Play With Fire

by William Shaw

  Breen approached the edge, stepping over the line, Mint following behind. When he reached the end, he peered over the worn granite into the dock.

  The tide was low, but rising. A small white police launch was bobbing a few feet off, an outsize searchlight on the cabin roof; next to it a large barge with a crane on it. Leaning over the side of the boat, a policeman was looking into the thick muddy water.

  As he watched, a frogman’s black-clad head popped up above the water.

  Someone shouted, ‘Right. Stand clear. Away from the cable.’

  A puff of black smoke blew up from the winch. The bystanders who had been gawping at the show moved back. A local copper ran towards Breen. ‘Don’t want to be there if the bloody thing snaps,’ he said, grinning.

  ‘What have they got?’ asked Breen.

  ‘Peugeot,’ he said. ‘They got the body out half an hour ago. Trying to haul the car up but the docks have silted up. Can’t drag the bugger out of the mud. Tried twice already an’ it slid back in. The silt clutches hold of it, see?’

  ‘Did someone report it going in?’

  The copper shook his head. ‘Lad saw it at low tide. Just by chance. Apparently you could just make it out under the water.’

  The cable tautened, groaned against the dockside, juddering. They could hear the other crane below too, straining at the wreck, sending up a fug of exhaust.

  ‘It’s coming,’ someone shouted.

  The angry tone of the winding engine seemed to calm a little suddenly as the load became lighter. The car must have been sucked from the mud.

  ‘Shut it down, shut it down.’

  The moment the operator put the winch into neutral, the cable ran out a little way.

  ‘Whoa!’

  Cautiously, Breen approached the edge of the dockside again. Heated by the afternoon sun, the air was suddenly pungent with the sewerish stench of the dock bottom. The black Peugeot was almost entirely out of the mud, water cascading in arcs around it from cracks between the doors and boot and the bodywork and the driver’s open door. The bonnet remained mostly underwater, but what was visible was covered in thick greeny-brown silt.

  It was an old model. Below, one of the men wiped the number plate clean with the side of his hand. Breen noted the registration.

  ‘Where was the woman? In the boot?’

  ‘No. Behind the wheel. She must have driven it in there.’

  ‘Suicide, I suppose,’ said Mint.

  When he heard she was dead, he had assumed someone had killed her. Was it better if it was suicide? He wouldn’t feel so responsible for her death, at least. Breen turned to the local constable. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Pathologist took the body away about half an hour ago.’

  ‘It was her then, do you think?’ Mint said, uncertainly. ‘Killed Miss Bobienski. I mean, you don’t drive off the end of a dock on purpose, do you? Guilty conscience?’

  The crane on the barge revved again. They were trying to lift the car onto the rusting hulk. The vehicle swung dangerously in the air, creating eddies in the water around it and clanging dully against the barge’s side.

  On Fridays, it had become part of their routine to go to the Electric Cinema Club in Portobello: he and Helen, Elfie and sometimes John Carmichael too. The Imperial Cinema, where the club took place, was on the wrong side of London, but they showed unusual films; there was nothing like it in the East End. Besides, Amy got them cheap tickets; it was where she worked.

  Today in particular, Breen hadn’t felt like going. It had been a long week; he felt exhausted. And now his best witness, Florence Caulk, was dead and what if that was his fault?

  But Helen felt cooped up at the flat. She looked forward to their one night out. And Mint was taking the shift at Harewood Avenue with a WPC, waiting for Mr B, Mr C and Mr K, who would presumably arrive for the appointments they had booked with Julie Teenager. Breen would rather be there than here and watching a Marx Brothers double bill.

  Carmichael had been late. They had taken their seats without him; as Harpo Marx repeatedly pickpocketed a five-dollar note from a policeman, Carmichael finally arrived, squeezing himself down the row until he found a spare seat next to Elfie. Elfie and Helen were giggling. ‘God,’ said Helen. ‘I’m going to wee myself.’ Breen wasn’t finding any of it funny. Neither was Amy.

  ‘What’s wrong with her?’ whispered Helen. Now Chico was taking money from Groucho; Breen found it tiresome and childish.

