by William Shaw
‘Two-and-a-half, sir…’
‘On a case like this we’ll be under a lot of scrutiny.’
Breen understood. The Home Office was in charge of the police. The dead man was the son of a senior politician.
‘It’s not my turn, sir.’
A small sniff. ‘There are no such things as turns. This is not Monopoly, Sergeant. Constable Jones will assist you.’
Constable Jones. Secondary modern boy with just three Certificates of Secondary Education, a fondness for the royal family, and a pregnant wife.
‘With Prosser and Carmichael gone, you are the longest serving officer here. I have contacted Rhodri Pugh’s people. They will wish to meet you to ensure that the case is handled with the sensitivity it requires. I hope you haven’t booked tickets or anything stupid like that?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Good. One more thing.’ Bailey paused as if he had something difficult to say. He smoothed the sheet of blotting paper on top of his desk with the heel of his hand.
‘It’s my birthday on Tuesday,’ he said.
Breen blinked. ‘Congratulations, sir.’
‘It happens to be my sixtieth,’ said Bailey.
‘Yes, sir,’ said Breen.
A pause while Bailey pulled on his ear lobe. A slight tremble in his fingers. ‘I know I’m not always the most popular officer with the younger men,’ he said finally. ‘Probably my fault. Always a bit formal, I expect.’
‘I wouldn’t say that, sir.’
‘Don’t fib, Paddy.’
Unlike the other men in D Div, CID, Breen actually liked Bailey. Secretly, at least. The way he put the photo of his wife and children on his desk. The way he collected rainwater to feed the African violets he kept on his windowsill. The way he stuck to the rules, irritating all the younger, more impulsive coppers.
‘I don’t like to be thought of as stand-offish. My wife was planning a dinner for me at home, but I suppose there’ll be plenty of time for that when I’ve retired. So I thought maybe I should go out for a drink with my mates on the job.’
His mates on the job. The phrase sounded absurd in Bailey’s mouth. He was one of those stiff-backed men. One of those who had fought in the war. One of those who believed conformity was a sign of trustworthiness.
‘What do you think?’ asked Bailey.
‘Well, sir…’
‘You think they’ll want to come?’
‘Of course they will,’ said Breen.
‘Splendid.’ Bailey smiled. ‘I shall look forward to that, then. Perhaps you could spread the word?’
Breen hesitated. ‘Wouldn’t it be better if the invite came from you, sir?’
‘I don’t think so. Nothing formal, you see. Just a jolly evening with the lads.’
‘Right, sir.’ Breen turned to go.
‘I meant to ask,’ said Bailey. ‘Was there any talk last night about why Sergeant Prosser was leaving us?’
‘No, sir,’ said Breen. ‘Not a thing.’
‘I just wanted to get to the bottom of it, that’s all. Sergeant Prosser was a lifer.’ Breen turned to face the inspector again. ‘He was in it for the full pension. He has a family to support. People like that just don’t resign out of the blue unless something’s going on. Something is up. I want you to be my eyes and ears, Paddy.’
‘Sir?’
‘To find out why he left us so suddenly. If there’s any muck there, I need to know. Eyes and ears, Paddy.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Breen.
‘Don’t look so glum, Sergeant. I wouldn’t give this case to anyone. I hope you appreciate that. Do it well and it’ll be good for you.’
Breen down looked at his shoes. The scratches in the leather. ‘Thank you, sir.’
‘What’s wrong?’ said Marilyn, standing up at her desk. ‘What did Bailey want?’
Breen said nothing. He walked on straight past her to the shelves behind her desk.
‘You in a bate about something, Paddy?’
He took two old box files. They had been emptied, but they still had the names of old cases written on them. Cases that had happened long before Breen’s time here at Marylebone.
‘Paddy?’ said Marilyn again. ‘Are you OK?’
The CID room was brightly lit by neon strips that flickered occasionally. He took the box files and dropped them on his desk. Sat down. Called up the travel agency he had been talking to about his holiday. ‘What about if I went to Ireland in January instead?’ he asked.
