Shoot to Kill (7 page)

Gasparino shrugged. ‘It’s going.’

Withers smacked him on the shoulder. ‘Chin up, my man. It’s another day closer to going home.’

Gasparino smiled. ‘Yes, indeed.’

‘Thing is,’ Withers stared into the middle distance, ‘as soon as you get home, you wanna get back.’

‘Tell me about it.’ The realization that he would miss all this – seriously miss it – was like a nervous ache in his stomach. Gasparino hoped that the baby would make that feeling go away, or at least give him something else to think about and make it more manageable.

Withers rubbed the heel of his left boot into the dirt. ‘I mean, this shit can be boring, but when it’s exciting, it’s really fucking exciting.’ He turned to Gasparino. ‘Know what I mean?’

‘I do.’

‘It’s a great fucking buzz.’

‘Yeah,’ Gasparino said almost wistfully.

Withers took a packet of Camel cigarettes from his jacket pocket, offering one to Gasparino, who refused.

Withers pulled a cigarette from the pack with his teeth, lit it and took a deep drag. ‘So,’ he said, exhaling the smoke through his nose, ‘will you be coming back?’

‘Me? Nope.’ Gasparino shook his head. ‘This really is my last time.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You’re not coming back?’

‘That is correct. I’m not coming back.’

Grinning, Withers sucked down another mouthful of smoke. ‘Wanna have a little bet on that?’

Men, couples, singles, groups – all welcome!

Carlyle read the sign and yawned. It was late and he was of the firm belief that he should have been in bed hours ago. Everton’s Gentleman’s Club was maybe a two-minute walk from his flat and he felt a strong temptation to keep on walking. Inside, the inevitable commotion had kicked up as the police went in and started asking people to prove their identities. Almost immediately, a couple of customers slipped out, middle-aged businessmen, eyes glued to the pavement, the looks on their faces suggesting a mixture of frustration and embarrassment. After watching them slink round the corner and disappear into the hustle and bustle of Kingsway, the inspector turned his gaze to the girl standing in the doorway. She was wearing a lime-green Puffa jacket over a white blouse, with the shortest skirt he had ever seen showing off her black suspenders to good effect, as well as the goosebumps on her thighs. In her Ferrari-red stilettos, she still only came up to his chin.

‘ID?’ he asked.

Shivering against the cold, she shook her head.

‘No papers?’

‘No understand,’ she lied lazily, making no effort to try and be convincing, in an accent that suggested she came from somewhere east of the Danube. Belatedly, he thought that maybe they should have brought a translator.

‘Where are you from?’ he said slowly, sounding like an English tourist abroad.

Wiping her nose on the sleeve of her jacket, she took a tentative step towards him, glancing quickly inside. ‘Caledonian Road.’

For fuck’s sake
, Carlyle thought,
why do I bother?
He took a pile of flyers from her hand. ‘You go inside,’ he said slowly, gesturing with his thumb, ‘and get something that proves who you are. Passport, driver’s licence, something like that . . .’

Still shivering, she stood her ground.

‘Show it to one of the officers,’ Carlyle continued.
And put some proper clothes on
, he thought. ‘Now!’

Reluctantly, the girl finally went into the club. Even more reluctantly, Carlyle followed her. Inside, the place was almost empty. A couple of punters sat at their tables, drinking in silent amusement as the police went about their business. The sound system had been turned down to a respectable level and the house lights had been turned up, allowing him to appreciate the full splendour of Everton’s somewhat gothic decor.

Carlyle looked at the Harlequin Contour pattern wallpaper in brown and salmon pink and tutted. ‘Surely this kind of stuff went out of fashion in the 1970s,’ he quipped, gesturing at the wallpaper, to a small, pretty WPC standing by the bar.

‘I wouldn’t know, sir,’ the girl deadpanned. ‘I wasn’t born then.’

Ignoring the mischievous twinkle in the WPC’s eye, the inspector turned his attention to the matter in hand. It appeared that Sergeant Bishop had divided the staff into ‘talent’ and the rest. Along one wall, a group of gentlemen – oversized bouncers and undersized barmen – had been lined up while Bishop and a couple of the other WPCs went through their documents. On the other side of the room, a larger group of officers were slowly processing the strippers, none of whom were wearing more than a G-string and heels.