  ‘What do you mean, what’s wrong?’

  ‘Amy. The way she’s been glaring at John ever since he got here.’

  Breen glanced sideways. Amy was sitting on the far side of the aisle. To him, it was hard to say whether she was angry, or just engrossed in the plot.

  Afterwards as they waited for a taxi on the street outside, Helen said, ‘You didn’t laugh once, either, misery man.’

  He didn’t want to tell her about the case; about McPhail, about the D-Notice, about Florence Caulk. She’d question him, ask him about minute details, when he was still trying to get it all straight in his own head.

  ‘I couldn’t concentrate,’ he said. ‘I’ve got too much going on. Something I want to ask you, John. I think my prostitute had a driver. Know how I’d track him down?’

  ‘You tried Vice?’

  ‘I was just wondering if you had any ideas.’

  ‘Work, work, work,’ complained Elfie.

  John shook his head, his arm around Amy, looking embarrassed, uncomfortable. He was so large; she so small next to him. It was clear they had been arguing about something, but what? As the taxi pulled away, Breen looked back and saw Amy wriggling her shoulders and moving away so that John’s arm hung there in the air for a second.

  ‘Maybe she’s just fed up with him being so unreliable all the time,’ Helen said.

  It had been a surprise that Amy, young, pretty and hip, had ever gone out with John, a copper, in the first place; but since John and she had started their unlikely romance, Amy had become close to Helen and Elfie. The three of them got on well together.

  ‘We don’t argue like that, do we?’

  ‘We?’ said Helen.

  ‘Yes. You and me.’

  ‘Only because you’re impossible to have a decent argument with.’

  Once they had driven a quarter of a mile, Helen was asleep on his shoulder so he had to wake her when the car reached Harewood Avenue.

  He handed her and Elfie thirty bob for the fare home.

  Helen turned away, pulling her coat tight. ‘I’m going to sleep upstairs at Elfie’s. That way you won’t wake me up when you come in.’

  Breen watched the taxi drive away, then rang the bell. Mint came down and opened the door.

  ‘Where’s the woman constable?’

  ‘I said she should go home. Didn’t seem necessary for both of us to stay on. Nothing happened, the last hour.’

  ‘Did you get them?’

  ‘Only two of them here, but three more on the phone.’

  ‘Good.’

  Upstairs, the two punters were both sitting on the same pink sofa, looking miserable. The older of the two held a blue teddy bear he had presumably brought as a present. ‘You can’t just hold us here. We’ve done nothing wrong.’

  ‘You’ve questioned them?’

  ‘Yes. This is Mr C. He is a schoolteacher.’ The younger man looked up, ashamed. ‘A girls’ private school. Do you think we should tell the school?’

  Mr C groaned.

  ‘And the other one is Mr K, I take it?’ Because of the bear.

  ‘His name’s Hardy. He runs a frozen food business.’

  ‘Anything else useful from either of them?’

  ‘Not really, Sarge.’

  It was too much to hope that one of them would be the policeman.

  ‘I’ve got both their addresses. I haven’t charged them with anything.’

  ‘It would be a bit difficult, Mint. They haven’t committed any offence.’

  ‘Something interesting, t
hough. This gentleman –’ he pointed at the schoolteacher – ‘was picked up by a car.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘Only it wasn’t a man driving it. It was a woman.’

  Breen turned to the man. ‘What did she look like?’

  ‘Early twenties. Dark hair, done up on top. A bit Jean Shrimpton, you know?’

  ‘Did she have a name?’

  The man shook his head.

  ‘What sort of car?’

  ‘A Cortina. One of the new ones. Car radio and everything.’

  ‘What about a number?’

  ‘Julie’s woman dealt with all that.’

  Julie’s woman: Florence Caulk. Breen held the door open for them both to leave. ‘We’ll need to get them to account for their movements since Monday too. What about Mr B?’

  ‘Didn’t show up, Sarge. Didn’t call either.’

  ‘Interesting.’ The Slavic man who brought wine.

