She's Leaving Home

by William Shaw

  In one of the more recent ones she stood in the doorway of a tree house, arms on hips like Peter Pan, far above the ground. It was taken from below, her looking down triumphantly at the photographer. She was wearing a woolen check shirt and work boots. Near the back he found a recent one: a portrait of her gazing sullenly at the camera, clearly taken in the house they lived in now. He teased those last two out from their corners and put them in his pocket.

  “What’s that you’ve got?” said Block. “This is our crime scene, remember, not yours.”

  “I need a photo of the dead girl. I’ll send it back to you when I’ve had a copy made.”

  The sergeant grunted.

  Breen picked up some of the paperwork that had been scattered over the floor by the policemen. It was letters, mostly. He returned to the couch and began to leaf through them. One was from an insurance agent informing them that the contents of Fonthill House were now valued at £2,000 and saying that the premium was overdue. Several others were about Fonthill and came from a solicitor in Exeter and were addressed to Mrs. Sullivan. Flicking through them, he learned that they had bought the house just two years earlier for £11,000. There were no details of the mortgage; it appeared they had bought the property outright. He noted down the solicitor’s address.

  After another ten minutes looking through the jumbled correspondence, he said to Tozer, “I’m done here. Let’s take a look at the girl’s bedroom before they turn that upside down too.”

  They found it easily enough. So far the children’s bedrooms had remained unscathed. They were both at the back of the house. One was clearly the boy’s. It had photographs of Lamborghinis and Lotuses on the walls. An Exeter City Football Club calendar. A microscope. A dartboard. A crane made of Meccano. A half-built radio-control plane. A picture of Sitting Bull.

  Morwenna’s was next to it. There was a wardrobe full of children’s clothes, and a shelf full of books like The Little House on the Prairie and Black Beauty, but little else in the room that suggested a life lived into double figures. A purple gonk lay on the bed.

  He opened the chest of drawers. The top drawers were completely empty. Old clothes filled the lower ones, but there was nothing that interested Breen. Her bedside table had a drawer, but that too was empty. There had once been pictures on the walls torn out from teenage magazines, of the Beatles no doubt, and photographs pinned above her bed. All that remained were small marks in the paint where the Sellotape had been removed and the pins pulled out.

  “It’s like she’d already been erased,” Breen said.

  A little while later, they were in the kitchen, looking through the dresser drawers, when a shout came from the master bedroom: “Tell that girl to put the kettle on.”

  Breen opened a cupboard. Yesterday it had been full of packets of Rich Tea biscuits. Now it was empty.

  “She’s taken biscuits,” he said.

  “What?”

  “She’s taken packets of biscuits with her. Rich Tea. About a dozen.”

  “So? Maybe she likes Rich Tea biscuits.”

  “She could have left us some,” complained a copper.

  An officer came in and looked around. “Didn’t you hear? Put the tea on. He’ll be back with the sarnies any mo, speed he was driving.”

  Nobody moved. Eyes turned towards Tozer.

  “Fuck’s sake,” she muttered.

  “Got it,” shouted a copper, sticking his head around the hallway door. He was holding a piece of paper. “I got the registration number. Sir?”

  Block bowled downstairs and snatched the piece of paper from him.

  “Well, well. It looks like the Metropolitan Police aren’t useless at everything,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “One of your lot did Major Sullivan for going through a red light. Maroon Jaguar. Registration ALP 367G. Good work. Phone that in, Constable.” And he handed the piece of paper back to the constable. “Get it out on the phone, now.”

  “Can I see that?” said Breen.

  The constable looked at Block; the sergeant nodded. “Make sure we get it back, though.”

  The Jaguar had been pulled over after passing through a red light on Edgware Road. Breen noted the name of the officer who had issued the ticket.

  When Tozer emerged from the kitchen, a scowl on her face and a tray filled with cups of tea in her hands, Breen held the document up for her.

  “What is it?”

  “Look at the date.”

