She's Leaving Home (5 page)

“Which people?” called Breen.

“Them people.” She thumbed her nose at the white Georgian building behind the sheds.

He walked up Garden Road and turned left onto Abbey Road. Twenty yards from the junction, a young girl of eight or nine in khaki shorts stood crying under an elm tree.

Other trees had lost their leaves in the rain of the last few days, but this one stood greenly straight, alone on the pavement. Breen walked past, then stopped and turned. The girl was still sniveling, eyes red.

“What’s the matter?” Breen called back at her.

“My cat’s stuck up the tree,” said the girl.

Breen looked up. “I can’t see it.”

“She’s right at the top. Been there for hours.”

“She’s just enjoying the view.”

“No she ain’t.”

“She’ll come down in a bit,” said Breen.

“No she won’t.” The girl wiped her nose on the sleeve of her jumper.

“She will. You’ll see.”

“No she won’t.”

Breen walked on. By the next corner he stopped and looked back. She was still there, looking up at the tree, wetness shining on her face.

There was a low white wall behind which cars were parked. From a distance, it looked as if the paint was old and peeling. When he walked closer he saw that in fact the paint was relatively new, but hundreds of words were scratched into the surface. He peered to make them out. “Mo.” “Susan 4 George.” “I luv you John Mary B.”

He squatted down to read more. “Nina 4 Beatles.” “John xxx Lisa.” “Mary and Beth woz here 10/9/68.” “USA loves you.” “Wenna+Izzie always All we need is
♥
.” “Pippi and Carolyn 1968.” “I shagged a Beatle”—“LIAR”—“NOT TRUE.” Painstakingly carved: “Those who make revolutions halfway dig their own graves.” “Hands off!!! I sor them 1st.” “Paul call me! V. important!! Greenwich 4328.” “Bob Dylan”—“cant sing.” “Kirby Hill girls love u.” “I was alone I took a ride.” “Kiwis are No 1 Beatles Fans.” “YOU SAVED MY LIFE.” “Jill = Scruffs.” “Apple rules.” “Leprosy I’m not half the man I used to be Since I became an amputee”—“THAT IS SICK”—“How DARE you?” “I am the walrus”—“no i am.” “WE LOVE CYNTHIA”…About thirty-five feet of wall, covered in these messages.

He walked round into the small car park. There were more words on the other side too.

“We paint over it every few months,” said a voice. Breen looked up.

The front of the recording studio was a large Georgian house, set back from the road. Standing on the steps leading up to the front door was a man in a brown caretaker’s coat, holding a clipboard. There was a pile of musical instruments at the bottom of the stairs: cellos and double basses.

“Don’t know why we bother. It’s like that again in a few weeks.” He leaned forward and checked the labels on the instrument cases, then made some marks on his clipboard.

“Mostly girls?” said Breen.

“Ninety-five percent.”

“How do they know when the Beatles are here?”

The man shrugged. “Sometimes they’re how we know when the Beatles are due. When they start arriving we know that means the Beatles will be in today.”

Breen wandered up to him and showed his warrant card.

“Oh yeah?”

“If I showed you a photo, would you be able to tell me if it was one of the girls?” he said.

“Don’t bother. Another copper showed us it already. The dead girl.”

“You didn’t recognize it?”

“No. There’s so many of them. We don’t pay them any mind, really. They’re OK. Don’t do any harm.”

The man picked up a pair of cello cases and walked them up the stairs.

“Is there anyone else I should ask?”

“Almost certainly,” he said, returning to pick up a double bass. “But I don’t know who that would be. Best thing you could do is come back when the Beatles are here. Then you’ll see them all, all the girls.”

“When’s that going to be?”

“No idea. Sorry.”

“What is it they all want?” asked Breen.

“Who? The girls?”

“Yes.”

“They just want to be close to them.” He walked the instrument up the stairs through the front door and returned again.

“Do you want a hand?”

“You’re not allowed to touch the instruments. Union regulations.”

The man paused and took a tobacco tin out of his pocket. “It’s like they think if they can only get to them, everything will make sense. People think they must have the answer to everything. It would drive me mad. Wouldn’t it you?”

“Yes, it would.”

“They try and break in sometimes. We’ve had one or two who made it past the doors.”

“What happens then?”

