Time of Death (5 page)

‘What is your opinion, Commander?’ someone asked.

It was a question that neither expected nor deserved an answer. ‘I think it is an interesting proposal,’ she replied, letting her gaze move smoothly round the table. ‘However,
whatever happens, I am sure that we will maintain and build on our excellent performance record in this area.’

F
or the first time, Carlyle began to wonder if they were dealing with someone who wasn’t quite all there.

‘Which enemies?’ he asked.

Henry Mills looked at him as if he was trying to decide something. ‘The secret police,’ he said finally.

Joe sat forward. ‘We
are
the police, Mr Mills.’

‘Not you lot,’ Mills snapped. ‘The
secret
police.’

‘What “secret” police?’ Carlyle asked. ‘MI5?’ Bored and frustrated, he was rapidly tuning out of this conversation. Mentally he was already back at the
station, if not well on the way to going home for his dinner. He even wondered if there was going to be anything good on telly tonight before defaulting back to the matter in hand. ‘Who do
you mean?’

Mills stared at him blankly.

‘MI6?’ Carlyle tried again.

‘No, no, no!’ Mills pointed at the poster above the fireplace. ‘Not our lot. Are you stupid?’

Joe sniggered. Carlyle gritted his teeth.

Henry Mills waved his arms about theatrically. ‘I’m talking about the bloody Chileans.’

‘Chileans?’ Carlyle looked at the poster above the fireplace. He stuck his hands deep in his pockets.

‘1973. The CIA-backed fascist coup d’état.’ Mills gestured at the poster, saying, ‘The overthrow of the government of President Salvador Allende. Didn’t you
learn about it in school?’

‘I’m not interested in what happened in 1973,’ Carlyle told him. ‘I’m interested in what happened last night – here, in this flat.’

Now it was Mills’s turn to grow annoyed. ‘But I’m trying to explain . . .’

Fearing an extended history lesson, the inspector held up a hand. He wondered if maybe Henry Mills should have a lawyer, after all. The brief could try and talk some sense into his client.
‘Why would someone from Chile want to kill Mrs Mills?’ he asked.

‘They were just fed up with her,’ Mills said, a slight croak appearing in his voice. ‘She never gave up.’

The two policemen looked at him quizzically.

‘Agatha was finally getting to them. They wanted to shut her up.’

Closing his eyes, Inspector Carlyle saw a montage of all the bullshit stories that he’d had to listen to over the years flashing before him on fast-forward. Irritated beyond belief, he
signalled to Joe and they went out into the hall.

‘Can you believe this bollocks?’ he said under his breath, still watching Mills through the doorway.

Joe leaned against the wall. ‘The front door was locked, with no sign of forced entry. Same with the kitchen window. No fingerprints on the suspected murder weapon. We’re checking
the rest of the kitchen again right now, but nothing interesting so far. No unusual footprints, fibres or anything like that.’

‘Mills has to be our man then,’ said Carlyle, staring at the floor.

Joe nodded.

‘At the very least, he’ll have to come up with something better than this Chilean connection.’

‘On the plus side for Mr Mills,’ Joe observed, ‘there was no blood on him or on any of his clothes, when we arrived. And there’s no sign of him having tried to clean
anything up.’

‘He could easily have dropped any stained clothes in the rubbish,’ Carlyle mused. ‘The bin men have already been this morning. Better speak to Camden Council and find out where
all the rubbish ends up.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Joe doubtfully.

‘Don’t worry,’ Carlyle grinned. ‘You can get a couple of PCs to sort through it all.’

‘That’ll make me popular.’

‘It’s tough at the top.’

Now it was Joe’s turn to grin. ‘How would
you
know, exactly?’

‘Anyway,’ said Carlyle, not rising to the bait, ‘this looks fairly straightforward. Sometimes they are.’

‘Hmm.’ Joe scratched his head. ‘Overall, it does look like a domestic.’

‘I think it does,’ Carlyle agreed. ‘I don’t know what he thinks he can achieve with this Chilean nonsense, but I suppose we should be grateful that at least he’s
not trying to blame little green men.’

The inspector stepped back into the room. Mills was still sitting calmly in his chair. He was like a blank page, if a bit grubby round the edges. Prepared to give it one last go, Carlyle rubbed
his neck and consciously let a cloak of dispassionate formality descend over him.

