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 . . .’
NINE
By the time he got to the Barbican, the place looked like a scene out of some straight-to-video cop movie. The whole arts complex surrounding the school had been cordoned off. Outside the tape, tourists and office workers mingled, sharing a mixture of concern and curiosity, while resisting the best attempts of a dozen or so uniformed officers to move them along. As he approached the Silk Street entrance, Carlyle counted more than a dozen police vehicles, including two large Bomb Squad vans. He wondered how long it would take them to search the entire site – several hours at least. There would certainly be no more chance of school today. He pulled up Alice’s number on his mobile, and cursed when he got a ‘network busy’ message.
‘Fuck!’
Ending the call, he redialled immediately. And got the same message.
‘Bastard fucking phone!’
And again.
And again.
At the fifth or six attempt, he got through. After barely two rings, his daughter’s voicemail kicked in. Hi! This is Alice. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you. Bye!
‘Alice,’ he said as calmly as he could manage, ‘it’s Dad. Call me when you get this.’
Keeping the phone in his hand, he walked up to a sergeant standing by the police tape. Flashing his ID, he got a nod of recognition.
‘Where are the schoolkids?’ Carlyle asked.
‘Gone to the RV points, sir,’ the sergeant said in a practised manner.
‘And where are the RV points?’
‘Er . . .’ The officer shrugged.
Carlyle was just about to slap him, when they were interrupted by a middle-aged woman with a clipboard. ‘Which class?’ she asked Carlyle briskly.
‘Er . . .’ Now it was Carlyle’s turn to show his ignorance.
The woman hid her frown behind her clipboard. ‘Teacher?’
‘A man, I think,’ was as much as Carlyle could manage.
This time the woman made no attempt to hide her contempt for his ignorance.
Summoning up the patience of a saint, she gave him one last try. ‘Upper or Lower school?’
‘Lower,’ Carlyle said decisively. He knew he had to have a fifty-fifty chance of being right on that one at least.
‘They will have gone to Monkwell Square.’