by William Shaw
‘Or boyfriend even?’
‘What? A pansy?’ said Jones.
‘I don’t know,’ said Breen. Until he could talk to the family there was so little they knew about him. He listened to Jones trying to organise the coppers.
‘Right,’ said Jones. ‘You lot take odd numbers.’
A groan. Breen stubbed out his first cigarette of the day on the pavement and walked up the narrow gravel path to the house next door, pushing past overgrown shrubs that invaded from either side. A man dressed in a cream jacket with a bright blue cravat stood at the door. ‘I haven’t slept,’ he said. ‘I kept thinking my house was going to fall down. Can you imagine?’
He was in his sixties, maybe older, thin and fragile. ‘They said it’s safe but I’m not terribly sure. Are you here to ask about the unpleasantness?’ His hair was dyed an unlikely shade of black. He looked Breen up and down. ‘I suppose you’d better come in.’
Breen waited in the living room while the man made a cup of tea, emerging from the kitchen finally with a porcelain cup and saucer that rattled as he walked. The man sat down at a small, ornate desk. Behind him, there was a thin crack in the striped wallpaper. Breen wondered if it was new.
‘I never really liked being semi-detached anyway,’ he said drily. ‘Of course, the council have offered me one of their little flats, but can you imagine? I don’t trust these skyscrapers. They’re always falling down all over the place, aren’t they? I’d rather be crushed under a pile of bricks, like poor Mr Pugh.’
‘Did you know him?’
‘Not in the slightest. He was really not my sort,’ said the man with a twitch of the lips. He had the sort of papery voice the old have when they smoke too many cigarettes.
‘Did he have a girlfriend?’
The man looked sour. ‘Billions. Do you have a fag, by any chance?’
Breen noticed he had a packet of Park Drives on the coffee table in front of him. An effeminate brand of cigarette, Breen thought. He felt in his pocket for his own; he bought one packet of ten every other morning from the newsagent before he caught the bus and used them to divide up his day. He didn’t like giving them away, but he handed one over. The man’s fingers were stained with nicotine. He leaned forward to light it and sucked hard, pulling in his cheeks.
‘Anyone regular? Anyone you’d recognise?’
The man made a face. ‘I’m not a bloody snoop, if that’s what you’re suggesting,’ he said, and blew smoke through his nose. ‘Besides, the girls never lasted long,’ he said. ‘He discarded them. You’d often hear some dreadful floozie weeping by the door. For pity’s sake. He wasn’t that good-looking.’
‘But no one you’d recognise?’
There was a patch of unshaved hair under his left nostril. ‘As I said, I’m not interested in young girls.’
‘But Mr Pugh was?’
The click of spittle in his mouth. ‘Clearly.’
‘There must have been someone who called regularly.’
The man turned his head away. ‘The truth is, I’m half blind. Can’t hardly see a thing. A bit of a handicap. I’d ask you to sit closer, but I’m not that keen on policemen either.’
‘Did you hear anything unusual last night?’
The gas could have been on for hours, seeping down into the house’s basement. It would have accumulated there slowly. The firemen had gone through the rubble looking for some kind of detonation mechanism. A match tied to an alarm clock striker, maybe, but they hadn’t found anything yet in all the mess. Though the doctor had not yet completed his report, Breen reckoned the man would have been dead for a few hours before the explosion.
‘Unusual?’ said the man, stretching all four syllables of the word as far as they could go. ‘Apart from a socking big bang?’ He curled his lip.
‘Before that, obviously.’
‘No. I don’t believe I did.’
‘I can’t see a car. Do you know if he had one?’
‘I don’t think Mr Pugh drove,’ he said. ‘He used taxis a lot. Used to keep them waiting outside for ages. Wasteful.’
‘What sort of time of day? Was he going out in the daytime or the evening?’
‘Never the morning. God, no. He didn’t keep what you might call conventional hours. And he’d be back all times of night. Sometimes in the small hours. The taxis would wake me up. I never complained about it, mind you. Never complain.’
