On Friday Miss Rasper put through a phone call from a man who wouldn’t give his name. ‘Very hush-hush.’ She winked. She appeared to have forgiven him for yesterday’s treatment of Mint.
The moment she connected him, the voice at the other end of the line said, ‘I was right, wasn’t I?’
It took him a couple of seconds to recognise who it was. ‘It’s Felix, isn’t it? The man from OZ.’
‘But I was, wasn’t I? There was something going on.’
‘Why do you think that?’
‘Remember how I reckoned there was someone very special on Julie Teenager’s list of clients? And I was bloody right. Because I just heard that someone went and slapped a D-Notice on the Mirror when they said they were going to print something about Julie Teenager having it off with a copper, only they had to pull it at the last minute.’
Breen pushed his chair back. ‘You’re wrong. It isn’t a D-Notice. They wouldn’t slap a D-Notice on something like that. That’s a request not to publish because of an issue of national security. We coppers can’t just slap them out because of something we don’t like people reading.’
‘Just saying what I heard,’ said the man on the other end of the phone. ‘So there was something going on. Knew it, knew it, knew it. I have a scoop. Who is it?’
‘Felix. I really wouldn’t if I were you.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because there will be consequences if you do.’ He looked over at Mint. Mint would end up taking the blame if anything did come out.
‘Tsk. Are you threatening me?’
‘No. Not me personally, but I’m sure Vice Squad will if I ask nicely.’
‘Temper, temper. We’re the alternative press. We’re not part of the D-Notice system.’
‘Is that what they’re really saying? That it’s a D-Notice?’
‘Yes.’
‘Just don’t print anything yet, will you?’
‘Why not?’
He couldn’t say ‘Because if you do, my earnest young colleague will almost certainly be sacked’. Instead, he said, ‘Listen. If you hold on to the story, I’ll try and find you something good you can publish, OK?’
‘OZ getting into bed with the fuzz? Not likely. That’s not how we work.’
‘Just don’t print it, please, Felix. I’ll see what I can do.’
Breen put down the phone, pulled out his notebook and flicked through it.
When he called the number he’d found, a woman at the Sunday Times answered. ‘Ronald Russell? I’ll see if he’s at his desk. Who shall I say is calling?’
‘Detective Sergeant Cathal Breen.’
Russell talked quietly, as if he didn’t want anyone to overhear his conversation. ‘Well, did you speak to my brother-in-law?’
‘He confirmed he was with you over that weekend. We’re getting him to make a statement.’
‘You didn’t tell him…?’
‘I was discreet.’
‘Thank you,’ said Russell. ‘I very much appreciate that. So I’m in the clear?’
‘You have an alibi. I wouldn’t say you were in the clear.’
‘But—’
‘Now I want you to help me,’ said Breen. ‘Do you have any colleagues who work at the Mirror?’
‘Naturally.’
Naturally, thought Breen. ‘They were going to print an article on Miss Bobienski’s clients but they pulled it at the last minute. The Metropolitan Police asked them not to.’
‘Thank Christ for that.’
‘But I also heard a rumour that someone put a D-Notice on the story.’
‘Why the hell…?’
‘Exactly. It doesn’t seem that likely. But there are other things about this that aren’t that likely either. Perhaps you could call your colleagues there and find out for me if it’s true or not?’
‘Sure. I’ll ask around.’
‘One more thing. Julie Teenager had a driver to pick up clients. Did you ever use him?’
‘A driver? No. I never heard anything about that.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Why on earth would they put a D-Notice on a story about a prostitute?’
‘That’s what I want to know.’
The day was a slow one; the investigation was losing its focus. Ruling out suspects was not the same as finding the killer.
‘So,’ said Creamer, later, as Mint and Breen stood in his office, ‘you had one principal witness, who’s also a suspect, and somehow she’s disappeared.’
‘Yes,’ said Breen. ‘That’s right.’
It was Friday. Creamer liked everything tidy before the weekend. He looked from one face to the other, hoping that someone would say something positive. ‘I can’t say I’m not disappointed,’ he said in the end.
But she wasn’t missing for much longer. At four Mint picked up the phone. Breen watched his eyes widen, his face whiten.
