by William Shaw
“Sir?” interrupted one.
“Yes?”
“We already done this street yesterday.”
“Yes, I know,” answered Breen. “And?”
“And like I said, we already done that.”
“We questioned the occupants in daylight, just after the murder,” he said. “Half the people would have been at work. They’ll have been home now and had a chance to talk about it some more. Now we need to do it all over again to find out what they’re saying today. We haven’t even found the nanny who first found the body yet. Ask around. See if anyone knows where she lives. Keep going over and over until we find something.”
“Two to one she’s not even from round here,” muttered Jones.
There was grumbling from the younger ones at the back. Breen ignored it. “Find out what they’re saying. Find out…what they think about it all.”
“What they think about it?” said one of the older coppers incredulously.
There were a couple of sniggers. They preferred it when they had a list of questions they could go through one by one.
“Yes. What they think about it all. About the murder. About who she might have been.”
“You’re the boss.”
The policemen drifted off back down the street away from them.
“Short odds she’s a judy like that guy upstairs says,” Jones said to Breen. “If this was Prosser’s case he’d have already checked the streetwalkers.”
“Then why don’t you ask Carmichael who the prostitutes are round here? He’s on Vice. He might have heard something.”
“You’re the one who’s all matey with Carmichael,” Jones said. “Why don’t you?”
Breen only half heard him. He was standing by the line of lock-ups, close to where the body was found and looking around him. He pulled an A–Z from the pocket of his coat and flicked through the pages until he found the one Cora Mansions was on. He looked from the page up at the streets around him. The alleyway at the back of the flats was narrow, too narrow for a car. If somebody had brought the victim in off the street they must have carried her. Strange place to choose to hide a body.
“I do hope you’re not feeling poorly again, Sergeant.” He looked up. Miss Shankley, housecoat flapping in the gentle breeze, was on the rear fire escape again.
“Fine, thank you, Miss Shankley.”
“Glad to hear it. No collywobbles today, then?”
“Miss Shankley,” he called up to her. “Is one of these sheds yours?”
“Third from the left.”
He went to the door and examined it. “It has a new padlock.”
“Should bloody hope so.”
“Why’s that?”
“Wait a mo.” She turned, then disappeared inside her flat. Two minutes later she had descended the front stairs and was standing next to him, tiptoeing around the muddy puddles in her fur-lined house slippers.
“They’ve all got new locks,” said Breen. All had been fitted with new brass hasps too. Ask about the doors.
“They were all broken into, weren’t they?” said Miss Shankley as she arrived at his side.
“Were they?”
“Three, four weeks ago. We had your lot round about it. Surprised you didn’t know that. It was a bloody nuisance. Took the caretaker that long to get round to fixing it. I’m really not sure why we pay a service charge at all. He drinks, you know. Thinks we don’t notice.”
Looking closer, under a new coat of paint, Breen could see the marks in the wood where each door had been prized open. He ran his fingers over splintered wood that had been covered with filler and sanded down. “So somebody came along and busted all these doors?”
“You can see why we don’t like strangers round here,” said Miss Shankley, nodding her head in the direction of the white house behind. “Things go missing.”
“Oh yes. Your new neighbors. The ones that arrived, I think you said, two and a half weeks ago. That’s a week after your doors were busted in.”
“I never actually said it was them, did I? You’re deliberately misconstruing me.”
The sheds were small. The doors all opened outwards.
“I mean, it’s not people like us who go around entering and breaking,” said Miss Shankley.
“Did you lose much stuff in the break-in?”
“No. Don’t keep nothing valuable in there. Paint pots. Household items that needed mending. That sort of thing.” Breen remembered all the fearsome china ornaments in her flat and imagined a space crowded with limbless tigers and headless pirates.
“Is that all?” said Miss Shankley.
He held up the A–Z and pointed at the space to the north of the flats.
“What’s this building here?” he asked, pointing to the map. Taking his eyes off it, he looked down past the lock-ups to the wall that separated the flats. You could see a roofline of what looked like a workshop of some kind rising above the brick wall.
“That’s that recording studio.”
Breen looked blank.
“EMI. The Beatles. You know.”
Breen frowned.
“Bloody nuisance,” said Miss Shankley, turning away.
“Tell me one thing,” Breen asked her. “What day were the locks fixed?”
“Last Friday, would you believe.” Breen did the calculation. The killing would have taken place two days later.
“How did you keep the shed safe before the caretaker fixed the locks?”
“Weren’t any point really, was there? Nothing left in there worth having.”
“So your door was easy to open—until three or four days ago?”
“Wide to the world. Some people complained about them banging in the wind. Can’t say I heard them, but it weren’t my fault, was it?” She turned and waddled away back into the courtyard.
“Which people?” called Breen.
“Them people.” She thumbed her nose at the white Georgian building behind the sheds.
He walked up Garden Road and turned left onto Abbey Road. Twenty yards from the junction, a young girl of eight or nine in khaki shorts stood crying under an elm tree.