  She read it. 12 October 1968. It took a little while longer before the penny dropped.

  “Hell,” she said. “He was in London the day before his daughter was murdered.”

  Breen nodded.

  “That was a Saturday. He told us he went to London the week before, but didn’t say anything about being there on the twelfth,” said Tozer.

  “No. We only asked him where he was on the Sunday.”

  “She said he was back here.”

  “Maybe he was. Maybe he came back. It’s a fast car. He could have driven up there and back in a day.”

  “Was it him, then?” she asked.

  Across the room, a voice called, “Get a move on. That tea will be cold by the time it gets to us.”

  Nineteen

  That evening Tozer suggested they eat out at a carvery in Newton Abbot. “Can’t stand being around my dad too long. I don’t know how my mum does it. He’s like a ghost. Mum thinks his hearing’s going, but I just think he can’t be bothered to listen anymore.”

  The restaurant was mock half-timbered, with loudspeakers that wired Mantovani to every corner. The walls were covered with antique copper bed pans and horse brasses. Red-fringed lamps sat on each table. Theirs was table 11, according to the triangular plastic sign next to their cruet set.

  “Mum wants me to move back. I’m not sure I could take it. I do like it here, don’t get me wrong, but I think I’d go nuts.”

  The side of Breen’s head where the glass had cut him was throbbing.

  “You’re quiet.”

  He nodded. “I just feel tired.”

  “You should see a doctor.”

  “I did. He told me to rest.”

  Tozer lit a cigarette, looked around for a waiter and said, “I could kill a drink.” Breen pulled the two photographs he had of Morwenna out of his wallet and looked at them.

  “So,” said Tozer. “Why do you think she killed him?”

  “What if it wasn’t her?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “Yes, but it were, weren’t it?”

  An elderly pair of women sat silently spooning soup, one plump and the other thin, tipping their bowls away from themselves as they scooped up the last drops.

  “I mean, how can you kill a man you’ve lived with all those years? Like that too. From right close to him. I’ve never seen anything so disgusting in my life. Do you want to eat à la carte, or shall we go for the buffet?”

  Bored, she took the lid off the mustard pot and peered inside.

  “She must have really hated him,” she said.

  “If it was her…”

  “Helen bloody Tozer!” Their waitress finally appeared, dressed in a black shirt with a white pinny tied round her waist. Big pink plastic earrings dangled from her ears. “Look at you.”

  “Val? You work here?”

  “Almost two years. Silver service and everything. Oh, God. You look fab. You’re so bloody thin. You living in London now, your mum said. What’s that like? I heard it’s full of wogs…You having starters?”

  They ordered a carafe of red wine. “School friend,” Tozer said, when she’d disappeared to fetch it. “Well, not friend really. We were on the same hockey team.”

  “I could tell you some stories about Helen,” the waitress said to Breen, bringing the wine back to the table. “We were mad girls, weren’t we?”

  “Speak for yourself, Val.”

  She poured a drop for Breen to taste, then held out her left hand. “Look at this, Hel.”

  “Y
ou married? Who to?”

  “Guess!”

  “I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t.”

  “Course you do. Go on, guess.”

  “Kevvo?”

  “God, no. Not in a million years. He lives in a caravan now up Bovey Tracey after his mother kicked him out for stealing out of her purse. Honest.”

  “Dennis?”

  “Helen! Act serious.”

  “Who was that boy you were caught with by your dad? Rich?”

  Shaking head. “No way. Come on, Hel. It’s obvious.”

  Breen noticed a large man in a dinner suit trying to get the waitress’s attention.

  “Sorry. Um. I give up.”

  “Graham.”

  “Graham with the three fingers on one hand?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wasn’t he the one who used to peek over the shower stalls when we were changing for sports?”

  Val laughed. “Yeah.”

  “I never knew you were interested in him.”

  The fat man took a knife and hit a wineglass with it three times, ping ping ping.

  “I was too. Don’t you remember? I always thought he was nice.”

