by William Shaw
‘You can’t do that,’ protested the librarian, who was still standing over them.
‘What does that mean?’ asked Helen, ignoring him.
Breen blinked. Checked the map again. Breen was struggling to remember where Penny’s flat had been. It had been dark when he arrived. He had been exhausted at the time.
‘A woman called Penny lived somewhere around here. She was Doyle’s girlfriend.’
‘Do you think she’s…? Bloody hell.’
‘There,’ he said. ‘I’m sure of it.’ The post office would have just been a street away. They ran back down the stairs, map in hand.
‘Come back! That’s library property.’
‘Why her, though?’ said Helen, panting as she ran.
‘I don’t know.’
Helen pulled up right outside the police station doors. Sharman had his coat on and was about to go out when Breen and Helen ran up the stairs into the old building.
Torquay Police Station was deserted, save for a couple of people on the phones. Cups of tea, half drunk, gone cold. Fags stubbed out in ashtrays. Papers that had slipped onto the floor, trodden on.
Sharman led them up to a small office on the second floor. Small force, thought Breen. Everyone would be out looking for a grey Mini van. They didn’t have the resources. They were overwhelmed by a crime like this. It showed.
At a desk, Sharman leaned over the map with Breen, Helen behind them, straining her neck to see.
Breen said, ‘I think these were postal orders paid by Milkwood to Doyle. His girlfriend lives here. This is where he’d have gone to cash it. But also, maybe she cashed them. Maybe he was already dead by then. I don’t know. But I think Milkwood was paying Doyle off about something using Drug Squad funds. Large sums once a month. The rest of the postal orders were cashed down here.’
‘His girlfriend. She got long hair?’
Breen nodded.
‘You met this woman? You think she could have done it?’
‘I don’t know her well. I went back to her house. I spent the night there.’
‘Sounds like you know her well enough to me,’ said Helen.
Breen tried to remember his strange evening with Penny. The drugs. The bizarre conversations about death and The Tibetan Book of the Dead. ‘I don’t know. Maybe. I asked her if she knew Sergeant Milkwood, but she said she didn’t. Yet it’s possible that she cashed at least one of the postal orders he made out. And the last five were cashed down here in Newton Abbot.’
‘What’s her address?’
Breen struggled to remember a house number. ‘This road. Just off Ladbroke Grove.’ Then: ‘There was a lotus flower painted on the door.’
‘Last name?’
‘I have no idea.’
Sharman looked faintly appalled. ‘You say you spent the night with this woman?’ He shook his head and picked up the phone. Breen listened in. He was calling Scotland Yard now, passing on the details, requesting that they tear the flat apart looking for clues about where she might be.
Talking to the Metropolitan officers, Sharman was deferential, calling them by their ranks. ‘Yes, Sergeant. One of your fellows here. He’s down on sick leave. Suggests this woman could be a suspect. If he’s right, the woman won’t be at home so you’d need to break in.’
Breen looked at his watch. One o’clock. If he was right, Mrs Fletchet would be being tortured, a knife cutting flesh.
Helen stood by his side, pale. Yet still the world seemed to be moving at such a cautious speed, the minutes slowly ticking on the big electric clock.
The desk sergeant came in, panting from the stairs.
‘Had a call from Constable Toohey. Milkman up Bovey said he thinks he saw the grey Mini van on his round this morning. Noticed it because he thought there was a scarecrow in the passenger seat. Thought it was someone messing around.’
‘A woman with a hessian bag on her head,’ said Breen.
‘He get a good look at the driver?’
‘Don’t know, sir. He wanted to speak to you, only you was on the phone.’
Sharman rolled his eyes. ‘Keep him on the bloody line next time he calls.’
When the sergeant had clattered back down the stairs, Breen said, ‘Visual confirmation.’
Sharman nodded.
‘Shouldn’t you call all the officers together for a meeting?’ asked Breen.
‘Please put a bloody sock in it, Sergeant. We do it our way down here.’
