by James Craig
Dropping his empty bottles in a bin, he crossed the road and stepped inside, experiencing the usual mix of pleasure and guilt at bunking off, even if only for a short while.
When he finally returned to Charing Cross police station, Carlyle dawdled at his desk, still in no hurry to get into the interview room. If Mills was going to stick to his Chilean story, it was likely to be a long and painful afternoon. Carlyle had endured more than his share of domestics over the years, and it was always a struggle spending hours going round the houses just to get formal confirmation of what you already knew. The endless ability of people to delude themselves never ceased to amaze him. Numbers, on the other hand, never lied. Carlyle was a firm believer in statistics, and the statistics told you that most victims were killed by people they knew. It was common sense, of course: usually, the only people you can annoy enough for them to want to kill you, are your nearest and dearest. Carlyle knew of several occasions when he himself might have been in serious trouble if Helen had been holding a skillet at the time – or vice versa. That was just a reality of everyday life . . . and death.
On his way to the basement he passed the front desk, eyeing the usual motley collection of supplicants waiting to be disappointed in one way or another. He nodded at Sergeant Dave Prentice, chewing on the end of a pencil while he contemplated some form that was lying in front of him.
‘Dave.’
The desk sergeant pulled the pencil out of his mouth and looked up. ‘John.’ He had the exhausted look of a man who had spent too long on the front line, trying to keep the public at bay. Carlyle, like everyone else in the station, knew that he was counting down the days to his long-awaited retirement to Theydon Bois, a suburb at the eastern end of the Central Line.
‘Anything interesting today?’
‘Not really.’ Prentice nodded towards a sickly-looking man in chinos and a white shirt, sitting on one of the benches. ‘That bloke,’ he whispered, smirking, ‘says some schoolgirls tried to beat him up in the National Gallery.’
Carlyle looked at the guy. There wasn’t a mark to be seen on him. ‘Where are the schoolgirls?’
‘They did a runner.’
‘Stands to reason.’
‘But the guy insists on making a complaint,’ Prentice sighed. ‘What a tosser. He can sit there for a while. Anyway, did you hear about Dog?’
‘No. What’s he done now?’ Carlyle asked. Walter Poonoosamy was a regular nuisance in the neighbourhood. His nickname came from his preferred way of chiselling tourists, asking them for cash to support his fictitious pet Labrador which went by the name Lucky.
‘He was found dead last night in a pew in the Actors’ Church,’ Prentice explained. ‘The rector came across him there when he was closing up. Gave him quite a scare, apparently. They reckon it was a heart attack. He was only forty-four, which is amazing considering he looked well north of sixty.’
‘I suppose so,’ Carlyle conceded. ‘But at least he beat the odds.’
Prentice looked at him quizzically. ‘How do you mean?’
‘I read somewhere that the life expectancy for homeless guys is forty-one. If he made it to forty-four, Dog beat that by almost ten per cent.’
Prentice shrugged. ‘Tough old world.’
‘Yes,’ said Carlyle, ‘it sure is.’
Upstairs, Joe was waiting for him. He was munching a chicken sandwich while watching a couple of men in suits record the space between the desks with metal tape measures.
Carlyle gave his sergeant a questioning look.
‘Estate agents,’ explained Joe softly, sticking the last of the sandwich in his mouth.
‘What?’ asked Carlyle. ‘Are we selling the station?’
‘Buying it.’
‘Huh?’
‘Apparently,’ said Joe, ‘the station building was sold to a hedge fund or something as part of a job lot several years ago, in a sale and leaseback deal. The cash paid for a black hole in the pension fund. Anyway, now that the property market has collapsed we’re going to buy it back. According to the Police Review, the Met is going to make a fifty million pound profit.’
Carlyle watched as the two men disappeared round a corner, in search of other things to measure. ‘Better than the other way round, I suppose. But when did we become property developers rather than coppers?’ He scratched his head. ‘Is Henry Mills downstairs yet?’
