A Song for the Brokenhearted

by William Shaw

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Pity.’

  Carmichael burst in through the door, dripping. It must have started raining hard. He shook out an umbrella on the doormat.

  ‘Aye, aye,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks for coming,’ said Breen.

  Carmichael looked around the cafe and grunted. He had never liked this place. ‘Coffee still rubbish, Paddy?’ he asked.

  Breen looked down at his cup. ‘Terrible,’ he said.

  ‘Charming,’ said Joe’s daughter. ‘Anything to eat?’

  ‘Not likely,’ said Carmichael, sitting heavily at one of the small yellow Formica tables.

  The cafe was quiet, this time of day. They were the only customers. The radio was playing ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’. Joe’s daughter filled another cup.

  ‘Come on, then,’ Carmichael said. ‘I haven’t got all day.’

  Breen sighed. He’d both hands around his mug to soak the heat from it.

  ‘It’s about Helen.’

  ‘Tozer? ’K sake, Paddy. I thought this was going to be about Milkwood. I’ve just run halfway across London.’

  ‘It is about Milkwood too,’ said Breen. ‘That’s the point.’

  Carmichael looked confused.

  ‘You know we were talking about Helen’s sister?’ said Breen.

  ‘The one who was murdered?’

  The radio played its ridiculous, sing-song tune. ‘Before she was killed, she was tortured,’ said Breen.

  ‘Fuck. I didn’t know.’

  Joe’s daughter glanced up from the sink, where she’d started washing plates, frowned and then went back to her work.

  ‘Listen to this.’ And Breen pulled out a notebook from the pocket of his mac and started to read out details he’d copied from the pathologist’s report. ‘Victim had had a boiled egg inserted into her vagina. Reddened tissue of the dermis of the inner labia indicates the object was hot when inserted into the victim.’

  Breen looked up and watched his friend’s face as he absorbed the horror of it. The widening eyes, the falling jaw.

  ‘An egg?’ he said, shaking his head slowly. ‘You’re not serious?’

  Breen closed his eyes for a second. A wave of nausea, caused by more than just the image in his mind.

  ‘Is he OK?’ said Joe’s daughter.

  Breen opened his eyes, took a breath and turned the page in his notes and read again. ‘Breasts mutilated with sharp instrument. Victim’s nipples had been entirely removed and were not present.’

  Carmichael looked shocked. ‘They cut Milkwood’s chest too.’

  ‘I thought so,’ said Breen. Again he read, ‘Burns to abdomen with cigarettes. Burns to buttocks with cigarettes.’

  ‘Jesus. I don’t get it. That was four years ago, yes?’

  Breen explained how he’d gone through the murder files at the small Devon police station and made the connection between Milkwood and Alexandra Tozer. ‘Alexandra was going out with an older man. A friend of Milkwood’s. Milkwood had all the references to this man being a suspect removed from the file. Milkwood was trying to protect him, but it’s not clear why. It may have been just to keep his name out of the papers. Or…’

  ‘Slow down, Paddy. So you reckon the same person who killed her sister killed Milkwood? And in exactly the same way?’

  Breen shrugged. ‘You can’t jump to conclusions. All I know is that they were killed in the same way. Either it’s the same person, or someone trying to make a point about the first murder.’

  ‘What about Helen?’ said Carmichael.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Where is she? Is she OK?’

  Breen didn’t answer.

  ‘Is there something wrong with him?’ asked Joe’s daughter. ‘I’ve been thinking he doesn’t look right.’

  The bell above the door rang and a group of young Jewish boys in long coats entered talking loudly, laughing. They had dark springs of hair on each side of their faces, small black skullcaps on their heads.

  Breen took a gulp of his coffee and put the mug back down on the table. He took a breath. ‘I called Helen up just now to tell her about all this. Only she’s not there. Apparently, the Tuesday after I left the farm, she left too. She told her mother she was coming to see me. She never arrived.’

  ‘Christ.’

  ‘Helen was lying, I think. She’d have called me if she was coming to see me.’

  ‘Why was she lying?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  The Jewish boys had pulled out a box of dominoes and were shuffling them noisily on the table next to theirs, tiles clattering on the Formica.

