She's Leaving Home

by William Shaw

  “We should have told Sergeant Block we were coming out here,” said Breen.

  “Why?”

  “That’s what you’re supposed to do.”

  “This is 1968, sir. There aren’t any ‘supposed to’s’ left.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “What’s the chances we find anything up there, anyway?”

  The gate to the footpath that led up to it was not locked; the path was choked with fallen leaves.

  “Do you think there’s anybody in?”

  “Doesn’t really look like it.”

  The chalet’s faded curtains were closed. Breen went to the front door and knocked, then called, “Hello?”

  Nobody answered. He walked round the wooden building. There was a fresh log pile stacked against the back wall in readiness for winter. Lying on an unruly lawn, a fallen tree trunk had been carved into the shape of a Picasso-ish reclining nude, arms stretched above her head.

  “No sign of anyone,” said Tozer, face pressed up against a windowpane.

  At the rear of the house, a series of water butts gathered rain from the roof, green mold streaking down their sides.

  “Well, it was worth a try, I suppose,” said Tozer. “What now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We could go for a drive on the moors. See if we can find somewhere to have a bit of lunch.”

  A jar full of paintbrushes stood on a bench, filled with more rainwater.

  “Well? What else is there to do? It’s not like the Constabulary want us poking our nose into any of this anyway.”

  From the back of the house, a pathway led into the woods. Breen was in his brogues. He wished he’d brought a pair of Wellingtons from Tozer’s collection.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Just looking around.”

  The path was narrow and led to a small stream that cascaded down the hillside. It was dammed. Someone had built a small pool into the surface of the hill, collecting the brown water off the moor. Dark leaves rotted below the surface.

  “I expect she used to swim naked here. What do you think?”

  She had followed him down the path.

  “I imagine her as being the kind of woman who swims naked,” said Tozer.

  The path continued up the hill.

  “Nobody would see you here,” she continued. “You could pretty much do as you please. All them orgies that solicitor was talking about, probably.”

  Breen followed the path up past the stream, skidding on the rocks and mud in his leather soles. The place was dank and rotten underfoot.

  “Oh, wow. There are little sculptures here,” said Tozer. “Did you see them? They’re a bit overgrown.”

  Breen was walking up the pathway, about twenty yards away now, in the thick woods. The light filtered down through autumn trees. Something caught his eye among the bracken and bramble that lined the narrow path. Leaning down, he picked up a piece of rubbish that someone seemed to have dropped by the pathway. He unfolded it carefully and held it up to the light.

  “Tozer?” he whispered.

  She was too far away. “Oh, Lord. Naked people. Little statues of nudie people dancing.”

  “Shh.”

  “Nobody’s got bosoms that big. Not even Jayne Mansfield.”

  “Tozer. Quiet,” he hissed.

  “What?”

  He held up the piece of rubbish and waved it at her.

  Through the branches, she looked at him, puzzled. “Wait there,” she said, starting to crash through the undergrowth towards him.

  He held his finger up to his mouth but it didn’t lessen the noise she made tramping through the undergrowth.

  “What is it?” she asked when she was next to him.

  He held up the wrapper.

  “So?”

  He pulled out his notebook awkwardly and thumbed through it, then opened the page. “See?” he said. He held the page book towards her.

  “I can’t really read that.”

  “Rich Tea biscuits,” he said.

  Abruptly, she burst out laughing, loudly enough to startle a magpie that flapped up into the tree canopy. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  The shot was not loud, but it felt like it was close. A muffled pop that could have come from yards away.

  Tozer’s laughter stopped dead. She dropped down onto her hands and knees and crawled to the tree behind which Breen was sheltering.

  “It might just have been someone hunting pigeons,” she whispered.

  “It might.”

  They were pressed against each other. Breen was conscious of the bony warmth of her, her short breaths. After a minute, she said, “How long are we going to stay here?”

  Breen said nothing.

  “What if we go back to the car and find a phone? Then call up the Devon and Cornwalls?”

  “Like you said, it might just have been someone hunting pigeons.”

  “Or rabbits.”

  “Right.”

  “Want me to go?”

  He shook his head, then peered out from the tree. “You reckon it came from over there?”

  She nodded. He stood up. “Hello?”

  No answer.

  “Hello?” he called again.

  The usual sound of the woodland had reasserted itself. A two-note birdsong. They had heard nobody moving, nobody running away.

  He moved forward; the crack of a stick underneath his foot almost made him throw himself to the ground. “Is there someone there?”

  Nobody answered; nobody moved.

  “What was that, then?” Tozer finally said. “I could have sworn that gun was close.”

  Gaining confidence, they spread out, peering behind the larger trees, into thickets of bramble. The woods were a long strip of land, maybe thirty yards wide, that stretched around the contour of the hillside. Breen saw small, strange, brightly colored fungi, orange tentacles forcing their way through the leaves, big blobby pale lumps, small bright red upturned cups. There were small piles of droppings, and the half-eaten carcass of a wood pigeon. The rich smell of rot. But no sign of another person; not even a sign of footprints or broken branches. The biscuit wrapper must have just been a coincidence.

