London Calling - James Craig [56]
SIXTEEN
Carlyle slurped at a cup of lukewarm black coffee, and happily munched on the pastry he’d saved from earlier in the day. The third floor of the police station was deserted apart from a couple of cleaners who were wandering from desk to desk, waving some feather dusters around in a desultory fashion, like a pair of bored performance artists from the piazza nearby. Dropping the remains of his Danish on a napkin, he picked up the pen lying on an A4 notepad next to his keyboard. At the top centre of the page, he wrote IAN BLAKE, drawing a neat box around the name. Below the box he wrote the name of Christian Holyrod.
For several seconds, he studied the yellow paper, searching for inspiration. It was time to start putting the pieces together, and this was the part of the job he liked almost more than any other. After all his time on the Force, he still got a buzz of excitement as he embarked on that voyage of discovery that would inevitably take him to the heart of his case. How he conducted that journey – whether from behind a desk or out on the street – didn’t matter just as long as it took place.
‘Right …’ He pushed the remainder of the Danish into his mouth, washed it down with the last of his coffee, and started bashing the keyboard. Clicking on to Google, he typed in BLAKE+HOLYROD. The legend ‘Results 1–10 of about 12,000 (0.09 seconds)’ popped up and Carlyle reflexively hit on the first link, which was a newspaper article entitled The Merrion Club: Young, rich and drunk. Carlyle waited for the story to load before scanning it quickly. It informed him that Blake and Holyrod had both been members of an ultra-exclusive Cambridge University fraternity famous in equal measure for its hard drinking and bad behaviour. For reasons that were not explained, the club was named after the Dublin street in which the Duke of Wellington had been born. The story was a trail of booze-fuelled vandalism and famous old boys. Near the bottom of the piece, a quote from a hanger-on caught his eye: ‘It wasn’t considered a proper night out until a restaurant had been trashed. A night in the cells was par for the course for a Merrion man. So, too, was the debagging of anyone who incurred the irritation of the Club.’
What was a ‘debagging’? Carlyle decided he could guess. He now contemplated the accompanying group photograph. Standing on the front steps of some stately pile, all floppy hair, morning suits and sophisticated sneers, they looked like extras from a Spandau Ballet video. In fact, he thought that they looked as though they were boys from a departed era. The picture was taken less than thirty years earlier but it could just as easily have been a hundred and thirty. The caption beneath the image listed the members of the Merrion Club of 1984: George Dellal, Ian Blake, Nicholas Hogarth, Edgar Carlton, Xavier Carlton, Christian Holyrod, Harry Allen, Sebastian Lloyd.
Carlyle read and reread the eight names on the list. ‘Well, fuck me sideways!’ He continued to stare at the image for a long time.
There was Blake at the back, over to the right. Holyrod, London’s current mayor, stood in the middle, waving a cigar. In front of him, the leader of the opposition, Edgar Carlton, was standing next to his brother Xavier, who, if Carlyle remembered correctly, was the shadow foreign secretary. Fuck knows who the rest of them are, Carlyle thought. At this rate, he wouldn’t have been surprised if the rest of them included the new Pope and some minor European royalty. He understood that the Establishment was tightly knit – after all, that’s what made it the Establishment – but this was surely ridiculous.
Quickly scribbling those six new names on his pad, he added little crosses beside the Carltons and Holyrod. Switching his attention back to the keyboard and