She had been put in a surgical ward full of older women, lying asleep in crisp white sheets. Her face was more colourful than it had been on the day before; all blues, purples and yellows. Her breathing was so shallow that once or twice he leaned closer to feel the breath on his cheek, just to reassure himself.
‘She’s fine,’ said a woman’s voice.
Breen turned. Behind him, in the neighbouring bed, a woman in her sixties sat knitting. Her long grey hair came down over her shoulders; the sort of hair she’d have normally worn up in a bun.
‘Did you do that to her?’
‘God, no.’
She shrugged and clicked her needles. ‘Mine used to do a bit of that. You her husband?’
‘No.’
‘Brother?’ She didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Was that her husband just now?’
‘There was another man here?’
‘Nice man. Just left.’ Her lips moved as she knitted, counting rows.
Breen stood and looked up and down the corridor. ‘What was he like?’
‘I don’t see that well. He just wanted to know if she was OK.’
Breen’s neck was prickling; his heart started beating. ‘What did he look like?’
‘Bit like you, I suppose. You a relation then?’
‘It’s my baby,’ he said.
The needles stopped clicking. ‘I thought you said you weren’t married?’
‘Think. Was there anything else about that man?’
‘He was nice. He asked me what I was knitting.’
Breen looked at the woollen garment; a children’s jumper.
A nurse came by. ‘Did Miss Tozer have another visitor?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re the first.’
‘There was a man here. What did he look like?’
‘No need to shout,’ said the nurse.
‘This woman here said there was a man, visiting my girlfriend. What if it was the man who assaulted her?’
‘Girlfriend,’ muttered the woman.
‘That was the vicar,’ said the nurse.
The woman pouted, set her needles clicking again. ‘I said he was a nice man.’
Breen laughed, a little too loudly.
Helen Tozer opened her eyes. ‘Hello you,’ she said. ‘I was wondering what all the noise was.’
Relieved, Breen sat down again, this time on the edge of her bed.
‘You’re meant to bring me chocolates.’
‘Right,’ he said.
‘You look rough,’ she said.
‘You, on the other hand, look gorgeous.’
‘I went to see Elfie,’ she said.
‘I didn’t think you were supposed to get up.’
‘It’s only my face he messed up, not my legs. I’m bored just sitting here with all these old…’
The woman in the next bed with the knitting clacked her needles furiously.
‘She’s fed up. Poor little lad even looks like Klaus, didn’t you notice? She’s scared about taking him home on her own, I think. You know, I thought I was the one who wouldn’t cope. She was the earth mother, you know? She’s falling apart.’
He looked at her and thought of Elfie’s baby boy, crying in the cot.
‘How’s the case?’
‘Not so good. I think this time he’s getting away with it.’
‘No. You’ll get him.’
‘Maybe not this time.’
Outside, the rain had started again, smearing the windows. He started cautiously. ‘What was it you were trying to say, yesterday? You were on some drug.’
‘You’ll think I’m nuts.’
‘So?’
She smiled at him, then winced from the pain of moving her lips. ‘I think the man who attacked me was the same one that killed the other two,’ she said.
‘I heard you saying it yesterday, but at first I didn’t understand. I figured it out last night. You think it’s all the same. You, Mrs Caulk, Kay Fitzpatrick, Julie Teenager.’
‘He went for my face. Like the others. All of them.’
He nodded. It was true. It was usually husbands or lovers who went for a woman in the face; there was something deliberately vicious about it. Four in a row? It was unusual, but all he said was, ‘That could be coincidence.’
‘Yes. But what about this? He didn’t attack me the first day. He attacked me the second day. When he saw you.’
‘I know. The man from the hospital in Chichester.’ A bell started ringing far away, down some corridor. It was like the bells were in his head too.
‘Yes. I think it was him in our flat.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Something about the height. The way he moved. I don’t know.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘And you heard him speak?’
‘Just one word.’
‘What about his accent? Was it Russian?’
‘You couldn’t really tell.’
The tea trolley was coming around, pausing by each bed, pouring tea from an urn into pale green cups and saucers.
‘He hates women,’ she said. ‘He wants to disfigure them.’
‘Is it a stretch to assume, just because you’re all women, that it’s the same man?’
‘Think about it though. He saw us when you were asleep. I saw him, you didn’t. But he saw me and the penny must have dropped that we were together. You and me. He knew I could recognise him. He knew I could identify him to you. That’s what changed everything.’
‘Right.’
‘He’s someone who you know. Someone who you’ve already met in your investigation. That’s why he wants to kill me. To stop you making the link.’
‘Wants?’
‘Yes.’
‘Someone I know? But you don’t?’
‘Exactly.’
Breen nodded. ‘Yesterday, before I left you at the flat, I thought I was being watched.’ He had assumed it was one of Sand’s men. ‘But it was you he was waiting for. My God.’
