Hands thrust deep into his pockets, Carlyle waited for a taxi to barrel past, heading up the road at a ridiculous speed, before crossing the street.

His mind blank, he looked up at his place of work as if seeing it for the first time. Below a small and grubby royal crest, the sign said
CHARING CROSS POLICE STATION
. One of a hundred and forty Metropolitan Police stations located across London, the nick covered some of the most expensive real estate in the world, a block north of the eponymous train station. It was a squat, featureless building, rising six economical storeys high, bristling with CCTV cameras on every corner, peppered with windows too small for its bulk; windows for seeing out of rather than for looking in through. The half a dozen old-fashioned blue police lamps that appeared to have been placed in random locations around the building looked just as fake as they actually were. The same blue lamp used to be found outside all police stations, reminding the public that the police were always ready to serve. Now they were just design accessories.

The station building was painted in an off-white colour that always looked dingy. The finishing touch was a small portico, as if copied from the nearby church in the Piazza, framing the front entrance and making it look more like a provincial town hall than a major cop shop. This had been his home from home for the past fifteen or so years. Ignoring the phone vibrating in his pocket, he climbed the front steps, walked past the blue lamp stationed at the front entrance and entered the outer foyer of the building. This was where the public would wait on wooden benches, playing with their mobile phones, reading the Crimestoppers posters on the wall, feeling uncomfortable and wondering what everyone else was there for. Eventually, they would be buzzed through a set of glass doors which led further into the building and the main lobby.

Behind the glass doors stood the front desk, the desk sergeant and the beginning of what was usually either a short and unhappy or a long and very unhappy brush with the best of British officialdom. Someone once said that all police stations smell of shit and fear. In the case of Charing Cross, the normal combination was a mix of body odour and boredom. It was like a hospital without the nurses, or a school without the kids: soulless, bureaucratic and depressing.

At any given time, the benches were usually the domain of tourists who had been robbed, rickshaw drivers complaining about unpaid fares, run-over cyclists and other slow-motion road-rage cases. There was also a steady stream of assault cases, the unlucky victims of random, invariably drink-fuelled violence. All in all, the flotsam and jetsam from the shallow end of the gene pool, Carlyle reflected. These were the people he’d signed up to work for, thirty years ago. The inspector was long since resigned to the fact that nothing ever changed. As one wag once put it, the clowns may change but it’s still a bloody circus. What did that make him? A trapeze artist? A lion-tamer? Charing Cross Station was his Big Top. Even so, he liked to spend as little time inside the building as possible.

At least this evening the place was largely empty. One of their regulars, a dosser from the Parker Street halfway house on the other side of Covent Garden, was asleep in a corner; two benches along, a fat woman sat with her hand in a bag of peppermint creams. Next to her a young boy, maybe nine or ten, was engrossed in a game on his PSP. Both of them seemed perfectly content. A couple of yards away, a silver-haired Japanese guy in a suit and tie sat, elbows on knees, staring into space.
You’re a bit overdressed for here, sunshine
, Carlyle thought as he tapped on the glass and waited to be buzzed through. Presumably a businessman who’d had his wallet nicked.

It took him a few moments to get the attention of Angie Middleton, the desk sergeant, who was busy arguing with an animated bloke standing at the desk – another unhappy punter. Finally, he caught her eye. Middleton hit the release button and Carlyle pulled the door as it clicked open. As he did so, he caught sight of Umar heading towards him, on his way out. A look of frustration crossed the sergeant’s face as he saw his boss and realized that his departure was going to be delayed.

‘We need to have a catch-up,’ said Carlyle by way of greeting, pointing back into the bowels of the station.

‘I’ve left a note on your desk.’ Umar tapped his watch. ‘We’ve got an antenatal class tonight. Christina will kill me if I’m late again.’

Carlyle grimaced. The last thing he needed was Umar buggering off early. On the other hand, he knew from his own experience of family life that some things during pregnancy were fairly non-negotiable. Helen had insisted that they go to some National Childbirth Trust classes in Kentish Town before Alice was born. The whole thing had been horrendous, stuck in a room with a dozen or so middle-class couples who had their C-section in the diary and were already worrying about schools and music lessons. Worse, the teacher who was a cross between Andrea Dworkin and Enid Blyton. Carlyle had found the whole thing embarrassing and tedious in equal measure. But, rightly, it had been Helen’s call. It hadn’t killed him to go.

Even now, the memory of pelvic-floor exercises and pain relief (he wasn’t offered any) made him shudder. He took a deep breath and squeezed out a grin. ‘Is it all sitting on bean bags talking about the end of life as you know it?’

‘My God.’ Umar made a face. ‘It’s far worse than that.’

