by William Shaw
Tozer said, ‘What was she going to a clinic for? You think she’s pregnant?’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. There were more men there than girls.’
Tozer said, ‘Oh, God. There’s a dope clinic at University College. One of those drug clinics. You know. For junkies. Did she walk away with anything?’
‘A paper bag.’
They looked at each other.
‘No wonder she’s ashamed of going home.’
‘You can’t go back there now, you know,’ said Breen. ‘Jayakrishna knows you’re police.’
Tozer didn’t say anything.
‘Promise me you won’t go back there.’ said Breen.
By the time they returned to the stalls, the crowd were looking bored. The couple under the sheet still weren’t doing anything.
In the upper circle, someone was starting a slow handclap.
‘Bring back the naked girls!’ a man shouted.
‘Play some music.’
‘Give us a bloody song. We paid.’
‘What do you think they’re doing under there?’
‘Let’s go. I’ve had enough,’ said Tozer. ‘This is shite. I’m in a really bad mood now.’
John Lennon and his Japanese girlfriend weren’t even doing anything. Somebody booed, but was instantly silenced by a louder reply of hisses.
As they stood to leave, the man they’d seen with the revolutionary girl called Suzi jumped on stage next to Lennon and Yoko and held up a sign saying ‘THE END OF THE WORLD IS AT HAND FOR SEVEN MILLION IN BIAFRA’. He started shouting, ‘Do you care, John Lennon? Do you care?’
None of the people on stage knew what to do next. Like the police, everyone was confused about what was the right thing to do in a situation like this. Blind. Empty. Meaningless. Pointless. Unsure which way to go next. So they did nothing.
‘Do you care?’ shouted the protester.
The event was a shambles. People were hissing the protester: ‘Shut up and sit down!’
‘And a Merry Christmas to you,’ said Tozer as they walked out into the drizzle.
He got off the bus at Kingsland High Street, glad to be back in east London. The kindness and cruelty were familiar. At least you knew where you stood.
He stopped in the doorway of an ironmonger to tie a loose shoelace. When he stood and moved on again, he was conscious of another person several doorways down the street. A policeman’s instincts.
He carried on walking. Was someone following him?
At his flat, he hesitated before putting the key in the door. With no street lights the cul-de-sac was black, but he thought he heard something moving among the rubbish that was piled up there. Heart thumping now. Should have done more press-ups.
‘Who’s there?’ he said, holding his key in one hand. He peered into the blackness, trying to accustom his eyes to it.
Nobody moved.
‘I can see you,’ he said. ‘Come out of there.’
This time there was a rustling. Just cats? Or rats?
Keeping one eye on the black space, he felt for the keyhole and found it. The moment he opened the door he put the light on, expecting to see at least the outline of some lurking man, but there was nobody there at all. The same leafless buddleia bushes growing out of a crack in the tarmac. The same rusting motorbike engine. A black MG. The same pile of rubbish swept into the corner by the wind.
He took a torch and walked out to where he had seen, or imagined, the man. There was what could have been a footprint in the dirt by the far wall. Or maybe it was just his head playing stupid tricks.
He went inside, closed the front door and leaned back against it.
The bizarre circus at the Albert Hall, and the sense that he was still being pursued, left him rattled. Instead of going to bed, he sat back at the kitchen table to look through the notebooks yet again. Turning pages.
At around two in the morning he was running his index finger down the page of notes he had made at Johnny Knight’s house.
A list of dates when each of his letters had been sent.
He stared at the numbers on the paper.
Christ.
How had he missed that? He checked again.
Christ.
Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus Christ.
He took the sketch of the burnt man off the wall and laid it next to the photograph of Johnny Knight. How had he not seen that before? If he still had his original notes he would have checked the date, but he knew it well enough.
He leaned down and banged his head against the small kitchen table, then lifted it again and looked at his watch. Twelve minutes past two. He wished he could tell someone.
He wanted to talk to Tozer, but she would be asleep in a single bed in a shared room in the women’s section house. His mind whirred.
