This is Where I Say Goodbye

Book 12: Inspector Carlyle

by James Craig

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

His father is dying.
He's stuck in the middle of a gang war.
And he has to solve a case with no clues.
Welcome to the world of Inspector John Carlyle.

Work goes on the backburner for Inspector Carlyle as he tries to manage his father's final days. But when the drug dealer providing the old man's pain relief ends up dead, London's least conventional copper finds himself in the middle of a vicious East London turf war. Meantime, he is supposed to be dealing with the case of a young woman found badly beaten in an alleyway. With no idea who she is, and no clues as to her attacker, he has to get help from some unlikely sources.

Release date: February 1, 2018

Publisher: Constable

Print pages: 277

Sample

Feeling seriously unwell, Josh Sandberry stumbled away from the phosphate glare of the streetlight by the bus stop and ducked into the alley that ran away from Tottenham Court Road, towards Whitfield Street. His head was spinning and the chorus to ‘Get Lucky’ was playing on a loop in his head. It was almost three in the morning and six hours of steady drinking was taking its inevitable toll. ‘Eight vodka and Cokes on a school night!’ He giggled. ‘Not good, old boy. Not good at all.’

Reaching the entrance, he toe-poked an empty wine bottle, sending it clattering down the alley.

‘Mwargh.’ As Josh blundered forward it was clear that he was not the first person tonight who had sought out an al-fresco bathroom. Grimacing at the smell of ammonia, he felt his knees buckle slightly.

I’m going to puke.

Placing a hand on the brick wall to his left, he lowered his head and took a couple of shallow breaths, preparing to retch.

‘Come on, you’ll feel better.’ He knew that it was best to decant the contents of his stomach before making the journey home. In the middle of the night, it would take an hour or so to get back to Wood Green. He didn’t want to have to jump off the bus halfway home to spill his guts on the pavement.

Through the swirling fog of alcohol, he reflected on how he hadn’t intended to get pissed at all. Tonight was supposed to be one quiet drink, maybe two. But he had fallen in with a group of boisterous LSE students and one drink had become three, four, five. By midnight, it had turned into quite a session and there didn’t seem much point in calling a premature halt to proceedings. Apart from anything else, Josh had got his eye on one of the students, name of Debby or Sally or something, all pink hair and massive cleavage, just his type. For her part, Debby – he was fairly sure that was her name – had seemed quite interested in him, too. Josh remembered a hand on the knee at one point. As it had begun creeping surreptitiously towards his crotch, he’d thought his luck might be in. Then the next thing he remembered it was almost one thirty and the girl had disappeared. He hadn’t even got a phone number.

Ah, well, these things happened. Even if she had taken him home, Josh reflected philosophically, the chances of him getting it up would have been small to none. All he wanted to do now was go home and sleep. If he was going to wake up with a monster hangover, much better that he was in his own bed. With his mouth feeling like a small animal had expired in it, he coughed violently, trying to raise some spittle. One thing was for sure: tomorrow would have to be a duvet day. Cautiously rolling his head on his shoulders, the senior customer engagement manager tried to remember if a day off might nix his chance of receiving an end-of-month performance bonus. Highly unlikely that he was up for one, was his immediate conclusion, given that he had already missed his performance targets both last week and the week before.

Without any money at stake, he turned his fragmented thoughts to the politics of the situation. When was the last time he’d thrown a sickie? Not in the last month or so. He hoped not, anyway. His supervisor, a sullen cow called Andrea, hated him. It was your basic personality clash: Josh had a personality; Andrea didn’t. Josh was the life and soul of the party; Andrea didn’t like the idea of people enjoying themselves, even out of office hours. He had already had two warnings this year about absenteeism. And it had been made clear to him that another day off could be fatal.

Finally raising some moisture on his tongue, Josh spat into the gutter. The prospect of getting the sack from his shitty little sales position didn’t really bother him. Getting another job in London would be a piece of piss, even if he didn’t have a reference. What did rankle was the pleasure Andrea would get from sacking him. He knew she would happily deliver his P45 personally if he gave her the chance. It would probably be the most exciting thing that happened in her miserable little life all year.

