‘They were just fed up with her,’ Mills said, a slight croak appearing in his voice. ‘She never gave up.’
The two policemen looked at him quizzically.
‘Agatha was finally getting to them. They wanted to shut her up.’
Closing his eyes, Inspector Carlyle saw a montage of all the bullshit stories that he’d had to listen to over the years flashing before him on fast-forward. Irritated beyond belief, he signalled to Joe and they went out into the hall.
‘Can you believe this bollocks?’ he said under his breath, still watching Mills through the doorway.
Joe leaned against the wall. ‘The front door was locked, with no sign of forced entry. Same with the kitchen window. No fingerprints on the suspected murder weapon. We’re checking the rest of the kitchen again right now, but nothing interesting so far. No unusual footprints, fibres or anything like that.’
‘Mills has to be our man then,’ said Carlyle, staring at the floor.
Joe nodded.
‘At the very least, he’ll have to come up with something better than this Chilean connection.’
‘On the plus side for Mr Mills,’ Joe observed, ‘there was no blood on him or on any of his clothes, when we arrived. And there’s no sign of him having tried to clean anything up.’
‘He could easily have dropped any stained clothes in the rubbish,’ Carlyle mused. ‘The bin men have already been this morning. Better speak to Camden Council and find out where all the rubbish ends up.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Joe doubtfully.
‘Don’t worry,’ Carlyle grinned. ‘You can get a couple of PCs to sort through it all.’
‘That’ll make me popular.’
‘It’s tough at the top.’
Now it was Joe’s turn to grin. ‘How would you know, exactly?’
‘Anyway,’ said Carlyle, not rising to the bait, ‘this looks fairly straightforward. Sometimes they are.’
‘Hmm.’ Joe scratched his head. ‘Overall, it does look like a domestic.’
‘I think it does,’ Carlyle agreed. ‘I don’t know what he thinks he can achieve with this Chilean nonsense, but I suppose we should be grateful that at least he’s not trying to blame little green men.’
The inspector stepped back into the room. Mills was still sitting calmly in his chair. He was like a blank page, if a bit grubby round the edges. Prepared to give it one last go, Carlyle rubbed his neck and consciously let a cloak of dispassionate formality descend over him.
‘Did you and your wife have an argument, sir?’ he asked.
‘No!’ Mills jerked out of the chair, accidentally kicking his empty glass across the floor. He watched it roll towards the inspector’s shoes and stood up, as if mesmerized, unsure of what to do next.
Slowly, Carlyle bent down and picked up the glass. Stepping away from Mills, he placed it carefully on the mantelpiece. Happy Hour was over. The two men stood there silently for a few seconds, waiting for something to happen. Finally, Carlyle turned to his sergeant. ‘Call a car, please, Joe, and take Mr Mills back to the station.’
SEVEN
Cerro Los Placeres, Valparaiso, Chile, September 1973
It was time.
His Term of Grace was over.
The dogs of the Lord were coming.
The dogs of the Lord were coming and he did not want them to find him naked. Tired but alert, William Pettigrew tugged a shirt over his head and pulled on a pair of torn Wrangler jeans. Stepping out of the bedroom, he counted the six steps to his front door, trying to ignore the tightening knot in his stomach. Hopping from foot to bare foot, he mumbled the lines of a prayer by a Trappist monk called Thomas Merton: ‘My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going…’
The Domini canes arrived in a flurry of engine noise and exhaust smoke. There was the squeal of rubber on tarmac, the crunch of boots on gravel, angry shouts and fearful cries. When they finally stopped outside the house, Pettigrew felt a wave of serenity wash over him. ‘There is no point,’ he mumbled to himself, ‘in hiding under the bed when a man with a machine-gun knocks on your door at two o’clock in the morning. Instead, you answer it.’
A soldier jogged towards him, rifle raised. He looked little more than a boy — seventeen, eighteen at most. Catching the youth’s eye, Pettigrew acknowledged the sadistic twinkle in it, the almost pantomime menace in his voice. He breathed in the smell of body odour and refried beans mixed with Torobayo Ale.
Dropping his gun to his side, the boy jumped in front of the priest and spat in his face. Pettigrew flinched, but didn’t wipe it off.
The first blow sent him crashing to the ground. He tried to breathe slowly, through his mouth, trying to ignore the fire alarm going off in his brain and the fire in his crotch as the pain raced round his body on a surge of adrenaline.
In the shadows, someone laughed. A callous voice cried: ‘That’s got to hurt!’
‘ Bienvenido a la Caravana de la Meurte,’ the young soldier said grimly. Another gob of phlegm splattered on the ground in front of Pettigrew’s face. He looked up. The slack grin on the soldier’s face said it all.
Welcome to the Caravan of Death.
Enjoy the ride.
Pushing back his shoulders, Pettigrew stood up straight in front of the new Inquisition.
From his studies at the Catholic University in Santiago, he knew that, in these parts, the first Papal Inquisition officially ended only in 1834. It had lasted for more than 600 years.
Now it was back.
‘It is time for me to die.’
Death, however, is not a specific moment. It is a process that begins when the heart stops beating, the lungs stop working and the brain ceases functioning. In this case, he knew that it was going to be a long, slow, painful process. He had shown the insolence and malapertness of the heretic, and now his false designs were to be crushed. The prophet, the dreamer, must be put to death and the execrableness of his false doctrines purged.
He didn’t possess the apostolic humility, austerity, the holiness required for anything remotely approaching salvation.
It was too late for zealous preaching.
It was too late for voluntary confessions.
Now there was nothing to do but embrace the pain.
Instinctively, in their souls, the soldiers knew that no man must debase himself by showing toleration towards heretics of any kind. Pettigrew braced himself for another kick. He knelt forward, getting as close to the boy’s boots as he could without making it look too obvious. If he didn’t get much backlift, the boy wouldn’t be able to get much force into the next assault and maybe it would just be a glancing blow. Rocking gently on his knees, he could smell the boot polish. It had been smeared across the toes of his scuffed boots, like make-up on a corpse. If he’d bothered to rub it in properly, he thought idly, I might have seen my face reflected back at me. Instead, there was just darkness.
The boots took a step back. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath and waited.
The kick never came.
After a few seconds, the soldier stepped away and turned towards a yelping noise that had started up somewhere to his right. It sounded like a dog hit by a car, but Pettigrew knew that it wasn’t. Cursing and screaming, a woman he didn’t recognise was being dragged down the street by her hair. The boy soldier jumped forward and, without breaking stride, let fly with a casual half-volley, like a kid kicking a stone along the street. His right boot landed somewhere near her mouth and Pettigrew watched her face explode in a mess of crimson, like something out of a Sam Peckinpah movie. The yelping and cursing stopped, replaced by a low, frothy moan.
The soldier studied the toe of his boot and carefully began cleaning it on the back of his left calf, smearing a mixture of blood, snot and nasal cartilage across his olive-green fatigues. Satisfied with the result, he turned back to face the priest, eyes glazed. Stepping closer, he pointed at a large puddle of green paint over to Pettigrew’s right, which was spreading slowly across the scrub of the tiny front yard. The eight tins of Eden Green paint had been a birthday present from his sister. They had been stacked by the door for several months now, waiting for him to get round to painting the outside of his house, a three-room shack his friends and neighbours had helped him build two summers ago. The soldiers had clearly found them too much to resist, kicking them over as they’d jumped down from their trucks.