‘Big-boned’ wasn’t the half of it. When did they start letting any fat slob join the force? he wondered glumly. Probably when most of the population started becoming obese, he told himself.
Carlyle let Mills look him up and down, while the widower sucked down another slug of Scotch. The look on his face suggested that it gave him neither comfort nor pleasure.
‘I would lay off the drinking if I were you, sir,’ Carlyle said stiffly.
‘Oh, would you?’ Henry Mills made a face. ‘Well, it’s my bloody house,’ he drained his glass with a flourish, ‘and it’s my bloody wife.’
But you’ll soon be at my bloody station, Carlyle thought. He was four feet from Mills and could clearly smell the drink already on his breath. Hopefully it would make him talkative or, just as good, forget to ask for a lawyer. ‘That’s an unfortunate form of words, sir,’ he said, ‘under the circumstances.’
Despite everything, Henry Mills grinned. ‘Don’t I know it, Mr.. ’
‘Inspector.’ Carlyle fumbled in a pocket for his warrant card. ‘Inspector John Carlyle. I’m from the Charing Cross station.’
By the time Carlyle had managed to recover his warrant card, Mills had already turned his back on him and was pouring himself another drink. ‘Want one?’ he asked, over his shoulder.
Carlyle ignored the offer. ‘Why don’t you take a seat, sir?’
Assured that his glass was well on the way to being three-quarters full, Henry Mills plonked himself down in an overstuffed armchair in one corner, beside the window, and then plonked the bottle on the floor beside him. Hoping she hadn’t managed to break the sofa, Carlyle took the place vacated by the outsized WPC. Preliminaries over, he decided to jump straight in. Looking past Mills, out of the window, at a sky that could have been blue, could have been grey, he asked: ‘Why did you kill your wife?’
Mills’s brow furrowed and he gripped his glass more tightly. His mouth opened, but no words came out. Carlyle waited a moment. He was about to repeat the question when they were distracted by a noise coming from the hall. A second later, Bassett went past, followed by the body, bagged up, carried on a trolley. As Agatha Mills left home for the last time, her husband let out a low moan, sinking back into his chair. The next moment, Joe appeared in the doorway.
It’s like trying to work in the middle of Piccadilly fucking Circus, Carlyle thought.
He signalled for his sergeant to come in, and Joe complied, perching on an arm of the sofa that was closest to the door and furthest from Mills, who was meanwhile staring morosely at the glass of Scotch now sitting precariously on the arm of his chair.
Still no one spoke.
Carlyle let himself enjoy the smell of the Scotch as he belatedly looked round the room. A large, empty fireplace took up much of one wall. There were a couple of photos on the mantelpiece; at first glance both appeared to be of Henry and Agatha on holiday. Above the fireplace was a massive poster depicting a clenched fist in front of a flag that Carlyle didn’t recognise. In large text at the top it said Venceremos, and at the bottom Unidad Popular. Yellowed in places, with a tear in the bottom left-hand corner, it looked like the kind of thing you would have expected to adorn the wall of a student flat maybe thirty or forty years ago, but it had been placed in an expensive- looking aluminium frame that appeared to be worth many times more than the poster itself.
The other two walls were covered by shelves stuffed with books from floor to ceiling, mainly history and fiction as far as he could tell. Some of them were in English, but there were also many in foreign languages — Spanish, French and German. Most looked well-thumbed. There were also piles of books rising three feet high on either side of the armchair that Henry Mills was now sitting in. There was another stack in front of a small CRT television which was almost hidden in a corner by the window. A video machine sat on top of the TV, but Carlyle couldn’t see any tapes. Neither machine was on standby and both were covered in a thick layer of dust. There was no sign of either a DVD player or a digibox.