TWENTY-FIVE
Last night, when he had finally gone to bed, Breen had dreamed of naked women. An army of them removing their clothes in front of him, exposing naked flesh. Bosoms of all sizes and shapes. Their bareness terrifying.
He had woken in the small hours, aroused and disturbed, unable to return to sleep. Though he had been in bed only a couple of hours, he had dressed and come to the police station early to meet Inspector Bailey. He had to talk to him now.
When he arrived at the station, the front desk was deserted. A phone ringing, unanswered. Undrunk tea still steaming on the desk.
Something was wrong. The entire ground floor was empty.
‘Hello?’ called Breen.
No answer. Then he heard murmuring voices.
He walked down the corridor until he came to the stairs down to the cells. He descended. A small crowd of coppers was standing outside one of the cells.
‘What happened?’ asked Breen.
‘I just came in and found him like that,’ said the constable.
The man laid out on the cold floor could have been only about eighteen or nineteen years old. He had on a check flannel shirt, with a small gold crucifix around his neck, and his thin, dark, scrawny hair had been brushed down over his forehead.
‘What was he in for?’
‘Drunk and dis.’
The constable was kneeling beside the dead man. Drunk and disorderlies often got into punch-ups with coppers. Breen noticed the damp flannel in the constable’s hand.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ asked Breen.
The constable was one of the old-school men, about ten years older than Breen, lined face and a bruiser’s hands. ‘Bit of spit and polish. You wouldn’t want his relatives having to see him looking bad.’
‘What do you mean, “bad”?’ Breen said, striding forward and yanking the flannel out of the constable’s hand.
‘Steady on,’ said the constable.
‘That’s tampering.’
Breen knelt too and reached out his hand. The chill of skin was always a shock. The man had been dead for hours. Breen pushed back the long dark hair and saw the thick line of colour under his hairline.
‘Drunk, you say?’
‘Mad,’ said the constable.
‘And so a couple of coppers gave him a going over?’
‘Course not,’ said the copper.
‘And didn’t anybody check on him?’
He looked around. There were at least ten constables now looking back down at him.
‘What are you doing, Paddy? Leave him alone.’
‘What happened when he was brought in?’ There was a pile of cold sick in the corner of the room.
‘This isn’t your business, Paddy. It’s nothing to do with you.’
Breen was undoing the man’s check shirt.
‘You’re not even supposed to be in here. I heard you were suspended.’
There were more bruises on the man’s chest.
‘He was just drunk, that’s all. Leave it to us, Paddy.’ Breen heard a note of hostility creeping into the voices around him.
‘Paddy?’
Breen turned. Jones was standing at the door of the cell.
‘Paddy? What the fuck are you doing?’
‘There’s a dead man, Jonesy. We’re supposed to investigate when that happens.’
‘Not you, Paddy. You’re not even on the force right now, remember?’
Breen started to loosen the man’s trousers.
‘I was there, Paddy,’ said Jones. ‘He was roaring. Probably fell over and banged his head.’
Breen stopped and turned. ‘You? You were there?’ His voice too loud.
People started chipping in their own opinions. ‘He took a slug at us, didn’t he?’
‘Out of order.’
Breen picked up the boy’s right hand. The fingers lay in odd directions, as if they had been broken.
Jones came and grabbed Breen’s shoulder, tugging him backwards. ‘Leave this alone, Paddy. You’re making a mistake.’
Other men were around Breen now. He felt hands grabbing him under his armpits, ready to yank him upwards.
Abruptly, the voices went quiet.
‘Let me through.’
Inspector Bailey.
‘Shit,’ someone muttered behind Breen. The hands under Breen’s armpits relaxed.
‘What’s going on?’ Bailey demanded.
Breen turned to see the inspector pushing through the crowd at the doorway of the cell. He too looked down at the dead man.
‘Dear God,’ he said. There was silence. A shuffling of feet. ‘Who brought this man in?’
There was silence.
‘Who arrested this man?’
