Time of Death (8 page)

Carlyle let a few seconds elapse. The only sound inside the room was the low whirring of the tape-machine. He counted to thirty in his head, waiting to see if Mills would offer up anything
else.

. . . 27, 28, 29, 30 . . .

Mills kept his eyes on the table and said nothing. Carlyle decided to give it thirty seconds more.

. . . 58, 59, 60 . . .

Still nothing. The lawyer meanwhile looked as if she had all the time in the world. Finally, Carlyle spoke: ‘How does it feel?’ For a second, he wondered if he’d actually asked
such a soft question. He ignored the surprised look on the lawyer’s face and instead stared firmly at Henry Mills.

Thrown by the question, Mills thought about it for a minute. Carlyle could see that he was wrestling with his thoughts, trying to work out an honest answer. For the first time, he felt a pang of
empathy with the dishevelled man in front of him. It struck him that if Helen’s skull had been smashed in – even if it had been Carlyle himself who had brained her – he would have
been left distraught. Life without his wife, he imagined, would be like a living death. He would become a kind of zombie, just like the man in front of him.

‘I don’t know,’ Mills said finally. ‘If you’re morbid enough to imagine these things, I suppose you expect it to be dramatic, gut-wrenching, a rollercoaster of
emotions. In reality, it’s been a very tedious and boring day. I should have laid off the Scotch, like you told me, Inspector .’

Carlyle gave him a small bow.

‘I know I should say something like
the reality hasn’t hit me yet
, but what the “reality” is, remains to be seen. Agatha and I have been married for almost forty
years, we don’t have any children, and our lives could be considered fairly,’ he thought about the right word, ‘self-contained.’

Carlyle nodded, trying to look thoughtful, inviting him to continue.

‘That’s not to say we had separate lives – we didn’t. What we had was a very comfortable combined existence where neither of us felt compromised.’ His eyes welled
up and he struggled to keep his voice even: ‘Seeing her lying there on the floor – it wasn’t her. It wasn’t real. It wasn’t
us
.’

Carlyle waited for more but nothing was forthcoming. He glanced at the lawyer, who seemed to be confused by her client’s opening gambit. Was that a confession or not?

Switching off the tape-machine, Carlyle turned back to Henry Mills. ‘I want you to take a break,’ he said gently, ‘and then we can have another go. Talk to your lawyer here.
She will know the kind of detailed questions that I’m going to ask. If you’ve basically given me your full statement, then it is going to take a while for us to go through the evidence.
If you can think of anything – anything at all – that might help your case, now is the time to tell me. Then, if you want to change your story, we can get this thing sorted out quickly
and you can have a rest.’

H
e had almost got back to his desk on the third floor when he felt his phone vibrating in the back pocket of his jeans. Seeing that it was his wife, he hit the receive
button.

‘Hi.’

‘John. You have to get to the school.’ Helen’s tone was verging on fraught.

‘There’s been a bomb scare . . .’

B
y the time he got to the Barbican, the place looked like a scene out of some straight-to-video cop movie. The whole arts complex surrounding the school had been cordoned off.
Outside the tape, tourists and office workers mingled, sharing a mixture of concern and curiosity, while resisting the best attempts of a dozen or so uniformed officers to move them along. As he
approached the Silk Street entrance, Carlyle counted more than a dozen police vehicles, including two large Bomb Squad vans. He wondered how long it would take them to search the entire site
– several hours at least. There would certainly be no more chance of school today. He pulled up Alice’s number on his mobile, and cursed when he got a ‘network busy’
message.

‘Fuck!’

Ending the call, he redialled immediately. And got the same message.

‘Bastard fucking phone!’

And again.

And again.

At the fifth or six attempt, he got through. After barely two rings, his daughter’s voicemail kicked in.
Hi! This is Alice. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you. Bye!

‘Alice,’ he said as calmly as he could manage, ‘it’s Dad. Call me when you get this.’

Keeping the phone in his hand, he walked up to a sergeant standing by the police tape. Flashing his ID, he got a nod of recognition.

‘Where are the schoolkids?’ Carlyle asked.

‘Gone to the RV points, sir,’ the sergeant said in a practised manner.