Trying not to make his gawping too obvious, Carlyle scanned the latter line, making random notes in his head as he did so. There were two black girls, two white and one Asian. All had effortlessly adopted the kind of generic bored-hostile look that Carlyle saw day in, day out from just about every member of the public that came into contact with the police.

When the Asian girl, who had the best, most natural-looking figure, caught Carlyle staring at her chest, he quickly looked away, feeling himself blush as he did so. His gaze turned to the far end of the room, where the small stage, lifted barely six inches off the ground, was empty.

‘Get on with it!’ shouted one of the punters, a stocky young guy in a suit, as he slammed an empty beer schooner down on the table.

Bishop stepped towards the guy’s table. ‘Shut it,’ he warned, ‘or you’ll be under arrest.’

A look of indignation flashed across the young man’s face. ‘For what?’ he said belligerently.

‘Oh, I’ll think of something,’ Bishop growled.

Carlyle smiled. He liked the sergeant’s style. Bishop was a relatively new arrival from some station out east; the Isle of Dogs’ loss would be Charing Cross’s gain. He wondered about asking Simpson to assign Bishop to work with him on a more regular basis. That decision, however, had already been made.

Not knowing when to stay schtum, the man was about to talk himself into a cell when there was an almighty commotion from the back of the stage. One of the officers, a young PC called Lea, came sprawling through a doorway, holding his nose as blood poured from it. ‘I’ve been hit!’ he groaned, stumbling over the edge of the stage and falling flat on his face. The laughter that rolled round the room was quickly followed by gasps of amazement as a raven-haired Amazon followed the hapless Lea through the door. Easily six foot tall, she was completely naked apart from a pair of incredibly high stilettoes.

Those look very classy
, thought Carlyle, impressed.
And she’s gone to town with the Philips Ladyshave
. A true professional.

In her hand, the woman had some kind of cosh. With an angry flourish, she brandished it at Lea. ‘C’mon, you bastard!’ she screamed, in what seemed to Carlyle to be some kind of American accent. ‘Come and get another thrashing.’ Whimpering, Lea sought refuge under a nearby table.

Finally tearing his eyes away, Carlyle looked at his troops. Those
that weren’t mesmerized were drooling. ‘Okay,’ he sighed, gesturing to Bishop, ‘that’s enough. Take them all in. We’ll sort this out at the station.’ Swivelling on his heel, he walked straight into a man in a baseball cap with a large video camera on his shoulder. ‘Who the fucking hell are you?’ he barked.

The guy readjusted his cap and kept filming. ‘Danny Craven, Scattered Flowers Productions.’

‘What?’

Keeping his eye glued to the viewfinder, Craven pulled a crumpled business card from the back pocket of his jeans and thrust it towards Carlyle. ‘Content providers for the Mayor’s website.’

Reluctantly taking the card, the inspector weighed it in his hand as if it was a piece of desiccated dog shit. Several thoughts passed through his mind, none of them pleasant. ‘Fuck that,’ he said, striding towards the door. ‘Sergeant Bishop! You can arrest this stupid fucker as well.’

‘Sure thing,’ said Bishop with a smile.

Sticking to his task, Craven went in for a close-up on the belligerent stripper.

‘Good man!’ Carlyle shoved Craven’s card into his jacket pocket. Over his shoulder, he gave the troops a regal wave. ‘I’ll see you back at Agar Street.’
After
, he said to himself,
I’ve had a decent kip
.

Another day, another dollar. Wiping the sweat from his brow, Adrian Gasparino watched as a small contingent of Afghan National Army soldiers entered the compound, looking like a bunch of schoolkids on a day out. As far as he knew, they hadn’t been expecting any ANA, but that didn’t mean much – they had a habit of just showing up.

Given that the ANA were usually quite good at arriving in places where there wasn’t going to be any fighting, he was happy enough to see them. Maybe this would be a quiet day at the office for all of them. He counted a dozen of them as they stood aimlessly in a group about twenty feet from where he was sitting. None of them looked older than about fourteen; they were small, stick-thin, their uniforms several sizes too big, with hollow cheeks and dead eyes. Gasparino
sighed. The idea that the coalition forces could train these boys to take the place of professional soldiers was just another of the fantasies you had to believe in if you were to try and convince yourself that this was a war worth fighting and that the billions of dollars’ of weapons, equipment and aid thrown at the locals had been money well spent.

