The General was right. She was still awake.
She opened the door of the house off Ladbroke Grove barefoot, in a long dark cotton dress.
‘Oh. It’s you.’ She leaned forward and kissed the General on the cheek.
‘Who’s this?’ she asked, looking at Breen. She was young and blonde and wearing a strange oily scent that reminded Breen of damp earth.
‘A messenger,’ the General said. ‘I don’t know his name.’
‘Cathal,’ said Breen.
‘You got any hash, love?’ asked the General. ‘I’m speeding my socks off. I need to come down. Urgently.’ He giggled.
She opened the door wide and they walked inside.
The flat was messy, but in a comfortable way. An old bicycle, painted yellow, scuffed the wall it lay against. A huge poster of Humphrey Bogart was pinned above it. She led them through to a large kitchen at the back of the house. There were scarves draped over lampshades to keep the light low in the house. The air had the thick, sweet scent of burnt-out incense mingled with the smell of cooking.
‘You hungry? I made some soup,’ she said.
The General shook his head. ‘Too much whizz,’ he said.
The kitchen was somewhere she clearly spent a lot of time. There were shelves full of rice and lentils. Strange Buddha figures, embroidered onto brightly coloured cloths, hung from the wall above a large cooker. Strings of cotton flags crossed the ceiling. At the back of the room was an old pine table, surrounded by mismatched chairs.
She opened a drawer in the table and pulled out a silver tin and handed it to the General. Inside was a lump of what looked like brown stone. He sat at the table, then pulled it out and sniffed at it.
‘Nepalese?’ he said. Digging in his pocket, he pulled out a small glass pipe and started crumbling pieces into it. ‘Put some music on, Penny. It’s too quiet.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Not now. I like it quiet.’
Breen stood awkwardly, watching. Penny looked at him and said, ‘Who are you?’
‘Cathal,’ Breen said again.
‘You said that already,’ Penny said. ‘I meant what are you doing here?’
The General said, ‘He was at the Roundhouse, telling everyone he was looking for Afghan.’
From his coat pocket, Breen pulled out the photograph of the three men and handed it to the woman. The General held a lighter above the pipe and sucked hard.
She took the photograph, looked at it and sighed. ‘Who was on?’
‘Family,’ the General said, his voice pitched higher as he held in the smoke.
She wrinkled her nose, as if she didn’t like them. ‘Haven’t been there since Jim Morrison played. Where did you get this?’ she demanded.
‘Bill Milkwood’s wife gave it to me,’ said Breen. ‘I’m looking for Nick.’
‘He’s dead now too, isn’t he?’ she said, looking at the picture. ‘Bill, I mean.’ She didn’t seem particularly concerned.
‘Who’s dead?’ said the General, passing the pipe to Penny, who pulled out a chair and sat down beside him. She didn’t answer.
‘An old friend of Afghan’s,’ said Breen. ‘What do you mean, “too”?’
It was Penny’s turn to suck. She held the smoke in her lungs a minute. ‘He wasn’t a friend of Nicky’s,’ she said, as she exhaled smoke through her nostrils. ‘Nicky hated him. Just someone Nicky knew. From the old days.’
‘You heard about him being killed?’
‘Killed?’ said the General, coughing. ‘Wow. Bummer.’
‘It’s OK. He’s been reborn.’ She held out the pipe to Breen.
He shook his head. ‘I’m OK, thanks,’ he said.
‘Take some. It’s good.’
‘Really, I’m fine.’
She handed the pipe over to the General and smiled at Breen. ‘You don’t fool me,’ she said. ‘That make-up and those nails.’
‘Don’t I?’ said Breen.
‘You’re not on the scene.’
‘I’m a policeman,’ he said.
The General had just taken a long pull on the pipe and erupted into coughing. ‘Bloody hell.’
Penny leaned over and thumped him on the back. ‘I thought so,’ she said.
Breen said, ‘I’m trying to find who killed Bill Milkwood. Nothing else. I’m not here about drugs. I’m not even here officially.’
‘Christ. I thought there was something funny about you. Jesus. Jesus. Jesus.’
Penny just stood and said, ‘I’m going to make some tea.’ She switched the electric cooker on and went to fill a kettle.