“Nothing really. They just stand there. They don’t know what to do when they’re actually in front of them.” He licked his cigarette paper and spun the cigarette between his fingers, then went inside the building.

Breen left him and walked farther up Abbey Road. It was a genteel street of mansion houses and dull apartment blocks with few people on the pavements outside them. A butcher, blood on his apron, came out of a corner shop and started yanking down the shutters of his shop. Breen checked his watch. It was Wednesday, half-day closing. The place would be dead soon. He lit today’s second cigarette as he passed Hall Road and carried on until he reached Langford Place, then stopped for a minute, finishing the smoke before turning back.

The girl was still there, weeping beneath the elm tree. Breen walked past her a second time, then stopped. He turned round yet again and walked back.

“Does your mother know you’re here?” said Breen.

The girl shook her head.

“Wouldn’t she be worried?”

The girl shook her head again.

“It must be a very special cat.”

This time the girl nodded.

Breen returned to the alley behind the flats where the dead girl had been found. The ladder was still leaning against the large bin. “You in there?” he called, but the policeman who was supposed to be going through the contents inside the bin had vanished. The wooden extension ladder was heavier than he expected it to be, but he found a way to balance it on his shoulder.

“You. Where you taking that now?”

Miss Shankley was leaning over her rear balcony.

“I’m just borrowing it for a few minutes, that’s all,” he called back.

“Mind you do. That’s private property.”

By the time he reached the tree, the weight of the ladder was digging hard into the top of his shoulder. He dropped the ladder down onto the pavement and looked up at the elm. The lower branches started at around ten feet up; they were dense. It was hard to see a place on which he could balance the top.

“What are you doing?” asked the girl.

“What does it look like I’m doing?”

“Keep your hair on. Just asking.”

Breen jammed the ladder up into the branches. Halfway up, one side of the ladder slipped off the small branch that had been holding it. Breen gripped tight as the ladder twisted. “Hold the ladder steady,” he ordered the girl.

She didn’t move.

“If you don’t hold the bottom of the ladder, I can’t go up it to try to find your cat.”

The girl put one hand on the ladder.

“Both hands. Don’t let it move. OK?”

The girl looked up at Breen and nodded.

A couple more rungs and Breen was in among the thick branches. They looked impossibly dense. He took a few seconds to choose a limb that seemed to offer a little more space than its neighbors, then cautiously wrapped his hand around it. The wood felt hard and cold next to his skin. Pulling himself up on it, he found a foothold for his right foot on the crook of a branch.

“Are you sure this cat of yours is up here?”

“Yes. He is.”

He looked up again. Leaving the safety of the ladder, he squeezed his left foot next to his right. Now he was in the tree, past the limbless trunk.

He paused again, considering his next step. He found himself smiling. He hadn’t smiled in weeks, it felt like.

The bark of the tree was creviced but his fingers were too big to fit between the cracks. He would have to rely on branches. He chose one above his head. Feeling bolder now, he looked for another to take the weight of his left foot. Raising his body upwards, his right shoe slipped suddenly from the branch, sending the weight of his body sideways, cracking into the trunk.

“Ow,” he said quietly to himself.

He had been careless. He would have to keep his feet directly on top of each branch. Leather soles had no grip.

He waited until he had caught his breath, then looked up again. “I can’t see him.”

“He’s right at the top.”

Again, he placed his left foot back on the same branch, more firmly this time. Hauling himself up with his arms, he was able to raise his body higher now into the leafless branches at the center of the tree. His body was twisted now, top half facing one way, legs the other, but there was something satisfying about having reached this place, above the traffic, away from the street. He must have climbed trees when he was a child. But when? He couldn’t remember.

“What’s he doing up there?” A voice from below.

“Rescuing my cat.”

He was only perhaps fifteen feet above the ground but it felt more. Beyond the street, he could see the traffic clearly, the elderly man tugging a dog away from a bus-stop sign, the veteran with one leg swinging down the pavement on his crutches. If it hadn’t been for the ladder and the girl holding it, no one would know he was there. Through the leaves he could see Grove End Road. A mansion house on the corner. In a first-floor flat, a woman in a blue dress was standing at a cooker stirring something. The kitchen looked warm and cozy. A rich chicken soup, perhaps, or stew and dumplings. He could almost smell it. Was she cooking for a lover or for herself?

