She's Leaving Home (6 page)

I
t was a new Cortina, F reg, pale blue with a white door, the letters
POLICE
picked out in black on the side.

The Temporary Detective Constable got in and tossed her hat into the back of the car, not saying anything.

“Right.” This was a new one on him.

He opened the door, sat down and turned the engine on, then went to put the car into reverse and almost passed out from the pain of the motion. “God,” he said.

“You all right, sir?”

The nerves in his shoulder were screaming. His skin prickled with a sudden sweat.

“Sir?”

He breathed deeply and reached his good arm up to adjust the rearview mirror so he could reverse without turning his head.

Gingerly putting the car into first, he made it out onto the street and up to the traffic lights without having to change gear again.

“Sure you’re OK?” she said.

“Fine.”

“Your arm. I heard you fell out of a tree,” she said in her rural accent.

“Yes.”

“Bet it hurts.”

“Yes,” he said. “A bit.”

They didn’t talk again until they were halfway up Lisson Grove.

“She wasn’t raped, then? The dead girl?”

He looked at her. She was young, probably only in her early twenties. “We’re not sure yet.”

“Got any leads?”

“Not so far,” he said.

She nodded, then said, “You’re still in second. You should change up.”

He dropped his arm down to the stick and the left side of his body flooded with pain again. He wasn’t sure he could do this.

There was a traffic jam ahead. He tried to see what was causing it, but a large bread van blocked the view.

“They said she was naked. Did you see her?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Was she pretty?”

He looked at her. “Not particularly, I don’t think. People look different when they’re dead.”

Now the car was going slowly he needed to change down again. Cautiously he moved his hand down to the gears. Another sudden stab of pain. He braked to avoid hitting the car in front, stalling the engine.

“What’s wrong?”

He laid his head on the steering wheel of the stationary car. “I’m not sure I can drive. I can’t seem to change gear. My arm’s too sore.”

“From when you fell…?”

“Does everyone know about it?”

She nodded. Somewhere behind a car horn sounded. Breen switched the hazard lights on and cars slowly started moving around them. After a while she dug in her bag. “Got an aspirin if you want,” she said.

They had given him painkillers at the hospital, but he wasn’t due another one until lunch. “We’re going to have to go back to the station.”

“You going to call in sick?”

“I can’t drive.”

Looking at him, she said. “Who’ll take over this case?”

“Sergeant Prosser, I suppose.”

She scowled and pulled out a packet of cigarettes from her bag, offering him one. Usually he didn’t smoke so early in the morning. He took one, though. First of the day. It would help with the pain.

“What if I did it?” she said.

“What?”

“Drive the car.”

“But you can’t.”

“Been driving tractors since I was eight, sir. Otherwise you’ll have to go back to the station, won’t you?”

He nodded. If he went back now he would be sent home sick. “Women officers aren’t authorized to drive cars.”

“Just for today. You’ll probably be all right tomorrow, won’t you?” She lit the cigarette for him, throwing the match out of the sidelight. “No one has to know.”

Cars coming the other way stared, wondering why a police car was stopped in the middle of the road, lights flashing.

“Tell you what,” she said. “I’ll change over just before we get there if you like.”

The car inched forward until they reached the cause of the jam. Big new Greater London Council blocks were starting to spring up all over London; they were building new flats here too. These were small fry compared to some of them, just four stories high, and already half built. A lorry unloading bricks blocked half the road and a workman was directing cars around it, but he was doing so in a half-hearted, haphazard way, one or two vehicles at a time.

Tozer honked the horn, but the sudden burst of noise didn’t help. The workman trying to direct the traffic panicked. He tried to make a Commer van that was coming towards them back up to let the four or five cars in front of the police car come through, but there was a big red Number 2 bus right behind the van. There was no space for it to move backwards.

“For pity’s sake.” The policewoman wound down her window and shouted, “Oi! Get a bloody move on! Want some chewing gum, sir?”

“No thanks.”

A gust of wind blew a pale white curtain of concrete dust across the road into the constable’s open window. She wound it up, swearing, brushing the pale flecks from her woolen suit.

