The Kings of London

by William Shaw

  Carmichael was wearing a blue-and-yellow checked blazer that made him look even larger than he was. He grabbed Breen’s arm and started pulling him through swing doors and down corridors.

  Breen had never been to the canteen here before. It was huge. People clutched wooden trays and queued for chips and sandwiches served by a line of serving women in pale nylon pinnies.

  ‘So?’ Carmichael said, sitting down opposite Breen at a long table.

  From up here, Breen could see right across the Thames towards Nine Elms. He asked, ‘Do the Drug Squad do much surveillance of suspects?’

  ‘You know we do.’

  ‘I’m trying to find out about a man called Robert Fraser. All I know is he was arrested last year for drugs and sentenced to six months. He thinks your lot are still keeping an eye on him.’

  ‘Probably are, then,’ said Carmichael. ‘Name rings a bell. Big case. They pulled in Mick Jagger too, remember?’

  Breen tried. The last two years were an exhausted blur of bed baths and hospital visits. Breen took a gulp of coffee. Drainwater.

  ‘What do you want to know?’ asked Carmichael.

  ‘A murder case I’m on.’ He was wary about telling Carmichael more.

  ‘And you think this Fraser was involved?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m crashing around in the dark, to be honest.’

  ‘I thought you were on holiday, anyway.’

  There was an odd burst of light as the sun broke through the London cloud. The grey streets outside looked suddenly brighter.

  ‘Bailey didn’t let me go. Because we’re short-handed. Because people like you have jumped ship.’

  ‘Don’t blame me. You should have come here too. Marylebone CID is a dead duck. Bailey’s stuck in the past. Longer he stays there, the worse it’ll be. This is where it’s going on.’ He gestured around at the dozens of coppers sitting in the canteen. The future looked more like a bank headquarters than a police station.

  Breen pushed the coffee away from him. Even the smell was making him nauseous.

  ‘This is where we are,’ Carmichael was saying. ‘Ten years ago you could have listed the names of pretty much every heroin addict in London. There were – what? – two, three hundred in the whole of the city. Since the beatniks and the pop stars, drugs are everywhere. That’s why the Home Office are trying to put the lid on it. They’ve changed their tune. Now they want us to put them away.’

  ‘I’m just interested in what you have on Fraser.’

  ‘It’s the Frankie Pugh murder you’re on, isn’t it?’

  ‘Who told you?’

  ‘Everybody knows. Why haven’t I read anything about this in the papers? You’d have thought they’d be all over it.’

  ‘Francis Pugh is Rhodri Pugh’s son,’ said Breen. ‘One of Harold Wilson’s men. Until we know why he’s been killed, he’s keeping the lid on it. It’s like there’s an unofficial D Notice on the whole thing.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Carmichael. ‘Right. And Bailey is all for the hush-hush, I suppose?’

  ‘You know him. I’m reporting back to Rhodri Pugh’s people.’

  Carmichael laughed. ‘See? Everyone thinks England is swinging, everybody thinks there’s a revolution going on, but your place is stuck in the Middle Ages, far as I can see.’

  ‘I’m being expected to work in the dark. I’m not allowed to make an appeal in the papers. They’re controlling who I interview.’

  Carmichael said, ‘Either the whole thing will backfire and the press will get wind of it, or you’ll get nowhere at all. The Home Office will demand heads. Either way you’re being set up to take the blame for it.’

  Breen said, ‘Is Fraser still on drugs?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘How would you know someone was on drugs? It’s not as if they carry a sign.’

  ‘Do you think Pugh was on drugs?’ Carmichael said.

  Breen didn’t answer. Go carefully. The Drug Squad were notorious for liking headlines. If they started nosing around, the story would end up in the press in no time. So he said nothing.

  ‘So it’s good here, then?’

  ‘I’m still finding my feet. But least it’s not Bailey.’

  Once he would have told Carmichael everything. They were mates. He would have told him about the death threats. They would have laughed, maybe. But now he kept things to himself, wondering whether someone was lurking behind corners, waiting for him.