‘Yeah.’ Joe had now turned his attention to a chocolate doughnut which then disappeared in three rapid bites. ‘He’s in interview room six. We’re ready to go.’
Riddled with prevarication, Carlyle was more interested in food. ‘I’m going to get a bite to eat,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll go and have a chat with him. In the meantime, round up all the reports, so we can go through everything this afternoon.’
‘Will do.’
‘Anything from Bassett yet?’
‘Yeah,’ said Joe. ‘He emailed through his preliminary findings. Nothing we don’t already know. The force used in killing her was more than you might expect from an old guy like Henry Mills, but in these type of domestic situations you never know.’
‘Quite.’
‘It looks like the skillet was the murder weapon. They found some hair and skin in the dishwasher pipes.’
‘Any fingerprints on the machine?’
‘His and hers – some smudges. But no others.’
‘Good. Nice and quick.’
‘Yeah, looks like we caught Bassett on a good day.’
‘Lucky old us. Anything else?’
‘Not really,’ Joe shrugged. ‘They found some other unidentified prints in the kitchen, but that’s about it.’
‘You’d expect that,’ Carlyle said.
‘Yeah, but some of them were on the window frame.’
Carlyle thought about that for a second. ‘Inside or outside?’
‘Inside,’ Joe replied. ‘I don’t know if they checked on the outside.’
‘Ask Bassett. I wonder if they were Chilean fingerprints?’
Joe laughed. ‘Even the mighty Sylvester Bassett won’t be able to tell us that.’
‘Shame. Anyway, see what he can tell us.’ Another thought popped into his head. ‘And see if you can find out anything about Agatha Mills on Google.’
Joe looked at him doubtfully.
‘I know, I know,’ Carlyle sighed, ‘but it’s worth five minutes. Just in case. Maybe there really is a Chilean connection of some sort.’
Joe’s frown deepened.
‘It we find anything it will help us understand where Mr Mills is coming from,’ Carlyle persisted. ‘See our way past the bullshit.’
Twenty minutes and a cheese sandwich and a double espresso later, Carlyle was sitting in interview room number six, across the desk from Henry Mills and his lawyer, a mousy, nervous-looking woman who looked and sounded Mediterranean. A police constable stood by the door to ensure fair play. Carlyle had never come across this lawyer before but he knew immediately that she wasn’t going to cause him any trouble. Not with this case, at least. Focused on that thought, he had forgotten her name even before she had finished spelling it.
Under the harsh lighting of the windowless room and missing the comforting arm of the Famous Grouse, Mills seemed jumpy. He was well on the way to drying out and clearly wasn’t too happy about it. He’s probably as uninspired by his representative as I am, Carlyle thought. He dropped an A5 pad on the desk, carefully pulled the cap off his biro, and jotted HM, 7/6 on the top of the page. The interview would be recorded but he liked to take his own notes. At least 99 per cent of what would get transcribed from the tapes would be rubbish – all ums, ahs and lawyerly equivocation – and he didn’t want to waste time by having to wade through all that kind of crap later.
‘We have been waiting here over an hour,’ the lawyer whined.
You’re paid by the minute, Carlyle thought, so what do you care? He tried to look sincere. ‘My apologies,’ he said, before switching on the tape-machine and running through the formalities. T
hat done, he leaned forward and eyed Henry Mills as if the lawyer wasn’t even there. The smell of whisky had faded from the man’s breath, but he looked incredibly tired, as if his new surroundings had sucked some of the life out of him. The room was warm and stuffy. Even after a double espresso, Carlyle himself still felt a bit sleepy. ‘Okay,’ he proceeded casually, ‘in your own words, tell me what happened.’
Mills looked at the lawyer, who nodded stiffly. Dropping his hands on to the table and avoiding eye contact, he launched into the monologue that Carlyle knew he would have been refining in his head since calling the police earlier that day. ‘I really know nothing. I went to bed about nine thirty. Agatha was listening to a radio programme in the kitchen. I read a bit of the new Roberto Bolano book – do you know it?’
