Declared Dead

Book 19: Inspector Carlyle

by James Craig

Genres: Crime Fiction

Synopsis

Praise for James Craig:

'A cracking read' BBC Radio 4

'Fast paced and very easy to get quickly lost in' Lovereading.com

'Craig writes like an angel' Crimefictionlover.com

Having left the Metropolitan police force - somewhat under a cloud - John Carlyle is forced to become a PI when the widow of his former best friend, art gallery owner and cocaine smuggler Dominic Silver, asks him to travel to the US, the place of Dominic's murder. She can't claim his vast estate until he is officially declared dead; a simple task of picking up some paperwork, or so Carlyle thinks - but on arriving in Florida he finds the situation anything but simple. In fact, it proves to be bloody murderous...

Release date: February 6, 2025

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 90000

Sample

Yorkshire, 1984

In Carlyle’s head, Joe Strummer was screaming about the Zombies of Death. Seriously pissed off, the callow cop drew another breath. He’d slept badly. He’d eaten badly. He was constipated and really needed a shit. Beset by an immense lethargy, he needed to be up and about.

Most of all, he needed a ruck.

He needed to crack some fucking skulls.

Sitting beside him on a clapped-out old bus commandeered from the army, Dominic Silver placed a hand on Carlyle’s knee, which was jerking up and down like an out-of-control piston. ‘Calm down, sunshine.’

‘I just want to get on with it,’ Carlyle grunted.

‘Listen to you,’ Dom teased, removing his hand. ‘Fucking Rambo wannabe.’

‘Fuck off.’

Dom laughed. ‘That’s the last time I give you any whiz for breakfast.’

‘How long are we going to sit here?’ Carlyle complained. He’d dumped a fat line of speed – courtesy of Dom – in his coffee in anticipation of some impending action. The amphetamines had done their job but things had been slow to get going.

‘You know the drill,’ Dom said drily. ‘Hurry up and wait.’

‘Fuck.’ Carlyle started bouncing in his seat, like a five-year-old after ingesting two cans of Coke and a couple of Mars bars.

Dom tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Take your fucking numbers off.’

Metropolitan Police Constable John Carlyle’s badge number was V253. Today, however, was not a normal day on the beat. Carlyle would not be policing London, his home city. Rather, he and his colleagues had been dispatched to the grim north, thrown into battle against striking miners involved in a bitter, long-running industrial dispute. The standard rules of policing had been thrown out of the window and you could do what you liked, as long as you didn’t get caught. It was not a day to be wearing any identification.

Carlyle fumbled with his epaulettes. Finally removing the badges, he stuffed them into his pockets. From somewhere behind the bus came the sound of a loud, extended fart, followed by a mixture of complaints and laughter.

‘Dirty bastard,’ Dom grumbled.

Carlyle took the opportunity to silently squeeze out some gas of his own just as the bus doors opened. Charlie Ross, a gruff Scottish sergeant, appeared beside the driver and signalled for calm.

‘Game on.’ Dom gave him a gentle elbow in the ribs. ‘Want another bump?’

Carlyle shook his head. ‘I’m good.’

‘Righty-ho, my little fuckers,’ Ross shouted. ‘Listen up.’ Small and gaunt, with sunken cheeks and a biker moustache straight out of the Village People, the sergeant was at least twenty-five years older than anyone else on the bus. When he rolled up his sleeves, you could see a Japanese dragon tattoo on his right forearm. There was an evil twinkle in his eye at all times, except when the booze took hold and he was about to keel over.

Ross pointed past a line of identical buses at the silhouette of the mine beyond. Outside the front gates, the group of strikers was steadily growing. ‘It’s time to play.’ A loud cheer went up, accompanied by the sound of boots being stomped on the bus floor and truncheons rapped against the windows. The sergeant waited for the noise to abate, then continued, ‘Remember, what happens on the picket line stays on the fucking picket line. Do not take any shit. And look after your mates. We watch each other’s backs.’

It was the standard pep talk.

To Carlyle’s chagrin, Dom stuck a hand up. ‘Sergeant?’

‘Yes, son?’ Charlie Ross grinned, enjoying the banter.

