She's Leaving Home (3 page)

“This has been a terrible experience. It’s really shocking for everybody who lives here, you know.”

“What were you doing when you found the body?”

“Not me, no. I didn’t find the body. It was the girl.”

Breen frowned. He looked over at the constable. “The body was first spotted by a young woman who was walking with a child,” he said.

“She was screaming her head off. I came out to see what all the fuss was about,” said Miss Shankley. “She was standing down there bawling her eyes out with these two poor little children.”

“Who is this girl?”

The constable shrugged. “Miss Shankley said she was wearing a dark uniform. Possibly a nurse or a nanny.”

“She ran off,” said Miss Shankley.

Breen remembered the girl he had seen before, watching the body being removed. He went to the window and looked down but the girl was nowhere to be seen. “Have you passed her description to the other constables?”

“Not yet, no, sir.”

“The constable here said you had something to tell me.”

“Well, yes, but I’m not sure it’s important,” said Miss Shankley with a prim smile.

“It might be,” said the copper.

“Yes, of course. It might be. Who am I to say? You are the professionals, after all.”

Breen rubbed his head. “Do you mind if I sit down?” he asked.

“I’m sorry. Rude of me,” she said. The sofa had plastic covers that squeaked as he lowered himself onto them.

“I feel so dreadful for the girl,” Miss Shankley said. “Even if she was, you know…I mean, being found naked too. So degrading. It was never like this when I moved in. It was lovely, this block. We used to have street parties down there.”

“My colleague said you…”

“You told me you had noticed some new people move into the building.”

“Not this building, thank heavens,” she said. “No, no. The house behind.” She stood and pointed out of the window.

Breen stood again, slowly, took a couple of paces to the window and looked out to where she was pointing. Behind the lock-ups, behind where the dead girl had been found and the wall against which the rubbish was stacked, was a white Victorian house, half hidden by a large lime tree that stood between the new flats and the older building. Paint was peeling from the wall closest to them and a leaky overflow pipe had left a green stain down the white wall.

Miss Shankley stubbed out her cigarette, smoothed her housecoat, then stood up. She picked up the ashtray and disappeared to the kitchen to empty it.

“When did they move in?” called Breen.

“Two weeks ago. Two and a half now. On the Wednesday.”

“You’re very precise about that.”

“You notice things,” she said, reentering the living room with the ashtray wiped clean.

“Like what?”

“Well, you notice things that are unusual, don’t you?”

“Not everyone does,” said the copper.

“I suppose not,” said Miss Shankley, smiling as she smoothed down her housecoat.

“Unusual?” asked Breen.

She lowered her voice. “They’re dark,” she said, as if they might hear if she spoke too loud.

“Dark?”

“Black. You know. Africans,” she said, as if he hadn’t understood.

“I see,” said Breen. He sat back down on the sofa. “Africans?”

“Well, they told me they were from Africa,” said Miss Shankley.

“Oh.” He sat back on the sofa. On the walls were three mallards, all different sizes, flying up in a diagonal line. He closed his eyes and rubbed each side of his nose with the finger and thumb of his left hand, then looked at his watch. It was past one o’clock. Lunchtimes in the pub were routine. He would not mind missing that today.

“Is that all you want to know?” asked the woman, disappointed at his silence.

“I’m just wondering why they told you they were African,” he said.

“Well, you see, at first I thought they were Jamaican. We had a Jamaican family move in last year. There was a lot of fuss about that. They didn’t stay. Perhaps they didn’t like it here. Well, it’s not their sort of place, is it? We were very relieved when they moved. I’m sure they were too.”

Breen put his hands in his mac pockets. “So…you told your new neighbors to go back to Jamaica and they told you they were Africans?”

“I beg your pardon?” said Miss Shankley, lifting her chin a little higher.

“Nothing. I think that’s all for now,” he said, standing.

“It was just a neighborly conversation, that’s all,” said Miss Shankley.

“But they’re new in the area and you think that they’ve got something to do with the dead girl?”

“I didn’t say anything of the kind, officer,” she said, mouth hard and small. “I just thought you should know that there were people who were not from round here who had recently moved in.”

“And we’re grateful for you being so observant,” the constable butted in.

The woman sat on her plastic-covered armchair, pouting.

