Never Apologise, Never Explain - James Craig [40]
Joe perched on the edge of the desk, opened the file and flipped through some sheets of paper. ‘It looks like he was telling the truth about the Chilean thing.’
‘Yeah?’ said Carlyle, looking at the somersaulting hourglass on his computer screen, not really caring any more.
‘Agatha Mills had a brother,’ Joe continued, ignoring his boss’s off-hand mood, ‘called William Pettigrew. They had a Chilean father and an English mother.’
‘Pettigrew? Doesn’t sound very Chilean to me.’
‘There’s a Scottish great-grandfather or great-great-grandfather in there somewhere,’ Joe explained. ‘There’s a strong Celtic influence, apparently. A whole bunch of Scottish farmers went over in the 1840s and 1850s. And the Chilean navy was formed by a Scot, Lord Cochrane, when they were fighting for independence from the Spaniards.’
‘Interesting,’ said Carlyle, impressed.
‘Wikipedia is a great thing.’ Joe shrugged. ‘We’ve always been tight with the Chileans, apparently. They’ve even had people fighting in Iraq.’
‘Jesus!’ Carlyle shook his head. ‘What’s it to them?’
‘Dunno. Anyway, William became a Catholic priest in Valparaíso, a coastal town north of Santiago. He disappeared during the 1973 military coup, when the army overthrew the government.’
‘That’s what usually happens in a military coup,’ Carlyle deadpanned.
Joe did not rise to the bait. ‘The family,’ he continued, ‘were eventually told that William Pettigrew was dead, but no body has ever been found.’
‘Again, not that uncommon.’
‘Agatha Mills, however, spent the last thirty-five years going back and forth between London and Chile, trying to find out what precisely happened to her brother and who killed him. She never lost hope of bringing her brother’s killers to justice.’
Carlyle sighed. ‘Good luck on that one.’
‘Well,’ said Joe, ‘you have to give the old girl some credit. She kept at it for decades, despite a history of threats from military types.’
‘Death threats?’ Carlyle perked up slightly.
‘Yeah . . . at least, according to some of the press reports. Mainly low-level stuff, like having her laptop nicked or her car tyres slashed. But I read one story about her getting an envelope in the post with a couple of bullets in it.’
‘The press are hardly reliable,’ Carlyle snorted. ‘I’m not going to start chasing my tail on the basis of a few clippings.’
‘No,’ Joe said, ‘but still.’
The inspector grunted.
‘You were the one who told me to check it out.’
‘Okay,’ Carlyle sniffed, ‘so she pissed off some Chileans pining for the good old days under that general.’ He groped for the name. ‘Maggie Thatcher’s mate.’
‘Pinochet.’
‘Yeah, right,’ Carlyle nodded, ‘General Pinochet.’
‘I think he was arrested in London a few years ago,’ Joe said, ‘while enjoying our Great British hospitality.’
Carlyle raised an eyebrow. ‘And?’
‘And nothing. Storm in a teacup and then he went home.’
‘Got away with it all,’ Carlyle mused.
‘I suppose so.’
‘They always do.’
‘To the victors the spoils.’
‘Yes, indeed, Joseph.’ Carlyle spent a moment contemplating life’s endless unfairness. ‘Isn’t he dead now?’
‘Pinochet?’ Joe made a face. ‘No idea.’
‘Either way,’ Carlyle mused, maybe just a little more interested now, ‘it’s all a long, long time ago. Why would anyone – apart from Agatha Mills, the loyal sister – still care about all this stuff now?’
‘Because Chile has got a new President,’ said Joe. ‘A socialist – and a woman.’
‘Interesting combination,’ said Carlyle, still not seeing the relevance.
‘She was a torture victim herself,’ Joe explained. ‘She ordered a fresh investigation into cases like William Pettigrew’s.’
‘Okay . . .’
‘The Pettigrew case review was completed last year. It concluded that he was almost certainly tortured and then shot dead aboard a navy ship called,’ he flicked through the papers again, ‘the White Lady.’
‘What did they do to him?’
‘The usual stuff, I suppose,’ said Joe. ‘Electric shocks to the gonads, that sort of thing.’
‘We could do with some of that downstairs,’ Carlyle grinned.
‘Different world back then.’
‘Which you would