‘I can’t believe I brought the bloody fuzz to Afghan’s house. What a fucking moron. He’ll kill me.’
‘Where is Nicky?’ asked Breen.
Penny said, ‘Why? Why do you want to know?’
‘Because he may know something about who killed Bill Milkwood.’
She nodded.
‘Nicky’s dead too,’ she said simply.
‘I mean, you don’t actually know that for certain,’ said the General. ‘You don’t really know it, do you? What if he’s just lying low? Sometimes he just, you know, vanishes.’
‘He’s dead. I know.’
Breen looked at his watch. It was very late. ‘Are you his… lover?’
‘Yes. Was his lover, I suppose. He left. Went. Never came back.’
Breen was puzzled. ‘Did he pack a bag or anything? Did he leave a note?’
‘I don’t really know,’ she said. ‘He may have done. He came and went as he pleased. He was never here that long. But he always came back.’ She stretched up and took a tin from the shelf. ‘Chamomile or lapsang?’
Breen looked around the kitchen. It was messy, but not chaotic. ‘How can you not notice whether he packed a bag or not?’
‘I was in Afghanistan,’ she said. ‘It was getting towards winter so I came home. When I came back he was gone. No note. Nothing. He’d been planning a trip to Morocco.’
‘A fucking policeman.’
She leaned down to the General and said quietly, ‘It’s OK. Stay calm. You’re peaking. Nothing bad is going to happen.’
‘Right,’ said the General, reaching for the pipe.
She took it from his hands. ‘Not now. Later. You need to chill out. I’ll give you some tea.’
‘OK.’ He nodded. ‘Tea. Sounds nice.’
The kettle began to bubble. She spooned black tea into a large pot. Even if it was in a city, something of the warmth of the kitchen reminded Breen of the Tozers’ farm.
‘This was when?’ he asked.
‘It would have been back in November, only I got ill in Afghanistan. They said it was dysentery, but I don’t think it was.’
‘The shits. Oh, God,’ muttered the General.
‘I was so sick I spent two weeks holed up in a freezing shed in an olive grove near Herat hallucinating, so I didn’t make it back until a few weeks ago. By then he was gone.’
‘He’s probably still on the road,’ said the General. ‘Morocco. Goa. You know.’
The tea steamed in mugs. Breen took one and put his hands around it.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Penny eventually. ‘He’s moved on.’
‘Moved away.’
‘Moved on to another existence.’
Breen sipped the tea. It was rich and smoky. He didn’t normally like tea but this tasted good. ‘Did he have another girlfriend?’
She laughed suddenly. ‘You’re quite beautiful, for a policeman,’ she said.
The General snorted. ‘Look out, piggy. She likes you.’
‘Moved on to another life,’ she said.
‘Why?’
‘Have you read The Tibetan Book of the Dead?’ she asked.
The General giggled. ‘The Tibetan Book of the Dead. It’s an acid trip.’
‘In Herat I was close to death. My soul left my body for a while. I met Nicky in the afterlife.’
Breen said, ‘What do you mean?’
‘I met his soul. I saw him clearly surrounded by light. He was passing on.’
‘Wow,’ said the General. ‘You saw Afghan?’
‘It’s just like it said in the Book of the Dead. His soul was free. He was emancipated. He could go anywhere. He came to me. I was blessed. I tried to talk to him but he was talking in another language.’
‘You dreamed you saw him?’
‘It wasn’t a dream. It was real.’
Breen said, ‘But you don’t know he’s dead. Not for certain.’
She was still smiling, but tears were coming down her cheeks now. ‘I do,’ she said. ‘I know for certain. He always came back. Or sent a message. There has been nothing.’
Maybe it was the fumes of whatever they had been smoking getting to his head. Could you inhale them just by being in the same room? Breen’s brain was fizzing. If Nick Doyle was dead, he had disappeared in November, then.
‘He stared at the sun, man. Afghan stared right into the sun. I saw him do it.’
‘Hush, baby,’ said Penny. ‘You need to rest now.’
The General sighed. ‘One more pipe?’
‘You’ve had enough, baby.’
‘Just a little bit?’
‘Shh,’ she said.
‘Maybe I could sleep. Can I crash here, Penny?’
