by William Shaw
One was clearly a top copy; the others were carbons. The top copy had the instruction ‘Confidential. Do NOT share’ written in red biro. He hesitated, then folded one and tucked it into his jacket, along with his notes.
FOUR
‘See? We done it proper. Told you.’
The police car was parked on the road above the farm; they didn’t want the rest of the family to know where Breen had been. It was already getting dark now. Breen opened the door.
‘And you eliminated every single one of the suspects?’
‘Yes. All had alibis that put them in the clear. Every single one. Apart from Mr Tozer, but they didn’t figure that one at all. I mean, you’ve got to be careful. But it wasn’t Mr Tozer.’
Breen shook his head. ‘So you think it must have been someone else. Someone you haven’t even considered yet.’
‘That’s the only option.’
Breen nodded.
Light glowed from the farmhouse windows. Breen walked down the track, stumbling over loose stones as he made his way towards it.
Breen woke with a start in darkness. He cried out something formless, syllables without shape.
‘Shh.’ A hand on his face. ‘Just me,’ said Helen.
Heart galloping, Breen leaned over and switched on the bedside lamp.
She said, ‘I wanted to talk. About yesterday. I didn’t get the chance at dinner.’
He had taken a long time to go to sleep. Lying in bed, alone in his room, he’d started to read the pathologist’s report. It had been thorough, detailed and ugly. And the facts of Helen’s sister’s death were horrible. As a younger man the details would not have upset him this way. He had seen bad things with his own eyes. Not as bad as this, maybe. Was it that he knew the victim’s sister? He had become thinner-skinned.
Helen was dressed in an old brown jumper of her father’s that was fraying at the cuffs.
‘I didn’t mean to scare you.’
God. Had he put the pathology report away before turning the light out? He checked the bedside table and was relieved to see it was not there, so he must have put it in the drawer.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing.’
‘So? Did you go to the police station?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did Freddie show you what was in the files on Alex?’
Breen nodded.
‘What do you reckon?’
Breen was still blinking in the light, trying to wake up. ‘I don’t know… What time is it?’
‘Just gone five. It’s my turn for the milking. Did you find out anything?’
It felt like the middle of the night. He could only just have fallen asleep. Breen sat up slowly, guarding his shoulder. ‘Why did you ask him to take me there?’
‘Don’t think I haven’t noticed how bored you’ve been this last couple of days.’
‘So you were doing this as a kindness to me?’
‘Sarky doesn’t suit you, Paddy.’
‘Seriously,’ said Breen. ‘What are you doing opening up all this stuff, Helen?’
‘It’s true, though, isn’t it? You’re going mental down here. That’s why you were digging around in the spinney the other day.’ She leaned over and touched his hand. ‘And I just wanted you to take a look. Let me know what you thought.’
‘Things are getting better with Hibou here, aren’t they? It’s like there’s a corner being turned. You sure you want this stirred up?’
‘Stirred up? Like it’s some unfortunate family bust-up that’s best forgotten? Alex was killed and whoever killed her got away with it. You can’t ever let that go.’
Breen reached out his hand and pulled at one of the loose threads in her jumper.
‘So?’ she said.
The wool unravelled in a series of tiny jerks. ‘They put in a lot of time,’ said Breen. ‘You could tell from how much stuff there was. But whether they did it well or not, I don’t really know… It would take weeks to go through it.’
She was thinner than she had been in London, if that was possible. There were bags under her eyes.
‘I know they put in a lot of time. I was here. Remember?’
‘You can’t just review a case in an afternoon.’
‘Still. If I could persuade Freddie to let you in there again?’
‘You sure you know what you’re doing, Helen?’
‘I’m doing the milking. That’s what I’m bloody doing,’ she said, and stood.
Breen lay down in the darkness and tried to avoid falling back to sleep.
Grey drizzle fell outside. Hibou said, ‘What is it with you and Helen? I don’t get it.’
They were in the fug of the kitchen, condensation dripping down the windows.
She had just come in to make make a Thermos of tea.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You row like you’re girlfriend and boyfriend. Why not admit it and just go out together?’
‘We’re not in love.’
‘Looks like it to me.’
‘And we don’t row.’
‘So how come she’s in such a foul mood this morning? I saw her coming out of your room all mardy.’
‘It wasn’t a row,’ said Breen.
‘You two spend your time mooning around each other like you’re lovers, but neither of you actually do anything. It’s pitiful.’
Breen put down the spoon he was eating porridge with. ‘Because we’re not lovers.’
Hibou poured hot water into the chipped enamel teapot and shrugged.
Mrs Tozer came in with a basket full of washing. There was a rack that hung on pulleys from the ceiling that squeaked as she lowered it.
‘What do you say, Mrs T?’ said Hibou. ‘I said Cathal and Helen should be going out.’
‘None of my business,’ said Mrs Tozer, loading clothes on the rack. ‘None of your business neither.’
‘Just larking,’ said Hibou.
Breen grunted and went to put his bowl in the sink. ‘Leave it, dear,’ said Mrs Tozer. ‘I’ll do that.’