  There was a loud bang behind them, then a burst of laughter and clapping. A young constable had dropped his tray on the floor, spraying cottage pie over the lino. ‘Nice one!’

  ‘And half the bloody rock stars are buying big houses in the countryside and driving around in white Rolls-Royces. Some bloody revolution if you ask me. Know what? They gave us all a reefer to smoke last week. So we could recognise it. You should have seen me. Afterwards they asked me what was so funny. And I couldn’t even remember.’

  A young woman in a nylon coat and white cap elbowed the young policeman out of the way and started cleaning up the mess.

  ‘Leave it with me. I’ll see what I can find out.’

  Breen watched the woman on her knees, patiently sweeping up the spilt food into a tin dustpan.

  ‘Look at the bum on that,’ said Carmichael. ‘Not bad, eh?’

  The sign was still not working when Breen left the building. The workmen had abandoned it.

  Carmichael was right. If he was not careful he’d end up taking the flak for anything that went wrong.

  A gust of wind funnelled by the tall building caught Breen’s raincoat. It flapped suddenly upwards, obscuring his vision. He was heading back to the older building in Marylebone. To the comfort of worn floorboards and ancient dirty windows.

  Breen’s stomach lurched when he saw the paper stuck into his typewriter. Another threat? What this time? It was starting to wear him down, make him jumpy.

  Nobody seemed to have noticed it.

  But when he looked it was just a note from Marilyn, written in her neat round hand: ‘Harry Cocks (?) called. Has tickets for rugby on Sat. 01 723 9567.’ Breen screwed up the note and put it in the bin.

  Tozer arrived back at the office just before lunch. She was carrying a slightly battered guitar.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said Jones. ‘What is that?’

  ‘It’s a hairdryer,’ said Tozer. She leaned the guitar against her desk while she put down her handbag and sat down, then picked it up again and laid it across her lap.

  ‘Not what I meant,’ said Jones, but Tozer ignored him.

  ‘You have a nail-clipper, Marilyn?’ she asked. ‘I think I should cut them. You can’t play guitar with long nails. Mind you, I bite them anyway.’

  Marilyn ignored her. One of the strip lights was flickering again. It was giving Breen a headache. He asked, ‘How was it?’

  ‘This bloke in the squat’s going to teach me guitar,’ said Tozer.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Jones to Marilyn. ‘I’ll be glad when she’s gone. At least things will be normal again.’

  ‘I always fancied it. Being honest, I only thought lads played guitar,’ she said.

  ‘You got into the squat, then?’ said Breen.

  ‘I should have guessed,’ said Jones.

  Tozer nodded. She was holding the guitar on her lap, awkwardly trying to get her hand around the neck.

  ‘She’s a bloody woman, for pig’s sake! ’Sides, that’s not proper police work.’

  ‘Did they see anything?’ asked Breen.

  Tozer shook her head. ‘They said you can’t see into their place anyway. I checked. They’re right. The angle’s wrong. You can just about see into the garden, but that’s all.’

  She cradled the guitar onto her lap and struggled to arrange her fingers on the fretboard.

  ‘It’s a commune,’ she said. ‘Free love and everything. They asked me to join.’

  ‘Free love?’ said Jones, sounding interested now.

  Marilyn sneered at Tozer. ‘I expect you’
d like that. Free love.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ demanded Tozer.

  ‘Free love?’ said Jones again. ‘She couldn’t even give it away.’

  Tozer pretended not to hear him. ‘Cow,’ she muttered.

  ‘How many people live there?’ asked Breen.

  ‘Six or seven. Two women.’

  ‘One of them has long fair hair?’ asked Breen.

  She nodded and looked up from the guitar. ‘You noticed her, then?’

  Breen said, ‘Just saw her for a second, that’s all.’

  ‘She’s called Hibou – so she says, anyway. It’s “owl” in French, apparently.’

  ‘She a frog?’

  ‘French? No. It’s just a name.’

  ‘What about that man, Jaya…’

  ‘Jayakrishna.’

  ‘What the heck kind of wog name is that?’ said Marilyn.

  ‘It’s Indian. I think it’s nice,’ said Tozer. ‘The other girl’s called Padma, only her real name’s Emily.’

