On Thursday morning, Breen picked Tozer up from the women’s section house in Pembridge Square at 8.30. Most of the women in D Division lived here, sharing rooms in a pair of huge old Regency houses that had been knocked together. No men were allowed beyond the sitting room.
Tozer came clattering down the steps, cardigan half on.
‘Here I am. All ready,’ she said, tugging a brush through her hair as she got into the passenger seat of Breen’s car. ‘The walking joke of D Div.’
‘What are you on about?’ said Breen.
‘You said I was a joke. In front of Jones. I heard you.’
Breen crunched the gears, pulling out into the Bayswater Road. ‘No I didn’t. I said those squatters would take you as a joke. That way you’d get a better chance of talking to them than by trying to break down the door.’
‘Super,’ she said. ‘Thanks.’
‘Why are you in such a bad mood all the time?’
Tozer didn’t answer.
Bayswater Road was stationary, so he U-turned, intending to cut through Westbourne Grove.
‘Look out,’ said Tozer.
‘What?’
‘Didn’t you see that kid on a bike?’ she said, looking back over her shoulder.
‘Of course I did,’ said Breen.
They crawled northwards. ‘You should have stayed on Bayswater Road,’ Tozer said.
‘We’ll be fine.’ He swung the car left again to cut up to Royal Oak but the traffic was backed up here, too, cabbies honking their horns and swearing.
‘This is horrible,’ she said.
Breen could see what had happened. A lorry had got stuck trying to reverse into a building site ahead. It had taken the turn too sharply and was now grinding against the metal gatepost.
Breen pulled the car over and got out.
‘What are you doing?’ said Tozer.
‘John!’ Breen shouted. ‘John Nolan.’
A big man in a frayed tweed jacket who was attempting to direct the lorry driver turned. He wore blue workmen’s trousers and black boots with the steel toecaps showing through.
‘It’s me,’ said Breen.
‘Well there. Cathal Breen.’ The Irishman put out his big red hand. ‘How you been?’ he asked in an accent exactly like Breen’s father’s. ‘Good to see you.’ If he closed his eyes, he could be standing in front of his dad.
‘What’s going on?’ said Tozer.
‘Give me a minute,’ said Breen.
‘Bunch of bloody idiots,’ said Nolan. ‘Will you look at that?’ The lorry continued to move backwards and forwards, trying to get clear of the gate as the queue of cars got longer.
It wasn’t until the age of twelve or thirteen that he had realised his father even had an Irish accent. A strong one at that. It had come as a surprise when his school friends said they couldn’t understand what his father said.
By eighteen he had become so embarrassed by the way Tomas Breen spoke that he had found excuses to avoid inviting his girlfriend home, a cheery seventeen-year-old redhead who had let him fondle her breasts but no more.
It wasn’t just the way his father had spoken. It had been everything about him.
Listening to Nolan now, he was shocked to realise how much he missed the sound of his father’s voice.
‘I’ve been OK,’ said Breen. ‘Do you have a minute?’
‘For the son of Tomas Breen I have more than a minute. I’ve an office just around the corner.’ Nolan had known Breen’s father as a younger man. He had been one of the many struggling to find a job in London who were given work on the building sites by his father.
Tozer was out of the car and standing next to him now. ‘Is anything wrong?’
‘This is an old friend of my father’s,’ said Breen. ‘John Nolan.’
Tozer held her hand out to him.
‘That’s right,’ said Nolan, glancing down at Tozer’s thin legs, then up to her chest and then, finally, to her face.
‘Why don’t you wait in the car?’ said Breen.
‘I’m OK. I can wait.’
‘It’s just I wanted to ask Mr Nolan something,’ said Breen.
‘I don’t mind,’ she said.
Breen was about to insist but Nolan said, ‘Come and join us for a cup of tea.’
‘OK,’ Tozer said with a grin.
The building site was just on the far side of Lord Hill’s Bridge. They followed Nolan down the path next to the concrete foundations dug ten feet down into London’s crust, shored up by thick planks of wood.
‘What are you building?’
‘That road,’ said Nolan. ‘You know. The big road on legs. The West Cross Route.’
They had been smashing down houses right the way from Shepherds Bush to Paddington for months. Beautiful old rows that had survived the German bombs. A clear line curving from the west. There had been protests from locals, whose communities were being cut in half, and bricks thrown at the bulldozers in Notting Hill, but mostly people wanted the roads.
