The Kings of London

by William Shaw

  He walked away from the station. Jones had been right. He was not supposed to be there. He had come to the station to talk to Bailey; Bailey was in hospital now, possibly fighting for his life. He would not be back.

  The cold wind blew into Breen’s bones. His feet were ice. He stamped to keep the blood flowing to his toes, thinking of the man in the cells, cold on concrete, and Bailey turning pale in the cell below the pavements. Then stopped stamping because his right foot was sore again.

  People were going to work, heads down into the wind. The last few worn-down days before the Christmas holidays. A man at the bus stop struggled with a copy of the Express. ‘SOVIETS TEST NEW NUCLEAR DEVICE’. Breen’s eyes were on the entrance to the police station, watching the last of the late-night shift leave, and the morning latecomers ambling in. A man in overalls was slowly wheeling a bicycle up to the front door. He seemed to be struggling with it. After a couple of seconds, Breen figured out why: the front wheel was buckled into a heart shape. A broken wheel. Breen guessed he was coming to the station to report some kind of accident. The usual to-and-fro of an ordinary morning.

  There would be a broken mother: ‘My boy wouldn’t do that. Liked a drink, maybe, but wouldn’t do that…’ Suspecting the worst, police closing ranks to look after their own. Like Jones said, it happened all the time.

  Abandoning the doorway he had been standing in, he went to a phone box around the corner and fed in a threepenny bit.

  ‘Marilyn? Is Tozer there yet?’

  ‘Paddy? Where did you go to?’

  ‘I’m not supposed to be in the office. I had to get out. Is Tozer back?’

  ‘Not a whiff of her. She should have been in yonks ago. If she’s going to be out all morning she should bloody call, shouldn’t she?’ Marilyn lowered her voice. ‘I spoke to Bailey’s wife. She cried and everything. What happened, Paddy? Bloody hell.’

  ‘Maybe you should ask Jones about that.’

  ‘I know he’s a bit difficult, Bailey, but he’s a good man. No one here seems that bothered about it, though.’ She was whispering now. ‘It’s almost as if they’re glad it happened. And that bloke who died. I mean… Right here. Where I work. That shakes you up a bit.’

  A schoolboy in cap and shorts, knees red from the cold, was being dragged along the pavement by a heavily pregnant woman. He was scuffing his shoes, snivelling about something. Breen watched the woman struggling with the child and with the weight in her belly.

  ‘I mean,’ Marilyn was saying, ‘everyone knows we rough people up a bit. It’s only to be expected…’

  It would be typical of Tozer to have kept it to herself. Breen thought about being a father. What it would be like to be a father? His own father. Distant. Well-meaning. Stuffy. A formal handshake at the school gates in front of all the giggling boys. The smell of shaving soap.

  She would probably want an abortion, he supposed. Like Pugh’s women. They were legal now, after all. How did it work? How did they kill it? Men knew so little. He imagined shiny surgical instruments. Huge syringes sucking blood and membrane. He was engulfed by a very Catholic sense of horror that he did not even know he was capable of until that moment.

  ‘Paddy?’ said Marilyn. ‘You still there? I worry about you, Paddy. Are you coping on your own? You didn’t look so good this morning.’

  But the pips went.

  ‘No more change,’ said Breen, though he still had more in his pocket.

  After he’d replaced the receiver he watched the pregnant woman and her boy through the dirty glass of the phone box. They were standing on the edge of the pavement, still searching for a gap in the morning traffic.

  He watched them cross the road, the mother still pulling the boy along behind her. When they reached the opposite pavement he spotted Tozer, just a few yards away from them, striding towards the police station.

  He called her name across the busy road.

  She paused. Looked around a second, then walked on, as if thinking she must have imagined it.

  Breen ran into the road. A man on a motorbike swerved, swearing at him. A coach, coming slowly the other way, blocked his view of her. By the time it had gone she had disappeared.

  He stood on the pavement, looking left and right. She finally emerged from a newsagent, unwrapping a new packet of Juicy Fruit.

  ‘Paddy?’ She smiled. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I think I figured out what happened to Johnny Knight,’ he said.

