The Kings of London

by William Shaw

  ‘Are you really a policeman?’ said the fat art collector.

  ‘Yes,’ said Breen.

  ‘Met?’

  Breen nodded, looking around the room.

  ‘Never met a policeman who was up in art. What division?’

  Breen looked back at the man. He was older than Breen, fat but muscular with it. ‘D,’ said Breen.

  ‘You must know Jack Creamer. Old friend of mine.’ The man took a gulp from his wine.

  ‘Inspector Creamer? Works out of the Maida Vale station.’

  The man nodded, grinning. ‘Excellent man. You in Maida Vale?’

  Breen shook his head. ‘Marylebone.’ He looked the man up and down. In a check suit and two-tone shoes, he was too flamboyantly dressed to be a copper himself.

  The man frowned. ‘Marylebone? That’s where Sergeant Michael Prosser works, isn’t it? Know him?’

  Breen took a sip from his wine. ‘Not anymore. He’s left the force.

  The man’s mouth opened. ‘Really? You sure about that?’

  ‘Harry –’ the woman tugged at the round man’s sleeve – ‘you should meet John. He’s got a couple of Barnett Newmans you might be interested in.’

  Breen asked, ‘Are you a friend of Michael Prosser’s?’

  The man shook his head. ‘No. Not at all. Just met him a couple of times.’

  Breen noticed a gold signet ring on the man’s finger. The ring was engraved with the symbol of a square and a pair of compasses. Breen asked, ‘What line are you in that you know coppers?’

  The man’s laugh was squeaky, high-pitched. ‘Me? Rugby.’

  Breen must have looked puzzled.

  ‘Big supporter. Metropolitan Police Rugby Club. Great men. You a rugby man?’

  Breen shook his head. His friend Carmichael had tried to persuade Breen to play when they first joined up, but Breen didn’t have the physique for it.

  ‘I’ll send you tickets to one of the games, if you like. There’s one on Saturday. You like the art, then?’ asked Harry.

  Breen looked around the small room again. ‘Well, yes,’ said Breen. ‘It’s very fresh.’ The wine was going to his head.

  ‘Know what? I think I do too,’ said Harry, slapping him on the back. He pulled a silver tin from his inside jacket pocket and handed Breen a business card from it. ‘Get in touch,’ he said. ‘I’d like to thank you some time for your advice.’

  Breen left them alone to look at the paintings again. The crowd was young, rich and confident. Conversations were loud. Bursts of laughter. There was a sense that if you were here, you were uniquely privileged. You had arrived at a special place, at a special time, before anyone else. A sense of breaking out of Britain’s predictable greys and browns into something bigger and stranger.

  Between the laughter, Breen heard the young artist saying, ‘Brushstrokes are a, uh, layer that lies between the painting and the audience. I feel that flatness is just an absolute necessity for modernist painting.’

  The revolutionary returned, holding three glasses of white wine carefully in both hands. ‘Where’s Robert?’ she said.

  Breen looked around. He couldn’t see him anywhere.

  ‘Did he tell you he was a homosexual?’ said the revolutionary.

  ‘I guessed,’ said Breen. He lifted his wine glass.

  ‘He said he thought you were very good-looking. He said he wanted to fuck you.’

  Breen coughed, almost spilling what was left in the glass. Afterwards he gasped for air. She hit him on the back and said, ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Are you interested in men?’ she asked, ‘Or women?’

  Breen was wiping wine from his jacket and didn’t answer.

  ‘When I was younger I used to love openings. I hate them now,’ she went on. ‘They’re so ridiculous. I’d blow up the lot of them. I think Robert’s gone, you know? He does that sometimes. Just leaves if he’s bored. I think he’s really quite rude.’

  Breen looked at the crowd around him. Harry Cox was buying one of the paintings, leaning over a desk with his chequebook out, a crowd of people around him.

  Two glasses of wine had made Breen feel bolder than he would normally. He turned to the pretty revolutionary and said, ‘Maybe we could go somewhere else for a drink?’

  The woman paused for a second, looking surprised. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t think so.’ He watched the gallerist’s assistant take the cheque with a distant look on her face, as if she were doing the bald man a favour by accepting it. The gallerist was shaking his hand, smiling. When Breen looked back, the revolutionary was not there. He looked around the gallery, but she must have slipped away too, leaving him here on his own.

