James Craig - The Circus

‘The Financial Times did a piece on it recently.’ She took a mouthful of tea. ‘They called it “a twenty-first-century playschool for grown-ups”, something like that.’

‘Nice.’ Trying not to make it too obvious this time, he gave her the once-over as he sipped his green tea. Late twenties slash early thirties, smartly dressed in a dark business suit and pale pink blouse, pretty enough but with a hard edge to her features that would, under different circumstances, have encouraged him to give her a wide berth.

This morning, she looked pissed off rather than upset. Indeed, he had gained an impression that ‘annoyed’ was Gemma Millington’s default demeanour. London can do that to you, Carlyle thought. It puts you on your guard.

At any rate, she did not look like the grieving girlfriend. In truth, that was a bit of a result. The inspector hated having to do the ‘my condolences’ routine with the friends and family of the victims of crime. The social-worker aspect of the job was something he had never been any good at.

‘Napoleon once said an army marches on its stomach,’ she remarked. ‘Here they just want us to stay inside the building — get more work done.’ This was clearly an opinion that she had expressed many times before.

‘And do you?’

She looked at him blankly.

‘Stay inside the building.’

‘Yes. I mean, the food’s good.’ She gestured at the blackboard menu which covered most of one wall, listing a wide choice of dishes from sashimi and courgette tapenade to shepherd’s pie, each offering colour-coded with a little yellow, green or red dot. ‘And it’s all free.’

‘Free? Jesus, that must cost a fortune.’

She gave him a look. ‘This company made more than two billion pounds in profit last quarter.’

‘I guess they can throw you the odd pie then.’ Carlyle pointed at the board. ‘What do the coloured dots mean?’

‘Everything is ranked by its nutritional value. Red essentially means pudding, cheesecake and stuff. Green is the healthy stuff. Yellow is somewhere in the middle.’

‘I’m a red man,’ Carlyle grinned.

‘Apart from the restaurant, downstairs in the basement there’s a newsagent, a chemist, and even a dry cleaner’s.’

‘Maybe I could come and work here,’ Carlyle quipped.

‘All the security is outsourced,’ she replied quickly.

‘It was a joke.’

‘Ah.’

Carlyle finished his tea. ‘So, what is it that you do exactly?’

‘I’m one of the in-house legal team.’

A lawyer and a journalist, Carlyle reflected. Her relationship with Duncan Brown must have been a barrel of laughs.

She pulled a business card from the overstuffed handbag sitting on the table between them and handed it across. ‘I’m the sixth youngest VP of Legal that they’ve ever hired in Europe.’

‘Wow!’ Carlyle tried to look impressed. ‘Congratulations.’

‘I cover the whole waterfront: government relations, corporate development and new business development.’

‘I see. That sounds. . interesting.’

‘This is a great place to be working — there is so much going on.’

‘I’m sure.’ He stuffed the card into his jacket pocket. ‘And you’re okay talking about Duncan here, at work?’

She shrugged. ‘Might as well.’

Definitely not seeming heartbroken.

‘Don’t want to take time off?’

‘No, not at all.’

‘Sure?’

She gave him a hard stare. ‘My decision. Let’s just get on with it.’

‘Fine. They explained to you what happened?’

‘I got the basics from your colleague earlier. But you were there? You’ve actually seen him, haven’t you?’

‘Yes,’ Carlyle nodded.

‘So why don’t you tell me what happened?’

Carlyle replied, ‘That’s what I need to find out.’ He quickly ran through his visit to Cockpit Yard, not feeling any particular need to sanitize the story for the clearly robust Ms Millington’s benefit.

‘My God!’ Millington took another mouthful of tea. ‘Presumably it was some random nutter?’

The inspector looked at her carefully. ‘Why would you say that?’

‘You should know about these things rather better than me, Inspector,’ she said somewhat reproachfully. ‘Duncan must just have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

Carlyle thought back to the CCTV images.

She had given up on the eye-contact now, allowing herself to be distracted by the guys playing billiards on the other side of the room. ‘I can’t see what else could have happened. What do you think?’

‘I’ve no idea.’ Carlyle rummaged round in his jacket pocket and found a scrap of paper and a biro. This was supposed to be an interview, so he should at least pretend to take some notes.

Millington tapped an expensively manicured finger on the screen of her BlackBerry, which sat on the table. ‘You must think I’m a really hard bitch,’ she said, as if challenging him to deny it.

Just a bit . ‘No,’ he lied. ‘People react to this kind of situation in different ways. Not everyone automatically throws themselves to the ground and starts wailing. There are plenty of times when you just see people kind of closing down in front of you.’

‘Yes.’

‘Or they try to keep going as if nothing has happened — in some sort of denial. It’s all about individual coping mechanisms. There’s nothing wrong with being. . detached.’

For the first time, something approximating sadness crossed her face. ‘It doesn’t exactly feel real yet.’

‘These things can take time to sink in.’

‘The funny thing is, when he abandoned me in the theatre, I made a decision there and then to dump him. It had been such an effort to get him to come along at all, and then he buggered off before we even got to the interval.’ She gave the inspector a shamefaced smile. ‘Makes me a terrible person, eh?’

‘Not really.’ Carlyle adopted a sympathetic expression. ‘Happens all the time.’

She gave him a puzzled look.

‘Girls dumping their boyfriends, that is. Not the boyfriends getting stabbed and thrown in the back of a rubbish truck.’

She sighed. ‘We were together for eighteen months. The relationship was just getting into a rut. Neither of us was prepared to compromise enough to move things on. I felt that if I didn’t pull the plug now, things were only going to get worse. I didn’t want my whole life to start ebbing away.’

‘Right.’

Millington was staring off into space. ‘Anyway,’ she said quietly, ‘I’ve been seeing someone else for a while.’

Carlyle tried to scribble on the scrap of paper but found that the biro was out of ink. He tossed it on to the table in disgust.

‘He’s a lawyer, like me.’ She noticed the sudden look in the inspector’s eye. ‘He’s been in Brussels all this week,’ she added hastily.

Handy, Carlyle thought, but hardly a perfect alibi seeing as it’s only a couple of hours away on the Eurostar. ‘I’ll need his details all the same.’

‘Fine.’ She picked up her BlackBerry, and Carlyle recited his own email address. A couple of taps on the smartphone and it was done. ‘I’ve sent you his v-card.’

‘Thanks.’ He made a mental note to get Joe to check the guy out.

‘These things happen,’ she said — then seeing the scepticism in his face, she held up a hand. ‘Duncan was a nice guy.’

Nice?

‘But he was very narrow in his focus.’

Unlike you, Ms VP Legal .

‘He liked to describe himself as a good, old-fashioned hack.’

‘What did he mean by that?’

‘Basically, as far as I could tell, it meant he would spend as much time as possible in pubs, talking to his “sources”.’ Millington let out a hollow laugh. ‘He thought he was fighting against the idea that journalists should be chained to their desks twenty-four seven, simply rehashing stories from the internet.’