by William Shaw
‘She’s just young. And pretty. And full of hope.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘Do I sound fed up?’
‘What if she gets back into drugs? People do, you know. Your parents trust her. They’re taking her in as if, I don’t know, she’s their daughter…’
She took a cigarette from his packet without asking him. ‘You think we should chuck her back out?’
‘That’s not what I’m saying. I just don’t know anything about her.’
‘I have to go.’
‘Stay and talk.’
‘Can’t,’ she said.
‘Are you happy your dad is getting on so well with her?’
‘You noticed then?’
‘Hard to miss.’
‘Why wouldn’t I be?’ she said, and closed the door behind her.
He was woken the next morning by someone shaking him gently. It was Sunday, he remembered. He was deep in sleep. He never slept like this, but the sheets always seemed clean in this house and smelt of the air they were dried in and the lavender Mrs Tozer sewed into little packets and left in the cupboards. Like some weird storybook spell was being cast.
It was Helen doing the shaking. ‘Morning,’ she said. She was on the edge of the bed next to him.
He was blinking, struggling to wake. She looked different. ‘What time is it?’
‘Half eight.’
She was in a dress. Breen sat up. Something was going on. She never wore dresses, even in London. Miniskirts and tops, but never dresses. Before he could ask, she said, ‘I’m taking Mum and Dad to church.’
‘I didn’t think they went any more.’
‘I thought they should. I said I’d give them a lift.’
He looked at her, suspicious. ‘You told them to go to church? I didn’t think you believed in anything.’
‘It’s nothing to do with God. It’s just trying to get things back to normal again. Like it used to be.’ She reached out and brushed hair out of his eyes. ‘You need a haircut,’ she said.
Breen nodded.
She stood. ‘And besides, I’ve arranged for you to have a visitor.’
‘A visitor?’
‘You’re bored. It’s not good for you; I can see that. But it’s someone I’d rather Mum and Dad didn’t meet. So I thought I’d get them out of the way.’
A voice from the kitchen: ‘Hel, we’re ready. Are you coming?’
She stood and blew him a kiss.
‘Who?’
She raised her fingers to her lips. He rolled over and lay there, awake now.
Eventually he dressed and went downstairs. The Tozers had already gone. Hibou was finishing the washing-up. He stood in the warm kitchen and stretched. His shoulder was feeling a little looser this morning. The ache from his fall seemed to be subsiding.
Hibou dried her hands on one of the cloths on the stove and reached down one of Mr Tozer’s coats from the back of the kitchen door.
‘I thought I’d go for a walk,’ said Hibou.
‘Not going to church like the rest of them?’
‘I don’t believe in the Abrahamic god,’ said Hibou. ‘I’m a pantheist.’
‘You’re sixteen,’ said Breen.
‘Seventeen.’
‘Bully for you,’ said Breen. ‘Did Helen tell you to go out?’
‘No. I just fancy it,’ she said. ‘Helen says there’s avocets on the river.’
‘What?’ said Breen.
‘Birds,’ said Hibou, thumb already on the latch of the back door. ‘I made you sandwiches,’ she said. ‘Cheese and onion. Don’t forget them.’
‘For me?’
‘Helen said I should do it.’
‘Why?’
‘Don’t ask me.’
When she’d gone he watched her walking away, down the slope towards the estuary. She was walking with a sense of purpose, as if she knew exactly where she was headed. He stepped outside into the yard and watched her as she crossed past the pond. At the edge of the estuary she took a path to the right, towards the town, before disappearing from view behind the scrubby oaks that lined the waterside.
It was cold. He shivered. He was about to go back inside when he heard a car crackling down the gravel track towards him.
He turned and saw the pale blue of a police car. It pulled up at the front of the house.
Sergeant Freddie Sharman didn’t get out. He leaned over and opened the passenger door.
‘Get in,’ he called, unsmiling.
‘Morning to you too,’ said Breen.
‘This is not my idea.’
Breen leaned down and peered into the car. ‘Where are you taking me?’
‘Didn’t Hel say?’
Breen shook his head.
‘She didn’t say anything? What she wanted me to show you?’
‘No.’
‘Bloody hell,’ he said. ‘I feel like her lackey.’
‘I know exactly what you mean,’ said Breen, getting in. And the car drove up the rutted track out of the farm.
Torquay Police Station was a dirty Victorian building at the corner of a steep street, Gothic grey stone and dark wood-panelled rooms. Like the station he had worked in at Stoke Newington, it was reassuringly solid and old-fashioned. This felt more like home.
‘In on a Sunday, Fred?’ said the desk officer, chewing on a pencil.
‘No,’ said Sharman. ‘I’m not here at all, matter of fact. And neither is this gentleman.’
‘Who said that?’ said the copper, pretending to look around. ‘Could have sworn I heard someone speak.’ And went back to chewing.
The station was quiet. Sharman and Breen walked down a short corridor, past a room where a couple of coppers sat drinking tea and listening to the radio. Sharman led him up a thin staircase to a room on the second floor, under the eaves. It was filled with filing cabinets of all shapes and sizes, crammed in around the walls and arranged in a small square in the middle of the room. There was just enough space to walk around them. Sharman went straight to one in the far corner and opened up a drawer.
