She's Leaving Home

by William Shaw

  A photograph of the traffic notice was there in the bundle of papers. Breen leafed through them. There were copies of the major’s bank statements, which showed considerable sums of money entering and leaving his account, but no explanation of what it was the major had done for a living.

  He pulled out the photograph of Julia Sullivan’s body, lying on the floor of the tree house. Labeled “886M/88/1168,” it was overexposed, the flash too bright for the small cabin. The white of her skin was snow-like, the blood merely a thin gray. Her head, or what was left of it, was propped against the wooden wall. Her legs lay awkwardly, one tucked under the other. A half-eaten loaf of bread and two bottles of vodka lay on the floor beside her, alongside a pile of unopened packets of Rich Tea biscuits.

  And all around the walls of the tree house were photographs. Breen opened his drawer and pulled out a large, old-fashioned magnifying glass. They appeared to be photographs of children, dozens of them, held up by drawing pins. A boy and a girl. Almost certainly her son and daughter, both dead under awful circumstances, both of whom she had outlived, but not by very much.

  Tommy Nutter Suits from £12 19s. 6d. Drip-dry shirts in stock. Lurex—The Latest Top Gear 59 shillings. The shop window was crowded with signs, handwritten on white card.

  Breen stood outside, looking in. There was a plain blue shirt with a button-down collar. It was not his usual style, but maybe he should start to move a little more with the times. He went inside to see if they had it in his size.

  “Got it in a fifteen-and-a-half. That do?” said the man in the shop. He was smartly dressed in a pinstripe suit with wide lapels and flares, and a pink shirt with a high collar.

  “Are you Martin or Dawes?” asked Breen.

  “Both,” said the man. Parted neatly on the side, his hair was slicked down with Brylcreem.

  “What?”

  “Martin Dawes. I just thought it sounded better if I was two people. Martin and Dawes. That’s me.”

  Breen pulled out his wallet and pulled out two pound notes and his warrant card.

  The shopkeeper took a look at it and said, “What? You expecting a discount?”

  “You were broken into on a Monday night a while back?”

  “‘Broken into’ makes it sound like they had to try.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like I said to the other coppers. They didn’t break in. Someone opened the doors.”

  Breen remembered wondering why the shop’s back door was open, yet apparently undamaged. Ask about the doors.

  “Have you got the buggers, then?”

  “Not yet.”

  The man nodded. “Well, there’s a surprise. I stopped by Hoxton Street market on Saturday. There was a guy selling my suits there. Cocky bastards, they hadn’t even bothered to take my labels out. Why should they? None of your lot are going to do nothing about it. You want a tie with that?”

  “Did you call us to let us know? We would have pulled him in.”

  The man laughed and set to wrapping the shirt. “Course you would. Tell you what, though. One of your lot did OK. He stood up to them. Got himself stabbed, I heard. Hold on. That wasn’t you, was it?”

  “No. It wasn’t me,” said Breen.

  “At least he put up a fight. Other guy ran off. Typical. I don’t know why we bother paying our taxes.”

  Breen took his change and picked up his shirt. “So you’ve not met him at all then, the copper who was stabbed? He hasn’t been in here since?”

  He shook his head. “I’d shake his hand and tell him thanks for trying, at least. Unlike the rest of you. Couple of uniform blokes came in the day afterwards. That’s the last I’ve heard of until you turned up.”

  “No phone calls or anything?”

  “Not a dickie.”

  Breen wrote down his name and a phone number. “Let us know if you see any more of your suits going on sale, will you?”

  The man ignored the card, leaving it on the counter.

  “Got a nice V-neck jumper that will go a treat with that shirt if you like,” he said.

  He took stairs two at a time now. Panting, hand on the brass railing, he met Constable Tozer on the way down. She was carrying a mug full of tea in one hand and a rock cake in the other.

  “Hello,” they both said.

  “How’ve you been?” he asked, getting his breath.

