William Shaw - She's leaving home

No one answered.

Louder. “Where’s Constable Tozer?”

He pushed through them into a dining room at the back of the little house. Unlike the front room, this was completely untouched, six chairs tucked neatly in around a dark mahogany table, dried flowers in a vase on the sideboard. A painting of a man on a horse. The room looked bizarrely normal, unaffected by the catastrophe that had just taken place.

The sergeant was in the kitchen at the back of the house talking on his radio. “Leg wound. He’ll live.”

It was as wrecked as the living room. He looked at Breen and said, “Nothing like this has ever happened round here,” making it sound like an accusation.

Police had smashed down a stable door at the back to break in; windows had been shattered by the gunfire. The remains of a hasty breakfast of cornflakes and toast lay on a pine table.

“Where’s Constable Tozer?”

The sergeant didn’t seem to hear him; he was talking to his lapel radio again.

Breen returned to the living room. Two ambulance men were crouching over Ezeoke, who lay, eyes shut, on the floor now. They had torn away his trousers and were pressing gauze onto a wound just below his blood-soaked underpants. His skin looked gray.

“Fuck you,” he said to no one in particular.

Breen noticed a small, narrow staircase at the back of the room. To reach it he had to pick past Mrs. Briggs’s body, eyes wide, looking up at him as he stepped over her.

He found Tozer upstairs in the back bedroom, fully dressed in her uniform, lying on top of the covers of a single bed, a tartan blanket over her. Her hands and ankles were tied with cord to the side of the metal bed, her eyes shut, her mouth slightly open. He leaned over her and put his face next to hers.

She was warm. He felt her soft breath on his unshaven face. He stood there leaning over her for some time, feeling her breathe in and out, grateful, occasionally running the sleeve of his shirt across his eyes. Groans and complaints rose from below as they lifted Ezeoke onto a stretcher. He stayed with her, his face against the warmth of her skin, until the inspector appeared at the door.

“She alive?” he said.

Breen jumped back, as if he had been caught doing something he shouldn’t have.

“She’s OK, I think,” he said.

As two coppers lifted her awkwardly down the stairs, still unconscious, Breen found the bathroom and started to rinse his eyes, splashing ice-cold water up onto his face from the basin.

They had given Ezeoke a painkiller and handcuffed him to the small bed in the ambulance.

“Shame they stopped hanging people, in my opinion,” said the ambulance man.

Breen and a constable sat opposite, jerking from side to side as the ambulance navigated the narrow Suffolk lanes. Ezeoke’s rage at the world seemed to shine from him, even in semi-consciousness. Breen’s failure had been not to recognize that anger. Ezeoke had kept it half-hidden inside him. Perhaps it was the immigrant’s trick. The ability to exist in two places at once. Two halves of a mind, each not recognizing the state of the other. His father had learned to hide so much of himself. Breen was only now learning how much he had kept secret.

Ezeoke opened his eyes. “You,” he said.

“Mrs. Briggs is dead,” said Breen.

Ezeoke nodded. “She wanted to go to Africa with me. To fight.”

There was a notice that said No Smoking, but the young constable ignored it.

“Jesus,” said the copper. “It shakes you up a bit, doesn’t it? Did you see her?”

Ezeoke’s right hand was handcuffed to the side of the bed he lay on. They had dressed the wound on his leg.

“Did you really ever intend to make it back to Africa?” said Breen.

“Of course,” said Ezeoke, though his eyes flickered with what looked to Breen like doubt and he turned his head away from them.

“I don’t think you’d have lasted five minutes,” said Breen.

“You’re a liar.”

The ambulance’s bell rang briefly, clearing cars away ahead.

“Did I kill any of your police?” Ezeoke said, when the noise stopped.

“No.”

“A pity,” said Ezeoke. “I should have killed you all. You English.”

“Fuck’s he on about?” said the young policeman sitting next to Breen, blowing out cigarette smoke. Breen noticed the young man’s hand was shaking.

When Tozer returned to Marylebone Police Station, two days later, the coppers lined the corridors and clapped her.

“Oi, oi. Sleeping Beauty’s back.”

“Well done, love,” said Carmichael.

“I heard you had a spot of bother too,” she said, kissing the big man on the cheek. “They said you were on the bog the entire time.”

“Shut up.” Carmichael grinned like an idiot.

“Aye, aye.”

“Think he fancies you, darling.”

“Who said that?”

Somebody started singing, “For she’s a jolly good fellow.”

“Save it for the pub,” said Tozer.

“I don’t know why you’re making all this fuss for someone who got themselves caught,” said Marilyn. The song petered out.

The office quickly returned to normal. Marilyn made tea. Breen went back to his desk to do paperwork.

Tozer followed him to his desk. “I called you yesterday,” she said.

“I was out,” said Breen, “helping out at Joe’s over the weekend. He’s had a stroke. A bunch of us are keeping the place open.” He had visited Joe in hospital; he had spent an hour listening to the slurred words before Joe had fallen asleep, exhausted from the effort of trying to make sense of the strange words and growls that tumbled from his lopsided mouth. He’d looked frightened and thin.

“That’s sad. Is he OK?”

“Not too good.” It was too early to tell whether he would get better, the doctors said. “What about you?”

“I’m OK.”

She pulled out a cigarette and lit it. Bailey came out of his office and opened his mouth to say something, but thought better of it, and walked on. When he was out of earshot, Tozer said, “On the news they said it was a gunfight. They said Ezeoke killed Mrs. Briggs.”

“I know. It wasn’t really like that.”

“Nobody will tell me what really happened.”

Breen stood and walked round to her side of the desk.

“They said Ezeoke was shooting at you.”

“Yes,” he said. “That’s true.”

“Why?”

“I think he felt he had nowhere left to go.”

“Tell me, then. I need to know what happened. It’s like being in a dream, still. Only the opposite. I’m asleep and all this stuff that makes no sense going on around me.”

He sighed. “To be honest, I don’t know where to start.”

“I need to know. It’s driving me bloody nuts.”

Tozer stole an ashtray from Prosser’s empty desk and came back, holding it in her left hand.

“I went to find you,” he said. “But you were gone.”

“I was outside Okonkwo’s for about five minutes and she turned up. I didn’t know whether to run and find you or what. Only, right away, Okonkwo came out and Ezeoke was with him.”

“He was in the shop when we were there.”

“I suppose. The moment they were gone I went up and got the car and followed. I couldn’t stop to phone.” She talked quietly so her voice could not be heard by the others in the office. “He pulled into a breaker’s yard near Walthamstow. I waited a while, then followed him in. Bloody stupid. I’ll never make a copper. Not that it matters anymore. He was waiting for me inside the gates.”

“What do you mean, you’ll never make a copper? You did great.”

“He stabbed me with a needle full of something. When I woke up we were in that car I’d been following. That Mrs. Briggs was driving. What did happen to her?”