‘It’s all in here,’ he said.
Alexandra Tozer had her own cabinet: three drawers, filled with hanging-file folders. Without even looking, Breen could see the coloured paper of different forms, the yellowing photographs, the bulging roneo’d reports.
‘Nothing leaves this room without my say-so,’ Sharman said.
Breen looked around. There was a small old-fashioned desk by the radiator, an empty inkwell at the corner.
‘Did you work on the case?’
‘Everybody did. This isn’t the Met. When something like that happens everyone’s involved. I was new to CID then, I’d just made sergeant. But, yes, we spent weeks going over the land on the farm. And tramping around up on the moor above it. There were all sorts of theories about where she’d been killed before she’d been dumped on the farm, but nobody ever found anything.’
‘Why not?’
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ said Sharman. ‘Local boys. Funny accents. What do they know? But round here a murder like that meant something. Everyone was close to it. Not like the Met. I expect you get a new murder most days up there. As far as I’m concerned, a fresh pair of eyes, that’s great. But tread careful.’
‘Right.’
‘This is just a favour, to Helen. Because you’re here. In the vicinity. And you’re going to see all sorts of things in those files. None of it gets back to the family.’
‘Why?’
‘You’ll understand when you see it.’
‘Helen arranged this. I won’t be able to keep it from her.’
Sharman rubbed his lower lip against his moustache. ‘We told them it was brutal. We never told them how bad, though.’
Breen stared at the cabinet.
Sharman said, ‘There’s stuff in there they never told the papers or the family. Not even Helen. It was… pretty weird, ask me. Awful.’
‘What if she wants to know?’
‘That’s for you to deal with. But I care about
her. I know you do too. I don’t want her getting upset.’
Breen leaned over the top drawer and looked down at the thick wad of documents.
‘I’m going home,’ said Sharman. ‘Sunday dinner. I’ll come and drop you back.’
‘OK.’
‘You got sandwiches or something?’
He thought of the packed lunch Hibou had made him. It was still sitting on the kitchen table in a brown paper bag. ‘I’ll be fine,’ he said.
Sharman hesitated by the door.
‘Just ’cause you’re down from London, don’t go thinking we didn’t do our best. We busted a gut to find out who killed that girl.’
‘I’m sure you did,’ said Breen.
‘So don’t go digging around to say we didn’t do it proper, is all I’m bloody saying.’
And Sharman closed the door behind him.
Breen looked around the room. An empty tea mug on top of one of the cabinets and an ashtray full of old butts.
He wondered how Helen had persuaded Sharman to do this.
In the three drawers, the files weren’t in any particular order. Papers had been crammed in, buckling edges, spilling pages from their clips. It was as if they’d been taken out, rifled through many times and put back in. The disorder seemed to show the sense of frustration there must have been with this case.
Breen didn’t mind. The order that tidy people put things in often concealed delicate connections. This last few months had taught him that chaos could be useful. He squatted in front of the cabinet and started leafing through a drawer.
The crime-scene photos were right at the front. Black-and-whites, eight by ten inches. They had pinholes at the corners. Breen took them out and looked at a few of them.
The first was of her face, taken in the bright light of a pathology laboratory, he guessed. Pale and overexposed. Eyes vacant. But even with the dark bruising around the mouth he could see the resemblance to Helen. The curve of the eyebrow. The twist of a lip. But Helen’s angular face came from her father. Alexandra had had her mother’s softness. There were cuts to the side of her head, as if from a struggle. Even like this you could tell she had been beautiful.
He put the photograph on the desk and dug back into the folder for more. The second photograph made his stomach lurch.
It was of the mutilations on the dead girl’s breasts. Her nipples had been cut off. A knife dug into the skin; an irregular, circular wound.
He stared at the photograph for a while, trying to distinguish between pre- and post-mortem injuries. How much of this had been done while she was still alive? That would be in the pathologist’s report. Then he pulled out a third one. The body as it was found, on the Tozer’s farm, lying in the spinney which he had tumbled into a few days earlier.
It was a good-quality photo. She was lying on her back, legs straight, arms by her side. You could see the texture of the grass and fallen leaves around her; the dappling of the light. Though animals had gnawed the dead flesh, they didn’t seem to have moved her.
There was something unsettlingly poetic about the way the photographer had composed the picture: the tree roots poking through soil, the shine on a policeman’s boot a couple of feet away from her head. It was almost as if whoever had taken it had wanted to show that they were more than just a functionary.
But it wasn’t only the photographer who had composed the scene, Breen realised. The body had been laid there carefully. Respectfully almost. Though that seemed an absurd thing to say after what the killer had done to the victim; but the position seemed to be very deliberate. A body wouldn’t have fallen into this position. It had been arranged, limbs straight, hands against the soil. What did that say? Was there some ritualistic element to the killing?