She stood. ‘I’ll find an eiderdown. You can sleep on the couch in the front room.’ She told Breen, ‘Pour yourself another cup of tea.’
When she was gone, arranging a bed, Breen stood and walked to the shelf. There was a picture in a frame, draped with a string of faded dry marigolds. Penny stood with a bare-chested man in front of a temple. Between them stood a bearded sadhu in an orange robe. Penny was smiling. The bare-chested man was Nick Doyle. In contrast to Penny’s bright smile, his expression was serious, his gaze almost vague, as if he was looking beyond whoever was taking the picture.
Seeing him tanned, dressed in loose cotton trousers, a pair of leather sandals on his feet, he looked very different from the photograph he had already that had been taken at least a decade before. His face was much thinner and wore an intense, serious expression.
Penny came back into the room.
‘Is this your house?’
‘My parents’ house. They’re dead,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Breen.
‘Best thing they ever did was die,’ she said. She pulled up a chair next to him and sat cross-legged on it. ‘So,’ she said. ‘Tell me what you know about Nicky. I miss him. I like to hear anyone talking about him.’
‘But I don’t know anything about him,’ said Breen. ‘I was hoping to find out.’
‘He was amazing. He had an ancient soul. You know what that is?’
Breen shook his head.
She said, ‘Have you got any cigarettes? I’m out.’
Breen offered her one, and took one for himself. He had already smoked his ration for the day but anything this late counted as tomorrow, he supposed.
‘When did you meet him?’
‘It was in the Amir Kabir in Tehran. It’s a hotel, of sorts. A doss-house, really. I was heading out to India, but our bus needed fixing. Tehran’s such a dump. The city’s full of Yanks. They run the place. Nicky was just on his way back from Kashmir. I fell in love with him there and then. He was different. All the other travellers were all talk, talk, talk.’
Tehran and Kathmandu. Breen realised that he hadn’t even made it as far as Ireland, yet these people, only a few years younger than himself, were travelling the world.
‘Travelling was like a competition with them. They’d talk about rat-infested beds they’d slept in, or cockroaches in their food, like they were boasting. “I was beaten up by Turkish police.” “I ate rat in Delhi.” Nicky was different. He didn’t talk much at all, in fact. It’s like he was on a higher level.’
‘But he was smuggling drugs?’
She shrugged. ‘What’s so bad about that? Besides, he didn’t take drugs himself any more. He didn’t need to,’ she said. ‘But he turned lots of people on.’ She was talking about him in the past tense, he noticed.
‘He didn’t take drugs?’
‘No. He was already there. He had been stripped to the bone. We only get a glimpse of the light sometimes. He saw the light all the time.’
She picked up the pipe and the lump of dope and started breaking small pieces of it with long fingernails.
‘I shouldn’t be here if you’re doing that,’ said Breen.
‘Arrest me, then,’ she said. ‘I don’t really care. I don’t care about anything.’
‘What do you mean, stripped to the bone?’
She licked small pieces of the hash from her fingers. ‘He only talked about it the one time. In Cappadocia I think it was, a bunch of American draft dodgers started talking about how the Viet Cong tortured their victims. They made them watch while they killed their children and raped their wives. This was the war they escaped by leaving America. Nicky just said, “I have seen that.”’
‘He said that? When? Did he talk about that?’
‘He didn’t have to say when. We all knew it was true. “I have been to the Gates of Hell,” he said. You read William Blake?’
Breen shook his head.
‘Blake is beautiful. He talks about the Gates of Hell. Meeting the devil. Anyway, it was obvious Nicky was telling the truth. We all believed him.’
Breen blinked. ‘Weren’t you curious what he meant?’
‘Of course we asked. But he didn’t say any more. Like I said, he didn’t need to. His soul had been scoured clean. That’s what he was like. What about the Book of the Dead? You read that?’
‘No.’
‘You should. Then you’d understand. Nicky had already been right to the edge of experience.’
Breen blinked. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘I don’t expect you would,’ she said.
‘What did you like about him?’
She smiled. ‘Do you know why we went travelling? We were looking for knowledge. It’s why we take drugs. Why we study religion. You just had to look at Nicky to know he had the knowledge.’
‘Do you have any idea why he disappeared?’