He tore his eyes away and looked up again. The sky behind them made the branches look even blacker.

“What’s his name?” he called down.

“Whose name?”

“The cat, of course.”

“Loopy.”

“Loopy?”

“That’s right.”

So here he was, halfway up a tree, calling out to a cat called Loopy. He peered into the dark branches and thought he saw, clutching the main trunk like a sailor in a storm, a small black shape. Hard to make it out through the leaves, but as his eyes adjusted to the darkness it gradually came into focus. Claws dug into the bark, a small black cat looking down at Breen over its shoulder.

To be honest, Breen decided, the cat looked perfectly fine there. If anything, there was something scornful in its expression. He looked down again at the girl. Scruffy, thin-cheeked, hopeful.

“Loopy. Loopy. Come here, Loopy.”

The cat didn’t move. It continued to stare at Breen, unimpressed. He would have to climb higher, he decided.

I
t occurred to him, as he waited to be X-rayed, that he was in the same hospital where the dead girl still lay. She was somewhere below the floorboards beneath him. She would be still, naked, blue and cold, lips dark, breasts flat, lying on her back in darkness. There would be rough, bloodless stitches where Wellington had opened her up, perhaps, like snips of barbed wire. She was waiting in a drawer for Breen to find something.

He closed his eyes.

“You all right?” said the nurse cheerily. He was in a side room on the ground floor; he sat on the bed, arm lying in his lap. “You look a bit done in.”

“Collarbone. This chap here. Hurts like bugger, I expect.” A doctor, a young man with a pipe tucked into the top pocket of his white coat, sent pain tearing up his arm as he prodded and poked. “What in heaven’s name were you doing?”

Sitting on the daybed, he told them about the girl and the cat and the tree.

“Sleeve,” said the nurse.

Automatically Breen moved his bad arm and flinched. “Ow,” he said.

“Other one,” she giggled.

“And you’re a police detective?” said the doctor.

“Yes.”

“And you were up a tree trying to rescue a girl’s cat?”

“That’s so sweet,” said the nurse, wielding the syringe. “Just a little prick.”

“Is this one the last? I really should be going,” said the doctor.

“Two more. One abscess, one chest pain. I think that’s it for tonight.”

“I lost my balance trying to grab him,” said Breen.

“At least you tried,” said the nurse. “That’s the main thing.”

“Is it?”

“Of course it is.”

The doctor left, clacking his heels down the corridor.

“Do you think I could have a coffee?”

“Sorry.” The nurse smiled. “No coffee. No, no, no. Not for you.” She put the syringe down on the trolley and picked up a clipboard.

“Can I have some water then?”

Again she shook her head. “Nil by mouth. You’ll probably need anesthetics, poor old you. We’ll know if we have to just as soon as they’ve taken your X-ray.”

“And how long will that be?”

“I really can’t say. There’s quite a queue. I think it’s great that you were helping rescue a cat.”

“You mean other people don’t?”

“Of course they do,” she said. “Anyone we should contact?”

She tutted in a sympathetic manner at his reply as she left the room and he was relieved she was gone. The hubbub of the hospital, the complaining doctor, the chattering patients, the rattling of trolleys, even the careless platitudes of the nurse, were oddly lulling.

He stood up and walked out of the side room, holding his arm to his chest. It was evening. A food trolley was doing the rounds; they were placing trays of lukewarm cottage pie and boiled vegetables on the beds of patients who were not going home for a while. Jelly and condensed milk for afters. He walked to the nurses’ station. “Is there a phone I can use?”

The nurse pointed him down a corridor, past the double doors towards a visitors’ room, where a gray-skinned man sat in his pajamas smoking a pipe and holding the hands of a bored-looking young girl.

It was not easy using a telephone with one hand. With the receiver wedged under his chin, he placed sixpence in the slot and dialed. When Marilyn answered he pressed Button A and heard the coin drop.

“I heard the news,” she said. “Oh, Paddy? What are we going to do with you?”

“The car’s in Garden Road. They brought me here in an ambulance. Can someone pick up the keys from me?”

“Do you want me to come and drive you home?”

“It’s all right. I might be here ages, for all I know. I have to have an X-ray but they won’t find anything. I’ll be fine.”

