London Calling - James Craig [104]
Carlyle turned to look at him, interest finally overriding his irritation at being shown up. ‘And how do you know this?’
Dom waved a hand airily above his head. ‘I know lots of things.’
‘Come on,’ said Carlyle, getting a bit exasperated now, ‘this isn’t about lots of things.’
Now he’d had some gentle fun, Dom’s expression became more serious. ‘Did you know that Eva went to Cambridge?’
‘No.’ Carlyle knew next to nothing about Eva Hollander, other than that she was Dom’s common-law wife.
‘Eva’s a very smart girl, got herself a first in History. Thought about doing a PhD, her subject being the cultural legacy of the Weimar Republic.’
‘But she hooked up with you instead,’ Carlyle quipped.
‘I didn’t meet her until later,’ Dom corrected him. ‘Instead of doing research, she got married. Her scumbag husband was actually a client of mine in the early nineties …’ He let those reminiscences trail off.
With his famed empathy, Carlyle kept on digging. ‘Let me guess,’ he said. ‘You lost some money, but won the girl.’
‘Don’t be flippant, John.’ Dominic sat up and stared him straight in the eye. ‘I wouldn’t take the piss out of your family, would I?’
‘No, sorry.’ Carlyle tried to get the conversation back on track. ‘So Eva knows this woman?’ he asked.
‘She knows her sister. They shared a house together in Cambridge, for a year.’
‘Small world.’
‘It sure is. Six degrees of separation, and all that.’
‘How did you make the connection?’
‘It was Eva,’ said Dom, grinding the toes of his black Converse All Stars into the dirt. ‘I got Gideon to do some basic research, since he’s quite good on the old Google and the various other databases we use to keep an eye on our clients …’
Other databases? But Carlyle didn’t enquire further.
‘… and when we pieced together what you were actually interested in,’ Dom shot Carlyle an amused look, ‘I spoke to Eva about it. I knew that she’d been there around the same time, and she remembers the Ashton kid topping himself. You know what teenagers are like, melodrama-wise. It was a big deal back then.’
Carlyle sat back, prepared to be impressed. ‘So how did Eva connect Robert Ashton to the Merrion Club?’
‘The housemate’s sister.’
‘This …?’
‘Susy Ahl. A-H-L.’
‘Ahl. OK, got it.’
‘She was Ashton’s girlfriend.’
‘OK,’ said Carlyle, genuinely interested now.
‘After the kid killed himself, Susy Ahl went off on one big time, apparently …’
‘As you would.’
‘As you would indeed. But she blamed the Carltons and the rest of their crew for driving him to it.’
‘Why?’
‘That,’ Dom said, ‘I don’t know. According to Eva, Ahl kicked up quite a fuss. But no one took her seriously, and she disappeared fairly soon afterwards. Eva graduated that summer, 1985, then she went travelling for a bit. After she got back, she married the moron-stroke-junkie tosspot who made her life hell for the best part of ten years. She was too busy trying to get the shithead clean to bother keeping in contact with all her old pals, so she lost touch with the housemate, too.’
Carlyle idly wondered what role Dom had played in trying to get the ‘shithead’ off drugs, himself being a drug dealer and all. Again, he kept his mouth shut.
‘Then I came along, and we had the kids, and things just moved on. It’s been a busy couple of decades. Now, hey presto, it’s twenty-five years later and now we’re caught up in our own little episode of A Week in Westminster meets Crimewatch.’
‘Where do I find the sister, Eva’s old flat mate?’ Carlyle asked eagerly.
‘She’s in Canada.’
‘Fuck, you’re kidding?’
‘No, I’m not.’ Dom watched a look of exasperation cloud Carlyle’s face, and he smiled. He then dug into the back pocket of his Levis, pulled out a scrap of paper and handed it over. ‘Sarah, the sister, is living somewhere west of Calgary. She married a cowboy or something. They have even more kids than Eva and me, apparently.’
‘That’s good to know,’ Carlyle said gloomily.
‘Susy Ahl, on the other hand,’ Dom grinned, ‘is right here in London.’
Carlyle stared at the address on the piece of paper and smiled. ‘Are you sure?’