Now a foreman had come out and was adding to the confusion by shouting at the workman directing traffic and pointing to the police car.

“Cathal Breen,” the constable said, pronouncing the “th” in the name. “When they said your name first, I thought it sounded like you were a woman,” she said. “Kathleen. No offense meant.”

He looked over at her. “It’s pronounced
Cah-hal
,” he said.

“Cathal. What kind of a name is that?” she asked.

“Irish,” he said. “My parents came over before the war. What about you?”

“My parents?” asked the woman, turning towards him, a puzzled look on her face.

“No, your name.”

“Tozer,” she said, looking ahead again. “Helen Tozer. Pleased to meet you.”

The traffic started to move again. He hoped she wasn’t going to talk this much all the time.

“The girls say you went mental a couple of days back, is that true?”

He looked at her. “Mental?”

“Sorry, sir. I mean…You did something, and Prosser ended up getting stabbed.”

“You know Prosser?”

“God, yeah. We all know Prossie. He lives in police flats near the women’s section house. Since his wife walked out on him he’s always hanging round.”

“Do you like him?”

“Not much.”

“I went mental? Is that what they say?”

“Yep.”

He watched a crocodile of schoolchildren in blazers and caps walking up the pavement.

“I’m just saying, you know,” said Tozer. The traffic cleared. She accelerated past a man on a motorbike.

“Do you have to drive so fast?” said Breen.

“They said Prossie went into a shop on his own where there was a robbery taking place.”

He still had to write the report for Bailey. Martin & Dawes. The modern men’s outfitters. By the time he arrived, Prosser’s car was already there and the back door to the shop was wide open; Prosser was inside. The thieves had been calmly loading rails of clothes into the back of a parked van.

“Chinks with knives, they said. Bloody hell. I hate knives,” said Tozer.

Two Chinese men; one kitchen knife, eight-inch blade. He was on the car radio outside calling for backup when Prosser had emerged a minute later, covered in his own blood. The thieves had made it out of the front of the shop, abandoning the van. Pure fury in Prosser’s eyes as he looked at Breen.

“Personally, I wouldn’t say it was your fault, exactly,” she said. “If he’d done it according to the book, he shouldn’t have gone in there until you got there.”

“Bully for you. Slow down.”

“Like I said, just saying.” She swung a quick right and pulled up by the murder scene. “This where she was found, then?”

He sat in the car, looking ahead.

“Sir?”

“Near the end of the sheds over there.”

She was silent for a while. “You would have thought somebody would have noticed their daughter had gone missing,” she said eventually. “I mean.”

“You’d be surprised,” said Breen, looking out of the car window. Rain had started to spatter against it.

“Be honest, sir, I think we’re wasting our time around here. Like Jones said this morning. Body was just dumped, wasn’t it? Whoever put it here could have come from miles off.”

“You think that?”

“I mean, I know it’s not my place, sir. Only I can’t help—”

“If the body was dumped, why here?”

Tozer frowned. “Just chance, I reckon. Someone was looking for a badly lit spot. That’s my point. There’s no reason to restrict our search to this area.”

“Tozer, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’ve been in CID half an hour…”

“Sorry, sir.” She stared at the steering wheel.

“Look. See these shed doors?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Until last Friday, all the locks were broken. The doors were all open. They’d been that way for a month or more. Anyone walking past would have been able to see that. But they were fixed two days before the murder. I’m guessing whoever dumped her was expecting to be able to leave her in one of these sheds for a few hours, maybe a day, until they could take her somewhere else. It would have to be someone local to have noticed that the doors were all open. And then they got here and found they’d all been locked…”

“…And panicked and dumped the body under a mattress?”

“Yes. Which means the murderer could be someone who walks down this road a lot. Probably every day. OK?”

“Right.” She nodded, and looked up and down the street with renewed interest. “Wow. So it could be someone living in any of these houses?”

“Possibly.”

