London Calling by James Craig

Author:James Craig
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781849019668
Publisher: Robinson Publishing
Published: 2011-05-26T00:00:00+00:00

NINETEEN

Southwark, London, November 1985

Halfway between the Elephant and Castle and London Bridge, PC John Carlyle sat by the window in an all-night greasy spoon café, staring into space. The place was run by a Lebanese family who had escaped the civil war in Beirut five years earlier. After months patrolling the local streets of Southwark, the young constable wasn’t sure that they’d made the right choice.

Sitting on the opposite side of the table, his partner of the last three weeks, Constable Kevin Slater, an amiable idiot from Manchester, shoved a bacon roll into his mouth and began chewing noisily. Staring into his empty coffee cup, Carlyle tried to ignore the brown sauce that was trickling down Slater’s chin and dripping on to his uniform. The pair of them were six hours into a ten-hour shift. Once it was over, Carlyle would have three days off. Not just any three days, because a crucial weekend loomed. Carlyle was in love.

Crash, bang, fucking wallop. He was in luurve. Thinking back to how it happened made him smile. On a day off, a week or so earlier, he had been mooching around the West End with no money in his pockets, and no plan of action. He was standing in Leicester Square looking at a movie poster for Rocky IV, which was due to come to the Empire in January, when the heavens had opened. Running down St Martins Street in search of shelter, he ducked into Westminster Reference Library. Behind a pile of books at a desk near the door sat the prettiest girl he had ever seen in his life. She looked up as he walked in. Carlyle caught her eye, and for a moment he couldn’t move. It was as if he had stepped into a different universe. Trying to recover the power of motion, he almost immediately tripped over a waste basket. While the girl tried to stifle laughter, he stumbled over to a chair some way off and spent the next hour staring at her over the top of a three-month-old copy of Farmer’s Weekly. Finally, as she was getting ready to leave, he stood up and introduced himself.

As a result, he got a date. She was due to meet him outside Leicester Square tube station in about seventeen hours’ time. London was their oyster. Now he had to come up with something, something damn good. He could not, under any circumstances, fuck this up. If he did, he was convinced that Helen Kennedy would never give him a second chance.

A monster burp from his partner tore Carlyle away from his thoughts. Having finished his roll, Slater went off in search of another. ‘Sure you don’t want one?’ he asked, waving an empty plate in Carlyle’s direction. ‘They really are excellent.’

‘Nah.’ Shaking his head, Carlyle turned away from his partner and stared out of the window in search of romantic inspiration. But in the middle of the night, on Trinity Street in SE sodding 1, there was none to be found.

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