Dom put his question slowly and thoughtfully: ‘Didn’t I read in the paper that the new Home Secretary had promised that all transgressions on the picket line, committed by either side, will be dealt with properly, without fear or favour?’

The sarky little bugger had been reading the Daily Telegraph again. Carlyle wondered why Dom had joined the police force. Why hadn’t he done something that would have been better suited to his entrepreneurial spirit and sharp brain? Surely it would have been easy for him to go into the City and make loads of money as some kind of trader. The bottom line, Carlyle realised, was that Dominic Silver was far too sharp to be a plod.

Laughter trickled round the bus.

‘Well.’ Ross stuck his thumbs into the breast pockets of his tunic and thrust out his chest. ‘I can tell you this. There are three things in life that are of absolutely no use to man or beast: the Pope’s testicles, tits on a man and a politician’s promise.’ His well-practised monologue was met with a further cacophony. ‘So these fuckers today aren’t going to give us any trouble, all right?’ Ross waited for the din to die down, then added, ‘We are here to maintain law and order, to allow the ordinary working man to do his job without interference, to protect the innocent and – most importantly of all – to break some fucking heads.’

Buzzing, they piled off the bus. Dom turned to Carlyle. ‘You didn’t think it was going to be this much fun, did you?’

Carlyle looked around, fruitlessly searching for some cover behind which he could finally void his bowels. ‘No,’ he admitted, ‘I didn’t.’

Shepherd’s Bush, 1985

Slumped on the sofa, Carlyle tried to ignore Barbara Edwards. 1984’s Playmate of the Year was winking at him from the well-thumbed copy of Playboy next to his feet, which were resting carefully on the delicate-looking glass coffee table. With a heavy heart and a twitching groin, he turned his gaze from Barbara’s incredibly perky breasts to a poster of the West Ham footballer Clyde Best on the wall behind the television. His gaze slid to the screen, which was showing the BBC lunchtime news. The sound was down but the pictures of glum faces told the story clearly enough. The miners’ strike was finally, officially, mercifully over. It had been a long, slow death and the men trudging back to work could only muster the feeblest signs of defiance. Having lost the war, they knew they faced a slow, relentless defeat during the peace as well.

Not that the police were celebrating victory. Many officers had enjoyed the escape from home life, the camaraderie of the picket line and the excitement of the rucks. Even more had become nicely accustomed to the overtime pay. Now it was back to the basics of normal life.

For Carlyle, the bricks and baton charges were already a dim and distant memory. After several months pounding the streets around Hammersmith, he was finally beginning to feel like a normal copper. Shoplifters, drunks and domestics were his bread and butter.

Now he was being transferred south of the river to Southwark. Between postings, he had a week’s leave to use up. Two days in he was bored and restless. So when he got a message from Dominic Silver, saying he wanted ‘a chat’, Carlyle was perfectly happy to oblige.

The last time the two of them had been together was outside Maltby Colliery, east of Rotherham. After a long, exhausting shift, they had played marbles on the pavement, like two kids just out of school. The recently acquired marbles already had a certain sentimental value: they had been catapulted towards police lines by the strikers during one of the more vicious scuffles of the conflict.

‘This is great,’ Dom had laughed, as he won another game, taking 50p off Carlyle in the process. ‘If marbles are all they can fight with, we’ve got absolutely nothing to worry about. They are really, truly fucked.’

As usual, Dom had been right.

Now, sitting in Dom’s bachelor pad, enviously eyeing his stroke mags and watching his 20-inch Philips television, Carlyle wondered how his mate could fund such a lavish lifestyle. Carlyle was still living with his parents in Fulham. He couldn’t afford to buy as much as an outside toilet anywhere within two hundred miles of London. Renting wasn’t much easier.

‘Stupid buggers. They should have seen the writing on the wall long ago.’ Dom stood in the doorway, wearing a Van Morrison Wavelength tour T-shirt and waving a large spliff in the direction of the television. It struck Carlyle that he was turning into a right old hippy bastard. Whatever happened to punk? It was almost as if the Clash, still struggling along in name only, had never happened.