She stared at him, puzzled. ‘Why did you think someone was watching you?’
He shook his head. ‘I’m off the case,’ he said.
‘You can’t be. What’s happened?’
‘Can you stand?’
‘Of course I can. I’m not a bloody cripple. What’s going on?’
‘We need to go somewhere private to talk.’
‘What about my tea?’
‘Take it with you.’
‘Three sugars, please,’ she said interrupting the woman who was pouring tea for her scowling neighbour.
She was standing now, putting on a dressing gown. Breen took the cup and carried it, rattling in its saucer, through a ward of women who all watched him as he passed.
‘This is the father of my child,’ she said. ‘The one I told you about.’
The women muttered.
She pushed open a door at the end of the corridor and stepped out onto the iron landing of a wet fire escape. Below a group of nurses were on a break, eating sandwiches. The rain had stopped for now, but water still dripped from the poplar trees at the edge of the car park.
‘You see, I made a mistake. That’s why they’ve taken the case away. I thought I knew who the man who attacked you was. I tried to expose him.’
‘Who?’
Breen paused, then said, ‘A Russian spy.’
Helen sprayed tea.
‘No. I’m serious. I’ve stumbled into something I barely understand. It turned out that Julie Teenager worked for Polish intelligence. She was blackmailing Ronald Russell to concoct stories that the Soviets wanted to see in our papers. I thought she may have been killed by her handler. But I can’t figure out why or how.’
Her mouth was wide. Standing on the rusty fire escape that looked out over the housing estates towards the treetops of Hackney Marshes, he explained everything that Sand had told him. He didn’t care any longer that it was supposed to be a secret. It was because of it all that Helen had been attacked.
‘So C1 have taken over the case now?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’
She stood there, trembling slightly in the cool air. ‘Do you still think it’s him? The Russian?’
‘I can’t make it add up. Something’s wrong. Something’s missing. It’s like thrashing around in the dark.’
‘So do you think C1 will get him? Whoever he is?’
‘Of course bloody not. The case is being mothballed because it’s inconvenient. Sand doesn’t want anyone to know what actually happened with Lena Bobienski in case it lets the Soviets figure out how much they knew.’
She nodded. ‘Fucking hell,’ she said. ‘This is someone who killed two women.’
‘I know.’
She shivered. ‘It’s July and I’m cold,’ she complained. ‘They wouldn’t really do that, would they? Just let someone get away with all this?’
‘I don’t know.’
She turned and they walked back to the ward.
‘What was he like? The man in Chichester?’ Breen asked.
‘Ordinary. That’s the trouble. Ordinary.’ She swung her legs back onto the bed and he pulled the blanket up for her.
‘Good-looking?’
‘I suppose. Not my type anyway.’
‘What if I drew him?’ He took out his police notebook and started with a thin face like Lyagushin’s, but she said, ‘No. Rounder than that.’
‘Really?’
He tried again, then again, with different shapes of head. Then adding ears, eyes, hair and nose. ‘A bit like that, yeah. Maybe if the ears were bigger.’
‘You said they were too big last time.’
‘Maybe.’
He sketched.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Try harder.’
‘Maybe the eyes were closer together.’ She sighed. ‘I picked up Elfie’s baby. It was… terrifying really. He’s so small… No. Not that close.’
Breen turned the page and started again. Whoever she’d seen at the hospital in Chichester definitely wasn’t Lyagushin. He had been wrong.
‘I told Elfie about going to see Kay Fitzpatrick. I thought it would be good to get her off thinking about her baby and stuff. Know what she said? Kay’s a driver.’
‘You said that already.’
‘She worked nights.’
Breen stopped drawing.
‘That’s a bit like him, I think,’ she said.
‘Hold on. She worked nights?’
‘Exactly,’ she said.
‘How did she know?’
‘That guy she knows who works with the Rolling Stones. Remember? We met him at Hyde Park. Tom Keylock. He was in yesterday with chocolates for her. He remembered, anyway.’
‘I’ll tell C1, I suppose.’
‘For all the bloody good it will do.’
He held up the sketch. A man. About thirty. A featureless face. It could be anyone, but at the same time, there was something vaguely familiar about it.
He stared hard at the pencil drawing. When he looked, he saw that Helen was dabbing her eyes with a tissue.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘What you done to her now?’ The woman in the next bed was craning over to see what had happened.
‘He killed two women, Cathal,’ Helen said. She wasn’t a woman who cried, usually, but he knew she was thinking of her own sister, the child, murdered and dumped in a ditch close to her family’s house.
He fingered the ring box in his jacket pocket. The nurses were coming through the ward now, telling visitors to leave.
‘I only just got here,’ protested Breen.