‘I don’t mind.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’
It irritated him that he couldn’t do anything around this house. He wasn’t allowed to. He had lived alone, or looked after his late father, for years. He enjoyed cooking, and didn’t mind washing up. But Mrs Tozer wouldn’t let him anywhere near her pots and pans. The most Breen had been allowed to do was help dry dishes on Sundays, the one day of the week that old man Tozer washed up.
He went to the bedroom and bolted the door, and started going through the notes he had made yesterday. He was in a bad mood. He turned back to the pathology report. He read four more pages, then put it down.
After lunch he announced he wanted to go out for a walk. He felt the house closing in on him again.
Mrs Tozer frowned. ‘Are you well enough?’
‘Of course I am,’ he snapped at her.
She didn’t answer. Went back to mending a pair of Mr Tozer’s spectacles with sticking plaster.
The drizzle had finally stopped. He walked up the steep lane out of the farm and onto the main road, twisty, high-hedged and dotted with puddles. When he heard cars coming he pressed himself into the bank to stay safe. People around here all drove like lunatics.
The nearest village was around a mile to the east. Breen found what he was looking for on the outskirts. A red phone box under a huge bare oak tree at a road junction; one of the old-fashioned boxes that you had to feed money into before you could dial.
He could have used the phone in the house, but there was no privacy there.
‘Sergeant Sharman,’ he said to the woman who answered.
Sharman was at his desk, fortunately. ‘Well?’ he said cautiously.
‘I wanted to ask,’ Breen said. ‘There has never been another murder like it… that same way?’
‘You don’t think we asked? Every time I read about another girl getting murdered I always check. Nothing like that,’ he said. ‘I mean, a murder th
at disgusting. You’d hear, wouldn’t you?’
There was a pause. A motorbike came roaring up the lane so loud, neither of them could speak anyway.
‘Is that all?’ said Sharman.
‘How many people did you interview, altogether?’
‘I don’t know. Hundreds, it would have been.’
‘But you created a suspect list?’
‘That’s right.’
The pips went. Breen added more pennies. ‘I know. But there were fifteen altogether on the list, by the look of it.’
‘I can’t remember.’
‘But there were only fourteen folders.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘At some point someone numbered all the suspect folders, one to fifteen. There’s a number written in the same pen on the top left-hand corner of all the folders. Edward Tozer is number one and the numbers go up to fifteen. But there are only fourteen folders. Number six is missing.’
There was a pause.
‘All I know is we ruled all of them out. Everyone had an alibi apart from Mr Tozer, but nobody really ever thought it was him. None of the people we interviewed could have done it.’
‘So who was number six?’
Sharman sighed. ‘Are you quite sure there was one missing?’
‘I checked.’
Sharman said, ‘Call me tomorrow. I’ll ask around.’ And he put the phone down.
Breen looked through the steamy windows of the phone box. Maybe he should walk more. It felt good to be out of the house. He needed to think.
He walked through the small hamlet, lingered in a poorly tended graveyard, looking at the writing on the stones until his feet started to feel cold, then headed back. He was a quarter of a mile down the lane when he spotted something pale stuck into the leafless hedge. A piece of paper. He was about to walk on when he noticed the stamp. A fourpenny Christmas one. As rain started to fall, he reached into the hedge and pulled out a crumpled envelope.
It was addressed to a Mr and Mrs Curtis; an address in Buckinghamshire, written in a round, girlish hand.
He wondered, for a second, whether Hibou had dropped it. The rain was coming thicker now. He wouldn’t have opened it, only it was unstuck anyway in the damp. In it, a single, blank sheet of paper.
‘What happened to you?’ said Mrs Tozer.
He was soaked, wet from head to toe, and shivering.
‘I was walking along the road. A bread van hit a puddle and splashed me.’
‘What were you doing walking along the road anyway?’ she tutted. ‘Get them clothes off. I’ll dry them.’
Breen went upstairs to his bedroom and pushed the door. At first he thought it was stuck. He pushed harder.
‘Who is it?’
‘It’s me. Can I come in? I need to change.’
His bedroom door had been bolted from the inside. ‘A minute,’ said Helen.
‘Are you OK?’ he said. He thought he heard crying.
No answer.
The pathology report was laid out on the bed, the sheets crumpled now.
‘I shouldn’t have brought it home,’ Breen said. ‘I’m sorry. You weren’t supposed to see it.’
Helen had dried her eyes, but they were still red-rimmed. She glared at him.
‘They never said it was like that,’ she said. ‘They told us she was killed quickly. Why did they lie?’
‘Because they didn’t want to upset you. It was bad enough for you anyway.’
She snorted. Breen closed the door behind him and locked it again. He went to the bed and picked up the papers.
‘She must have been so bloody scared,’ she said.
‘Yes. She must.’
Alexandra Tozer had not been killed quickly. The pathologist estimated that the sixteen-year-old had been tortured for around twelve to twenty-four hours before she died.