“It’d be no trouble. I’d like to.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Bailey wants to know what you were doing up a tree.”

“He’s heard, then?”

“Everyone heard, Paddy.”

“And everyone’s having a good laugh, I suppose?”

“Bailey isn’t laughing exactly.”

“No, I don’t suppose he is.”

He finally left the hospital at a quarter to eleven at night. A taxi dropped him off at his flat, where he struggled for a bit with the key, and when he went to bed it was too painful trying to take his shirt off, so he slept in it, fitfully, unable to turn over without it hurting.

At two he woke and thought he heard the sound of his father, struggling to make it to the toilet. He had found him once or twice on the floor, shivering with cold. Then, as he was about to get out of bed, he remembered it couldn’t have been his father and lay back to fall in and out of dreams full of monsters and men with knives.

“Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.”

“Get lost.”

“Ooh. Can you find my pussy, you big strong policeman?”

“I hear you’ve had a break in the case with your dead bird,” said Jones.

“You heard what?”

“A break. Get it?”

“Opportunity Knocks for Constable Jones,” said Carmichael. “What’s new, pussycat, whoa-uh-oh-uh-oh-oh!”

Marilyn said, “There’s a woman from Garden Road called up says you stole her ladder.” She came and stood by his desk. “You shouldn’t be at work. You hurt yourself.”

“Just bruises,” he said. “Doctor says I’m fine.” The doctor had given him a sling and told him to take a week off, but he could not bear the idea of a week in the flat on his own. His father’s stuff all around. Besides, if he was off sick the dead woman would be passed on to another officer. Probably Prosser. So he had not put the sling back on this morning. Instead he’d folded it and placed it in the drawer among his vests.

Prosser emerged from Bailey’s room. “Snap,” he said quietly. There would be bandages under his shirt sleeve.

Breen’s shoulder ached dully and he had to be careful not to move too quickly. The two men stood facing each other. The walking wounded.

“How are you doing?” he said to Prosser.

The office was suddenly quiet. Prosser was the longest serving of the CID Sergeants at Marylebone. Early forties. Tweed jacket with leather elbow patches. Just split up from his wife. Unlike Breen or Carmichael, he still lived in one of the police flats off Pembridge Square and spent his evenings playing declaration whist or pool at the table with the younger officers at the section house across the road. They all loved him. One of the lads.

“Me?” said Prosser, walking over to drop a folder on Jones’s desk. “I’m fine. It’s you we’ve got to worry about, is what I’m hearing.”

Marilyn looked up from her desk and broke the silence. “Meeting at nine sharp on the St. John’s Wood murder. Papers got wind of it last night,” she said.

Jones whispered something to Prosser, and Prosser looked at Breen and laughed.

“Carmichael,” Bailey said, emerging from his office. “I need a word.”

“Right away, sir.”

Breen crossed the room to his desk; there was a metal fire bucket standing on it. Inside was a note that read
In case you feel a bit queasy
. The note had been written on a sheet of Izal toilet paper, scrawled in pencil above where it read
Now Wash Your Hands Please
. Next to the bucket lay Dr. Wellington’s report.

Breen looked up at Prosser and Jones. Jones was trying not to laugh; Prosser just smiled. Turning to the report, Breen pulled out two black-and-white ten-by-eights of the dead woman’s face. Frizzy-haired, eyes closed, about sixteen or seventeen years old, maybe older, with square cheekbones that cut across her otherwise round, soft face. She had the flaccid look the dead have.

He was reading Wellington’s one-page report when Carmichael came back and sat at his desk.

“What did Bailey want?” asked Prosser.

“He wanted to know how I was so successful with the women.”

Marilyn snorted.

“Your wife especially, Jones.”

“Really funny.”

“He wanted to know why I drive a brand-new Lotus Cortina and you only have a clapped-out Morris.”

“You haven’t got a Lotus Cortina,” said Jones.

“No, but I’m going to, one of these days.”

“Seriously.”

“He’s getting his knickers in a twist about me doing stuff with the Drug Squad.”

Breen looked up. “When did you start working with the Drug Squad?”

“It’s not official, like. I just been giving them a bit of help. You know. And Bailey don’t like it unless he’s had the forms in triplicate.”