‘Don’t know, sir,’ somebody muttered. ‘It’ll be in the book.’
‘What happened to him?’
Again silence.
‘Nothing, sir.’
Bailey’s face reddened. ‘Don’t give me that. I asked a question and I expect a bloody answer!’
‘He was drunk. Maybe he just fell over, sir?’
‘What are you doing here, Sergeant Breen? You’re not even supposed to be in this building.’
‘I just arrived, sir,’ said Breen. ‘A minute before you. I came in to have a word with you, sir.’
‘What happened to this man, Paddy?’
‘He has a bruise here, sir,’ Breen said pointing to his head. ‘And he was sick at some point during the night.’
There was a quiet hissing in the room.
‘Silence!’ shouted Bailey angrily. ‘I won’t have this. A man is dead. In our police station. I want to know why.’
Somebody muttered, ‘One less bugger to worry about.’
‘What?’ demanded Bailey. ‘Who said that?’
Breen had never seen Bailey this angry. A man usually cool under fire. A veteran of worse than this. But his face was crimson, his eyes wide. He twitched his head sideways. ‘A man is dead. You are not a bunch of schoolboys caught smoking behind the sheds. I want to know what happened here!’
People at the back of the throng he’d pushed through started to drift away.
‘Jones?’ said Bailey. ‘What do you know?’
‘Me, sir? I just got here. Like Paddy.’
Breen stood. Bailey looked suddenly tired. He sat down heavily onto the small cell bed.
‘You OK, sir?’
Bailey nodded. ‘Could you fetch me a glass of water?’
The crowd that had come down to see the dead body had more or less vanished back upstairs.
‘This violence…’ said Bailey.
‘I’ll get you some water,’ Breen said. He followed the retreating policemen up to the pantry on the ground floor behind the front desk. Looking around for a clean glass he heard someone muttering, ‘Stupid cunt. None of Bailey’s beeswax anyway.’
By the time he made it back down to the cells with the glass of water, Bailey was lying on the cell bed, his face white and sweaty.
‘Sir? What’s wrong?’ said Breen.
‘Chest,’ he said. He closed his eyes.
Breen watched the inspector’s eyelids flicker, his mouth twitched.
‘Get a bloody ambulance!’ shouted Breen.
A young constable said, ‘… Else there’ll be two stiffs down here.’
‘Procedures…’ Bailey whispered.
‘What, sir?’
Bailey breathed slowly in and out, his skin like paper. ‘It’ll pass,’ he said.
Breen sat by Bailey until the ambulance men arrived, looking from one man to the next. One of them was breathing, anyway. Was it a heart attack? What were you supposed to do when this happened?
A sergeant stared round the door. ‘He going to be OK?’
Bailey’s face was grey now.
The ambulance was quick, at least. The stretcher-men came clattering down the steps. ‘Blimey,’ said one of them, peering into the cell. ‘Two for the price of one. What’s been going on down here?’
‘Don’t ask,’ said one of the coppers.
A pair of them took a corner of the stretcher with the ambulance men, keen to see Bailey out of the building. Breen followed their slow progress up the stone stairs and out.
That would be the end of Bailey’s career, he thought. Carried out of the building on his back. What a way to go. Twenty-two years on the force and you leave on a stretcher.
Breen went upstairs to the CID office.
Jones was alone there. The office was gloomy. One of the neon tubes had finally gone. Jones had made himself a cup of tea and now sat at his desk holding it, staring Breen in the eye as he crossed the room.
‘Write it down,’ Breen told him.
‘You shouldn’t even be here, Paddy. You’re not supposed to even come to the station any more.’
‘Write down exactly what happened last night.’
Jones said, ‘Not much point. It happens sometimes, don’t it? Besides, I don’t really remember. I’d had a few in the Louise.’ He looked nervy, shaking slightly.
Breen said, ‘For your own good, let alone anyone else’s.’
Marilyn arrived, taking off her scarf. ‘Oh, Paddy.’ She smiled. ‘What’s going on? There’s an ambulance outside.’
