Sins of the Fathers (21 page)

‘A super,
super
alpha male?’ Carlyle couldn’t resist.

Ignoring the jibe, Hutton began ostentatiously picking his nose. ‘There’s always someone higher up the pecking order than you, always.’ Rolling the snot into a ball, he flicked it across the table, missing Carlyle by a couple of inches. ‘And before you ask, no, I don’t know who it was.’

Returning home after his adventures in North London, Carlyle was relieved to find that his father had retreated back to his bedsit. It had occurred to him that his mother’s death would allow Alexander to return to the family flat in Fulham. On the other hand, the old fella had got used to his new digs over the last few years so maybe he should just stay put. Either way, it wasn’t going to be Carlyle’s problem.

Pulling a beer from the fridge, he padded into the living room and sat down. Next to the TV remote was a newsletter from Avalon, the medical aid charity where Helen worked. Taking a long pull on the beer, Carlyle scanned the main story:
More women die in childbirth in Afghanistan than anywhere else on the planet . . . alarmingly high rate of obstructed labour . . . chronic lack of midwives . . . the miles women are forced to walk to reach qualified healthcare.

A wave of infinite weariness washed over him. Last year, his wife had organized a family trip to Liberia to coincide with her work schedule. Carlyle had been less than enthusiastic. It was the first time he had been abroad since a package trip to Lanzarote almost a decade previously.

In the event, however, he had surprised himself by conducting himself with reasonably good grace. Now, from the safety of his European home, he could claim to have found it an educational, even a humbling experience. Not that he had any intention of ever going back.

As far as this year was concerned, he was expecting to revert to their usual week in Brighton. Boring but safe. An hour on the train, it was far enough away in his opinion.

Helen wouldn’t suggest going to bloody Afghanistan, surely?

As if on cue, his wife appeared in the doorway. Carlyle tossed the newsletter onto the coffee table and gestured for her to come and sit next to him. He had to admit she looked even more exhausted than he did. He knew he should get up and make her a cup of tea, but he couldn’t quite manage it. Instead, he watched as she dropped onto the sofa and grabbed his beer.

‘Bad day in the office?’

Helen finished the beer and handed him back the empty bottle. ‘Don’t ask.’ Then: ‘Thank you for getting your father pissed, by the way.’

Carlyle wanted to protest but thought better of it. He considered mentioning the Russian hookers but thought better of that too. ‘Sorry.’ He wanted to get another beer but his legs refused to stand him up.

‘The poor old soul,’ Helen sighed.

‘I think he’s bearing up quite well,’ Carlyle reflected.

Stretching out, Helen let him put an arm round her shoulder. ‘It’s just that genetic Scottish stoicism,’ she proclaimed.

‘Nothing wrong with that,’ said Carlyle somewhat defensively.

‘And another thing,’ Helen said out of the blue. ‘You have to go and see the priest.’

Carlyle forced himself up. ‘What?’

‘Father Wotjek Mac . . . Mac something at St Wulstan’s in Fulham.’

‘Who? What?’ On his feet now, he realized he was going to need that beer.

Pulling her mobile from the back pocket of her jeans, Helen scrolled down her text messages. ‘Mac–ius–zek. Maciuszek. He’s Polish.’

Carlyle felt his tiredness ratchet up a notch. ‘What the hell’s he got to do with anything?’ he snapped.

‘Alexander said your mother was Catholic.’

‘News to me.’ As far as he could recall, his mother had never expressed any religious beliefs of any sort. The woman had been far too . . . no-nonsense to believe in any of that kind of airy fairy, hocus pocus crap. ‘She certainly wasn’t a
Polish
Catholic.’

‘Plumbers, priests.’ Helen shrugged. ‘It’s what they do in Poland.’

‘Stereotyping a nation.’

Helen, who prided herself on being the most politically correct member of the family, shot him a sharp look. ‘There are worse things to be known for. Anyway, St Wulstan’s have agreed to conduct the funeral service and I assume that
you
weren’t proposing to shop around.’

‘Fair enough,’ Carlyle nodded. ‘I suppose we should be grateful that she didn’t express a desire to be buried back in Scotland.’

‘So you have to go and speak to the priest about what to say.’

Realizing that it would be too churlish to protest, Carlyle accept his allotted task.

‘I’ll text you the number. Don’t forget to give him a call.’

‘Of course not. Looks like we’ve got a wedding
and
a funeral to go to.’ He explained about Umar and Christina.