‘It’s going to join to a highway that will run right around London, they say,’ said Nolan. ‘And then three more “ringways” outside that. It’ll be better than Los Angeles, they reckon. Bloody cars zipping everywhere.’
‘Plenty of work for you?’ said Breen.
‘Loads of money and work for those who know how to make it, sure. You have to feel sorry for the poor buggers in the way, if you’ll excuse my language.’
‘I love the idea of driving above the city,’ said Tozer. ‘It’ll be like flying.’
‘I would say I prefer to be a little closer to the earth,’ said Nolan, stepping over bare dirt.
A man standing on the back of a lorry whistled at Tozer as she walked past.
‘You want to watch that,’ called Nolan. ‘This girl’s a copper.’ He was smiling though.
‘She can bang me up any time,’ said the man.
‘What did he say?’ said Tozer.
‘I had the priest say a Mass for your father,’ said Nolan as he passed them. ‘Hope you don’t mind.’
‘My father would have hated that you did it,’ said Breen. ‘But if there’s a God he’ll have been proved wrong and if there isn’t he’s past caring.’
Nolan laughed and led them to a small caravan with a box outside for a front doorstep. He entered first and was still trying to conceal the calendar advertising Mahony’s Skip Hire, with its picture of a barebosomed woman holding a wheelbarrow, when Tozer entered.
‘Don’t mind me,’ she said.
Nolan put the calendar into a file drawer and slammed it shut. The caravan was heated by paraffin. Condensation streamed down the walls. There was a small palm crucifix hanging on a nail on the wall, left over from Easter. Nolan plugged in the kettle, which sparked and fizzed. ‘There now,’ he said. ‘My office. Take a seat.’
Nolan scooped up the plans which lay on the small dining table and Breen and Tozer shuffled onto the bench seat alongside it.
‘The thing is, I’ve got some holiday coming up,’ said Breen, ‘I was thinking of going to Tralee,’ he said.
‘Is that right?’
‘I’ve never been to Ireland,’ he said. ‘It never entered my head until my father died.’
‘He never went back?’ said Nolan.
‘Never.’
Nolan poured a little water into a huge brown pot to warm it, opened the door of the caravan and emptied it outside. He said, ‘Some of the young men… they never go back either. It’s like it’s lost to them. Maybe they’re ashamed. They leave home boasting they’re going to make their fortunes and they end up working on some shitty job like this, ’scuse my language.’
‘My father was too proud to go, I suppose,’ said Breen.
‘I would say,’ said Nolan.
Tozer offered Nolan a cigarette. Breen shook his head. Nolan lit hers first with a silver lighter, then tore the filter off his and lit the broken end, scraps of smouldering tobacco falling onto the floor, then burst out coughing, thumping his chest.
Breen said, ‘And now I wish I’d asked him to take me. I would like him to have shown me around.’
Nolan nodded solemnly. ‘I understand,’ he said and took another long pull from his cigarette. ‘It’s always home, whether you’re born there or not.’
With the cigarette hanging from his lip, Nolan spooned tea into the pot and poured on the water. ‘You must go and see my cousins when you are there. I will tell them to show you the place.’
‘That’s what I wanted to ask. I won’t know anybody there.’
Tozer said, ‘Don’t you have any aunts and uncles?’
Breen said, ‘I don’t know. My father never talked about anybody.’
‘Sure, there must be relations there. You’ll have cousins. Everybody has cousins.’
If there were, Breen’s father had never mentioned them.
The tea steamed in the teacups. Nolan added sugar without asking. ‘It is true,’ he said. ‘He set himself apart from the place. He was a disappointed man.’ Nolan distributed the cups, then sat at the table, pulled out a sheet of paper and started writing a list of names and addresses for Breen.
Tozer said, ‘I think they should bulldoze the rest of London and start again. It’s an ugly, dirty old place, far as I’m concerned.’
Nolan asked, ‘What about that dead man you were asking about last month?’
‘No luck,’ said Breen. ‘Sometimes you never find out.’
‘It must take it out of you,’ said Nolan, and he erupted into coughing again. He wrote slowly and carefully, adding a telephone number when he had one. Tozer looked at her watch, drank her tea, said nothing. When he’d finally finished the list he handed it over to Breen. ‘You tell them I sent you. You’d be made most welcome. If you go, will you take some packages from me?’
