A Song for the Brokenhearted

by William Shaw

  Breen was screwing the pieces of paper up to put them back in the bin when he noticed the blue ink stains on the backs. He unwrapped them again and pushed them across to Carmichael.

  ‘The message book.’ Carmichael nodded. ‘Worth a look.’

  The notes had been written on sheets torn out of a duplicate book. The secretary who had left them for Milkwood must have kept a copy at her desk in case anybody called in for their messages. It might contain other messages Milkwood had received.

  ‘It’ll be locked up now. I’ll see to it in the morning.’

  The office was clearing. Lights were going out.

  ‘Fancy doing something later?’ he said.

  ‘I’m tired. I don’t sleep well with this arm.’

  ‘I don’t want to go back to the police flats. It’s driving me crazy there. Come on. Please, Paddy. Tell you what. You like films. Want to come to the cinema?’

  ‘What’s on?’

  ‘Some old silent movie.’

  Breen frowned. ‘I thought you were into Westerns?’

  Carmichael stood. ‘And how do you bloody know what I like and what I don’t?’ he said, suddenly angry for no apparent reason. He left the room, leaving Breen alone at Milkwood’s empty desk.

  TEN

  It was late. A crowd was gathering outside the Imperial Cinema in Notting Hill, a mixture of hippies and bohemians, chattering students and swaying drunks from the nearby pubs. Breen felt conspicuously sober waiting with them in his mackintosh and light tan shoes. A chalked notice said, ‘Tonight 11 p.m. Electric Cinema Club’.

  Carmichael arrived with a panatella between his lips and a bunch of daffodils in one hand.

  ‘For me?’ said Breen.

  ‘’K off.’

  ‘Any news of Milkwood?’

  Carmichael bit his lip, shook his head. ‘I just called up again. Nothing. I called his wife too. She’s in pieces. Wanted me to go round. I couldn’t face it.’

  Policemen didn’t just go missing. Especially not married ones.

  They joined the queue. ‘Who are the flowers for, then?’

  Carmichael said gruffly, ‘Someone.’

  The box office was just inside the entrance to the cinema. When they reached the front of the queue a young man wearing a deerstalker with a feather in it scowled and said, ‘Oh. It’s you again.’

  Carmichael showed a membership card. ‘I’ve brought a friend,’ he said.

  ‘I’m surprised you have any, considering,’ said the young man, taking ten shillings.

  ‘Considering what?’ asked Breen as they walked into the cinema.

  Carmichael looked around him. ‘Well, it’s like this. I started coming to this place undercover a few weeks back. We had a tip-off they were selling drugs here.’

  ‘So how come they know you’re Drug Squad?’

  ‘’Cause I raided it two weeks ago. Arrested six of them.’

  Breen burst out laughing. ‘No wonder nobody likes you.’

  Carmichael, taller than most of the people coming in, was craning his neck around. Then he broke into a smile. Breen watched him pushing his way through the stream of cinema-goers.

  ‘Amy,’ he shouted.

  The small entrance to the old cinema was packed with people. Breen struggled to see where his friend was heading. Then he saw her. A small girl, only around five foot tall. She was dressed in a black T-shirt, black cap, black hot pants and black-and-white striped tights, and was holding a silver torch.

  ‘Amy,’ he shouted again.

  Breen realised she was supposed to be an usherette, something imagined from the 1920s. She was wearing thick kohl around her eyes, Clara Bow-style. She grimaced when she saw Carmichael charging towards her through the crowd, holding out the daffodils in front of him.

  Breen couldn’t hear what Carmichael was saying, but he saw the girl reluctantly accept the flowers. When she rolled her eyes in exasperation, there was a hint of a smile too.

  A long-haired man in a windcheater shouted, ‘Hey, Johnny Narc’s back and he’s got a girlfriend.’

  The crowd stopped pushing past and watched. Carmichael stood, looking sheepish. The tiny girl took the flowers and started hitting the man in the windcheater with them. ‘He’s not my fucking boyfriend,’ she shouted.

  And then she turned to Carmichael and started beating him with the daffodils too. People stared, laughed. By the time she’d finished, the daffodils flopped out of her fist, broken-stemmed and shredded. She held them out to Carmichael and said, ‘Here.’