‘After the New Year, the ferries stop sailing until Easter,’ the woman said.
Marilyn padded alongside him after he’d finished the call.
‘Anything I can do, Paddy?’
‘No thank you, Marilyn,’ he said, too loudly. ‘And my name’s not Paddy. It’s never been Paddy. It’s Cathal.’
And the room was silent for a minute. The neon buzzed a little more loudly. The thing about Marilyn was that everybody knew she was a pain sometimes, but she kept the office working. Without her there was chaos. And Breen, of all people, was never rude to her.
Finally Constable Jones said, ‘Shock, I expect. From the explosion.’
‘Jesus,’ said Breen.
A pencil rolled off a desk and clattered onto the floor, unnaturally loudly.
‘Well, I’m sorry,’ said Marilyn eventually. ‘Excuse me for trying to help you, Sergeant Cathal Breen.’
Breen concentrated on the pile of documents he had grabbed from Pugh’s house. He divided them into two even piles and put each into one of the two box files.
When he snapped the clip shut on the first he looked up to see everyone in the office staring at him.
He realised he was shaking. Could they see that? He ignored them, picking up the picture he had used as a tray to carry the documents out of the house, turning it over for the first time.
It was a print, but modern. Very modern. Several perfectly round black dots on a white background. The dots were three different sizes. They were spaced as if in a pattern, but what the pattern was was not easy to discern. It had been mounted in a plain white frame a little more than two foot square.
Breen held it upright on his desk and looked at it, trying to work it out.
‘What the hell’s that?’ said a voice behind him. Constable Jones.
‘A picture I took from the house in Maida Vale.’
‘Modern art?’ said Jones. He held a comb in one hand.
‘Yes.’
‘I mean, who do they think they’re kidding?’ said Jones, tugging the comb through his thick hair to try to keep his side parting in place.
Breen nodded, still looking at the picture.
‘I mean, a five-year-old could do that. Even I could do that.’
‘Even you, Jonesy,’ said Marilyn.
Jones had a cut on his face just below his left eye. A graze on the cheekbone where someone had thumped him. He’d been fighting last night. He often got into fights after a late night drinking. It was part of the fun.
Breen stared at the picture still. The dots were printed onto perspex. In the bottom left-hand corner, a signature had been etched, but Breen could not make it out. Below that a number: 14/75.
Marilyn joined them. She said. ‘You sure it’s meant to be that way up?’
Breen said, ‘Sorry I was rude, Marilyn. I’m a bit out of sorts.’
Marilyn nodded. ‘No holiday then?’ she said.
Breen shook his head.
‘That jacket would look OK on you if it was a couple of sizes bigger,’ she said. ‘Turn around.’ And she started brushing flecks of lint from the cloth, tugging at it to smooth out the wrinkles.
The box files and the print sat awkwardly on his lap on the bus home. On Kingsland Road the bus stopped, and the conductor ordered all the passengers out because the bus had changed its route.
‘Everybody off,’ the conductor said. ‘This bus don’t go nowhere.’
The passengers refused to move at first. ‘It said Stoke Newington on the front, you
stupid coon.’
The West Indian just stood by the stairs, arms folded, metal ticket machine strapped to his stomach, a weary smile on his face. A wiry old man in a wool cap said, ‘I ought to smash your ugly black face in.’
The black man said nothing, still smiling. The old man quivered with anger, but after a couple of seconds moved on and stepped off the bus.
When he’d gone, the black man spat out of the bus after him.
‘Everybody off now,’ he said.
An old lady in a hairnet was struggling to pull a shopping trolley out of the luggage compartment under the stairs. The conductor moved to help her but she elbowed him aside. ‘I’ll do it myself, thank you very much,’ she said loudly, and carried on yanking at the trolley’s walking-stick handle.
There were around fifty people already queueing for the next bus and at this time of day it would be full when it arrived, so Breen decided to walk the quarter-mile home, still using the picture to balance the boxes. He passed The Scala. A poster advertised a late-night showing of The General; though he didn’t like modern pictures much, his father had once talked about seeing the Buster Keaton at the cinema in Killarney when he was a boy: ‘Greatest film ever made.’ Breen had never seen it.
