Breen closed his eyes for a second, then opened them again. He could look at this stuff; it was his job.
He moved the torch down again, playing the light onto the boards between the opening and the lift. He thought for a minute, staring at the dead woman, then called down, ‘Is there any other way to get into the loft, apart from this hatch?’
‘No,’ said the caretaker.
‘So if anyone needed to work on the lift they’d have to come up through here.’
‘Right.’
‘You sure about that?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Mint?’
‘Sir?’
He climbed down the ladder and handed the torch to him. ‘Your turn. Just look. Tell me what you see.’
Mint turned his head from side to side. ‘Me?’
‘Up you go.’
Mint scrambled up the rungs.
‘Have a good look around,’ said Breen. ‘Take your time.’
Apart from the scratching of Breen’s pencil on his notebook, there was silence for a while. The tall constable peered over. ‘Are you drawing?’
‘Yes,’ said Breen, not looking up.
‘Is that her?’ the copper asked.
From memory, he was sketching what remained of her face; the angle of her head.
‘Jesus fuck,’ said the constable.
‘Told you,’ said the one who had been up the ladder. ‘No eyes.’
‘Shouldn’t we take a closer look at the body?’ called Mint from above.
‘Not till the photographer’s been. I don’t want to disturb anything until it’s recorded.’
‘She’s beyond help, either way,’ said the policeman, peering at Breen’s notebook. ‘Not bad, though. The drawing I mean. If I could draw like that I wouldn’t be doing this. I’d be selling it along Green Park.’
Mint finally descended the ladder, his face white.
‘Oi, smiler!’ one of the coppers said to the caretaker. ‘Fetch a bucket. I think junior here’s about to bring up his breakfast.’
‘Will you be OK?’ asked Breen.
Mint nodded, but said nothing. With his pencil and notebook in his right hand he reached up and fingered the crucifix on his lapel. You always remembered the ones like this. However hard you tried, you’d never get them out of your mind. They would be with you all your life.
‘What did you notice?’ asked Breen.
‘Notice? She was…’ He tailed off.
‘Dead?’ whispered one of the local coppers, with a quiet snigger.
‘Hush,’ snapped Breen.
‘’Scuse me for breathing,’ muttered the man.
‘A young woman has been killed.’
‘Sorry, guv.’
‘Mint?’
‘Um. I couldn’t really see, Sarge.’
‘How do you think she ended up there?’
Mint frowned. ‘I guess somebody put her there.’
‘How?’
‘Carried her, I suppose?’
‘Go up. Look again. Tell me what you see.’
Mint took a breath. He was heading back up the ladder, shakily this time, just as the pathologist arrived, panting. It was Wellington; he recognised Breen and scowled. ‘Where is it?’ he said.
‘She. In the loft,’ said Breen, pointing upwards.
‘Let me at her, then.’ Wellington was dressed in a dark wool suit, too heavy for the weather. ‘I’ve a lunch at two.’
‘I don’t want anyone to go near her until the photographer’s been,’ said Breen.
‘Naturally, but the sooner I get at her the better,’ said Wellington.
‘I need a photograph of the scene. He’s on his way.’
‘Oh, for pity’s sake,’ said the doctor.
Mint came halfway down the ladder, eyes wide.
‘Well?’
‘She must have been put on top of the lift on another floor.’
‘Good,’ said Breen. ‘What made you think that?’
He came back down and dug into his jacket for his notebook. ‘There would have been steps in the dust if somebody had taken her up there this way.’
‘Write it down, then.’
‘What is this? Sunday school?’ Wellington took a pipe out of his pocket and put it in his mouth.
‘No smoking on the landing,’ said the caretaker.
‘I’ll smoke where I bloody like.’ Wellington shook a box of matches. ‘Just let me get on with my job, Paddy.’
‘When did the lift stop working?’ Breen asked the caretaker.
‘Friday morning, probably,’ he said.
‘Probably?’
‘I don’t use it. But I clean it in the mornings. It wasn’t functioning.’
‘She’s probably been dead three days, Wellington. Another hour won’t hurt.’
‘Not her I was thinking about. Another hour? Bloody hell, Paddy.’ He looked at his watch.
‘Is there somewhere we can talk?’ Breen said to the caretaker.
The caretaker eyed Wellington holding a match above the bowl of his pipe but said nothing. He nodded towards Flat 7 on the other side of the landing.
