London Calling - James Craig [46]
‘Why not?’ Carlyle asked.
‘Because some people will fuck anything,’ said Joe philosophically.
‘Charming.’
‘I know.’
‘Still, it’s not looking too good for your theory.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Joe, reluctant to give up on his thesis so easily. ‘Maybe he was indulging his gay side, his spurmo side then reasserted itself, and there was a falling out. Maybe it was, like the paper says, a sex game that went a bit … wrong.’
‘That wouldn’t really sit alongside the note, though, would it?’
‘No …’ Joe pondered that for a second, ‘although that could just be something to throw us off the scent. A distraction?’
‘It suggests premeditation rather than a crime of passion.’
‘Not necessarily. Maybe the killer was a quick thinker.’
‘I don’t know,’ Carlyle was shaking his head. ‘It’s all guesswork. What else does Facebook tell us?’
‘Blake is basically a posh boy who never grew up. He’s pushing fifty, but acting like he’s twenty-five. He likes skiing, Kate Nash and mojitos …’
‘Who’s Kate Nash?’
Joe rolled his eyes to the heavens. ‘Please try and keep up, old man. She’s a singer-songwriter who was flavour of the month – or flavour of the nanosecond – a year or so ago.’
‘Never heard of her,’ said Carlyle, who couldn’t have named any female singer since Kate Bush.
‘I just know the name,’ said Joe. ‘The kids have got one of her CDs, I think, but I’ve never heard any of her stuff myself. Having said that, she’s probably already made more than you or I will earn in our lifetimes … combined.’
Carlyle grunted. He hated all the irrelevant crap from victims’ lives that passed before him in the course of an investigation. The way that people managed to waste time never ceased to amaze him. In the station, they had banned Facebook because too many staff were spending too much time on it, thus sucking up all of the station’s bandwidth. On two occasions, the computer network had crashed completely. That was presumably due to the support staff, or at least he hoped so. Wasn’t Facebook old-hat now, anyway? Helen, who saw herself as the most socially and technologically literate member of their family, had set up an account but lost interest after about a week. Carlyle was pleased with that, almost as pleased as he was with himself for never having signed up in the first place. He had enough problems with real life, so creating a virtual one would seem madness. The whole thing was bloody dangerous – one of their friends was now getting divorced because her husband had run off with some girl he had met online.
Carlyle stood up, pulled out his wallet and handed over a fiver to Marcello. He waited for the change, and then dropped it in the tips tin. ‘OK,’ he said, turning back to Joe. ‘We’re making some progress. Let’s get over to Blake’s flat.’
‘Not possible.’ Joe shook his head. ‘By the time we got there, we’d have to come straight back again.’
Carlyle made a face. ‘Why?’
‘For the press conference.’
Carlyle gave him a dirty look. ‘What fucking press conference?’
‘Oh, yes.’ Joe’s eyes sparkled as he also got to his feet, and spread his arms wide. ‘Why do you think I’m looking so smart today?’
Carlyle looked his colleague up and down for a second time. Belatedly he noticed that Joe’s usual outfit – a grubby jeans and T-shirt combo – had been replaced by his basic courtroom attire: a dark-grey Marks & Spencer suit, crumpled white shirt and a maroon tie.
Buttoning up his jacket, Joe made a show of looking his boss up and down, too. ‘Not a match on the Paul Smith, of course. That is quality.’
Damn right, Carlyle thought. Glancing at his reflection in the window, he gave a nod of approval. His own suit was a very nice navy, three-button, single-breasted Paul Smith number that he had acquired a few years ago for seventy-five quid from the Oxfam shop just down the road, on Drury Lane. The one item in his wardrobe that he looked after carefully, it was still in reasonable nick. Given the turn of events, he was glad he hadn’t gone with his alternative outfit of The