‘And where are the RV points?’

‘Er . . .’ The officer shrugged.

Carlyle was just about to slap him, when they were interrupted by a middle-aged woman with a clipboard. ‘Which class?’ she asked Carlyle briskly.

‘Er . . .’ Now it was Carlyle’s turn to show his ignorance.

The woman hid her frown behind her clipboard. ‘Teacher?’

‘A man, I think,’ was as much as Carlyle could manage.

This time the woman made no attempt to hide her contempt for his ignorance.

Summoning up the patience of a saint, she gave him one last try. ‘Upper or Lower school?’

‘Lower,’ Carlyle said decisively. He knew he had to have a fifty-fifty chance of being right on that one at least.

‘They will have gone to Monkwell Square.’

Carlyle looked at her blankly.

‘It’s just next to the Ironmongers’ Hall,’ the woman said.

‘Just back the way you came, sir,’ the sergeant said helpfully. ‘Head towards St Paul’s – it’s just before you get to London Wall. Should only take you about
five minutes, maximum.’

‘Thanks,’ Carlyle replied through gritted teeth. Turning on his heels, he headed at a trot back through the gawkers and the randomly parked police cars.

It took him only a couple of minutes to find the Square. The place was full of girls in uniform gossiping in small groups, lounging about on the grass and generally looking quite pleased at the
prospect of the afternoon off. Quite a few were smoking and he was shocked to see one girl, who looked to be even younger than Alice, taking a casual drag on a cigarette as she sat under a tree.
How would he react if he found his own daughter smoking? He would cross that bridge if and when he came to it.

First he had to find her. It took him another few minutes to locate someone who looked like a teacher – a tall man in a suit, also brandishing a clipboard. Careful not to tread on any of
the pupils, Carlyle stepped forward and introduced himself.

The man nodded. ‘John Doherty, Deputy Head of the Lower School.’ When Carlyle explained that he was looking for his daughter, he frowned. ‘There’s no need to
overreact.’

Overreact?

‘It’s probably just a false alarm,’ Doherty continued. He looked as if he was in his early thirties, but with his floppy straw hair and boyish features he managed to look
younger than many of the girls. ‘Everyone has been accounted for. We’ve told all the ones that don’t normally get picked up that they can go home.’

Before Carlyle could respond, the phone started vibrating in his hand. It was a text message from Alice:
At home. All ok. x

A mixture of relief and frustration washed over him. He looked up, but the teacher had already walked off. For a few seconds, Carlyle stood there, feeling like a spare part. Then he called his
wife and left the Square, heading west.

T
he bell rang, shortly followed by a low rumble of excited chatter. Michael Hagger leaned against a pillar outside the entrance to Coram’s Fields Nursery. Trying to look
like the kind of bloke who would regularly pick his kid up from playschool, he watched the children start to stream out, still happily playing, stuffing their faces with snacks, or chatting about
the day. Mostly it was women – mothers or childminders – doing the collecting, but there was the odd father here and there making the effort to be part of the post-school run.

Once he was sure that home-time was in full swing, Hagger slipped past a woman struggling with a buggy and went inside the building. Smiling at the girls in reception, he casually walked down
the corridor towards Jake’s classroom.

Wearing jeans, trainers and a
Thomas the Tank Engine
T-shirt, the boy sat at a desk, drawing on a piece of paper with a green crayon. He was concentrating hard, with his tongue poking out
of one corner of his mouth. For the first time, it struck Hagger that he was a good-looking lad. Must get it from me, he thought. A teaching assistant stood at a sink in the far corner of the room,
tidying away a selection of paints and brushes. She had her back to them and didn’t turn round when he entered the room.

Jake saw him and made a face. ‘What are
you
doing here?’

Hagger forced a small smile. ‘I’ve come to pick you up.’

Jake looked confused. ‘You never pick me up.’

‘Well, I am today,’ Hagger replied through gritted teeth.

‘Where’s Mum?’

Hagger reached over and patted him on the head.

‘I’m picking you up today,’ he repeated. ‘I thought it would be nice.’

The teaching assistant was still busy putting caps back on tubes of paint.

