She's Leaving Home (23 page)

“How is she?”

“She’s not going anywhere today. Do you have her parents’ telephone number?”

Breen asked, “How do I find out where George’s house is?”

“I thought you were a policeman. You knew everything. Bet she knows where George’s house is.” She nodded at Tozer.

Tozer looked at the ground like a bad schoolgirl. “I might do.”

The other girls laughed. “See?”

Tozer took out a packet of Bensons.

“Can I have one?” said the short-haired girl.

“Me too,” said the other, taking her chewing gum out of her mouth and attaching it to the underside of her chair.

“Do you want to go in now?” the nurse asked the two girls.

They left the girls with their injured friend. The lift was at the end of the corridor.

Breen and Tozer stood by it, waiting for the doors to open. Once the lift came close, only to disappear down to the basement.

“Let’s take the stairs.”

“I’m in no hurry to get back to the nick,” said Tozer.

When the lift finally arrived and the doors opened, Frances Briggs was standing there, clutching an expensive-looking handbag in one hand and examining her face in a makeup mirror that she held in the other. “Well, if it’s not the detective. Going down?”

They stepped into the lift. “Back with us so soon?”

“Just delivering a patient.”

“Nothing serious, I hope?”

“Nothing serious.”

“And will you be coming to our shindig on Saturday, darling?”

“Well…”

“Oh, don’t be shy.”

“I’m not sure if you really need any more single men, by the sound of it.”

“Well then, bring a friend.” She looked from Tozer back to Breen.

It was only when they got out onto the Marylebone Road, where a horse-drawn dray was patiently trotting slowly along, forcing the traffic to crawl slowly behind it, that Tozer asked, “What was that lah-di-dah in the lift saying?” They walked across the road, making their way between the honking cars.

“Would you like to come with me?” Breen asked.

“Is there a party? How super. I’m game for any shindig, darling.”

“Shut up.”

“Don’t be shy, darling.”

He stopped, mid-traffic. “Do you want to go?”

“Are you asking?” she said.

“It would be useful,” he said, thinking that might be an encouragement.

“Useful?” She frowned. “You want me to go to a party? To be useful?”

“It’s Ezeoke’s party. I’m only going because of the case.”

“Useful?”

Why did he find it so difficult to come out with it and ask her to the party? “I haven’t been to a lot of parties in the last few years.”

“You surprise me,” she said, walking on ahead.

Had he always been so bad at this? he wondered as he walked back across the road to the police station.

I
n Hammersmith, Breen tiptoed through the mud to the wooden shed at the back of a building site. He wished he had worn different shoes.

“Come in,” said a voice when he knocked on the door.

The foreman sat behind a desk in a wooden hut crammed with filing cabinets and map chests. The makeshift room was heated to a fug by a pale green paraffin stove.

“God there,” said the man. “You look the very spit of him.”

Breen wiped his shoes on a newspaper on the floor. His father had always insisted he had his mother’s looks.

John Nolan wore a brown jacket over blue overalls; he stood and came towards Breen to take his hand and shake it. “I’m very pleased to meet the son of Tomas Breen.” A rough hand, like his father’s used to be before the old skin softened. “Take a seat. Just move them papers.”

Breen sat on the wooden chair opposite the desk.

“It is terrible news. I would have liked to come to the funeral if you’d have told me.”

“I’m sorry. I should have called you before.”

“I understand, of course. You had things you had to do.”

That felt like a reproach.

“But he was a great man. Very, very respected.” John Nolan opened the drawer of a filing cabinet and pulled out a bottle of Bell’s and two glasses.

“Was he?”

“Naturally. Doing what he did for us, you understand.”

“What do you mean?”

Nolan offered a cigarette. “Your father was the man who gave me my first job in the building trade here in England. He gave a great many of us our first job. I hadn’t seen him for years. I wish I had kept in touch with him, but when he retired it was as if he disappeared.”

The man was awkward now; he fiddled with a yellow pencil, flicking it from hand to hand. “And educated, so. He could quote from every one of the works of Shakespeare, you know.”

“Yes, I know.”

He poured two glasses and gave one to Breen, then raised it solemnly. “Tomas Breen. A great man,” he said, chinking his glass against Breen’s, then downing it in one.

Breen did the same; the alcohol scalded his throat.

“I am a Kerry man myself. To men like me who came over here, it was a pleasure to find an Irishman who knew the way things worked. He took us under his wing. He knew how to look after us. We all knew Tomas Breen. There’s not a ganger in London who wouldn’t have spoken respectfully of him.”

At home, Breen’s father had been quietly dismissive of the Irishmen he worked with. They arrived by the boatload, desperate and uneducated, carrying dreams of sending fortunes home. Many of the gangers treated them badly, keeping them in beer but paying them a pittance. The English hated them and put up cards in their windows:
No Blacks, No Irish
. “Ignorant bogtrotters” his father called them, but Breen never knew whether this was part of wanting to put his son off a manual trade. His father had imagined Cathal as a doctor, a scientist or an academic of some sort.

