Never Apologise, Never Explain - James Craig [31]
‘Inspector, it’s Amelia Jacobs.’
Shit. He could immediately tell from the tension in her voice that it wasn’t good news. ‘Hi.’
‘That bastard’s taken Jake.’
That bastard. Michael Hagger. The bloke he was supposed to talk to. The bloke he was supposed to sort out.
‘He picked him up from the nursery.’
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
‘I was ten minutes late,’ her voice cracked slightly, ‘and they were gone.’
‘Uhuh.’ The inspector kicked out at the coffee-table in frustration. You fucking idiot, he told himself, why didn’t you just warn the guy off? They were depending on you.
‘John?’ Helen gave him a quizzical look but he just shook his head.
‘It’s been on the TV,’ Amelia continued.
Not the kind of stuff we’ve been watching, Carlyle thought angrily.
‘On the news,’ she explained.
‘Yes.’
‘God knows what will happen to that poor boy. You’ve got to get him back.’
He took a moment to compose himself. ‘Who’s in charge of trying to find him?’ Amelia gave him a name. ‘Okay,’ Carlyle sighed, ‘I’ll have a word and see what I can find out.’
‘You were supposed to have a word with Michael,’ she snapped.
‘I know, I know, I know,’ he said sharply. ‘Let me see what I can do. I will get back to you asap. Sit tight. It will be okay.’ Not waiting for a reply, he ended the call.
‘What’s the matter?’ Helen asked.
‘The matter is,’ he groaned, ‘I’ve fucked up.’ As he said it, the mobile started vibrating again in his hand. ‘Shit!’ He lifted the handset to his ear. ‘Amelia . . .’ He tried not to sound too exasperated.
‘Inspector Carlyle?’
Carlyle recognised the voice and his heart sank even further. For the second time in less than five minutes, he should have let the call go to voicemail. ‘Yes?’
‘It’s Rosanna Snowdon.’
Snowdon was a presenter on the local BBC News in London. Their paths had crossed on a previous case and Carlyle owed her a favour, maybe more than one, after she had introduced him to the politician Edgar Carlton. Two years earlier, when he had still been the Leader of the Opposition, Carlton had been caught up in a nasty little case involving rape and murder. Snowdon, a family friend of the Carltons, had facilitated an introduction for Carlyle. Later, when the whole thing had come to a messy, inconclusive end, she had probably saved what remained of Edgar’s career by stopping him from trying to air the story in the media.
Largely untouched by any hint of scandal, Carlton had gone on to become Prime Minister after a landslide election victory. Snowdon, meanwhile, was building her media career at a steady rate. As well as the local news, she now presented a weekly show called London Crime, which did reconstructions of unresolved cases around the capital and appealed to the public for help in solving them. A few months earlier, the show had featured one of Carlyle’s cases, a particularly vicious mugging of a young mother in Lincoln’s Inn Fields which had been linked to a series of other attacks in and around the Holborn area. Snowdon had asked Carlyle to come on the show, but he felt embarrassed about begging for people’s help on television, and had sent Joe instead. The piece generated seventy phone calls and no sensible leads. The amount of police time that had been wasted as a result was too big for Carlyle to even think about trying to calculate it.
The case, of course, remained unsolved.
Carlyle was extremely uncomfortable about owing Snowdon a favour. As far as he was concerned, she was a user – a hustler who saw every item, every victim, as another step towards a celebrity presenter gig on national television, a rich banker husband and regular exposure in Hello magazine. But, however he felt about it, owe her he certainly did.
‘How are you?’ he asked, trying to inject some interest into his voice.
‘I wondered if I could talk to you about something,’ she said, not bothering with any preamble. ‘Maybe we could have a coffee together?’
‘This