There was a framed photograph of a young man on the wall behind where he sat. It was a studio portrait. Stood in a circle of light, a young man with brilliantined dark hair, a touch of make-up on the eyes.
‘Is that you?’
The same small smile.
‘You were an actor?’
He turned his head slightly sideways, as if inviting Breen to recognise him. Breen didn’t.
‘Yes. I am an actor,’ he said, after a pause. Emphasis on ‘am’.
‘Have you been in anything I’d have seen?’
The man scowled, tugged at an ear lobe. ‘You’re far too young to have seen me in anything. You haven’t drunk your tea. Is there anything wrong with it?’
Breen said, ‘You didn’t like Mr Pugh very much, did you?’
‘Is that part of Harold Wilson’s new Britain? It’s now compulsory to like your neighbour, is it? No. I didn’t like him, as a matter of fact. Him and all his women. Sexual liberation. The permissive society. I don’t approve of it, really.’ He patted down his jacket pocket as if looking for something.
‘May I have a quick look in your garden?’
‘The young think they can have everything they bloody want these days. Why should they? If I couldn’t have it, why should they?’
‘The garden,’ said Breen.
‘If you must,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid I’ve neglected it rather.’
He let him out of the French window at the back of the living room. It was overgrown. The grass was long and dead-looking. Brambles were starting to creep across what had been a lawn. The beech hedge that surrounded his garden had become straggly. There were gaps where you could see the houses behind. They were big, three-storey Victorian homes, but much less grand than the mansions on Marlborough Place.
By the back door of what must have been his kitchen lay a pile of rusting tin cans that he must have tossed there. They were all the same. Campbell’s Cream of Tomato Soup.
‘There,’ the man said when Breen came back inside, wiping his feet. ‘Now, have you got enough?’
Outside Pugh’s house, a group of kids gathered. One was snapping away with a camera.
‘You a copper, mister?’
Breen ignored them.
‘I heard he was sliced up by gangsters. They cut off his thingy.’
A girl with a big knitted scarf wound around her head giggled.
‘That’s what they said.’
‘Who said?’ said Breen.
‘Everyone. Is it true?’
‘No,’ said Breen.
‘You’re a liar,’ said the boy.
Breen pushed the gate open and walked around the rubble to the back garden of the dead man’s house. A garden without a home. Broken glass and wood lay strewn on what had been a large gravel rectangle with a small Japanese-looking shrine, sitting in the middle. Maybe Indian. At the rear grew a line of bamboo, too tall to see over.
He could hear someone moving in the garden beyond.
Breen looked around. Seeing the wooden kitchen chair, he lifted it across the gravel and placed it next to the bamboo, then stood on it, parting the stiff green stems.
There was a woman, head tied up in a bright scarf. She was thin, boyish, with a long floral skirt, a white cotton blouse and a small waistcoat. She was pinning up a line of clothes. A line of greyish-white nappies, each one clipped to the next.
Behind her, a makeshift vegetable garden, a row of beans blackened from the frosts.
He watched the woman for a while. It was November and the air was cold, but she wore nothing on her feet. She picked each nappy from a
large wicker basket, then took another pin from a cloth bag tied around her waist.
As she leaned towards the basket, Breen saw the outline of a breast, pale, smooth and soft. A dark nipple. Under her white cotton blouse, she was bra-less. The glimpse of her breast was gone in a second. She stood and pinned another half-dozen terry cloths to the line. He stayed a little too long, watching.
Pale skin under white cotton.
‘What you looking at?’
It was Jones.
How long had he been standing there, watching her? He flushed and the woman looked up, startled at the sound of voices. Breen jumped down from the chair, ashamed of himself.
‘I was trying to figure out if anyone could have seen into the house.’
‘Let me have a look,’ said Jones, standing on the chair.
Breen stood there, wondering if he was watching the young woman too.
‘I don’t think so. This stuff is far too thick to see through properly,’ he said.
EIGHT
Monday was wet. Rain swilled rubbish down the gutters to block the drains. It was a mistake catching the bus this morning instead of the Underground. Roads flooded. Traffic crawled down Hackney Road.
