by William Shaw
“Lightweight,” said Prosser.
“I don’t know how you do it.” Jones grinned. “And you were on brandy too.”
“Like I said, lightweight.”
Bailey emerged from his office. “Constable Jones. What time do you call this?”
“Sorry, sir. Won’t happen again.”
“Bad news about Sergeant Breen’s case, eh, sir?” said Prosser. “Turns out he was chasing the wrong suspect.”
“So it seems. Will there be any fallout?” asked Bailey.
Breen shook his head. “No, sir.”
“Sure?”
“Quite sure.” The man would be too embarrassed by what he’d done to make a complaint.
“That’s something.” Bailey nodded and returned to his room.
“Imagine tickling the pickle like that, on your dead wife’s dress,” said Jones. “That’s sick.”
“Feel big, do you, beating up old men?”
“He fell.” Jones smiled. “Not my fault.”
“You shouldn’t have treated him like that,” said Breen. “It was cruel. If I catch you doing something like that I’ll report you.”
“He’s an old wanker.”
“Language,” said Marilyn. Prosser looked straight at Breen and slowly shook his head.
Breen’s phone rang.
“Actually, I think what that old man did is quite romantic, in a way,” Marilyn said as she picked up the handset.
At ten he found Tozer in the canteen talking to two policewomen from A4, the women’s branch.
She smiled at him. “Where are we going?”
“I need to talk to you,” he said.
“Oooh,” said one of the girls.
“Who’s the lucky one?” said the other.
“Is it about my driving?” Tozer said.
“No. Nothing like that.”
“What she mean, driving?” said one of the girls.
“About what I said to Mrs. Broughton? No? What, then?”
“Not here,” he said.
“Oooh,” said the girls again.
“Shut up,” Tozer told them.
“Let’s go for a coffee somewhere else.”
On the way out of the back of the building, Breen heard someone shouting his name. Prosser pushed open the swing door and was coming after them.
“Go on,” he said to Tozer. “Get in the car.”
“What?” he said to Prosser.
Prosser grabbed him by his bad arm and said, quietly, “Lay off Jones. Nobody who bad-mouths their fellow officers in front of everybody like that belongs in the force.”
“Let go of my arm,” said Breen.
“Let go of my arm? You’re a bloody joke, Paddy Breen.”
Breen looked Prosser in the eye and said, “Jones beat up an old man. He didn’t fall. You know that.”
“This isn’t primary school, Paddy. Jones was doing his job. Which makes him twice the policeman you’ll ever be.” Prosser released his grip on Breen’s arm. “About time you started sticking up for coppers…”
Breen turned his back and started walking across the tarmac.
“Instead of just running away,” Prosser called.
“What did Prosser want?” said Tozer, when they were changing seats a hundred yards up Gloucester Road.
“I’ve been meaning to ask. Have you been taking my cigarettes?” Breen demanded.
“What?” she said, looking at him.
“Have you?”
“Bloody hell. Is that what you wanted to talk to me about?”
“No. But, have you?” he asked again.
“No.” Then: “Well, maybe a couple. I ran out. Sorry. I didn’t think you’d mind.”
“It’s OK. Just ask.”
She started the engine. “You mean you actually count the number of cigarettes you have left?” she said.
They went to the cafe in Paddington Rec and ordered a tea and a coffee.
“Anything else?” said the woman behind the counter.
“What’s that?” said Tozer, pointing at the counter. Cake 4d.
“Lemon drizzle.”
“Ooh,” said Tozer. “I’ll have one of them.” The woman picked it up with her fingers and put it on a white plate. The radio finished playing a song by Matt Monro.
“Let’s go somewhere quieter,” said Breen.
“What’s this about?”
They took their drinks to the bandstand, an old, rickety wooden hexagon whose roof kept off the rain. Breen sat down on the bare boards and crossed his legs. Tozer sat down a couple of feet away. “This is very mysterious,” she said. She pulled a chunk off the cake. “Want some?” she said, tucking her legs under her.
Breen shook his head. He hadn’t noticed her legs before. They were long and thin, but not in a bony way. He pulled his eyes away from them. “Why did you apply to CID?” he asked.
“It’s interesting work. It’s why I joined in the first place. Are you disappointed it wasn’t Rider?” she asked.
“More disappointed in myself. Just because things fit together doesn’t mean they’re right.”
“I was gutted,” she said. “I thought it was him.”
He looked at the thin rain falling down, making rings in the dark puddles around them. “Tell me about your sister,” he said.
She pursed her lips and looked away. After a minute she said, “Why should I?”
“Because if we’re working together on the death of a young girl, I’d like to know about her.”
“How did you know?”
“You change when you talk about her. Plus you talk about her in the past.”
“So?” She reached out for her tea, fumbled it and knocked the mug over. The brown pool dripped away quickly through the gaps in the worn boards.
“Alexandra Tozer. She was murdered in 1964.”
Quietly she said, “You got no business—”
“Yes I have.”
Tozer turned away. When she wasn’t looking, he found himself glancing back down at her legs again. “It has nothing to do with the job,” she said.