  “I remember you saying he gave you the creeps.”

  “Hel. I never did. I must have been joking. I was always nuts about him.”

  “Were you?”

  She pulled a purse out from her apron and opened it. “Here. That’s my little boy. Graham Junior.”

  “Excuse me, miss!”

  “Sorry, Hel. I’ll be right back.”

  The moment she was gone Tozer rolled her eyes. “We should have gone to Torquay. Less chance of bumping into anyone I know.”

  The two ladies who were eating together passed their table, returning from the carvery, one behind the other, with plates piled perilously high. Breen read the short typewritten menu the waitress had left on their table, trying to decide what to have.

  She returned with a notebook and pencil and stood there, scratching her head with the blunt end. “And what about you, Hel? Any romance in the air?” she asked, looking meaningfully from Breen to Tozer and back again.

  “We’re just down here on work.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “Who are those photos of?”

  “Just somebody,” said Breen.

  “Made up your mind yet?”

  When she returned with two hot plates so they could take them to the carvery, she said, “So, Hel. There’s no special man in your life, then?”

  “No.”

  The waitress pulled a sad face. “Don’t worry. It’ll happen. And who knows, you might strike it lucky like I did.”

  “Super,” said Tozer. She stuck out her tongue when the waitress turned her back.

  Breen was still there looking at the photographs when Tozer returned, plate piled with beef, Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes, mashed potatoes, cabbage, parsnips, turnips, coleslaw and fried onions.

  “You should eat something, sir. Keep your strength up.”

  “Where’s this taken?” He was looking at the photo of Morwenna standing at the doorway to her tree house.

  “You think it’s important?”

  “I don’t know what’s important right now. I can’t get anything into focus.”

  Tozer started eating, sawing through a thick lump of beef.

  “Actually it’s more like it’s all in focus, and I can’t sort out what’s important or not.”

  “Sounds like a trip.”

  “What?”

  “LSD. What the hippies take. We had a lecture about it the other day. You take a pill, you can’t tell what’s real and what’s not.”

  “Sounds terrifying.”

  “Some people like it, though. Mind-expanding.”

  Breen lifted up his bare plate. “If we’d not gone to tell them about their daughter, that man would still be alive.”

  Tozer slurped in a big chunk of beef and a bit of gravy trickled down her chin. “Oop,” she laughed, picking up her napkin and wiping her face. “Yes, but that doesn’t make it our fault.”

  Breen stood up with his plate.

  The man at the carvery wore a big white chef’s hat and held a newly lit cigarette. He put it in an ashtray on the next table while he drew off a thick slice of beef. The fat on it looked pale and waxy. Breen watched the knife carving slowly through the flesh.

  “I don’t really want meat.”

  “Sorry?”

  “No meat.”

  “No meat?”

  “That’s right. I’ll have vegetables.”

  “This is a carvery, sir.” There was a long pause. The man glared, put down the carving knife and fork and lifted up a spoon instead. “Potatoes, sir?”

  “Thanks.”

  “Carrots?”

  “OK.”

  “Cabbage?”

  “I’m fine, thank you.”

  “Nothing else? Nice bit of gravy?”

  “No thanks.”

  He sat down to find that their waitress had pulled up a chair and joined them at the table. “Ciggy break,” she said. “What’s London like?”

  They walked back to the farm in the dark. Tozer knew a way that cut across the back of the town, across small wooden footbridges, through damp marsh land and along the side of the river.

  Breen jumped as a startled bird clattered out of the reeds close to their feet, sending him into a puddle; the water went in over the top of his brogues. “Damn,” he said.

  Tozer laughed.

  He joined in. He was a little drunk. After the carafe of wine they had had brandies. The air was still and warm. The day had been a tough one, but he was oddly happy. It was funny, because when he first met Tozer, he had disliked her. She was too opinionated for a woman. Too awkward. These things seemed to matter less now. Was it since he had learned about her sister?

  “See up there?”