Afterwards, walking back across the mud to the car, Breen looked up and tried to visualise a road above his head, cars roaring along it, heading west. Buildings had already been pushed aside; a giant parting combed through the city.
Tozer said, ‘I didn’t understand a ruddy word that man said. His accent was so strong,’ she said.
‘Speak for yourself,’ he said.
‘I mean, I may talk in a Devon accent, but at least that’s ruddy English.’
They drove to Abbey Gardens and pulled up on the other side of the road to the squat. The street was quiet. The curtains of the building were all closed. Since they were last here, somebody had written a sign in big letters and stuck it on the inside of one of the windows:
Admit it. You’re frightened aren’t you????
‘Sorry I’m in a bad mood,’ said Tozer, looking away from him. ‘It’s just I don’t really want to go and live back on the farm. I like it here. Only I have to. You know what it’s like.’
Breen nodded. He looked at the squat. On the front step, a tabby cat sat waiting to be let in. ‘You don’t have to do this,’ he said. ‘Like Jonesy said, really. You’re not supposed to do anything like this.’
‘I’m not supposed to do nothing,’ said Tozer. ‘That’s the problem.’
She finished a cigarette and stubbed it out in the ashtray. ‘I just go and knock on the door, then?’
‘They won’t know you’re there if you don’t,’ said Breen.
Breen wound down the window and watched her knocking on the big front door with the side of her fist. Again, the window above opened and a bearded man with long hair appeared. Breen could see Tozer looking up, talking to him, but he was too far away to hear anything.
The conversation went on for at least a minute before the door finally opened. In the dark of the doorway Breen caught a glimpse of the young woman he’d seen in the garden, now talking to Tozer at the door. Pale, slender and slightly Pre-Raphaelite in a long cotton dress. Then the front door closed behind Tozer. Breen waited for ten minutes but she didn’t come back out.
She would be OK.
He would be in big trouble with the women’s division if she wasn’t.
He turned the engine on, put the car into gear, and drove away back south towards Westminster.
The shiny new sign was stuck: a big triangular metal stand with silver letters reading ‘New Scotland Yard’. It had only been outside the new building for a few weeks. It was supposed to turn round and round, symbolising how the Metropolitan Police were taking care of the whole city. Or as Carmichael had said, ‘How we’re always going around in circles’.
Two men were up a ladder trying to get it revolving again. Breen watched them struggling with it for a while until one of them finally pulled out a hammer and started thumping something inside the sign.
The giant building was so new it smelt like the inside of a plastic bag. The new lifts weren’t working, either, so Breen had to walk up four flights of stairs to find Carmichael’s office.
Big John Carmichael’s sideboards were even longer than last time Breen had seen them. Breen watched him for a minute, one finger typing, until he spotted Breen, stood and roared, ‘Paddy, you bugger! How’s things in D? What about that yokel bird you’re knobbing? Bailey still driving everyone crazy?’
‘I’m not knobbing anyone,’ said Breen.
‘Can’t have that, Paddy. You’ll waste away.’
Compared to the dark, high-windowed room where the two of them had worked together at Marylebone, this place was modern and light. There were orange plastic chairs. New green plastic telephones. Neat Olivetti typewriters. The future.
‘I want to hear everything. Come to the canteen. I’ll buy you a coffee. It’s crap, mind.’
Carmichael was wearing a blue-and-yellow checked blazer that made him look even larger than he was. He grabbed Breen’s arm and started pulling him through swing doors and down corridors.
Breen had never been to the canteen here before. It was huge. People clutched wooden trays and queued for chips and sandwiches served by a line of serving women in pale nylon pinnies.
‘So?’ Carmichael said, sitting down opposite Breen at a long table.
From up here, Breen could see right across the Thames towards Nine Elms. He asked, ‘Do the Drug Squad do much surveillance of suspects?’
‘I’m trying to find out about a man called Robert Fraser. All I know is he was arrested last year for drugs and sentenced to six months. He thinks your lot are still keeping an eye on him.’
‘Probably are, then,’ said Carmichael. ‘Name rings a bell. Big case. They pulled in Mick Jagger too, remember?’