They had set up a room in Plymouth to coordinate the search. Sharman was on a call to them now. Breen gathered they were calling in support from surrounding areas. They were going to flood the place with police.
‘Christ,’ said Helen. ‘By the time they get here…’
‘I know.’
There was a map on the wall. Breen found the scale of it terrifying. All this empty territory.
Other phones rang. Rang off again. Were the calls important?
‘Want me to get that?’ he mouthed at Sharman, pointing at a ringing phone.
Sharman shook his head. With everyone scouring the district, the station was oddly still, considering the drama that Breen supposed must be going on somewhere. Pliers, he thought, and knives. And he felt sick.
‘What do we do now?’ he asked when Sharman had finished his call.
‘We?’ Sharman looked up. ‘You go back to the farm. Stay there so we know where you are in case we need you.’ And then he was was back on the telephone to the Newton Abbot post office. ‘That’s right. A woman. Longish hair. Tall. Anybody remember her? I’ll hold.’
Breen blinked. He was not used to this. There was no reason why he should have a part in this investigation, of course. Technically he was a civilian; a man on sick leave. He didn’t know the local territory or the local coppers. He was limited in how much he could do. As for Helen, she wasn’t even a policewoman any more.
Breen stood. There was a large one-inch Ordnance Survey map on the wall. With his finger, he traced the road from the farm to the Fletchets’ estate.
‘Where’s that Bovey place?’
‘Down a bit. Left a bit. Just there,’ said Helen.
Breen lifted his finger. Then moved it back towards the place where the van was last headed.
‘What if she was coming in this direction?’ said Breen.
Sharman put his hand over the receiver. He shouted, ‘Do you mind? I’m trying to talk.’
‘We should go,’ said Helen, tugging at Breen. ‘They don’t want us here.’
They walked out of the building, back down to the car.
Helen was shaking her head. She stopped dead in the pavement, closed her eyes. ‘I can’t see it. In my head it was always a man. No woman would do those things.’
‘You can’t know that,’ said Breen.
She opened her eyes again, fumbled for the keys in her handbag.
‘This is horrible,’ she said. She got in and started the engine. The exhaust was going in the ancient Morris. You had to shout to be heard over the noise if the car was driving uphill. ‘The first day Alexandra was gone, this is what was happening to her.’ She was chewing on her lower lip. ‘I didn’t like her much, Mrs Fletchet, but Christ. What do we do?’
‘We have to wait,’ said Breen. ‘Think.’
Helen drove out of town. The world seemed ridiculously normal. Someone had a flower stall by the side of the road. Daffs one shilling a bunch. A crocodile of schoolgirls walked up the pavement, hand in hand, brown satchels swinging.
Away from the town, she accelerated, but then, rounding a corner, had to slap on the brakes. There was stationary traffic ahead. The Morris’s pads were old and soft and the car seemed to take an age to slow. Breen closed his eyes and braced himself for a collision with a shiny new Zodiac in front, but when he opened them he saw that their car had slid to a stop less than a foot away from it.
‘Jesus,’ said Helen. ‘If you’re right, she could be taking chunks from her now.’
Breen’s heart was beating fast.
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The traffic was backed up on the hill approaching the town. Helen pressed on the horn. Others were doing the same.
‘Stop,’ said Breen, hands over his ears. ‘There’s no point.’
The queue crawled forward and when they eventually reached the next bend, they saw what was holding up the traffic. It was a roadblock. Policemen were leaning into the cars, asking questions, then waving them on.
‘At least they’re doing something this time,’ said Helen.
This time, thought Breen. The car inched forward again. He looked at his watch: almost two now. Neither of them said it, but they were thinking the same thing. Was the woman taking Eloisa Fletchet to the same place where Alexandra Tozer had been tortured and killed?
The traffic crawled forward at an agonising speed. Neither of them spoke in the twenty minutes it took to reach the front of the queue.
The young constable who leaned in through Helen’s window had a boil on his neck and a chipped tooth.
‘Helen Tozer, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘I know your dad.’ She nodded. ‘Only we’re stopping people to ask if they seen a suspicious-looking grey Mini.’