  THIRTEEN

  On Thursday morning, Breen picked Tozer up from the women’s section house in Pembridge Square at 8.30. Most of the women in D Division lived here, sharing rooms in a pair of huge old Regency houses that had been knocked together. No men were allowed beyond the sitting room.

  Tozer came clattering down the steps, cardigan half on.

  ‘Here I am. All ready,’ she said, tugging a brush through her hair as she got into the passenger seat of Breen’s car. ‘The walking joke of D Div.’

  ‘What are you on about?’ said Breen.

  ‘You said I was a joke. In front of Jones. I heard you.’

  Breen crunched the gears, pulling out into the Bayswater Road. ‘No I didn’t. I said those squatters would take you as a joke. That way you’d get a better chance of talking to them than by trying to break down the door.’

  ‘Super,’ she said. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Why are you in such a bad mood all the time?’

  Tozer didn’t answer.

  Bayswater Road was stationary, so he U-turned, intending to cut through Westbourne Grove.

  ‘Look out,’ said Tozer.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Didn’t you see that kid on a bike?’ she said, looking back over her shoulder.

  ‘Of course I did,’ said Breen.

  They crawled northwards. ‘You should have stayed on Bayswater Road,’ Tozer said.

  ‘We’ll be fine.’ He swung the car left again to cut up to Royal Oak but the traffic was backed up here, too, cabbies honking their horns and swearing.

  ‘This is horrible,’ she said.

  Breen could see what had happened. A lorry had got stuck trying to reverse into a building site ahead. It had taken the turn too sharply and was now grinding against the metal gatepost.

  Breen pulled the car over and got out.

  ‘What are you doing?’ said Tozer.

  ‘John!’ Breen shouted. ‘John Nolan.’

  A big man in a frayed tweed jacket who was attempting to direct the lorry driver turned. He wore blue workmen’s trousers and black boots with the steel toecaps showing through.

  ‘It’s me,’ said Breen.

  ‘Well there. Cathal Breen.’ The Irishman put out his big red hand. ‘How you been?’ he asked in an accent exactly like Breen’s father’s. ‘Good to see you.’ If he closed his eyes, he could be standing in front of his dad.

  ‘What’s going on?’ said Tozer.

  ‘Give me a minute,’ said Breen.

  ‘Bunch of bloody idiots,’ said Nolan. ‘Will you look at that?’ The lorry continued to move backwards and forwards, trying to get clear of the gate as the queue of cars got longer.

  It wasn’t until the age of twelve or thirteen that he had realised his father even had an Irish accent. A strong one at that. It had come as a surprise when his school friends said they couldn’t understand what his father said.

  By eighteen he had become so embarrassed by the way Tomas Breen spoke that he had found excuses to avoid inviting his girlfriend home, a cheery seventeen-year-old redhead who had let him fondle her breasts but no more.

  It wasn’t just the way his father had spoken. It had been everything about him.

  Listening to Nolan now, he was shocked to realise how much he missed the sound of his father’s vo
ice.

  ‘I’ve been OK,’ said Breen. ‘Do you have a minute?’

  ‘For the son of Tomas Breen I have more than a minute. I’ve an office just around the corner.’ Nolan had known Breen’s father as a younger man. He had been one of the many struggling to find a job in London who were given work on the building sites by his father.

  Tozer was out of the car and standing next to him now. ‘Is anything wrong?’

  ‘This is an old friend of my father’s,’ said Breen. ‘John Nolan.’

  Tozer held her hand out to him.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Nolan, glancing down at Tozer’s thin legs, then up to her chest and then, finally, to her face.

  ‘Why don’t you wait in the car?’ said Breen.

  ‘I’m OK. I can wait.’

  ‘It’s just I wanted to ask Mr Nolan something,’ said Breen.

  ‘I don’t mind,’ she said.

  Breen was about to insist but Nolan said, ‘Come and join us for a cup of tea.’

  ‘OK,’ Tozer said with a grin.