‘That’ll be nice,’ Helen smiled, ‘especially after all the other stuff.’ She gestured towards the kitchen. ‘Now go and get us both another beer.’

Joe Rowan leaned on the desk, playing a game called Angry Birds on his iPhone. His kids had shown him how to play it a week ago and now he was hooked.

‘Sarge?’

‘Huh?’ Rowan launched a bird from a slingshot, groaning when it missed the egg-stealing pig and smashed into a concrete slab.

‘
Sarge
.’

Reluctantly, the desk sergeant looked up to see WPC Sarah Williams standing in front of him. Williams was a good-looking girl but a bit thick. She also liked to complain. He warily looked the WPC up and down. Williams had married an accountant a year or so ago. Already, around the edges, you could see that she was beginning to go to seed. Rowan was surprised that she hadn’t popped out a sprog by now. An image of Williams and her bean counter trying to make a baby popped into his head and he smirked.

The WPC gave him a funny look. ‘What?’ she asked, the gormless Celtic accent overriding her Estuary English.

‘Er, nothing.’ Rowan pushed the image of a flushed and sweating Williams from his head and shuffled some papers on the desk in front of him. ‘What is it?’

Williams jerked a thumb over her shoulder. ‘There’s a bloke chained to the railings outside with a pair of handcuffs.’

‘Jesus,’ Rowan complained, ‘not another stag party, is it?’

‘He’s an old bloke.’

‘Old blokes get married too, stupid buggers.’

The landline sitting next to the computer on his desk started ringing. After some deliberation, Rowan picked it up.

‘Charing Cross . . . I see . . .’

Williams watched his face grow serious. He looked her up and down without any hint of his usual lasciviousness and she wondered what she had done wrong.

‘Can I have your name, please? Hello? Hello?’ Biting his lower lip, Rowan returned the receiver to the cradle and began bashing at the keyboard next to the screen. A member of the public, fed up at the delay in being seen, knocked on the glass doors that separated the desk from the waiting room.

Not looking up, Rowan hit the keys harder.

The man banged on the door with his fist.

Williams gave him the hardest glare she could manage. ‘We’ll be with you as soon as possible,
sir
,’ She turned back to the desk, leaning forward to try to see what was on the screen.

‘What is it?’

Taking a half-step backwards, Rowan scratched his head for the longest time.

‘Sarge?’

‘The guy chained to the railings,’ Rowan said finally, ‘did he have any ID on him?’

‘I dunno,’ Williams shrugged. ‘I haven’t gone through his pockets. He’s really pissed off. Keeps swearing at me in all kinds of different languages.’

‘Okay. Call the Fire Brigade. Get them to free him and then you bring him in here. I need to talk to him.’

Refreshed by eight hours of solid kip, it was a relatively cheery Inspector Carlyle who bowled up on the third floor of Charing Cross police station well before 8 a.m. He was surprised to find his sergeant already at his desk.

‘Another restless night?’

‘Savage is looking for you,’ Umar grunted, not looking up from his copy of the
Metro
.

‘Has he found Collingwood yet?’

‘Nope.’

Well he can sod off then
, the inspector thought with a deliberate lack of charity. ‘Simpson will be pleased.’

Umar slurped noisily from a large mug of tea. On the side was the legend:
World
’
s Best Dad
.

You’re getting a bit ahead of yourself there, sunshine
, Carlyle thought. He wasn’t big on superstition but he would like to see the baby out safe and sound before Umar started flaunting his parenting skills. ‘She’s got other things to worry about.’

‘Huh?’

Umar turned the paper so that his boss could see the story he was reading. The headline read:
NAMED AND SHAMED
. ‘Eight hundred people outed Dino Mottram online as one of the people who’d got a super-injunction,’ Umar grinned.

Even squinting, Carlyle couldn’t read the text of the piece, so he retreated to his chair.

‘Yes, indeed,’ Umar continued. ‘Mr Carole Simpson has been revealed as the quote unquote “leading businessman” who entertained three ladies of the night while on a business trip to Dublin, pleasuring himself with a state-of-the-art sex toy while conducting a board meeting over the telephone.’

Carlyle thought about that for a moment. ‘What’s a “state-of-the-art sex toy”?’

Umar scanned the remainder of the article. ‘That is not explained.’

‘Probably just as well. Poor old Simpson. She really does know how to pick ’em.’

