Time of Death (9 page)

‘Yes.’ Helen grinned.

He half-laughed. ‘Well, I suppose that’s using your initiative, kind of.’

‘But sadly for them,’ Helen continued, ‘one of the girls used her mobile to call it in. They are
soooo
busted.’

‘Jesus. How do you know all this so quickly?’

Helen tapped her nose with a finger. ‘The mothers’ network is always first with the news.’

‘Very impressive.’

‘There’s more.’

‘There is?’

‘Yes.’ Helen’s face darkened. ‘The sniffer dogs didn’t find any bombs, but they did come up with eight bags containing drugs.’

‘What kind of drugs?’ Carlyle asked.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Dope, presumably.’

‘What about that skunk stuff?’ Helen asked. ‘Isn’t that the new super-threat to the nation’s teens?’

‘Only if you’re a neurotic middle-class parent,’ Carlyle yawned, ‘happy to throw a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc down your throat every night while lecturing your kids about
how they shouldn’t even look at a spliff.’

Helen regarded him thoughtfully. Normally she was the more liberal side of the relationship. When it came to drugs, however, her husband’s laissez-faire fatalism made her more than a
little uncomfortable.

‘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 it like it is? There
is
no bloody God. End of story. If people could just acknowledge that
basic fact, everyone’s life would become a lot easier.’ Almost willing himself to get more annoyed, he read on:
A spokesman said: ‘This campaign will make people think –
and thinking is anathema to religion.’
Bollocks it will, thought Carlyle sourly. If you are stupid enough to believe in God, what good is a bloody slogan on the side of a sodding bus?

Feeling his cheeks colouring, he looked imploringly at Helen, who was still curled up on the other end of the sofa. Well aware of the warning signs whenever her husband started winding himself
up, she studiously ignored him, saying nothing and keeping her eyes firmly fixed on the television. She was watching that show where various ‘celebrities’ are dropped into the
Australian jungle and made to debase themselves for a couple of weeks to no apparent purpose.

A serious woman in most other respects, Helen was addicted to junk television, and it drove Carlyle mad. This programme had to be one of the worst. He felt the urge to flee the room, but lacked
the energy to haul himself off the sofa. His eyes were drawn back to the screen where a mound of bamboo worms were wriggling on a large plate which had been placed in front of one of the
contestants. There was a close-up of the man’s disgusted face, as a worm was waved in front of him by one of the grinning presenters. Carlyle’s mouth fell open. ‘Christ!’ he
exclaimed. ‘That’s Luke Osgood!’

‘
Sir
Luke Osgood,’ Helen corrected him, reminding him of the former Metropolitan Police Chief’s recent knighthood. The gong had helped to soften the blow of his very
messy and very public sacking by the Mayor of London a year or so earlier.

‘What the hell’s he doing in the jungle?’ Carlyle spluttered.

‘He’s got to eat all of those worms on the plate in three minutes or no one in the competition gets anything to eat tonight.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Carlyle, hating it when Helen tried to be funny like this, ‘but what’s he doing there in the first place?’

‘This is part of his reinvention as an all-round media performer,’ Helen said, as if it was the most natural thing in the world for the man who had been Britain’s top policeman
for five years to be conducting himself in such an appalling manner.

Carlyle studied the screen intently. The man currently stuffing bamboo worms into his mouth bore only a limited resemblance to the haggard bureaucrat who had been last seen leaving New Scotland
Yard by the back door, hounded by journalists, with the scorn of his political masters ringing in his ears. Osgood’s previously messy hair had been cut short, bleached (to hide the grey) and
spiked with gel. He sported a tan that bordered on orange and, although it was hard to tell on the television, Carlyle thought that there was a suggestion of some plastic surgery to remove the
lines around his eyes and to make his lips fuller. ‘His mid-life crisis just gets worse,’ he sneered.

As Commissioner, Osgood had never impinged much on Carlyle’s working life, but his subsequent behaviour had caused some surprise. Barely two months after getting the sack, he left his wife
and kids, announced that he was bisexual, and set up home with a twenty-five-year-old ballroom dancer who had arrived in London from Bergamo. Now the ‘pink policeman’ had a weekly
column in a Sunday newspaper, and seized every opportunity to go on television or the radio to criticise Christian Holyrod, the Mayor who had sacked him, or else his former colleagues and his
successor, Sir Chester Forsyth-Walker, a self-proclaimed ‘copper from the old school’.

Carlyle didn’t know anyone on The Job who didn’t think Osgood should have just taken his money, a pension pot of £3 million, and disappeared into the sunset with his mouth
firmly shut and his newfound sexuality kept firmly hidden in the closet. How can anyone get to fifty and suddenly decide that they’re gay? For once, Carlyle found that he was in step with the
majority view of the rank and file across London’s police stations, which was that Osgood could have no complaints if someone was to drag him down a dark alley and kick the living shit out of
him for being such a pathetic, ego-crazed tosser.