‘A boiled egg,’ said Helen. ‘I mean. That’s so… so…’
Often pathologists’ reports were handwritten and barely decipherable. This one had been typed, at least, but Breen had had to read the covering letter several times before he had understood what the pathologist was trying to say. The torturer had mutilated her body in several ways while she was alive. He had cut off Alexandra Tozer’s nipples, cut diagonal marks onto her belly and had burned cigarettes on her skin. But that was not the part that Breen had found most disturbing. Breen had re-read the sentence over and over to make sure he was not misunderstanding it. The killer had placed an egg in her vagina.
The pathologist had written: ‘Upon opening the egg, we found its contents to be hard-boiled.’ Breen had had to put the report down at that point, the horror mixed with the absurd image of a man in a laboratory tapping an egg with a teaspoon.
The hot egg had seared her skin as it entered. ‘Traces of burnt tissue,’ said the report.
Traces of burnt tissue.
And it had still been inside her when the body was found.
Helen was shaking slightly. ‘I mean. It’s fucking horrible. Christ.’
Breen would have had to admit, if asked, that he didn’t really understand some of the anatomical terms being used. He wished his generation understood more about female biology.
Helen said, ‘What is that? Something symbolic? Placing an egg there. What does it mean? Oh, God. I hadn’t expected that.’
Breen sat on the bed beside her and put his arm around her, tentatively at first. Her shoulders jerked in small shivers as she leaned into him. He was not used to seeing her like this. She had always been so tough.
‘I’m really stupid,’ said Breen. ‘I should have hidden it.’
She yanked away from him. ‘Why? If you believe that, you’re as bad as them. Thinking we shouldn’t know this stuff. She was my sister. I should know this.’
‘I know. But.’
‘I know what the police are like. Keep everything to ourselves. Don’t trust anyone.’
‘They just didn’t want to hurt you.’
She glared again. ‘Well, that worked well, then, didn’t it?’
Breen knew better than to argue.
She shrugged away from him, stood up and looked out of the window. ‘I mean, I knew it must have been a loony. But bloody hell.’
And she shivered again.
A voice from downstairs. ‘Supper.’ Her mother, summoning them down. More food.
‘In a minute,’ called Helen.
‘Are you going to be OK?’ he asked.
‘I heard that she’d been mutilated. Her breasts and stuff. But they told me that was after she died. Poor Alex.’
‘Yes.’
‘God. How do I look? Will they see I’ve been crying?’
Her eyes were still red.
‘You might get away with it,’ he said.
All last night he too had been thinking, why an egg? Did it mean something? The other mutilations were perverse enough.
‘You think?’ she said, peering at the small mirror.
But an egg. An egg in a place where eggs come from? Was it supposed to symbolise something?
She was blinking, rubbing her eyes with the backs of her hands, trying to get her eyes to look normal. Helen Tozer didn’t cry. She wasn’t that type of girl.
The mirror Helen was looking into would have been Alexandra’s once. She would have looked into it too; the pretty one of the two sisters. The one who was into make-up and boys. Maybe even the day she was killed, standing here with her mascara, putting it on for someone. Now her sister was drying her eyes in it.
They ate supper talking little. It was steak and kidney pie. A dark, rich sauce. Breen felt the flab poking out over his waistband.
Helen took a little pastry, but barely touched the meat. She sat there, head down, looking at the table.
‘You all right, Hel?’ her father said. She was uncharacteristically quiet. He, on the other hand, was becoming more talkative by the day.
Helen didn’t answer.
Hibou said, ‘They say if you stuff the skull of a cat with oa
k bark and bury it in the ground, it makes your soil more fertile.’
‘That right?’ said Mrs Tozer. ‘Who says that, then?’
‘God’s sake,’ said Helen, putting down her fork. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘Only saying,’ said Hibou. ‘Making conversation.’
‘Something wrong with the pie, lovely?’ asked her mother.
‘I’ve got a headache, that’s all,’ Helen said, and pushed the plate away.
They ate the rest of the meal in silence until Helen stood suddenly and left the room, leaving the door at the bottom of the stairs wide open.
‘I’ll do the cows tonight if you like,’ said Hibou, calling up the stairs after her as she stood to close the door to keep the warmth in the kitchen.
‘What’s wrong with her?’ said her father when she’d gone.
‘Another lover’s tiff, most like,’ said Hibou, looking at Breen.
Breen didn’t want to eat any more either, but he felt he had to now, chewing his way slowly through a piece of beef. As he swallowed he could feel the meat sliding slowly down his gullet.
‘Is she all right?’ said her father.
Sounds of Helen retching were coming from the bathroom upstairs.
‘I’ll go and see what’s the matter.’
Her mother stood and followed Helen upstairs, leaving the three of them with their half-finished plates of food.
FIVE
Helen Tozer was sharing her bedroom with Hibou. Hibou slept on a folding bed under the window. Hibou’s bed was neatly made, eiderdown tucked in over the blankets.
Helen’s clothes were all over the floor, a pair of white knickers poking out of the top of a muddy pair of jeans, bra on top of them.
She lay on the bed looking pale. ‘I feel manky.’
The wall above her bed was covered in photographs. Bob Dylan. Jean Seberg in A Bout de Souffle. Several of George Harrison. Brian Jones in a fur coat. A still from the movie Yellow Submarine. A yellowing cover of Nova.