  Big John dropped them on the floor, pushed the mocking crowd aside to make his way back to Breen, who stood there, open-mouthed.

  ‘Shut up,’ said Carmichael.

  ‘Didn’t say a dicky bird,’ said Breen.

  The film turned out to be Metropolis.

  The forty-year-old film looked strange and beautiful, the plot unfolding at a pace that seemed uncomfortably slow for the fast city it was being shown in. Yet these young men and women watching it seemed rapt at the heavily made-up people clutching at their hearts dramatically, the robotic workers, shuffling like dead men, in a totalitarian city. At the front, a piano player thumped a modernist soundtrack, full of clanging semitones.

  The seats were old and uncomfortable. Breen noticed something moving on the floor by his feet. ‘Are they mice?’

  ‘Probably. What I don’t get,’ said Carmichael, ‘is why they’re watching it in the first place.’

  ‘Shh,’ someone behind hissed.

  Carmichael turned. ‘It’s a silent bloody movie. It’s not like you’re listening to it.’

  ‘Why are you watching it?’ said Breen. ‘That’s the question. Who’s that girl you brought the flowers for?’

  ‘Amy,’ said Carmichael. He relit his panatella. ‘Did you like her?’

  ‘I didn’t exactly meet her.’

  Breen looked around at the crowd lounging in the seats. A man to his right had hooked his legs over the empty chair in front.

  This generation always seemed so keen on the past, dressing like eighteenth-century dandies or dark-eyed Twenties flappers and watching silent movies that had seemed so old-fashioned when he was growing up. They treated history as their playground. Perhaps they were losing trust in the future, in the white heat of technology and restaurants in the sky. Like Hibou, he supposed, who wanted to turn the Tozers’ farm back into something ancient and primitive.

  Was that something rustling in the old popcorn on the floor? Breen lifted his shoes and placed them on the chair in front of him. When he looked up, he noticed the usherette had squeezed herself into the seat next to Carmichael.

  ‘Don’t you ever come to this place again,’ she hissed. ‘It’s embarrassing for me.’

  Breen leaned closer to hear.

  ‘Give me your phone number and I won’t need to,’ said Carmichael.

  ‘I thought you bloody lot could find that out anyway,’ she said.

  Another voice from behind: ‘Shh.’

  ‘What about a meal? This is my best friend, Paddy. We could make a foursome.’

  ‘Are you mad?’

  ‘Tomorrow night.’

  ‘I work Friday nights. Leave me alone.’

  The girl called Amy stood and stamped away up the aisle and through the swing doors at the back.

  Carmichael waited a minute, then stood and went to follow her.

  Through the projector-lit fog of smoke, Breen watched the young couple kissing on screen, watched by the mad scientist with the strange steel hand. He stayed for another few minutes but Carmichael didn’t return, so he followed him out of the cinema into the cold air.

  Carmichael was sitting on the step at the front of the cinema, smoking. Breen put his scarf down on the cold step and sat next to him, shaking his head when Carmichael offered him a cigar.

  Portobello Road was quiet. It was past midnight. The pubs were long shut.

  ‘So yeah. We raided this place two weeks ago. We had word some people were smoking marijuana on th
e premises.’

  ‘And?’ said Breen.

  ‘By the time we got past the door most people had had time to dump their gear on the floor. Only we caught one guy trying to leg it out of the emergency exit. We made him strip and he had this big bag of resin down his Y-fronts. We banged him up. Next thing Amy turned up at the station at two in the morning demanding we set him free.’

  ‘He was her boyfriend?’

  ‘Her cousin. Anyway. There was nothing we could do about him until the magistrates’ court in the morning, so we spent a bit of time talking, her and me.’

  Breen grinned. ‘And you fell for her?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say fell for her, exactly,’ said Carmichael, looking down at his feet.

  Breen was laughing.

  ‘I know. She’s not even my type. But she’s… I don’t know. So alive.

  A taxi came past with its FOR HIRE light on, slowed when it neared Carmichael and Breen, then drove on down the cold street.

  ‘She looked pretty alive when she was hitting you with those flowers,’ said Breen.

