A Song for the Brokenhearted

by William Shaw

  ‘You shouldn’t have been up and about, anyway. You’re a naughty boy. You have to stay still. Mrs Tozer? See this young man stays inside.’

  Helen’s mother, still at the bedroom doorway, nodded.

  ‘Have I messed it up?’ said Breen, feeling for a cigarette on the bedside table with his good hand. ‘Will it still heal OK?’

  ‘I’m confining you to quarters. No getting up and wandering around. Don’t want a wonky arm, do you?’

  Breen lit the cigarette, not offering one to the doctor. He was going to go mad, just lying here, he thought. In this small room. This room particularly.

  They had put the family radio in his bedroom. When the doctor had gone, Breen listened to the news. The government was calling up reservists to put down some rioting in Ulster. Someone reckoned Soviets were planning to send bacteria to Venus to generate oxygen in the atmosphere there. In London, they were selecting jurors for the Kray brothers’ trial at the Old Bailey.

  Just the thought of London made him homesick.

  He switched from FM to VHF and twisted the tuner until he came across a police frequency. On it, you could only ever hear half of the conversation.

  A lorry broken down on a hill somewhere. A pensioner complaining about a tramp stealing vegetables from an allotment. Ridiculous country crimes.

  Breen switched off the radio and looked at the cracks in the ceiling again.

  Nothing happened around here. He should not have agreed to come.

  Around five, Mrs Tozer returned with shepherd’s pie and cabbage and white bread. She refused to believe that Breen did not like tea, so there was a cup and saucer there too. He ate out of boredom.

  Helen Tozer came up at around eight, smelling of the milking shed.

  ‘You’ve got gravy on your face,’ she said, and sat on the bed next to him.

  ‘Where?’ he asked.

  She pulled a checked cotton hanky out of her jeans pocket and dabbed his chin.

  ‘You look tired,’ he said.

  ‘Another cow’s gone dry. And we’re going to have to buy hay in.’

  She put her handkerchief back into her pocket. They could hear her mother in the kitchen, her father in the front room, telly on loud. The Dick Emery Show.

  ‘My bloody dad didn’t grow enough fodder for the winter. I don’t know what got into him. He never used to be like this.’

  ‘And you? Are you OK?’ he asked.

  Helen Tozer looked different down here on the farm. In London she’d worn miniskirts and mascara. Here she wore loose jeans and jumpers that unravelled at the elbows. It wasn’t just the way she looked, though. She was as lost here as he was.

  She shrugged. ‘Not really.’

  He enjoyed her closeness now, her body warm against his. It didn’t happen often.

  They had met in London when she was a policewoman, before she had come back down here to look after the farm. They were never lovers. Not properly. They had had sex just once in his under-heated flat in Stoke Newington. Both of them drunk. He had hoped for another chance, but it had never come. When he came down to Devon to recuperate from the gunshot wound, he had imagined she would be looking after him. Instead she was out all day, working. Someone had to run the farm, didn’t they? Her parents only had the one child now.

  ‘Stay for a while,’ Breen said, reaching out to take her hand. The skin was rougher. She pulled the hand away and rolled off the small bed onto her feet.

  ‘I’m going to have a bath, then I’m going to bed,’ she said. ‘I’m up at five.’

  She picked up his tray, but instead of leaving she stood by the door, watching him.

  ‘What?’ he said, irritated at the way she was keeping her distance from him.

  ‘Dad saw you,’ she said, ‘by the spinney.’

  The spinney where Alexandra’s body had been found. Down the hill a little way from the farmhouse, the piece of land that was too steep, too awkward to plough. He tried to read the flat expression on Helen’s face.

  ‘Was he upset?’

  ‘He doesn’t like people going there.’

  ‘I was curious, that’s all,’ said Breen. ‘I wanted to see… I get bloody bored, just lying here.’

  ‘Well, you’re going to bloody well have to lie there now, aren’t you?’ she said, and pulled the door behind her.

  Murdered people never really go away. They stay with you. If you never discover why they were killed, or who the killer was, it’s worse. As a policeman he knew this from the families and friends of victims that he’d met over the years. Now, living here, the dead girl was all around him in this house.