Bailey appeared at the door of his office. He glared at Breen, then said, “Right, Breen, Jones. What have we got?” The team crowded into Bailey’s office.

What have we got?
Facts that were too sparse to suggest any sense of direction. The policemen had returned from their search yesterday with a pair of knickers; they were large, white and matronly, and from the state of them had obviously been lying on the ground for far longer than the dead woman. Nothing else had been found.

The victim remained unidentified. The door-to-door inquiries had come up with two individuals—in addition to Mr. Rider—who suggested that the dead body was a prostitute. This, Breen considered, was a possibility. Streetwalkers used Hall Road, only five minutes’ walk away, but Carmichael said that nobody had reported any prostitutes missing.

What the body was doing out there in the open was a mystery. It was a halfhearted place to leave a corpse, barely concealed in such a public place. It suggested a lack of planning by the person, or people, who’d murdered her. The murder had been badly thought through. Or at least, the disposal of the body had been.

“No decent leads, really. It’s enough to make you sick,” said Jones. People snickered.

“Enough of that,” said Bailey.

“Ha-very-ha,” said Carmichael.

“I said. Enough.”

A woman police officer entered the room. Everyone stopped for a second and looked at her. Though there was a women’s unit at Marylebone, they were only on admin tasks and social work. If a crime involved a kid you’d ask one of them in. Apart from that, they never came into the CID office.

The woman blushed. She was gawky-looking; a thin, angular face, and dark hair cut into a lank bob.

Bailey scowled and said, “You’re early. I’ll be with you in a minute, Miss…?”

“Tozer, sir.”

“We’re wasting our time there,” said Jones. “Going over the same ground. She was dumped, Wellington said.”

“Breen?” said Bailey.

“I don’t agree. Until we know where else to look, it’s our best bet.”

“Waste of time, I say.”

“What about the woman who discovered the body?” asked Bailey.

“It wasn’t a woman. It was a girl. A nanny. No name yet. We’re looking.”

The one thing the door-to-door inquiries had established beyond doubt was that the orange mattress that had lain over her had been there before she had been dumped. Several people had noticed it, lying against the wall on top of the pile of rubbish.

Breen picked up the forensics report and started to summarize it for everyone in the room. In it, Wellington said pretty much what he’d said the day before yesterday to Breen. She had been strangled. He estimated that she had died between 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. on the previous day—around fifteen hours before she was discovered. The fact that blood had settled on one side suggested she was not dumped until at least two hours after she was killed, which meant that she had not been dumped until 8 p.m. at the earliest on the previous day, by which time the alley would have been dark.

“Nobody’s going to dump a naked bird in broad daylight,” said Carmichael.

“She’s not just a naked bird,” blurted the woman constable. A broad West Country accent made her voice sound doubly out of place.

Everyone stared.

“No, you’re right. She’s a naked dead bird,” said Carmichael. People laughed. Tozer colored but didn’t lift her glare from Carmichael’s face.

“That’s sufficient, thank you,” said Bailey. “Wait outside please, Constable, until we’re ready.”

The woman left. Breen picked up from where he’d left off. There were no obvious signs of penetration, though Wellington hadn’t ruled out a sexual assault. He looked at the woman constable through the glass. She was standing outside, looking at her feet, embarrassed.

“Missing persons?” asked Bailey.

Jones answered. “No one there matching the victim’s description in the last two weeks.”

“A pretty, young, naked woman stirs the prurient instinct. With that kind of attention it is useful to make progress fast. OK, everyone. Back to work,” said Bailey with a sigh. “And Breen?”

“Yes, sir?”

“That woman constable outside has applied to join CID.”

There was an immediate hush in the room.

“Like it or not, she’s been made a TDC,” said Bailey. Temporary Detective Constable. She was a probationer.

“You’re joking?” said Carmichael.

“It is not my doing, you can be quite sure of that.”

“Hell’s teeth.”

“She will be on the murder squad with you and Jones, Breen.”

“Oooh,” came the catcalls. “Breen has got a girlfriend.”

“What?” said Carmichael. “We’ve got to work with a bloody plonk?”

“I should imagine Breen needs all the help he can get.”

“But she’s a woman, sir,” continued Carmichael.

“Well spotted, Carmichael.”

“So’s Breen,” said Jones.

“That will be all, thank you,” said Bailey, closing the door behind him.