  In the darkness she pointed up the estuary. The tide was full. In the far distance, miles down towards the sea, lights reflected off the water.

  “The Beatles stayed there last year. In a hotel. When they were filming Magical Mystery Tour. Imagine that. The Beatles coming to this godforsaken backwater. Alexandra would have been in heaven.”

  “Did you see them?”

  He had an impulse to take her hand, but she had already started walking again, squelching through the mud. He was glad he hadn’t done it. It was the drink, like last time.

  “Me? I was in London, worse luck. Always in the wrong place at the wrong time, me.”

  The lights of the farmhouse were ahead of them now, a single bulb lighting the farmyard.

  Mr. and Mrs. Tozer were in bed by the time they got in, the house dark and silent. The kitchen was still warm, though. Tozer started opening cupboards. “I know they got some bottles stashed away somewhere,” she said. “Here. I found some Martini. Do you like that?”

  “Not for me.”

  “There’s a drop of whisky. Want that?”

  “A little, then.”

  Breen sat at the kitchen table and pulled out the three photos of the dead girl again: the morgue photograph, and the two he had taken from the house.

  She sat next to him, so close he could smell the alcohol and cigarettes on her breath. “Promise me one thing. You won’t let my mum and dad see those, will you?”

  He took off his left shoe and removed his sock. It was sodden.

  “Hang it on the range,” said Tozer.

  He sipped the whisky and pulled out his packet of cigarettes. In the last couple of days, he had taken to writing marks on the packet to remember how many he had smoked. Today there were four downward strokes and a fifth, crossing them out. He had already smoked five. He went to put them back in his jacket, then thought better of it.

  He smoked the sixth cigarette flicking through the pages of his notebook, glancing up occasionally to look at Tozer, sitting by the range, bare feet up on the surface warming her long legs. It tasted particularly good.

  When he came to the ad
dress of the solicitor he had found, he asked, “Do you have a phone book?”

  Twenty

  Breen sat up slowly in bed and looked out of a small, square window onto the estuary below. He slept later here than he ever did at home. His head felt thick and slow.

  A cold, bright day. Seagulls wheeling in a blue sky. A group of swans dawdling on the tide, a small red boat chugging against the current in the estuary below. The prettiness of the scene was unnerving. The domesticity reminded him of what he had never had. His good mood was gone. He wished he was back in London, amongst the gray of it. Sighing, he got up to dress. Mrs. Tozer had washed a shirt, a pair of underpants and a pair of socks for him, leaving them neatly folded and piled on a chair.

  He was shaving when he heard a car coming down the lane towards the house. He pulled the curtains to one side and saw it was a police car, slowly weaving through the puddles.

  When he came down to the kitchen there was a man sitting at the table drinking a cup of tea. Mrs. Tozer was cooking bacon.

  “Sergeant Breen?” said the man. He wore a suit that looked too small for him, and had a thin moustache on his upper lip.

  “Yes?”

  “Sergeant Sharman,” he said. “Plymouth CID.”

  “Sharman?”

  “A little birdie told me you were involved in a bit of drama. I thought I’d find out what was up.”

  Mr. Tozer was there too. His corduroy trousers were tucked into the thick woolen socks in which he stood. He must have just come in from the farm and left his boots outside.

  “You spoke to Sergeant Block?” asked Breen.

  Sharman shrugged. “You’re in the country now. Everybody knows everyone else’s business round here.”

  Mrs. Tozer put the bacon into a sandwich and put it down before Sergeant Sharman. She looked pale. “Fred says you’re here to investigate a dead girl,” she said to Breen. “Only, Helen had said you were down here looking into people who were making dirty films.”

  Sharman laughed loudly. “She said what?”

  “She said you were looking into a pornography ring.”

  “Round here?” said Sharman. “Making smut films?”

  “That’s what Hel said.”

  “First I heard of it, round here.”

  “She told you that because she didn’t want you to know about the case we were working on,” said Breen. “In case it upset you. I’m sorry.”