Roberto who? Carlyle shook his head.
‘It’s nine hundred pages long,’ Mills continued, ‘and I’m finding it a bit of a struggle to get into. After a few pages I felt sleepy, and I must have switched the light off before ten.’ He stopped to grimace in a way that looked contrived to Carlyle. ‘Agatha often stays up later than me, so there was nothing unusual about that. I woke up about seven forty-five and she wasn’t there, and then I got up and I found her . . . dead . . . . and I called you.’ He looked up and shrugged. ‘That’s it. I don’t know what else to tell you.’
Carlyle let a few seconds elapse. The only sound inside the room was the low whirring of the tape-machine. He counted to thirty in his head, waiting to see if Mills would offer up anything else.
. . . 27, 28, 29, 30 . . .
Mills kept his eyes on the table and said nothing. Carlyle decided to give it thirty seconds more.
. . . 58, 59, 60 . . .
Still nothing. The lawyer meanwhile looked as if she had all the time in the world. Finally, Carlyle spoke: ‘How does it feel?’ For a second, he wondered if he’d actually asked such a soft question. He ignored the surprised look on the lawyer’s face and instead stared firmly at Henry Mills.
Thrown by the question, Mills thought about it for a minute. Carlyle could see that he was wrestling with his thoughts, trying to work out an honest answer. For the first time, he felt a pang of empathy with the dishevelled man in front of him. It struck him that if Helen’s skull had been smashed in – even if it had been Carlyle himself who had brained her – he would have been left distraught. Life without his wife, he imagined, would be like a living death. He would become a kind of zombie, just like the man in front of him.
‘I don’t know,’ Mills said finally. ‘If you’re morbid enough to imagine these things, I suppose you expect it to be dramatic, gut-wrenching, a rollercoaster of emotions. In reality, it’s been a very tedious and boring day. I should have laid off the Scotch, like you told me, Inspector .’
Carlyle gave him a small bow.
‘I know I should say something like the reality hasn’t hit me yet, but what the “reality” is, remains to be seen. Agatha and I have been married for almost forty years, we don’t have any children, and our lives could be considered fairly,’ he thought about the right word, ‘self-contained.’
Carlyle nodded, trying to look thoughtful, inviting him to continue.
‘That’s not to say we had separate lives – we didn’t. What we had was a very comfortable combined existence where neither of us felt compromised.’ His eyes welled up and he struggled to keep his voice even: ‘Seeing her lying there on the floor – it wasn’t her. It wasn’t real. It wasn’t us.’
Carlyle waited for more but nothing was forthcoming. He glanced at the lawyer, who seemed to be confused by her client’s opening gambit. Was that a confession or not?
Switching off the tape-machine, Carlyle turned back to Henry Mills. ‘I want you to take a break,’ he said gently, ‘and then we can have another go. Talk to your lawyer here. She will know the kind of detailed questions that I’m going to ask. If you’ve basically given me your full statement, then it is going to take a while for us to go through the evidence. If you can think of anything – anything at all – that might help your case, now is the time to tell me. Then, if you want to change your story, we can get this thing sorted out quickly and you can have a rest.’
He had almost got back to his desk on the third floor when he felt his phone vibrating in the back pocket of his jeans. Seeing that it was his wife, he hit the receive button.
‘Hi.’
‘John. You have to get to the school.’ Helen’s tone was verging on fraught.
‘There’s been a bomb scare . . .’
NINE
By the time he got to the Barbican, the place looked like a scene out of some straight-to-video cop movie. The whole arts complex surrounding the school had been cordoned off. Outside the tape, tourists and office workers mingled, sharing a mixture of concern and curiosity, while resisting the best attempts of a dozen or so uniformed officers to move them along. As he approached the Silk Street entrance, Carlyle counted more than a dozen police vehicles, including two large Bomb Squad vans. He wondered how long it would take them to search the entire site – several hours at least. There would certainly be no more chance of school today. He pulled up Alice’s number on his mobile, and cursed when he got a ‘network busy’ message.
