Never Apologise, Never Explain - James Craig [61]
In short, he was not your average criminal.
At the heart of this success was a very pragmatic attitude to money. Dominic never spelled it out, but Carlyle was vaguely aware that he handed over a very high proportion of his take to his key suppliers, in exchange for protection. ‘I’m kind of freelance, kind of not,’ he once told Carlyle, ‘kind of independent, kind of not. Basically, they outsource this part of their operation to me. It’s like anything else – if I’m quicker, cheaper and less hassle, I get the job.’
Pragmatic and self-aware himself, Carlyle recognised that they had a lot in common. Indeed, there were many things about Dominic Silver that the inspector genuinely liked. Over the years, Dominic had shed his cheeky-chappy demeanour and become more serious. He had obtained a degree in Business and Management from Queen Mary College, and with his greying shoulder-length hair and rimless spectacles, he looked like a writer or an academic or maybe the keyboard player in some soft rock outfit like Genesis. For someone with a net worth that was probably heading towards fifty million, Dom enjoyed a very down-to-earth lifestyle. He wasn’t bling and kept an extremely low profile. He didn’t do drugs. He didn’t smoke, and only took the occasional drink. He went to the gym regularly and kept himself in shape – although he was almost six feet tall, he couldn’t weigh much more than seventy kilos.
In short, their relationship was both stable and cordial. It wasn’t complicated, but it wasn’t very clear either. Neither of them would necessarily have wanted to create it if it didn’t already exist, but they could both see its advantages as well as its drawbacks. Of course, Carlyle could never go after him, even if he wanted to: he would be compromised by the favours that Dominic had done for him in the past. But he was confident that he was not alone in that regard; for years, the rumour was that Silver had some fairly serious protection even further up the food chain, both inside the Met and outside. He also had a close-knit inner circle of advisers which Carlyle would join on an ad hoc basis, as part of the unspoken quid pro quo for Dominic’s help whenever he needed it.
Carlyle felt very ambivalent about their relationship. If someone chose to use it against him, he knew what it could do to his career and to his family. That did cause him concern, but the reality was that it was too late to do anything about it now.
Carlyle watched Dominic fiddle with his phone. Finally finding the clip he wanted, he hit the play button. ‘There’s a lot of crap at the beginning, but the party piece is worth waiting for.’
‘Mm.’ Dominic offered him the phone. ‘Go on, take a look.’
Taking the handset, Carlyle watched Alice race off through the middle of someone’s football game, followed by Tom and Oliver. He turned and eyed the video jerking across the mobile’s tiny screen, without focusing on it. In his book, phones were meant for voice calls. Since when did everyone suddenly need to make their own videos? He glanced back at the kids to make sure that they were not straying too far. ‘What’s that?’ he asked.
‘It’s a guy called Jerome Sullivan.’
‘Who’s he?’
‘He is – was – in the same business as me. Not really a competitor, but I’d met him a couple of times.’
‘What happened to him?’ Carlyle asked, wary now that they had moved on to business.
‘He shot himself in the head,’ said Dominic, amused.
‘What?’ Carlyle scrutinised the handset. ‘He filmed himself committing suicide? I didn’t think that people in your line of work tended to suffer from depression.’
‘Not exactly,’ Dominic grinned. ‘He was showing off to a mate and didn’t realise there was a round still in the breech.’
Carlyle watched Jerome put the gun to his head. ‘Darwinism in action.’
‘That isn’t what killed him, though,’ said Dominic cheerily. ‘The bullet kind of bounced off his skull and missed his brain.