‘Did you and your wife have an argument, sir?’ he asked.

‘No!’ Mills jerked out of the chair, accidentally kicking his empty glass across the floor. He watched it roll towards the inspector’s shoes and stood up, as if mesmerized,
unsure of what to do next.

Slowly, Carlyle bent down and picked up the glass. Stepping away from Mills, he placed it carefully on the mantelpiece. Happy Hour was over. The two men stood there silently for a few seconds,
waiting for something to happen. Finally, Carlyle turned to his sergeant. ‘Call a car, please, Joe, and take Mr Mills back to the station.’

Cerro Los Placeres, Valparaíso, Chile, September 1973

I
t was time.

His Term of Grace was over.

The dogs of the Lord were coming.

T
he dogs of the Lord were coming and he did not want them to find him naked. Tired but alert, William Pettigrew tugged a shirt over his head and pulled on a pair of torn
Wrangler jeans. Stepping out of the bedroom, he counted the six steps to his front door, trying to ignore the tightening knot in his stomach. Hopping from foot to bare foot, he mumbled the lines of
a prayer by a Trappist monk called Thomas Merton: ‘My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going . . .’

T
he
Domini canes
arrived in a flurry of engine noise and exhaust smoke. There was the squeal of rubber on tarmac, the crunch of boots on gravel, angry shouts and fearful
cries. When they finally stopped outside the house, Pettigrew felt a wave of serenity wash over him. ‘There is no point,’ he mumbled to himself, ‘in hiding under the bed when a
man with a machine-gun knocks on your door at two o’clock in the morning. Instead, you answer it.’

A soldier jogged towards him, rifle raised. He looked little more than a boy – seventeen, eighteen at most. Catching the youth’s eye, Pettigrew acknowledged the sadistic twinkle in
it, the almost pantomime menace in his voice. He breathed in the smell of body odour and refried beans mixed with Torobayo Ale.

Dropping his gun to his side, the boy jumped in front of the priest and spat in his face. Pettigrew flinched, but didn’t wipe it off.

The first blow sent him crashing to the ground. He tried to breathe slowly, through his mouth, trying to ignore the fire alarm going off in his brain and the fire in his crotch as the pain raced
round his body on a surge of adrenaline.

In the shadows, someone laughed. A callous voice cried: ‘That’s got to hurt!’

‘
Bienvenido a la Caravana de la Meurte
,’ the young soldier said grimly. Another gob of phlegm splattered on the ground in front of Pettigrew’s face. He looked up. The
slack grin on the soldier’s face said it all.

Welcome to the Caravan of Death.

Enjoy the ride.

P
ushing back his shoulders, Pettigrew stood up straight in front of the new Inquisition.

From his studies at the Catholic University in Santiago, he knew that, in these parts, the first Papal Inquisition officially ended only in 1834. It had lasted for more than 600 years.

Now it was back.

‘It is time for me to die.’

Death, however, is not a specific moment. It is a process that begins when the heart stops beating, the lungs stop working and the brain ceases functioning. In this case, he knew that it was
going to be a long, slow, painful process. He had shown the insolence and malapertness of the heretic, and now his false designs were to be crushed. The prophet, the dreamer, must be put to death
and the execrableness of his false doctrines purged.

He didn’t possess the apostolic humility, austerity, the holiness required for anything remotely approaching salvation.

It was too late for zealous preaching.

It was too late for voluntary confessions.

Now there was nothing to do but embrace the pain.

I
nstinctively, in their souls, the soldiers knew that no man must debase himself by showing toleration towards heretics of any kind. Pettigrew braced himself for another kick.
He knelt forward, getting as close to the boy’s boots as he could without making it look too obvious. If he didn’t get much backlift, the boy wouldn’t be able to get much force
into the next assault and maybe it would just be a glancing blow. Rocking gently on his knees, he could smell the boot polish. It had been smeared across the toes of his scuffed boots, like make-up
on a corpse. If he’d bothered to rub it in properly, he thought idly, I might have seen my face reflected back at me. Instead, there was just darkness.

The boots took a step back. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath and waited.

The kick never came.