‘Mrs Fletchet,’ she said.
‘You heard, then? Well, if you or your gentleman friend see it anywhere…’ said the copper.
‘How many roadblocks are there?’ asked Helen.
‘Least half a dozen now. They’re sending men from Somerset an’ all,’ he said, waving them on.
‘No news?’
‘Not yet.’
Breen was chewing on his lip, anxious, unsettled.
The farm looked strangely normal, too, cows placidly chewing on grass. But there was no work going on.
Mr and Mrs Tozer were sitting in the living room, holding hands, looking pale.
‘Anything?’
They shook their heads.
Breen went to his room, pulled out his notebooks and laid them on the eiderdown. He knelt down by the bed and started looking through the pages, over and over.
There was a knock on the door. ‘It’s me, Hibou. Are you busy?’
‘Yes, as it happens.’
She had changed out of her farm clothes into one of Alexandra’s old dresses. She sat on the end of his bed, next to the notebooks and scraps of paper. Away from London she had become so much more confident. But now, sitting in his room, she looked more like the shy girl he had seen peeking out of the window at him at the squat in London.
She looked at him kneeling by the bed. ‘Are you praying?’
‘Something’s wrong. I’m just trying to look at… Never mind.’ Breen’s head was humming. Why would Penny be doing this? He had the sense that if he could only concentrate on the facts, something would emerge–a pattern, an anomaly. But he was not in his flat, or at his desk. He was in a small, cramped bedroom.
Hibou said, ‘I won’t be a sec.’
He sighed. ‘All right.’
‘I wanted to ask. You spoke to my dad, you said.’
Breen nodded. ‘Helen did.’
‘Was he, you know, OK?’
Breen said, ‘It’s OK. We didn’t tell him anything.’
‘Promise?’
‘What did he do to you, Hibou?’
She looked shocked. ‘Why would you even think that?’
The phone started ringing in the hallway downstairs. He could hear Mrs Tozer downstairs. ‘Oh, hello, Freddie. You again,’ she was saying. ‘Yes. He’s here. Is everything all right, Freddie?’
Hibou said, ‘What if it’s nothing to do with him? What if it’s something I did? Would Helen still like me then?’
‘Give me a minute, Hibou, OK?’ And he was pushing past her, out of the door and down the narrow staircase.
Mrs Tozer was still on the phone, saying, ‘You must come round for tea sometime, Freddie,’ as if there was nothing out of ordinary happening.
‘Sharman?’ said Breen, taking the phone from her.
‘Wild bloody goose chase. Your Penny woman was in London all the time. It can’t have been her after all. We’ve been wasting our time there. And she doesn’t know anything about postal orders.’
‘You sure?’
‘That’s what the Met said. They gave me an earful. I know you’re trying to help, but… just leave it to us, OK? I have to go.’
Before he could say anything, Sharman put the phone down. The large grandfather clock ticked in the hallway.
‘What’s wrong?’ said Helen.
‘The woman wasn’t Penny.’ He turned away, puzzled. He walked back through the kitchen and up the small staircase to his bedroom, turning the pieces of the puzzle over in his head.
By the time he got back to his room it was empty. Hibou had gone.
He knelt back down and returned to flicking through his notebooks. The second fell open at the sketch he’d done of the photograph of the three men in Africa: Doyle, Milkwood and Fletchet.
He stared at the sketch of the photograph. It wasn’t particularly good. And then he opened the drawer, picked out one of his drawing pencils and added longer hair to Doyle, just as Carmichael had done to the original a couple of weeks earlier.
He had a copy of the photograph somewhere. Where was it? He riffled through the envelopes but couldn’t find it.
He stepped out of the bedroom into the hallway. ‘Helen,’ he shouted. ‘Come quick.’
People weren’t used to shouting in this house.
Helen came running up the stairs. ‘What’s the matter?’
Hibou reappeared. ‘Hel. I want to talk to you. It’s important.’
‘Not now,’ said Helen. ‘Pete’s sake.’ They went into Breen’s bedroom and closed the door behind them.
