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.’