  ‘That’s bloody weird. They all change their names.’

  ‘Jayakrishna says you need to leave your self behind.’

  ‘Leave your marbles behind, more like. What’s your new name going to be?’

  ‘What about the owl girl. What’s her real name?’ asked Breen.

  ‘She wouldn’t tell me,’ said Tozer. And she dropped her fingers across the nylon strings. ‘That’s a D, that is,’ said Tozer. ‘I’m not sure it’s in tune though.’

  ‘Don’t care if it’s A-flat minor. It’s horrible. You going to change your name to Hiawatha or something?’

  ‘Not that kind of Indian,’ said Tozer.

  ‘Higher purchase,’ said Marilyn.

  ‘Higher than a bloody kite, I expect,’ said Jones.

  ‘Had they seen anything at all?’ said Breen.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I was thinking of going back tomorrow, Paddy. Is that OK?’ She strummed the strings again.

  ‘Why?’ demanded Breen.

  ‘What?’ said Jones. ‘So you can learn another bloody chord?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Tozer.

  Jones said, ‘Right. It’s five to one. Lunch break. Who’s coming down the Louise for a pint?’

  Marilyn had her powder compact out already and was putting lipstick on.

  Breen watched Tozer concentrating on keeping her fingers on the fretboard while trying to pluck the strings one by one.

  Bailey emerged from his office and paused open-mouthed at his door, looking at Tozer, sitting at her desk in the CID room, a big guitar across her scrawny lap. Breen put the phone down.

  ‘Off to the pub for lunch, sir,’ said Jones. ‘You coming?’

  Bailey closed the door again.

  FOURTEEN

  For the third night in a row, Breen slept fitfully, waking with a full bladder, banging his ankle on a chair as he groped his way to the toilet in the dark. He stood in front of the toilet bowl, relieving himself as he listened to the sound of cats fighting in the yards behind the houses.

  Back in bed, he fell asleep again and dreamed his father was in the kitchen, cooking a giant bird of some kind. The bird flapped its wings occasionally, but his father kept saying, ‘It looks dead to me.’

  In his dream, Breen was not surprised when the bird burst into flames. The scorched creature blundered around the room, keening in distress. His father had once set fire to his own kitchen, Breen remembered. It was the reason why he now lived with Breen. Only, Breen considered thickly, his father was dead now.

  The shock of the thought woke him.

  Breen smelt the fumes as he surfaced into the real world. Smoke. Not dream smoke. Real smoke. Breen had got into the habit of leaving his bedroom door open to listen out for his father. A grey cloud was now drifting in through the open doorway.

  He jumped out of bed and went into the living room. Thicker smoke was already curling below the ceiling.

  It took him another second to register that his front door was alight. On fire. Flames were licking up it, already two or three feet high. He stood there, dimly wondering how a front door could catch fire, before the horror of the situation struck him. Though he could escape to the small yard at the back of the house, and the flat above him was empty, he would be trapped.

  He lurched towards the kitchen, yanking out pans, placing two into the sink and turning on both taps. He found it hard to think, head still in the dream.

  By the time he returned to the living room the flames were higher, crawling up towards the top of the door.

  He hurled both pans at the flame. The wood hissed and the flames shortened for a second, then sprang back alight.

  The sense of being in a dream wouldn’t leave him. This was the same fire that had burned his father six years ago; the same that had killed the man in the empty house. He had to wake up. Think what to do.

  He ran back to the kitchen and refilled the pans, coughing from the smoke. As a copper on the beat he had seen the after-effect of fires. He probably only had a few minutes in which to escape.

  The blackened man on the slab in the white room.

  He ran to the back door and shouted ‘Fire!’ as loudly as he could, then returned to the front room with the pans. By now the flames had fully regained their strength. And more. At the top of the door, the paint was starting to bubble. The water he had in his pans would not be enough to stop the fire now, but he threw their contents onto the flames anyway. The water was swallowed whole, this time having no effect at all.

  A sudden wave of heat stung his face and he sucked in air from the shock of it. His lungs exploded into coughing and he dropped to his knees as if knocked down by a punch. His chest felt as if it had been raked by broken glass.