  “OK. Busy. You know.”

  “You’ve cut your hair.” It was shorter than before. The sides now barely covered her ears, giving her an even more tomboyish look than usual.

  She moved her head to the left, then the right to give him a proper view. “The girls say I look like a feller.”

  “I like it,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  “You still at Harrow Road?”

  “All done there now. How’s the shoulder? Getting better?”

  “Pretty much.” Stilted conversation. The familiarity they had had when they were away together had gone.

  “You going to court tomorrow to watch Pilcher?”

  “What’s that?”

  “The John Lennon thing. He’s up for sentencing for that drug raid.”

  “Are you going?”

  “Might do. Bunk off. Never know, might get an autograph.”

  “Mind you don’t get into trouble.”

  “I don’t care.” She grinned. “All the hippies are saying Pilcher probably planted the drugs anyway, and it’s not too unlikely, let’s face it. It’s sick.”

  A throng of uniformed men came barging down the stairs. “Oi, oi, Helen,” one of them said. “Coming round my place later?”

  “Bugger off.”

  “Mind you don’t spill your tea, love.”

  When they’d gone, she said, “Any luck with your man in the fire?”

  “He was a dosser, Wellington reckons. So does Prosser.”

  “What’s Prosser got to do with it?”

  “Bailey put us both on to it. Trying to knock our heads together, I think.”

  “Prosser’s still mad at you, you know. He came into the section house last week calling you a…name.”

  “What name?”

  “A prick, if you want to know.”

  Breen smiled. “I hardly see him. He’s never around. Always off on some business. I don’t ask.”

  “He’s been visiting his son, I expect. He’s not been well.”

  “His son? I didn’t know…”

  “A spastic. He don’t talk about it, but everyone knows. He pays for him and everything. His wife looks after him. His ex, I mean. He’s still got the police flat, though. I don’t think he’s told them. That way he keeps it to himself.”

  “I never knew.”

  She nodded. He put his foot on the next step up.

  “What about the girl?” she asked.

  “Nothing new. Sometimes these things just grind to a halt.”

  “I know.” The hardness in her face again.

  “Of course.”

  They both stood there, waiting for the other to move on. Police-men and -women came and went up the stairs. “It’s an awful shame. Do you think her father did it?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t suppose we ever will.”

  “That’s the way it goes, isn’t it? Well,” she said. “My tea will be getting cold, sir.”

  “Yes,” he said, and went on his way, up the stairs. When he got to the office he kicked himself for not having the balls to invite her to come to Ezeoke’s party. In case she said no.

  Not knowing where to go next with Morwenna Sullivan, he concentrated on the unidentified man, walking around the building sites in the neighborhood where the body was found. “You want to come?” he asked Prosser.

  “No. You’re OK.”

  “Everything OK with you?”

  “Why shouldn’t it be?”

  “I heard your son was ill.”

  “Mind your own fucking business,” said Prosser.

  Not for the first time, London was being built by the Ir
ish. The men Breen met on building sites were young and muscular, still brown from a summer under the English sun.

  “No. No one gone missing from here,” they’d say automatically, not meeting his eye.

  They were nervous of the police, unwilling to talk. Only when he told them he was trying to find the identity of a dead man did they start to open up.

  “Anyone gone missing?” said a young man from County Offaly. “Sure. We’ve all gone missing—haven’t we, boys?”

  As a teenager he’d asked his dad for summer jobs working on the building sites. His father had always refused. He hadn’t wanted him mixing with these men.

  He was standing at the bottom of a block they were creating as part of the new Abbey Estate. A tower of concrete rose upwards; a spine onto which the flats were being attached, like ribs to a backbone.

  “Is there anyone from this site who’s been missing since October the second?” he repeated, above the churn of a cement mixer.

  Heads were scratched. The workforce was often a fluid one. Men would leave if they received a better offer from another foreman. Or they would simply disappear.