He scribbled something on a pad, put down the phone and said, ‘They found Mrs Caulk.’
‘Who’s they?’
‘River police. They just called.’ He stared at his phone.
‘Oh Christ. Dead?’
He nodded, looking horrified.
‘Where?’ Breen remembered how she had asked him for protection. At the time he had thought her overdramatic, self-centred.
‘I spoke to her,’ said Mint. ‘And now she’s dead.’
East India Docks had been the first of them to shut down. Just two years later, it looked like something left over from the war. Buddleias had sprouted in brick crevices of the warehouses. The windows were black. Moss was sprouting around the old shiny cobbles. Some of the cranes had been removed for scrap, but a few remained, rusting cables dangling in the air. The men who worked here, whose fathers had worked here, were on the dole now. No amount of strikes had saved them. They were planning on closing all the docks eventually and moving the ships downriver to Tilbury. The area which had been so full of noise and smell when he was a boy was silent. St Katharine’s, Surrey Docks and London Dock had closed last year. The whole East End was dying. Already it seemed like a place of ghosts.
A group of men were peering over the end of one pier. Breen drove the car towards them. As he approached, a man in overalls ran over, waving his hands for them to halt.
They got out and Breen saw why they had been told to stop. Someone had rigged a cable from an old diesel winch that they’d managed to get working. But the winding-engine was thirty yards away and the steel rope lay in a long line between the engine and the drop into the water. The motor was running, but the cable was still slack. Breen followed it across the dockside to where it disappeared over the end of the pier.
Breen approached the edge, stepping over the line, Mint following behind. When he reached the end, he peered over the worn granite into the dock.
The tide was low, but rising. A small white police launch was bobbing a few feet off, an outsize searchlight on the cabin roof; next to it a large barge with a crane on it. Leaning over the side of the boat, a policeman was looking into the thick muddy water.
As he watched, a frogman’s black-clad head popped up above the water.
Someone shouted, ‘Right. Stand clear. Away from the cable.’
A puff of black smoke blew up from the winch. The bystanders who had been gawping at the show moved back. A local copper ran towards Breen. ‘Don’t want to be there if the bloody thing snaps,’ he said, grinning.
‘What have they got?’ asked Breen.
‘Peugeot,’ he said. ‘They got the body out half an hour ago. Trying to haul the car up but the docks have silted up. Can’t drag the bugger out of the mud. Tried twice already an’ it slid back in. The silt clutches hold of it, see?’
‘Did someone report it going in?’
The copper shook his head. ‘Lad saw it at low tide. Just by chance. Apparently you could just make it out under the water.’
The cable tautened, groaned against the dockside, juddering. They could hear the other crane below too, straining at the wreck, sending up a fug of exhaust.
‘It’s coming,’ someone shouted.
The angry tone of the winding engine seemed to calm a little suddenly as the load became lighter. The car must have been sucked from the mud.
‘Shut it down, shut it down.’
The moment the operator put the winch into neutral, the cable ran out a little way.
‘Whoa!’
Cautiously, Breen approached the edge of the dockside again. Heated by the afternoon sun, the air was suddenly pungent with the sewerish stench of the dock bottom. The black Peugeot was almost entirely out of the mud, water cascading in arcs around it from cracks between the doors and boot and the bodywork and the driver’s open door. The bonnet remained mostly underwater, but what was visible was covered in thick greeny-brown silt.
It was an old model. Below, one of the men wiped the number plate clean with the side of his hand. Breen noted the registration.
‘Where was the woman? In the boot?’
‘No. Behind the wheel. She must have driven it in there.’
‘Suicide, I suppose,’ said Mint.
When he heard she was dead, he had assumed someone had killed her. Was it better if it was suicide? He wouldn’t feel so responsible for her death, at least. Breen turned to the local constable. ‘Where is she?’
‘Pathologist took the body away about half an hour ago.’
‘It was her then, do you think?’ Mint said, uncertainly. ‘Killed Miss Bobienski. I mean, you don’t drive off the end of a dock on purpose, do you? Guilty conscience?’
The crane on the barge revved again. They were trying to lift the car onto the rusting hulk. The vehicle swung dangerously in the air, creating eddies in the water around it and clanging dully against the barge’s side.