  ‘So have I got this right? Tozer disappears two days before Milky turns up dead. And whoever kills him is either the same person as killed her sister…’

  ‘Or someone who’s copying the way her sister was killed.’

  Breen could see the ugly thought working its way through Carmichael’s mind, his eyes getting wider.

  ‘Wait. Did she know the details of her sister’s murder?’

  Breen nodded. ‘Yes. I told her.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Carmichael exhaled.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘All the details? And the…’ He pointed to his nipple.

  Breen nodded. ‘She read the pathologist’s report. I had them in my room. She read them, yes.’

  Carmichael was shaking his head now. ‘You do know what I’m thinking?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve been thinking the same.’

  ‘You think it was revenge?’

  ‘You can’t just go jumping to conclusions like that,’ said Breen.

  Carmichael was silent for a while. He stared at Breen. ‘Helen Tozer?’ he said eventually. ‘With the beanpole legs and everything? She couldn’t do that. I mean, Milkwood was strong.’ Breen thought about the darkness that had settled over Helen. ‘Could she?’ said Carmichael. ‘She wasn’t like that. Was she?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Did she ever talk about taking revenge on whoever killed her sister?’

  Breen shook his head. ‘She just wanted to know who did it,’ he said. ‘That’s all.’ But as he took one of his own cigarettes out of his pocket and held it in his hand, he remembered Helen telling him how she admired a woman whom Breen had once investigated; a woman who had calculatingly arranged the murder of the man who had killed her brother.

  ‘And whose idea was it that you go digging around into her sister’s murder?’

  ‘Mine,’ said Breen. ‘It was mine.’ And as he said it, he knew that wasn’t really true either. It had been Helen who had arranged for him to go and look at the case notes. His skin felt cold.

  Carmichael nodded. ‘I’m just thinking aloud, you understand? That’s all. Doesn’t everyone who’s had a family member killed dream of this? Getting their revenge?’

  Breen didn’t say anything. But it was possible. Violence had its echo.

  ‘And you’ve no idea where she is now?’ Carmichael said.

  ‘She said she was coming to London, to visit me. But I don’t even know if that’s true.’ Rain streamed down the window at the front of the cafe. ‘I don’t even know if she’s in London. She just told her mum that. Do you really think she set this whole thing up, so that I could lead her to Milkwood? That would be… fantastical, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘No. God, no,’ said Carmichael, though he didn’t sound certain either. ‘All the same, I’ll have to tell this to CID, won’t I?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Carmichael chewed on his tongue; a habit when he was thinking.

  ‘Or you could wait?’ suggested Breen. ‘Just a couple of days. It’s going to kill her parents if the police arrive at the farm and start asking about all this. Maybe she’ll turn up.’

  Carmichael breathed out heavily. ‘You know I can’t do that, Paddy. I’ve got to tell them.’ Carmichael’s voice had the tone of someone visiting a hospital bedside.

  Breen looked away.

  The boys clacked dominoes onto the table.

  Carm
ichael frowned. He dug in his pocket for some change and put it on the table. ‘Let’s get out of here. I don’t know why you hang round in these places.’

  Outside, it was still raining hard.

  ‘Don’t go fucking weird on me,’ Carmichael said, opening the passenger door to his police car, then running round to his side.

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ said Breen.

  Carmichael slammed his door shut, wiped rain from his face with a handkerchief. ‘You’ll be fine, chum. No question.’

  It was an Escort with no police markings. The ashtray was full and the floor on the passenger side was covered in empty Rothmans packets.

  ‘Thanks, John.’ Breen sat in the car seat, feeling like a drowning man. ‘Just take me home, will you?’ Carmichael sat there for a minute, thinking, still chewing on his tongue, saying nothing. ‘To be honest,’ said Breen, ‘I don’t feel that great.’

  ‘Sitting around isn’t going to fucking help,’ said Carmichael.

  ‘Somebody will probably need to interview me formally, I suppose.’

  Carmichael snorted. ‘God’s sake.’

  ‘I don’t suppose it’s a Drug Squad investigation now, anyway,’ Breen said. ‘It’ll be CID. You better let them know.’

  ‘Course it’s a fucking Drug Squad investigation. Whatever you’re saying, there might still be some drug-gang thing going on. Besides, try stopping us. Milkwood was one of ours.’