  The building site was just on the far side of Lord Hill’s Bridge. They followed Nolan down the path next to the concrete foundations dug ten feet down into London’s crust, shored up by thick planks of wood.

  ‘What are you building?’

  ‘That road,’ said Nolan. ‘You know. The big road on legs. The West Cross Route.’

  They had been smashing down houses right the way from Shepherds Bush to Paddington for months. Beautiful old rows that had survived the German bombs. A clear line curving from the west. There had been protests from locals, whose communities were being cut in half, and bricks thrown at the bulldozers in Notting Hill, but mostly people wanted the roads.

  ‘It’s going to join to a highway that will run right around London, they say,’ said Nolan. ‘And then three more “ringways” outside that. It’ll be better than Los Angeles, they reckon. Bloody cars zipping everywhere.’

  ‘Plenty of work for you?’ said Breen.

  ‘Loads of money and work for those who know how to make it, sure. You have to feel sorry for the poor buggers in the way, if you’ll excuse my language.’

  ‘I love the idea of driving above the city,’ said Tozer. ‘It’ll be like flying.’

  ‘I would say I prefer to be a little closer to the earth,’ said Nolan, stepping over bare dirt.

  A man standing on the back of a lorry whistled at Tozer as she walked past.

  ‘You want to watch that,’ called Nolan. ‘This girl’s a copper.’ He was smiling though.

  ‘She can bang me up any time,’ said the man.

  ‘What did he say?’ said Tozer.

  ‘I had the priest say a Mass for your father,’ said Nolan as he passed them. ‘Hope you don’t mind.’

  ‘My father would have hated that you did it,’ said Breen. ‘But if there’s a God he’ll have been proved wrong and if there isn’t he’s past caring.’

  Nolan laughed and led them to a small caravan with a box outside for a front doorstep. He entered first and was still trying to conceal the calendar advertising Mahony’s Skip Hire, with its picture of a barebosomed woman holding a wheelbarrow, when Tozer entered.

  ‘Don’t mind me,’ she said.

  Nolan put the calendar into a file drawer and slammed it shut. The caravan was heated by paraffin. Condensation streamed down the walls. There was a small palm crucifix hanging on a nail on the wall, left over from Easter. Nolan plugged in the kettle, which sparked and fizzed. ‘There now,’ he said. ‘My office. Take a seat.’

  Nolan scooped up the plans which lay on the small dining table and Breen and Tozer shuffled onto the bench seat alongside it.

  ‘The thing is, I’ve got some holiday coming up,’ said Breen, ‘I was thinking of going to Tralee,’ he said.

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘I’ve never been to Ireland,’ he said. ‘It never entered my head until my father died.’

  ‘He never went back?’ said Nolan.

  ‘Never.’

  Nolan poured a little water into a huge brown pot to warm it, opened the door of the caravan and emptied it outside. He said, ‘Some of the young men… they never go back either. It’s like it’s lost to them. Maybe they’re ashamed. They leave home boasting they’re going to make their fortunes and they end up working on some shitty job like this, ’scuse my language.’

  ‘My father was too proud to go, I suppose,’ said Breen.

  ‘I would say,’ said Nolan.

  Tozer offered Nolan a cigarette. Breen shook his head. Nolan lit hers first with a silver lighter, then tore the filter off his and lit the broken end, scraps of smouldering tobacco falling onto the floor, then burst out coughing, thumping his chest.

  Breen said, ‘And now I wish I’d asked him to take me. I would like him to have shown me around.’

  Nolan nodded solemnly. ‘I understand,’ he said and took another long pull from his cigarette. ‘It’s always home, whether you’re born there or not.’

  With the cigarette hanging from his lip, Nolan spooned tea into the pot and poured on the water. ‘You must go and see my cousins when you are there. I will tell them to show you the place.’

  ‘That’s what I wanted to ask. I won’t know anybody there.’

  Tozer said, ‘Don’t you have any aunts and uncles?’

  Breen said, ‘I don’t know. My father never talked about anybody.’

  ‘Sure, there must be relations there. You’ll have cousins. Everybody has cousins.’

  If there were, Breen’s father had never mentioned them.

