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 the 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.