Never Apologise, Never Explain - James Craig [28]
‘Basically,’ Carlyle continued, on a roll now, ‘it’s all the same stuff. You either use it or you abuse it. Some people can handle it; some people can’t. I’ll ask around in the morning, see what I can find out.’
‘Okay. That would be good. One of the bags belonged to a girl in Alice’s class.’
That stopped him in his tracks. ‘You’re kidding!’
His wife shot him a look that indicated that she most definitely wasn’t. ‘I don’t think she’s one of Alice’s friends but, still, we’ll have to keep a close eye on things.’
‘Yes,’ Carlyle agreed, moving swiftly from the realms of the theoretical to the pragmatic, ‘we will.’ He leaned across and pulled Helen towards him. For a while they just lay there, each of them thinking about their daughter and about the dangers ahead; each knowing also that there wasn’t really anything that they could do about it right now. You just had to wait and see how things turned out.
Finally Helen moved things on. ‘How was your day?’
‘Well . . .’ Carlyle sighed. He talked her through the story of Agatha and Henry Mills, or at least as much of it as he knew.
‘Will the case be closed tomorrow?’ she asked.
‘I hope so. We’ll see what Mr Mills has to say for himself in the morning.’ Henry Mills had been left to stew in the cells overnight. While Carlyle had been chasing around after his daughter, Joe had seen the man later that afternoon. Mills had stuck to his story that he had been fast asleep when someone had been practising their forehand smash with a frying pan on the back of his wife’s head. Exasperated, Carlyle had made it clear to the lawyer that they would charge him in the morning. Mills’s passivity was curious, but people reacted to stressful situations in different ways. Carlyle thought he might just be shutting down, trying to keep the outside world at bay. He decided to send in a psychologist to see what they made of the man. If nothing else, it would give a clear sign to Mills, and his lawyer, that they were curious about the state of his mental health. If the lawyer was sufficiently switched on, she would realise that the police weren’t buying her client’s story, but that they would probably be willing to do a deal on the grounds of diminished responsibility or something similar.
The inspector didn’t see the point of long sentences for domestic cases; it wasn’t as if the killers were a threat to the wider public, and it cost a fortune to keep them in jail. Far better that Mills’s lawyer got him to take a five-year deal, and the whole thing got wrapped up now. That way, he would probably be out in less than three. The alternative would be to go through the protracted, convoluted and hugely expensive legal process. If he did that, Mills would probably get eight to ten. There was a chance that he might get off on either a technicality or a jury’s sympathy vote but, if they were doing their job, the lawyer would tell him that it wasn’t worth the risk, or the hassle. Even if he won, he would still end up spending more than a year in custody, given the painfully slow speed at which the wheels of British justice manage to turn.
For Carlyle, the length of the sentence was an irrelevance. A win was a win. And a quick win was the best kind of all. Once guilt was confirmed, the case was closed. Nine times out of ten, he didn’t really care what happened beyond that.
Trying to forget about Henry Mills for a while, Carlyle returned to the evening paper. As usual, he read the sports pages first. Finding nothing of interest, he turned to the front. On page four his eye caught a story about an advert that the British Humanist Association had placed on the side of some of London’s red buses, proclaiming: There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life. Carlyle, a devout atheist, immediately took offence at the word ‘probably’. ‘These bloody lentil-sucking, sandal-wearing, liberal do-gooders,’ he harrumphed to himself under his breath. ‘Why can’t they just tell