‘They’ve got his boyfriend waiting for him at a nearby hotel,’ Helen replied. ‘He’s quite cute.’

Carlyle frowned. ‘Luke Osgood? Cute?’

‘No!’ Helen giggled. ‘The boyfriend. He’s called Gianluca.’ She arched her eyebrows theatrically. ‘Quite the Italian stallion.’

Carlyle chose to ignore his wife’s professed admiration for the hunky Gianluca, keeping his focus on Osgood, who was now well on the way to finishing his wormy snack. ‘But why is he
bothering with all this?’ he asked. ‘He can’t need the money.’

‘I think he’s got a taste for it.’

Carlyle frowned again. ‘For what? Worms?’

‘No,’ Helen gave him a firm poke with her foot, ‘for being a celeb. His ego is finally being allowed to run free. He’s unleashed his frivolous side after a lifetime of
being submerged in the system.’

‘I see,’ said Carlyle. He made a grab for her foot, but she pulled it away. ‘Just be happy that
I
manage to stay submerged in the system. Letting my ego run free
wouldn’t put any bread on the table.’

‘If you could make as much money as Sir Luke,’ Helen grinned, ‘you have my permission to eat as many bugs as you like. You can even take an Italian boyfriend.’

Carlyle gave her a funny look.

‘Only joking. But there’s plenty of money in all this for Lucky Luke. Apparently, he’s getting paid a hundred and twenty thousand to do this show. With all his other work,
he’s making something like three-quarters of a million a year now.’

‘Jeez.’ Carlyle let out a long, low whistle. Seven hundred and fifty thousand would be three times what Osgood was getting as Metropolitan Police Commissioner. What a world, he
thought; what a fucking stupid world. You could earn £250,000 a year, be responsible for 50,000 people and a budget of £3.5
billion
, not to mention having to deal with the
politicians and all their crap – or, indeed, the safety of some 7 million Londoners. Alternatively, you could triple your money for sitting about talking rubbish and eating worms. He had to
admit that it was not really such a difficult decision. ‘But what about his dignity?’ he asked lamely.

‘What about it?’ Helen snorted, tiring of the repeated interruptions. ‘How much did he have left when the Mayor sacked him? Anyway, how much is
your
dignity
worth?’

Carlyle didn’t need to think about it for long to conclude that the answer was a lot less than £750,000. ‘God, all that cash! Could you imagine?’

‘Don’t feel too bad about it,’ Helen said. She gave him another poke with her toe, but this time it was gentler. ‘Osgood’s only got a limited window of
opportunity.’ She disengaged her foot from his ribs and waved it at the screen. ‘How many times can he do stuff like this? It’s downhill all the way from here.’

‘I suppose you’re right,’ said Carlyle.

‘Before you know it,’ Helen said, ‘he’ll be reduced to selling security shutters on late-night TV.’

‘And opening supermarkets in Croydon,’ Carlyle laughed.

‘Do they do that sort of thing any more?’ Helen asked.

‘I dunno,’ said Carlyle. ‘You would assume so. Opening supermarkets and churning out z-list celebrities are probably the only things that this country is good at any
more.’

On the other side of the world, Luke Osgood swallowed the last worm and raised his arms in triumph. ‘Will he win?’ Carlyle asked.

‘No,’ Helen said with certainty. ‘Gay ex-policeman is too
niche
to win. He’s also too middle-class. People like him are the ones who get halfway on shows like
this: not complete losers who get voted straight off, but not popular enough with the masses to get through to the very end. To do that, you either have to be a cheeky chappy soap star who gets the
mums’ vote or a model with big boobs and a tiny bikini who gets the lads’ vote.’ She mentioned the names of a couple of people that Carlyle had never heard of. ‘One of those
two will win.’

As they watched Osgood return to his jungle camp in triumph, Alice appeared in the doorway. She deftly tossed a mobile towards the sofa and retreated to her bedroom without saying a word.
Carlyle caught the phone before it hit him on the head. He felt it vibrating in his hand and automatically hit the receive button. ‘Hello?’

‘Inspector, it’s Amelia Jacobs.’

Shit. He could immediately tell from the tension in her voice that it wasn’t good news. ‘Hi.’

‘That bastard’s taken Jake.’

That bastard. Michael Hagger. The bloke he was supposed to talk to. The bloke he was supposed to sort out.

‘He picked him up from the nursery.’

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

‘I was ten minutes late,’ her voice cracked slightly, ‘and they were gone.’

‘Uhuh.’ The inspector kicked out at the coffee-table in frustration. You fucking idiot, he told himself, why didn’t you just warn the guy off? They were depending on you.