  ‘Come to the canteen,’ she said. ‘I’ll get you a coffee. You look frozen.’

  ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘I’m not supposed to be there. I need to talk. You got a minute?’

  ‘I’m doing naff all,’ she said. ‘They don’t give me anything worth doing.’

  They walked to Manchester Square, grey but for the lights from the modern office block on the north-east corner.

  ‘See that?’ She nodded towards the north-west side of the square. ‘That’s the Beatles’ record company.’ There was a commissionaire standing on the door to shoo out any fans who tried to get in. ‘I used to dream of seeing that,’ she said.

  Moving through the square, they headed towards a large red house at the north side of the square, a dusty public art gallery that had survived from the last century. All the time he’d worked in Marylebone, Breen had never even realised it was here. They found the warmest room, huge, with faded red silk wallpaper and dozens of paintings in curly gilt frames. Heat pouring from the big cast-iron radiators.

  ‘What?’ said Tozer.

  It took a while for Breen to stop shivering. ‘You remember when we broke into Johnny Knight’s house?’

  He held up a notebook and pointed to a date in it – ‘11 September 1968’ – and a note: ‘Second class’.

  ‘See?’

  She looked at him. ‘No.’

  He rubbed his stiff fingers on the metal of the radiator. ‘It was the oldest postmark on the letters.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘The eleventh is two days before my father died. Don’t you get it?’

  She frowned. ‘I don’t see what this has got to do with your father, Paddy.’

  He was not explaining things properly. He tried again. ‘The oldest letter tells us when Johnny Knight was last at his house.’

  ‘I’m lost, Paddy.’

  A woman attendant came into the gallery and glared at them, then sat in a small wooden chair against the opposite wall.

  ‘If a second-class letter was posted on the eleventh, it would have arrived on the thirteenth, right? The day my father died.’

  Breen’s fingers were aching now. He pulled them away and blew on them.

  ‘So Johnny Knight didn’t come home on the thirteenth?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  The woman opposite them reached below and pulled knitting out of a bag.

  ‘The dead man in Carlton Vale,’ said Breen.

  It took three or four seconds. ‘God,’ said Tozer. The burnt man.

  The woman with the knitting tutted. Her needles started to flick from side to side. Click-clack, click-clack.

  ‘But that’s just coincidence. I mean… You can’t know it was Johnny Knight. He just disappeared on the same day.’

  A party of schoolchildren burst into the room in blazers and grey cloth caps, nattering to each other.

  ‘No talking.’ The teacher, a thin woman in tweed, scolded her charges. They fell silent. ‘The Laughing Cavalier by Frans Hals,’ she announced. ‘See how his eyes follow you around the room?’

  ‘Three things,’ Breen told Tozer. ‘One. Wellington said there was concrete dust on the man’s trousers. I’d always assumed he was a labourer. But quantity surveyors work on building sites, don’t they?’

  ‘Miss?’ said one of the children. ‘That man in the picture is wearing a dress.’

  ‘Silence,’ ordered the teacher.

  ‘Two,’ said Breen. ‘I was put on the case with Prosser. But Prosser warned me off it. He told me not to waste my time on it.
Whenever I tried to investigate it he nudged me away.’

  ‘Everyone told you to let it go, Paddy. Not just Prosser. We were worried you were going mental about the case ’cause of your dad.’

  The schoolchildren were sitting cross-legged on the floor with their exercise books and pencils now.

  ‘I know, and that’s true, but Prosser was really angry. And then there’s the third thing. If you were a copper and you killed someone, what would be the easiest way to get rid of a body?’

  ‘Bloody hell.’

  The schoolchildren looked up. One pointed at Tozer and said, ‘Miss, she did a bad word.’

  ‘I said, silence!’

  Tozer hunched across and whispered, ‘You think he killed Johnny Knight on D Division turf so he could make sure the investigation got nowhere?’

  Breen nodded.

  Tozer reached into her handbag and scrambled around for a packet of cigarettes. ‘You have a light?’

  Breen shook his head.

  ‘This is mad,’ said Tozer. ‘So Prosser killed him and burned him so bad maybe no one would know. And we were working alongside him all that time?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s a theory, that’s all.’

