She's Leaving Home (2 page)

Marilyn’s phone rang. Distracted, Breen watched her answer it, saw the softness of her face disappear as she listened. “Right,” she said. She picked up a notebook and started writing out details in shorthand. “OK,” she said, pencil still in hand, “got it,” and put the phone down. It rattled on the cradle. She looked up at Breen.

“One just come in,” she said. She stood and walked straight to Bailey’s office.

“Sir?” She knocked on the glass of his door.

Bailey stood, square-shouldered, in the middle of the office. He was cleaning his glasses with his handkerchief again, listening with the rest of them as Marilyn read from her notes.

“A young naked woman,” Marilyn said. “Found under debris. St. John’s Wood. Discovered by a woman. Approximately eleven a.m. Local resident called it in. Body appears recent.”

It was 11:20 now, according to the Bakelite clock that hung above the door.

“Aye, aye,” said Carmichael. “Young naked woman. Best not send Jones. He’s never seen one of them.”

“’K off.”

“Some things we don’t joke about in this office, Carmichael.”

“No, sir.” Carmichael smirked, looking downwards. Tobacco suede Chelsea boots, finger loop at the ankles.

“May we continue?”

“Go ahead,” said Carmichael.

No one liked Bailey, but people hadn’t used to be so obvious about their feelings.

Bailey cleared his throat and turned to Marilyn again. “Any sign of a weapon?”

“Didn’t say, sir.”

Bailey gazed around the room, looking from face to face. Then he made up his mind. “Breen, by rights I think this one’s yours.”

“Me, sir? You already put me on the arson one, sir.”

Bailey sniffed. “I’m aware of that. However, as you might have noticed we’re a little short-staffed today. Nothing wrong with you taking on another case, is there, Sergeant?”

“No, sir.”

“Specially as you’re the reason we’re short,” muttered Jones.

“I’m sure you’re keen to show you’re up to it, aren’t you, Paddy?” said the inspector.

“Yes, sir,” he said.

Bailey pursed his lips for a second as if deep in thought. Eventually he said, “Jones? You’ll assist on the murder squad.”

“Assist Breen, sir?”

“Yes. Assist.”

Jones glowered at Bailey. “Yes, sir. If you say so.”

“Good.” And turned back to his office and his African violets and closed the door behind him.

They stood there for a second, saying nothing, until Marilyn said to Jones, “You know what he’s trying to do, don’t you? Stop you acting like a total spacker about what happened to Prosser.”

“Thanks for making that perfectly clear, Marilyn,” said Jones. “Only it ain’t going to work.”

“I know,” said Marilyn. “You’re still going to be a spacker either way.”

Breen began looking through the drawers of his desk for a fresh notebook. There was a prescription for some painkillers for his father and a pile of raffle tickets from the D Division Christmas Ball 1967, but no notebook.

Jones, nylon blazer and brown slacks, dark hair Brylcreemed down below his collar, came up and stood close to him and said quietly, “I said I’d go and do an errand for Prosser. On account of him being in hospital. ’Cause he got stabbed. I’ll be along this afternoon, if you can handle it until then, that is.”

“Fine by me,” said Breen. “Anyone got a spare notebook?”

T
wo local constables from the St. John’s Wood station stood at the entrance to the alleyway into the back of the flats. They were still waiting for the tarp to cover the victim with.

“A kid found her,” volunteered one of the constables. “The body was covered up by a mattress. All sorts of people must have walked past her from the back of Cora Mansions this morning, but he spotted her on account of his height. Being short, you see?”

At the beginning of an investigation, local constables were especially keen.

“So she could have been there a while, I reckon.”

“Thanks.”

The body was out of sight beyond the line of sheds. Breen noticed a man setting up a camera on a tripod.

“Anybody know who she is?”

“No, sir. Unidentified so far.”

“Anybody gone round the houses yet?”

The policeman, a pale-looking youngster, raised an eyebrow. “We was waiting for you, sir.”

Breen stepped back. On the fire escape at the back of Cora Mansions, a woman in a pale housecoat stood leaning over the metal banister looking down at the group of men working around the body. “You going to take a look, sir?”

A ginger cat sat on the roof of one of the sheds, glaring at the activity. The police camera’s flash went off.

The cameraman was lowering his tripod to alter the angle of his shot. The police doctor looked up from his kitbag. “Bugger me,” he said. “Paddy Breen. Heard you were last seen running away from the scene of the crime. What are you doing here?”

“Good to see you too, Dr. Wellington,” said Breen.

“If I die,” said Wellington, “please don’t let me be found with my naked behind sticking up to the sky. What a way to go.” Early forties. Balding. Hair swept over the top. Rakish sideburns and a cravat.

They had moved the mattress off the body and stood it against the brick wall next to her. The woman—not much more than a girl really—lay awkwardly, head jammed down on the earth, legs above her, tangled in a rusted bicycle frame. Absurd in her nakedness. Drizzle trickled unevenly from her upturned bottom down her pale, dead back. A small drip of blood had dried at the upturned corner of her mouth. Her pale blue eyes were wide and glassy.

Breen looked away. “Excuse me,” he said.