The weekend had turned up nothing much. Most people in the street knew Francis Pugh by sight. Not one of them knew him in person. The Chief Inspector had visited his father; Bailey had been given an appointment to discuss the case with him later today.
A team of policemen had spent Sunday picking through the rubble, making a small pile of possessions. Records, a nail-clipper, a set of croquet mallets, some saucepans. Breen asked if they had found an address book, or anything that might tell them who Pugh’s friends were, but nothing useful had been retrieved. Now the rain was turning the site to mud.
Nobody seemed to know who the victim’s friends had been. Nobody had come forward to offer any useful information at all. Breen was in the dark.
When he finally got off a bus on Wigmore Street, a paving stone rocked under his feet, sending a spray of water across his legs and into the shoes of a pretty girl in a lime-green miniskirt. She glared at him before strutting off eastwards.
Breen ducked into the doorway of a Radio Rentals shop for shelter. The sign in the window said: ‘Watch both channels every evening. And in COLOUR.’
By the time he made it into the CID office he was dripping and late. His bones felt cold.
‘Hello, Paddy. Someone don’t like you,’ said Constable Jones. He was there with Constable Tozer who was gnawing on a Chelsea bun.
‘What?’
‘A little love letter.’ Jones nodded towards Breen’s typewriter. There was a piece of paper in it.
‘Read it,’ said Tozer, watching him closely. ‘It’s not very pretty.’
Breen shook the rain from his hair and walked towards his desk. Typed in capitals:
YOU ARE A DEAD MAN YOU CUNT
Breen looked at it for a second, then pulled it out of the machine. The letters had been thumped into the paper. ‘Who saw this?’
‘Marilyn. When she came in,’ said Jones. ‘She told me about it.’
Breen looked at the typewriter. The caps lock was still on. ‘She tell anyone else?’ he asked.
‘Dunno,’ said Jones. His navy tie, sticking out of his knitted jumper, was stained with that morning’s egg. He was wearing an ‘I’m Backing Britain’ badge.
‘Can I ask you a favour?’
‘Course.’
‘Don’t mention this to anyone, OK?’
Jones frowned. ‘But…’
Breen asked, ‘Can you do that?’ It was not easy asking favours of Jones. Breen didn’t like him: his cockiness, his eagerness to get into fights, his ill-matched clothes.
Tozer looked cautiously at Breen. Jones smiled, embarrassed. ‘I mean, no one likes you that much. But I don’t know no one who could be bothered to actually hate you,’ he said.
‘It’s just a joke, I expect.’
‘Funny joke,’ said Tozer.
Breen said, ‘All I’m saying is, can we not talk about it?’
‘I don’t mind,’ said Jones, and went and sat at his desk.
Breen opened his drawer and picked out a brown envelope and added it to the last one he’d received:
ILL BLOODY CUT YOU FOR WHAT YOU BLOODY DONE
‘Christ,’ said Tozer, quietly. ‘When did you get that?’
‘Shh,’ said Breen. Inspector Bailey was making one of his rare forays outside his office. He looked at Tozer, paused, raised an eyebrow.
‘My car’s outside,’ he said to Breen. ‘Downstairs in five minutes.’
Breen placed the letters back in the drawer together and closed it, then called the police surgeon to ask when the post-mortem on the victim would be completed.
Breen sat in the back of Bailey’s Cortina. A uniformed copper who looked even older than the inspector was driving.
‘I have met Rhodri Pugh on occasion’ Bailey said. ‘He is on the Home Affairs Select Committee. A decent enough fellow, considering…’
Considering.
‘It is advisable for the police not to become too involved in politics, whatever we may think privately. We are public servants.’
Considering he was a Labour politician, he meant. Bailey was from Harold Macmillan’s generation. The straight-backed men. To them, Harold Wilson and his Party were a conniving bunch of Bolsheviks. But he would do whatever they required.
‘However, this lot seem to be behind the police. At least the working classes understand the need for law and order.’
‘Is he aware the body was mutilated?’ Breen asked him.