After a few seconds, the soldier stepped away and turned towards a yelping noise that had started up somewhere to his right. It sounded like a dog hit by a car, but Pettigrew knew that it
wasn’t. Cursing and screaming, a woman he didn’t recognise was being dragged down the street by her hair. The boy soldier jumped forward and, without breaking stride, let fly with a
casual half-volley, like a kid kicking a stone along the street. His right boot landed somewhere near her mouth and Pettigrew watched her face explode in a mess of crimson, like something out of a
Sam Peckinpah movie. The yelping and cursing stopped, replaced by a low, frothy moan.

The soldier studied the toe of his boot and carefully began cleaning it on the back of his left calf, smearing a mixture of blood, snot and nasal cartilage across his olive-green fatigues.
Satisfied with the result, he turned back to face the priest, eyes glazed. Stepping closer, he pointed at a large puddle of green paint over to Pettigrew’s right, which was spreading slowly
across the scrub of the tiny front yard. The eight tins of Eden Green paint had been a birthday present from his sister. They had been stacked by the door for several months now, waiting for him to
get round to painting the outside of his house, a three-room shack his friends and neighbours had helped him build two summers ago. The soldiers had clearly found them too much to resist, kicking
them over as they’d jumped down from their trucks.

‘Get down!’

William Pettigrew looked at him uncomprehendingly.

‘Lie in it, fucker!’

The priest looked at the paint and hesitated.

‘Get on with it,’ the youth’s face turned pink as he struggled to find the right words, ‘motherfucker!’

Another boot caught Pettigrew in the small of the back. Forced down into the puddle, his shirt and trousers were immediately soaked in the cloying green paint. Lying still, he felt a small pulse
of satisfaction that he had managed to get dressed before opening the door. To be both naked
and
green would have been a terrible embarrassment.

Of course, it was also a waste of good paint, but that seemed a total irrelevance now, since it wasn’t as if he would be coming back to start the decorating.

A boot tickled his ear. ‘Why didn’t you stay away, dickhead?’

It was a good question.

William Pettigrew was well known locally as a so-called ‘Red Priest’, a liberation theologian and, therefore, a troublemaker. That meant that he was always likely to be on
someone’s list. When the coup began, his friends had warned him that he would be a target; that he should lie low, maybe even leave the country for a while. Pettigrew was lucky – he had
that option; he had a passport and he had money. He could go back to Great Britain and leave this all behind. On several occasions, the Archdiocese and the ecclesiastical governors had made it
clear to him that this was a course of action of which they would approve.

He had toyed with going to Scotland – his great-greatgrandfather had been an innkeeper in Montrose – to see for himself where the Pettigrews had first come from. But, deep down, he
knew that was just a fantasy. He would never run away.

In the event, he did leave Valparaíso . . . for a little while. After a couple of nights of listening to the shooting, he had headed for a village twenty kilometres up the coast, where he
spent a couple of nights on a friend’s floor. The whole thing quickly seemed melodramatic and self-indulgent – cowardly, even. By running from his fate, he had put himself in a prison
of his own making. After all, Cerro Los Placeres was his home. There was nowhere else to go. There was nowhere else he wanted to be.

He knew that he had to suffer with the people here, share the suffering of the powerless, the impotent. He knew that he could offer his neighbours no solutions to this terrible situation. He
didn’t know the answers. But he could walk with them, search with them, stay with them. Die with them.

His only weapon was forgiveness. Forgiveness is fuelled by love; violence is fuelled by fear. Love is the antidote to fear. And he knew that love is what he would need in his heart when he
arrived at the gates of Heaven.

So he came back.

For a couple more days, he went about his business in Valparaíso unmolested. It seemed that no one cared about William Pettigrew.

Until now.

A
nother kick brought him back to the present. More words were whispered in his ear:

‘You are an idiot as well as a pervert.’

‘Do you think God cares what happens to scum like you?’

‘You should have fucked off back to England, while you had the chance.’

‘The Church shrinks from blood but we do not.’

After a couple more kicks, and a few smacks around the head with a rifle butt, Pettigrew’s hands were tied firmly together in front of him. Careful to avoid getting any of the bright green
paint on their fatigues, two soldiers hauled him towards the rear of a canvas-covered truck. Half-lifted, half-pushed, he was bundled inside. There were maybe ten or twelve other people already in
there, but no one that he recognised in the gloom. They instinctively shied away from him, fearing any association that could make their situation worse. Righting himself, he found a space near the
tailgate. Shouting and laughing came from outside the truck. Inside there was only a pensive silence, laced with a heavy dose of fear.