Carlyle caught a whiff of the joint and breathed in discreetly, declining Dom’s offer of a toke. On the TV, one of the union leaders appeared on the screen. Dom turned up the sound and they listened to the man talking about ‘dignity’, ‘solidarity’ and ‘the need to keep fighting’. His expression, however, told another story. The man was the definition of beaten, so haggard, so haunted that you almost expected him to burst into tears at any minute.

‘Idiots!’ Dominic snarled. ‘Donkeys leading lions.’

‘If the lions really were lions,’ Carlyle asked, ‘would they allow themselves to be led by donkeys?’

‘Smart arse.’ Dom took another puff.

Carlyle shrugged.

Dom failed to blow a smoke-ring and coughed. ‘Seriously, though,’ he said, through the haze, ‘that’s a bloody good question, Johnny boy. Now shift up.’

Carlyle moved to one end of the sofa and Dom flopped down beside him. For the next few minutes, he stared at the television screen intently, without saying a word. Eventually the news bulletin moved on to other stories: Nelson Mandela had refused a deal that would see him released from jail in return for renouncing armed struggle.

‘Bad move, Nelson, old son,’ Dom remarked airily.

‘If he does a deal, it’ll damage his credibility,’ Carlyle said earnestly.

‘Credibility’s overrated,’ said Dom, sharply. ‘He’s been in jail for what, twenty years? He’s already in his sixties. He should get out while he’s got the chance. Once he’s out, Botha and his boys are finished. Even that bitch Thatcher won’t be able to stop him.’ He clenched his fist and shouted at the TV screen: ‘Nelson! You’re a lion! It’s time to roar!’

Dom’s political viewpoint was at least as surprising as his property ownership. Carlyle had never before heard him speak of anything other than football and girls. Even if it was the dope talking, which Carlyle was sure it was, he sounded nothing like a copper. Carlyle wondered for a minute if he might whip a pile of newspapers from behind the sofa and try to sell him a copy of Socialist Worker. The smoke was making him feel giddy. Getting up slowly from the sofa, he went to the window. Opening it, he felt the cold air sneak into the room and breathed it in deeply.

Dominic looked him up and down. ‘I’m leaving the force,’ he announced, through the haze.

Carlyle almost banged his head against the window frame. ‘You’re doing what?’

‘I’ve had enough of all this bollocks,’ Dom said, looking round for an ashtray. ‘It’s not for me. I’m packing it in.’

‘Your family won’t like that,’ Carlyle said, knowing Dom’s dad was a policeman. So, too, was his uncle. Blokes couldn’t do anything else in the Silver household.

‘It’s my decision,’ Dom said firmly, stubbing out the remainder of his joint on a saucer he had finally discovered under the sofa.

‘What’re you going to do?’

‘I’m going to focus on my other business interests, full time.’

‘And what might those “business interests” be?’ Carlyle asked warily, not really wanting to know the answer.

‘I’m looking for some help.’

Trying not to feel flattered, Carlyle asked a question that he quite wanted an answer to, even if he might not like it. ‘Why me?’

‘Why not?’ Dom stared into space and wound up his short sales pitch. ‘I know you. I know you’re straight. I know you’re dependable. I know you’re not cut out to be a copper.’ That he had anticipated the question wasn’t as surprising as his ability to push the right buttons.

‘What do you mean,’ Carlyle huffed, “not cut out to be a copper”?’

Dom grinned slyly. ‘Come on, John. Coming from me that’s hardly a criticism, is it? Neither of us fits in. We can both see past the bullshit. I can’t play the game and neither can you. If you stay, they’ll piss all over you. Even more than they’ve done already.’

Carlyle rested against the windowsill. ‘I am a copper,’ he said, more for his own benefit than for Dom’s. ‘Now all this coal bollocks is over, I’m enjoying it a lot more. It’s fine.’

Dom swung his legs on to the sofa and stretched, like a cat. ‘Don’t you realise? This is what it’s always going to be like. There will always be something. Last time it was the miners; next time it’ll be the steel workers, or the dockers, or the anti-apartheid mob or students or whatever. There will always be an enemy within, as well as an enemy abroad. We – they – can’t do without them. There always has to be someone to fight.’