  The phone trace had eliminated two more, both of whom gave names that matched their directory entries and addresses and who could be interviewed further on Monday.

  ‘What jobs did they do?’

  ‘One’s the car dealer.’

  ‘Mr L?’

  ‘Yes. And the other’s a civil servant. After some discussion he admitted to being the one who favoured corporal punishment, referred to by Mrs Caulk as “Spanky”, I believe.’

  ‘Civil servant? Which department?’

  ‘Fisheries.’

  Breen had been hoping it would have been something important, like Defence, something that would account for other people being interested in Miss Bobienski – whoever they were. He walked down the stairs into the night. After such a bad day, a good night perhaps, but still no Mr B. And no policeman.

  On Saturday morning Breen was in the bath, relaxing with a cigarette, when Helen knocked on the door.

  ‘Let me in,’ she said.

  ‘I’m in the bath. I’m naked.’

  ‘I would hope so.’

  So he got up, put a towel around him, wrapping it under his armpits so it covered the scars on his belly, and opened the door.

  ‘Get back in the bath. I’ll wash your back.’

  Naked again, he got into the water, taking a flannel from the rack that lay across the bath and covering his penis.

  She was looking at his stomach though. ‘Poor Cathal. Is it still sore?’ she asked.

  He crossed his arms over his belly.

  ‘No. Just itches sometimes.’

  ‘You got in late. I heard you come in.’

  ‘You were upstairs.’

  ‘I couldn’t sleep. Elfie snores. I heard you shut the front door.’

  ‘I walked back from Harewood Avenue. Everything’s going round in my head. I knew I wouldn’t sleep unless I was tired.’

  ‘It must have been gone three you got in. What’s wrong?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I can tell. You’re a million miles away.’

  ‘The prostitute’s maid is dead.’

  ‘Oh. How?’

  ‘Looks like suicide. She drove a car into the docks down at Limehouse.’

  ‘Christ. So you think it was her that killed Julie Teenager?’

  ‘I don’t know. Wellington said he thought it was a man.’

  ‘He couldn’t imagine a woman doing anything other than ironing.’

  Breen was unsettled by the death of Florence Caulk and by the uncertainty of whatever it was that McPhail was keeping from him. Large, obscure; a deep disconcerting rumble that wouldn’t go away.

  Helen sat on the edge of the bath and pushed his arms aside, then moved her hands over his stomach. There was tenderness in Helen’s touch, but he just felt awkward, lying there in the soapy, cooling water. There were patches of his skin where, when she ran her fingers over it, he could feel nothing at all.

  Saturday was normally a day off, but he caught the bus into town, sitting alongside the shoppers going up to Oxford Street. The papers said the Americans would send a rocket to the moon next week; all the windows on Breen’s bus were jammed tight shut and the man crammed into the seat next to him was loudly calling the Irish ‘bloody savages’.

  When Breen reached his desk there was a note tucked into the cylinder of his typewriter. Breen pulled it out and read it.

  Breen read it: ‘Mr Russell. Sun. Times. Said thinks you were right about D-Notice.’

  Breen looked around to find the constable who had taken the message, but the office was deserted.

  That night he sat with a WPC in Julie Teenager’s flat, but there was only one call from a first-timer who had found Julie Teenager’s advert in an old copy of Private Eye. There were no further visitors either.

  Breen looked at the list in his notebook. After three days at the flat, only three men remained from Mrs Caulk’s list: B, G and I. One of them was a copper; one was a murderer. Maybe one was a copper and a murderer.

  TWENTY-ONE

  On Sunday afternoon, front door open to keep the flat cool, Breen heard a man shouting in the cul-de-sac.

  He walked up the steps to find Klaus, standing at the upstairs front door with a cardboard box full of albums in his arms.

  ‘I don’t know where they are,’ said Elfie, arms crossed above her bump.

  ‘How can I drive it if I don’t have the keys?’ He flicked his hair from his eyes. ‘They were on the hook in the hallway. They’re not there now.’ He was tall, fair-haired and wore his flowery shirts open at the collar.

  ‘How do you know? You haven’t been here all week. You’ve been fucking that woman.’

