London Calling - James Craig [29]
Ending the call, Carlyle shivered. The air-conditioning had been left fully on, so the room temperature was now easily below sixty degrees. The man in front of him was naked, lying face down on a queen-sized bed that was almost too big for the room. It was hard to tell, but the victim looked about Carlyle’s age, maybe just shy of six feet tall and in reasonable shape. Apart from the fact that he was dead, of course. He had a bit of a mullet, Carlyle noted, and was thinning on top. His clothes had been draped over the back of the chair (an ‘École Nissim de Camondo designed Lucite chair’ no less) in one corner. A pair of expensive-looking loafers, Charles Church or a similar brand, had been placed neatly beside the chair, in front of drawn curtains which were now splattered with blood.
Scanning the room, Carlyle decided that he had seen much worse. The most arresting touch was the knife gleaming, as if self-satisfied, in the room’s twilight. It looked like a standard kitchen item. It was, however, sticking out of the victim’s backside, in a way that set a new benchmark for London knife crime. Unable to resist, Carlyle mumbled to himself: ‘That must be a real pain in the arse.’ With his nose hovering about three inches away, he squinted to read the writing on the handle. It contained an image of two matchstick men, side by side, with just two arms and three legs between them. The man on the right had his arm in the air in a walk-like-an-Egyptian type of pose. Bloody strange logo, thought Carlyle. Next to it was the brand name Zwilling and J.A.Henckels. Otherwise, it looked like a normal knife, one you could probably buy anywhere. Nevertheless, its provenance was something to have checked later.
At a gentle knock at the door, Carlyle stepped back past the foot of the bed and into the vestibule. He pulled open the door to find a friendly blond woman called Susan Phillips smiling at him. Phillips was based at the Holborn police station, which was barely five minutes away by car at this time of night. She had been a staff pathologist with the Met for more than fifteen years now, and they had worked together several times before. ‘Good morning, Inspector,’ she said with an annoying cheerfulness. ‘I hear you have something for me.’
‘Thanks for coming,’ Carlyle said, holding the door wider. He thought she was looking tired and quite a bit older than her thirty-seven years, but sensibly he kept such thoughts to himself. After all, it was the middle of the night, and Carlyle knew that he was no oil painting himself, whatever the hour.
‘No problem,’ Phillips nodded. ‘Shall I come in?’
‘Let me move out first,’ said Carlyle, ‘then you can get at him more easily. I won’t spoil your fun, but it looks fairly straightforward.’
He stepped out into the corridor and nodded a greeting at a pair of forensic technicians he didn’t recognise. A couple of yards along, Anna Shue had also returned, with PC Burgess in tow. Burgess was looking quite pleased with himself, having successfully fully tracked down the twenty-pound note tendered by Alex Miles in the Epoca cafe.
Stepping forward, Carlyle had a quiet word with both, and watched them set off to deal with their allotted tasks. Phillips and the technicians had already taken over the room and there would be little for Carlyle to do for the next couple of hours.
He could have been dozing, or he could have been thinking. Either way, Carlyle’s reverie was ended by a knock at the door. Without waiting to be invited in, room service appeared with a breakfast trolley bearing scrambled eggs, coffee, toast, a generous selection of Danish pastries and some fruit. The waiter pushed the trolley as far into the room as possible, then turned on his heel to leave. Almost before Carlyle had the chance to mumble ‘Thank you’, the man was gone, seeming careful, for whatever reason, to avoid eye contact – or any other kind of contact – with the forces of law and order.
Realising that he hadn’t eaten for more than twelve hours, Carlyle salivated as he eyed the spread provided.