Breen held up the sketchbook, saying, ‘It wasn’t Penny. I think it was Doyle. He’s alive.’
‘What?’
It hadn’t been a woman kidnapping Eloisa Fletchet. It had been a man; a man with long hair. Helen snatched the notebook out his hands and peered at it.
‘Doyle was Milkwood’s snitch. Milkwood was paying him as an informant. That’s what the postal orders were. He would have been living with Penny when he cashed the first one.’
‘I thought you said he was killed in Spain?’
‘That’s just what Penny thought. Maybe it was a way to hide, getting Milkwood to pretend he was dead, laying a false trail. I don’t know. But look.’
‘You think he could have been mistaken for a woman?’
‘It was just the long hair. Long hair and thin, the man said. And he was living down here. He cashed the postal orders. The last one was just a few weeks ago. He’s down here.’
Helen stared at the drawing as if waiting for it to talk to her.
‘We should call Sharman,’ he said. He looked at his watch. It was past three in the afternoon now.
Helen nodded, still holding the notebook. ‘You should give his picture to the local police so they know who they’re looking for.’
Breen thought he heard Hibou, still outside the door, but when he opened it, she had gone.
The light was already starting to fade. Clouds were building over the moors to the north.
Breen phoned Newton Abbot; Sharman was not there. He had gone to the incident room in Torquay. Breen called there but nobody seemed to know where he had gone. A constable told them to call back in half an hour.
‘There isn’t time,’ said Breen.
‘Sorry, sir. We’re up to our necks right now.’
Sharman didn’t call back till a little before four. ‘If this is another runaround, we don’t have time for it.’
‘It’s not. He was Penny’s boyfriend. It explains why the first postal order was cashed near her flat. I think he was was being paid off by Milkwood in some way.’
‘We’re looking for a woman.’
‘This guy had long hair. The milk-lorry driver was some distance away, wasn’t he?’
‘Well, yes…’ Another phone rang somewhere in Sharman’s office. Sharman sighed. ‘If I find someone free, I’ll send th
em for the photograph,’ he said.
Helen was sitting on the stairs, head in her hands. ‘You can’t imagine what this is like for me,’ she said. ‘You can’t bloody imagine.’
Mr Tozer emerged from the living room. He stared at the hall carpet in front of him for a second. ‘Any news?’
Breen shook his head. The man’s fingers trembled. He turned and went back into the darkness of the living room.
The house was changed. Everything that had happened in the summer of 1964 was vivid again. The past and the present had come together.
Mrs Tozer was standing at the door looking out at the fields, as if expecting to see something there. ‘I heard it on the radio too,’ she said. ‘They’re looking for this woman. They say she’s been abducted. But they said another woman did it.’
‘Paddy thinks it’s a mistake. He thinks it’s a man called Doyle. They’re coming for a photograph of him that Paddy’s got.’
‘But the news says it’s a woman,’ said Mrs Tozer, as if that meant Breen must have got it wrong.
Breen stood next to her, smoking a cigarette. He watched her hands. They were clutching each other, but constantly in motion, fingers twining and intertwining, like a bucket of eels.
‘Poor woman. I mean, she stands a chance, though, doesn’t she, at least? Unlike Alex.’
When a loved one is murdered, it eats away at the families. Breen had seen it happen many times. Even good people like the Tozers absorbed some of the darkness.
The grandfather clock whirred and chimed.
‘Where’s that copper, for the photograph?’ said Mrs Tozer.
‘They’ll be here soon,’ said Breen.
Clouds hung low, turning the estuary water slate grey.
At five, the light broke from under the clouds that hung over Dartmoor. Gold light made the fresh green of the fields greener, the red of the soil redder.
The police car was here, finally. A big-eared young man in a uniform that looked too loose on him stood at the front door. Breen had hoped that Sharman himself would come so he could ask about progress, so he could explain his theories. Instead, the young man said, ‘Bugger to find this place. I drove past three times. Should have a sign or something. I’m here to pick up some photo.’