‘Come with me,’ Breen said to Mint.
It wasn’t a flat, it was a bed-sitting room, with an old sofa covered in blankets next to a gas fire and facing an old black-and-white TV. There was a curtain across the room, blocking most of the light from the windows; Breen guessed the man’s bed was on the other side of it. Bookshelves were filled with boxes of all sizes – old cardboard shoeboxes, wooden cigar boxes, biscuit tins, tobacco tins – all full of doorknobs, sash weights, screws, hinges and the other paraphernalia of an odd-jobs man. His name was Benjamin Haas, he said, and he had worked here since shortly after the war.
‘She was a working girl,’ he said, shrugging. He filled a kettle from the sink and put it on a small gas hob.
‘A prostitute?’
‘If you like,’ he said. ‘A hard-working girl.’ He had a mid-European accent. ‘Always paid her rent. Always polite.’
‘Friends, relations?’
‘Only a maid.’
‘Name?’
‘I know only her first name, Florence. Maybe that’s her real name. Maybe it isn’t. It is not my job to ask.’
‘So you don’t have an address for her?’ Spooning tea into a large brown pot, Haas shook his head.
‘What about the lift. What was wrong with it?’
‘The electric motor is finished. The repair man coming. But he doesn’t come yet.’
‘It was definitely out of action on Friday morning, you say.’
The body was on top of a lift in an open shaft; it would have been visible if the elevator car had descended.
‘Did she have a boyfriend? Husband?’
Again, he shook his head. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Pimp?’
‘No no no. She wasn’t one of those girls. You don’t understand.’
‘What about any arguments? Any falling out? Did you have any problems with her?’
‘Only pop music. She plays pop music a lot. And loud. Terrible music.’ He smiled. ‘Bang bang bang. Yeah yeah yeah.’
Breen looked around the room. There were dusty hardback books piled on the floor.
‘You live here on your own?’
He put a tray on a stool; the teapot, three white mugs, a box of sugar cubes and a half-pint bottle of milk. Then he waved his arm around the room and smiled. ‘Obviously.’
‘You liked Miss –’ Breen checked the name in his notebook – ‘Bobienski, though.’
‘She is half my age. Was,’ said Haas.
‘Are you Polish, too?’
‘Austrian,’ said Haas. ‘As a rule, I dislike the Poles. After all, they, as a rule, dislike Jews, so I dislike them, but I liked her. She was different. She had… Charakter.’
‘Character.’
‘Yes.’ He poured three cups of tea.
‘Had she been here long?’
‘Only two years.’ The man rubbed his lips and then scratched at his arm.
Mint, who had been silent all this time, leaned forward and took his tea. Breen left his. ‘She was a prostitute,’ Breen said.
‘We do what we have to do,’ said Haas. He waved his hand around him. ‘In Austria, I used to be a cello player in the Philharmonic Orchestra. Now I fix taps that drip.’
‘You maintained the lift?’
‘That… no. Too kompliziert.’
‘Did she have regular customers?’
‘Of course. She was a pretty girl.’
‘Would you recognise them?’
‘Men do not visit prostitutes in order to be recognised. In the evenings, I stay in my room and listen to the radio.’
Breen wondered if the guardedness of his answers came from being an outsider, from speaking a second language, or something more.
‘Did she pay her rent on time?’
‘I am just the caretaker. But I have never heard any complaints from the landlord.’
‘You might tell him that it’s an offence under the Sexual Offences Act to let out premises as a brothel.’
Haas shrugged. ‘So? Maybe close down all the hotels here also.’
‘Who else lives in the building?’
Four of the flats were empty, said the caretaker. One was awaiting a new tenant. One contained an elderly couple who had been away on holiday since the end of June. One of the basement flats housed a French family who returned home every summer. The husband worked in a restaurant. The other was being used to store furniture. ‘On the first floor there are four students, from the University of London. Below that, Mr Payne,’ he said.
‘What does he do?’
‘Old man,’ said Haas. ‘He is retired.’
Breen turned to Mint on the sofa next to him. ‘Do you have any questions?’
‘Me?’ Mint sat clutching his tea, blushing under his thick dark hair.
‘For example, when Haas last saw Miss…’
‘Bobienski,’ said the caretaker. ‘On Thursday. Her pipes were making noises. She asked me to fix them.’
‘Were you aware of men coming to visit that evening. On Thursday?’ asked Breen.
