‘OK, so he’s looking for his dear old ma. The question is, why?’
‘Because he’s her son.’ Taking a large bite out of the apple, the sergeant watched the Astra get overtaken by a minibus full of football fans. Clocking Elmhirst, they treated her to a series of obscene gestures as they edged past in the outside lane. As they pulled in front of the Astra, she flipped them the finger and was rewarded by an unflinching view of the chalky cheeks of one of the fat bastards in the back row. Elmhirst and Gapper giggled in unison, much to the inspector’s irritation.
‘For Pete’s sake.’ He felt like a schoolteacher on a fifth-form school trip.
Letting the minibus accelerate way from them, Gapper kept his eyes on the road. Elmhirst took another bite of her apple. ‘People are funny when it comes to these type of things. Maybe he wants a tearful reunion or something?’
‘He’s not making much of a job of it, anyway.’
Devouring the apple core, Elmhirst dropped the stalk back into her bag. ‘What’s happened to the woman, by the way – the one that Kortmann thought was really Tosches?’
‘Barbara Hutton?’ Carlyle sniffed. ‘There’s still no sign of her or her husband.’ Conscious that his ‘to do’ list was getting ever longer, he made a mental note to check in with the daughter when they got back to London. ‘They’ll turn up.’
‘In Paraguay,’ Elmhirst ventured. ‘In twenty years’ time, or something.’
‘That was the Nazis, who fled to Latin America,’ Carlyle corrected her. ‘Tosches was a leftie.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘You know what I mean.’
Not really, he thought coolly. Turning his attention to Gapper, he gestured at the road in front of them. ‘How far away are we from this place, Joel?’
The driver looked at the sat nav. ‘Should be about another forty minutes, I reckon.’
Elmhirst looked round at him expectantly. ‘So what’s the plan when we get there, boss?’
Good question, Carlyle thought, saying aloud: ‘I’m working on it.’
THIRTY-FOUR
Letting the car coast to a halt at the side of the road, Gapper switched off the headlights. For several moments, the three of them sat in silence.
‘Is this it?’ Carlyle stared out into the darkness. ‘There’s nothing here.’
The driver gestured down the single-lane road and into the night. ‘According to the sat nav, it is 750 metres further on.’
‘What is?’ the inspector asked with a sense of foreboding. He’d had more than his fill of pastoral adventures the last time around.
‘It’s a housing development called Voisin Towers,’ Elmhirst explained.
‘But it’s in the middle of nowhere,’ Carlyle argued. ‘You can even see the stars in the sky.’
‘It was supposed to be elegant living for commuters,’ the sergeant continued, ‘a proposed total of 350 units – 230 flats and 120 houses – at prices of up to £1.8 million.’
‘Nearly two million quid? Out here?’ Carlyle made a disgusted sound. ‘Bloody hell, those are almost London prices.’
‘You know what it’s like with the housing market,’ Elmhirst said. ‘Everyone talks it up and up – and then it crashes.’
‘Yeah, I suppose so.’ Carlyle gave silent thanks to his late father-in-law, who had conveniently keeled over, leaving Helen a small but cosy ex-council flat in Covent Garden. If it wasn’t for that, they would have probably ended up living miles away from the centre of the city.
‘The developer went bust in the crash. One day, everyone was working away as normal and the next they just never came back. The place is owned by a consortium of banks. It was number six on a list of the top fifty worst speculative developments in the UK. No one thinks it will ever be finished. The council is trying to get it demolished and returned to green fields, but the banks don’t want to pay the twenty million that it is expected to cost. The whole thing is a bit of a mess, really.’
‘You don’t say. But how did they get planning permission in the first place? Aren’t they supposed to protect the Green Belt from this sort of thing?’
‘There’s an investigation into that, apparently. The local paper ran a campaign.’ Releasing her seatbelt, Elmhirst opened the door and got out of the car, while the inspector struggled out of the back of the Astra. Gapper, who seemed perfectly happy to stay behind the wheel, did not move.
Dressed in a pair of skinny jeans, black Converse All Stars and a black leather biker’s jacket at least two sizes too big for her, the sergeant looked like one of the cool teenagers on the way to the village disco. Stuffing her hand in her pockets, she set off along the gentle incline. The inspector, definitely not one of the cool kids, lagged a respectful distance behind.
After a couple of minutes, Elmhirst came to a stop. Once Carlyle had caught up, she pointed at the vaguest of shapes in the distance. Squinting, the inspector could make out a feeble splash of light coming from one of them.
‘That’s Voisin Towers,’ she told him. ‘Kortmann’s credit card was used yesterday at a petrol station three miles down the road. The CCTV shows that it was used by Gregori, aka Popp.’
‘Not very clever,’ Carlyle murmured, his mind already focusing on the shoeing that was going to be coming Marcus Popp’s way once he caught up with him.
‘He’s obviously under a lot of stress.’
‘We’re all under a lot of stress.’ He glanced back at the Astra. Gapper was happily ensconced inside, eating a Mars Bar and reading a newspaper; he didn’t look like he was under any stress at all.
‘With his mum and everything,’ Elmhirst ventured, ‘Marcus is under more stress than most.’
‘We don’t even know if she is his mum,’ Carlyle reminded her. ‘In fact, the more I understand about both of these two comedians, Popp and Kortmann, the less likely I am to believe anything that comes out of their respective mouths. I’m coming to the conclusion that poor old Barbara Hutton is nothing more than a posh Bloomsbury housewife with a rather unappealing husband.’
‘But we have to confirm that.’
‘Yes, we have to confirm that.’ Fumbling in his jacket pocket, Carlyle pulled out his glasses, slipped them on and scanned the horizon. Quickly deciding that the glasses weren’t helping him see any better, he put them back in his pocket. ‘So, to recap, Popp used the credit card not far from here.’
‘We got a copy of the receipt for his shopping: battery-operated lamps, blankets, a gas stove – like he was going camping or something.’
Once again, Carlyle peered into the distance. ‘Which brought us to this place.’
‘Which brought us to this place,’ she echoed.
‘Because it’s not as if there are any other places they could go camping.’
‘He doesn’t have a tent,’ Elmhirst said. ‘At least, not as far as we know.’
‘Jesus. It’s all a bit thin.’
‘Simpson was very keen that we check it out,’ Elmhirst told him.
‘Yes, she was, wasn’t she? Very keen indeed.’
‘Maybe she knows something that we don’t.’
‘Perhaps. But that’s not really her style. The Commander is usually quite open. In my experience, she is very much a team player.’
Elmhirst grinned. ‘You like her, don’t you?’
‘We work well together,’ was all Carlyle would concede before he resumed his stroll down the road. ‘For whatever reason, she wants the place checked out, so I suppose we’d better go down there and get on with it.’
The two of them approached the ghost estate at a gentle pace, each lost in their own thoughts. For no apparent reason, Carlyle’s mind had turned to thoughts of 1980s music in general and Echo amp; the Bunnymen in particular. The chorus of ‘Villiers Terrace’ started playing on a loop in his head, growing in intensity with each repetition until he finally expelled it. Good band, he thought. They should have been more successful than they were. He wondered if, like everyone else, they had re-formed in recent years, to try and make some money on the nostalgia circuit. He vowed to find out; maybe he could persuade Alice to go to a gig with him.