  “That was weird,” said Tozer.

  Breen wondered if they had imagined it. Or maybe it was some strange trick of the local air currents that had made a distant hunter’s shot seem closer than it was; maybe the air really was thicker in Devon.

  “I’m hungry,” said Tozer. “Can we get some lunch?”

  They started to retrace theirs steps back towards the pool and the small chalet.

  “I thought she’d be here,” said Breen.

  “The locals are probably right. She’s long gone. We should go. It’s starting to rain, I think. I just felt a raindrop.”

  They walked back, past the chalet to the car. The key was stiff in the lock, and Tozer spent some time struggling with the door. When she opened it and leaned across the seats to open Breen’s door, he noticed some color in her hair.

  “You’re bleeding,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “On your head,” he said, getting in beside her.

  She touched the top of her head and brought her fingers down; there was a small smear of redness.

  “Here,” he said, pulling her head towards him. There was a little spot of blood in her hair, but no sign of any wound.

  “What the…?”

  Breen was out of the door, running back up the narrow path past the pond. By the time she caught up with him, back in the woods, he was staring upwards. Twenty feet above their heads was a small tree house, built around the trunk of a tall beech tree.

  “My God.”

  There were planks across the bottom of the structure. Something dark had made an oval stain on the wood. Slowly, drop by drop, it fell to the ground.

  Twenty-one

  Breen stamped his feet in the cold to try and get his muscles back under his control.

  “They’ll be here soon,
” said Tozer, looking up at the tree.

  “They’ll be here soon,” Breen shouted, hoping whoever was in the tree house could still hear.

  Walking towards the edge of the woods to try and get a better view of the tree house, they found the Jaguar covered in a green tarpaulin. She had driven it up a muddy track and left it at the side of the field. Breen lifted the tarpaulin; the front driver side light was smashed.

  “You think she shot herself when she heard us?”

  He nodded. “I think so. She pulled the ladder up after herself so no one could see she was up there.”

  “She’s almost certainly dead, sir.”

  Breen had nothing to say.

  Tozer stamped her feet to keep warm. “So, what do you reckon? Major Sullivan goes up to London, has some sort of argument with his daughter. Ends up killing her. When we come down here and tell Julia Sullivan her daughter’s dead, she figures out he’s killed her, takes a shotgun and shoots him and runs away here, because it’s a place she used to live with her daughter. Then she shoots herself?”

  Breen’s neck was aching from looking up at the tree house. “It’s possible.”

  “You think it was hearing me, seeing us, that made her do it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “God. Everything we do is wrong, isn’t it?”

  Breen didn’t answer. The view from here was no better. He walked back into the woods. The blood at the base of the tree house looked black in the dimming light.

  Sergeant Block stood below, collar turned up. “Unbe-fucking-lievable.”

  It was almost dark by the time a fire engine had arrived with ladders. The blood had stopped falling a long time ago. On the uneven ground the firemen were trying to wedge chocks under the base of a long ladder to make it steady enough to reach the tree house.

  Tozer had fetched a tartan rug from the boot of the Morris Oxford. It was covered in dog hair, but she’d placed it round Breen’s shoulders to try and stop him shivering.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you thought she was here?” said Block.

  Breen pulled the blanket tighter round him. “You know, I wish I had. Then it would have been you here, instead of us.”

  “You didn’t tell us you were coming down to interview the Sullivans. You turn up there and one of them ends up dead. You didn’t tell us you knew where Julia Sullivan was hiding and now she’s probably dead as well.”

  “I didn’t know for sure she was here.”

  “You obviously had an idea.”

  “She’d still have shot herself the moment she saw you coming.”

  Block spat onto the leaves on the ground. “Maybe I wouldn’t have just blundered in without knowing if she was here or not in the first place. If it is her.”

  “Move please, gents,” said a fireman, carrying a long coil of rope to the ladder.

  They stood back a little way. The fireman slung the rope over his shoulder and began to climb the ladder. It was dark now and another fireman trained a strong torch up to help him see. In the beam of light, the blood on the timbers shone red. At the top of the ladder, the fireman spent what seemed like minutes tying the top rungs to the tree. Breen trod impatiently below. Eventually the man switched on his own torch and put his head up into the trapdoor.

  He shone the torch down, dazzling them. “It’s a woman,” he called.

  “I should take a look,” said Breen.

  “You can read my report. I’ll send you a copy. Now get out of here.”

  Breen shook his head. “I should see the scene.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Block. “Get out of here, the pair of you.”

  They stood a while longer, while the firemen tied pulleys to the tree so they could begin to lower the body down, before Breen turned his back and walked to the car, Tozer following behind.

  “Tosspot,” said Tozer, turning on the engine. “Block.”

  She switched on the interior light and leaned across to Breen’s seat, her body across his, and pulled down the sun visor. She tried to peer at the top of her head in the vanity mirror. “Is there blood there? I can’t see.”

  She flattened her dark hair down onto her head and stretched her eyes upwards, but could see nothing.

  “I want a bath.” She released the clutch and the car lurched forward. “I feel like Lady Macbeth.”

  The car shot down the small lanes.