‘Maybe.’ Carlyle raised a hand to his forehead and felt the small scar that remained from the flying brick that had caught him on the picket line.

‘Face it: you’ll be doing someone else’s dirty work for ever.’ Dom picked the roach out of the saucer and rolled it between his fingers. ‘So it’s just as well that I can offer you alternative employment.’

‘Doing what?’

‘A bit of man management, nothing complicated.’

‘Hm.’

‘It’s a chance for you to get in at the beginning of something big. Something lucrative.’ Dom raised his eyebrows. ‘Whaddaya say?’

Going to work for Dom was a complete non-starter. Carlyle might hate being a cop but he loved it too. Still, he said he’d give the offer careful consideration.

‘Don’t take too long thinking about it,’ Dom counselled.

Carlyle vowed he wouldn’t procrastinate. It was an easy concession to make, given that he already knew the answer would be no.

‘Things are moving on apace, and business is booming.’ Dom sent him on his way with a cheery wave. ‘Now’s the time to get ahead of the game.’

‘It’s forty years since Dom and I worked together,’ Carlyle protested. ‘More. We were only kids.’

‘You stayed close,’ Helen reflected.

Carlyle didn’t want to go there. ‘Our paths crossed now and again.’

‘It was more than that. We used to see him and Eva quite a lot.’

‘Whatever,’ Carlyle huffed. ‘The point is Dom went missing years ago, when he ran off with that bit of skirt.’

‘Bit of skirt?’ Helen raised an eyebrow.

‘Slip of the tongue,’ Carlyle quickly backtracked. ‘Multi-millionaire celebrity artist, if you prefer.’

‘When did you last speak to him?’

‘Hard to say.’ Carlyle racked his brains, failing to come up with a precise answer. ‘We had a brief chat after I left the Job – he rang to commiserate when I got the elbow, but it was just a short call.’

‘But you’re still mates.’ It sounded like an accusation.

Carlyle was equivocal. In truth, his relationship with Dominic Silver had always been highly complicated. That they were both solid family men had, for a long time, offset the differences in their professional lives. While Dom had not stayed long in the force, Carlyle had spent his entire career working for the Metropolitan Police, rising through the ranks to reach the exalted rank of commander before falling foul of the familiar mix of circumstances and politics and being shown the door.

Helen kept probing. ‘You go back a long way.’

What did she want him to say? Carlyle didn’t like being put on the spot by his wife. ‘Back in the day,’ he said cautiously, ‘we had a good working relationship.’

‘And it never bothered you what he did?’

‘Define “bothered”,’ Carlyle grunted. ‘Dealing with people who operate outside the law was what I did for a living. The fact that Dom was a mate, well, there were pros and cons.’ Throughout his career, Carlyle had always had a pretty ambivalent attitude towards drugs. Both personally and professionally, he could take them or leave them. As a young man he had dabbled in moderation, like a lot of people do. As an older cop, he saw plenty of things that seemed more worthy of his attention than people getting high. It was the criminalisation of drugs, rather than the drugs themselves, that caused most of the issues. Abuse and addiction should be a medical issue, not a matter of law enforcement. In Carlyle’s considered opinion, the so-called ‘war on drugs’, the result of American puritanism and stupidity, caused far more problems than it solved.

This ambivalence extended to his relationship with Dom. Dom moving into drug-dealing made a kind of sense. He was still in the law-and-order business, just on the other side of the fence. The pair remained friends after Dom had left the force. Indeed, there had been more than one occasion when Dom had offered him a job. Carlyle had always refused but he was happy enough to work with his old friend when their professional interests were aligned.

‘The drug-dealing was never a problem?’

‘Not in a moral sense.’ Carlyle shrugged. ‘I mean, alcohol’s a drug, and cigarettes cause tremendous harm. The lines have always been drawn in a fairly arbitrary way.’

‘But you were supposed to uphold the law.’

Why was she winding him up? Carlyle suspected his wife was pissed off to come home after a hard day’s work and find him with his feet up, boozing. ‘Yeah.’ He didn’t want to get into an argument, but neither did he want to concede any ground. ‘It’s complicated, though, as you well know. Things on the street are never that straightforward.’

