by William Shaw
He ate the beans on their own in front of Olympic Grandstand. He was watching a girl from the USSR who was doing floor exercises to some thumping piano music—she was beautiful in a scary, Soviet kind of way—when the electricity clicked off. The light on the television shrank to a small line, then a single dot, then disappeared into blackness.
Breen sat there a minute, eyes adjusted to the darkness. The sounds of the street seemed louder now. When his eyes began to make out dull shapes, he stood and felt around for the electric meter by the front door. He usually left a pile of half crowns on top but they were all gone. He dug one out of his pocket, fed it into the slot and turned the handle. The television came back to life, blaring a national anthem he didn’t recognize.
After he’d washed the plate and put it on the rack he smoked his fifth and last cigarette, then dressed in his pajamas and went to bed, worn thin by the day.
He sat in bed looking through his police notebooks, one for the dead man, the other for the dead girl. He hadn’t even begun to write his report about what had happened to Prosser last night. He fell asleep trying to remember what he had meant when he had written “Ask about the doors.”
Four hours later he woke, unable to return to sleep. He switched on the light by the table, and lay awake for a few minutes, then he got up and shaved.
Outside it was dark. He walked down Kingsland High Street, deserted at two in the morning but for the occasional car, pavements silver with rain. The late summer was slipping into winter with little in the way of autumn in between.
He passed shops with their wooden shutters down, barrows chained to trees, piles of rubbish and dogs that growled from behind locked gates. Below the pavement, water trickled noisily through drains.
At Dalston Junction he arrived at Joe’s All Night Bagel Shop. It never closed, serving tea and coffee to lorry drivers delivering at Ridley Road market and to the taxi drivers waiting for the early shift to begin. The front of the cafe was painted bright red. In the window was a handwritten sign that read 7 days without a bagel makes one weak.
Joe, leaning on the counter reading a novel, looked up as he came in. “Hello, my friend,” he said, and spooned coffee into a mug without asking. Joe only served instant. When Breen had told him he should buy one of the machines like the coffee shops in the West End and start serving real coffee, he had said, “And maybe get a skiffle band to play for my customers too.”
“Teacakes are half price,” said Joe as he filled the mug with hot water from an urn. Breen never ate here, but Joe always offered something.
“What’s the news?” asked Breen.
“My daughter is about to make me a grandfather,” said Joe. “What’s happening with you?”
“I’m in the shit.”
Joe said, “Don’t tell me your problems. I have enough of my own,” and went back to reading his novel. Breen added a spoonful of sugar to his coffee, stirred, then stood at the counter slowly sipping it. The bell went and a young greaser couple in black leathers came in, ordered egg and chips and sat down on opposite sides of a small table, staring at each other while they waited for Joe to cook their food. The guy had long hair and huge sideburns, like some reincarnated Viking warrior. He stubbed out a cigarette and leaned over and started to kiss the young woman on the mouth. Older men gaped enviously over cooling tea. In all their lives they had never had the chance to be as young as this, to wear leather and to fondle beautiful women so brazenly in public. As if to tease them further, under the table, the man forced his right hand between the black leather of the young woman’s thighs. She slapped it away and broke the kiss, laughing loudly.
The doorbell rang again. This time it was a young man in a tweed cap that looked too small for him, brim pointing upwards. He approached the counter and asked for a cup of tea.
“Cor, look at them two.” He nodded at the pair of greasers who were kissing again. “I bet she fucks him,” he said quietly. “What you think? I bet she likes it too. I bet she fucks anyone. I’d fuck her.”
Joe said nothing. While he served the tea, the young man said in a quiet voice. “Hey, I got something good for you. Do you want to buy any watches? Gold watches going cheap.”
Joe replaced the large teapot on the table and said, “What do I need to tell the time for? This bloody place never bloody closes.” He turned back to the chip basket, lifting it from the hot fat.
The young man blinked a couple of times. It could have been a nervous tic. “I thought you Yids liked a bit of tom.”
“A bit of tom? God save us. Talk English, schmuck. You watch too much television.”
“Tom. Tomfoolery,” the guy whispered. “You know, jewelry.”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake go home,” said Joe quietly. The chips were still too pale. He dropped them back into the bubbling oil.
Next the young man turned to Breen. When he’d come in, Breen had thought he was only about twenty. Now he looked closer he could see fine lines around his eyes, and veins breaking in the skin. “What about you, mate? Nice stuff.”
Joe said, over his shoulder, “You’re barking up the wrong tree there, my friend. I told you, if you know what’s best for yourself, get lost.”
The young man was offended. “I’m just trying to earn a living like the rest of you,” he said.
Joe snorted. He cracked first one egg, then a second, onto the hotplate and wiped his brow with his forearm.
“Shockproof,” said the man to Breen, picking up his mug of tea. “Gold straps. Roman numerals. Guaranteed to five yards underwater.”
Breen put down his coffee and reached inside his jacket pocket. For a second the man’s face lit up, thinking he was about to make a sale, until Breen pulled out his wallet and opened it. “Do as he says. Get lost.”
The man slapped his cup back down, spilling brown tea over Joe’s Formica counter, and was gone into the night in half a second.