  From downstairs came the noise of washing-up. Clattering plates.

  He turned the radio back on. ‘Gamma One. Can’t hear you, over.’

  Something about someone pilfering eggs from a kitchen window ledge now.

  The hills here made communication hard. He decided he didn’t like hills. He longed for the grey flatness of London. The possibility that something was going to happen.

  When he had worked with her back in London, Helen Tozer had never wanted to tell Breen about her sister. Breen had insisted. Women were more emotional than men, weren’t they? Less rational. It would affect her work. Wanting to understand why she had joined the police in the first place, he had insisted she talk about it. She had resented having to tell him about Alexandra, but in a way, that had been the start of their friendship.

  He lay awake with it all going around in his head still.

  Had the dead girl been left there? He assumed so. She had been subjected to a violent assault, he knew that. No one would have been able to murder a schoolgirl in the middle of a farm without someone noticing, would they? So why would you go to the trouble of dumping the body back here? There had to be a reason for that. Somebody wanted the body found. Yes. Did it mean that the killer was someone who knew the farm well? The local police would have been through everything, of course. There would be reports.

  He tried rolling over onto his left side but the pain was too bad, so he sat up straight instead. This was stupid, lying awake like this. There was nothing he could do, anyway. He should try and sleep. Or think of something else at least.

  She’d told him then that her sister had been raped, beaten and knifed. A brutal murder. Sometimes killers got away with it, he knew that. But how good had the investigation been?

  It was only when the noise of Helen going out to do the morning milking in the winter darkness woke him, at around five in the morning, that he realised he had slept at all.

  A little after eight the sun rose behind the curtains and Mrs Tozer came in with a tray of bacon and sausages and took away his ashtray.

  He tried reading his paperback, but did not enjoy it any more than he had yesterday. Got to his feet and pulled a chair to the window. Helen had brought him a pad and some pencils; she knew he liked drawing. But whenever he tried to draw the scene he saw through the small, square window, his efforts looked childlike. It was hardly his fault. The cosy round hills and the fat hedgerows looked like a child’s drawing to start with. He preferred drawing faces. People. Things.

  He got back into bed. Yawned. Dozed.

  Later, in the morning, Hibou came and sat with him for a while. Her break from the fields.

  ‘Did Helen tell you to come?’ Breen asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, blushing. There were an awkward few seconds, then she said, ‘I don’t mind.’

  In London Hibou had looked fragile and feminine. A runaway, she had been taken in by squatters who had fed her drugs and used her for sex. She had been timorous and shy. Here in the countryside she was still strikingly pretty in a pink-skinned, English way, even in her dungarees and Land Girl headscarf. She was more confident, more muscular. The farm seemed to suit her. She was coming alive.

  ‘We got a hundred and two gallons of milk this morning, Hel said.’

  Breen tried to sound interested. ‘Is that good?’

  ‘Better. Was only getting seventy last wee
k. We should be getting twice that, though. They say cows like music.’

  ‘Are you going to sing for them?’

  She snorted. ‘That’d curdle it. I asked Mrs T if I could try to make some butter from it. Eggs are down, though. Don’t know why.’

  ‘Could somebody be stealing them?’

  She curled her lip. ‘Round here? Doubt it. Why?’

  ‘Just something I heard on the radio. You like it here, don’t you?’

  Hibou nodded. ‘I think I’m good at it,’ she said. ‘It’s looking after things.’

  Hibou was Helen’s project. Helen had brought her here from London so she could have a place to quit heroin. She was the same age Alexandra would have been when she died. Breen had always assumed that was why Helen had wanted to save her.

  ‘I think everyone should grow food,’ said Hibou. ‘It’s about being connected.’

  ‘Connected to what?’ said Breen.

  ‘The land. Nature. Everything. The Earth.’

  Breen turned away.

  ‘You’re laughing at me,’ she said.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Don’t you feel it? Back when we all lived on the land, we would all have been connected to the Earth energy and to the moon and stars.’

  ‘The Earth energy?’