  Klaus spotted him hovering on the basement steps.

  ‘Cathal. Come up here. She’s stolen the bloody keys to the Magnette,’ said Klaus. Klaus’s vintage black car sat taking up room in the small cobbled courtyard at the front of their house. ‘Tell her I’ll call the police if she doesn’t give them back.’

  ‘That’s my Pentangle album,’ said Elfie. ‘I bought that with my own money.’

  ‘I’ll give it to you if you give me my keys.’

  ‘I don’t have your precious keys.’

  ‘What the hell do you think you are doing, Klaus?’ demanded Breen.

  ‘I just want to be able to drive my car. Is that too much to ask?’

  ‘She’s carrying your baby.’

  Other neighbours opened their doors a crack to listen.

  ‘You’re a policeman. She’s stolen my keys. You should do something.’

  ‘I didn’t steal your bloody keys,’ protested Elfie.

  Because he didn’t have the car to carry them in, Klaus left the records in the box by the front door. When he’d gone, Helen went upstairs and sat with Elfie a while as she cried.

  On Sunday night, Breen slept badly.

  He dreamed he was in a chair, his arms bound tightly. Opposite him, there was a woman dying whom he couldn’t reach. When he looked again he saw the woman was pregnant. With a shock, he realised that the dream wasn’t right. It wasn’t supposed to be Helen there dying. That wasn’t the way it had happened. He tried rocking the chair back and forwards to break free, but he was trapped, unable to move. He pushed harder and harder.

  Helen woke him, shaking him gently.

  ‘I’ll make a mint tea,’ she said, quietly.

  ‘You’re alive,’ he said, damp with sweat.

  ‘I would hope. Do you want to tell me about it?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Poor boy.’ Her hand on his forehead.

  When he finally closed his eyes again, he slept dreamlessly and missed his alarm clock ringing. Monday morning and he felt sluggish. Mint arrived when he was still shaving.

  Helen, dressed only in a nylon dressing gown, invited him in. ‘He’s late,’ she said.

  Mint sat awkwardly on the edge of the armchair, drinking coffee.

  From the bathroom, Breen could hear them talking. ‘Is it too strong?’ Helen said. ‘Cathal likes it like that. I think it’s like drain cleaner.’


  ‘No, it’s fine.’ A pause. ‘When’s it due?’

  ‘End of August.’

  Breen towelled the shaving foam off his face. ‘Soon, then?’ Mint was saying.

  ‘I know. Dead scary.’

  K Division had towed the Peugeot to a police warehouse in Stepney. Breen drove there, Mint giving directions from a map.

  ‘If she committed suicide, that would be that, wouldn’t it?’ said Mint.

  ‘Maybe. It’s not an admission of guilt, but it would be close.’

  ‘Where did she get the car from?’

  ‘They haven’t traced it yet.’

  ‘I just didn’t expect it to be her. She seemed, you know, nice, considering.’

  ‘Nice can kill too,’ said Breen.

  The car was sitting in the middle of the warehouse floor, the wooden doors pulled open to let the light in. Yesterday’s stink of mud and rot had followed the vehicle.

  A few feet away was a trestle table on which they’d placed several items. The car’s jack. A soggy newspaper. The victim’s shoes and a small brown leather suitcase, lying open, its contents in an untidy pile next to it.

  Breen walked over to the table. The clothes that had been in the suitcase were still damp; they smelt musty. There was a dress, a couple of blouses, and several cardigans.

  ‘Like she was going away somewhere,’ said Mint.

  The local CID officer was called Hope. He was in his forties, dressed in shirtsleeves and tie, a hearty, loud-voiced man whose belly strained over his belt, pushing at his buttons.

  ‘So she was running away?’ suggested Mint.

  ‘Perhaps. But what kind of woman packs no underwear?’ asked Breen.

  Mint leaned forward and started rummaging through the clothes, a puzzled look on his face. Breen left the table and walked towards the car. It was an old Peugeot 203. The bonnet and all four doors were open.

  Hope asked, ‘Did you get a copy of the preliminary report on the body?’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Breen.