The British Prime Minister, a feckless ex-public schoolboy by the name of Edgar Carlton, had recently said that the 10,000 British troops in Afghanistan could start withdrawing from as early as next year. British commanders were under ever-greater pressure to talk up the ANA and its ability to take over responsibility for security in the country. The 146,000 trained ‘Afghan warriors’ had to be praised at all times. Gasparino had been particularly amused by the comments of the Commanding Officer of Task Force Helmand Brigade Advisory Group at one press conference: ‘They are brave in the fight. They are willing to tackle the insurgents head on and they are astute and shrewd in their judgement when they are dealing with the local population.’

If the embedded hacks had taken the comments at face value, the soldiers had been somewhat more sceptical. ‘Bollocks,’ had been the sergeant’s mumbled response. ‘I wouldn’t want those bastards watching my back.’

Most of the ANA soldiers carried M-16 assault rifles, although Gasparino noticed a couple carried AK-74s, weapons left over from the days when the Soviets had been fighting here. One of them had a 7.62mm, M240 machine gun slung over his shoulder. All of them looked jumpy, although that was the usual state for members of the ANA. Gasparino noticed that a couple of them were holding hands, ‘man love’ being Standard Operating Procedure in the ANA. He shook his head, mumbling the local Afghan saying to himself: ‘
Women are for children, boys are for pleasure
.’ It was accepted that many Pashtun men were
bacha baz
– ‘boy players’. Like his colleagues, Gasparino had been shocked by the tradition of Afghan men taking boys, some as young as eight or nine, as lovers. In Kandahar, on an earlier tour, he had been to a dance
party where boys of around nine dressed up as girls, with make-up and bells on their feet, performing for leering middle-aged men who threw money at them before whisking them off for sex. One of the unit’s translators, Rahmatullah, had explained to him that it was down to Islamic law. Women – covered from head to foot – are invisible and unapproachable. It is commonly accepted that Afghan men cannot talk to an unrelated woman until
after
they have proposed marriage. ‘How can you fall in love if you can’t see her face?’ Rahmatullah asked. ‘We can see the boys, so we can tell which ones are beautiful.’

‘But,’ Gasparino frowned, ‘doesn’t Islamic law also forbid homosexuality?’

‘We don’t love them,’ Rahmatullah shrugged, ‘we just have sex with them.’

‘Bloody hell!’ Gasparino laughed nervously. ‘You make it sound like the Catholic Church.’

Rahmatullah gave him a confused look.

‘Never mind.’

‘Are you after a boy yourself?’

‘Er, no thanks.’ Gasparino felt himself blush violently as he beat a hasty retreat back to the camp.

It was a conversation that Gasparino had played over in his head many times. However you looked at it, the set-up was basically institutionalized child abuse. He was all for religious tolerance, but couldn’t get past the fact that many aspects of the treatment of children and women here were just plain wrong. He thought about what his own family life would be like – a world away from this – and felt more confused than ever about what he was supposed to be doing here. The whole situation made him hugely uneasy – but he had no idea what he could do about it.

He watched as one of the sergeants, Spencer Spanner, wandered over to the ANA’s commanding officer, a lieutenant who was still too young to be able to grow a proper beard, shook hands and started talking. There was the usual gesturing and waving, head-scratching and grinning as Spanner explained about the day’s operation
and tried to get to the bottom of just what exactly it was that the ANA were up to. Gasparino felt a wave of nostalgia wash over him. Spanner was a great bloke; he would miss him, back in England. Closing his eyes, his mind wandered to the shower he would have back at camp. After that he would try and call Justine, leaving it as late as possible, in case today was the date of her scan.

The receptionist had disappeared without a trace. Sitting in the empty waiting room, with nothing on the off-white walls, Roche looked around for something to read. But there were no pamphlets, no magazines to browse, not so much as a copy of yesterday’s
Standard
or today’s
Metro
. The idea was that you just sat there and contemplated your fate.

What was Dr Wolf’s first name?
She had no idea and, somewhat disappointingly for a police officer, no real curiosity either. Wolf was not someone she saw as ‘helping’ her situation; rather he was just another part of the bureaucratic maze that she had to negotiate, in order to continue with her professional life.

The question of the guy’s name fluttered across her brain as she was trying to focus on other, more important things. Or maybe less important things. Different things. Alison Roche had seen the psychiatrist, once before and once after her arrival in SO15. Those had been routine meetings. This, most definitely, was not.