‘Out,’ ordered a sister, tugging at the chair he was sitting in.
‘Wait,’ said Breen, turning back to Helen. ‘I didn’t bring chocolates. But I brought this.’
And he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the blue velvet box and the ring he had bought from Grima’s.
He watched her face for the sign of a smile. ‘Cathal?’
‘Perhaps you shouldn’t look at it now. It’s not the time.’
‘Please, Cathal,’ she said, quietly. ‘I don’t want this now.’
‘Take it. Whatever. If you don’t like it you can change it.’
Under the bruises, her skin was white. Tears escaped her eyes again.
‘Out,’ shouted the nurse.
‘Should have done that before he knocked her up,’ muttered the woman in the next bed.
‘Stupid timing,’ said Breen.
Still crying, she opened the ring box.
‘Out,’ called the nurse again.
He looked back, and she was staring open-mouthed at the ring, a look of horror on her face.
‘Just forget it, OK,’ he said, and turned away.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
‘So?’ said Mint, grinning at him from the Mini. ‘How did it go?’
The flat was dark and miserable. It felt damp and cold, even in July.
He was a fool. He should never have bought the ring, let alone tried to give it to her.
He needed to think, so he put coffee on the stove, but the milk in the fridge had turned, curdling in the bottle. He poured it down the sink and pushed the solids into the drain with a wooden spoon.
With a cup of strong black coffee in his hand, he tore the pages out of the notebook and put them on the kitchen table, staring at them, trying to make them come to life, but the five drawings he had done each looked like different people. She had only seen the man briefly on both occasions. It was not her fault. One looked a little like his own father. Another like Constable Mint.
For all that, there was something about the face she had described that was familiar.
He had an idea. Flicking through his notebook, he found the number for the house at Harewood Avenue. The phone rang for a minute unanswered.
He replaced the receiver, waited a few seconds, then phoned again. This time he heard someone pick it up and hold it to their ear, breathing heavily, as if he had run down the stairs to reach it in time.
‘Haas?’
‘Who is this?’ the voice whispered.
‘Detective Sergeant Breen.’
‘Oh.’ A pause. ‘The detective. Have you found the man who killed Lena yet?’
‘I’m afraid not. But I wanted to ask you a favour.’
‘Me?’
‘Is there something wrong, Haas?’ There was something anxious about his voice.
‘Nothing.’
‘OK. Well, I have some drawings I want you to look at. It’s possible that one of them might have been a customer of Lena’s. I would like to show you them.’
‘I told you. I didn’t see them.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ said Breen. ‘Every time I’ve been to the house, it was you who answered the door. It was you who picked up the phone just now, when nobody else did, despite the fact you live on the top floor. I think you saw everyone who went in and out. I think that’s the kind of man you are.’
Haas sighed. ‘Usually, I keep myself… under a stone. But maybe I notice some things.’
‘I need you to help me.’
‘If I can. You are trying to find a man who killed a good woman.’
‘Two good women. Florence Caulk was murdered last week.’
‘Oh. That is terrible. I did not know.’ He could hear Haas on the other end of the phone, sighing. ‘I lied to you, Mr Breen,’ he said.
‘I know.’
‘I am sorry. It was not my idea to lie. When the men came to search the house, I said they were police.’
‘They weren’t. I know.’
‘You knew?’
‘Yes. Not at the time. But I know now.’
‘I am sorry I lied. They told me to.’
‘So you knew who they really were?’
‘Natürlich, yes.’ He lowered his voice to a whisper, as if that would stop anyone else hearing what he was saying. ‘They were your security service.’
Breen nodded. ‘Of course. You were working for them. All along, you were working for them, weren’t you?’
‘It was not my idea. They told me not to cooperate with you. I am sorry. They ask me to keep a lookout for a man. They showed me a photograph.’
It would be Lyagushin.
‘They told me to call every time he visited.’
‘So you had to watch all the visitors.’
‘Yes.’
Breen took a second. ‘We shouldn’t talk now,’ he said. Every crackle of static on the line was suspicious. ‘They may be eavesdropping. That restaurant you told me about. Do you remember? Don’t say the name.’
‘You mean—’
‘Don’t say the name.’
‘Oh.’
‘Meet me there tomorrow. One o’clock. For lunch.’
‘They are listening?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe.’
That night, Breen slept badly, alone in the flat. At two in the morning, he realised he was awake and that a bird was singing in the cul-de-sac. The middle of the night, yet it was singing as if for dear life.
He got up and looked through the curtains, up the stairs and into the stairwell, wondering if someone had disturbed it. A quarter-moon hung above the police station, to the south. All the way up there, men were walking on it.
He was still awake two hours later when the blackness around him began to thin and so he rose, put on a dressing gown, and started looking again through the pages of his notebooks.