‘So you looked the other way.’

‘Sometimes I had to make a decision,’ was as far as Carlyle would go. A pragmatist to his fingertips, he never had any qualms about exploiting situations that he considered win–win. ‘But it’s all a long time ago now. Water under the bridge.’

Carlyle had been relieved when Dom eventually announced he was getting out of the drugs business. Moving into the art world meant swapping one group of sharks for another but it was a kinder, gentler proposition for a man entering his middle years. Dom’s skill set meant he made a smooth transition from dealing one product to another. For many years, he ran a successful gallery on Cork Street in the heart of London’s art market. There he put on several exhibitions of an up-and-coming young artist called Kelly Sobrinho. Sobrinho’s career took off and so did her relationship with Dom. After their affair had been exposed, Dom left his family and quit London.

For her part, Kelly Sobrinho was mad, bad and dangerous to know. Carlyle was pretty sure the woman had killed a former partner after a drunken argument at a launch party for an installation in Trafalgar Square. Indeed, in one of his last duties as a cop, Carlyle had travelled to Kazakhstan in a futile attempt to bring her to justice.

In the end, the case was ‘not proven’, as the Scots liked to put it. Of course, the notoriety did nothing to harm Kelly Sobrinho’s career. Collectors spent hundreds of millions on her work. She became ‘the next Damien Hirst’, travelling the world first class from show to show, overseeing exhibitions and installations from Montevideo to Macau. Then there were the visiting professorships in LA, Brisbane and Oman. And the marketing deals with high-street stores and global fashion brands. According to the latest edition of The Times Rich List, the former struggling artist now had a net wealth heading towards £150 million.

Kelly and Dom had set up home in Miami. ‘He fell off a boat,’ Helen said, ‘missing, presumed drowned.’

Carlyle’s immediate reaction was scepticism. The whole thing sounded like some kind of publicity stunt. ‘It would be just like Dom to fake his own death,’ he quipped.

‘John, for God’s sake, this is serious.’ Helen shot him a look that said, At least try to pretend to be a grown-up for once. ‘Eva’s in bits.’

If his old comrade was, in fact, sleeping with the fishes, Carlyle didn’t want to know. ‘Eva should be long past caring,’ was his verdict.

Helen refused to acknowledge his lack of enthusiasm. ‘She could do with some help.’

Carlyle sensed he’d been volunteered for something. ‘What can I do?’ he whined.

‘She’s coming round to discuss it.’ Helen started fussing with the mess on the coffee table, indicating that the visit was imminent.

‘Tonight?’ Whatever Eva and his wife were cooking up, Carlyle really didn’t want to get involved. ‘I’m busy.’

Helen swatted his objection aside. ‘Don’t you want to know what happened to Dom?’

‘I thought you said he fell off a boat.’

‘They haven’t found the body,’ Helen repeated, ‘and no one can tell Eva what happened.’

‘So what can I do?’

‘Eva’s in legal limbo. Dom’s missing but there’s no death certificate, so she can’t sort the will out.’

Aha, Carlyle thought, we’re getting to it now. ‘Eva needs the cash.’

Helen rolled her eyes. ‘It’s not just that. She needs closure.’

Closure. How American. ‘You have a chat with her,’ he suggested, ‘and you can fill me in later.’

That wasn’t good enough for Helen. ‘I said you’d be here.’

‘I’m busy,’ Carlyle repeated. It was more a plea than an assertion.

‘Doing what?’

‘Fulham are playing,’ he fibbed, safe in the knowledge than Helen would no more consult the fixture list than a horoscope. ‘I thought I’d go and watch it in the Sun.’ Retirement was so boring he’d even started going to the pub.

Helen wasn’t going to let him wriggle out of it. ‘What time does it start?’

‘Erm, eight.’

‘Perfect.’

Shit.

‘Eva’s coming at half seven. It won’t take that long.’

‘She’ll be late,’ Carlyle grumbled.

‘Just ask a few pertinent questions, gather the basic facts, and you’ll be able to catch the second half of your game, no problem.. . .