‘Mum always picks me up,’ the boy said stubbornly. ‘Or Amelia.’

A right pair of useless, lazy bitches, Hagger decided. ‘They said I could come and get you today.’

‘Mum says you’re a complete bastard,’ Jake said casually, lowering his gaze and pressing the crayon harder into the paper. ‘And a total cunt,’ he added, swapping
his green crayon for a red one.

‘Does she now?’ Hagger bristled.

‘What is a cunt, anyway?’

‘Nothing.’

The boy looked up. ‘It’s a bad word, isn’t it?’

‘She’s only joking.’ Hagger grinned nervously. He glanced towards the back of the room but the teaching assistant clearly hadn’t heard. She had the taps running now,
washing out some pots.’

‘Amelia too.’

‘They love me really. Just like you, eh?’

Jake still didn’t look up. ‘I want to wait for Mum.’

Hagger had expected this reaction from the boy. He knew that he had to be quick. He couldn’t afford a scene. Dropping a small bag of jelly babies on the desk, he whispered, ‘I
thought we could go and get an ice cream.’

The boy grabbed the sweets and stood up. ‘Okay,’ he said, tearing open the packet. He looked up at his father. ‘Then can I go and see Mum?’

‘Of course.’

H
appy to be on his own for once, Dominic Silver relaxed on a couch in his house on Meard Street in Soho. Gideon Spanner, his eyes and ears on the street, was out on his rounds
and so Silver had the place to himself. The room was silent apart from the hum of traffic outside, interrupted by the occasional burst of a police siren. He had muted the television, on which was
playing a rerun of Evander Holyfield’s 1989 fight with Michael Dokes, to focus on a report in the
Evening Standard
. It was the unremarkable story of two drug dealers who were due to be
sent down for up to twenty-seven years after police found two holdalls containing 50 kilograms of heroin in the boot of their car. The report claimed that the ‘haul’ was worth almost
£5 million ‘on the street’. I’m not sure what street you’re thinking about, mate, Dom sniffed. Off the top of his head, he estimated that anyone would do well to
generate three and a half million from such a load in these straitened times. Still a tidy sum, but well below peak prices. The deepening recession was savaging all types of discretionary spending;
even the drugs business, which had held up better than most for longer than most, was now seriously feeling the pinch. Austerity was the name of the game now, even when it came to getting
wasted.

He turned back to the newspaper story. The dealers claimed to have been picking up leaflets that they had ordered from a printing business. According to this version of events, the leaflets were
not ready for collection at the appointed hour. Meantime, the men were asked to deliver the holdalls instead in return for £250. The jury had taken less than fifteen minutes to find the
cretins guilty. It was a surprise that its deliberations had taken that long. The police must have been pissing themselves.

‘Idiots!’ Silver studied the mugshots of the duo that accompanied the story and shook his head. He had mixed feelings about the police’s success in this case. The drugs had
belonged to a rival dealer and someone else’s product being taken off the market was always good news. Without feeling too smug, Dominic felt that natural selection would always work to his
advantage. At the same time, however, it showed that you could only push your luck so far. Disappointed customers would still want servicing and any gap in the market invited a free-for-all. There
were plenty of people who would happily spill blood for the sake of market share. That was the capitalist way.

Dominic closed the paper and tossed it on the floor, thinking that it was getting ever closer to the time when he really should be calling it a day. He shut his eyes and tried to clear his mind
of all its various distractions.

This, he knew, was a big test.

Could he live up to one of life’s basic rules?

Could he quit while he was ahead?

A
shower and a fried-egg sandwich went a little way to easing the frustrations of the day. Alice had retired to her bedroom to do her homework, and seemed completely unfazed by
recent events. Picking up the evening paper, Carlyle flopped on to the sofa beside his wife. ‘What a day!’

Helen finished sending a text message and dropped her phone on the coffee-table. ‘Well, at least there was no bomb. Apparently a couple of the older girls called it in.’

Carlyle gave her one of his many bemused looks. ‘Huh?’

‘They were due to have a test. They didn’t want to do the test, so . . .’

‘So they said that there was a bomb in the bloody school?’ he spluttered.