If he had been investigating, what would he have done first? He would have looked at where the body was found. Breen returned the photograph and started looking for any notes, made at the time, that would describe the scene. Eventually he found a typewritten crime-scene report written in stodgy English (‘the deceased’s body was found lying with its head to East-North-East’). It was sixteen pages long.
He looked around for something to make notes on.
A sign on the wall read: ‘No HOT drinks alowd!!!’ Breen unpinned it and used the back to copy sections from the report. He wrote his notes as small as he could to save space.
The scene-of-crime report alone took him a couple of hours to go through, by which time his first sheet of paper was full. There were two more copies of the scene-of-crime photo in a brown envelope. Breen took them out, tore the envelope into two sheets and started filling them, too.
It felt good to do this. As if he were emerging from a long, heavy sleep. Something to think about. Something to do. He could feel the blood start to move around his body again.
There was a folder with a photo of a man clipped to it. A transcript of an interview inside, plus some handwritten notes. A suspect? Breen started scanning through the drawer for similar ones.
Flicking from front to back in three drawers, he found fourteen similar folders. He took them out and laid them on the floor in a large rectangle. Each appeared to represent someone the police had interrogated in the days after the killing. Some were thick, bulging with paper that spilled out, and well-thumbed. Others contained just a sheet or two.
It would take days to go through them all properly. He began by noting down all of the names, then started to delve through them where they lay on the floor.
At the Met they loved to assume that forces outside of London were all yokels, soft-headed men who had it easy. But there was no sign that the Devon police hadn’t thrown all they had at it.
One folder was titled ‘Edward Tozer’. Breen hesitated over it. Helen’s father had been interviewed. He would have to have been considered a suspect too. It was only reasonable.
It contained a signed statement and the transcripts of two interviews, one conducted two days after the discovery of Alexandra’s body, the second around two weeks later.
Breen read through the first interview:
SGT BACON:
Did you and your daughter ever argue?
MR TOZER:
Yes.
SGT BACON:
What did you and yr daughter argue about?
MR TOZER:
(Says cannot remember.)
SGT BACON:
(rpt q.)
MR TOZER:
Not coming back from school on time. Playing music late. Not dressing decently. Not eating food properly. Talking back to her mother.
SGT BACON:
(Asks about last time saw AT.)
MR TOZER:
Wed a.m. She was going to school.
SGT BACON:
Was there an argument on way to school?
MR TOZER:
No. I don’t remember.
SGT BACON:
What about boyfriends?
MR TOZER:
Never saw any.
SGT BACON:
AT was good-looking girl.
MR TOZER:
I know she had boyfriends. She never dared bring them to the farm. I didn’t approve.
The transcript was stilted; he couldn’t imagine Mr Tozer talking like that, but it was surprisingly detailed nonetheless. The officer taking notes had been thorough. They were probably better records than most of the ones they kept at Marylebone.
SGT BACON:
Go through everything you did on that day.
MR TOZER:
(Asks for clarification.)
SGT BACON:
15th July. (Day of murder.)
(Mr Tozer became angry and refused to continue with interview.)
The statement was a carbon copy. It would have been written by the investigating officer from the interviews for Mr Tozer to sign. There was the name of a solicitor who had also been present. Breen would have asked the same questions as the policeman. They would have needed to find out what old man Tozer had been doing on the day his daughter was murder
ed.
He read the statement.
On Thursday, 16 July at approximately 11 a.m. I noticed one of the dogs going into the spinney. Though I shouted he would not return. I was made curious by this. I followed the dog there and discovered the body of my daughter. I did not call the police for approximately fifteen minutes because Mrs Tozer was distressed. When police asked why the dog had not discovered the body earlier I explained that the dog had been tied up the previous day for biting a calf.
He closed Mr Tozer’s file and picked up another at random. Outside, it had clouded over. The room was getting dark. He stood and switched on the light, a single bulb dangling from a cord in the middle of the room.
‘Bloody hell. You made a mess.’
Sergeant Sharman was at the door. Kneeling, Breen looked around him. There were piles of paper everywhere, covering the floor, on top of cabinets, on top of the small desk.
‘There’s a lot of material.’
‘Told you, didn’t I?’
Breen rubbed his eyes. ‘Can I have a bit more time? I feel I’ve only just started.’
‘It’s my day off. I’m only doing this as a favour,’ said Sharman. ‘I said I’d drop you back at three. It’s ten to now.’
Breen looked at his watch. Had he really been here four hours? He frowned, stood, went to the desk and picked up the sheets of paper he’d been writing on. Six pieces of paper, covered in tiny script. ‘What about another day?’ he asked.
‘Not sure. We’ll see.’
‘Give me ten minutes. I’ll tidy up.’
Sharman sighed. ‘Five,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you downstairs.’
Breen began piling up the folders on the floor, making a few last rapid notes. They were disorganised when he got here, but he wanted to make sure he kept the papers he had read separate from the ones he had not yet had a chance to look at, so he was trying to be as methodical as he could. While putting them back in the drawer, he came across three copies of the pathologist’s report.