“Did the constable here ask if you heard anything out of the ordinary last night?” said Breen, pausing in the hallway.

“I asked her all your questions, sir. She says the rubbish has been like that for weeks. And she sleeps with earplugs in.”

“I have nothing against Africans,” said Miss Shankley. “But they have the whole of Africa to live in.”

“Just one more question. What time do you get up in the morning?”

“Around six. I listen to the radio.”

“Do you remember if you looked out of the window?”

“Probably.”

“There’s a mattress down there. It’s orange.”

Breen pointed out of the window. Miss Shankley got up and stood beside him. The mattress was still leaning against the wall where the police had propped it when they uncovered the woman’s body. “Do you remember seeing where that was when you got up this morning?”

“Why would I notice a thing like that? You know,” said Miss Shankley, “I saw you being sick in the bushes down there, Sergeant. I noticed that, clearly enough. I’d have thought you’d have got used to it by now.” Then to the copper, “Is he all right? He’s still looking a bit peaky if you ask me.”

“I think we’re done, Constable,” said Breen.

“I’m a woman on my own. I find all this very disturbing.” She led them to the front door and as she held it open for them she said to the other policeman, “Rivers of blood, you know.”

“What?” said the copper.

“Immigrants,” said the woman. “What Mr. Powell said. They don’t have any place here. You wait. What if there were as many niggers in the country as bloody Irish? They let a thousand Pakis in the other day. Think about it. It’s going to be trouble. You’ll see.”

On the walkway outside, the copper said, “Mind you, I think she’s got a point. We all do.”

“What?” said Breen.

“You know. All the coons coming over. People don’t like it. Not just Enoch Powell. They’re taking our jobs. And they’re bringing crime with them. They’re taking over all the knocking shops too. And selling drugs.”

He strode on ahead down the walkway, then stopped and turned, waiting for Breen to catch up.

“My father was an immigrant,” said Breen.

“Yeah, but he definitely wasn’t a coon, sir.”

Breen started up the stairs to speak to Mr. Rider at number 31, the man who had told Miss Shankley that the dead girl was a prostitute, but there was no answer. The neighbor’s front door opened and an old woman peered out and said, “He’s not in.”

“We going to knock on the darkie’s door now?” said the constable.

When they went to try the door of the white house behind the sheds, no one was in there either.

“We could break in?” suggested the copper.

“We could,” said Breen. “If this was
Z-Cars
.”

“Just an idea.”

Breen squatted down and pushed back the black painted letter flap to peer into the house but there was a letter box on the other side, blocking the view.

Back inside the police car, Breen wound down the passenger window and watched the policemen, standing awkwardly in doorways as they talked to the residents, slowly working their way down the street.

W
est London was full of color. Each year the colors got louder. Girls in green leather miniskirts, boys in paisley shirts and white loafers. New boutiques selling orange plastic chairs from Denmark. Brash billboards with sexy girls in blue bikinis fighting the inch war. A glimpse of a front room in a Georgian house where patterned wallpaper had been overpainted in yellow and a huge red paper lampshade hung from the ceiling. Pale blue Triumphs and bright red Minis parked in the streets.

Around Clerkenwell the color faded. The old monochromes of postwar London returned. Still flat-capped and gray, East London continued about its business.

The bus back to Stoke Newington was crowded and fractious. He stood downstairs, hanging on to the strap until the bus emptied out at Angel. For the rest of the journey he sat next to a young woman who was crammed into a seat surrounded by shopping bags full of new clothes. She was pretty in a Bardot-ish way. He found himself looking at her reflection in the glass of the bus window. On the other side of the glass, the orange streetlights were bleary in the wetness.

He lived in a cul-de-sac behind the police station where he had worked before he took the job with D Division. Basement flat.

There had been no chance yet to put away his father’s things. A carton of bandages still sat on the dresser and his walking frame was still by the door. On the telephone table a pile of the notes he had left for the women he had paid to look after his father while he was at work. The nurse’s folded zed bed, tucked into the corner of the room. A tangle of wires from a single socket powered the radio-gram, two standard lamps, the electric clock and the television.

His father had stayed here for the last six years of his life but had never liked it. He had lived on his own in Fulham until the day he had forgotten about a pan of sausages and set fire to the kitchen of his flat. Breen had had to move out of the police section house on Mare Street to rent this place. It had a spare bedroom that his father could use until he was well enough to move back on his own. That had never happened.