On Fridays, it had become part of their routine to go to the Electric Cinema Club in Portobello: he and Helen, Elfie and sometimes John Carmichael too. The Imperial Cinema, where the club took place, was on the wrong side of London, but they showed unusual films; there was nothing like it in the East End. Besides, Amy got them cheap tickets; it was where she worked.
Today in particular, Breen hadn’t felt like going. It had been a long week; he felt exhausted. And now his best witness, Florence Caulk, was dead and what if that was his fault?
But Helen felt cooped up at the flat. She looked forward to their one night out. And Mint was taking the shift at Harewood Avenue with a WPC, waiting for Mr B, Mr C and Mr K, who would presumably arrive for the appointments they had booked with Julie Teenager. Breen would rather be there than here and watching a Marx Brothers double bill.
Carmichael had been late. They had taken their seats without him; as Harpo Marx repeatedly pickpocketed a five-dollar note from a policeman, Carmichael finally arrived, squeezing himself down the row until he found a spare seat next to Elfie. Elfie and Helen were giggling. ‘God,’ said Helen. ‘I’m going to wee myself.’ Breen wasn’t finding any of it funny. Neither was Amy.
‘What’s wrong with her?’ whispered Helen. Now Chico was taking money from Groucho; Breen found it tiresome and childish.
‘What do you mean, what’s wrong?’
‘Amy. The way she’s been glaring at John ever since he got here.’
Breen glanced sideways. Amy was sitting on the far side of the aisle. To him, it was hard to say whether she was angry, or just engrossed in the plot.
Afterwards as they waited for a taxi on the street outside, Helen said, ‘You didn’t laugh once, either, misery man.’
He didn’t want to tell her about the case; about McPhail, about the D-Notice, about Florence Caulk. She’d question him, ask him about minute details, when he was still trying to get it all straight in his own head.
‘I couldn’t concentrate,’ he said. ‘I’ve got too much going on. Something I want to ask you, John. I think my prostitute had a driver. Know how I’d track him down?’
‘You tried Vice?’
‘I was just wondering if you had any ideas.’
‘Work, work, work,’ complained Elfie.
John shook his head, his arm around Amy, looking embarrassed, uncomfortable. He was so large; she so small next to him. It was clear they had been arguing about something, but what? As the taxi pulled away, Breen looked back and saw Amy wriggling her shoulders and moving away so that John’s arm hung there in the air for a second.
‘Maybe she’s just fed up with him being so unreliable all the time,’ Helen said.
It had been a surprise that Amy, young, pretty and hip, had ever gone out with John, a copper, in the first place; but since John and she had started their unlikely romance, Amy had become close to Helen and Elfie. The three of them got on well together.
‘We don’t argue like that, do we?’
‘We?’ said Helen.
‘Yes. You and me.’
‘Only because you’re impossible to have a decent argument with.’
Once they had driven a quarter of a mile, Helen was asleep on his shoulder so he had to wake her when the car reached Harewood Avenue.
He handed her and Elfie thirty bob for the fare home.
Helen turned away, pulling her coat tight. ‘I’m going to sleep upstairs at Elfie’s. That way you won’t wake me up when you come in.’
Breen watched the taxi drive away, then rang the bell. Mint came down and opened the door.
‘Where’s the woman constable?’
‘I said she should go home. Didn’t seem necessary for both of us to stay on. Nothing happened, the last hour.’
‘Did you get them?’
‘Only two of them here, but three more on the phone.’
‘Good.’
Upstairs, the two punters were both sitting on the same pink sofa, looking miserable. The older of the two held a blue teddy bear he had presumably brought as a present. ‘You can’t just hold us here. We’ve done nothing wrong.’
‘You’ve questioned them?’
‘Yes. This is Mr C. He is a schoolteacher.’ The younger man looked up, ashamed. ‘A girls’ private school. Do you think we should tell the school?’
Mr C groaned.
‘And the other one is Mr K, I take it?’ Because of the bear.
‘His name’s Hardy. He runs a frozen food business.’
‘Anything else useful from either of them?’
‘Not really, Sarge.’
It was too much to hope that one of them would be the policeman.
‘I’ve got both their addresses. I haven’t charged them with anything.’