‘Been there, done that.’ Carlyle gave him a consoling pat on the back. ‘Sometimes you just have to take one for the team.’

‘Yeah. It’s all bollocks.’

‘Of course it is,’ Carlyle agreed, ‘but if it keeps Christina happy that’s what counts.’

‘Mm,’ Umar said dully.

‘My view,’ Carlyle was usually reluctant to go about dispensing advice but, for once, he easily slipped into the experienced older bloke role, ‘is that you just have to wait for it to come out and then get on with it. Nothing can prepare you for it; I wouldn’t bother with any books or any advice.’

Umar’s face broke into a grin. ‘Other than yours, of course.’

‘Of course,’ Carlyle smiled. ‘Trust me, for I am The Oracle.’

‘Ha ha.’

Carlyle spread his arms wide. ‘Take it to the bank, my friend. The only thing you have to do is keep the missus as happy as possible and roll your sleeves up on the big day.’

‘Okay.’

Feeling increasingly comfortable riding his high horse, Carlyle went on with his lecture. ‘Above all, as soon as the crap starts flying, literally in this case, you’ll have to get busy changing those nappies.’

‘Of course.’ Umar looked offended. ‘I’ll be doing my share.’

‘No, no, no, no, no.’ Carlyle glanced over at the desk. Middleton and her unhappy punter appeared to have reached a stalemate. ‘You have to do much more than that. I remember my dad watching me change one of Alice’s nappies. Standing back at a safe distance, the old bugger happily boasted how he’d never had to change a single nappy in his life. Those days are long gone.’

‘I know,’ Umar said, already bored by the inspector’s reminiscences.

‘Good. And I’ll speak to Helen about the wedding tonight.’

‘Thanks.’

‘No problem. Give me a call when you’ve finished comparing birthing pools and baby buggies and we can work out a plan of action.’

‘There is a hell of a lot to go through here, though.’ Hopelessly caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place, Umar nervously fingered his mobile phone. ‘Maybe I should give Christina a call and tell her I need to work late.’

‘Nah. It’s okay. You’d better get going.’

Umar looked nonplussed. ‘Er, thanks.’

The inspector gave him a sad smile. ‘Good luck.’ As he watched his sergeant head out of the station, it crossed Carlyle’s mind that twenty-six weeks of paternity leave added up to six months. How long did he have when Alice was born? A week? Certainly no more than that. The world was going mad. He’d need to find yet another bloody sergeant; Simpson could hardly blame him for Christina getting knocked up but she would still be pissed off. He was getting through sergeants at a ridiculous rate. At least he would know in advance to look for a new one. The trick was to find a suitable candidate before some no-hoper was foisted upon him.

Carlyle quickly flipped through a list of possible replacements in his head, but no one immediately came to mind. He realized that he would have to give the matter some very serious attention.

‘But this is simply not good enough.’ The man at the desk waved an exasperated arm in the direction of Angie Middleton. He was about the same height as Carlyle, with jet-black hair that ended neatly just above the collar of his shirt. The accent was the kind of mid-Atlantic nothingness of someone who had lived in the United States for an extended period of time.

Careful, mate
, Carlyle thought,
or you’ll get yourself nicked
.

‘Sir.’ A massive black woman, Middleton lurched back on her heels to avoid getting a smack in the mouth. It crossed the inspector’s mind that if she gave the guy a smack back he might not wake up for a week.

Another wave of the arm. ‘We have been waiting for almost two hours.’

Carlyle’s brain told him to keep walking but, hesitating, he made the fatal mistake of making eye-contact with Middleton. A relieved grin spread across her face as she gestured towards him.

‘The inspector here will be able to help you.’

The man turned, nodded at Carlyle and extended a hand. ‘Hiroshi Takahara.’

Reluctantly, Carlyle shook the man’s hand.

‘Mr Taka . . .’ Middleton looked down at a business card lying on the blotter on her desk, ‘Takahara here works at the Japanese Embassy.’ She pointed at the old guy who was still sitting on the bench, staring into space. ‘He’s here about Mr Nino . . . miya.’

Takahara nodded again, or maybe it was a small bow. ‘His daughter.’

Carlyle gave him a blank look.

‘Mr Ninomiya’s daughter appears to be missing,’ Middleton explained. She was busying herself in paperwork, not looking up in case Carlyle tried to return the hospital pass. ‘He would like to find out how the investigation into her disappearance is going.’

What investigation? A jolt of panic kicked the inspector’s brain into gear. The Japanese Embassy was in Piccadilly, close to Hyde Park Corner. ‘Isn’t this one for West End Central?’ he asked, more in hope than expectation. West End Central, on Jermyn Street, was a lot closer to the Embassy than Charing Cross.