‘I believe so. He identified his son’s body on Saturday after they’d pulled it out of the building, and he had a meeting with the Chief Inspector yesterday. I understand it was distressing. The body was a bit of a mess. And incinerated, I believe. I was briefed by the Inspector earlier this morning. He stressed how important this case was. That we should above all respect the wishes of the family.’
Breen understood. The police were not natural Labour fans, but the new Home Secretary was a populist. In the year he’d been in office he had been eager to show himself a law-and-order man, pushing through anti-immigration legislation, toughening his department’s stance on cannabis and other drugs. Law-and-order men were always popular with the top brass. He was one of us.
‘The wishes of the family?’ said Breen, smiling slightly.
‘His mother died of cancer two years ago. No brothers or sisters.’
‘So the minister is the family?’
‘In a manner of speaking, yes.’
‘I see.’
Bailey sighed. ‘Don’t pretend you’re somehow above all this, Paddy. Cynicism is not a sign of intelligence. They are our masters. We are there to serve them.’
They pulled up outside an office in Petty France. ‘Thirty minutes,’ Bailey told the driver, who grunted and reached for a packed lunch, wrapped in brown paper. A uniformed officer gave Bailey a little salute as they walked in through the door.
They waited in the lobby of the government office, sitting in straight-backed leather chairs as men in suits came and went. Young civil servants with Eton accents talked loudly and importantly as they marched through the lobby, bundles of paper under their arms.
After about twenty minutes a tall man in a pinstriped suit with wide lapels appeared. ‘Inspector Bailey?’ he said.
Bailey said, ‘And you are?’
‘My name is Tarpey. I am a colleague of Mr Pugh’s. As this is a personal matter, Mr Pugh thinks it best that we meet somewhere… less formal.’
And before either of them had a chance to answer, he marched out of the building. Bailey and Breen followed behind.
The restaurant was a short walk away, on the corner of Buckingham Gate. The minister, a round-faced man with wire glasses, was sitting in a booth with a coffee pot and a toast rack in front of him, next to a pile of ministerial documents he was looking at.
‘Inspector
Bailey,’ announced Tarpey.
The man looked up from his papers. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Inspector. Please, sit down.’ He spoke in a Welsh accent.
‘I’m very sorry for your loss, sir,’ said Bailey, taking the seat opposite. Breen was not offered a chair. He wondered if he should pull one up from another table.
Apart from Rhodri Pugh, the restaurant was empty, tables all set for lunch. The minister looked pale and tired. ‘I thought it best I should contact you to offer my full cooperation with the investigation,’ he said.
Breen recognised him vaguely from the news, but he seemed older in real life. His eyes were rheumy, perhaps from tears. His son was dead, but he was back at work. Things must go on.
‘Very thoughtful, sir,’ said Bailey. ‘We will do all in our power to apprehend the responsible person. Or persons.’
‘Persons?’ said Pugh. ‘More than one, you think?’
‘Too early to say, sir.’
‘Right.’
The restaurant was dark, lit by lamps around the walls. ‘Coffee?’ he offered.
‘Thank you,’ said Bailey.
Tarpey, who had sat next to Pugh in the booth, now leaned forward and poured Bailey a cup. The milk jug looked tiny in his big, bony hands.
Rhodri Pugh cleared his throat and said, ‘See, I was not very close to my son.’ He talked in a quiet voice; a man who was used to silencing a room by whispering rather than shouting.
‘My son…’ he said. His eyes teared up a little. ‘He was a bright boy. I think we probably failed him.’
‘Sir?’ said Bailey.
Tarpey remained palely expressionless. Breen wondered if he was a civil servant of some kind. Or a Party worker. As the minister talked, the man glanced at Breen, still standing, looked him in the eye, gave him a small smile.
‘A bit of a black sheep, really,’ Pugh was saying. ‘Somewhat of a disappointment, I suppose. When I was younger I worked as an electrician. You had to have a trade. My son had nothing like that to give him the discipline one needs. My fault, I suppose. Had it too easy.’
A ‘disappointment’, thought Breen. A hard thing to say about your own son.
‘Did he work?’ asked Bailey.