  Tozer held up a cigarette and said to the teacher, ‘Excuse me? Do you have a light?’

  The teacher frowned and said, ‘Absolutely not. One minute to finish your drawings.’ The sound of pencils.

  Tozer called to the attendant across the heads of the children. ‘How about you?’

  The attendant scowled. ‘No smoking,’ she said.

  ‘Jesus.’

  Breen watched one of the boys scritching the pencil across the page, angrily crossing out his drawing. He had loved drawing as a boy. He had spent hours sketching comics in his room, or doing portraits of his friends in return for sweets.

  ‘Stand,’ ordered the teacher. The children stood. ‘Follow me.’

  And they were gone. The room was quiet again, except for the clicking of the attendant’s needles.

  ‘What are we going to do about it?’ said Tozer.

  Breen liked the ‘we’. ‘I had been going to tell Bailey. That way, at least, there would have been a record. But he’s just been taken to hospital. He had a heart attack this morning.’

  ‘Christ. He ok?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Great timing,’ she said.

  ‘As usual.’

  Tozer said, ‘Bailey wouldn’t have done anything, mind. He wouldn’t touch anything that made the police look bad.’

  ‘I think you underestimate him.’

  ‘It’s kind of beside the point, now, anyway.’

  ‘From the letters we found at the house, Johnny Knight had worked for Morton, Stiles and Prentice. I know the man he was working for,’ said Breen. ‘I met him at a party once.’

  ‘You go to parties?’

  ‘I was thinking of going to talk to him.’

  ‘This is all for Scotland Yard. You’ve got to tell them.’

  ‘I know. I’m going to,’ he said.

  He read the black-and-gilt painted label on a frame. The Adoration of the Shepherds. Jesus lying on straw. The shepherds around him, big-eyed and awestruck. A baby and a mother.

  Tozer said, ‘Something else. I think I know where Shirley Prosser is.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I thought you’d be interested,’ she said. ‘I was thinking, What if Charlie has to see a doctor on account of his spastic thing? So I checked the numbers from that address book you gave me. And I was right.’

  ‘God,’ said Breen. ‘That’s why you went to see a doctor this morning?’

  ‘How did you know?’ she said.

  ‘Marilyn said. I thought…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘No. Go on. You’re looking weird.’

  Breen said, ‘Jones thought you were pregnant.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s why you were at the doctor.’

  Tozer’s eyes widened. ‘Oh my God. They said that? I’m so embarrassed. Just Jones?’

  ‘Marilyn was there too. I shouldn’t have said anything to you about it.’

  ‘And so you thought…?’

  ‘Yes. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Jesus, Paddy. I mean. Bloody hell! How humiliating. Everybody talking about me like that.’

  Breen apologised again.

  ‘That’s horrible.’

  Tozer squinted back at him for a second, then explained. Two days ago Shirley Prosser had rung up her old doctor to ask to transfer to a new GP. ‘The doctor hadn’t wanted to tell me at first, but I told his secretary it was a murder investigation. It is, isn’t it?’

  Breen nodded. Was he actually disappointed that she wasn’t pregnant? He had the obscure feeling that something had been taken from him that he hadn’t known he’d even had.

  ‘So she gave me her new GP’s address,’ said Tozer.

  ‘Did you call him?’

  She shook her head. ‘I was worried about scaring Shirley off. If she knows we’re looking for her, she might scarper again.’

  ‘You shouldn’t leave, you know,’ he said. ‘You’re too good at this.’

  She smiled. ‘What’s up with you?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Where is it? The place where she’s gone.’

  ‘Margate. That’s Kent, isn’t it? I was thinking I could give the local coppers a call. They could get the address off the GP, without letting her know. They won’t have to know what it’s about. I’ll just say it’s a routine family thing. Women Police stuff. Policemen would never ask what. They hate Women Police work.’

  ‘Good,’ said Breen. ‘Really good.’

  ‘I’ve never been to Margate. I hear it’s nice. What are you looking at?’

  He was looking at the painting. Sentimental crap, really. Old men looking weepy and awestruck at the baby. He looked closer.