  ‘And what if he was involved in the murder of a teenage girl?’

  Carmichael said, ‘All the more reason.’

  Breen’s head went down, chin on his chest. ‘I’m tired.’

  Carmichael turned to him. ‘Paddy. You don’t need to bloody sleep. You need to wake up! This is no time to give in.’

  Breen blinked.

  ‘Jesus, Paddy. Sometimes I don’t bloody know you,’ Carmichael said, putting the key in the ignition. ‘You’re such a fucking homo. There’s work to do. Serious bloody work.’

  ‘You going to call CID and tell them?’

  ‘In a minute.’

  Carmichael turned to look out of the rear window, one hand on the wheel, pulling the car out into the street in front of a taxi. Leaning forward to peer through the rain-smeared glass, knuckles white on the wheel, he looked huge.

  FOURTEEN

  Mrs Milkwood sat by the gas fire, dressed in a black skirt and black cardigan. ‘I mean, how can I plan a funeral when they won’t tell me when they’ll release the body?’ she said.

  Carmichael nodded. ‘I know.’ There were cards on the mantelpiece. ‘In deepest sympathy’. ‘Thinking of you at this sad time’.

  ‘You think all this is going to take long? He’s my husband, after all. Why won’t they let me have Billy back, Sergeant Carmichael?’

  Breen looked at Carmichael; Carmichael looked at the carpet. ‘I’m sure they will release the body soon, Gwen,’ he said. From the evasive way he said it, Breen realised, they had not told her the details of how her husband had been tortured. As with the Tozers, they were trying to save her from the hurt. This British reflex to conceal.

  ‘He wanted to be cremated,’ she said. ‘I was against it. My family are always for burial,’ she said. ‘You’ve let your tea go cold, Sergeant Breen,’ she said. ‘Shall I pour you another?’

  Despite everything, she seemed oddly calm. Coping, thought Breen. He shook his head. ‘I’m fine, thank you.’

  ‘Anything at all, Gwen,’ said Carmichael. ‘Just say the word and we’ll help out. All the boys want you to know that.’

  ‘My mind’s a blank,’ she said. ‘I keep thinking about who I should invite to the funeral. I’ve never liked funerals.’

  Carmichael turned to Breen. ‘What’s the name of that man who Milkwood was friends with in Devon?’

  ‘Fletchet,’ said Breen. ‘James Fletchet.’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Mrs Milkwood smiled. ‘James. He’s a lord now, of course. I’ll have to invite him. I expect if he does come he’ll give a speech. He’s an excellent speaker. And he did admire Billy very much, I think, in his way.’

  ‘What about children? Did you and Bill have any children?’

  She shook her head. ‘No. We never did.’

  Breen looked at her. She had found someone she presumably loved and now that certainty had been obliterated. He thought about Helen. Tried to imagine her in this sort of setting, the wife of a policeman, but couldn’t. Then he tried to shut her out of his head; best not to think about Helen.

  Carmichael sat in the armchair with a half-eaten iced-ring biscuit in his hand. A proper armchair, upholstered in a sturdy floral fabric. It would have been Milkwood’s chair, with a footstool and the best view of the TV. ‘How did they know each other, Gwen, Fletchet and your husband?’

  ‘They worked together in Africa,’ said Mrs Milkwood. ‘Great pals, they were in those days.’

  Carmichael looked at Breen and said, ‘Fletchet was a copper?’

  Mrs Milkwood’s laugh was high and thin. ‘Heavens, no. Not Jimmy. He was a farmer. A gentleman farmer.’ She laughed again. ‘When his father, Lord Goodstone, died, the family estate in Devon went to his older brother. The family sent Jimmy out to run the farm in Kenya instead. That’s where we met him. Kenya was full of people like that. The also-rans of the British aristocracy.’ She laughed. ‘That’s what he used to call himself. An also-ran. As if. The younger brothers used to wind up there and they’d get set up with a coffee farm or whatever. We moved in pretty grand circles in those days, Bill and me.’

  ‘You were in Kenya?’

  ‘Bill was in the Kenyan police. CID as a matter of fact. We went out after the war. It was an opportunity.’

  ‘And Fletchet?’

