She's Leaving Home

by William Shaw

  She pulled out a cigarette from her handbag and offered one to Breen. Breen shook his head.

  “It was a Tuesday. Dad drove round Newton Abbot going into all the scrumpy bars, of which there are a few, let me tell you, pulling out the boys and accusing them of running off with his daughter. You should meet my dad. He’s sort of big. Ever drunk scrumpy?”

  Breen shook his head again.

  “I wouldn’t. It’s piss.” She finished the glass. “Mind if I give you the money to get another?” she said.

  He shook his head. “I’ll get it.”

  “Can you see if they got any crisps?” she called.

  The middle-aged, bleach-haired barmaid was at the off-sales counter, handing over lemonade and a packet of cigarettes to a scabby-headed boy. “They for your dad?” she said, handing him the cigarettes.

  “Who do you think they’re for?”

  “They better chuffing be,” said the barmaid. “I’ll give you a slap if I see you smoking them.”

  She returned to the main bar and served Breen. “Three and six. You’re from round here, in’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Copper, in’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thought so. I know all the coppers round here.”

  “What? All of them?” Tozer called out. “You must be a bit of a live wire then.”

  A few of the customers laughed. “She bloody is, an’ all.”

  “Oi, shut up or you’re banned, the lot of you,” said the barmaid with a grin. “You live by the station, don’t you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Thought so. My sister used to look after your dad.”

  He tried to remember the name of the pale girl who used to clean for him back when he worked at the local station, but he couldn’t. “How is she?”

  “She’s marrying an accountant.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said.

  “Sorry to hear about your dad too. My sister liked him. She said your dad used to recite poetry to her.”

  Where other memories had vanished, his father had been left with odd chunks of the poems he must have learned as a child. Unexpected, haunting lines that occasionally fell from his mouth like reproaches: “The Light of Lights looks always on the motive, not the deed, the Shadow of Shadows on the deed alone.”

  “He’s in a better place now,” said the barmaid, and turned to pull another pint with arms that looked used to heavy work.

  When Breen came back with the drink and the crisps, Tozer opened the packet, dug around for the blue twist of salt and poured it over them. She munched a few in silence.

  “Your father sounds like he could be a scary fellow, then,” said Breen.

  “Oh, my dad ain’t really scary. He’s a lamb. It’s just he is tall and he does carry a shotgun round with him, but that’s only to knock the crows off the hurdles.” She closed her eyes as if seeing something more clearly in her mind. “He used to be a very careful man. We had the best-kept cows in South Devon. He was always winning prizes at the County Show. We got a whole wall full of rosettes. Best Guernsey Cow in Milk. Best Guernsey Group of Three. You know? Champion Local Dairy Animal. Now he just goes through the motions. It’s not the same.”

  She fell silent. The smoke fug thickened around them. The hubbub of the pub had reasserted itself now. Tozer’s joke about the barmaid had broken the ice. Breen’s beer had left a ring of wetness on the dark wood table. He put his finger in the spilled liquid and drew lines out from the circle so that it looked like an infant’s drawing of the sun, rays spreading outwards.

  “They found her on the second day, in the woods just a couple of hundred yards from our house.”

  He thought of the girl under the mattress. The drizzle trickling down her cold body.

  “I was at school when they found her. I remember Mrs. Wilton, our headmistress, coming to get me out of maths class. Her face was as pale as a nun’s arse and I remember she had an ink mark right next to her mouth from chewing a pen or something, and I couldn’t stop staring at it all the time she talked. I knew even before she opened her mouth, though, that they must have found her, just by looking at her. Alex had been raped and knifed. There were bruises all over her. That’s why they didn’t want me to see her. He had piled sticks and leaves on top of her and just left her. They say the foxes had been at her.”

  She said all this in a matter-of-fact voice, but took another large gulp from her rum and black at the end of it. Breen thought: her sister must have struggled a long time with injuries like that.

  They sat in silence together for a while.

  “Was that why you joined the police, then?”

  “What? To find who killed my sister? Not at the beginning.”

  A bearded tramp stuck his head round the door. The barmaid shouted a single word: “Out.” The head disappeared again.

  “I fell in love.”

  Breen watched her twisting a stud round in her earlobe. A small gold dot on pink skin.

  “Not really love at all, actually. Stupid. This copper fancied me. He was a detective sergeant, as it happens. He was on the case.”

  “Oh.”

  “That summer, the house was full of policemen. They were always round the place. We thought they were going to find Alex’s killer. We loved them, me and Mum and Dad. We couldn’t do enough for them. Our house was like their bloody country club. We were the best bloody thing that happened to them.”

  The pub was quiet. People talked in low voices to each other. There was only the noise of traffic passing in the High Street, and the occasional click of balls from the table next door.

  “We used to serve them tea and toast with cream on it. I could swear they were all a stone heavier by the end of the winter. I loved it. All the talk of evidence and stuff. My dad says I’ve always been a bit of a tomboy. I liked the company.”

  In the public bar, someone broke a glass. The sound of ironic cheering followed.

