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.