Carlyle let his eyes skip across the spines of the books at random: Pinochet in Piccadilly: Britain and Chile’s Hidden History; Subversive Scriptures: Revolutionary Christian Readings of the Bible in Latin America; States, Ideologies, and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of Iran, Nicaragua, and the Philippines. His eyes quickly glazed over as he worried that the titles alone could give him a headache. Carlyle liked a good read, but he couldn’t imagine getting through the hundreds of books in this room alone. He got through maybe seven or eight books a year. If it wasn’t a footballer’s ‘autobiography’, it was the kind of thriller where someone had to be decapitated, dismembered or disappeared by page three — the kind of thing where a crazed serial killer believed he was channelling the spirits of vengeful Norse Gods, or some such. All good fun. In real life, of course, he’d never come across a serial killer and knew that he never would. This was London, after all, not some American urban hell.
He chuckled to himself. Mr and Mrs Mills were not the kind of people who read about serial killers, real or imagined. He could tell that they were a bit too high-brow for that. And maybe a little unworldly as well. The overall air of the room was one of comfortable mess; you got the impression that nice people lived here. Or, at least, had done until last night when one of them had brained the other, for whatever reason.
Closing his eyes, Carlyle counted up to thirty in his head. Opening them again, he slowly scanned the room once more. Noticing nothing new, he turned to Henry Mills, who had drained his glass but was making no effort to go for a refill. Carlyle was just about to resume his questioning when a young woman, one of the technicians, stuck her head through the door. ‘Sir?’ she asked, unsure which of the two policemen she should be addressing. ‘Could you come to the kitchen for a minute?’
Carlyle sighed. ‘Fine.’ He got up and followed her back into the kitchen. It looked bigger with the body removed, but he was still careful to avoid the blood on the floor as he stepped towards the open dishwasher. Peering inside, he saw that it was largely empty apart from a couple of mugs and some cutlery. On top of a nearby work surface, however, was a steel skillet that had not been there before. It had been sealed in a plastic bag.
Carlyle looked at the woman expectantly, without feeling the need to expend the effort to either introduce himself, or to ask her name.
‘This looks like it could be it,’ she said, taking her cue.
Carlyle nodded. ‘It must have been cleaned up pretty good in there.’
‘Yes,’ the woman said, ‘and the outside of the dishwasher has been wiped clean of all prints. But we should still find some material in the filter or the pipes.’
‘Good,’ said Carlyle. Finally, he could feel his energy levels rising. They should have this sorted out by the end of the day, if not earlier. The thought of such an easy win put a spring in his step. ‘That’s very good,’ he said. ‘Very helpful.’ He turned and walked back into the hallway. Checking his watch, he wondered idly if he could beat his previous record for closing a case. Seven or eight years ago, he’d had a homeless girl deliver up a full confession to the killing of her ‘boyfriend’ less than three and a half minutes from the start of her formal interview. Carlyle had been counting off the seconds from the clock in the interview room as she droned into the tape recorder. The boyfriend had been an evil, drunken bastard and had deserved everything he got, which in this case was more than a dozen stab wounds to the head and chest.
Carlyle had felt no real interest in the girl — a runaway from some provincial hellhole — or why she had done it. He couldn’t even remember what had happened to her subsequently; if she had been sent to prison or placed into care. But he could still close his eyes and see her blank expression. And he recalled the fleeting satisfaction derived from closing a case almost before it had even been opened. Sometimes people couldn’t get the words out quickly enough. Spilling your guts was an extremely commendable impulse, in the inspector’s book. The question now was: would Mr Mills similarly oblige?
Standing in the middle of the living room, Carlyle looked Henry Mills up and down. He waited for Mills to make eye contact before speaking.
‘What happened?’
‘I don’t know,’ Mills replied.
‘Did you kill her?’ Carlyle asked evenly.
Mills looked at his empty glass. ‘No.’
‘Come on, Mr Mills, it looks very clear-cut to us.’ He glanced at Joe, who responded with a vague gesture of agreement.
‘No.’ Mills shook his head. ‘I didn’t do it,’ he said. He suddenly seemed completely sober.
Fuck, Carlyle thought. No confession means no record-breaking for me today. His energy levels started ebbing again. Time for our man to visit the station, he decided. Stick him in a cell for a while.
No more Famous Grouse.