  Mrs Milkwood lifted the plate of biscuits to offer them round. ‘I am sure they would have ended up knowing each other anyway. Kenya society was quite small, really,’ she said. ‘Quite exclusive. And they were such good pals, Jimmy and Bill, but it was the Emergency that brought them together, really.’

  ‘What Emergency?’ said Carmichael.

  ‘The Mau Mau of course.’

  ‘The Mau Mau? He never talked about that,’ said Carmichael.

  ‘I wouldn’t expect him to,’ said Mrs Milkwood. ‘The point is that it was a crisis. And the British all pulled together. That’s how they knew each other.’

  Breen tried to concentrate, to engage his brain in what Mrs Milkwood was saying. It felt so hard to think at all right now. ‘The Mau Mau was an independence movement,’ he said.

  Mrs Milkwood slammed her cup down into her saucer. ‘It was evil, barbaric superstition. Those people were savages.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I only know what I read in some of the papers.’

  Mrs Milkwood quivered with rage. ‘Precisely the problem, Sergeant. You people back home… you didn’t have a clue what was happening out there. We were stationed in Nyeri. The White Highlands. You’d have known what was happening if you were out there, I’ll tell you that.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to offend you,’ said Breen.

  Mrs Milkwood sighed. ‘It’s not your fault, I suppose. Even the bloody Governor didn’t have a clue. How would he, stuck in Nairobi? Nobody understood what it was like for us.’

  Carmichael leaned forward in the armchair to have enough space to dig into his pockets for his packet of panatellas. ‘So how did they end up together?’

  ‘When the Emergency started they stationed us in Nyeri. They set up little police stations all over the Highlands to try and keep a lid on it. And sent out the soldiers too. Lancashire Fusiliers. But half the time they didn’t know what they were doing. It would have been chaos if it wasn’t for landowners like Jimmy. It was people like him who really got things going while the government was still sat on its behind. Back in ’52, when the murders started, the farmers were the only ones putting up a fight. After all, they were the ones being murdered in their beds. The monsters were breaking into farms and killing men, women and children. The landowners were the ones with the local knowle
dge. They worked with the blacks. They spoke the lingo. Jimmy and Bill ran the screening station, weeding out the malefactors.’ She paused. Glared at Carmichael. ‘Do you mind not smoking those, Sergeant? I don’t mind cigarettes, but cigars do linger.’

  Carmichael muttered an awkward apology, put the cigar back into the packet.

  Breen stood up and walked over to the cabinet, and pointed at the photograph he had noticed before. He bent down and peered at it, and realised that Fletchet was there, in the picture. ‘That’s the two of them in Kenya?’

  She smiled. ‘Yes.’ Mrs Milkwood followed him to the shelf of photographs, opened the glass door and took out the silver-framed picture. ‘I was a little thinner then, I suppose,’ she said, as if waiting for a denial.

  She handed the picture to Breen. Breen tried to understand what he was seeing. Three men and two women standing in the sunshine, smiling, holding drinks. He recognised Fletchet. Though he stood to one side, he clearly seemed the important person in the photo. He stood a head above them in height, with his arm around Bill Milkwood’s shoulders. They were in a garden, surrounded by roses and more exotic-looking flowers.

  ‘And Mrs Fletchet?’ She was standing to the side, in a black swimming suit and dark glasses, holding a martini glass.

  ‘Yes. Eloisa. She’s Italian, you know. I always found her a bit of a snob. Not like Jimmy. He was one of us. One of the white community. But she did throw great parties. We used to drink such a lot in those days.’ She giggled.

  ‘Where was this taken?’

  ‘At Jimmy’s house. We had a lovely house too. One of the cottages on his estate. Nowhere near as grand as his, but I loved it. Servants. Everything. I’ve got a photograph of that somewhere. It had this beautiful balcony which we used to eat our supper on. Beautiful bougainvillea everywhere. It was quite splendid for a while. It all feels like a dream, now.’

  ‘So… you were friends with James Fletchet too?’ said Breen.

  ‘Great pals. We knew him back here at home too. But Africa was the highlight. If it wasn’t for the Mau Mau it would have been such fun. Then again, I suppose that’s how we knew each other in the first place.’ A high laugh.