  “Joey, maybe.”

  “No, Joey was in yesterday. He had busted his toe,” said a man with a voice that sounded much like Breen’s father’s. “That’s why he’d gone a bit quiet.”

  “Are you a Kerry man?”

  “God sakes no. I’m from Cork.”

  “Close.”

  “That’s libelous talk.” The man’s smile showed broken teeth. High above them a crane dangled a great wing of precast concrete.

  “Detective Sergeant Breen. Is that an Irish name?”

  “My father was from Tralee.”

  “And you’re a policeman now? Oh God. There’s hope for us all.”

  He wanted to say his father had been a builder too. Instead he asked, “How big is this one going to be?”

  “Eighteen floors,” said the man. “Four flats on each floor. Seventy-two homes on as much land as it takes to keep a horse.”

  “If it was you, Spanky, you’d take one of those flats and keep a horse in it too, I expect.”

  “Now how would I get it in the lift?”

  “What about Paudie?” said another voice.

  “You could lure it in with a lump of sugar.”

  “Paudie? No. He’s working over Hammersmith this week, I believe.”

  “Working? When did they start to call what Paudie did work?”

  “It would have to be a fuckin’ big lump of sugar to get a horse into that tiny lift.”

  “Is it a missing man you’re after looking for?”

  “We have found some remains of a man. We can’t identify him.”

  “God there. That’s no good.”

  “Poor bastard.”

  Breen nodded.

  “And you think it may be an Irishman?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Why not? The odds are great, I would say.”

  The Cork man took off his red woolen hat and rubbed his thinning hair. “The unfortunate truth of it is, nobody would really mind a fuck if any of us went missing, ’cept for the publicans,” and he spoke with such a sudden sadness in his voice that all the big men around him were quiet for a second.

  Until one of them said, “Speak for yourself, you cunt.” And they all started laughing again, louder than before, as if they were all really having a great time.

  For a while he stayed there and watched the crane swing the huge hunks of concrete skywards. He wished he had asked his father which buildings he had made. It would have been good, seeing them still standing and knowing that his father had built them.

  That night he pulled out his father’s address book. It had lain untouched for the last couple of years in the drawer beside his bed. It was a small one, the black leather worn and cracked, bought from Boots years ago. His father had been a quiet man; he had not had many friends. Though he had worked with them on the building sites, he had not liked the younger Irishmen who had arrived in waves in the ’50s. He had thought them too loud and wild.

  The entries were made in his neat, elaborate handwriting, learned in some small schoolhouse in Kerry. Some names, those with whom he’d lost touch or who had died, had been crossed out. A couple of those Breen recognized he copied into his address book; his handwriting was so different from his father’s.

  Twenty-three

  There was a crowd pulsing around a light gray Bentley. A surge of people trying to get close to the man at the center of the crowd. A burst of flashbulbs going off as a young man with long hair lifted his head a fraction. A babble of voices.

  He spotted Tozer on the stairs leading up to the front entrance and pushed his way through the crowd towards her.

  “This is horrible,” she shouted above the racket.

  A ring of police helmets showed above the rest of the crowd. Somewhere in the middle was the pop star, making his way slowly to the waiting vehicle, a tiny dark-haired woman in a fur coat that made her look even smaller clinging to him.

  “Do you feel you’ve let your fans down, John?”

  “Were you set up?”

  “John?”

  “Down with the pigs!”

  It was a short walk from the steps down to the waiting vehicle, but the police could not get through.

  “Over here, John.”

  “Since leaving your wife, have things fallen apart for you?”

  Men in macs with notebooks pressed forward against the flow. Others holding Leicas and Hanimexes above head height were hoping to snatch a photo.

  “Come on now, give us some room.”

  Cars slowed to watch the goings-on. Others, behind them, honked, trying to get past. Idle passersby craned necks.

  “John! We love you!”

  “What a farce,” said Tozer.