  Breen sat, hand gripping the side of the seat. “He was right, though. We made a mess of it and because of that she’s dead.”

  Twenty-two

  Three in the morning, Tuesday night, the only customer in Joe’s All Night Bagel Shop was listening to the music Joe was playing on his gramophone. Tonight he was playing jazz.

  “You should find another job,” said Joe. “Something with a night shift.”

  “You’re just trying to get someone to replace your daughter now she’s had a baby.” Breen read a copy of yesterday’s Times that someone had left on the counter. It was full of the American election.

  Joe took a pull from his tiny rolled-up cigarette and coughed. “You couldn’t even wash up. I wouldn’t let you in a million miles of my kitchen anyway. You’d turn the milk sour.”

  “My dad was always telling me to get another job.”

  “It’s best left to the stupid ones. The ones who have no imagination.”

  “Is that a compliment?”

  Joe snarled. “Go home to bed. You’ve got to be up in four hours to go to work.”

  The bell over the door rang and a policeman came in. Breen recognized him from several nights before, and he said exactly the same thing: “Turn that racket down.”

  “Talk of the devil,” said Joe, taking the needle off the record.

  He took an aluminum teapot off the shelf and spooned tea leaves into it.

  “Can I have the key to your bathroom, mate?” asked the constable. Joe took it off a nail by the till and handed it to the policeman.

  Breen turned over a page with the headline “Vietnam may lose Hubert Humphrey the Presidency”; the next announced, “Nigeria’s General Gowon says ‘Final Offensive’ Will Be Decisive.” He read the article; it was about the Biafran war. It said the general had been trained at Sandhurst. His Federal troops had encircled Biafra, cutting the secessionist state off from the sea. The Biafran advance on the Nigerian capital had been turned back. Instead, the rebel troops had been pushed back inside their own borders. The journalist seemed to think it would all be over in a matter of weeks. “You know anything about this Biafran war, Joe?” he said.

  “Since when have you been interested in foreign affairs?”

  “I met a Biafran man. A doctor.”

  “Very educated, the Biafrans. They call themselves the Jews of Africa. Though I’m not sure having a persecution complex is enough to make you the Chosen People.”

  “The man I met thinks they will win the war. This article here says they don’t have a chance and that it will all be over in weeks.”

  “Which do you believe?”

  “The newspaper, I suppose.”

  “There will always be people who say a war will be over by Christmas. We could have stopped it all if we’d wanted to. What happened to your sidekick?” Joe asked Breen.

  “Sidekick?”

  “That girl.”

  “Helen? She’s been assigned to another murder squad.”

  Breen had not seen her since they had come back to London. All the previous week she had been at Harrow Road Station, working with Sergeant Prosser; an incident room had been set up there to deal with a domestic murder in Kensal Town. She had not called him.

  The copper came out of the bathroom and sat at the far end of the counter. “Got any biscuits to go with that?”

  “What happened to that case you were on with her?”

  “You’re very conversational tonight, Joe.” Breen closed the paper and folded it.

  “My daughter said I should try and be more friendly to our customers.”

  “H
a.”

  “I can be friendly, you know.”

  “It’s possible that the murderer is already dead.”

  “You should be happy then instead of sitting there with a face ache.”

  “Should I?”

  “You liked her, didn’t you?”

  “Who?”

  “The copper girl.”

  Breen shrugged.

  Joe looked at him. “She seemed nice to me.”

  “You have her, then. You could do with a woman in here.”

  Breen put on his coat.

  Joe tutted. “Expect she’d had enough of you, anyway.”

  “Is all this part of your charm offensive?”

  “Bugger off home to bed, Paddy. You’re like a stone in a shoe.”

  The night was cold, the pavement slippery from dead leaves. He walked back slowly, let himself in and switched on the light. His two-bedroom flat seemed unlived in, despite the mess. The living-room floor was particularly bad now, the floor covered with pieces of paper. He missed the cozy domestic muddle of the Tozers’ house. The women’s things he had never lived with. Lace doilies on shelves. Pictures chosen simply because they were nice. Dried flowers.

  He looked at all the mess of paper. The single sheets had turned into piles around the room. Laid out. Organized. Arranged. Rearranged. Some words underlined. Others crossed out. Maps. Lists. Questions. Photographs of Morwenna Sullivan, alive and dead. A drawing he’d made of Alexandra Tozer in her John Lennon hat. Sometimes he moved them deliberately, like a chess player moving his pieces. Other times he shifted a pile randomly to see if it would make any sense in a different place in the room.

  Breen tiptoed carefully through the paper and took his place in the chair, surveying his work. He wondered if he should call Constable Tozer tomorrow. A couple of times in the last week he had put his hand on the receiver to call Harrow Road and ask to speak to her, but he hadn’t dialed the number. He wasn’t sure what he’d say.

  From where he sat now, the sheets of paper radiated outwards in circles. On the pile straight in front of the chair was one titled “Major Sullivan.” There was an empty space between that and another single sheet that said: “Morwenna Sullivan. Killed 13 October.” He stared at the empty floor space as if waiting for it to speak to him.