“You must be feeling the loss still.”

“I am,” said Breen.

“He would have been proud of you,” said the foreman. “You being a policeman.”

“You would think so,” said Breen.

Nolan looked around fifty, his skin darkened from the work outdoors. “He was, I am sure of it. He raised you on his own, did he not? A remarkable thing.”

“He did. My mother died when I was young.”

“Of course. We knew that, but he didn’t talk about it a great deal. That was a terrible loss to him. And he too proud to accept help from the Church.”

Somewhere outside a piledriver started its regular thumping.

“My father didn’t think much of the Church.”

“No, he did not,” the foreman said. “But I’m sure St. Peter will forgive him that on account of his goodness. He had reason, naturally.”

“What do you mean?”

Nolan looked wary. “On account of what happened to him and your mother.”

Breen frowned. “What was that?”

The foreman paused. He picked up the glasses and put them back in the cabinet, unwashed. “It’s of no importance. You said on the phone you were trying to find the identity of a missing man.”

Breen took out a notebook. Nolan crossed to a gray filing cabinet, pulled out a sheet of paper and handed it to Breen.

“It’s a worksheet. If you’re a foreman you fill one in for each week. Payday on Friday.”

Breen looked at the name on the top of the sheet. Patrick Donahoe. The worksheet consisted of seven boxes, one for each day of the week. The sheet was headed, “Week commencing September 30, 1968.” The boxes marked Monday and Tuesday were ticked but all the rest were blank.

“I asked around like I said I would. It’s a small world. You only have to be in London a couple of years and you know everyone on the building sites. That’s the name I came up with.”

“Where was he working?”

“Paddington. Not so far from where your man was found.” He pointed to the worksheet. “As you can see, he didn’t come in on the Wednesday. They thought it must be because he had a sore head. It was his birthday, you see, on the Tuesday.”

There was a calendar on the wall advertising a plant-hire company. A topless girl sat uncomfortably astride a blue moped in November’s picture. Somebody had circled her nipples with a pen.

“But he didn’t come in on the Thursday either and they haven’t seen him since?”

“That’s right. And he’s never been in to collect his wages.”

“Do you have any record of an address for him?”

“I do. He was a first cousin of the foreman there from back home. They had took him on here as a favor to his father.”

“Have they contacted his father to ask if he’s been in touch?”

“Naturally. And no. I’m afraid he has not.”

“How old was he?”

“It was his twentieth birthday. And they bought him a bottle of whisky to celebrate it.”

“A bottle?”

“Yes.”

Breen said nothing, but took down the man’s father’s address.

“They said he was a nice fellow too.”

“And was he in the habit of going missing?”

“They are all missing men, after a fashion. They should be at home looking after the farms and chasing girls, but instead they’re here building flats and getting drunk.”

Halfway back across the building site he stopped. The mud was almost up to his socks.

“You should have worn boots,” said a man in a flat cap.

“Bugger off.”

The slow regular thud of the piledriver seemed to shake the ground he stood on. But instead of heading forward towards drier ground, he turned back through the ooze, towards the foreman’s hut again. Mud sucked at his feet. He could feel the moisture seeping into his socks through the gap around the tongues of his shoes.

A second time he opened the door to the shed. Nolan looked up. “Did you forget something?” he said.

“You were going to say something about what happened to my mother and father.”

The man’s face stayed blank. “I said it wasn’t important.”

Breen picked up the newspaper and wiped the mud off his leather shoes. “If it’s not important, what is it then?”

The man changed tack. “If he hadn’t told you, he didn’t want you to know.”

Breen balled the dirty newspaper up and threw it into a bin, then started on his other foot with a fresh sheet. The man took a cigarette from his shirt pocket, offered one to Breen, who refused it. “I’m not sure it’s my place to say, if he did not tell you.”

“My father is dead.”

“Yes. But I would like to respect his wishes.”

Breen sat in the chair in front of Nolan’s desk. “Respect my wishes. I have no relations. My parents are both dead. No one to tell me if you don’t.”

“True enough,” said the foreman. He sucked on his cigarette a minute, blew smoke out through his nose, then said, “So you don’t know why your father and mother left Ireland?”

“Because he hated it. He thought it was a backward place.”

“Maybe so. But there was more to it than that. Your mother was a schoolteacher in the local village. She was ten years older than him, a married woman herself. She fell pregnant by him. Did you not know any of this?”

“No.”

“Can you imagine the ruckus?”

“I didn’t know any of it. Only that they were in love.”

“When you were born, it would have been a terrible scandal, of course. The Church wanted to take you into an orphanage and raise you so they could brush the whole episode under the carpet. The stink it would have caused in a little place like he came from.”

“I never knew.”

Nolan stubbed the cigarette out and immediately lit another. “Your mother’s husband was a dry old stick. He worked on the railway, I believe. There was no such thing as divorce, of course. And so they eloped with you to England.”

