Free Buckingham Palace Blues by James Craig

finally.
    ‘Joe Dalton?’ Carlyle made a face. ‘Who’s Joe Dalton?’
    Matthews pawed at a stain on the carpet with her boot. ‘Joe was in SO14. Did a bit of moonlighting in his brother’s taxi. Topped himself a couple of months ago.’ She rubbed her eyes. ‘Decapitated himself in his cab.’
    Carlyle thought about it for a moment. ‘How did he manage that?’
    ‘It was in the papers. You might have read about it.’
    Carlyle shook his head. ‘No, I don’t think so. What’s Dalton got to do with all the shenanigans going on at SO14?’
    She shot him a look. ‘That’s for you to work out. You’re the bloody detective. Jesus!’
    ‘Okay.’ Carlyle sighed. ‘If I’m the bloody detective, where should I start bloody looking?’
    Despite herself, Matthews grinned. ‘Go and talk to his girlfriend. A woman called Fiona Allcock.’ The grin stretched into a leer. ‘As in all-cock.’
    ‘Where do I find her?’
    ‘It shouldn’t be difficult to track her down. She’s famous.’
    ‘Famous?’
    ‘Just Google her.’
    Fucking Google. Suddenly it was the world’s number-one police tool. How did any criminals ever get caught before it existed? Carlyle thought about it. ‘It’s a fairly common name. How will I know if I’ve got the right Allcock?’
    ‘Jesus!’ Matthews groaned. ‘You’re still as annoying as ever.’ Then her grin reappeared, this time wider than before. ‘Try Googling ‘‘Allcock’’ and ‘‘animals’’. See what you get. Just don’t let the wife catch you doing it.’
    Carlyle raised an eyebrow.
    ‘Off you go.’ Matthews laughed, sticking a couple of coins in a slot in the table and releasing the balls for another game. ‘That’s your lot. And don’t come back here again. Next time I will brain you. And that’s a promise.’
    Superintendent Warren Shen was standing in the storeroom on the first floor, above the Vintage Magazine Shop in the heart of Soho. Yawning, he flicked the fringe of his shoulder-length blond hair out of his eyes. Six foot one inch tall, rake thin, dressed in jeans and a Bruce Lee Fists of Fury T-shirt, he looked like he was barely into his twenties when, in fact, he would reach forty in little more than six months’ time. A seventeen-year police career, the last six of them in Vice, had not yet eaten away at his boyish good looks. What it had done to him on the inside was, however, another matter entirely.
    Out of the window, Shen eyed the entrance to the Soho Parish Church of England primary school, on the other side of Great Windmill Street. It was coming up to leaving time and a small group of mothers, a couple of them minding younger children in pushchairs, were standing by the gate to collect their kids. Every couple of minutes, one of the girls from the Fun Palace strip club next door would venture out into the street and remonstrate with the waiting mothers, inviting them to fuck off lest they put off potential punters wandering up the street.
    This was a scene that Shen had witnessed many times before. The strip clubs, sex shops and hostess bars on Great Windmill Street regularly complained about the potential for the school run to interfere with their passing trade. With no obvious sense of irony, one of the shop-owners – Soho’s self-proclaimed number one dildo merchant – had complained to the local paper that the school ‘lowered the tone of the neighbourhood’. On the one hand, it was quite funny. On the other it made Shen pine for the good old days (approximately twenty or so years before he started on the Force) when you could simply round up the filth-peddlers and the perverts and haul them back to the cells for a good kicking.
    In the face of this onslaught, one of the mothers – an evangelical Christian called Mary Mack – once had the temerity to fight back. Mack organised a petition and launched a campaign for a fifty-yard ‘smut-free zone’ around the school. It was a good idea but, given the economic realities of the