His flat was a basement in Stoke Newington. He had moved in back when he was working at the local police station. It had given him somewhere to look after his father in the last years.
Tomas Breen had not approved of his son joining the police. He had wanted better for him. A schoolteacher like his dead mother, perhaps. Or a lawyer.
‘What you do makes you who you are,’ he had said. His father, who had dreamed of being a great writer but who had been a builder all his life.
‘People who spend time in sewers end up smelling of excrement,’ his father had said.
He placed the pile down on the steps and struggled with the lock for a minute before opening the door. He reached for the light switch, but the meter had run out.
Walking into a dark flat, he banged his shins on the boxes of his father’s possessions.
When the lights were back on he took off his clothes and set them on hangers above the bath and put on his pyjamas and dressing gown.
There was a tin of sardines already open in the fridge. There wasn’t much fresh veg on sale by this time of the year but he’d found some firm-looking tomatoes at the weekend. They weren’t very ripe but he fried them with some mixed herbs and then crushed the sardines onto the toast and put the tomatoes on top, then settled down to eat them with a glass of milk.
He spent the evening in front of the television, leafing through Francis Pugh’s documents. They were not in any particular order. A few bank statements. Some receipts. One or two letters. He owned shares that paid regular dividends. Sums of over £100 a month were paid in from an account named ‘Pugh Trust’; the estate of some rich relation, he supposed.
Breen spent a while sorting the dead man’s bank statements into their correct order. With gaps, there were just over two years’ worth.
He took a sheet of cardboard he’d ripped from a used packet of Quaker porridge oats and started listing the payees, leaving out ordinary-looking payments: the GPO, the Gas and Water Boards and the Greater London Council. Stephens Brothers, Shirtmakers. Regent Shoes. Dougie Millings the tailor. Dolly’s in Jermyn Street. Foale & Tuffin in Panton Street. Apple Tailoring. A shop called Hung On You. Another called Dandie Fashions.
It took almost three hours to list each payee, and by the time he’d finished, the back of the cardboard was completely covered. If Harold Wilson’s Labour government were union men and grammar school intellectuals, the sons of miners and labourers, Francis Pugh didn’t see himself as one of them. He was a dandy; one of the beautiful people.
Swinging London was just a small, exclusive part of the city. Francis Pugh had either been part of it, or had badly wanted to be.
Breen slept badly. He woke in a dream in which men jumped out at him with knives. ‘I’ll bloody cut you for what you bloody done.’ After that, he could not get back to sleep again.
He had fallen out of the habit of sleeping through the night.
As his dementia had taken hold, his father had lost track of the hours. Breen would often wake to find all the lights on in the flat, his father sitting by the front door with a suitcase at the ready. ‘Is it time yet?’ he would ask.
‘Not yet, no,’ Breen would reply, and make a cup of warm milk for them both.
‘I thought I heard them calling my name.’
‘Just the wind.’
‘Later then?’
‘A lot later, yes.’
The proportions of things changed at night. The volume of the ticking travel clock. The lump in a mattress. The memory of a night with Helen Tozer, naked in this bed and the shape of her back against his.
Tonight he rose, switched on the light and began to search for something to do. The front room was tidy. He had replaced all the papers in their boxes. The plates from supper were washed up, dried and put back in the cupboard.
He took his brogues and carefully brushed wax into the leather, spitting on them occasionally. He added a second layer of wax, then a third, each time rubbing them shiny with the buffing brush. He was a man who polished his shoes.
He held them up to the light bulb. They shone, but he could still see the scuff marks left where he had stumbled amongst the debris. Then he looked around for something else to do.
The picture on which he had carried the pile of papers was still there, leaning face down against the wall. There was a gas fire in the fireplace. Above it, Breen had put a faded reproduction of a Cézanne he had bought in Petticoat Lane. He took down the old print and put up the black-and-white dots.
It looked bright and airy. Optimistic. Clean. New. And disturbingly meaningless. A void. Like the plain white cover of the new Beatles record he had bought a few weeks before.