  The tea steamed in the teacups. Nolan added sugar without asking. ‘It is true,’ he said. ‘He set himself apart from the place. He was a disappointed man.’ Nolan distributed the cups, then sat at the table, pulled out a sheet of paper and started writing a list of names and addresses for Breen.

  Tozer said, ‘I think they should bulldoze the rest of London and start again. It’s an ugly, dirty old place, far as I’m concerned.’

  Nolan asked, ‘What about that dead man you were asking about last month?’

  ‘No luck,’ said Breen. ‘Sometimes you never find out.’

  ‘It must take it out of you,’ said Nolan, and he erupted into coughing again. He wrote slowly and carefully, adding a telephone number when he had one. Tozer looked at her watch, drank her tea, said nothing. When he’d finally finished the list he handed it over to Breen. ‘You tell them I sent you. You’d be made most welcome. If you go, will you take some packages from me?’

  Afterwards, walking back across the mud to the car, Breen looked up and tried to visualise a road above his head, cars roaring along it, heading west. Buildings had already been pushed aside; a giant parting combed through the city.

  Tozer said, ‘I didn’t understand a ruddy word that man said. His accent was so strong,’ she said.

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ he said.

  ‘I mean, I may talk in a Devon accent, but at least that’s ruddy English.’

  They drove to Abbey Gardens and pulled up on the other side of the road to the squat. The street was quiet. The curtains of the building were all closed. Since they were last here, somebody had written a sign in big letters and stuck it on the inside of one of the windows:

  Admit it. You’re frightened aren’t you????

  ‘Sorry I’m in a bad mood,’ said Tozer, looking away from him. ‘It’s just I don’t really want to go and live back on the farm. I like it here. Only I have to. You know what it’s like.’

  Breen nodded. He looked at the squat. On the front step, a tabby cat sat waiting to be let in. ‘You don’t have to do this,’ he said. ‘Like Jonesy said, really. You’re not supposed to do anything like this.’

  ‘I’m not supposed to do nothing,’ said Tozer. ‘That’s the problem.’

  She finished a cigarette and stubbed it out in the ashtray. ‘I just go and knock on the door, then?’

  ‘They won’t know you’re there if you don’t,’ said Breen.

&
nbsp; Breen wound down the window and watched her knocking on the big front door with the side of her fist. Again, the window above opened and a bearded man with long hair appeared. Breen could see Tozer looking up, talking to him, but he was too far away to hear anything.

  The conversation went on for at least a minute before the door finally opened. In the dark of the doorway Breen caught a glimpse of the young woman he’d seen in the garden, now talking to Tozer at the door. Pale, slender and slightly Pre-Raphaelite in a long cotton dress. Then the front door closed behind Tozer. Breen waited for ten minutes but she didn’t come back out.

  She would be OK.

  He would be in big trouble with the women’s division if she wasn’t.

  He turned the engine on, put the car into gear, and drove away back south towards Westminster.

  The shiny new sign was stuck: a big triangular metal stand with silver letters reading ‘New Scotland Yard’. It had only been outside the new building for a few weeks. It was supposed to turn round and round, symbolising how the Metropolitan Police were taking care of the whole city. Or as Carmichael had said, ‘How we’re always going around in circles’.

  Two men were up a ladder trying to get it revolving again. Breen watched them struggling with it for a while until one of them finally pulled out a hammer and started thumping something inside the sign.

  The giant building was so new it smelt like the inside of a plastic bag. The new lifts weren’t working, either, so Breen had to walk up four flights of stairs to find Carmichael’s office.

  Big John Carmichael’s sideboards were even longer than last time Breen had seen them. Breen watched him for a minute, one finger typing, until he spotted Breen, stood and roared, ‘Paddy, you bugger! How’s things in D? What about that yokel bird you’re knobbing? Bailey still driving everyone crazy?’

  ‘I’m not knobbing anyone,’ said Breen.

  ‘Can’t have that, Paddy. You’ll waste away.’

  Compared to the dark, high-windowed room where the two of them had worked together at Marylebone, this place was modern and light. There were orange plastic chairs. New green plastic telephones. Neat Olivetti typewriters. The future.

  ‘I want to hear everything. Come to the canteen. I’ll buy you a coffee. It’s crap, mind.’