Pushing the offensive Andrea from his mind, he began fumbling with his flies. Whether or not he managed to puke, he definitely needed to relieve his aching bladder. Steadying himself, he heard a disgusted cluck from the mouth of the alley. Half turning, he saw a girl in a red coat staring at his crotch, mild disgust on her face. Nobody’s forcing you to look, Josh thought. Even in his befuddled state, though, it was clear that getting arrested for indecent exposure – or worse – would not be a good idea. Cock in hand, he turned his back on the gawper and waddled deeper into the alley, his shoes squelching across a sticky mess of alcohol and bodily fluids on the cracked tarmac.

Standing in the shadows, Josh glanced over his shoulder, checking that his audience was gone, before unleashing an arc of piss towards the pile of black bin bags that awaited the arrival of the refuse collectors in a few hours’ time.

Aaaaaah.

Impressed by the distance he was getting, Josh began hosing the bags, slowly moving left and right. Suddenly the sound of water on plastic was replaced by something altogether less distinct. Frowning, he peered into the darkness.

‘Holy shit!’ Stumbling backwards into a pile of cardboard boxes, he finally managed to throw up.

This time tomorrow she would be fishing. Well, maybe not this time tomorrow, but in thirty-six hours, for sure. WPC Wendy Granger closed her eyes and tried to imagine the bucolic scene in all its soft-focus beauty. Before she could compose the image in her head, a siren brought her back to her current reality. Tottenham Court Road at chucking-out time, the street decorated with vomit, piss and blood, a motley collection of teenagers reluctant to go home.

Granger looked down at the girl in the red coat standing in front of her. Petite, maybe five foot two, with long dark hair and the kind of pale skin that shimmered under the street lighting, she was claiming that she was eighteen. Granger very much doubted it. Fifteen seemed a better guess, sixteen at a push. There was a clear smell of alcohol on her breath but her eyes were bright and she didn’t seem intoxicated. Even at this late hour, the girl retained a fresh-faced look that suggested a stamina Granger had lost years ago.

There’s no point in hating her, the cop admonished herself, just because she’s young. Granger had a vague sense of being young herself, once, nights up the West End, too much to drink, followed by embarrassing behaviour of one sort or another. It was a rite of passage.

On the other hand, it was impossible not to feel a lingering sense of resentment at being confronted by the next generation, kids getting ready to push her off the stage before Granger had achieved anything. The handful of gawkers standing behind the police tape, next to the bus stop, couldn’t have contained anyone older than twenty, all of them happily chatting and filming the scene on their mobile phones, as if this was simply an extension of the night’s entertainment, put on for their benefit. Granger had to fight an irrational urge to have them all arrested and shipped back to the station. Whoever said that youth was wasted on the young had probably been thinking about the stupid little sods stumbling around Westminster at closing time. So much energy, so little imagination. A properly enforced curfew on the under-twenty-fives would cut the workload of the nightshift by about 75 per cent. At least. Granger herself would be thirty this year. I’m turning into Mum, she thought morosely, overlooking the fact that her mother, by the time she had reached that particular milestone, had already popped out three kids and was well on the way towards the unsuccessful conclusion of her second marriage.

‘Is this gonna take long?’ The girl pointed towards a bus approaching the stop. ‘I want to get that.’

‘I just need to take some details.’ Granger pulled out the battered Moleskine notebook that had been a present from her dad three Christmases ago. The pages were covered with densely packed notes, mostly relating to long-forgotten cases. Granger deliberately kept her handwriting small and neat to make the notebook last as long as possible. She flipped towards the back for a blank page. ‘You can get the next one.’

‘But they take ages at this time of night,’ the girl complained.

‘Sorry,’ Granger lied. ‘Won’t take long. The alternative would be to go down the station.’

‘I didn’t do anything,’ the girl whined, every word making her sound even younger than she looked. As the bus came to a halt, she looked like she was considering making a run for it. The doors opened and, after a moment’s debate, a couple of gawkers jumped on board. The doors closed behind them and the driver glanced at the goings-on in the alley before pulling away, heading towards Camden. The girl watched it depart with a mixture of annoyance and resignation in her face. ‘Okay,’ she turned back to face Granger, ‘so I’ve missed my bus. Thanks a lot. What do you need to know?’