Breen tried. The last two years were an exhausted blur of bed baths and hospital visits. Breen took a gulp of coffee. Drainwater.
‘What do you want to know?’ asked Carmichael.
‘A murder case I’m on.’ He was wary about telling Carmichael more.
‘And you think this Fraser was involved?’
‘I don’t know. I’m crashing around in the dark, to be honest.’
‘I thought you were on holiday, anyway.’
There was an odd burst of light as the sun broke through the London cloud. The grey streets outside looked suddenly brighter.
‘Bailey didn’t let me go. Because we’re short-handed. Because people like you have jumped ship.’
‘Don’t blame me. You should have come here too. Marylebone CID is a dead duck. Bailey’s stuck in the past. Longer he stays there, the worse it’ll be. This is where it’s going on.’ He gestured around at the dozens of coppers sitting in the canteen. The future looked more like a bank headquarters than a police station.
Breen pushed the coffee away from him. Even the smell was making him nauseous.
‘This is where we are,’ Carmichael was saying. ‘Ten years ago you could have listed the names of pretty much every heroin addict in London. There were – what? – two, three hundred in the whole of the city. Since the beatniks and the pop stars, drugs are everywhere. That’s why the Home Office are trying to put the lid on it. They’ve changed their tune. Now they want us to put them away.’
‘I’m just interested in what you have on Fraser.’
‘It’s the Frankie Pugh murder you’re on, isn’t it?’
‘Everybody knows. Why haven’t I read anything about this in the papers? You’d have thought they’d be all over it.’
‘Francis Pugh is Rhodri Pugh’s son,’ said Breen. ‘One of Harold Wilson’s men. Until we know why he’s been killed, he’s keeping the lid on it. It’s like there’s an unofficial D Notice on the whole thing.’
‘Ah,’ said Carmichael. ‘Right. And Bailey is all for the hush-hush, I suppose?’
‘You know him. I’m reporting back to Rhodri Pugh’s people.’
Carmichael laughed. ‘See? Everyone thinks England is swinging, everybody thinks there’s a revolution going on, but your place is stuck in the Middle Ages, far as I can see.’
‘I’m being expected to work in the dark. I’m not allowed to make an appeal in the papers. They’re controlling who I interview.’
Carmichael said, ‘Either the whole thing will backfire and the press will get wind of it, or you’ll get nowhere at all. The Home Office will demand heads. Either way you’re being set up to take the blame for it.’
Breen said, ‘Is Fraser still on drugs?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘How would you know someone was on drugs? It’s not as if they carry a sign.’
‘Do you think Pugh was on drugs?’ Carmichael said.
Breen didn’t answer. Go carefully. The Drug Squad were notorious for liking headlines. If they started nosing around, the story would end up in the press in no time. So he said nothing.
‘So it’s good here, then?’
‘I’m still finding my feet. But least it’s not Bailey.’
Once he would have told Carmichael everything. They were mates. He would have told him about the death threats. They would have laughed, maybe. But now he kept things to himself, wondering whether someone was lurking behind corners, waiting for him.
There was a loud bang behind them, then a burst of laughter and clapping. A young constable had dropped his tray on the floor, spraying cottage pie over the lino. ‘Nice one!’
‘And half the bloody rock stars are buying big houses in the countryside and driving around in white Rolls-Royces. Some bloody revolution if you ask me. Know what? They gave us all a reefer to smoke last week. So we could recognise it. You should have seen me. Afterwards they asked me what was so funny. And I couldn’t even remember.’
A young woman in a nylon coat and white cap elbowed the young policeman out of the way and started cleaning up the mess.
‘Leave it with me. I’ll see what I can find out.’
Breen watched the woman on her knees, patiently sweeping up the spilt food into a tin dustpan.
‘Look at the bum on that,’ said Carmichael. ‘Not bad, eh?’
The sign was still not working when Breen left the building. The workmen had abandoned it.
Carmichael was right. If he was not careful he’d end up taking the flak for anything that went wrong.
A gust of wind funnelled by the tall building caught Breen’s raincoat. It flapped suddenly upwards, obscuring his vision. He was heading back to the older building in Marylebone. To the comfort of worn floorboards and ancient dirty windows.
Breen’s stomach lurched when he saw the paper stuck into his typewriter. Another threat? What this time? It was starting to wear him down, make him jumpy.
Nobody seemed to have noticed it.