‘As I say, I make it my job not to be aware of these things,’ he said.
Mint finally opened his mouth to speak. ‘So can you account for your movements between Thursday night and…’
‘Saturday morning?’ suggested Breen.
‘Yes,’ said Mint. ‘Can you account for your movements between Thursday night and Saturday morning?’
‘Of course I can,’ said Haas. ‘I was here. I went to the shops to buy food and some hardware. I came home. I listened to the radio. They played organ music by Couperin.’
‘And Saturday?’
‘They played Handel, I think.’
‘No,’ said Mint. ‘In the morning?’
‘Maybe I went to Bloom’s. For lunch.’
Breen said, ‘Blooms? In Whitechapel? That’s the other side of London. Just for lunch?’
‘I like the food. It’s what my mother used to make.’ It was a kosher restaurant; all the Brick Lane Jews ate there.
‘Who did you eat with?’ said Mint.
‘Alone.’ He shrugged.
Breen said, ‘You went all the way to the East End to eat a meal on your own?’
‘It is a very nice meal,’ said Haas simply.
‘So you have no alibi?’ said Mint.
‘I do not know that word,’ said the caretaker, looking at Breen for an explanation.
‘My colleague means that we only have your word for it – because you were alone.’
Haas shrugged, looked away. ‘Ah. Alibi. I understand. Yes. You have only my word.’ He stood and turned his back to them.
Outside, the photographer had arrived, a large man, grumbling about having to lift his lights up the stairs. ‘About bloody time,’ said Wellington.
Breen and Mint followed the caretaker down to the floor below.
‘Crikey,’ was the first thing Mint said when he saw the pinkness of the room. They stood on the white carpet, looking around the room, gazing at the artifice of it. There was a pile of Jackie magazines on the table. The giant teddy bear sat on the sofa, as if watching them.
The Beatles smiled.
‘And how old was she?’ asked Breen.
‘I don’t know. No no no. This was all theatre business.’
‘Theatre business?’
‘Täuschung. Illusion. Her job. She was not a child. She was a woman.’
‘I don’t understand.’
There was a small kitchenette to the right of the front door; a large main room, and two bedrooms. The first bedroom was the bigger of the two. Like the living room, almost everything in it was pink, including the bedsheets. It was a double bed, with a Union Jack bedcover and a yellow cloth rabbit placed on top of the pillows.
There were toys on the floor. A doll’s house. A pink Dansette record player. All over the bedroom walls were more photographs of pop stars, stuck with Sellotape. Breen recognised some of them: The Kinks, The Who, Mary Hopkin, The Monkees.
‘She pretended,’ said Haas. ‘Swinging London. You know?’
Among the photographs, Breen noticed the picture of a soft-faced young man with bright white hair. He was clutching a guitar. The photo was signed in black felt pen. ‘Best wishes.’ The signature was indecipherable.
‘Who’s that?’ he asked Mint.
‘It’s that dead bloke, Sarge,’ he said. ‘In the papers.’
There was a dressing table artfully scattered with bottles of colourful nail varnish and make-up.
‘And this was her bedroom?’
Breen pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, put it around the wardrobe door handle to open it.
‘No. This was where she worked. Her own bedroom was across the corridor.
One half was full of ordinary clothes, a mac, a cocktail dress. The other side was full of what appeared to be costumes.
There were three school uniforms and a pink flouncy thing with ruffles, several brightly patterned miniskirts, tops with stripes and polka dots, and two pairs of bright, patent-leather thigh-length boots.
‘She was a specialist,’ said Haas. ‘She knew how much you English men liked young girls. That was the name she used. Julie Teenager. She was quite well known, I believe. A pop star.’
‘Julie Teenager?’
‘And you didn’t have any problem with that? In your house?’ asked Mint.
‘It is not my house,’ he said flatly.
‘Must have cost a bit to rent this place,’ said Breen.
‘Nineteen pounds ten a week,’ said Haas.
Mint raised his eyebrows. It was a lot for a flat in London, especially around here; Breen paid less than a quarter of that, but that was in Stoke Newington. ‘She must have been earning a whack, then,’ said Mint.
‘I never asked her.’
‘You have the key to this flat. When you didn’t see her, did you let yourself in?’
‘No. Miss Bobienski’s maid Florence knocked on my door on Friday night to ask if I had seen her. She was worried. She had heard nothing from her. There were men coming.’