Breen said to Jones, ‘Write it down. Call Wellington. Make sure a doctor sees him before anybody moves him.’
‘You can’t tell me what to do,’ said Jones. ‘You don’t even work here right now.’ And he took a sip from his tea, still staring at Breen.
‘What’s wrong?’ said Marilyn. ‘Why’s everybody down in the basement? What did you come in for anyway, Paddy?’
Jones forced a smile and said, ‘Bloody hell, Marilyn. Is that actually a skirt?’
‘Why? What do you think it is?’
Jones said, ‘More of a necktie that slipped down a bit. Not that I mind a bit of leg. Bailey wouldn’t like it though. Not that he’ll be that bothered now.’ A giggle.
Marilyn hung her coat on a hook.
‘I’ll kill you one of these days, Jonesy.’ She stopped. ‘What do you mean, all that about Bailey? Where is he, anyway?’
‘Haven’t you heard? I think he just took early retirement. That was him in the ambulance.’
Marilyn thumped down in her chair, mouth open. ‘Oh my God.’
‘Heart attack,’ said Jones.
‘We don’t know if it’s a heart attack yet,’ said Breen.
‘That’s awful,’ said Marilyn.
‘Isn’t it?’ said Jones.
Marilyn frowned. ‘You shouldn’t sound so bloody pleased about it.’
‘Who said I was pleased?’
Breen looked at him. ‘Call Wellington. Now.’
‘That’s the duty officer’s job, not mine,’ said Jones.
Breen went up to him and stood nose to nose. ‘You were there when the dead man was brought in. You’ve got to make sure it’s done by the book.’
‘He was steamboats. Fighting drunk. Everyone saw. We got nothing to worry about.’
‘What dead man?’ said Marilyn. ‘My God! Come on, you two. Break it up.’
Breen said, ‘Otherwise people will start to think you’re trying to cover something up.’
‘Boys,’ said Marilyn. ‘Come on. What’s all this about a dead man?’
‘A drunk in the cells, that’s all,’ said Jones.
Breen turned away from Jones and said, ‘Is Constable Tozer coming in?’
‘Poor old Bailey,’ she said. ‘Here at the station?’
‘Just now. Keeled right over.’
‘What about Tozer?’ asked Breen again.
‘She’s in late. Told me she had an appointment at the doctor’s this morning,’ said Marilyn. ‘Has anybody called Bailey’s wife yet?’
Breen looked at Jones. ‘No,’ he said.
‘Typical,’ said Marilyn. And she started looking through her index cards for Bailey’s home number.
Breen said, ‘What’s Tozer doing at the doctor’s, anyway?’
‘Bet she’s up the duff,’ said Jones.
‘Keep your dirty thoughts to yourself,’ said Marilyn. ‘Don’t talk about stuff like that.’
‘God’s sake, woman. I was only joking.’
‘Well, it’s not funny. Nothing you ever say is bloody funny.’
‘What’s got into everybody?’ said Jones.
‘Bailey’s had a bloody heart attack and you’re acting like a bloody pillock.’
‘Think about it, though,’ said Jones. ‘I mean, she’s leaving the force, in’t she? Bet she’s knocked up.’
Breen said, ‘She’s leaving the force to look after the family farm.’
‘That’s what she says,’ said Jones. ‘She would, wouldn’t she?’
‘I mean… Could be anyone’s, the way she puts it about,’ muttered Marilyn. ‘Not that I’m saying anything. What do you want to see her for anyway, Paddy?’ She picked up the telephone.
‘Oh, Paddy,’ said Jones. ‘You should see your face. Is there something you should be telling us?’
‘Will you shut up for once in your life, Jonesy,’ said Marilyn. ‘I’m about to phone Bailey’s wife.’
And Jones was finally silent.
Breen picked up his coat. As he left, he heard Marilyn say, ‘Mrs Bailey?’ And Breen was thinking: They had only spent one night together, but what if…? They had been drunk. They hadn’t used anything.
