Free Buckingham Palace Blues by James Craig Page A

neighbourhood, one that never had the remotest chance of being realised. Instead, the poor misguided woman had found herself singled out for particular abuse.
    Only a week earlier, Mrs Mack had been sexually assaulted and pelted with dogshit by a group of disgruntled sex-industry workers. When the Evening Standard had put the story on its front page, it had caught the attention of someone sufficiently senior at New Scotland Yard for action to be demanded. Shen had been tasked with arresting the culprits and sending a clear signal to the good citizens of Soho that there were limits of indecent behaviour beyond which even they could not go without the risk of official sanction.
    Needing to catch the perpetrators in the act, Shen had been surprised and delighted when Mrs Mack agreed to come back for more punishment. Before she could change her mind, he had put in place a highly sophisticated sting operation that basically involved her lingering outside the school gate, waiting to be abused again.
    Shen brought the Motorola radio to his mouth as he watched a fat peroxide blonde come out of the Fun Palace and on to the pavement. She was followed by one of the strip club’s bouncers, a skinny, shaven-headed bloke in a Britney Spears T-shirt.
    ‘Here we go . . .’
    As the duo headed towards their target, the other mothers moved quickly away. Shen watched the by now familiar angry exchange that followed. Waiting until the bouncer put his hand on Mack’s shoulder, he spoke into the radio: ‘Okay. Move in. Arrest them both. Make sure we try and keep them in custody longer this time.’
    As the two miscreants were bundled into a police van, the kids began heading out through the school gates. Shen thought of his own kids safely ensconced in the South London suburbs, and gave a silent prayer of thanks. By all accounts, Soho Parish was a very good school. But you had to be a certain sort of parent to send your kid there and have to put up with all the neighbouring shit, both metaphorical and physical.
    Shen turned to Carlyle who was sitting on a sofa, reading the evening freesheet and worrying about Fulham’s chances of avoiding relegation this season. ‘You live round here, don’t you?’
    Carlyle nodded, but didn’t look up from the paper. ‘Yeah. About five minutes down the road. The other side of Cambridge Circus.’
    ‘Kids?’
    ‘One. A girl.’
    Shen gestured in the direction of Soho Parish. ‘She didn’t go there, did she?’
    ‘No. The wife looked at it though.’
    ‘I wonder what all the kids make of it.’
    Carlyle finally closed his paper, folded it up and stuck it in his jacket pocket. ‘What? All the sex shops and stuff?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘I suppose what you know is what you know,’ Carlyle said. ‘If you make this neighbourhood boring and mundane, then it loses any glamour and attraction.’
    ‘It’s a theory, I suppose.’ Shen stepped away from the window and moved into the centre of the room. ‘Anyway, I read that report Simpson sent me. Interesting . . . Do you really think the girl you found had been inside Buckingham Palace?’
    Carlyle shrugged. ‘It’s a possibility.’
    ‘A rather far-fetched one.’
    ‘Maybe. I dunno.’ Carlyle stiffly pushed himself up out of the sofa and on to his feet. ‘The more I think about it, the more I think, Why not? Given all the other shit that people do there, it would make a perfect location for some evil bastard to get up to something like that.’
    ‘It would be a new one on me,’ Shen said. ‘But we’ll make some enquiries. Any leads on the girl?’
    Carlyle shook his head. ‘Not yet.’
    Both men knew it was a minor miracle that she had been found once. There was next to no chance now that she would ever be seen again.
    ‘What about the Ukrainian angle?’ Carlyle asked.
    ‘Obviously,’ Shen said, in the kind of flat tone you adopted when giving a speech to the local Residents Association, ‘we get a lot of Eastern Europeans –