  ‘You don’t feel it because you don’t want to be connected to nothing but yourself.’

  ‘I thought Helen had sent you in here to cheer me up?’

  ‘You think of something to talk about then,’ she said.

  ‘Do you think Helen is happy here?’

  ‘Why wouldn’t she be? I was asking her if maybe I could plant a biodynamic vegetable plot in the spring. And try and sell them at the market.’

  ‘Biodynamic vegetables?’ asked Breen.

  ‘You know. Health foods. Grown without chemicals. Planted according to the moon’s cycles. More natural.’

  Breen looked at her. ‘They’ve been farming on this land for generations,’ he said. ‘They don’t want someone coming along and telling them how to do it, especially not someone with a head filled with hippie… stuff.’

  She reached up and undid her headscarf, letting her long blonde hair down. ‘Actually, Mr Tozer says it’s fine,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘He’s going to dig over a quarter-acre behind the house for me to use. For your information.’

  ‘He is?’

  Mr Tozer had rarely shifted from the living room for weeks. ‘Old man Tozer is digging over a place for you to grow funny vegetables?’

  She had a so-there smile on her face. ‘Biodynamic,’ she said. ‘Not funny.’

  Breen was silent.

  ‘Anyway, the other thing is, Helen says to say we should all go out on Friday night as a treat,’ she said. ‘If you’re well enough.’

  ‘Go out? Around here?’ A small market town a couple of miles away with a few rough pubs and a cider bar, and that was it.

  ‘It’d be fun. Get your mind off it.’

  ‘Off what?’

  ‘Whatever it is that’s making you so grumpy.’

  ‘Will you be OK? Going to the pub?’

  ‘I’m not a nun,’ she said. ‘It’s my birthday Saturday, actually. So it’s kind of a celebration. You think Helen would lend me something to wear?’

  ‘Do you still want it? You know… the drugs?’

  She shook her head. ‘Not really. Only if there’s nothing to do,’ she said, looking away. ‘It’s why I like working.’

  ‘Your parents will be thinking of you,’ he said. ‘I would imagine birthdays are hard for them, not knowing where you are.’

  ‘Hel keeps telling me I should write a letter to them.’

  ‘You should. Are you going to tell them where you were?’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Do you miss them?’

  She blushed. ‘No,’ she said, but looked down at her hands as she spoke.

  ‘Everyone misses their parents,’ Breen said. His father had died last year.

  ‘Not me.’ She looked young again; less of a woman and more of a teenage girl.

  He rolled over. ‘I’m tired,’ he said. ‘I want to sleep now.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’ She stood. ‘I only came here to talk to you because I was asked.’

  ‘You’re going to be seventeen?’

  She nodded. ‘I know. So old,’ she said, and closed the door behind her.

  That night, he left the window open, even though it made the room cold. He lay awake, listening to hooting owls and the night trains. At one point he thought he heard someone moving outside, and got up and stood by the window, shivering in the chilly air as he peered into the blackness, but could see no one out there.

  He dressed himself carefully, put on a vest and a woollen shirt of Mr Tozer’s and went downstairs.

  ‘Where are you going?’ said Mrs T.

  ‘Just stretching my legs.’

  ‘You stay out of trouble this time,’ she said, but she smiled at him.

  There was a long wooden henhouse roughly in the middle of the hen enclosure. As he approached, the birds came towards him, expecting food.

  He squatted down and looked at them. Strange creatures, with their lizard eyes and mechanical movements. There was a gate, but it wasn’t kept locked. It would be easy to sneak in after dark to steal eggs, he reckoned.

  He pulled back the latch and moved gingerly into the pen. The chickens clucked and cackled around him, pecking the dirt where the grass had been worn away. He walked towards the henhouse. There was a ramp leading up to a small door. He squatted down and peered in, and was hit by an acrid smell. He retreated, blinking, and bent to examine the patches of bare soil. Was that a footprint? He lowered his face towards the ground to look as closely as he could. It was too large to be Hibou’s. It could be one of Mr Tozer’s, though.

  On the way out he opened and closed the latch a few times, listening for the noise it made.

  What was he doing? This was stupid. He was losing his mind, out here.