‘Why?’ She shook her head slowly. ‘But then I don’t really understand why he appeared, either. Or why he stayed. Why? Why do you need to know about him?’
‘Because Sergeant Milkwood was killed. The police don’t know why. I’m trying to talk to anyone who knew him.’
She laughed gently. ‘So you put on make-up and did your nails.’
Breen had forgotten about the eyeliner. There was a small Indian mirror in a hand-painted frame propped on the shelf. He stood up and looked at himself in it. The black around his eyes had leaked onto the surrounding skin, giving him a demonic look.
He tried wiping it with the back of his hand.
‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘It looks sort of cool. I like it.’
It was late. He didn’t know what he was doing here any more. Nothing she was saying seemed of any use to him.
‘And you think he’s dead just because you had… this dream?’
She shrugged. ‘Some heads I know met up with him in Marrakech around Christmas. I found that out a couple of weeks ago. They had a big party. I wish I’d been there. Last thing I heard, he was heading back after that, through Spain. From what people are saying they got him there.’
Breen remembered the photographs from Milkwood’s desk at Scotland Yard. Had he recognised the dead man?
‘They?’
‘Whoever killed him. It’s dangerous there. A few people have disappeared this winter. Not just Nicky.’
‘Was he bringing drugs back?’
‘Probably. People think he was murdered there. He just disappeared, you see. Nobody’s heard of him for so long. It’s like a network. If you just live in one place you wouldn’t understand.’
‘Did he ever talk about Kenya?’ Breen asked. ‘Was that where he had seen suffering?’
‘I knew he’d been there, but he didn’t ever talk about it.’ She lit the pipe and drew on it, closing her eyes.
‘Did he ever mention James Fletchet?’
Two streams of smoke blew from her nostrils. She shook her head.
‘He didn’t really talk about people. He talked about experiences. How to make consciousness-expansion endure in ordinary life. And he didn’t need drugs to do it.’
She held out the pipe to him. He shook his head.
‘You should. You need to open yourself up. I can tell. I can see right through you. Under the make-up, which is nice by the way, you’re just a frightened boy hiding under the bed.’
‘What experiences?’
She flicked the lighter and took another pull.
‘“The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” That’s William Blake, too. You need excess.’
‘I thought excess just led to the hospital.’
She laughed, smoke bursting from her lungs.
‘Oh boy. You’re a long way away from where Nicky was. Nicky read a lot of Blake. “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite,”’ she said.
‘What kind of experiences?’ Breen persisted.
‘You want to know? He had been with the devil. Just like Blake said. You could tell, just by being with him.’
Breen said, ‘He had been with someone who was the devil?’
‘No. The devil himself. He went on journeys all the time. Sometimes he went with his body. Sometimes he went without.’
Breen said, ‘Don’t get me wrong, but was he mentally ill?’
She laughed again. ‘Jung says that if you enter the world of the soul, you are like a madman. Of course people like you might think he was mad. You think all visionaries are mad.’
‘What about Alexandra Tozer? Did he ever mention her?’
‘Who’s she?’
‘Someone who died.’
Again she shook her head. ‘No. Was it someone Nicky knew?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Breen. ‘I’m just trying to make connections.’
‘We’re all just trying to make connections,’ she said.
They sat in silence for a while. She didn’t seem to mind. He thought about getting up to go home.
‘What about you?’ she said, unsmiling. ‘What are you really looking for?’
The question annoyed Breen. He was looking for whoever killed Helen’s sister. But that was not what she meant. Besides, it wasn’t the answer he wanted to give, right now. Why wasn’t it enough any more just to answer the obvious questions?
‘I’m not looking for the same things as you,’ he said.
‘Maybe you will be some day. Everybody comes to it in the end.’
He thought about Helen. He thought about the smarmy sergeant who had interviewed him at Scotland Yard: ‘So we’ve got a girl who knows exactly how her sister was killed. And a few days later she disappears and a man connected to the case turns up with exactly the same… injuries. And you don’t think she’s connected?’ He was here because he was looking for a way to prove to himself that it couldn’t be her. That’s all.
He stood. ‘I really should go,’ he said.
‘It’s OK,’ she said, reaching out to his arm. ‘You can stay if you like. Talk some more.’