‘I guess her wedding is off then,’ Umar mused.

‘I guess so. But you never know, stranger things have happened.’

‘Simpson’s never going to put up with something like that.’

‘Probably not.’ Not really caring one way or another, Carlyle was distracted by the sight of Angie Middleton puffing up the stairs. Middleton really was a big girl and the effort looked considerable. By the time she reached his desk, the inspector was worried that she was about to have a stroke.

‘Lift not working?’ he smirked.

Shaking her head, Middleton wiped a bead of sweat from her brow. ‘Exercise regime,’ she panted.

Carlyle glanced at Umar but his sergeant had returned to his paper.

‘Don’t overdo it, will you?’ From the look of her, there was no danger of that. He tried – and failed – to imagine what a thin Angie Middleton might look like.

Finally she recovered her breath enough to speak. ‘I was looking for you.’

Here we go
, Carlyle thought. Suddenly he didn’t feel so refreshed. ‘Simpson?’

‘No.’ Unable to stand any longer, Middleton perched on the edge of his desk. His personal space wasn’t so much infringed as obliterated. ‘Do you remember a guy called Fassbender?’

Pushing himself back in his chair, Carlyle squinted at her the way you might squint at an eclipse of the sun. ‘Paul Fassbender? Yeah, I remember him. Long time ago. Really long time ago. What about him?’

Middleton shifted her weight from one enormous buttock to another. ‘He’s downstairs. In one of my cells.’

Carlyle did not have to repair to the Archives to dig out any decaying files or reread any yellowing notes to recall Paul Fassbender. The case had not been an important moment in his career, nor had it taken up a huge amount of his time. It had been neither triumph nor disaster. It was not even an experience that resonated with him at the time. But the details had stayed with him. In fact, its place in his memory had grown over time. Now, it was one of those cases that he knew that he would remember long after he had retired. More than that, it was one of those cases that had shaped both how he thought about himself and how he viewed the world around him.

Fassbender had been a German doctor working for the National Health Service at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington. During his time in London, he started a relationship with a married woman called Samantha Sands.

When Fassbender returned to Germany, Samantha went with him. After a tug of war with her husband, their thirteen-year-old daughter, Lillian, went too.

It took Carlyle a moment to recall the husband’s name.

Daniel.

Daniel Sands.

For the unfortunate Daniel Sands, the nightmare was just beginning.

After a year living at Fassbender’s home near Munich, Lillian died suddenly. She had spent the day horse-riding. The coroner declared that the cause of death was an overdose of sleeping tablets. However, there was evidence of sexual activity. Daniel Sands, convinced that Lilian had been raped and drugged by her stepfather, began a campaign to have Fassbender charged with her murder. For her part, Samantha had stood by Fassbender, claiming that her ex-husband was delusional.

Carlyle could still recall the first time he had seen Daniel Sands, a small and crumpled figure in a creased suit, his tie at half-mast standing in Bethnal Green police station. The contrast with the man standing next to him, his lawyer, Martin Gevorkyan, couldn’t have been greater. The second-generation Armenian, tall and imposing in a crisp navy suit, radiated calm and authority. Sands radiated defeat and despair.

Gevorkyan’s office was next to one of the last remaining Second World War bombsites on the Mile End Road. He had made his name as a defence lawyer who was not scared of representing some of the most notorious criminal bosses in the East End. That he had taken Sands on as a client was really quite surprising. So too was his passion for the case. Gevorkyan was a man not known for taking anything too seriously, accepting victory and defeat in the courtroom with the same rueful smile. In this instance, however, he fought his way grimly through a succession of hearings for the best part of two years until he found a judge at the Royal Courts of Justice who would issue an international warrant for Fassbender’s arrest.

Back then, John Carlyle had reached the rank of sergeant. He was doing a short and unhappy stint on the front desk at Bethnal Green. When Gevorkyan marched his client into the police station and demanded that the warrant be immediately executed, Carlyle had been the only officer willing to schlep over to Germany and bring Fassbender back. For his trouble, he got to spend three days wandering around Munich before being told off by a stern judge who ruled that the warrant was invalid and declared that he was wasting the court’s precious time. Sergeant Carlyle never even clapped eyes on the good doctor. Indeed, it was only when he returned to England that it was properly explained to him that the Germans had refused to extradite Fassbender on the grounds that a Munich court had already dismissed the case due to lack of evidence.