The Circus by James Craig

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