‘Fuck!’
Ending the call, he redialled immediately. And got the same message.
‘Bastard fucking phone!’
And again.
And again.
At the fifth or six attempt, he got through. After barely two rings, his daughter’s voicemail kicked in. Hi! This is Alice. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you. Bye!
‘Alice,’ he said as calmly as he could manage, ‘it’s Dad. Call me when you get this.’
Keeping the phone in his hand, he walked up to a sergeant standing by the police tape. Flashing his ID, he got a nod of recognition.
‘Where are the schoolkids?’ Carlyle asked.
‘Gone to the RV points, sir,’ the sergeant said in a practised manner.
‘And where are the RV points?’
‘Er . . .’ The officer shrugged.
Carlyle was just about to slap him, when they were interrupted by a middle-aged woman with a clipboard. ‘Which class?’ she asked Carlyle briskly.
‘Er . . .’ Now it was Carlyle’s turn to show his ignorance.
The woman hid her frown behind her clipboard. ‘Teacher?’
‘A man, I think,’ was as much as Carlyle could manage.
This time the woman made no attempt to hide her contempt for his ignorance.
Summoning up the patience of a saint, she gave him one last try. ‘Upper or Lower school?’
‘Lower,’ Carlyle said decisively. He knew he had to have a fifty-fifty chance of being right on that one at least.
‘They will have gone to Monkwell Square.’
Carlyle looked at her blankly.
‘It’s just next to the Ironmongers’ Hall,’ the woman said.
‘Just back the way you came, sir,’ the sergeant said helpfully. ‘Head towards St Paul’s – it’s just before you get to London Wall. Should only take you about five minutes, maximum.’
‘Thanks,’ Carlyle replied through gritted teeth. Turning on his heels, he headed at a trot back through the gawkers and the randomly parked police cars.
It took him only a couple of minutes to find the Square. The place was full of girls in uniform gossiping in small groups, lounging about on the grass and generally looking quite pleased at the prospect of the afternoon off. Quite a few were smoking and he was shocked to see one girl, who looked to be even younger than Alice, taking a casual drag on a cigarette as she sat under a tree. How would he react if he found his own daughter smoking? He would cross that bridge if and when he came to it.
First he had to find her. It took him another few minutes to locate someone who looked like a teacher – a tall man in a suit, also brandishing a clipboard. Careful not to tread on any of the pupils, Carlyle stepped forward and introduced himself.
Th
e man nodded. ‘John Doherty, Deputy Head of the Lower School.’ When Carlyle explained that he was looking for his daughter, he frowned. ‘There’s no need to overreact.’
Overreact?
‘It’s probably just a false alarm,’ Doherty continued. He looked as if he was in his early thirties, but with his floppy straw hair and boyish features he managed to look younger than many of the girls. ‘Everyone has been accounted for. We’ve told all the ones that don’t normally get picked up that they can go home.’
Before Carlyle could respond, the phone started vibrating in his hand. It was a text message from Alice: At home. All ok. x
A mixture of relief and frustration washed over him. He looked up, but the teacher had already walked off. For a few seconds, Carlyle stood there, feeling like a spare part. Then he called his wife and left the Square, heading west.
The bell rang, shortly followed by a low rumble of excited chatter. Michael Hagger leaned against a pillar outside the entrance to Coram’s Fields Nursery. Trying to look like the kind of bloke who would regularly pick his kid up from playschool, he watched the children start to stream out, still happily playing, stuffing their faces with snacks, or chatting about the day. Mostly it was women – mothers or childminders – doing the collecting, but there was the odd father here and there making the effort to be part of the post-school run.
Once he was sure that home-time was in full swing, Hagger slipped past a woman struggling with a buggy and went inside the building. Smiling at the girls in reception, he casually walked down the corridor towards Jake’s classroom.