“Yes it does.” A wet pigeon landed on the bandstand handrail and cocked its head, eyeing Tozer’s cake. “She had been raped. She was found naked like our girl.”
Tozer chewed her lip. “Yes. And?”
“Is it why you have a go at senior officers like Carmichael, even though you’re only two years out of Hendon?”
“He called the victim ‘a naked bird.’” She took a makeup compact out of her bag; he watched her checking her eyes, one by one.
“I’m sorry for what happened to you,” he said.
“Yeah, yeah,” she answered.
“No. Really. It’s just…”
“Just what? Is it I’m just probationary again?”
“No. But it could complicate things.”
“My sister is a complication?”
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
“You had no right,” she said quietly.
“Yes, I did.”
“You went poking into my life.”
“I had to. You weren’t telling me about it. If it’s going to affect your ability to take a rational view of this case, I need to know.”
“Are you saying I’m irrational?”
“Maybe.”
“And you’re the really rational one?”
“That’s not the point.”
She stood up suddenly, snapping the compact shut. The pigeon, startled, flew off. “So what is the fucking point?”
He sat, shocked, as she turned away from him. “Where are you going?”
She didn’t answer, just walked down the wooden stairs onto the grass of the park and away through the drizzle.
“Tozer,” shouted Breen after her, standing, but she had disappeared down a curve in the path. “Constable Tozer,” he shouted again.
He picked up the two empty mugs and took them back to the cafe, then walked back to where Tozer had parked the car. The police car had gone.
He stood there, in the drizzle, waiting for her to return. He moved to the shelter of the porch of a nearby house, but the wind still blew the water into his clothes. After five minutes, with the rain starting to soak through his mac, it was clear she wasn’t going to come back.
The road was quiet. By the time he’d trudged to Maida Vale, water trickling into his shoes and he was soaked through. His brogues continued to fill with water as he walked. To try to hail a taxi he had to stand on the edge of the pavement in the downpour, holding his hand out as the cars splashed past.
Twelve
Been swimming?” said Marilyn.
“Give over.” He undid his shoelaces, peeled off his socks and draped them over the radiator.
“Protocol is protocol. I should have been told.” He could hear Bailey talking on the phone from his room.
“Have you seen Tozer?”
“This is not the first time this has happened,” Bailey was saying.
“No. Why? Have you lost her?”
“There is a right way to do that and a wrong way.” When Bailey lost his temper he spoke in clipped phrases. “That’s not an excuse. If I started ordering your officers around there would be anarchy. We have procedures. We have ways of doing things.”
“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” said Marilyn.
The office was still, people listening. Jones sat in front of a typewriter, forefingers poised over the untouched keys. Marilyn stood in the middle of the room, a mug of tea in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
“What’s going on?” asked Breen.
“This is chaos. This kind of thing will make us a laughingstock.”
Marilyn made a face. “Some raid going on in Montagu Square,” she said. “I just put the call in to him now from New Scotland Yard. By the sound of it, the boss hadn’t had a whiff of it.”
“He’d only do his nut about it because they weren’t doing the paperwork proper,” said Prosser.
Jones’s phone rang; he picked it up.
“Did you know anything about this?” Breen asked Marilyn.
“Not a peep,” Marilyn said. “Did you?”
“No.”
“Are you trying to suggest that there would have been a security risk if you’d told me about it? Are you?”
“You’re not serious? You’re having me on?” said Jones down the phone.
“What’s going on?”
Jones put the receiver down with a whoop. “Fuck-ing hell,” he said. “You’ll never guess.”
“What?”
“You’ll never guess who Pilcher’s mob are just pulling into Paddington Green.”
“Who?”
“Only John Lennon and his Nip bird.”
“Pilch? John Lennon?”
“What for?”
“Drugs. They just raided John Lennon for drugs. They’re on the way there now. That’s why the boss has his knickers twisted.”
“Drugs?”
“John fucking Lennon and that Yoko Boko bird.”
“Yoko Boko? What the fuck’s that?”
“Pilch has only gone and done it now. Like to hear him singing now.”
“Help! I need somebody. Help,” sang Prosser.
Big laugh.
“I’m down. I’m really down. I’m going down…”
More hilarity. Some of the younger officers were practically crying now.
Jones banged his desk and joined in, singing, “All you need is love.”
“What the hell’s that, Jones?” said Prosser.
“It’s a Beatles song, isn’t it?”
“Yeah but it ain’t funny, you moron.”
Jones looked stung.
Marilyn handed Breen a large brown envelope. “It’s the artist’s drawing of the girl,” she said. More quietly, she added, “If you want, we could go for a drink later. Some of the boys are going out.”
“I don’t think they want to go out for a drink with me that much.”
“We could go somewhere else then.”
“Oi, oi,” said Jones. “I thought you had a boyfriend, Marilyn.”
“I was just trying to cheer him up.”
“I know how you could put a smile on my face, Marilyn,” said one of the other men.
“You lot disgust me.”