  In the fire’s light he saw the print from Francis Pugh’s house hanging on the wall, the white turning pink from the light of the flames.

  This is how you die. This is how you wind up on a slab in Wellington’s hospital. He wished his life had not been so solitary.

  And then he heard the fire engine’s bell over the crackle of the fire.

  They gave him breakfast at Stoke Newington police station. It was the first station he’d worked at after he left Hendon, an austere but familiar three-storey Victorian block standing out like the last good tooth in a rotten mouth of broken buildings close to the cul-de-sac where he still lived.

  As the morning shift arrived, everyone seemed to have heard about the fire.

  ‘We’ll get the bastard,’ the desk sergeant had said. ‘We’ll fry his bollocks and see if he likes it. I promise you that, Paddy.’ All the policemen, whether they were faces he recognised from when he worked here or newcomers to the station, tutted and sympathised. That it should happen on their turf. That someone should try and kill one of them.

  The breakfast was large and oily on a big, cracked white plate. Four slices of fried bread, double eggs, three rashers of bacon and two pale-looking sausages. He could only manage a little of it, people patting him on the back and wanting to know what had gone on. Breen thanked them but couldn’t wait to get away, back to his flat.

  ‘Jesus, Paddy. Who did you piss off?’

  When he returned to the cul-de-sac, a man from the council was fixing his wrecked door.

  ‘You were bloody lucky,’ the chippie said, a nail dangling from his lips. ‘What woke you up?’

  ‘My father,’ said Breen. There was a little smoke damage on the outside of the house, but not that much. Yes, he had been lucky.

  ‘Was he in there an’ all?’

  The firemen had said it was probably paraffin or meths. Petrol would have gone up quicker. A crude burning rag shoved through the door. The local police had knocked on doors already, but no one had seen anything.

  ‘Oi, Breen!’ called a voice. ‘Your boss is at the station. He wants to see you.’

  ‘Inspector Bailey? He’s here?’

  ‘Thin bloke,’ said a uniformed constable at the end of the street. ‘Bit of a misery.’

>   ‘That’s him.’

  Breen walked back out into the high street. From twenty yards away he could see Bailey standing on the pavement outside the station, talking to the local head of CID.

  ‘I’ve been telling Inspector Bailey that we’re going to throw everything we’ve got at this, Paddy,’ he said.

  Bailey looked at Breen and said, ‘In that case, perhaps you better tell the inspector what Constable Tozer told me when she heard the news. It’ll save him an awful lot of work.’

  ‘Sir?’ said Breen.

  ‘Apparently Sergeant Breen has been getting death threats. He didn’t think to mention them to me.’

  ‘That right?’ said the inspector.

  ‘And Constable Tozer says she thinks you have a pretty good idea of who you’ve been getting them from.’

  Breen coughed up smoke.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Yes. I do.’

  Bailey pursed his lips, looked towards his left and said, ‘I’m extremely disappointed, Paddy.’

  Breen said, ‘I may know who did this.’

  ‘Who?’ asked the Stoke Newington man.

  ‘I think we should go inside,’ said Bailey.

  When they were inside an office with a closed door, the inspector said, ‘Well?’

  ‘It’s a copper,’ said Breen.

  ‘Oh, Christ.’

  Sergeant Michael Prosser, late of Marylebone CID, was bent. Or had been bent, at least. From day one at CID Prosser had never trusted Breen, or liked him. He’d liked him even less after Breen had forced him to quit the job he loved.

  Prosser had been running a coat-hanger job. At Marylebone they kept spare sets of keys to a few of the local businesses. To raise extra cash for his spastic boy, Prosser had been making copies and selling them on to a gang of thieves. He wasn’t the first copper to have done it. Nor the last. Back in September, Breen had stumbled onto the scam.

  Breen had used the knowledge to force Prosser off the job. If he didn’t leave, Breen would expose him. He would lose his pension and be sent to prison. If he resigned, Breen would tell no one. It would be their secret.

  With a spastic child to pay the bills for, Prosser had had no choice.