It seemed too early to start moving his father’s belongings. They still cluttered the flat: his photographs and books, his records by Italian tenors, his poetry and his novels and his collection of walking sticks, even the leather armchair Breen was sitting in now.

Normally Breen enjoyed cooking for himself. From the age of ten or eleven he had taken over cooking the meals for himself and his father. Tonight, though, he just heated a can of beans. He went to cut a slice of bread to go with it, but the loaf in the bread bin was sprouting gray mold.

He ate the beans on their own in front of
Olympic Grandstand
. He was watching a girl from the USSR who was doing floor exercises to some thumping piano music—she was beautiful in a scary, Soviet kind of way—when the electricity clicked off. The light on the television shrank to a small line, then a single dot, then disappeared into blackness.

Breen sat there a minute, eyes adjusted to the darkness. The sounds of the street seemed louder now. When his eyes began to make out dull shapes, he stood and felt around for the electric meter by the front door. He usually left a pile of half crowns on top but they were all gone. He dug one out of his pocket, fed it into the slot and turned the handle. The television came back to life, blaring a national anthem he didn’t recognize.

After he’d washed the plate and put it on the rack he smoked his fifth and last cigarette, then dressed in his pajamas and went to bed, worn thin by the day.

He sat in bed looking through his police notebooks, one for the dead man, the other for the dead girl. He hadn’t even begun to write his report about what had happened to Prosser last night. He fell asleep trying to remember what he had meant when he had written “Ask about the doors.”

Four hours later he woke, unable to return to sleep. He switched on the light by the table, and lay awake for a few minutes, then he got up and shaved.

Outside it was dark. He walked down Kingsland High Street, deserted at two in the morning but for the occasional car, pavements silver with rain. The late summer was slipping into winter with little in the way of autumn in between.

He passed shops with their wooden shutters down, barrows chained to trees, piles of rubbish and dogs that growled from behind locked gates. Below the pavement, water trickled noisily through drains.

At Dalston Junction he arrived at Joe’s All Night Bagel Shop. It never closed, serving tea and coffee to lorry drivers delivering at Ridley Road market and to the taxi drivers waiting for the early shift to begin. The front of the cafe was painted bright red. In the window was a handwritten sign that read
7 days without a bagel makes one weak
.

Joe, leaning on the counter reading a novel, looked up as he came in. “Hello, my friend,” he said, and spooned coffee into a mug without asking. Joe only served instant. When Breen had told him he should buy one of the machines like the coffee shops in the West End and start serving real coffee, he had said, “And maybe get a skiffle band to play for my customers too.”

“Teacakes are half price,” said Joe as he filled the mug with hot water from an urn. Breen never ate here, but Joe always offered something.

“What’s the news?” asked Breen.

“My daughter is about to make me a grandfather,” said Joe. “What’s happening with you?”

“I’m in the shit.”

Joe said, “Don’t tell me your problems. I have enough of my own,” and went back to reading his novel. Breen added a spoonful of sugar to his coffee, stirred, then stood at the counter slowly sipping it. The bell went and a young greaser couple in black leathers came in, ordered egg and chips and sat down on opposite sides of a small table, staring at each other while they waited for Joe to cook their food. The guy had long hair and huge sideburns, like some reincarnated Viking warrior. He stubbed out a cigarette and leaned over and started to kiss the young woman on the mouth. Older men gaped enviously over cooling tea. In all their lives they had never had the chance to be as young as this, to wear leather and to fondle beautiful women so brazenly in public. As if to tease them further, under the table, the man forced his right hand between the black leather of the young woman’s thighs. She slapped it away and broke the kiss, laughing loudly.

The doorbell rang again. This time it was a young man in a tweed cap that looked too small for him, brim pointing upwards. He approached the counter and asked for a cup of tea.

“Cor, look at them two.” He nodded at the pair of greasers who were kissing again. “I bet she fucks him,” he said quietly. “What you think? I bet she likes it too. I bet she fucks anyone. I’d fuck her.”

Joe said nothing. While he served the tea, the young man said in a quiet voice. “Hey, I got something good for you. Do you want to buy any watches? Gold watches going cheap.”

