The city hummed around him. Reassuringly familiar, it soothed his agitation. Too impatient to wait for a break in the traffic, Carlyle jumped in front of a small, red delivery van, studiously ignoring the exaggerated hand gestures of the driver as he skipped down Long Acre. Reaching Seven Dials, a mini-roundabout, with a pillar at its centre bearing six sundials (the seventh being the pillar itself, casting its shadow on the ground), he headed towards the north end of Mercer Street, close to Shaftesbury Avenue.
On the west side of the street was a small block of council flats known as Phoenix House. Built in the 1950s with the cheapest concrete available, the building would probably have been more robust if it had been constructed out of cardboard. Still, it looked clean and, from the outside at least, didn’t smell too badly. Carlyle buzzed, waited for a few seconds, heard the door unlock, and went inside.
On the top floor of Phoenix House was Flat 8. For more than a year now, it had been used as a knocking shop by a young Birmingham girl called Sam Laidlaw. The place was tiny, no more than 500 square feet all told, but it had a small roof terrace which allowed Laidlaw’s clients an al fresco option in the summer.
Laidlaw’s maid, Amelia Jacobs, was a retired prostitute who had known Carlyle for more than twenty years. She was a reliable contact, who had built up a healthy balance in his favours book over the years. A few weeks earlier, when she had asked to make a rare withdrawal, Carlyle knew that he would have to go and pay her a visit. Having already put it off a couple of times, he now felt obliged to put in an appearance.
If not exactly the stereotypical hooker with a heart of gold, Jacobs was an impressive figure. She was a plain-looking black woman in her mid-to-late thirties, about 5 feet 4 inches with a no-nonsense short back and sides haircut and hard eyes that never focused on you. If you passed her on the street, you might imagine that Amelia was a teacher, or maybe even a lawyer. The reality was rather different, but Carlyle knew that Amelia was nonetheless worthy of considerable respect. Above all, she was a survivor. Local legend had it that she had once tried, with some success, to bite off the penis of an obnoxious punter. Carlyle knew a nurse working at UCLH on Gower Street who claimed to have been on duty when the unfortunate bloke arrived in A amp;E. He had asked Amelia about the incident once — she had just smiled and said matter-of-factly: ‘Another few seconds and he would never have seen his thing again.’
Happily for visiting punters, and middle-aged policemen, reaching the top floor only meant three flights of stairs. There was a lift, but it rarely worked. Even when it did, Carlyle would rather take the stairs than risk getting stuck inside.
Jogging up the stairs, he felt only slightly winded.
Amelia met him at the door. ‘Thanks for coming, Inspector,’ she smiled.
‘No problem,’ Carlyle replied, trying to control his wheezing. ‘Sorry it’s taken me so long to get here.’
She made a non-committal gesture. ‘Come inside.’
A couple of minutes later he was sitting on an orange sofa in a drab sitting room that surely would be depressing enough to dampen anyone’s lust. He was nursing a dangerous-looking mug of coffee with a slick of what looked like washing-up liquid glistening on the top. Sam Laidlaw sat in a chair opposite him, staring at the floor like the naughty schoolgirl that she basically was. She was twenty-two or twenty-three going on fifteen. Her platinum-blond hair matched her sickly skin. It had grown out at the roots and badly needed redoing. In a grubby white T-shirt, grey jogging pants and no make-up, she looked a total mess. It would be like fucking a corpse, Carlyle thought. On the other hand, trying to be generous, it was relatively early. For her, the working week had yet to start.
Amelia explained the situation to Carlyle. The problem was a familiar one. His name was Michael Hagger, a local mini-gangster-turned-entrepreneur, occasional pimp and father to Sam Laidlaw’s four-year-old son, Jake. Hagger, according to Jacobs, was threatening to take the boy away from his mother as part of a long-running dispute about money.
‘Where is the boy now?’ Carlyle asked, suddenly worried in case he had ignored this situation for too long.
‘He’s on a play date,’ Amelia replied. ‘And he’s in nursery now too. We got him into Coram’s Fields after Easter. Three days a week.’