  ‘Do you think I’m making a twat of myself, Paddy? Only, I’m so bloody tired of hanging around with lowlifes. I want something different.’

  ‘Yes. You’re making a twat of yourself.’

  ‘I better phone in. See if there’s any news from Milkwood. Got any pennies?’

  Breen dug in his pocket for change. The red phone box was lit up in the darkness. From fifteen yards away, Breen sat watching the big man fumbling the coins into the slot, waiting for someone on night duty to pick up the phone.

  Then there were a couple of striped legs next to him.

  ‘Give this to your friend.’ Amy spoke in a quiet Scottish accent.

  A folded piece of paper torn out of an exercise book. He stood to look around but the doors were already swinging behind him. Without thinking, he opened the paper, expecting to see some rude message. Instead there were seven numbers. Her telephone.

  ‘Hey, John! Guess what?’

  But now Carmichael was walking towards him, face white.

  ‘I’ve got to go. They’ve found Milkwood.’

  This was not the man who held out a bunch of flowers to the woman in striped tights. He moved slowly, shoulders slumped.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Epping Forest. They found the body late this afternoon, but it was naked. Stripped. They didn’t even figure out it was him until tonight though, apparently. Christ.’

  ‘Shall I come?’

  He shook his head. ‘Watch the film. You’re on leave, Paddy.’

  Breen stood outside the cinema, watching Carmichael walk back down the street to his car, head down. He briefly considered going back to catch the rest of the silent movie, but his heart wasn’t in it.

  ELEVEN

  Early on Friday Breen called Carmichael at Scotland Yard, but he didn’t pick up. He would be busy. With nothing to do, Breen bathed, taking care to keep the bandage dry, then took the bus to an exhibition at the big new art gallery on the South Bank.

  He never had the time to do this normally. Now he had nothing but time. Breen spent an hour walking around low sculptures of flat, industrial sheets of metal, some brightly coloured, welded at all angles. They had installed a few on the Hayward Gallery’s concrete roof. Under a grey London sky, he walked around them, listening to an American in pale slacks talking loudly to his pretty, much younger girlfriend. ‘Don’t you see? This is sculpture that’s about being alive. Alive to yourself.’

  Breen looked at the sculpture and tried to understand what the American meant. The girl sucked on her hair but didn’t seem any more moved than Breen by the works, though he wasn’t sure whether this was the sculptor’s fault or his own. Instead of trying to fathom the minimalist sculptures, he kept imagining Milkwood’s pale naked body, lying in the woods. Or the photographs of the dead hippie he had seen on Milkwood’s desk. And of Tozer’s sister.

  Nagging at his brain was the thought that he had somehow been responsible for what had happened to Milkwood. If he hadn’t come to London asking after him, perhaps he would still be alive. There was little logic to the thought, but it had buzzed in his head all through the night.

  ‘I think it’s boring,’ the seen-it-all girl was saying.

  He decided he agreed with her. Like the concrete building itself, the art seemed joyless, disconnected from the chaos of the city around it.

  He needed a coffee. There was no cafe in the new gallery, so Breen walked down a bleak concrete walkway to the South Bank Centre. The tide was low, the Thames reassuringly greasy and loaded with silt.

  He sat down and lit a cigarette; his first of the day. He savoured the harsh taste of nicotine and coffee, still relishing the novelty of being back in London.

  An elderly woman with a fox-fur stole sat down at the table next to Breen, filling in crossword clues with a fountain pen. She worked fast, as if this was something she did every day. In a matter of minutes she had finished it. She placed her pen back in her handbag and lifted the paper to read it. It took Breen a second or so to notice the front page.

  DEAD POLICEMAN

  WAS TORTURED

  Two lines. Beneath that: ‘London gang connection’.

  And another second for the penny to drop.

  Breen stood. ‘Excuse me. I need to look at your paper.’

  The woman looked him up and down and then said, ‘Get your own.’

  ‘It’s important,’ said Breen.

  The woman raised the angle of her head a little, ignoring him.

  Breen looked around for anyone else reading a newspaper. Upstairs, an orchestra was rehearsing for a concert. The sounds of strings leaked out of the large hall whenever someone opened the doors. The cafe was all but deserted.