  “I wouldn’t say he was good looking, even, but he was important. And he fancied me. And I’m eighteen. And if a man like that says he loves you, you’re supposed to like them back. Do you want more crisps?”

  When Breen returned from the bar with two more packets, she said, “I found I liked the police, though. Being around with them. Everything that had happened to my family was wrong and they were there to put it right. So I started saying I wanted to join too.”

  “What did your father say?”

  “He was OK about it. He’s pretty much given up on the farm these days, since Alex was killed. She was found on our land, see? In the spinney down by the railway track. She’d been there those two days. I think that’s what spoiled it for him.” She looked down.

  “And the boyfriend? Was he keen on you joining the police?”

  “I thought he was, at the beginning. Then, first time I came back from training in Bristol with my uniform and all, he met me at the station and asked me to marry him. He expected me to chuck it all in and go to live with him in a police house in Torquay. And have lots of little police babies. I think he thought it was just a phase.”

  “And?”

  “And I was only, what, nineteen? Me and all the police wives waiting for the boys to come home drunk on a Friday night? He never took it seriously, me wanting to join the police. So I chucked him.”

  “How did he take it?”

  She put a handful of crisps in her mouth and chewed on them thoughtfully. “Not great. He’d bought a ring and everything.”

  “What about the investigation?”

  She pursed her lips. “One time they thought they’d found the boy who did it. It’s strange. You can focus all your hatred on someone real. You think that makes it easier, but actually it just makes things even more complicated. Turned out to be soft in the head. If you’d asked him if he’d killed John F. Kennedy he’d have said yes. They let him go after a week. After that, nothing.”

  “Oi, copper,” said a voice. A middle-aged man with a mournf
ul face was looking over at them from the bar. “You going to be in here long? Only, Val here”—he nodded at the barmaid—“says we got to be on our best behavior till you’re gone.”

  There was a laugh. “Take as long as you like,” said the barmaid. “It makes a change.”

  “Charming.”

  Tozer fished out her purse for the money to buy another drink. Breen shook his head and took a ten-shilling note from his pocket. He returned with the third round and asked, “Did you have any thoughts about who killed your sister?”

  “You deal with people like me all the time. You must know what goes through our heads.”

  “Yes. I do.”

  “Never being sure why someone was killed. It’s nothing that ever adds up. We start to look at everyone we see. Everyone we know. You look at the guy who drives the milk tanker up to the farm. The boys who ride motorbikes up on the farm tracks. The old guys with the fishing rods who go down to the estuary.”

  The bell rang for last orders. “We should head back,” Breen said quietly.

  “Even my dad, you know? That thought enters your head, eventually. You start to doubt everything.”

  The old guys shuffled to the bar for their last pint.

  “You got any food in your place?” said Tozer. “I’m starving.”

  Breen thought: a tin of tomatoes, a loaf that was probably stale, a tin of herrings, a piece of elderly cheese and a couple of onions.

  Joe’s All Night Bagel Shop was busy, full of people who’d dropped in after work, but Tozer was the only woman in the place. A couple of Chinese men sat at one table playing cards. A gaggle of Pakistanis were bickering loudly as they drank tea in the corner together.

  “Oi, keep it down,” shouted Joe as he brought Tozer’s fry-up.

  “It’s like the bloody United Nations in here,” said Tozer, looking around her wonderingly.

  “Isn’t it?” said Joe. “Nobody agrees with anyone else here.” He turned and shouted again at the Pakistanis, then asked Breen, “What’s wrong with your arm? Someone have a go at you?”

  Tozer tucked into her food. Sausages, beans, double egg, fried onions, mashed potatoes. Breen watched her eat, amazed.

  “What if the person who did it was a lover?” asked Tozer, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. Breen wondered for a second whether she was talking about their case or that of her murdered sister, until she added, “That’s why no one came forward to say she’s gone. Because he’s not reporting it.”

  He nodded. “That’s what gets me too. And why the parents didn’t come forward.”

  “How long is it going to take to track them down?”

  “Not long. We should know something on Monday.”

  They sat in silence a while. He watched her work her way through the plate, and as she did so, the cafe quieted, other customers leaving for their homes or for their night shifts. When the last of the baked beans was hoovered away, she sat back in her chair.

  “You’ve got to be patient,” he said. “Something will crack.”

  “Will it?” she said, looking at him darkly. “It hasn’t for four years with my sister. I don’t think it ever will.”

  “Sorry. I meant in our case.”

  “I know,” she said.

  Joe’s daughter was working tonight. She was standing behind the counter doing dishes with her growing belly pushed against the sink; it looked like the baby would be due very soon. Joe left her to it, lifting the counter with a broom in his hand and walking into the restaurant area. He swept the floor carefully with long strokes, avoiding Breen and Tozer’s table, pausing occasionally to lift chairs out of the way.

  In the kitchen, Joe’s daughter had the radio on. After the weather forecast that said it would rain, the news was all about the Mexico Olympics, where two black American athletes had raised their fists in Black Power salutes at the medal ceremony. “It’s a vulgar political display. Of course they should be suspended immediately and sent home,” a commentator was complaining.

