William Shaw - She's leaving home

“What’s he doing up there?” A voice from below.

“Rescuing my cat.”

He was only perhaps fifteen feet above the ground but it felt more. Beyond the street, he could see the traffic clearly, the elderly man tugging a dog away from a bus-stop sign, the veteran with one leg swinging down the pavement on his crutches. If it hadn’t been for the ladder and the girl holding it, no one would know he was there. Through the leaves he could see Grove End Road. A mansion house on the corner. In a first-floor flat, a woman in a blue dress was standing at a cooker stirring something. The kitchen looked warm and cozy. A rich chicken soup, perhaps, or stew and dumplings. He could almost smell it. Was she cooking for a lover or for herself?

He tore his eyes away and looked up again. The sky behind them made the branches look even blacker.

“What’s his name?” he called down.

“Whose name?”

“The cat, of course.”

“Loopy.”

“Loopy?”

“That’s right.”

So here he was, halfway up a tree, calling out to a cat called Loopy. He peered into the dark branches and thought he saw, clutching the main trunk like a sailor in a storm, a small black shape. Hard to make it out through the leaves, but as his eyes adjusted to the darkness it gradually came into focus. Claws dug into the bark, a small black cat looking down at Breen over its shoulder.

To be honest, Breen decided, the cat looked perfectly fine there. If anything, there was something scornful in its expression. He looked down again at the girl. Scruffy, thin-cheeked, hopeful.

“Loopy. Loopy. Come here, Loopy.”

The cat didn’t move. It continued to stare at Breen, unimpressed. He would have to climb higher, he decided.

It occurred to him, as he waited to be X-rayed, that he was in the same hospital where the dead girl still lay. She was somewhere below the floorboards beneath him. She would be still, naked, blue and cold, lips dark, breasts flat, lying on her back in darkness. There would be rough, bloodless stitches where Wellington had opened her up, perhaps, like snips of barbed wire. She was waiting in a drawer for Breen to find something.

He closed his eyes.

“You all right?” said the nurse cheerily. He was in a side room on the ground floor; he sat on the bed, arm lying in his lap. “You look a bit done in.”

“Collarbone. This chap here. Hurts like bugger, I expect.” A doctor, a young man with a pipe tucked into the top pocket of his white coat, sent pain tearing up his arm as he prodded and poked. “What in heaven’s name were you doing?”

Sitting on the daybed, he told them about the girl and the cat and the tree.

“Sleeve,” said the nurse.

Automatically Breen moved his bad arm and flinched. “Ow,” he said.

“Other one,” she giggled.

“And you’re a police detective?” said the doctor.

“Yes.”

“And you were up a tree trying to rescue a girl’s cat?”

“That’s so sweet,” said the nurse, wielding the syringe. “Just a little prick.”

“Is this one the last? I really should be going,” said the doctor.

“Two more. One abscess, one chest pain. I think that’s it for tonight.”

“I lost my balance trying to grab him,” said Breen.

“At least you tried,” said the nurse. “That’s the main thing.”

“Is it?”

“Of course it is.”

The doctor left, clacking his heels down the corridor.

“Do you think I could have a coffee?”

“Sorry.” The nurse smiled. “No coffee. No, no, no. Not for you.” She put the syringe down on the trolley and picked up a clipboard.

“Can I have some water then?”

Again she shook her head. “Nil by mouth. You’ll probably need anesthetics, poor old you. We’ll know if we have to just as soon as they’ve taken your X-ray.”

“And how long will that be?”

“I really can’t say. There’s quite a queue. I think it’s great that you were helping rescue a cat.”

“You mean other people don’t?”

“Of course they do,” she said. “Anyone we should contact?”

She tutted in a sympathetic manner at his reply as she left the room and he was relieved she was gone. The hubbub of the hospital, the complaining doctor, the chattering patients, the rattling of trolleys, even the careless platitudes of the nurse, were oddly lulling.

He stood up and walked out of the side room, holding his arm to his chest. It was evening. A food trolley was doing the rounds; they were placing trays of lukewarm cottage pie and boiled vegetables on the beds of patients who were not going home for a while. Jelly and condensed milk for afters. He walked to the nurses’ station. “Is there a phone I can use?”

The nurse pointed him down a corridor, past the double doors towards a visitors’ room, where a gray-skinned man sat in his pajamas smoking a pipe and holding the hands of a bored-looking young girl.

It was not easy using a telephone with one hand. With the receiver wedged under his chin, he placed sixpence in the slot and dialed. When Marilyn answered he pressed Button A and heard the coin drop.

“I heard the news,” she said. “Oh, Paddy? What are we going to do with you?”

“The car’s in Garden Road. They brought me here in an ambulance. Can someone pick up the keys from me?”

“Do you want me to come and drive you home?”

“It’s all right. I might be here ages, for all I know. I have to have an X-ray but they won’t find anything. I’ll be fine.”

“It’d be no trouble. I’d like to.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Bailey wants to know what you were doing up a tree.”

“He’s heard, then?”

“Everyone heard, Paddy.”

“And everyone’s having a good laugh, I suppose?”

“Bailey isn’t laughing exactly.”

“No, I don’t suppose he is.”

He finally left the hospital at a quarter to eleven at night. A taxi dropped him off at his flat, where he struggled for a bit with the key, and when he went to bed it was too painful trying to take his shirt off, so he slept in it, fitfully, unable to turn over without it hurting.

At two he woke and thought he heard the sound of his father, struggling to make it to the toilet. He had found him once or twice on the floor, shivering with cold. Then, as he was about to get out of bed, he remembered it couldn’t have been his father and lay back to fall in and out of dreams full of monsters and men with knives.

“Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.”

“Get lost.”

“Ooh. Can you find my pussy, you big strong policeman?”

“I hear you’ve had a break in the case with your dead bird,” said Jones.

“You heard what?”

“A break. Get it?”

“Opportunity Knocks for Constable Jones,” said Carmichael. “What’s new, pussycat, whoa-uh-oh-uh-oh-oh!”

Marilyn said, “There’s a woman from Garden Road called up says you stole her ladder.” She came and stood by his desk. “You shouldn’t be at work. You hurt yourself.”

“Just bruises,” he said. “Doctor says I’m fine.” The doctor had given him a sling and told him to take a week off, but he could not bear the idea of a week in the flat on his own. His father’s stuff all around. Besides, if he was off sick the dead woman would be passed on to another officer. Probably Prosser. So he had not put the sling back on this morning. Instead he’d folded it and placed it in the drawer among his vests.

Prosser emerged from Bailey’s room. “Snap,” he said quietly. There would be bandages under his shirt sleeve.

Breen’s shoulder ached dully and he had to be careful not to move too quickly. The two men stood facing each other. The walking wounded.