‘It would be a bit difficult, Mint. They haven’t committed any offence.’
‘Something interesting, though. This gentleman –’ he pointed at the schoolteacher – ‘was picked up by a car.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘Only it wasn’t a man driving it. It was a woman.’
Breen turned to the man. ‘What did she look like?’
‘Early twenties. Dark hair, done up on top. A bit Jean Shrimpton, you know?’
‘Did she have a name?’
The man shook his head.
‘What sort of car?’
‘A Cortina. One of the new ones. Car radio and everything.’
‘What about a number?’
‘Julie’s woman dealt with all that.’
Julie’s woman: Florence Caulk. Breen held the door open for them both to leave. ‘We’ll need to get them to account for their movements since Monday too. What about Mr B?’
‘Didn’t show up, Sarge. Didn’t call either.’
‘Interesting.’ The Slavic man who brought wine.
The phone trace had eliminated two more, both of whom gave names that matched their directory entries and addresses and who could be interviewed further on Monday.
‘What jobs did they do?’
‘One’s the car dealer.’
‘Mr L?’
‘Yes. And the other’s a civil servant. After some discussion he admitted to being the one who favoured corporal punishment, referred to by Mrs Caulk as “Spanky”, I believe.’
‘Civil servant? Which department?’
‘Fisheries.’
Breen had been hoping it would have been something important, like Defence, something that would account for other people being interested in Miss Bobienski – whoever they were. He walked down the stairs into the night. After such a bad day, a good night perhaps, but still no Mr B. And no policeman.
On Saturday morning Breen was in the bath, relaxing with a cigarette, when Helen knocked on the door.
‘Let me in,’ she said.
‘I’m in the bath. I’m naked.’
‘I would hope so.’
So he got up, put a towel around him, wrapping it under his armpits so it covered the scars on his belly, and opened the door.
‘Get back in the bath. I’ll wash your back.’
Naked again, he got into the water, taking a flannel from the rack that lay across the bath and covering his penis.
She was looking at his stomach though. ‘Poor Cathal. Is it still sore?’ she asked.
He crossed his arms over his belly.
‘No. Just itches sometimes.’
‘You got in late. I heard you come in.’
‘You were upstairs.’
‘I couldn’t sleep. Elfie snores. I heard you shut the front door.’
‘I walked back from Harewood Avenue. Everything’s going round in my head. I knew I wouldn’t sleep unless I was tired.’
‘It must have been gone three you got in. What’s wrong?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I can tell. You’re a million miles away.’
‘The prostitute’s maid is dead.’
‘Oh. How?’
‘Looks like suicide. She drove a car into the docks down at Limehouse.’
‘Christ. So you think it was her that killed Julie Teenager?’
‘I don’t know. Wellington said he thought it was a man.’
‘He couldn’t imagine a woman doing anything other than ironing.’
Breen was unsettled by the death of Florence Caulk and by the uncertainty of whatever it was that McPhail was keeping from him. Large, obscure; a deep disconcerting rumble that wouldn’t go away.
Helen sat on the edge of the bath and pushed his arms aside, then moved her hands over his stomach. There was tenderness in Helen’s touch, but he just felt awkward, lying there in the soapy, cooling water. There were patches of his skin where, when she ran her fingers over it, he could feel nothing at all.
Saturday was normally a day off, but he caught the bus into town, sitting alongside the shoppers going up to Oxford Street. The papers said the Americans would send a rocket to the moon next week; all the windows on Breen’s bus were jammed tight shut and the man crammed into the seat next to him was loudly calling the Irish ‘bloody savages’.
When Breen reached his desk there was a note tucked into the cylinder of his typewriter. Breen pulled it out and read it.
Breen read it: ‘Mr Russell. Sun. Times. Said thinks you were right about D-Notice.’
Breen looked around to find the constable who had taken the message, but the office was deserted.
That night he sat with a WPC in Julie Teenager’s flat, but there was only one call from a first-timer who had found Julie Teenager’s advert in an old copy of Private Eye. There were no further visitors either.
Breen looked at the list in his notebook. After three days at the flat, only three men remained from Mrs Caulk’s list: B, G and I. One of them was a copper; one was a murderer. Maybe one was a copper and a murderer.