He managed to walk four paces before he was sick into a patch of straggly nettles a little farther down the alleyway. There had not been much in his stomach besides coffee. When he pulled a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe his mouth, he felt his hand shaking.

“You all right, sir?” said a constable.

Breen looked away. His nostrils, throat and mouth stung. His stomach churned. “Yes, I’m fine.”

“Christ,” said Wellington.

“I think it’s just a bug…”

He bent over and vomited again. He spat a long dribble of saliva onto the grass next to his small, pink pile of sick.

“I think that’s what the college boys call contaminating the site, Breen,” called Wellington, rummaging in his equipment bag and eventually pulling out first a thermometer and then a small jar of Vaseline.

“Do you want a cough drop, sir?” said the local copper.

Still leaning over the patch of weeds he answered, “No, I’ll be fine,” spitting onto the grass again to try to clear the stinging taste from his mouth.

He straightened himself up, stomach aching from the convulsions. “Was she killed here, or dumped?” he asked Wellington. His voice was quiet, not much more than a whisper.

“Dumped,” said the doctor.

“Yes?”

“Well, I don’t think she bloody walked here looking like that. Looks like she was lying on her side for an hour or so after she was killed. Come here. Only don’t go chucking up on the evidence, Breen.”

Breen took a deep breath, stood up straight and approached the corpse again. “Look here,” said Wellington, leaning over the woman. “Blood pooling in the tissue of her left-hand side.” He pointed to a blueness in the skin on her pale thigh. “A prettier corpse than the last pile of bones you brought me,” he said.

Still leaning, he reached out and, holding it between finger and thumb, inserted the thermometer into the dead girl’s anus. “Convenient, at least,” said Wellington, twisting the glass rod a few times to push it in farther. “This won’t hurt a bit,” he muttered.

Breen quelled the spasm in his throat.

“Charming,” muttered one of the coppers.

Satisfied that it was in far enough, Wellington stood and looked at his watch. “You don’t look well, Breen,” he said. “You want me to take your temperature too? When she’s finished with it?”

“I’m fine, thank you, Dr. Wellington. Thank you for asking.”

“How was she killed?”

“I’ll go a tenner on asphyxiation. No other signs of injury so far.”

“Strangled, like?” said a constable.

Wellington glanced at the young man, irritated. He was not an investigating officer and had no right butting in. “Possibly,” he said. “Faint petechiae on the face. Blood spots. Her head appears to be congested with blood.”

The rain was starting to come down harder now, forming puddles in the dirty earth. Water dripped off the dead girl’s white fingers. Wellington carried on counting the seconds on his watch.

For constables who spent most of their time on the beat, a murder was a treat. They crowded round, eager, notebooks at the ready. Breen started by dividing them into two groups. The first were to start with a fingertip search of the whole back alley, working out onto the road and then spreading out from there.

“What are we looking for?” said one.

Breen paused. He felt another lurch in his stomach.

“Anything,” he said.

The policemen looked at each other, puzzled. Breen pulled out his handkerchief again and held it to his mouth. He turned his back to them and stared hard at the ground as the world around seemed to dip and weave.

A voice behind him. “Sir?”

“Give me a minute,” he muttered.

He could hear the buzz of conversation growing behind him. Someone laughed.

“Clothes,” he said. The murmuring stopped. He took another breath of air. “Clothes. Dress. Blouse. Bra. Knickers.” He paused, rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand, then continued. “She’s naked, isn’t she? Where are her clothes? Handbag. Coat. Purse. Think of anything a girl carries around. Lipstick. Powder. Women’s things. You”—he pointed to a ruddy-faced copper who looked a little older than the rest. “You’re in charge of checking out these flats’ bins, OK?”

A groan.

“Shrubbery. Front gardens. Knock on doors and ask to look in back gardens. Any railways or canals round here?”

“There’s the underground up there.”

“Good. How far?”

“’Bout a quarter-mile.”

“You. Call up the Transport Police. Give them my name. Say we want to search the banks, especially around road bridges. You two do the canal.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You…” Breen pointed to one of the constables.

“Me, sir?” He’d picked the tallest, a lanky lad with thick eyebrows.

“You take a note of the locations where they have searched and write down exactly where anything is found.”

“Right, sir,” the lad said, pleased to have been picked.

“Can’t I do that?” said the one who’d been given the bins. “Only I got a bad back.”

“You stick to the bins. You’ll be fine. Anybody finds anything, report it back to…What’s your name?” The copper mumbled his name. “Towels. Sacks. Blankets. Sheets. Anything she might have been wrapped in before she was dumped. Or just anything that you think shouldn’t be there…” he tailed off.

Still they stood there, waiting for more instructions.

“Right then. Start by that wall,” he said. “In a line. Move towards the street. And then…spread out.”

Finally they shuffled off, happier now he’d told them what to do. He turned to the second group. “Door-to-door,” he said.

This time they huffed like kids who had been picked for the fat boy’s team. Like all beat policemen, they abhorred knocking on doors, talking politely to members of the public. He gave them four questions. Did anybody have any idea who the dead girl might be? How long had that rubbish been piled by the sheds? Had anyone heard anything suspicious last night? Had anybody seen or noticed anyone different around the flats in the last few weeks? There were almost certainly better questions, but he couldn’t think of any, right now. He told the constables to start with the ground floor flats and work up. After that they could begin to move on up the road.