It took a moment, but Granger recalled the name the girl had given her. ‘Hayley Cooper?’ she asked, as she scribbled it down.

‘That’s right.’

‘Where do you live?’

Cooper gave an address in upmarket Highgate. ‘My mum’s a lawyer,’ she added, as if to explain the posh address, ‘a partner at a Magic Circle firm.’

‘And she lets you stay out at this time of night?’

The girl shrugged. ‘She’s in Singapore.’

Granger didn’t bother to ask about the father. ‘So,’ she asked, ‘you were the one who called it in?’

‘More fool me,’ the girl muttered.

‘What happened?’

‘How would I know?’

Gritting her teeth, Granger reframed her question: ‘What did you see that caused you to call nine-nine-nine?’

‘Not a lot.’ Cooper gestured towards a young man sitting on the back step of an ambulance parked on the pavement. There was a green blanket wrapped around his shoulders and he stared vacantly into the middle distance as he took occasional sips from a small plastic water bottle. Even at a distance of five yards, they could smell the mixture of vomit and urine emanating from under the blanket. Cooper wrinkled her nose. ‘He was in the alley having a wee. Men are such dirty little sods, aren’t they?’

‘Mm.’

‘They’ll go anywhere.’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘Anyway, I saw him doing his business and I turned away. I mean, you don’t want to watch that, do you? A few seconds later he started screaming, like he was being murdered. I couldn’t really see what was going on but he just kept shouting, so I called nine-nine-nine. The cops were here in, like, thirty seconds.’

Hardly surprising, Granger thought. The West End, throwing-out time. Lots of cops on the street. Everyone on high alert for trouble.

Cooper pointed down the alley. ‘They found him in there.’

‘You didn’t go in?’

‘No fear.’

‘And you didn’t see anyone else?’

‘No.’ Cooper shook her head. ‘He just went in for a pee. There was no one else.’

‘Someone could have come from the other end,’ Granger hypothesized.

‘If they did, I didn’t see them.’

‘And you didn’t see the girl?’

‘No.’

‘You didn’t hear any arguments, any screaming?’

Cooper gave the question some thought. ‘I was just arriving at the bus stop. I didn’t even know she was there.’

‘Okay.’ Granger began doodling in her notebook.

‘One of the other officers said she was dead.’ Cooper gestured at the guy perched on the back of the ambulance. ‘I don’t think he killed her – otherwise why would he have started screaming? I think he just went in there for a pee.’

‘She’s not dead.’ Granger immediately regretted saying it. You were not supposed to share crime-scene information with the public.

‘No? That’s good, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

Cooper peered into the alley. ‘Is she still in there, then?’

‘Dunno,’ the WPC admitted. ‘I think they took her out through the other end.’ From further down Tottenham Court Road, another bus was heading towards them. Handing over one of her business cards, Granger tried to think of a final question. She pointed her biro at the guy in the blanket. ‘Did he have any mates with him?’

‘No.’ Cooper brought out her Oyster card for a second time. Giving Granger a look that said, You promised, she edged towards the bus stop. ‘I think he was on his own. He was just a bloke who’d had too much to drink.’ The bus pulled up at the stop and the driver opened the doors. ‘I’ve gotta get to bed.’ Cooper turned away from Granger and broke into a jog. ‘I’ve got double Spanish in the morning and Mr Bueno-Rodriguez doesn’t let you into class if you’re late. I’ll call you if I think of anything else.’

WPC Granger watched the girl take a seat as the bus pulled away, heading towards north London. ‘Double Spanish,’ she muttered ruefully. ‘Those were the days.’

Standing under the harsh corridor lighting, Granger stifled a yawn. Bleary-eyed, the policewoman stared through the large window that gave the hospital staff an easy view of their latest patient, without having to go in and out of the room every five minutes. The girl from the alley had been cleaned up but the injuries on her face still looked fresh and raw.

Someone really did want to kill you, Granger thought, didn’t they?

They still didn’t know the victim’s name. For the moment, she had been given the imaginative moniker of ‘Miss X’.

After finishing her interview with Hayley Cooper, Granger had spoken to half a dozen other bystanders. None had provided her with any information of any relevance. The injured girl, meanwhile, had been taken the short distance – no more than a few hundred yards – to University College Hospital. There, she had been given a preliminary examination by an exhausted-looking junior doctor before being hooked up to a range of machines and placed in an induced coma.