Joe replaced the large teapot on the table and said, “What do I need to tell the time for? This bloody place never bloody closes.” He turned back to the chip basket, lifting it from the hot fat.

The young man blinked a couple of times. It could have been a nervous tic. “I thought you Yids liked a bit of tom.”

“A bit of tom? God save us. Talk English, schmuck. You watch too much television.”

“Tom. Tomfoolery,” the guy whispered. “You know, jewelry.”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake go home,” said Joe quietly. The chips were still too pale. He dropped them back into the bubbling oil.

Next the young man turned to Breen. When he’d come in, Breen had thought he was only about twenty. Now he looked closer he could see fine lines around his eyes, and veins breaking in the skin. “What about you, mate? Nice stuff.”

Joe said, over his shoulder, “You’re barking up the wrong tree there, my friend. I told you, if you know what’s best for yourself, get lost.”

The young man was offended. “I’m just trying to earn a living like the rest of you,” he said.

Joe snorted. He cracked first one egg, then a second, onto the hotplate and wiped his brow with his forearm.

“Shockproof,” said the man to Breen, picking up his mug of tea. “Gold straps. Roman numerals. Guaranteed to five yards underwater.”

Breen put down his coffee and reached inside his jacket pocket. For a second the man’s face lit up, thinking he was about to make a sale, until Breen pulled out his wallet and opened it. “Do as he says. Get lost.”

The man slapped his cup back down, spilling brown tea over Joe’s Formica counter, and was gone into the night in half a second.

“You could have waited till he paid,” muttered Joe.

“Keep your hair on,” said Breen, putting his warrant card back into his jacket pocket. “I’ll get it.”

Joe wiped down the surface with a gray dishcloth. “Flash that flipping thing around in here anymore and I won’t have any customers at all.” He put two plates onto the counter and tipped the chips onto them, then slid two eggs from the hotplate. “Egg and chips twice,” he called.

The greaser couple broke from their kiss and the man stood to fetch the plates. Breen pulled out his notebook and flicked through the pages he had written. His notes were densely scribbled and unmethodical. It was as if he had forgotten how he used to arrive at a scene and patiently record first the time of day, then the position of the corpse, and so on. Across the bottom of a page he had written “River Tiber.” He borrowed a pencil from Joe and turned to a clean page and started sketching what he remembered of the scene behind the flats. He had added diagrams to police notebooks before, but never drawings, even though he had a talent for it. Art had been one of the few subjects he had done well in at school. His father had never been able to hide his disappointment at the mediocrity of his son’s academic results, but the day before the funeral, Breen had discovered a small roll of the drawings he had done at school carefully tied in red ribbon, tucked in a box his father had brought with him to the flat.

He drew the downward curve of her back and the pure roundness of her behind, her arms folded awkwardly. “What you drawing?” said Joe.

Breen closed the notebook rapidly and put it back into his pocket.

It was quiet now. In an hour or so the morning shift would start arriving on their way to work. Joe went to his LP collection and spent a while looking through it, pulling out a record, replacing it, eventually picking out another. There was a record player just to the right of the counter. Joe took the black disc out of its sleeve and laid it on the turntable, then lifted the needle and dropped it carefully.

There was a moment of crackle, then a piano began to play slow descending notes. A cello joined in for a short phrase, then the rest of the string quartet, until they all gave way to the cello exchanging conversational phrases with the piano.

The woman looked up. “What in hell’s that?”

“Leave it,” said her boyfriend, pausing from his chips.

Joe came out front and sat down on a plastic chair and took out a cigarette and tapped it quietly on the table in front of him, then lit it and smoked as the music played. No one spoke. The only other noise was the clatter of cutlery on plate and the sigh of one of the old insomniacs who gathered at Joe’s in the smaller hours. It was one of those times when the unsatisfactory complexity of the world fades far enough into the distance for the moment to become a thing in itself. Making a shape out of such sadness seemed to offer a safety from it. Breen sat and listened as his coffee cooled. The moment lasted for two or three whole minutes before the bell rang and a bobby on his beat came in, the door’s bell ringing dissonantly against the music.

“Aye, aye, Joe,” said the copper. “Cup of tea. Two sugars. An’ turn down that old racket, why don’t you?”