  They stood on the steps of Marylebone Magistrates’ Court, looking down on the crowd. Breen hadn’t been able to squeeze into the courtroom it was so full. Tozer had been there early and seen it all.

  “What did he get?” Breen shouted in Tozer’s ear.

  “Magistrate fined him one hundred and fifty, plus twenty guineas costs.”

  “Not much, then. Carmichael must be hopping mad. And Pilcher too.”

  “They were. Should have seen their faces. Here he is now.”

  Carmichael came out of the courtroom looking sullen. “All right, Paddy?” A group of fans stood on the steps near them, teary-eyed.

  “His girlfriend had a miscarriage on account of all this,” said Tozer.

  “What’s that?” said Breen.

  “They said it in court. That Japanese girl Lennon is going out with. She had a miscarriage because she was so upset by it all.”

  “Her fault for hanging around with a druggie, then,” said Carmichael.

  “He looks smaller in real life, doesn’t he?” someone said.

  “He looks scared silly.”

  “Pilcher just wanted to nail him, that’s all.”

  Carmichael looked at Tozer. “He broke the law, darling.”

  “She lost her bloody baby, they said.”

  “He’s a pop star. He’s got millions of pounds. He drives a bloody Rolls-Royce for God’s sake. People like him would say anything to get off. People like him…It’s one law for him, another for the rest of us.” Breen had never seen Carmichael so angry.

  There was a bunch of fans still trying to get close to Lennon. Breen pointed at them. “Who are they?”

  “That lot? They’re the scruffs,” said Tozer, craning her neck.

  “Scruffs? Who are the scruffs?”

  “They go round everywhere. Camp out on their doors. Rich daddies, mostly.”

  “You couldn’t tell by looking at them, though.”

  Breen looked back towards them. They were the ones wearing sheepskin coats and screaming, “John!”

  The pop star had made it to the car now. They were struggling to close the door behind him. The car started moving through the crowd even before
the door was properly closed.

  A girl in a Doctor Zhivago coat leaned forward and kissed the glass of the window.

  “He’s spoken for, love.”

  “Stupid cow.”

  The Bentley moved slowly through the crowd until it was free of them, and as soon as it was gone, merging with the traffic on Marylebone Road, people started to move on.

  “There,” said Tozer. She dug into her handbag and pulled out a photo. It was the photo of the three prizewinners that Tozer had brought from the Beatles Fan Club.

  “It’s Penny Lane. Look.”

  Breen took the photo out of her hands. He looked at the photo of the three girls. “This why you came?” he shouted over the noise.

  “Partly.”

  He could feel his face break out into a grin. She had not given up on the girl either. By the time he looked back at the girls who had been pressed against the car, the one from the photo was now walking past with two friends. Tozer was right; it was the girl in Miss Pattison’s photograph.

  “Excuse me,” Breen called out to them.

  “What?” The girl must have been about seventeen. She was long-haired and wore a lot of eye makeup.

  “I just want to ask you something. I’m a policeman.”

  “Go away,” she said and walked on, her two friends beside her. They all dressed the same. All three wore sheepskin coats; each carried a large, bulging, cloth shoulder bag. One had a camera around her neck.

  “No. Wait.”

  He walked after them, but they walked faster.

  “Please. I just want to ask you some questions.”

  The three girls broke into a run, shoes clattering on the Marylebone paving. Breen sped up too, almost enjoying loosening the muscles for the first time in months. The girls barged their way out of the crowd, down the pavement.

  “Penny Lane!” called Tozer.

  Breen soon lost sight of them, but he could tell from the startled expressions on pedestrians’ faces that they weren’t far ahead. The girls all wore sandals with big heels. He would catch them easily as they wove their way through the crowd.

  He caught them up faster than he thought he would. The one who’d called herself Penny Lane stood with her friend at the corner of Balcombe Street next to the fallen body of a third girl. She was lying on her back, eyes wide, panting and whimpering.