‘That’s good,’ Carlyle said limply. At least the boy was being looked after properly some of the time. The Coram’s Fields Play Centre was fifteen minutes up the road, on the way to King’s Cross. It was run by Camden Council, and the staff there did a fantastic job with a broad range of kids from different backgrounds. His daughter Alice had gone there for a couple of years before starting school, and her mother still visited now and again to drop off spare books for the library. He would mention Jake to Helen and see if she could make some discreet enquiries.
Laidlaw remained mute. She had lifted her gaze far enough off the floor to stare intently at a blank 32-inch television screen in the corner. Carlyle followed her gaze and checked out the pile of DVDs on the floor by the TV. Postman Pat and Duck Dodgers cartoons peeked out from underneath a pile of generic porno titles. Carlyle had to resist the urge to gag. Apart from anything else, he was a big fan of Duck Dodgers, Daffy Duck’s Space Protectoret hero, having watched many episodes alongside Alice when she was younger. Now he wanted to scream. Calming himself down, he knew that he really would have to call Children’s Social Services.
‘What do you want me to do?’ he asked.
‘Talk to Hagger,’ Amelia replied. ‘Let him know that you’ve got your eye on him.’
As if that would make any difference.
‘Okay,’ Carlyle sighed. ‘Where will I find him?’
Again the girl said nothing.
‘The usual places,’ Amelia said.
That narrowed it down, thought Carlyle. ‘I’ll start at the Intrepid Fox,’ he said, to no one in particular, mentioning a pub two minutes down the road in Soho where Hagger was known to hang out.
The doorbell rang. Without saying a word, the girl got up and slouched out of the room.
‘That’ll be the twelve-thirty.’ Amelia signalled for him to get up. She glanced at her watch. ‘He’s early. The randy little sod obviously thinks he gets extra time that way.’
‘When you’re in the mood,’ Carlyle grinned, ‘you’re in the mood.’
‘I suppose so,’ Amelia said, raising her eyes to the ceiling. She ushered him towards the door. ‘Thanks, Mr Carlyle.’
‘I’ll let you know how I get on,’ he replied, happily handing her back the untouched mug of coffee.
‘Thanks.’
‘But I’ll need to speak to Social Services about Jake.’
She started to complain, but thought better of it.
He softened the blow. ‘Just so that there’s someone else keeping an eye out for him too.’
A pained expression crossed Amelia’s face. ‘Jake is loved, Inspector.’
‘Maybe he is,’ Carlyle shrugged. ‘But that’s not always enough. That girl’s too young.’
‘Sam does her best.’
‘The kid is four already. Unless the situation here changes, and quickly, he is fucked for life.’
‘What else can she do?’
‘She can go on benefits,’ Carlyle hissed, ‘like everyone else.’
‘What? And live on a hundred and twenty quid a week?’
‘There are worse things than being poor. She needs to smarten up.’
‘I know.’
‘For the kid’s sake.’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s your side of the deal.’
The woman nodded. ‘I understand.’
‘It’s a deal then.’ Carlyle smiled with as much enthusiasm as he could muster. ‘Expect me to hold you to it.’
On his way down, Carlyle passed a sheepish-looking man in his fifties who was trudging up the stairs while keeping his eyes firmly on the steps in front of him. Outside, in the sunshine, it felt even hotter than before, as if the temperature had been raised another five or ten degrees. The air was turning heavy and it seemed as if the forecast thunderstorms were now on the way. He had a nagging headache from too much caffeine, and his appetite for what was to come back at the station had dwindled to next to nothing. Needing to rehydrate, he went round the corner into Earlham Street and bought a bottle of water and a mango smoothie from the Big Banana Juice Bar next to Cambridge Circus. He stepped off the pavement and between a couple of parked cars, downing the water first and then the smoothie. The Fopp music store in Shaftesbury Avenue across the road was advertising The Clash by The Clash. He wasn’t sure about the lurid pink cover and he wasn’t going to spend thirty quid on a book, but he fancied a peek. For Carlyle, The Clash were, still, the greatest rock band ever. He had seen them a few times before their untimely demise, and he wanted to wallow in a little nostalgia for those days of his youth.
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. That 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…’