Never Apologise, Never Explain - James Craig [82]
He made a snap judgement. ‘Leave them where they are for the moment. We’ll need to talk to them. But I’ll make sure you can get them moved as soon as possible.’
‘Okay.’ She turned and swiftly left the room.
After she had gone, Carlyle stepped away from the murder scene and took the lid off Joyce’s coffee. He sipped it carefully. It was at best lukewarm now, but it was strong and it tasted good. He certainly wasn’t going to throw it away. ‘Waste not, want not,’ he said to no one in particular. ‘After all, this is going to be a long night.’
In the end, Carlyle spent almost four hours hanging around the hospital corridor before he was able to go home. It had taken a couple of hours for his new pals, Nick Chan and Greg Brown, to show up, and another hour before they were ready to talk to him. As far as Carlyle was concerned, that was fine. On this occasion, he would have to be professional courtesy and co-operation personified. For a start, he knew that he had a bit of explaining to do. Chan and Brown could really drop him in it if they wanted to. He could appeal to their goodwill but Carlyle knew that was not a good idea. Otherwise, all he could do was share his thoughts on a possible connection with the Agatha Mills killing and see if that might spark their imaginations.
‘Sounds like a load of rubbish to me,’ Brown snorted, after he had talked them through it.
Carlyle looked to Chan.
Chan shook his head. ‘“Rubbish” is the polite way of putting it.’
Recognising the reasonableness of their reaction, Carlyle gave a shrug. ‘The late Mr Joyce here sent a text to someone before I went off to the café, to check if Mills was part of the same group as his girlfriend. Did he get a reply?’
‘Let me see.’ Brown wandered off.
Chan watched him go and turned to Carlyle. ‘The gun is an Israeli semi-automatic, the Jericho 941, about fifteen years old. Not very common in this country.’
‘Not very common at all,’ Carlyle agreed.
Brown reappeared. ‘No texts for Mr Joyce this evening, but we can try and track down the recipient of the message he sent.’
‘Good.’ Chan turned away from his colleague to face Carlyle. ‘Inspector,’ he said, ‘you can go home now. We’ll be in touch.’
‘Fine,’ said Carlyle as he headed towards the main lifts. ‘You know where to find me.’
TWENTY-SEVEN
Carefully balancing a fragile but expensive-looking cup and saucer on his knee, Carlyle sat quietly waiting for Claudio Orb to take a sip of his own tea. High on the wall to Carlyle’s left was a large photograph of a Chanel-clad woman who presumably was the current Chilean President. From behind the Ambassador, light flooded in through the French windows opening on to a small balcony which looked over the busy square just outside.
He had arrived almost on a whim. When Henry Mills had walked out in front of that van, his case had apparently solved itself. It could be easily put to bed, and no one would give it another thought. Sandra Groves was Chan’s problem. Carlyle could put his feet up for a while and wait for the next pile of shit to come along. Being a restless soul, however, he knew that he wouldn’t be able to leave it alone. The sense that there was more to this than met the eye was lodged in his brain. It was a feeling that he’d experienced many times before. He hated the idea of being taken for a ride – whether it was due to professional pride or personal vanity – and he wasn’t minded to let things drop just yet.
Turning up at the Embassy, he had been cheered that his arrival had been greeted with neither surprise nor dismay. After passing through the most rudimentary of security checks, he had been sent up, on his own, to the Ambassador’s office,