Time of Death

by James Craig

  The man in the kitchen had his back turned towards him, but Carlyle instantly recognised Sylvester Bassett from his mop of curly golden hair (from this distance, you couldn’t see the grey), as much as his unfortunate dress sense which today meant a natty brown corduroy suit, pink socks and what looked like a pair of plum suede loafers. Carlyle could never understand why a middle-aged man would spend so much time and effort just to look so fey. Bassett had his head poking out of the kitchen window, which gave on to a fire escape at the back of the building. He was humming to himself and smoking a cigarette.

  ‘What have we got?’ Carlyle asked.

  Startled, Bassett took a step backwards, banging his head on the window frame. Cursing, he rubbed his head with one hand, while stubbing his cigarette out with the other. Tossing the dog end out of the window, he turned to Carlyle and gestured at the body. It lay face down, half under the table, with a pool of dried blood surrounding the head and shoulders. Agatha Mills was – or had been – maybe 5 feet 1 or 2 inches tall, with grey hair. She was dressed in a blouse which had once been white, with a blue skirt that almost reached her ankles and a grey cardigan. ‘Smacked over the head with a blunt object,’ Bassett explained, ‘maybe a pot or a rolling pin.’ He glanced around the room. ‘Plenty of suitable things to choose from in a kitchen.’

  ‘Have we found the murder weapon?’ Carlyle asked.

  Bassett pulled a packet of Benson & Hedges cigarettes out of his jacket pocket and started fiddling with it. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Who’s the guy in the living room?’

  ‘That’s the husband.’ Bassett flicked open the cigarette packet’s lid with his thumb, then closed it again. ‘Mr Henry Mills. He’s in a bit of a state.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘Been drinking.’

  ‘That’s understandable,’ Carlyle said reasonably. ‘But is he our man?’

  Bassett smiled. ‘You’re the detective, Inspector.’ He finally pulled another cigarette from the packet and pushed it between his lips.

  Carlyle scanned the kitchen again. Apart from the corpse and the congealing blood, everything looked perfectly shipshape. ‘Just asking your opinion.’

  Bassett was now fumbling with his lighter. ‘Looks likely,’ he conceded.

  Law of averages, Carlyle reckoned. Start with the most likely explanation and work outwards. Fucked-up families were what he did, after all. He took another look round. It was a well kitted-out kitchen with decent equipment: Miele and AEG machines rather than the buy-now, repair-later crap that most people usually bought. He clocked a fridge, washing machine, cooker, microwave and an expensive-looking coffee-maker almost as big as Marcello’s Gaggia machine in Il Buffone, before his gaze paused at the dishwasher. A small orange light indicated that it was still switched on. Giving the body a wide berth, he stepped across the room. The machine had been set for an intensive 65-degree wash, rather than an economy bio 45-degree one, and it had obviously completed one cycle. Carefully, he brought the back of his hand close to the machine, staying just shy of touching it. The machine was lukewarm rather than hot, suggesting that it had last been in operation several hours previously.

  He turned to Bassett, who was puffing on his latest cigarette as if it was his first one for many months, and pointed at the dishwasher. ‘Has anyone looked inside this?’

  Bassett thought about it for a second. ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’

  Carlyle turned to Joe, who had appeared from elsewhere in the flat and was hovering in the doorway. ‘Make sure this has been checked for prints and then open it up.’

  ‘Okay.’ Joe went off to see if he could find any remaining forensic technicians.

  ‘And see how the canvass of the neighbours is going,’ Carlyle called after him.

  ‘Will do.’

  ‘Are you going to take her now?’ Carlyle asked Bassett.

  ‘Yes. I think we are more or less done here.’

  ‘The report?’

  ‘Shouldn’t take too long. If there are any surprises, I’ll give you a call straight away.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  In the living room, the WPC was sitting on the sofa, staring into space. Henry Mills was standing by the large bay window, contemplating the crowds entering the British Museum. A billboard in the courtyard advertised an exhibition devoted to Babylon: Myth & Reality. Helen had been trying to get him to go with her to see it, but Carlyle knew it was just another one of those things they would never get round to doing. Not that this worried him; he could live without the Tower of Babel and the madness of King Nebuchadnezzar, so was happy to just let it slide.