At that moment the door of the shabby Victorian house next to the lock-ups opened, and a large black man emerged, pausing on the doorstep to look up and down the street. You couldn’t fail to notice him. Blacks were not common around this neighborhood; besides, he was dressed conspicuously, in a beige linen Nehru jacket, whose thin vicar-ish collar circled his large neck. It was the sort of suit that you saw African leaders wearing in the newspapers; businesslike, but deliberately un-British. The man, carrying a fat brown leather briefcase, checked his watch and then surveyed the street again.

Breen opened the car door and called after him, “Sir?” The black man appeared not to hear at first, or maybe pretended not to. Breen shouted louder. “Hey! Sir!”

The man turned, slowly, with great deliberateness towards Breen. He was a large man; his chest strained at the linen of his suit. “Yes?”

“Detective Sergeant Breen,” he called. “I’m investigating the death of a young woman whose body was found close to your front door.”

The man stood at the top of his front steps and looked back down at Breen. He smiled. “You need to speak to me now?”

“It is a murder we’re talking about,” said Breen.

A taxi was driving slowly towards them, “For Hire” lit in orange on its roof, checking house numbers.

“Of course, of course,” said the man, nodding. “But I am late for an appointment now. Would it be possible to arrange a time?” He spoke in the kind of accent that one only acquires in an English public school. “Shall we say, eleven a.m. tomorrow?”

“First things first. What’s your name?” said Tozer, pulling her pencil out from the elastic around her notebook. Breen looked at her, eyebrows raised.

“Samuel Ezeoke,” said the man. “And yours is?”

“How do you spell that?”

The man said slowly, “E-Z-E-O-K-E. Pronounced
Ez-ay-oak-ay
. My first name is Samuel. S-A-M-U-E-L,” spelling it out as if to a child.

“Can I have your employer’s address?” asked Constable Tozer.

“My employer’s address?” said Ezeoke, eyes wide.

“So he can vouch for you.”

“Because I’m an African?” Ezeoke reached into his jacket pocket and removed a small silver case from which he pulled a single business card.

As she read the card, Tozer colored.

Back in the car, thin-lipped, Tozer muttered, “How was I to know he was a bloody surgeon?”

Breen sat in the passenger seat, flicking through the pages of an
A–Z
. “What were you doing back there? You’re not supposed to be doing the questioning.”

“Thought I was helping,” she muttered.

“Well, you weren’t.” He looked at her.

She was chewing her lip, looking miserable. He sighed. He did not know how to handle women.

The rest of the morning they spent driving around the local streets, peering into backyards and alleyways. She was talking again.

“My old boss says they’re going to start a big investigation of CID for being bent,” said Tozer.

“They’ve been saying that for years,” said Breen, looking out of the passenger window.

“Are they bent?”

“Some.”

“That’s terrible,” she said. He turned away from the window and looked at her. She was so fresh-faced and eager it hurt.

“Is that the tree you fell out of, sir?”

“Yes.”

“Doesn’t look that big,” she said.

He reached in his pocket and took out the orange bottle of painkillers the hospital had given him.

“Don’t you want some water with them?”

“I’m OK,” he said, though bitterness lingered in his mouth after he’d swallowed.

“The police doctor said you were sick when you saw the body. Is that right?”

“Have you ever seen a dead body?”

She shook her head. “Not really. Seen loads of dead animals in my time on the farm. Millions of them.”

“It’s not the same.”

“I think I’d be all right if I saw one,” the woman said. “Not that I think it’s wrong for you to throw up. Everybody should be upset, the way I see it. Sir?” She interrupted her own flow. “That’s EMI Studios, isn’t it?”

“Do you ever stop talking?”

“Sorry. If other people don’t talk much I end up just filling the space. Loads of girls hang out there, though, don’t they? Hoping to see the stars. Do you think she could have been one of them?”

“You don’t think we might have considered that?” he said.

“Right. Sorry.”

Why did her eagerness irritate him so much? There was nothing wrong with being enthusiastic.

She said, “Mind you, that don’t mean she wasn’t one of them.”

“No. You’re right,” he said. “I’ve been thinking that.”

“You hungry?” she said, changing the subject again before he could begin to explain why. “I could murder a lardy cake.” She gazed at the window of a bakery window they were driving past.