Breen remained standing. He wanted to be home; had Helen visited again? He wondered if there would be any taxis at this time of night. If not it would be a long walk across London.
She tugged at his arm. ‘Please stay. I don’t like to be alone. I’ll be OK in the morning.’
Breen said, ‘That other man’s asleep in the living room.’
She let go of his arm. ‘No. You’re right. I’ll be fine.’
‘I’m tired,’ he said. ‘I need to sleep.’
‘Sleep with me, if you like,’ she said, looking up at him. ‘I don’t mind.’ Suddenly she seemed less like the confident traveller, hitching a ride from Tehran to Kathmandu. She looked lonely.
‘I could stay, I suppose,’ he said, sitting down again. ‘But I’m OK on the couch.’
She reached out a hand and touched his face.
‘I could cook you something,’ she offered.
She dropped her hand down to his lap and squeezed his thigh, then rubbed.
‘Relax,’ she said.
He flinched away from her, pushing his chair back.
‘Suit yourself,’ she said, withdrawing her hand. Instead she turned to the table, picked up the lump of resin and crumbled some more into the pipe.
She said, ‘I’m not like this usually. I don’t just have sex with people because they’re there.’
She smoked her small pipe while Breen sat in silence in her kitchen. The tang of tarry smoke filled the air. Breen wasn’t quite sure whether he was just exhausted, or whether the smell of it was making him high as well. His head swam.
‘Did you have sex with Nicky?’
She shook her head. ‘A few times. But he wasn’t very interested. Not like you. I can tell you’re interested. You’re just too afraid.’
There was a wailing noise. Outside, behind Penny’s kitchen, cats fought in the wet alleyways.
He tried to put Helen Tozer out of his mind. Instead he thought of hot countries, far away. Of travelling through them, away from cold, dark London. Unless you were in the army, travelling in foreign countries had never been an option for his generation. Even if they’d had enough money, exchange controls meant you were only allowed to take a few pounds with you out of the country, anyway. It had been impossible for most people. But it would have been good to see temples and minarets, to look at snowy mountains and wide deserts.
After about ten minutes, she laid her head on his shoulder and started to cry. ‘It’s just I miss him,’ she said.
He closed the front door as quietly as he could, not wanting to wake her. On the outside of the door there was painted an orange lotus flower which he hadn’t been able to make out in the darkness the night before.
On the Central Line, a young woman with a baby in her arms looked at his fingernails, then curled her lip into a sneer and whispered to another woman next to her.
The train was full. It was Monday morning. Breen had taken one hand out of the army coat pocket to grab the strap-hanger that hung from the ceiling of the carriage. Breen glared back at her. Took the other hand out of his pocket.
He must look like some old queen, returning from a night on Piccadilly. Breen had done his best to wash the make-up from his eyes in Penny’s bathroom. The water had been cold and the towel was greasy with dirt. But the paint on his nails wouldn’t wash off. He felt unclean. He hated being unshaven. His hair was uncombed and his clothes were dirty and slept in, making him feel like a tramp. He closed his eyes.
He had slept fitfully in a small bedroom on the first floor, covered in eiderdowns. The house had been silent, Penny asleep next to him, fully clothed.
He had untangled himself from the bed and roamed the house in the dark early morning. It was large and full of junk. Old wind-up gramophones, dusty drapes and Victorian furniture, sometimes repainted in bright greens and blues. He had looked for any sign that Nicky Doyle, a man in his mid-thirties, a traveller, drug dealer and mystic, a police informer and constable, had ever lived here, but apart from the photograph in the kitchen he had seen the night before, Doyle had left no trace.
He thought about what having sex with Penny would have been like. Underneath the hippie clothes her body would have been good to hold. He would have hated himself for it, but these chances didn’t come around often.
A chance for all that pent-up anger at Helen Tozer, for her not being here, to be released. But instead he had held on to it.
When he opened his eyes in the underground train, both women were looking at him now, disdainfully.
And then.
He was just struggling with the key in the front door of his flat, exhausted and wanting to lie down and sleep, when he heard a voice, high and loud.
‘Paddy.’
He looked up and blinked.
Helen Tozer. Blue minidress and cup of tea in one hand, big smile on her face.