Other trees had lost their leaves in the rain of the last few days, but this one stood greenly straight, alone on the pavement. Breen walked past, then stopped and turned. The girl was still sniveling, eyes red.
“What’s the matter?” Breen called back at her.
“My cat’s stuck up the tree,” said the girl.
Breen looked up. “I can’t see it.”
“She’s right at the top. Been there for hours.”
“She’s just enjoying the view.”
“No she ain’t.”
“She’ll come down in a bit,” said Breen.
“No she won’t.” The girl wiped her nose on the sleeve of her jumper.
“She will. You’ll see.”
“No she won’t.”
Breen walked on. By the next corner he stopped and looked back. She was still there, looking up at the tree, wetness shining on her face.
There was a low white wall behind which cars were parked. From a distance, it looked as if the paint was old and peeling. When he walked closer he saw that in fact the paint was relatively new, but hundreds of words were scratched into the surface. He peered to make them out. “Mo.” “Susan 4 George.” “I luv you John Mary B.”
He squatted down to read more. “Nina 4 Beatles.” “John xxx Lisa.” “Mary and Beth woz here 10/9/68.” “USA loves you.” “Wenna+Izzie always All we need is ♥.” “Pippi and Carolyn 1968.” “I shagged a Beatle”—“LIAR”—“NOT TRUE.” Painstakingly carved: “Those who make revolutions halfway dig their own graves.” “Hands off!!! I sor them 1st.” “Paul call me! V. important!! Greenwich 4328.” “Bob Dylan”—“cant sing.” “Kirby Hill girls love u.” “I was alone I took a ride.” “Kiwis are No 1 Beatles Fans.” “YOU SAVED MY LIFE.” “Jill = Scruffs.” “Apple rules.” “Leprosy I’m not half the man I used to be Since I became an amputee”—“THAT IS S
ICK”—“How DARE you?” “I am the walrus”—“no i am.” “WE LOVE CYNTHIA”…About thirty-five feet of wall, covered in these messages.
He walked round into the small car park. There were more words on the other side too.
“We paint over it every few months,” said a voice. Breen looked up.
The front of the recording studio was a large Georgian house, set back from the road. Standing on the steps leading up to the front door was a man in a brown caretaker’s coat, holding a clipboard. There was a pile of musical instruments at the bottom of the stairs: cellos and double basses.
“Don’t know why we bother. It’s like that again in a few weeks.” He leaned forward and checked the labels on the instrument cases, then made some marks on his clipboard.
“Mostly girls?” said Breen.
“Ninety-five percent.”
“How do they know when the Beatles are here?”
The man shrugged. “Sometimes they’re how we know when the Beatles are due. When they start arriving we know that means the Beatles will be in today.”
Breen wandered up to him and showed his warrant card.
“Oh yeah?”
“If I showed you a photo, would you be able to tell me if it was one of the girls?” he said.
“Don’t bother. Another copper showed us it already. The dead girl.”
“You didn’t recognize it?”
“No. There’s so many of them. We don’t pay them any mind, really. They’re OK. Don’t do any harm.”
The man picked up a pair of cello cases and walked them up the stairs.
“Is there anyone else I should ask?”
“Almost certainly,” he said, returning to pick up a double bass. “But I don’t know who that would be. Best thing you could do is come back when the Beatles are here. Then you’ll see them all, all the girls.”
“When’s that going to be?”
“No idea. Sorry.”
“What is it they all want?” asked Breen.
“Who? The girls?”
“Yes.”
“They just want to be close to them.” He walked the instrument up the stairs through the front door and returned again.
“Do you want a hand?”
“You’re not allowed to touch the instruments. Union regulations.”
The man paused and took a tobacco tin out of his pocket. “It’s like they think if they can only get to them, everything will make sense. People think they must have the answer to everything. It would drive me mad. Wouldn’t it you?”
“Yes, it would.”
“They try and break in sometimes. We’ve had one or two who made it past the doors.”
“What happens then?”
“Nothing really. They just stand there. They don’t know what to do when they’re actually in front of them.” He licked his cigarette paper and spun the cigarette between his fingers, then went inside the building.
Breen left him and walked farther up Abbey Road. It was a genteel street of mansion houses and dull apartment blocks with few people on the pavements outside them. A butcher, blood on his apron, came out of a corner shop and started yanking down the shutters of his shop. Breen checked his watch. It was Wednesday, half-day closing. The place would be dead soon. He lit today’s second cigarette as he passed Hall Road and carried on until he reached Langford Place, then stopped for a minute, finishing the smoke before turning back.
The girl was still there, weeping beneath the elm tree. Breen walked past her a second time, then stopped. He turned round yet again and walked back.
“Does your mother know you’re here?” said Breen.
The girl shook her head.
“Wouldn’t she be worried?”
The girl shook her head again.
“It must be a very special cat.”
This time the girl nodded.
Breen returned to the alley behind the flats where the dead girl had been found. The ladder was still leaning against the large bin. “You in there?” he called, but the policeman who was supposed to be going through the contents inside the bin had vanished. The wooden extension ladder was heavier than he expected it to be, but he found a way to balance it on his shoulder.