When they had set off to do what he had asked, he went to sit in the police car and lit a cigarette. Breen smoked five cigarettes a day. No more. He liked using them to divide up the day, plus it made a packet of No. 6’s last four days. Today he was already on his second. He sat behind the driving wheel, leaning forward to lay his head on the cool plastic. The sight of a dead body had never affected him like this before. He was not well.

After a minute he sat back and pulled out the clean notebook and the pencil. He sat for a while, holding the pencil in one hand and the cigarette in the other.

A few minutes after Wellington had left, an ambulance arrived, bell ringing, to take the body away. It parked in the middle of the street. The flash of its blue lights shone off the last damp leaves on the lime trees. As always, a small crowd had gathered to watch the goings-on. A young man dressed in football kit, and a woman with a headscarf and shopping trolley. A pair of young girls joined them to watch the gurney pass, rattling on the uneven ground. Dressed in big woolen coats and loud scarves the girls clutched each other by the arms as the dead girl passed them, covered by a black sheet. Craning her neck to see past them, a nanny dressed in a dark uniform stood smoking a cigarette just a few yards back from the rest of them. They seemed to be there just to feast on the sadness of the scene. Jones had arrived. He was picking through the debris, where the body had lain.

After a while, Breen started to feel cold, so he switched on the Cortina’s engine. The hum of the engine was reassuring.

A knocking on the driver-side window. It was one of the constables. “Are you all right, sir?”

He wound it down.

“I said are you OK?”

“I’m fine,” said Breen. He wiped his eyes with the cuff of his jacket. “I just needed a couple of minutes to think.”

“Yes, sir. Only, there’s a woman on the second floor. I think you should speak to her.”

He squinted up at her, leaning down towards the car’s open window. “Did she hear something?”

“She was the woman who called it in, sir. And she says new people moved in round here.”

“And?”

“And I think you should speak to her, sir.”

He turned off the car’s motor. “Do you have a mint or something?”

“No, sir. Sorry.”

Breen shook himself, then adjusted the rearview mirror to look at himself. He got out of the car to follow the copper.

The second-floor flats had their own walkway that ran along the front of the building. Faces peered out from behind doors as they passed. Breen had never minded it before. To be a policeman is to be watched. You were like a car crash. People stopped to gape.

The constable stopped in front of a green-painted door with a knocker in the shape of a pixie and a doorbell to one side. He rang the bell. A woman opened the door a crack. “This is Detective Sergeant Breen,” said the copper.

Breen stepped forward. “Good afternoon, Mrs.…Miss…?”

“Shankley,” said the policeman reading from his notebook.

“Miss,” said Miss Shankley, unchaining the door and standing back to let them in. Breen recognized her now. She was the woman in the housecoat who had watched them from the fire escape. She led them down a short corridor into a living room cluttered with china ornaments. Cheap plaster heads of leering Moors, one-eyed pirates, swarthy fishermen and swashbuckling highwaymen stared down from the walls. Shiny porcelain animals stood on every available surface.

Breen walked over to the window. The net curtains were drawn back. A family of white china cats sat on the sill.

“We’ve never had anything like this happen round here. Would you like a cigarette?” Breen shook his head and the constable did the same. “I have filter tips if you’d prefer? No?” Picking up a packet of Woodbines from the mantelpiece above the gas fire, the woman sat herself in an armchair opposite the television. On top, a pair of toby jugs stared at each other.

“Any idea who she is?” asked Breen. He looked back out of the window. The small crowd was still there, peering round the sheds at the policemen as they picked through the rubbish on which the girl’s body had lain.

“I heard,” the woman leaned forward, flicking a lighter, “that she was a prostitute.” She wore thick foundation that ended abruptly at the side of her face and at the line of her chin.

“You heard?”

“It’s talk. In the building.” She smoothed down her housecoat over her knees.

“Who was doing the talking, Miss Shankley?” Breen looked down at her.

The woman pouted. “I just heard it on the stairs. It’s amazing what you pick up.”

Breen looked down at his shoes. He wished she would ask them both to sit down, but she just sat there puffing on her cigarette. He had barely slept last night. He said, “Anything we know that could identify her is extremely important. Who did you hear it from?”

She sniffed, then said, “If you must know, it was Mr. Rider.”

The constable looked at his notebook. “Flat number 31,” he said. “Floor above.”

“That’s right. Are you going to mention that to him? Only, I’d appreciate if you didn’t tell him it was me as said so, you understand. I don’t want to cast any aspersions. This is a nice block.” Miss Shankley tipped the ash of her cigarette into a large ashtray. “How was she killed?”

“We can’t say yet.”

“Was she interfered with?”

“I’m not sure.”

“There was a woman abducted in a van on Abbey Road a few years ago. It turned out to be a young man who was a bit soft in the head who worked in the bakery. I don’t think he lives around here now, though.”

The woman sighed. The sound of a telephone ringing in the flat next door traveled through the walls.