Granger had informed the duty sergeant at the station that Miss X was not going to be giving any interviews for the foreseeable future. The wife was shamelessly angling to be stood down. Instead, she was told unceremoniously, ‘Stay put and await further instructions. And while you’re at it,’ said the sergeant, ‘see if you can come up with an ID for the victim.’

‘How I am I supposed to do that?’ Granger shot back, her frustration levels rising as her sugar levels dropped.

‘Sit tight,’ was the sergeant’s final word, ‘in case she wakes up.’

‘But—’

‘And keep your wits about you, in case her attacker turns up to finish the job.’

Yeah, right, Granger thought glumly. This isn’t the bloody movies, you know.

‘I’ll send someone to relieve you later on.’

‘I—’ Before she had been able to point out that her shift had technically ended four hours ago, the line had gone dead.

‘Bollocks.’ Granger cursed herself for not being more assertive. Not for the first time, she wondered if she was really cut out to be a cop. After more than eight years on the force, she should have moved up the ranks, at least a little. Instead her job was pretty much the same mix of social work, form-filling and endless hanging around that it had always been. Mindlessly doing what she was told – regardless of how stupid or pointless – was beginning to grate.

Moving away from the window, the WPC looked around for somewhere to sit down, groaning as she realized that there wasn’t a chair in sight anywhere along the entire length of the hospital corridor. Moving from foot to foot, she tried to ease the dull ache in her calves.

‘Hey.’

Granger looked up to see her sometime partner, PC Paul Dombey, appear from round the corner. Dombey was carrying a cup in each hand, with a paper bag hanging from his mouth. Granger stifled a giggle.

Coming to a halt, Dombey let Granger retrieve the bag. It was warm to the touch. She felt herself start to salivate, like Pavlov’s dog.

‘What are you up to?’ he asked, gesturing at her feet. ‘Practising your dancing?’

‘Cramp.’ Returning her elevated foot to the floor, Granger peered inside the bag and groaned. Two large iced doughnuts. She knew that even one bite of the additive-stuffed sugar bomb would blow her latest health regime completely out of the water. Resistance, however, was futile. She sucked in her stomach. ‘Didn’t they have anything else?’

Dombey looked mortally offended by her lack of enthusiasm. ‘Fresh from the shop,’ he pointed out. ‘It was either that or a KitKat. The bacon rolls won’t be ready for another twenty minutes or so.’

Thank God for small mercies. Granger wondered how much cholesterol there was in a doughnut.

‘I couldn’t wait that long,’ Dombey admitted. About six foot three, he looked like a giant seven-year-old. Three years in London had done little to take the edge off his comedy Yorkshire accent. Granger considered the amiable giant uniquely ill-suited to big-city life. She imagined that his natural habitat was more like a two-man police station deep in the Dales where he could hunt sheep rustlers and rescue missing ramblers. The kind of place that had disappeared in the 1960s.

Paul Dombey, man out of time. Granger tittered.

‘What’s so funny?’

‘Nothing.’ Granger took a piece of icing from the bag and nibbled it daintily. ‘Why is the food in hospitals always so crap?’

‘It’s comfort eating.’ Handing her a cup, Dombey stuck a hand into the bag, pulled out one of the doughnuts and took a large bite.

‘Mm.’ Granger removed the lid from her cup and took a sip of tea. ‘Thanks.’

‘No problem.’ Dombey grinned. ‘This is the kind of grub I’d want if I was in hospital.’ To emphasize the point, he demolished the rest of his doughnut in a succession of rapid mouthfuls.

Grub? Who used a word like that any more? Granger smiled. It was the kind of thing she’d expect her dad to say. ‘You’d think a hospital would be a bit more focused on promoting a healthy diet, wouldn’t you?’

‘Not really,’ Dombey said. ‘If you’re in here, you’ve got more important things to worry about than your five-a-day.’

‘Maybe.’

‘No maybe about it, Wend.’ Taking a slurp of his tea, he made a grab for the remaining doughnut with his free hand. ‘Don’t you want that?’

Granger instinctively jerked the bag away from him. ‘Maybe half.’