“You. Where you taking that now?”
Miss Shankley was leaning over her rear balcony.
“I’m just borrowing it for a few minutes, that’s all,” he called back.
“Mind you do. That’s private property.”
By the time he reached the tree, the weight of the ladder was digging hard into the top of his shoulder. He dropped the ladder down onto the pavement and looked up at the elm. The lower branches started at around ten feet up; they were dense. It was hard to see a place on which he could balance the top.
“What are you doing?” asked the girl.
“What does it look like I’m doing?”
“Keep your hair on. Just asking.”
Breen jammed the ladder up into the branches. Halfway up, one side of the ladder slipped off the small branch that had been holding it. Breen gripped tight as the ladder twisted. “Hold the ladder steady,” he ordered the girl.
She didn’t move.
“If you don’t hold the bottom of the ladder, I can’t go up it to try to find your cat.”
The girl put one hand on the ladder.
“Both hands. Don’t let it move. OK?”
The girl looked up at Breen and nodded.
A couple more rungs and Breen was in among the thick branches. They looked impossibly dense. He took a few seconds to choose a limb that seemed to offer a little more space than its neighbors, then cautiously wrapped his hand around it. The wood felt hard and cold next to his skin. Pulling himself up on it, he found a foothold for his right foot on the crook of a branch.
“Are you sure this cat of yours is up here?”
“Yes. He is.”
He looked up again. Leaving the safety of the ladder, he squeezed his left foot next to his right. Now he was in the tree, past the limbless trunk.
He paused again, considering his next step. He found himself smiling. He hadn’t smiled in weeks, it felt like.
The bark of the tree was creviced but his fingers were too big to fit between the cracks. He would have to rely on branches. He chose one above his head. Feeling bolder now, he looked for another to take the weight of his left foot. Raising his body upwards, his right shoe slipped suddenly from the branch, sending the weight of his body sideways, cracking into the trunk.
“Ow,” he said quietly to himself.
He had been careless. He would have to keep his feet directly on top of each branch. Leather soles had no grip.
He waited until he had caught his breath, then looked up again. “I can’t see him.”
“He’s right at the top.”
Again, he placed his left foot back on the same branch, more firmly this time. Hauling himself up with his arms, he was able to raise his body higher now into the leafless branches at the center of the tree. His body was twisted now, top half facing one way, legs the other, but there was something satisfying about having reached this place, above the traffic, away from the street. He must have climbed trees when he was a child. But when? He couldn’t remember.
“What’s he doing up there?” A voice from below.
“Rescuing my cat.”
He was only perhaps fifteen feet above the ground but it felt more. Beyond the street, he could see the traffic clearly, the elderly man tugging a dog away from a bus-stop sign, the veteran with one leg swinging down the pavement on his crutches. If it hadn’t been for the ladder and the girl holding it, no one would know he was there. Through the leaves he could see Grove End Road. A mansion house on the corner. In a first-floor flat, a woman in a blue dress was standing at a cooker stirring something. The kitchen looked warm and cozy. A rich chicken soup, perhaps, or stew and dumplings. He could almost smell it. Was she cooking for a lover or for herself?
He tore his eyes away and looked up again. The sky behind them
made the branches look even blacker.
“What’s his name?” he called down.
“Whose name?”
“The cat, of course.”
“Loopy.”
“Loopy?”
“That’s right.”
So here he was, halfway up a tree, calling out to a cat called Loopy. He peered into the dark branches and thought he saw, clutching the main trunk like a sailor in a storm, a small black shape. Hard to make it out through the leaves, but as his eyes adjusted to the darkness it gradually came into focus. Claws dug into the bark, a small black cat looking down at Breen over its shoulder.
To be honest, Breen decided, the cat looked perfectly fine there. If anything, there was something scornful in its expression. He looked down again at the girl. Scruffy, thin-cheeked, hopeful.
“Loopy. Loopy. Come here, Loopy.”
The cat didn’t move. It continued to stare at Breen, unimpressed. He would have to climb higher, he decided.
Six
It occurred to him, as he waited to be X-rayed, that he was in the same hospital where the dead girl still lay. She was somewhere below the floorboards beneath him. She would be still, naked, blue and cold, lips dark, breasts flat, lying on her back in darkness. There would be rough, bloodless stitches where Wellington had opened her up, perhaps, like snips of barbed wire. She was waiting in a drawer for Breen to find something.
He closed his eyes.
“You all right?” said the nurse cheerily. He was in a side room on the ground floor; he sat on the bed, arm lying in his lap. “You look a bit done in.”
“Collarbone. This chap here. Hurts like bugger, I expect.” A doctor, a young man with a pipe tucked into the top pocket of his white coat, sent pain tearing up his arm as he prodded and poked. “What in heaven’s name were you doing?”
Sitting on the daybed, he told them about the girl and the cat and the tree.
“Sleeve,” said the nurse.
Automatically Breen moved his bad arm and flinched. “Ow,” he said.
“Other one,” she giggled.
“And you’re a police detective?” said the doctor.