It wasn’t that the picture looked out of place amongst his belongings. More that it made the rest of his flat look out of place.
He considered taking it down again and replacing it with the dark print of two men in hats playing cards, but he didn’t. Instead he sat looking at it for a while, waiting for it to say something to him.
SEVEN
‘I had plans this weekend,’ complained Jones. ‘Bloody nobs, getting themselves killed.’
Jones was driving one-handed and fast. He wore a pale-blue long-sleeve hand-knitted cardigan. Breen wrinkled his nose. ‘Are you wearing perfume?’
‘What?’ said Jones.
‘It smells like perfume,’ said Tozer who was sitting in the back.
‘’k off.’
London looked grey and dirty. At least it wasn’t raining today.
Tozer sniffed again. ‘It’s not me, that’s for sure.’ She leaned forward towards Constable Jones. ‘It is you. You’re wearing perfume.’
‘It’s aftershave,’ protested Jones.
‘Aftershave?’ said Breen.
‘Whatever it is, it stinks.’
‘My wife says she likes it. She says it’s nice.’ He was only twenty. His wife was a year older. Coppers married young; that way you got out of shared rooms in a police house into your own flat.
‘It’s all right for you two,’ said Jones. ‘You probably got nothing better to do. I had plans this weekend.’
‘Thanks very much,’ said Breen. ‘What plans, anyway?’
‘Decorating,’ he said. ‘Doing the kiddy’s room. Dulux. No expense.’
‘You looking forward to the baby?’ asked Tozer.
‘Course,’ said Jones, looking away.
For a Saturday morning, the traffic was unusually slow. Jones honked the horn and waved to get the attention of a pedestrian. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Over there.’
Breen looked. Ahead, a woman in a black coat was yanking a boy of about ten years old up the street. The boy’s movements were clumsy, uneven. One foot dragged.
‘He looks like he’s one of the bloody Flowerpot M
en, don’t he, poor bugger?’ Jones honked the horn again, but the woman didn’t seem to hear it.
‘Who’s that?’ asked Tozer.
The boy appeared to wobble as he walked, as if his limbs were beyond his control.
‘That’s Sergeant Prosser’s boy, Charlie.’
They drew level, inching up Maida Vale. The woman was dark-haired, thin-faced. A bit too skinny for her age, perhaps. She caught sight of Jones in the car, smiled and waved. Her son stopped and stared at the car and smiled too. ‘Hi, Jonesy,’ she called, waving.
‘He’s a spazz,’ said Jones. ‘Ask me, she should have put him in a home.’
Breen watched her taking her son by the arm. ‘A spastic?’
‘I didn’t expect her to look like that,’ said Tozer, looking back at her through the rear window.
‘Like what?’ said Jones.
‘I don’t know. Kind of, not exactly pretty, I suppose, but…’
‘I’d give her one,’ said Jones.
‘You’re pathetic, Jonesy,’ said Tozer. ‘Admit it, Prosser wasn’t exactly Steve McQueen.’
He drove on, up Hamilton Road towards Marlborough Place.
‘I mean, imagine having a baby that turns out to be like that, though,’ said Jones. ‘Christ.’ A flicker of the eyes. Nerves, thought Breen.
Outside the flattened house, a paperboy was about to prop his bike against the kerb.
‘Oi!’ Jones rolled down his window. ‘Move that.’
The boy pulled the bike away, grumbling. In one hand, he held the morning’s copy of The Times, unsure of what to do with it. The house he had been going to deliver it to wasn’t there anymore.
A single copper stood marching on the spot to keep his feet warm in the November chill. A mother with a large black pram paused for a cigarette in front of the remains. ‘Isn’t it awful,’ she said. ‘Poor bugger.’
They started with a cigarette break on the pavement, blowing smoke into the still air, while the coppers gathered around them. They knew that Francis Pugh lived here alone; there was no immediate wife or family on hand to talk to.
‘And no girlfriend or nothing?’ said Tozer.
‘I don’t know.’