  “Oh, shut your idiotic hole,” said Joe angrily, switching off the radio.

  “I really thought it was him, you know,” said Tozer. “Rider. Even though I half knew the dress wasn’t hers. I just wanted to think it was him. Poor old git. Do you think he’s OK?”

  Breen said, “You have to get used to it. You never see the whole picture. Just parts of it. You have to make up the rest. You have to make assumptions. And mostly you’re wrong. But if you don’t start filling in the parts that aren’t there, you’ll never get it right. You have no choice.”

  “That’s what all the bits of paper are, aren’t they?”

  “In a way. I sit there sometimes and I’m trying to figure out which order they should be in. Whether they’re connected. That’s all. They help me think.”

  “You do that for every case, then?”

  “No,” he said. “I just started doing it. I never really had the space before, I suppose, when my dad was alive.”

  The cafe was quiet now, except for the sound of Joe’s daughter stacking dishes in the kitchen. Joe came back into the restaurant, pulled up a chair next to Breen and started to roll a cigarette.

  “You look tired, Joe,” said Breen.

  “Hope I don’t look as bad as you,” said Joe, licking the cigarette paper. He nodded at Tozer. “Who is your friend?”

  “This is Constable Tozer,” said Breen. “We’re working on a case together.”

  “Oh yeah?” said Joe, pulling a packet of Swan Vestas from his jacket pocket.

  “We’re just working together, like he said.”

  “That’s good.” He put the roll-up, so thin there could barely have been a strand of tobacco running through it, into his mouth and struck a match and sucked. He exhaled smoke through his nose, then said to Tozer, “And all this time I just thought Mr. Breen here was kidding when he said he worked for the police.”

  “Well,” said Tozer, “there are some I’ve met who aren’t that sure of whether he works for them or against them.”

  Joe smiled at her. “I can understand that.”

  “Got another coffee, Joe?”

  “In a minute,” he said, giving his cigarette another tug.

  They walked back to the car together.

  “So you’ve given up on detective constables then?”

  “Mostly,” she said.

  A milk float whined along the road, bottles chinking in their crates as it ran over cobbles. They walked back up towards Breen’s flat, not saying much.

  “You can stay at mine,” said Breen.

  She stiffened. “I’m not like that. Whatever they’re saying.”

  “No. I didn’t mean that. If you don’t think you’re OK to drive.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “I’ve got a spare room, that’s all,” he said. “If you want.” Though that was not what he had meant at all and he was sure she knew it. Whether it had been the beer or not, several times that evening he had imagined her naked, her scrawny arms around him. It would feel good to wake up with a woman. It felt like it had been a long time.

  “I’ll see you Monday, sir.”

  “Right.” He paused. “Good night then.”

  “Night.”

  She turned to go.

  “Tozer?”

  She stopped. “I’m going home, sir.”

  “No. I wasn’t…I just wanted to say again. Good work.”

  She looked at him and smiled. “Yep,” she said, and carried on walking.

  That night, as he lay in bed, Breen was conscious that life since his father had died seemed to have become a series of unconnected episodes. It shook his sense of the simple causality that his job rested on: that every crime required a criminal. Tozer’s sister had been killed. No one had been found. What if dead bodies just appeared on heaps of rubbish down side streets, without cause?

  He wished he had not tried it on with Tozer. She had rejected him. He was looking for patterns, covering walls and floors with pieces of paper, but if h
e could not understand how to make the most basic human connection of all, how could he be expected to make sense of other people’s lives?

  Saturday morning was always hectic. Laundry and groceries.

  The only men who went to launderettes were single, bachelors and widowers. They ignored each other and got on with the job, left as soon as they could. Every Saturday Breen took his bag of washing into the launderette next to Fine Fare. This morning he had to wait for over an hour for a machine to come free. Joe’s daughter waddled in with a plastic basket full of sheets. She fussed about him, helping him load the washing into the machine even though she looked huge with the baby.

  “When’s it due?”

  “Two weeks.”

  “Joe must be excited,” Breen said. “He’ll be a grandfather.”

  “You know my dad. He’d die before he let anyone know he was happy.”

  “But he is, though, I know.”

  She smiled at him. Joe’s family had disappeared in the concentration camps. He didn’t feel he had the right to be happy, she had once told Breen.

  “He’ll miss you when you have the baby.”

  “I won’t miss it. I’m sick of the place,” she said. “I wish he’d give it up.”

  When his machine was finally turning, she sat down heavily on the wooden bench next to him and took out a paper bag of licorice allsorts, offering him one.

  “That woman you came in with last night,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “It was good to see you with a girl.”

  “She’s just a colleague,” said Breen.

  She smiled and picked through the bag to choose a pink one.

  “I’ve never seen you with a girl before, Paddy,” she said, chewing her sweet. “That’s all I’m saying.”

  “I’ve had girlfriends,” he said. “Plenty. There was this girl worked in Hammersmith Library. But she wanted to go out all the time and I couldn’t after my dad moved in.”