The Hand of God (5 page)

‘I know, sweetie.’

Whenever she used the word ‘sweetie’, Carlyle translated it as ‘pillock’. He tried not to wince.

‘You always try your best.’ Helen smiled, looking less than convinced.

Annoyed, he shoved the last of the bread into his mouth in an attempt to stop it saying something stupid. Looking across the room, he caught the eye of the waitress almost by accident. How much longer would they have to wait for their pizzas? The girl gave him a hassled smile that could have indicated anything from one minute to two hours and disappeared into the kitchen.

‘Anyway,’ he observed, through a mouthful of dough, ‘it’s not like you don’t still live at home, is it?’ Helen lived barely five minutes’ walk away from where they were now sitting. Her father had bought a small ex-council flat on the other side of Covent Garden, near Holborn tube station, when the Government started selling them off. Around the same time, her mother had upped and left, moving to Brighton not long after Helen had finished school. Not surprisingly, domestic arrangements chez Kennedy were a touchy subject. Apart from anything else, an invite to visit the flat and break bread with Mr Kennedy had not been forthcoming; Carlyle didn’t expect to be receiving one any time soon.

‘That’s different,’ Helen replied, sitting back in her chair.

‘How?’

‘Well . . .’ By the time he caught the steely glare in Helen’s eye, it was too late. The girl arrived with the pizzas and placed them carefully on the table. Sensing the darkening mood, she gave Helen a smile of sisterly support, while blanking Carlyle, who tried and failed not to stare at her bum as she turned round and scuttled off.

The meal continued in near silence. As Carlyle shovelled the food into his face in an efficient, joyless manner, the couple at the nearby table got up and left. Out on the street, the man put an arm round his wife’s shoulders, planting a kiss on the top of her head as they headed towards Long Acre. Finishing his food, Carlyle somewhat reluctantly declined an ice cream, knocking back a single espresso as Helen paid the bill.

‘I’ll walk you home.’

‘It’s all right,’ she said flatly, dropping her purse into her bag and pushing back her chair.

‘No, seriously.’

‘It’s fine, John,’ she snapped. ‘I can make it through Covent Garden without any problem. I’ve been walking these streets on my own since I was eight, at least. I don’t need you to look after me.’

I know
, he thought glumly.

Getting to her feet, Helen reached across the table and gave him the briefest of kisses on the lips. ‘I need to get an early night anyway.’

‘Okay,’ he said wearily, knowing that this particular skirmish was over and he had to resign himself to being on the losing side.

‘I’ll give you a call. Next time you choose the movie.’

He nodded, relieved that there had at least been a mention of next time. The young waiter appeared with Helen’s coat and gave her a smile that had Carlyle clenching his fists. Trying to calm down, he watched the boy open the door and wish her a good night. Helen thanked him and headed out into the street without looking back. Once she was out of sight, he grabbed his own coat and slipped out on to St Martin’s Lane, heading in the opposite direction.

Approaching the Strand, he passed the entrance to Charing Cross police station on Agar Street. On the steps of the front entrance, a pair of drunks mumbled at each other between swigs of Double Diamond from cans proclaiming
40% extra free inside.
Carlyle gazed up at the traditional blue lamp that stood over the doorway. He had never been inside the station, an impressive whitewashed building on the site of a former hospital. However, from what he had heard, it was a cut above the places he had found himself working in during his fledgling career.
That would be a good posting
, he mused,
handy for popping in to see Helen, too.
Maybe one day. Sticking his hands in his pockets, he returned his gaze to the grubby pavement in front of his feet as he headed off towards his bus stop.

Nothing was more depressing than a two-day-old crime scene. With the victims taken away, the place was like a theatre production without any lead actors. The bit-part players who remained went about their tasks with a dogged professionalism, but the excitement of day one had gone, never to return. The drama of death had been replaced by the boredom of bureaucracy. The thrill was over.