  After a few seconds, Mills half-turned in his direction. He was wearing jeans and a white shirt with a fine green check. His face was flushed. In one hand he held a glass of whisky, with the bottle in the other. The inspector clocked the label – Famous Grouse – and the fact that it was well on the way to being empty.

  He gestured for the WPC to leave them. As she struggled out of the sofa, he experienced a ripple of disgust. ‘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.

  No more armchairs.

  No more comfortable untidiness.

  No more options.

  Wait a while and then charge him. Start making this thing feel real. But that would mean a lawyer, stretching things out even longer. He gave it one more push. ‘You didn’t do it?’ He gestured at the glass. ‘Or maybe you don’t remember doing it?’

  ‘No,’ Mills said firmly, sounding clearer by the minute. ‘I didn’t do it. I haven’t forgotten anything. I didn’t even have one drink last night.’

  Carlyle glanced at the bottle and decided that was not very likely. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘if you didn’t do it, then who did?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Mills said again, as if it was an even more acceptable answer the second time around. ‘She was like that when I found her.’

  ‘Where were you when it happened?’

  ‘In bed, asleep.’

  ‘Did you hear any noise?’

  ‘No. I wear earplugs because I’m a light sleeper.’ He nodded in the direction of the window. ‘The traffic . . .’

  ‘If it wasn’t you,’ said Joe, ‘do you know who might have done it?’

  Carlyle folded his arms. This was the bit where they would be told that the victim was a modern-day saint who didn’t have an enemy in the world.

  Mills carefully placed his glass down on the floor next to the bottle and looked at the sergeant, hopeful that he might prove to be more reasonable than his rather snide boss. ‘It had to be her enemies.’

  ‘Her enemies?’ parroted the inspector.

  ‘Yes.’ Henry Mills nodded. ‘I’m sure it was them. No one else would have done this. Not to Agatha.’

  Commander Carole Simpson eyed the large plate of sandwiches that had been placed on the table in front of her and groaned. Looking out across the river from the tenth floor of New Scotland Yard, she was suddenly struck by the thought that there must be millions of people out there who were actually having an enjoyable day. Not her. To say that being promoted had turned out to be something of a mixed blessing was an understatement. Meetings like this made Simpson feel that she had been transformed from a copper into a pen
-pusher.

  The Planning, Performance and Review Committee was almost three hours into its scheduled eight-hour session, and it was heavy going indeed. Sixteen people around the table, who either didn’t know each other or didn’t like each other, were reviewing the latest Specialist Crime Directorate Management Information Report, which presented the Directorate’s ‘key objectives and core performance indicators’.

  The conference room was hot and stuffy. Simpson stifled a yawn as best she could. For her this was increasingly what modern policing looked like: number-crunching while hidden away in an airless room, as far away from the public as possible; as far away from the criminals as possible. It was enough to send anyone to sleep.

  After everyone had carefully chosen their food, the committee turned to the Homicide section of the report. The overall homicide detection rate for the previous year was 85 per cent, slightly worse than the year before but still very satisfactory and – crucially – well within the performance target band.

  As the discussion rambled on, Simpson recalled with some satisfaction how she had personally overseen the investigations regarding four of the murders in question. Her officers had enjoyed a 100 per cent success rate. And now she was putting all that effort to good use. Although technically not part of the SCD’s efforts, she had made sure that the cases were included in the report, in order to boost the overall clean-up rate figures. After all, when you were locked in an endless battle with the politicians for money and resources, every little helped.

  Having made the mistake of biting into a cheese sandwich, which was foul, she washed it quickly away with a mouthful of coffee while listening to someone raise the issue of the recently proposed changes in the murder law. The plan was to replace the existing partial defence of ‘provocation’ with one of ‘fear of serious violence’ or, in exceptional circumstances, ‘seriously wronged’. Neither was much of a defence, Simpson reckoned. She was nervous at the constant attempts to fiddle with the laws of the land. Britain was a safe country; London was a safe city. Most people were good citizens or, at least, respectful subjects. The laws worked – they should be left alone.