London Calling - James Craig [23]
‘Yes.’ Miles bowed again. Carlyle wondered if he might have some Japanese blood in him somehow. More likely he was just taking the piss. Miles straightened up and started playing with a button on his jacket. ‘How can I help?’
As chief concierge at The Garden, Miles had acted as the hotel’s senior fixer for their more important and demanding guests for more than five years now. The Garden popped up on Carlyle’s radar once or twice a year and, consequently, their paths had crossed maybe three or four times. Miles was what Carlyle would describe as a low-level acquaintance. He operated in that grey area between upstanding citizen, usually of no use to Carlyle, and actual convicted criminal, the kind of person who kept the inspector in his job but was a pain in the arse at the same time.
Doubtless, Miles broke various laws of one sort or another, mostly relating to drugs and prostitution, on a daily basis. But he did so in a way, and in an environment, that meant his misdemeanours were of little or no concern to Carlyle. Both men understood that socially acceptable levels of behaviour were in a constant state of flux, and invariably strayed beyond the letter of the law.
Like Miles, Carlyle believed in self-interest, enlightened self-interest. This was as good a basis for their relationship as any, requiring no real thought and the minimum of action.
Like any good policeman, Carlyle very rarely concerned himself with the self-obsession and self-indulgences of the rich. He knew that, when it came to money, the law was only partially blind. Most of the time, the best way to deal with the well-off, with their acute sense of entitlement, was merely to ignore them. He always thought that he inherited such pragmatism from his father, who had never tired of advising his son: ‘Don’t get into pissing contests you can’t win.’ For Carlyle, after more than forty years on the planet and more than twenty years on the job, this rule only broke down with the extreme cases … like murder, for instance.
Like any good fixer, Miles knew where to get anything and everything. That was a basic requirement of the job, since the hotel’s ‘itinerant tribe’ could be very demanding. It was his ability to acquire specific, reliable, up-to-date information for his clients that became of occasional interest to Carlyle. Once Miles realised that the inspector was a pragmatist, and otherwise not in the least bothered about the needs of his ‘tribe’, he felt comfortable in doing business with him. As a result, the two men had casually established a modest relationship, just one of the hundreds that populated each man’s professional life.
There were now four of them standing around the concierge’s table. It was a mahogany Regency writing desk, largely hidden behind an oversized sofa in the left-hand corner of the lobby, and which did not fit in with the rest of the décor in any way, shape or form. Carlyle and Miles had now been joined by the obtuse porter, Brolin, and by PC Tim Burgess, a rather pretty but callow-looking youth who was currently half hiding behind a pillar.
Burgess had arrived with Carlyle from the station, but rather stood out here in his uniform, and also seemed rather overawed by his surroundings. Within two minutes of arriving in the lobby, the young constable had received an interested, wolfish glance from a clearly inebriated middle-aged woman wandering across the foyer from the bar towards the lifts. Carlyle was amused to see Burgess blush dramatically and he half expected the woman to come over, throw PC Burgess over one shoulder and carry him upstairs. Without a doubt, frozen with fright, Burgess would have been powerless to resist. Thank God I’ve got the help, Carlyle thought. Let’s hope the killer, if there is a killer, has already left the building. He tossed the brochure back on the desk and turned to focus on Miles.
‘Has Brolin told you about the note?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ Miles nodded. ‘How bizarre. Do you think it’s a joke?’
‘Probably,’ Carlyle smiled slightly, ‘knowing