“You could have waited till he paid,” muttered Joe.
“Keep your hair on,” said Breen, putting his warrant card back into his jacket pocket. “I’ll get it.”
Joe wiped down the surface with a gray dishcloth. “Flash that flipping thing around in here anymore and I won’t have any customers at all.” He put two plates onto the counter and tipped the chips onto them, then slid two eggs from the hotplate. “Egg and chips twice,” he called.
The greaser couple broke from their kiss and the man stood to fetch the plates. Breen pulled out his notebook and flicked through the pages he had written. His notes were densely scribbled and unmethodical. It was as if he had forgotten how he used to arrive at a scene and patiently record first the time of day, then the position of the corpse, and so on. Across the bottom of a page he had written “River Tiber.” He borrowed a pencil from Joe and turned to a clean page and started sketching what he remembered of the scene behind the flats. He had added diagrams to police notebooks before, but never drawings, even though he had a talent for it. Art had been one of the few subjects he had done well in at school. His father had never been able to hide his disappointment at the mediocrity of his son’s academic results, but the day before the funeral, Breen had discovered a small roll of the drawings he had done at school carefully tied in red ribbon, tucked in a box his father had brought with him to the flat.
He drew the downward curve of her back and the pure roundness of her behind, her arms folded awkwardly. “What you drawing?” said Joe.
Breen closed the notebook rapidly and put it back into his pocket.
It was quiet now. In an hour or so the morning shift would start arriving on their way to work. Joe went to his LP collection and spent a while looking through it, pulling out a record, replacing it, eventually picking out another. There was a record player just to the right of the counter. Joe took the black disc out of its sleeve and laid it on the turntable, then lifted the needle and dropped it carefully.
There was a moment of crackle, then a piano began to play slow descending notes. A cello joined in for a shor
t phrase, then the rest of the string quartet, until they all gave way to the cello exchanging conversational phrases with the piano.
The woman looked up. “What in hell’s that?”
“Leave it,” said her boyfriend, pausing from his chips.
Joe came out front and sat down on a plastic chair and took out a cigarette and tapped it quietly on the table in front of him, then lit it and smoked as the music played. No one spoke. The only other noise was the clatter of cutlery on plate and the sigh of one of the old insomniacs who gathered at Joe’s in the smaller hours. It was one of those times when the unsatisfactory complexity of the world fades far enough into the distance for the moment to become a thing in itself. Making a shape out of such sadness seemed to offer a safety from it. Breen sat and listened as his coffee cooled. The moment lasted for two or three whole minutes before the bell rang and a bobby on his beat came in, the door’s bell ringing dissonantly against the music.
“Aye, aye, Joe,” said the copper. “Cup of tea. Two sugars. An’ turn down that old racket, why don’t you?”
Five
On Wednesday morning the first post brought a letter from his father’s solicitor. There were no surprises. He knew the contents of his father’s will already. A few shares that were not worth much and around two thousand pounds that had been left over after paying for the nurses to look after him. Enough to give up the police, if he wanted, and live off what was left over for a year or maybe more. Maybe go to Ireland. He had never been. Or maybe buy a car. He had never owned one of those either. He put the letter in a drawer and walked up to Church Street to catch the bus to St. John’s Wood.
Mr. Rider was in this time.
He was a small, round, middle-aged man who lived alone. He wore a Marylebone Cricket Club tie with a brown cardigan and opened the door with a smoking briar pipe in his hand.
“And?” he said.
“May I ask a couple of questions, sir?”
He eyed Breen up and down and pulled on his pipe. Breen took out his warrant card and showed it to him. The man peered at it. “What about?”
“The murder of a young woman.”
“Ah. Yes. Of course.” He opened the door and beckoned Breen in.
Rider’s apartment was spartan: no television in the living room, no pictures on the walls. A complete set of Encyclopaedia Britannica and six volumes of The Second World War by Winston Churchill filled the bookshelf above a desk on which sat a solitary black and white photograph, framed in silver, of a young woman in army uniform.
“You said the murdered woman was a prostitute. I wonder how you knew.”
“I beg your pardon?” Mr. Rider stood still, blinking at Breen.
Breen repeated what he had said.
Mr. Rider opened and shut his mouth, then fiddled in his trouser pocket for a box of matches, before saying, “I didn’t.”
“You didn’t what, Mr. Rider?”
The room was thick with the reek of pipe smoke. There were no flowers or ornaments; a man’s room. The kind of absence of a woman’s touch that he recognized from his own childhood. “I didn’t know she was a…ah…prostitute.”
“But apparently you told people that you thought she was.”
“No I didn’t.” Pause. “I suppose I may have. I was just guessing. Rather silly of me, really, I see now. It sort of shakes you up, when something like this happens.”
“What made you think she was a prostitute?”
Mr. Rider struck a match to relight his briar pipe, sucking on it furiously. “I mean, there are prostitutes not far from here. After all, you do notice them.”
“You notice them?”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you use their services, Mr. Rider?”
The small man blushed and shook his head. “No. Certainly not.”
“I wouldn’t necessarily think the worse of you if you did. I just want to know.”
