Time of Death

by James Craig

  Like any decent copper, the commander basically thought that the only successful defence against a serious charge should be ‘I didn’t do it’. Lots of people thought that they were ‘seriously wronged’ one way or another. In her book, that could never be any kind of excuse for murder.

  ‘What is your opinion, Commander?’ someone asked.

  It was a question that neither expected nor deserved an answer. ‘I think it is an interesting proposal,’ she replied, letting her gaze move smoothly round the table. ‘However, whatever happens, I am sure that we will maintain and build on our excellent performance record in this area.’

  SIX

  For the first time, Carlyle began to wonder if they were dealing with someone who wasn’t quite all there.

  ‘Which enemies?’ he asked.

  Henry Mills looked at him as if he was trying to decide something. ‘The secret police,’ he said finally.

  Joe sat forward. ‘We are the police, Mr Mills.’

  ‘Not you lot,’ Mills snapped. ‘The secret police.’

  ‘What “secret” police?’ Carlyle asked. ‘MI5?’ Bored and frustrated, he was rapidly tuning out of this conversation. Mentally he was already back at the station, if not well on the way to going home for his dinner. He even wondered if there was going to be anything good on telly tonight before defaulting back to the matter in hand. ‘Who do you mean?’

  Mills stared at him blankly.

  ‘MI6?’ Carlyle tried again.

  ‘No, no, no!’ Mills pointed at the poster above the fireplace. ‘Not our lot. Are you stupid?’

  Joe sniggered. Carlyle gritted his teeth.

  Henry Mills waved his arms about theatrically. ‘I’m talking about the bloody Chileans.’

  ‘Chileans?’ Carlyle looked at the poster above the fireplace. He stuck his hands deep in his pockets.

  ‘1973. The CIA-backed fascist coup d’état.’ Mills gestured at the poster, saying, ‘The overthrow of the government of President Salvador Allende. Didn’t you learn about it in school?’

  ‘I’m not interested in what happened in 1973,’ Carlyle told him. ‘I’m interested in what happened last night – here, in this flat.’

  Now it was Mills’s turn to grow annoyed. ‘But I’m trying to explain . . .’

  Fearing an extended history lesson, the inspector held up a hand. He wondered if maybe Henry Mills should have a lawyer, after all. The brief could try and talk some sense into his client. ‘Why would someone from Chile want to kill Mrs Mills?’ he asked.

  ‘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, Valparaíso, 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.

  ‘Get down!’

  William Pettigrew looked at him uncomprehendingly.

  ‘Lie in it, fucker!’

  The priest looked at the paint and hesitated.

  ‘Get on with it,’ the youth’s face turned pink as he struggled to find the right words, ‘motherfucker!’

  Another boot caught Pettigrew in the small of the back. Forced down into the puddle, his shirt and trousers were immediately soaked in the cloying green paint. Lying still, he felt a small pulse of satisfaction that he had managed to get dressed before opening the door. To be both naked and green would have been a terrible embarrassment.

  Of course, it was also a waste of good paint, but that seemed a total irrelevance now, since it wasn’t as if he would be coming back to start the decorating.

  A boot tickled his ear. ‘Why didn’t you stay away, dickhead?’

  It was a good question.

  William Pettigrew was well known locally as a so-called ‘Red Priest’, a liberation theologian and, therefore, a troublemaker. That meant that he was always likely to be on someone’s list. When the coup began, his friends had warned him that he would be a target; that he should lie low, maybe even leave the country for a while. Pettigrew was lucky – he had that option; he had a passport and he had money. He could go back to Great Britain and leave this all behind. On several occasions, the Archdiocese and the ecclesiastical governors had made it clear to him that this was a course of action of which they would approve.

  He had toyed with going to Scotland – his great-greatgrandfather had been an innkeeper in Montrose – to see for himself where the Pettigrews had first come from. But, deep down, he knew that was just a fantasy. He would never run away.

  In the event, he did leave Valparaíso . . . for a little while. After a couple of nights of listening to the shooting, he had headed for a village twenty kilometres up the coast, where he spent a couple of nights on a friend’s floor. The whole thing quickly seemed melodramatic and self-indulgent – cowardly, even. By running from his fate, he had put himself in a prison of his own making. After all, Cerro Los Placeres was his home. There was nowhere else to go. There was nowhere else he wanted to be.

