William Shaw - She's leaving home

“We need to check the bins,” said Breen, ignoring him. “Up,” he ordered.

“It reeks, sir.”

The other coppers jeered. “Go on, Pigpen.”

“So. What are we going to do then, sir?” one of the local constables asked Breen.

“Keep on with the door-to-door.”

A half-dozen local officers were milling around, fecklessly waiting. Breen had asked for more but this was all he had been sent today. The assumption that the girl was going to turn out to be a dead prostitute was already having its effect. The force would not waste resources.

“Move, then,” ordered Breen.

A couple of them groaned. The novelty of an escape from the drudgery of the beat had already worn off. The officers were a mixture of the young and inexperienced and older coppers who didn’t like any officer telling them the way to do things.

Breen asked them to gather round. A circle of men surrounded him. “We’ll do this street, then move on to Abbey Road. OK? Take a house each and work your way down. Be imaginative. Try and find out if anyone-”

“Sir?” interrupted one.

“Yes?”

“We already done this street yesterday.”

“Yes, I know,” answered Breen. “And?”

“And like I said, we already done that.”

“We questioned the occupants in daylight, just after the murder,” he said. “Half the people would have been at work. They’ll have been home now and had a chance to talk about it some more. Now we need to do it all over again to find out what they’re saying today. We haven’t even found the nanny who first found the body yet. Ask around. See if anyone knows where she lives. Keep going over and over until we find something.”

“Two to one she’s not even from round here,” muttered Jones.

There was grumbling from the younger ones at the back. Breen ignored it. “Find out what they’re saying. Find out…what they think about it all.”

“What they think about it?” said one of the older coppers incredulously.

There were a couple of sniggers. They preferred it when they had a list of questions they could go through one by one.

“Yes. What they think about it all. About the murder. About who she might have been.”

“You’re the boss.”

The policemen drifted off back down the street away from them.

“Short odds she’s a judy like that guy upstairs says,” Jones said to Breen. “If this was Prosser’s case he’d have already checked the streetwalkers.”

“Then why don’t you ask Carmichael who the prostitutes are round here? He’s on Vice. He might have heard something.”

“You’re the one who’s all matey with Carmichael,” Jones said. “Why don’t you?”

Breen only half heard him. He was standing by the line of lock-ups, close to where the body was found and looking around him. He pulled an A-Z from the pocket of his coat and flicked through the pages until he found the one Cora Mansions was on. He looked from the page up at the streets around him. The alleyway at the back of the flats was narrow, too narrow for a car. If somebody had brought the victim in off the street they must have carried her. Strange place to choose to hide a body.

“I do hope you’re not feeling poorly again, Sergeant.” He looked up. Miss Shankley, housecoat flapping in the gentle breeze, was on the rear fire escape again.

“Fine, thank you, Miss Shankley.”

“Glad to hear it. No collywobbles today, then?”

“Miss Shankley,” he called up to her. “Is one of these sheds yours?”

“Third from the left.”

He went to the door and examined it. “It has a new padlock.”

“Should bloody hope so.”

“Why’s that?”

“Wait a mo.” She turned, then disappeared inside her flat. Two minutes later she had descended the front stairs and was standing next to him, tiptoeing around the muddy puddles in her fur-lined house slippers.

“They’ve all got new locks,” said Breen. All had been fitted with new brass hasps too. Ask about the doors .

“They were all broken into, weren’t they?” said Miss Shankley as she arrived at his side.

“Were they?”

“Three, four weeks ago. We had your lot round about it. Surprised you didn’t know that. It was a bloody nuisance. Took the caretaker that long to get round to fixing it. I’m really not sure why we pay a service charge at all. He drinks, you know. Thinks we don’t notice.”

Looking closer, under a new coat of paint, Breen could see the marks in the wood where each door had been prized open. He ran his fingers over splintered wood that had been covered with filler and sanded down. “So somebody came along and busted all these doors?”

“You can see why we don’t like strangers round here,” said Miss Shankley, nodding her head in the direction of the white house behind. “Things go missing.”

“Oh yes. Your new neighbors. The ones that arrived, I think you said, two and a half weeks ago. That’s a week after your doors were busted in.”

“I never actually said it was them, did I? You’re deliberately misconstruing me.”

The sheds were small. The doors all opened outwards.

“I mean, it’s not people like us who go around entering and breaking,” said Miss Shankley.

“Did you lose much stuff in the break-in?”

“No. Don’t keep nothing valuable in there. Paint pots. Household items that needed mending. That sort of thing.” Breen remembered all the fearsome china ornaments in her flat and imagined a space crowded with limbless tigers and headless pirates.

“Is that all?” said Miss Shankley.

He held up the A-Z and pointed at the space to the north of the flats.

“What’s this building here?” he asked, pointing to the map. Taking his eyes off it, he looked down past the lock-ups to the wall that separated the flats. You could see a roofline of what looked like a workshop of some kind rising above the brick wall.

“That’s that recording studio.”

Breen looked blank.

“EMI. The Beatles. You know.”

Breen frowned.

“Bloody nuisance,” said Miss Shankley, turning away.

“Tell me one thing,” Breen asked her. “What day were the locks fixed?”

“Last Friday, would you believe.” Breen did the calculation. The killing would have taken place two days later.

“How did you keep the shed safe before the caretaker fixed the locks?”

“Weren’t any point really, was there? Nothing left in there worth having.”

“So your door was easy to open-until three or four days ago?”

“Wide to the world. Some people complained about them banging in the wind. Can’t say I heard them, but it weren’t my fault, was it?” She turned and waddled away back into the courtyard.

“Which people?” called Breen.

“Them people.” She thumbed her nose at the white Georgian building behind the sheds.

He walked up Garden Road and turned left onto Abbey Road. Twenty yards from the junction, a young girl of eight or nine in khaki shorts stood crying under an elm tree.

Other trees had lost their leaves in the rain of the last few days, but this one stood greenly straight, alone on the pavement. Breen walked past, then stopped and turned. The girl was still sniveling, eyes red.

“What’s the matter?” Breen called back at her.

“My cat’s stuck up the tree,” said the girl.

Breen looked up. “I can’t see it.”

“She’s right at the top. Been there for hours.”

“She’s just enjoying the view.”

“No she ain’t.”

“She’ll come down in a bit,” said Breen.

“No she won’t.” The girl wiped her nose on the sleeve of her jumper.

“She will. You’ll see.”

“No she won’t.”

Breen walked on. By the next corner he stopped and looked back. She was still there, looking up at the tree, wetness shining on her face.