Trying not to appear too much like a voyeur, Walter Callender eyed the smart but brittle-looking woman standing in front of him. Dressed in a tailored grey trouser suit and a pearl blouse, with a pair of sensible low-heeled patent-leather shoes, she looked – to the inspector’s way of thinking at least – more like a headmistress than a spy. He guessed she was about his own age, if rather better preserved. Despite her attempts to appear casual, he detected the impatient air of a woman used to having things proceed at a fair lick. Clearly, she must be more than competent to have reached the rank of commander in MI5. After all, the security services, like the police, didn’t tolerate women in senior positions unless they were at least twice as good as their male counterparts. But why was she here at all?

Not wanting to seem too curious about her presence, the inspector waited patiently as Camilla Brewster made a show of carefully inspecting Hugh Scanlon’s study. For her part, the commander politely ignored the rather obvious attentions of her host as she perused the dead journalist’s library.

After finishing with Fleet Street, Scanlon had done most of his writing in a small shed behind the house. It was the kind of simple wooden box with a pitched felt roof that you could buy at any garden centre for £80. According to the neighbours, the old fellow had spent the majority of his time either in the shed or by the side of the canal with his fishing rod. By all accounts the house itself was very much the domain of Mrs Scanlon, while her husband was allowed his small, semi-independent protectorate at the bottom of the garden. The space allowed him to get ‘a bit of peace from his wife’, as one of them, a small, nosy woman called Celia Woolfall, had put it.
That won’t be a problem any more
, Callender had thought when he’d been told of the remark.
You’ll get plenty of peace now.

The shed was eight feet by ten, with floor-to-ceiling bookcases on two sides and a large window at the back looking out over the fields towards the canal. A wooden desk and a battered brown leather office chair took up most of the floor space, while a stainless-steel sink stood in the back corner, next to a small fridge. With Callender standing in front of the desk and Brewster behind it, the place felt cramped and stuffy.

The commander had arrived from London that morning without any advance warning, a team of half a dozen forensics technicians in tow. Having taken over both crime scenes, Brewster’s boys had already gone through the study, removing the papers that had covered Scanlon’s desk, along with the contents of his waste bin and, bizarrely, his fridge. All that remained on the desk was a grubby red telephone, two cheap biros – one blue, one black – a dirty mug and a small plate. The plate was empty, apart from a few breadcrumbs and a blob of mustard. Feeling a sudden pang of hunger, Callender licked his lips. Lunch had been a ploughman’s and a can of Coke that Joe Young had brought him from the Red Lion several hours ago. Both had disappeared into his stomach without touching the sides.

For the briefest moment, Callender imagined himself sitting in the shade of an oak tree in the pub’s beer garden, sipping a pint of Young’s Special London Ale.
Heaven.

Quickly dismissing such a fantasy, he switched his thoughts to Mrs Callender’s trip to Jones & Sons butcher’s shop in Greaves Street. They had discussed it when he had finally got home the previous evening, and he knew that she would be cooking pork chops for tea. Glancing at his watch, the inspector vowed that he would not miss his dinner for the second night in a row. Absolutely not.

Returning to the matter in hand, he waited patiently while the commander continued scanning the titles on Hugh Scanlon’s bookshelves. Over the years, the journalist had collected a large but seemingly random mixture of largely non-fiction titles; thick hardbacks dominated the shelves, mainly twentieth-century history and current affairs, with a few biographies dotted here and there. A copy of
Rothman’s Football Yearbook 1976
, on a middle shelf, stood out like a sore thumb.

‘Do you think he read them all?’

‘Sorry?’

Brewster pointed in the direction of a history of the Korean War. ‘Do you think he read all these books? There are so many of them. How would anyone find the time?’

‘I don’t know.’ Callender tried to add up all the books he himself had at home: a collection of Sven Hassel novels, a couple of old law texts and Mrs Callender’s gardening books. Probably not even twenty; certainly fewer than Hugh Scanlon had written. To his left, at eye level, was a shelf dedicated to the man’s own work. He had clearly been very prolific over the years; the inspector carefully counted no fewer than twenty-seven different titles bearing his name.

His musings were interrupted by Brewster mumbling something to herself. He watched as she picked a title from the shelf above her head, scanned the dust jacket for a few moments and then carefully returned the book to its place next to its neighbour. She repeated the process like a picky reader in Newbury district library, unable to decide on her next selection.