The Evening News and the Evening Standard wouldn’t print a photograph of a dead body, but they would print a likeness. His best bet now to identify the girl was to ask the public. He had booked a police artist to create an image of the victim, but when he took the pastel drawing out of the envelope he stopped for a second and frowned.
He didn’t recognize the woman in the drawing at all. She was pale, bony, thin-faced, and seemed much older than the dead woman he’d seen at the scene of the crime. For a minute he stared at it, not sure if his brain was playing tricks on him.
“This isn’t her,” he said eventually.
“Let’s see,” said Marilyn. She held the drawing in one hand and Breen’s photo of the dead girl, the one he’d been using to show members of the public, in the other. “Not really. Is it?”
“Not in a million miles.”
“Has she, you know, changed? It’s been a couple of days now.”
“She’s in the fridge. Bodies don’t change. Not for a while at least.”
“I see what you mean.” She looked from one picture to the next.
“It’s like he’s drawn someone completely different.” The woman had a thin, aquiline nose.
Marilyn went back to her desk, picked up the phone and started making calls.
Breen went back to his desk and sat down. It was getting dark already. The days were getting shorter. He opened his drawer and picked out his pencils, then the pencil sharpener which he had inherited with the desk. It had been at the bottom of his filing cabinet, one of those large ones with a handle. Now he clamped it to the edge of the surface and started sharpening his pencils, one by one. It was satisfying, leaving each with a shining point. On an impulse he leaned forward and smelled the pencil sharpener. A sudden rich aroma of dry cedarwood.
“What are you doing?” said Jones.
Breen looked up sheepisly. “I was smelling the shavings.”
Jones looked at him. “Bloody hell.” He went back to his work. “Smelling the bloody shavings.”
“You’ll never believe it,” Marilyn called across the room. “He’s only gone and drawn the wrong body.” Heads looked up from their desks. “Two unidentifieds down at the university morgue. One numbered 97617, the other numbered 97611. Only, the last number looks just like a seven so they pulled out the wrong one for him. Weren’t his fault.”
“Pity’s sake.”
“They say they’re sorry.”
“Bet they do.” He looked at the drawing again. The fluid strokes, the oddly inappropriate flourish of an eyelash, the pale glisten on the dead lips. The care of the artist’s hand.
“And how soon can he do another one?”
She got back on the phone to him. “I’m trying to book him in now, but he won’t be able to do it until Monday.”
Breen groaned. “Can’t he do it Saturday?”
“He don’t work weekends,” she said.
That meant next Tuesday’s papers at the earliest, so the newspaper with her picture on it would not be on sale until over a week after the murder. Already opportunities were fading. The longer it took, the less chance there was of a result.
“How you doing with that women’s libber of yours, Paddy?” asked Jones. “Wouldn’t mind seeing her burning her bra.”
“You’re pathetic,” said Carmichael.
“Only joking,” said Jones.
“Nothing to see there. She’s flatter than a bloody snooker table,” said Carmichael.
“You should know,” said Jones.
“She’s nothing but trouble.”
“Didn’t she let you poke her, then?”
Marilyn cupped her hand over the handset and said, “Do you mind, boys? I’m trying to make a phone call.”
“Go on, Marilyn,” said Jones. “They’re wasted on your boyfriend.”
“They’d be wasted on you, mate.” Marilyn flicked a V-sign and carried on with the call.
“I heard Pilch didn’t find nothing,” said Jones. “That he had to take his own gear along, just so he could find something, know what I mean?”
Carmichael glared at him. “Who the hell told you that?”
Breen looked at Carmichael. “That true, John?”
Carmichael said, “Course it bloody isn’t. What are you saying, Paddy?”
Breen didn’t answer.
“Spit it out, Paddy. You’ll turn into Bailey if you don’t watch it.”
Bailey emerged from his office looking pale. “What’s that?”
“Nothing, sir.”
“Why have you got no shoes on, Sergeant Breen?” he asked. Breen looked down at his bare feet.
Prosser interrupted. “Sir. I got a question.”
Bailey sighed. “Yes?”
“Is it true we’re all getting women drivers now, Inspector?”
“What on earth are you talking about, Sergeant?” Bailey blinked.
Breen knew what Prosser was doing. “This is called sticking up for your fellow officers, is it?” he said quietly.
Prosser just winked back and smiled. “I must have got the wrong end of the stick,” said Prosser to Bailey. “Only I just heard that you were letting us have women drivers.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Sergeant Prosser. That would be against regulations.”
“My mistake, Inspector.”
After Bailey had gone back in his office, Prosser walked over to Breen’s desk and said, “Just kidding, Paddy. Keep your hair on. Though just think how angry he’d be if he found out.”
“What’s all that about women drivers, Prossy?” said Jones.
“Never you mind,” said Prosser.
Breen picked up the artist’s drawing again and looked at it. From the photograph, he started drawing the dead girl’s face with his sharp pencil, first the roundness of her face, then shading the curves of her skin. There was an ill-tempered silence in the CID room.
Somewhere out on the stairway, one of the old guys from the force was whistling some old music-hall song in one of those high, quavery tones, all vibrato and swoop. The voice broke into song: “You are my lily and my rose…”