Breen tried to imagine his quiet father leading such a daring, romantic life, but could not.

“She died not long after they were here. You wouldn’t remember her, I don’t suppose?”

“Sometimes I think I remember her. I’m not sure though.”

“You would have been only one or two, I think. Maybe three. I’m sure she’s been there, looking after you. Of course the Church offered to take you in again. But your father would have none of it. He thought them a bunch of lousy hypocrites for the stink they caused in the first place. So he raised you on his own. And looking at you, he did a very fine job of it, I would say.”

“He never told me any of this.”

“I don’t think he was proud of taking another man’s wife. I don’t think he was proud of having a son out of wedlock. He was a very proud man, Tomas Breen. He was very proud of yourself too. He talked about you all the time at work, you know. ‘Cathal has done this,’ ‘Cathal has done that.’”

“He did?”

“Of course he did. A fine boy like you.”

Breen looked into the older man’s eyes. There were little pale crescents below each pupil, veins in the yellowed whites. Breen would have liked to believe the foreman was not just saying this out of kindness.

A workman in a donkey jacket knocked on the door and threw it open. “Someone’s only gone and put diesel in the big cement mixer. The engine’s jiggered.”

“Jesus. I’ll be along in a minute,” Nolan called. “Leave us alone a second.”

Breen stood up to go. The old foreman shook his hand warmly. “And now somebody else’s son is dead. I hope you find the truth of it. You’ll excuse me for saying that most of the police in England could not give a one-legged fuck for another dead Irishman.”

“No,” said Bailey.

“This lot, they’re girls, sir. Sixteen, seventeen years old. They’re not going to want to talk to me. If I had Constable Tozer with me…”

“Firstly, there is no need,” said Bailey. “We know who killed Morwenna Sullivan.”

“I’ve turned it over and over, sir,” said Breen. “I can’t see how Major Sullivan could have done it.”

“Secondly, there are plenty of other lady police constables. CID is not a matchmaking agency, Sergeant.”

Breen stood in front of Bailey’s desk, blinking. “What, sir?”

“You heard what I said. Any woman constable will do perfectly well.”

“Tozer really understands this world, sir.”

Bailey quivered as he spoke. An old branch about to fall from an older tree. “It is not our job to understand their world. This is precisely why…” The older man looked him in the eye. Breen stared into the pale flecks around his iris. “Precisely why I’ve been opposed to women officers doing men’s work all along. Any more questions?”

“Bugger that for a game of soldiers,” said Tozer, when Breen told her what had happened. “Miss the chance to be outside George Harrison’s house on official business?”

“Why don’t we go at the weekend? You wouldn’t be on duty then.”

“You really don’t like breaking the rules, do you?”

“Saturday?”

“I can’t do tomorrow. One of the women in A4 is getting married. A bunch of us promised to go shopping with her. I can’t imagine anything worse.”

“Sunday then?”

“Sunday and Monday I’m on shift. How about Tuesday?”

“OK. See you then.”

“What about the shindig?” she said.

Breen looked at her. “Are you coming? I thought…”

“After you said I could be useful, how could I refuse?”

Breen wondered if he had time to go to the barber’s before the party on Saturday. On second thoughts, maybe he should let his hair grow a bit.

He was looking around for a constable to drive him to the building site in Paddington when a car drove into the car park at the back of the station, high speed, siren blaring, breaking to a halt behind the back door. Carmichael leaned out of the window of the Escort. “There you bloody are. Jump in.”

“What’s going on?”

“You seen Prosser anywhere?”

Breen stood on the stone stairs that led up to the main police building. “He’s gone out somewhere. He didn’t say where.”

“Never mind. Get in.” Carmichael reached back and opened the car door.

“Why?”

“Just get bloody in.”

Breen got in the back. Jones was behind the wheel.

“Go, Batman,” Carmichael ordered Jones. Jones floored the accelerator and the car roared onto the road, siren wailing, cars scattering to left and right. On Seymour Street, Jones braked to let a schoolteacher anxiously herd a crocodile of schoolchildren off a zebra crossing, then accelerated past.

“What’s happening?”

“Surprise,” said Carmichael, leaning backwards from the front seat.

The car zigzagged between a lorry and a motorbike. “Out of the way,” shouted Jones.

“Tell me.”

“Like I said, surprise.”

Breen pressed himself into the backseat, feet wedged against the base of the seat in front. “Slow down. What’s the hurry?”

“Don’t be a girl,” said Jones.

“You’ve got blood on your collar,” Breen said to Carmichael.

“Where?” Carmichael turned and pulled down the sunshade on the passenger side and examined his pink-striped shirt. There was a splodge of blood on the right point. “Shit. So I have. I’ll never get that out.”

“Soak it in vinegar when you get home. That’s what my wife does,” said Jones, sawing in and out of the parting cars, heading south down Great Portland Street and across Oxford Street.