  ‘The brushwork,’ he said. ‘It’s amazing.’ And now he looked closer, he realised it was. Gorgeous. Uninhibited. Free strokes of a hand that worked on this, what, four hundred years ago?

  She squinted at it. ‘That sheep looks like a Cheviot to me,’ she leaned forward. ‘I always fancied Cheviots. Well? What about it then? I got the day off on Saturday. We could go. Both of us.’

  Click-clack, click-clack, went the knitting needles.

  ‘Saturday is the Christmas Ball,’ he said.

  ‘Well, I wasn’t thinking of staying overnight,’ she said, grinning. ‘I’m not that kind of girl.’

  TWENTY-SIX

  The sign was working again now, though jerkily. Breen could hear the machinery creaking.

  Breen walked past the big revolving triangle, through the revolving door, into the lobby of New Scotland Yard. He never liked this place. It made him feel anxious just being here. The front desk was run by three women wearing telephone headsets who sat in a line at a desk, all staring at him as he approached.

  Unsure of which of them he was supposed to be talking to, he picked one and said, ‘I need to see Detective Sergeant Deason, CID.’

  The woman ignored him. The one on her left picked up a telephone and dialled. ‘Name?’

  Breen waited, standing by the desk. Men, some in uniform, others in plain clothes, emerged from lifts, walking with a sense of purpose, talking loudly, laughing. Breen checked his watch.

  ‘Will he be long?’ he asked.

  ‘Don’t know,’ said the receptionist.

  He took out a cigarette. Put it back in the packet. Bent down, tied his shoelaces a little tighter. As he was bending, someone thumped him on the back.

  ‘Paddy? You finally coming to join us here?’ Big John Carmichael, slim panatella in hand, with another member of the Drug Squad. ‘I just heard about Bailey. Bloody hell.’

  Breen, smiled, straightened up, shook Carmichael’s hand. ‘I don’t think he’ll be coming back in a hurry.’

  ‘Poor bastard.’

  ‘You never liked him in the first pla
ce.’

  Carmichael’s companion headed towards the lift, leaving the two of them together.

  ‘I never said that, Paddy. Jesus. Can’t I just feel sorry for him? You heard the latest? Rumour is, they already marked Creamer down as your new boss. From Maida Vale.’

  Breen said, ‘Inspector Creamer?’ A Rotarian. Probably a Freemason too. Liked a tidy desk. There were stories he liked to make his bobbies Turtle Wax his car during their shifts.

  ‘You’re best out of it,’ said Carmichael. ‘What are you doing here anyway?’

  Breen explained, without saying too much, that he had come to meet the detective in charge of Prosser’s murder. He had what he thought was new evidence.

  Breen said, ‘While you’re there I have something for you, John. A squat in Abbey Gardens. I think maybe it was them who got the drugs to Francis Pugh. I think they may be selling on prescriptions there.’

  ‘Pugh. The dead bloke?’

  ‘Something else. The squat was about to be evicted in the summer. Guess what? Out of the blue, the eviction was called off.’

  ‘You need to go a bit slower, Paddy. You’re talking too fast.’

  ‘I just think somebody is pulling strings, somehow. There’s more to it…’

  A long pull on the mini-cigar. Carmichael, oldest friend and play-ground pal, said nothing, just watched Breen with a frown on his face.

  Breen said, ‘So you’ll check into the house? Just take a look? You know what to look for. I can’t do this myself. I’m suspended.’

  Carmichael curled his lip. He looked older, thought Breen. His face fatter than it had been, eyes redder. Maybe it was just seeing him in daylight. Maybe the pints and chasers for lunch.

  Carmichael carefully stubbed out the panatella in an ashtray on a stand by the lift doors and put the unsmoked half back in the tin. ‘I can’t make any promises, Paddy. I’m the new boy in the Drug Squad. I have to check with my superiors first.’

  ‘But it’s worth a look, isn’t it?’

  Carmichael said, ‘You should be putting your feet up. This isn’t even your responsibility anymore. What you doing for Christmas anyway?’

  Before Breen had a chance to answer, the receptionist called out loudly, ‘Breen? Someone from Detective Sergeant Deason’s team will see you now. Third floor, turn left out of the lift.’