‘Customers.’
‘Exactly.’
‘But she didn’t report anything to the police?’
Haas smiled. ‘Obviously not. The police do not always treat people like her well, perhaps.’
‘So the maid had a key too?’
The caretaker nodded.
‘Friday night? And the lift was definitely not working then?’
‘As I have said.’
‘She dressed up as a teenager?’ asked Mint. ‘For men?’ He looked shocked.
‘She looked younger than she was, I think,’ said Haas.
They crossed the corridor. In contrast to the other frivolous rooms, this was monastic. A small space, with a single high window that faced out onto the back of the building, a colour television and a shelf full of novels. On her dressing table here, a small family photograph taken at some smart event.
Breen picked it up. A couple with a young boy and an infant. The man wore an RAF uniform and held the hand of the young boy dressed in a stiff suit. The woman wore a hat with a single feather in it and clutched the baby in her arms. It looked like it had been taken during the war. He stared at it for a second.
‘She never talked about them,’ said Haas, before Breen’d even asked the question. ‘It is a tragedy, now you see the family. He fought Nazis, you see?’
‘Yes.’
‘Royal Air Force.’ Haas stood stiffly alongside him as Breen flicked open the clips on the back of the wooden frame and took out the photograph.
On the landing, Wellington looked ostentatiously at his gold wristwatch, still waiting for the photographer to finish his work, as Breen appeared out of the dead woman’s flat. Breen ignored him, shouting up through the hatch to the cameraman. ‘Get photographs of her rooms too, OK?’ Then he turned back to the caretaker. ‘What about the lift?’
‘I think the engine is broken. It’s old.’
Breen grasped the scissor gate and shook it; the metal rattled.
‘Careful,’ said the caretaker.
‘Why?’
‘It’s old, that’s all.’
Breen pulled the gate open. She would be lying above him now.
‘What if the lift wasn’t here? Could I open this door?’
‘You’re not supposed to be able to. For safety.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘No. I’m not sure. It’s old,’ said the man. ‘It is not safe. I don’t like it. I tell the landlord we need to close it down. He does nothing. That’s why he is rich and I am poor.’
Breen led him to the floor below. The gate there was shut. You could see through to the other side of the square spiral stairway, the brown wood banister descending at an angle, dust on the untouched ledge beyond.
He shook the scissor gate again. It was locked. He thought for a minute, then reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out a penknife and opened the blade. He manoeuvred it into the joint at the side and pushed the blunt edge against the clasp that hooked into the side of the door. A small movement and the lock sprang free. Breen slid back the mechanism. ‘Is it supposed to do that?’ he asked.
‘It’s old. I said it already,’ said the caretaker.
In front of him, the lift shaft was empty. Grabbing the side of the door frame, he peered downwards. There was some litter, dropped onto the floor at the bottom; old cigarette packets, sweet wrappers. Then he looked up, towards the underside of the lift above.
‘Where’s the machinery? The motor that makes the lift work? Can I see it?’
‘Downstairs,’ said Haas.
They descended two more floors. There were two small flats in the basement. Between them there was a third door. Haas pushed it open and went inside.
Everything about the lift was ancient. It must have been installed between the wars. Breen squatted down, peered at the electric motor, looking for signs that it had been tampered with. He could see nothing obvious, but he was not the practical man his father had been. His father had been a builder, an Irish immigrant who had discouraged his son to have any interest in his trade in the hope that he would better himself. By which he had not meant becoming a policeman.
‘The engineer says he is coming tomorrow,’ said Haas. ‘Maybe the next day.’
‘He can’t touch it until we’ve looked at it.’
‘How long will that take?’
‘I’ll let you know,’ said Breen. On the way out he said, ‘Is this door usually unlocked?’
Haas shrugged. ‘No. There is nothing valuable here. Some tools. Nothing much.’
Breen strode up to the ground floor, then down again, and back up, counting stairs. Mint trotted silently behind him. After making a couple more notes, he walked out into sunlight where an ambulance waited outside to collect her body.
The young men from the new C Department had arrived with their briefcase bags of equipment, powders and brushes, tape measures and scalpels. Most of the men Breen knew in CID resented this new intrusion of science into the job. They’d managed fine without it before.
Outside, London was looking grubby and ordinary. The huge trees were still, leaves heavy above them in the quiet of a Sunday afternoon.