The man shook his head again. “No. No. I don’t.”
“So you have no particular reason for thinking the dead woman was a prostitute?”
The man said nothing.
“People like to assume the worst of the dead; that it’s their fault for getting killed,” said Breen. A strangled girl. A burned-alive man.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Can I ask where you were on Sunday night?”
“Sunday night?”
“Yes.”
“The night the girl was killed?”
“That’s right.”
“I’d have to think.” The man reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out a small knife and started excavating the bowl of his pipe.
“Take your time,” said Breen.
“I don’t know. Probably went for a walk. Came back here. Had supper. Listened to the wireless. The Light Programme. Same as always.”
“Nothing more definite than that?”
“I don’t have particularly definite days,” said the man with a small, high giggle. “I’m retired. A widower. I live alone. I suppose it’s rather odd to a young man like you, but the days just pass.”
“Try and think.”
“I’m trying,” said the man abruptly and with that the knife slipped. The man gave a small squeak and put his left thumb into his mouth. A dribble of blood trickled down his chin.
“You’ve hurt yourself, Mr. Rider.”
“It’s nothing,” he said quietly, but to do so meant taking his thumb out of his mouth. Blood spilled down his old skin onto a thin Persian rug.
“Hold your hand up. It’ll slow the blood,” said Breen.
Breen went to the bathroom. He found Elastoplast where he would have expected it, in a small cabinet in which Mr. Rider also kept his toothbrush, his razor, a tin of Eno Fruit Salts and an old empty bottle of Yardley English Lavender. A women’s perfume.
He returned with the plasters. “I can manage perfectly well myself,” snapped the man as blood splodged onto the white cuff of his shirt.
Outside again, Breen made it to the end of the walkway, then stopped. For a few minutes he sat on the cold stairs writing his notes. When he looked back he found that he had written a list. “Pipe. Blood rug. Woman in photo. People think worst of dead. Lonely.” Two pages that would sound ridiculous if he was ever required to read it out in court.
Breen looked up at the sound of footsteps. A man he recognized as one of the residents, clutching a stiff broom. “You going to be there all day?” he said.
Breen closed his notebook, put it back into his pocket and stood, then watched the man patiently sweeping the stairs, one at a time.
The debris had all been cleared away. A search of the ground had turned up nothing. Now there was just a patch of bare earth next to the sheds.
The local constables were gathering again in the yard. Jones was there too, hands in his suit pockets, chatting to a couple of the uniformed men. Breen arrived at the bottom of the stairs just as a dustbin lorry was reversing slowly down the small opening between the sheds and the building. Somebody had scrawled on the back of the lorry’s dark green paint, Thunderbird 3.
“What’s going on?”
“Three guesses,” called one of the binmen jumping off the back of the lorry. Wearing a large canvas apron and a big pair of leather gloves, he waddled to a pair of steel doors and banged back the bolt. There was a huge iron bin that collected the refuse from half of the flats inside.
“Leave it,” Breen said. “I don’t want it taken away.” He called to a nearby constable, “What happened to that copper I told to go through the rubbish?”
“Off sick I heard. Bad back, so he said.”
“Off sick?”
“Yep.”
“Why didn’t anybody tell me?”
“Dunno.”
The binman stood with a chain, ready to latch it onto the big bin.
Breen ran over. “Leave it alone. Come back another time.”
“No skin off mine.”
“What’s going on?” Miss Shankley was leaning ov
er the railings above.
“Sergeant Breen is arresting your dustbins,” said Jones.
The binman banged on the side of the lorry. “Ride ’em out, cowboy,” he shouted. “Police orders.”
“We need to examine the contents,” Breen said.
“Now the buggers won’t be back for another week. It’ll stink the place up,” Miss Shankley called down.
Breen walked across the yard and pulled off the ladder that hung on hooks against the wall.
“Careful with that,” Miss Shankley shouted.
Leaning the ladder against the side of the bin, he said to the young freckle-faced constable who was still standing nearby, “In you go.”
“Me, sir?”
“Yes.”
“Inside that?”
“See what you can find.”
Jones said, “’K that for a lark. She was dumped, Wellington said. Chances are, you get your uniform all mucky for squat, mate. We’re not going to find anything round here anyway.”
“We need to check the bins,” said Breen, ignoring him. “Up,” he ordered.
“It reeks, sir.”
The other coppers jeered. “Go on, Pigpen.”
“So. What are we going to do then, sir?” one of the local constables asked Breen.
“Keep on with the door-to-door.”
A half-dozen local officers were milling around, fecklessly waiting. Breen had asked for more but this was all he had been sent today. The assumption that the girl was going to turn out to be a dead prostitute was already having its effect. The force would not waste resources.
“Move, then,” ordered Breen.
A couple of them groaned. The novelty of an escape from the drudgery of the beat had already worn off. The officers were a mixture of the young and inexperienced and older coppers who didn’t like any officer telling them the way to do things.
Breen asked them to gather round. A circle of men surrounded him. “We’ll do this street, then move on to Abbey Road. OK? Take a house each and work your way down. Be imaginative. Try and find out if anyone—”
