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By Root 517 0

clicking out of the internet, Carlyle paused to roll up his sleeves. Taking a couple of deep breaths, he prepared to do battle with the Force’s internal IT network. The British police were notorious for their terrible computer systems, which were commonly assumed to have let an unknown number of serious criminals slip through the net over the years. A few years earlier, the high-profile failure to vet a school caretaker who subsequently murdered two schoolgirls had encouraged the introduction of a Police National Database linking all forty-three forces in England and Wales. But that was still quite some way off and, knowing that trying to search the whole country was too ambitious, Carlyle decided to stick to London – even if it was hard enough trying to extract information from the different computer systems run by the Metropolitan Police. Many old-school coppers simply could not be bothered trying to access them, but Carlyle realised that, for all their failings, they offered him access to a treasure trove of information of the kind that had helped him solve many cases in the past.

Typing in a second username and password, he accessed a Met database that allowed him to view basic details of all the capital’s outstanding homicide cases. Blake he knew about, along with the Carlton brothers and Holyrod, who were all still very much alive. So, one by one, he slowly typed in the other four names: ‘Delal, Hogarth, Allen, Lloyd’. Asking for anything showing from the last six months, he waited five, six, seven seconds before NO RESULTS flashed up on the screen.

Carlyle leaned back in his chair. Then he tried again, extending the search parameters, to cover the last two years.

Another short wait.

Again NO RESULTS appeared on the screen.

So much for a quick hit. Carlyle looked at the clock and realised it was way past Alice’s bedtime, so it looked as if he wouldn’t be seeing her this evening. Don’t rush it, he told himself. This could crack the whole thing open. He remembered the note: ‘not the first and not the last’. Someone mentioned in this database had to be connected to Blake. It was worth the effort to try to find them. He pulled his mobile out of his jacket and sent Helen a text saying that he would be working a while longer, before getting up and going for a piss. After fetching another coffee from the machine, he walked twice around the office to stretch his legs and clear his head, before returning to his desk.

Carlyle felt extremely tired but he forced himself to concentrate. ‘Third time lucky,’ he mumbled to himself, as he looked again at the scrawl on his pad. The handwriting was appalling, almost illegible even to himself. He flipped back to the newspaper story on the internet and ran his finger down the names, double-checking the spellings. With a groan, he realised that he’d missed one l out of the name Dellal. Quickly, he punched the correct spelling back into the database, and hit send. He was still cursing his carelessness when it popped up in front of him:

Dellal, George Edward Hazlett

DoB: 16/9/63

Deceased: 12/02/10

COD: multiple stab wounds

Investigating officer: S. Sparrow

Status: OPEN

‘Sam fucking Sparrow,’ Carlyle smiled, ‘come on down …’

Inspector Sam Sparrow worked out of the Enfield station in north London. He was a straightforward, no-nonsense policeman maybe five or six years younger than Carlyle, with almost as many commendations and considerably better career prospects. The two men had worked together in the late 1990s, when Sparrow had been leading an investigation into Turkish drug dealers in the Wood Green neighbourhood of north London. After the Turks had begun invading rivals’ turf to the east, Carlyle, stationed at Bethnal Green at the time, had been drawn into what became a violent and bloody mess, with body parts randomly strewn across both neighbourhoods. Sparrow had proved very easy to work with, and Carlyle had come out of six months’ hard slog with both a commendation and a promotion. For a while, he was on a roll. It even looked as if all his