London Calling - James Craig [94]
‘Good session?’ Joe asked.
‘Not bad,’ Carlyle mumbled, in a way that he hoped said ‘Food first, talk later’.
Plastered on the wall beside them were flyers announcing all different kinds of classes, from Kendo to Russian Military Fitness (Train the Red Army way, with genuine Spetsnaz instructors!) to Hot Bikram Yoga. There were also adverts for a number of one-on-one personal training services. One ad fascinated and appalled him in equal measure. ‘You’re never too old for a six-pack’, it proclaimed, over a stunning black-and-white picture of a smiling guy in his sixties with a set of abs of such perfect definition that they defied belief. Not for the first time, he felt awestruck and oppressed at the same time.
Tired, wired and not particularly impressed with his boss’s apparent lack of interest in communicating, Joe tried to rouse Carlyle from his thoughts. ‘Did you get to speak to Carlton?’
‘Yeah,’ said Carlyle, feeling the post-exercise hunger kick in now, and hoping that his food would hurry up. ‘For about ten seconds. The Rt Hon Edgar Carlton MP, Leader of the Opposition, told me he would deign to see me later.’
‘When?’ Joe asked.
Carlyle adopted what he hoped was his most philosophical demeanour. ‘I have absolutely no idea.’
Joe frowned. ‘Does he actually realise just how serious this is?’
‘Does he care, more to the point?’ Carlyle asked. ‘These people all see this as our problem, not theirs. They have other priorities, and they’re certainly not working to our timetable.’
Joe lowered his voice slightly. ‘But we are talking about multiple murders here.’
Carlyle glanced around. The actor was still gossiping away with one of the weightlifters. ‘I don’t notice that the world has stopped turning.’
‘Have you spoken to Simpson about it?’
‘I’ve left her a message, but what’s she going to do?’ Carlyle shrugged. ‘Probably, the way she sees it is that she works for them, we work for her. Who’s the dog here and who’s the tail? This is one of those situations where we’re just supposed to sit tight and do what we’re bloody told.’ The endorphins were fast wearing off and he felt a whole new type of fatigue. A good I’ve-got-off-my-arse-and-done-something type of fatigue, but a fatigue nevertheless. ‘Anyway, how was Cambridge?’
Finally receiving his cue, Joe took up two pieces of paper that had been resting on his lap and handed them over. One of them was a copy of the photo they had seen so early in the morning at Horseferry Road car park. Carlyle, in fact, had another copy of the same picture in his pocket, which had been emailed over by Matt Parkin, the sergeant handling the Nicholas Hogarth crime scene, just before Carlyle had left the station. The other item was a short newspaper article, consisting of a single column underneath a photograph. It was no more than maybe a hundred and fifty or two hundred words. Carlyle scanned it, glanced at Joe, and perused it again, more slowly.
By the time Carlyle had finished reading it the second time, his order had arrived. Thanking the waitress, he drained half of the orange juice and took a bite from the hummus wrap.
‘It’s the same guy,’ said Joe.
Carlyle chewed carefully and swallowed. ‘Certainly looks like it.’
‘Could even be a cropped version of the same photo?’
Carlyle looked again. ‘Yes, it could,’ he agreed. The photo featured in the newspaper was a head-and-shoulders shot with a clear sky in the background. It wasn’t great quality, but it looked very much as if it had been copied from the same photo left behind the windscreen wiper of Nicholas Hogarth’s Range Rover.
‘The article comes from the Cambridge University newspaper,’ said Joe. ‘It was published in April 1985, almost a year after our friends sat their finals.’
In order to appear suitably impressed, Carlyle read the story a third time:
Student Suicide Tragedy
Family and friends of Robert Ashton