But when he looked it was just a note from Marilyn, written in her neat round hand: ‘Harry Cocks (?) called. Has tickets for rugby on Sat. 01 723 9567.’ Breen screwed up the note and put it in the bin.
Tozer arrived back at the office just before lunch. She was carrying a slightly battered guitar.
‘Bloody hell,’ said Jones. ‘What is that?’
‘It’s a hairdryer,’ said Tozer. She leaned the guitar against her desk while she put down her handbag and sat down, then picked it up again and laid it across her lap.
‘Not what I meant,’ said Jones, but Tozer ignored him.
‘You have a nail-clipper, Marilyn?’ she asked. ‘I think I should cut them. You can’t play guitar with long nails. Mind you, I bite them anyway.’
Marilyn ignored her. One of the strip lights was flickering again. It was giving Breen a headache. He asked, ‘How was it?’
‘This bloke in the squat’s going to teach me guitar,’ said Tozer.
‘Jesus,’ said Jones to Marilyn. ‘I’ll be glad when she’s gone. At least things will be normal again.’
‘I always fancied it. Being honest, I only thought lads played guitar,’ she said.
‘You got into the squat, then?’ said Breen.
‘I should have guessed,’ said Jones.
Tozer nodded. She was holding the guitar on her lap, awkwardly trying to get her hand around the neck.
‘She’s a bloody woman, for pig’s sake! ’Sides, that’s not proper police work.’
‘Did they see anything?’ asked Breen.
Tozer shook her head. ‘They said you can’t see into their place anyway. I checked. They’re right. The angle’s wrong. You can just about see into the garden, but that’s all.’
She cradled the guitar onto her lap and struggled to arrange her fingers on the fretboard.
‘It’s a commune,’ she said. ‘Free love and everything. They asked me to join.’
‘Free love?’ said Jones, sounding interested now.
Marilyn sneered at Tozer. ‘I expect you’d like that. Free love.’
‘What do you mean by that?’ demanded Tozer.
‘Free love?’ said Jones again. ‘She couldn’t even give it away.’
Tozer pretended not to hear him. ‘Cow,’ she muttered.
‘How many people live there?’ asked Breen.
‘Six or seven. Two women.’
‘One of them has long fair hair?’ asked Breen.
She nodded and looked up from the guitar. ‘You noticed her, then?’
Breen said, ‘Just saw her for a second, that’s all.’
‘She’s called Hibou – so she says, anyway. It’s “owl” in French, apparently.’
‘She a frog?’
‘French? No. It’s just a name.’
‘What about that man, Jaya…’
‘Jayakrishna.’
‘What the heck kind of wog name is that?’ said Marilyn.
‘It’s Indian. I think it’s nice,’ said Tozer. ‘The other girl’s called Padma, only her real name’s Emily.’
‘That’s bloody weird. They all change their names.’
‘Jayakrishna says you need to leave your self behind.’
‘Leave your marbles behind, more like. What’s your new name going to be?’
‘What about the owl girl. What’s her real name?’ asked Breen.
‘She wouldn’t tell me,’ said Tozer. And she dropped her fingers across the nylon strings. ‘That’s a D, that is,’ said Tozer. ‘I’m not sure it’s in tune though.’
‘Don’t care if it’s A-flat minor. It’s horrible. You going to change your name to Hiawatha or something?’
‘Not that kind of Indian,’ said Tozer.
‘Higher purchase,’ said Marilyn.
‘Higher than a bloody kite, I expect,’ said Jones.
‘Had they seen anything at all?’ said Breen.
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I was thinking of going back tomorrow, Paddy. Is that OK?’ She strummed the strings again.
‘Why?’ demanded Breen.
‘What?’ said Jones. ‘So you can learn another bloody chord?’
Jones said, ‘Right. It’s five to one. Lunch break. Who’s coming down the Louise for a pint?’
Marilyn had her powder compact out already and was putting lipstick on.
Breen watched Tozer concentrating on keeping her fingers on the fretboard while trying to pluck the strings one by one.
Bailey emerged from his office and paused open-mouthed at his door, looking at Tozer, sitting at her desk in the CID room, a big guitar across her scrawny lap. Breen put the phone down.
‘Off to the pub for lunch, sir,’ said Jones. ‘You coming?’
Bailey closed the door again.