What are you looking for?
Callender wondered.
What have I missed here?
Under his shirt, he felt a bead of sweat run the length of his spine before disappearing between his buttocks. It had turned out to be another broiling day; even with the door open, the atmosphere in the hut was stifling. The commander, however, showed no signs of perspiring. Staring at his shoes, Callender tried to sniff out a trace of her scent. If she was wearing any, however, he couldn’t detect it. Standing on tiptoes, she retrieved one of the more frivolous books from Scanlon’s top shelf:
Norma Jean: The Life of Marilyn Monroe
. For fifteen or maybe twenty seconds she gave it the same careful consideration as she had all the others, before putting it back.

‘Can I help you with anything in particular?’ Callender asked politely as his reserves of patience ebbed away.

Turning to face the dull local policeman, she gave him a smile that could have been interpreted as either sad or ironic.

‘Are you searching for something specific?’ he persisted.

‘No, not really.’ Brewster gave him one last glimpse of the smile and then packed it away. ‘I just find it interesting to get a feel for the man who lived and worked here, now that he’s gone.’

Callender nodded solemnly. ‘I was expecting CID,’ he said finally.
Not the bloody security services.

‘I can imagine.’ The smile made a fleeting reappearance. ‘But we didn’t think that would be necessary,’ Brewster continued, making no effort to explain who she meant by
we
. She gave the inspector a look of such utterly shameless mock sincerity that he briefly had to look away. ‘Your team is doing a professional and thorough job. I don’t see any need to bring in outsiders at this stage, do you?’

What would you be, then?
Callender wondered, feeling his hackles rise. It had taken him the best part of thirty minutes to get over his initial shock after she had first flashed some ID and asked to be shown the house and then Scanlon’s den. The shock had since been replaced by a growing annoyance at her relentlessly patronising attitude and her refusal to explain what she was up to.

‘As you can imagine,’ the commander purred, laying on what charm she could muster for the benefit of the provincial plod, ‘MI5 has followed Mr Scanlon’s career very closely.’

‘He was one of your spies?’

‘No, no.’ Brewster paused as a technician, one of the MI5 bods bussed in from London that morning, appeared in the doorway. ‘Yes, Root?’

The technician, a small, tubby bloke with vague features, could have been anywhere from thirty to fifty. He was dressed in white nylon overalls, which looked like they hadn’t been washed in some considerable time. ‘We’re finished here,’ he said quietly, wiping a bead of sweat from his brow with his sleeve, ‘so we’re off back to Gower Street.’ Not waiting for a reply, he turned and headed towards the house.

Callender returned his gaze to the empty desk. ‘What was Scanlon working on?’ he asked. ‘Was it relevant to his death?’

‘There’s no reason to suppose so,’ Brewster said airily. ‘What we are doing here, it’s just standard protocol.’

‘Of course,’ said Callender stiffly, knowing bullshit when he heard it.

‘Hugh Scanlon was a bona fide reporter,’ the commander continued, ‘a leading expert in his field. He served a number of Fleet Street’s great proprietors with distinction for more than four decades. He would come into our offices and give talks to our people once in a while, give them a taste of developments in the wider world, but he wasn’t on the payroll or anything like that.’

Anything like that?

‘Personally, I thought he was interesting but a bit . . . obsessive.’

From the far side of the house came the sound of a van engine roaring into life and starting off down the lane; Brewster’s crew heading back to London. ‘You knew him?’ the inspector asked.

‘We met maybe half a dozen times over the years,’ Brewster replied casually. ‘Either at one of his seminars or for a chat over a large tumbler of expensive single malt in the bar of the Athenaeum. Hugh liked his whisky, especially in more recent years. To be honest, I’m surprised that his liver was able to take it for so long.’

Callender knew when he was being pushed in a certain direction and he was happy to play along. If he was going to lock horns with this woman, it would have to be further down the line. ‘Well,’ he said, edging towards the door, ‘it looks like he’d had a skinful when he went into the canal.’

‘I’m not surprised, really.’

‘I’m still waiting for the pathologist’s report from Dr Scudder, but it looks like he had polished off something like half a bottle, maybe more, of Scotch. We would have probably considered it an accident if it wasn’t for what happened to the unfortunate
Mrs
Scanlon.’