  He knew that he had to suffer with the people here, share the suffering of the powerless, the impotent. He knew that he could offer his neighbours no solutions to this terrible situation. He didn’t know the answers. But he could walk with them, search with them, stay with them. Die with them.

  His only weapon was forgiveness. Forgiveness is fuelled by love; violence is fuelled by fear. Love is the antidote to fear. And he knew that love is what he would need in his heart when he arrived at the gates of Heaven.

  So he came back.

  For a couple more days, he went about his business in Valparaíso unmolested. It seemed that no one cared about William Pettigrew.

  Until now.

  Another kick brought him back to the present. More words were whispered in his ear:

  ‘You are an idiot as well as a pervert.’

  ‘Do you think God cares what happens to scum like you?’

  ‘You should have fucked off back to England, while you had the chance.’

  ‘The Church shrinks from blood but we do not.’

  After a couple more kicks, and a few smacks around the head with a rifle butt, Pettigrew’s hands were tied firmly together in front of him. Careful to avoid getting any of the bright green paint on their fatigues, two soldiers hauled him towards the rear of a canvas-covered truck. Half-lifted, half-pushed, he was bundled inside. There were maybe ten or twelve other people already in there, but no one that he recognised in the gloom. They instinctively shied away from him, fearing any association that could make their situation worse. Righting himself, he found a space near the tailgate. Shouting and laughing came from outside the truck. Inside there was only a pensive silence, laced with a heavy dose of fear.

  Five minutes later, the tailgate was closed and the canvas flaps at the back of the truck pulled down. Someone shouted to the driver that they were ready to go, and the truck rumbled into life. After a few more seconds they set off, travelling at a steady pace of not much more than twenty miles an hour. Out of the back, through the gaps in the canvas, Pettigrew could see that they were being closely followed by a group of three soldiers in a jeep. One was manning a machine-gun mounted on the back, just in case anyone decided to take their chances and jump. No one did.

  It was clear that they were heading south, towards the port area. Pettigrew had been what they called a ‘worker priest’ in Valparaíso’s Las Habas shipyards for almost a year, so he knew this route well. He also knew why they were going there. A couple of naval vessels had arrived in Valparaíso two days before the socialist government had been overthrown. With the President, Salvador Allende, dead, and ‘leftists’ of all descriptions being rounded up, rumours quickly began circulating that these ships were being used as overflow facilities for the prisons.

  ‘A nice bit of sea air – and free board and lodging,’ someone had joked at the time. ‘A lot better than Londres Street,’ the man had added, referring to the
Communist Party headquarters in Santiago which, as everyone knew, was now being used as a torture centre.

  Pettigrew had looked at him askance.

  ‘Like a little vacation really.’

  Really? Well, his vacation started here.

  They moved slowly through the streets. The city seemed desolate even for the middle of the night. Lights were out. Windows were closed. Doors firmly bolted shut. People were curled up in their beds, worried that they might be next, wracking their brains for any behaviour, any words, that might lead to a midnight visit and a one-way trip to Las Habas.

  Even the dogs that habitually prowled the dustbins looking for food had the sense to take the night off.

  Inside the truck, someone started sobbing. Another began quietly reciting the Lord’s Prayer. At the end, there were a couple of ragged Améns, followed by more silence. A woman close to Pettigrew squeezed her rosary so tightly that the string broke and the beads fell to the floor, scattering at their feet. She glanced at Pettigrew and shrugged. He said nothing. They both knew that it was far too late for God.

  They made four more stops on the way. Pulling up outside houses that the priest didn’t recognise; picking up men and women whom he didn’t know. At each stop, two or three more people were shoved into the back of the truck. There was some shouting, a few screams but no real complaints and no resistance.

  By the time they reached the dockside, the truck was full. The driver slowed his speed as he pulled onto one of the piers. Through the gap in the canvas, Pettigrew caught a glimpse of a distinctive four-mast schooner, the Dama Blanca. The White Lady was a familiar sight in Valparaíso, being the training ship for the cadets at the city’s Arturo Prat Naval Academy. He had even been on board once himself, during an Open Day early in 1972. Visitors were given a tour of the bay, some free rum and a rather boring lecture on Arturo Prat and his good works.