  The chickens watched him, unconcerned.

  TWO

  On Friday, Hibou opened the door at the bottom of the stairs and silence fell in the kitchen.

  ‘What? Do I look daft?’ She looked down at what she was wearing.

  Nobody had seen her out of overalls or jeans since she’d been at the farm. Now she was wearing a short blue corduroy skirt and a suede jacket, open over a pale turtleneck jumper.

  Mrs Tozer had been mixing a batter. She paused, bowl under one arm.

  ‘They fit really well, don’t they?’

  Old man Tozer made a strange noise: half splutter, half groan.

  ‘Why is nobody saying nothing? Hel? You said I could borrow your clothes.’

  A dollop of batter splodged onto the floor. Still nobody moved.

  ‘Those aren’t my clothes,’ said Helen quietly.

  ‘Oh. But I thought you said…’

  Breen looked at Helen’s parents, both open-mouthed.

  ‘They were in Paddy’s room,’ Hibou explained. ‘And I thought they were yours… I’m sorry.’ She turned to head back up the stairs. ‘I’ll go and change them.’

  ‘I never threw them away,’ said Mrs Tozer.

  ‘No,’ said old man Tozer, finding his voice. ‘It’s OK.’

  Everybody turned to look at him now. His eyes seemed redder than usual.

  ‘I thought they were a bit, you know, bigger…’ said Hibou.

  The clothes fitted Hibou well. They made her look much older than her seventeen years; much more sophisticated. Helen was skinny. Breen looked at the swell beneath the suede jacket. Her sister, Alexandra, must have been larger than her, too.

  ‘You look lovely, my dear,’ said Mrs Tozer, wooden spoon starting to move again.

  And Hibou beamed and shook out her blonde hair. Briefly, Breen caught Helen’s eye. She looked away, unnerved.

  The spoon clacked against the side of the pudding basin.

  ‘Don’t look,’ sa
id Helen. ‘It’s my ex.’

  ‘Where?’ said Hibou.

  ‘In the lounge bar. By the window. Oh, God, no.’

  The public bar was standing room only, air damp from wet clothes and thick with smoke. There was a jukebox playing Elvis Presley.

  ‘The one with the little moustache? He looks OK,’ said Hibou, peering past the bar into the room beyond.

  ‘You are blind.’

  Breen was having trouble protecting his arm from the jostling around him in the Union Inn. Neither he nor Hibou was drinking. In a pub like this it wouldn’t have mattered she was underage, but she didn’t like alcohol, she said. He was still on antibiotics.

  ‘You really went out with him?’ Hibou said. ‘When was that?’

  ‘Yonks ago. We were engaged for a bit. Almost married.’

  ‘Never? You? I can’t imagine that.’

  ‘That was the problem. Neither could I.’

  Breen was drinking Coca-Cola. Helen was on rum-and-black.

  ‘See? This is why I hate being back here. This place is too small.’

  ‘In London I felt lost,’ Hibou said. ‘People are friendly here, I think.’

  ‘’Cause you’re in a miniskirt,’ said Helen. ‘That’s why they’re friendly.’

  ‘Don’t,’ said Hibou, but she smiled all the same.

  It was true, though. Hibou exuded a kind of obvious sexiness that Helen didn’t have. People turned their heads. Men stared at the bare legs, then upwards to the rest of her. Breen wondered if it had been like that with Alexandra, too. He also wondered how aware Hibou was of the effect she had. A little too aware, perhaps.

  ‘I’d have hundreds of children if I was married. Would you have kids, Hel?’

  Helen shuddered. ‘I don’t ruddy think so.’

  ‘Why not?’

  A young man with sideburns approached. Through a straggle of long hair, Breen noticed a tattoo of a swallow on his neck. He leaned forward, towards Hibou, putting his hand on the wall behind her. ‘You new around here?’

  ‘She’s helping us out on the farm,’ said Helen. ‘Leave her alone, Spud.’

  ‘I like shy, me. You want to be a farmer, do you, darling? I’m a farmer.’

  Helen said to Breen quietly, ‘You OK?’