Never Apologise, Never Explain - James Craig [11]
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