Time of Death Read Online Free PDF

perching on an arm of the sofa that was closest to the door and furthest from Mills, who was meanwhile staring morosely at the glass
of Scotch now sitting precariously on the arm of his chair.
    Still no one spoke.
    Carlyle let himself enjoy the smell of the Scotch as he belatedly looked round the room. A large, empty fireplace took up much of one wall. There were a couple of photos on the mantelpiece; at
first glance both appeared to be of Henry and Agatha on holiday. Above the fireplace was a massive poster depicting a clenched fist in front of a flag that Carlyle didn’t recognise. In large
text at the top it said Venceremos , and at the bottom Unidad Popular . Yellowed in places, with a tear in the bottom left-hand corner, it looked like the kind of thing you would have
expected to adorn the wall of a student flat maybe thirty or forty years ago, but it had been placed in an expensive-looking aluminium frame that appeared to be worth many times more than the
poster itself.
    The other two walls were covered by shelves stuffed with books from floor to ceiling, mainly history and fiction as far as he could tell. Some of them were in English, but there were also many
in foreign languages – Spanish, French and German. Most looked well-thumbed. There were also piles of books rising three feet high on either side of the armchair that Henry Mills was now
sitting in. There was another stack in front of a small CRT television which was almost hidden in a corner by the window. A video machine sat on top of the TV, but Carlyle couldn’t see any
tapes. Neither machine was on standby and both were covered in a thick layer of dust. There was no sign of either a DVD player or a digibox.
    Carlyle let his eyes skip across the spines of the books at random: Pinochet in Piccadilly: Britain and Chile’s Hidden History ; Subversive Scriptures: Revolutionary Christian
Readings of the Bible in Latin America ; States, Ideologies, and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of Iran, Nicaragua, and the Philippines . His eyes quickly glazed over as he
worried that the titles alone could give him a headache. Carlyle liked a good read, but he couldn’t imagine getting through the hundreds of books in this room alone. He got through maybe
seven or eight books a year. If it wasn’t a footballer’s ‘autobiography’, it was the kind of thriller where someone had to be decapitated, dismembered or disappeared by page
three – the kind of thing where a crazed serial killer believed he was channelling the spirits of vengeful Norse Gods, or some such. All good fun. In real life, of course, he’d never
come across a serial killer and knew that he never would. This was London, after all, not some American urban hell.
    He chuckled to himself. Mr and Mrs Mills were not the kind of people who read about serial killers, real or imagined. He could tell that they were a bit too high-brow for that. And maybe a
little unworldly as well. The overall air of the room was one of comfortable mess; you got the impression that nice people lived here. Or, at least, had done until last night when one of them had
brained the other, for whatever reason.
    Closing his eyes, Carlyle counted up to thirty in his head. Opening them again, he slowly scanned the room once more. Noticing nothing new, he turned to Henry Mills, who had drained his glass
but was making no effort to go for a refill. Carlyle was just about to resume his questioning when a young woman, one of the technicians, stuck her head through the door. ‘Sir?’ she
asked, unsure which of the two policemen she should be addressing. ‘Could you come to the kitchen for a minute?’
    Carlyle sighed. ‘Fine.’ He got up and followed her back into the kitchen. It looked bigger with the body removed, but he was still careful to avoid the blood on the floor as he
stepped towards the open dishwasher. Peering inside, he saw that it was largely empty apart from a couple of mugs and some cutlery.