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By Root 759 0

the front door behind him, Carlyle stepped quickly down the hallway, heading for the kitchen. Glancing round the room, he saw that nothing had been touched since the original investigation. A chair lay overturned beside the kitchen table and Agatha Mills’s dried blood was still caked on the floor. Carlyle wondered how long the place would stay like this. It could take months, if not years due to legal reasons for the flat to get sold and have someone else move in. It struck him that this place would be great for Helen and Alice and himself, but it was way out of their league – probably about a million quid out of their league. He wondered who actually owned it now – whether the Millses had left it to anyone in their wills, or whether it would just revert to the Government, to help pay down the National Debt. God knows, the public finances needed all the help they could get.

Moving over to the kitchen window, he flicked open the latch and stepped out on to the same fire escape where he had found Sylvester Bassett, the pathologist, having a smoke on the morning after Agatha Mills’s death. Sitting on the small landing just below the windowsill, Carlyle let his head rest against the metal handrail of the fire escape and closed his eyes. In the cool silence of the stairwell, he spent a minute or so running through the day’s events in his head. Reaching no particular conclusions, he dug into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out a list of the Chilean guests who had attended the Mayor’s reception at City Hall, a week earlier.

The list had arrived, as promised, from the Ambassador’s office the day after the actual event. A couple of days after that, Carlyle had stuck it in his jacket pocket and basically forgotten about it. Now, for want of anything better to do, he began scanning the rows of names and organisations, none of which meant anything to him. After a short while, his eyes glazed over. Putting the list back in his pocket, he just sat there, staring into the darkened windows of the empty flats opposite.

After a while, his thoughts turned to Rosanna Snowdon. She had asked for his help: had he let her down? He really had no idea. Had he got her killed? Surely not. The bastard who killed her was the bastard who killed her. He had long ago realised that he was not the kind of guy who tried on other people’s guilt for size.

He was spared any extended reflection by the phone vibrating in the breast pocket of his jacket. He frowned, convinced that he had switched it off, before realising that the one ringing was his private phone. Muttering to himself, he checked the incoming number – Dominic Silver.

‘Hello?’ he barked.

‘So you do actually know how to answer your phone,’ Dominic chuckled.

‘I thought you were supposed to be busy,’ Carlyle said, remembering the man’s last message.

‘I was . . . I am, but you sounded harassed.’

‘I am.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ said Dominic, exuding unreasonable reasonableness. ‘So how can I help?’

Carlyle took a moment to remember the problem in question. ‘Michael Hagger.’

‘Yes,’ Dominic said breezily, ‘what about him?’

‘He came to see me.’

‘Did he indeed?’ Dominic’s tone remained determinedly cheery, but Carlyle could now detect an underlying wariness. ‘Did he bring the boy?’

‘No, but he said that Jake was okay.’

‘That’s something, I suppose.’

‘Hagger also said that he would be returning him soon.’

Dominic said nothing to that.

‘And he also said,’ Carlyle continued, ‘that I was to tell you to back off.’

Dominic laughed. ‘And what did you say?’

‘What could I say?’ Carlyle shot back, with more than a hint of exasperation in his voice. ‘I didn’t have a bloody clue what he was talking about.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘How should I know?’ Carlyle snapped.

‘You let him go?’

‘Dominic, what was I supposed to do? We don’t know where the kid is or even why he’s being held,’ Carlyle pointed out, glossing over the fact that Hagger could have easily decked him if he had been silly enough to try and arrest him.

‘Ever the pragmatist,’ Silver joked. ‘Let’s hope that no one finds out how you