  ‘Could you keep an eye on my coffee?’

  The woman didn’t answer. Breen ran out of the building, trying to find a newspaper vendor. It wasn’t until he was almost at Waterloo Station that he found one, standing with papers under his arm.

  He walked back towards the Festival Hall reading the newspaper. ‘Sources at Scotland Yard point to the probable involvement of London gang members in the gruesome killing.’ The newspaper’s crime correspondent had written a column titled ‘New Gang Threat?’: ‘London police may have arrested the leaders of the notorious Kray twins’ gang, and the Richardson Gang are on the run, but sources within the Metropolitan Police suggest that a more ruthless generation may be taking their place.’

  Breen arrived back at the Festival Hall to find the woman with the fox fur gone. His undrunk coffee had been cleared away.

  Back at home, he called Carmichael’s desk at Scotland Yard, but there was no answer. Then he tried the section house. A man on the phone said he was at work, so he tried his office again, but there was still no one picking up. Then, even though it wasn’t evening yet, he phoned the farm, but no one answered there either.

  He felt unsettled. He did not like not knowing what was going on.

  He walked to Abney Park Cemetery, looking at gravestones and angels with broken wings. On the way back he looked in at the Stoke Newington Police Station.

  ‘Aye, aye. Bloody Paddy Breen. Back again like a bad rash on the bollocks.’

  Though years ago he had worked with him, Breen was struggling to remember the name of the old copper at the front desk, so he just said, ‘Morning, Sarge.’

  ‘To what do we owe the pleasure?’

  Breen closed the big blue front door behind him. ‘Just thought I’d pop in and say hello.’

  ‘What do you think this place is? A ruddy social club?’

  ‘Might as well be, for all the work you do.’

  The dirty old Victorian building was close to his flat. Rat-infested and freezing in winter, it had been the first station he had worked in and he had loved it here. Today, it looked worse than usual. One of the ground-floor windows had been broken recently. Someone had tried to tape a piece of cardboard over it.

  ‘You’re the one who�
��s pulled sick leave, what I hear,’ the sergeant was saying.

  He missed the familiar banter. Men who insulted each other in place of having to say anything more familiar.

  The sergeant lifted the hinge on the desk and beckoned him in. ‘Anyway, what’s this we hear about you getting yourself shot, you stupid pillock? Criminals these days. Can’t even shoot a gun proper.’

  Another younger copper emerged from the office behind the sergeant’s cubbyhole. He had a plaster above his eye, probably from a fight.

  ‘Fetch Paddy Breen a cup of tea. No, you never liked tea, did you? Fetch him a cup of coffee if we’ve got one.’

  ‘Don’t bother. Your coffee’s worse than your tea.’

  ‘Ooh. Bloody Paddy Breen has gone all West End on us. Spending too long in the Eyetie caffs.’

  Breen joined the sergeant in the small space behind the desk. The man was sitting on a stool next to a paraffin heater that blared heat upwards but seemed to make no difference to the chill in the small room.

  ‘You’re off a while, I suppose,’ said the sergeant.

  ‘Six weeks,’ said Breen. ‘Maybe longer.’

  ‘Jammy bastard.’

  ‘I was bloody shot. Couple of inches lower and I’d have died. What’s jammy about that?’

  A short moment of embarrassed silence. A couple of frowns. Realising that there had been too much anger in his voice, Breen forced a smile. ‘Still, you should have seen the other man.’

  This time, a big laugh from the other two coppers. Breen turned away and closed his eyes. Behind lids, he saw the dead man, head like half an orange, flat on the tarmac. Bile rose in his stomach. Deep breath. Get a hold on yourself.

  Other policemen crowded in. N Division had always been a rough patch; so were its coppers. Brawny, broken-nosed men who gave as good as they got. A couple of ex-dockers, tattoos out of sight under their sleeves. One with a bandaged hand, Breen noticed.

  Cigarettes were passed around. Somebody found a tin of biscuits that one of the local shops had dropped by a couple of days before. The gloss paint on the walls dripped condensation. Idly, Breen riffled through the shoebox under the counter, full of lost belongings that members of the public had handed in. A wallet, probably empty; a watch with a broken strap; a sorrowful-looking knitted gollywog.