‘Deal.’

Taking the doughnut from the bag, Granger carefully pulled it apart, offering her partner the larger piece.

‘What are you doing?’

Granger turned to see a middle-aged woman in a white coat striding towards them. She had an iPad in one hand and a mobile phone in the other. The expression on her face was at the extremely pissed-off end of the annoyed spectrum. She pointed to a noticeboard on the far wall. ‘What does that say?’

‘Check your balls?’ Dombey pointed his doughnut at a poster about testicular cancer.

Glaring at the young constable, the woman indicated an adjoining notice that bore the stark message: ‘No food or drink in the corridor’. ‘This is supposed to be a clean environment,’ she snapped, coming to a halt in front of Granger. The name badge on her coat said ‘Dr Hendricks’. She was tall, maybe five foot nine, with angry brown eyes. Her brows were knotted together, with deep furrows lining her forehead. Her long black hair was streaked with grey. Attractive but more than a little worn at the edges.

Burnout victim, Granger thought. It’ll take more than a week at a health spa to get you back on your game, she decided.

‘You can’t eat here.’

Grinning like the idiot he was, Dombey shoved the remains of his doughnut into his gob, swallowing quickly.

Granger dropped her half back into the bag and placed the lid on her tea. ‘Sorry,’ she said meekly.

‘We have enough problems with vermin already.’ The doctor gestured towards a series of small boxes that had been placed along the wall at floor level. The mouse traps were branded with the logo of a famous pest-control company. Granger was so tired that she hadn’t noticed them until they were pointed out to her. Hendricks eyed the two police officers suspiciously. ‘How did you get in here anyway?’

How do you think? We walked straight past the front desk. Granger gestured towards the girl in the bed. ‘We’re here about the girl who was assaulted.’

‘Well,’ the doctor observed, ‘you’re not going to be able to talk to her for a while . . . days, maybe weeks.’

‘We need to make an ID,’ Dombey pointed out. ‘There was nothing on her where she was found, no driving licence, credit card, anything like that.’

‘So what are you expecting?’ Even accounting for the fact that she was frazzled, the doctor’s sneering tone was rather over the top. ‘A tattoo on her inner lip? Her name sewn into her clothes? Dog tags?’ She pointed to a small pile of clothes lying on a chair next to the bed. ‘When she came in, as you probably know, she was wearing a flimsy dress, knickers and a pair of shoes. There’s nothing with her name and address on it.’

‘We don’t know who she is.’ Dombey provocatively sipped his tea.

‘Then you’ll have to come back later,’ the doctor looked like she wanted to give him a smack with the iPad, ‘when she wakes up.’

The three of them stood there, no one apparently sure of what to do next. Granger watched as a second doctor, a youngish guy with blond hair, approached Hendricks, smiling sheepishly.

‘Any developments?’ he asked. His English was so precise and clear that he had to be a foreigner.

Hendricks looked as irritated by her colleague as she did by the police. ‘Only bloody cops, wasting our time,’ she snapped.

The man shot an apologetic glance at Granger and Dombey. ‘Markus Siebeck.’

‘I’m Dombey and this is Granger.’ Dombey gestured towards the girl’s room. ‘We were the ones who brought her in.’

‘What are her injuries?’ Granger asked.

With a theatrical sigh, Hendricks began tapping on the screen of the tablet. ‘Two broken ribs, a collapsed lung, multiple bruises,’ she intoned mechanically, ‘TBI—’

Dombey frowned. ‘Eh?’

‘Traumatic brain injury,’ Granger explained quickly, not wanting the good doctor to think they were totally thick.

‘That’s why we’ve put her in the coma,’ Hendricks explained, ‘while we assess her condition.’

‘Was she sexually assaulted?’ Dombey asked, a bit too eagerly for Granger’s taste.

Hendricks shook her head. ‘There was no evidence of that. She was just beaten half to death. Isn’t that enough?’

Granger stared at the floor.

‘I’ve got to get on with some work.’ Turning to her colleague, Hendricks pointed towards the exit. ‘Markus, will you see the officers out of here, please?’

Granger started to protest, then thought better of it. Being a cop, you learned to pick your battles. This one wasn’t worth fighting.

From the flat next door came. . .