At the Woolworths on Stoke Newington High Street he bought a box of Milk Tray chocolates, then walked on to the bus stop on Rectory Road.
He imagined footsteps behind him, but when he turned, there was no one there. On Brooke Road, he dipped into a newsagent, and as he emerged with a copy of The Times, he was sure he saw a man in a light blue mac, collar turned up, standing with his back turned to him, peering hard at the window of the Radio Rentals shop. It was fifty yards away and too far to make out any features.
He stepped back into the newsagent and bought ten No. 6’s and a box of matches. When he emerged again, the man was still there, face still turned away.
At the bus stop, he joined a short queue. The buses were quiet, this time of day. Holding the newspaper up, he scanned around for the man in the light blue mac, but couldn’t see him.
The double-decker came and Breen boarded it, finding space downstairs. He sat next to a blind man who opened a purse and spilled pennies onto the floor. He was just leaning down to pick them up for him when the bus pulled off. Someone must have jumped onto the back platform while the bus was moving, because the conductor shouted, ‘Oi! Next time, wait. I don’t want to be picking you up off the bloody road,’ but by the time he had straightened up and turned to look, whoever it was had made it up the stairs to the top floor.
It was a short ride to Aldgate. He paused under the sign: London’s Most Famous Kosher Restaurant. Haas was not there yet, so he sat on a stool at the window and asked for fried gefilte fish and coffee.
There was an old joke about Bloom’s. A customer once complained about his water being brought in a dirty glass. When the waiter returned with fresh water, he called loudly to all the diners, ‘Who ordered the water with the clean glass?’
Breen checked his watch; he did not have long. Haas was supposed to be here at one. He would have time to have lunch, then it would be visiting time. He would go and take the ring back, apologise for giving it to her, and hope that they could go back to where they had been before he’d bought it.
The fried gefilte fish came. It lay flat on the plate, with pickled beetroot on the side. He tried a little, but it was dry and hard to eat. He thought of Helen; she would hate this unfamiliar, un-British food. She would be wrinkling her nose; laughing at it, mocking him for ordering it. The coffee was not good: watery and bitter without any flavour. Breen checked his watch.
Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw someone looking at him, but when he turned, all he saw was an elderly woman smoking a cigarette in a long holder. Once you know you have been followed, spied on, you cannot get the idea out of your head; you begin to distrust the world around you.
He cut a little more from the fish. It was greasy and cold. Even with the chrain – the pickle – it was hard to swallow. He put down his fork and looked at his watch again.
After visiting Keylock, he was more convinced than ever that the two assaults, on Helen and Kay Fitzpatrick, and the two murders, Julie Teenager and Florence Caulk, were all by the same man – as Helen had believed. He had no faith that C1 would be doing anything to find who he was, though. Their job would be to bury it. In his pocket, he had the sketches he had drawn from Helen’s description. They weren’t much good and he couldn’t work out who it was that Helen had seen, but if there was a connection, maybe Haas would recognise someone.
He saw Haas long before Haas saw him. A man in a dark blue workman’s jacket, thin, slightly bent. He was standing at the small traffic island at the junction where Commercial Road met Whitechapel High Street.
He looked to the left and right, for a gap in the flow of vehicles. And then, he looked up and he saw Breen waving at him from his table inside the brightly lit restaurant.
The man smiled. It was the plain, open smile of a man who had not let the hardness of his life crush him. A man who, thirty-five years before, had played in orchestras to cheering crowds in gilded rooms but was now just another man in a London crowd.
The traffic was bad here, motorbikes dodging between the vans and cars, taxis lurching between slower vehicles.
And then, behind Haas, Breen saw a man in a light blue mac, collar turned up, who had dodged through the traffic to arrive at the traffic island just behind the caretaker.
Haas smiled at Breen still, staring straight ahead.
Breen’s eyes were wide. He had no idea what was about to happen, but was sure it was not good. Behind the glass window, Breen raised both hands: Look out. The man behind you.
Waving his hands, he knocked his plate to the floor where it smashed. Other diners stared at him, the man shouting in the window.
‘LOOK OUT!’
Haas can’t hear him, of course.
In the second before the lorry obliterates the view, Breen sees Benjamin’s smile falter. He is wondering why the policeman is suddenly looking so concerned, why he is gesticulating at him, why he is trying to say something to him? What?
And then there is a screeching of brakes; followed, what seems like ages later, by a kind of stillness.
The busy junction’s traffic, so frenetic a few seconds ago, has stopped. Cars are stationary now. Nothing moves.
And then someone starts screaming. And more people join in.
It was strange how everyone had seen it differently.
A woman with a wailing toddler on her arm said she had seen the man trip and fall on the edge of the pavement. The lorry driver said exactly the same, though how he could have seen anything, Breen didn’t understand, as Haas had fallen under his rear wheel. A girl with a black bob and too much make-up, who Breen guessed should have been at school, said a man had barged into him, making him stumble, but when Breen asked her to describe the man, she had no idea at all. A Pakistani man said the same. Haas had been jostled.
A pensioner, medals on his grubby jacket, said he’d seen a man in a mac running away from the scene, but when he pointed in one direction, the girl pointed the opposite way. The man said the mac was pale. There was no mention of a colour.
After the lorry had blocked his view, Breen had seen nothing at all. It had taken him long seconds to leave his seat, push out of Bloom’s front door, past the crowd at the roadside and round the vehicle.
When a local copper arrived, out of breath, he attempted to shove onlookers away, demanding that the man move his lorry so that the cars could pass.
‘I can’t drive that,’ complained the lorry driver, and he pointed to Benjamin’s body.
Benjamin’s head was under the large rear wheel, the skull broken like an egg. His body was curled behind it in the gutter, arms by his side. In a single, crooked line, blood ran out over the grey stone and mingled with discarded cigarette packets and chewing gum.
Breen felt the small piece of fish he had eaten rise in his gorge.
Around the body there was a circle of people, staring. Breen nudged a teenage boy out of the way and squatted down. He felt in Benjamin’s trouser pockets but there was nothing but loose change and keys.
Haas’s old jacket was frayed a little at the sleeve. He felt inside the outer pockets but they too were empty. Unbuttoning it, he found his wallet in the inside pocket.
If Haas had had anything useful to say, it had been obliterated under the wheel of the four-ton truck.
He stood and looked about, staring at the people around him. Was the killer still here, watching him, or had he run away?