William Shaw - She's leaving home

“A police bullet. Got her in the face. Carotid artery. They said Ezeoke shot her but they’re just covering their backs. It was never a shotgun. I saw it. It was a bullet wound.”

“It’s so strange to have slept while all that was going on around you.”

“I was scared for you,” he said. “I didn’t know if you were dead or alive.”

She looked away. “I can’t say I’m sorry, whoever did it,” Tozer said. “She was a cow.”

In the house, she said, Frances Briggs had held Tozer’s mouth wide while Ezeoke had forced the tranquillizers down her throat. “It was horrible. I was kicking and struggling. Look.” She pulled up the sleeve of her tunic. “I kept thinking about my sister. What it must have been like for her.”

Breen nodded. There were still marks on her wrist from where the ropes had cut her. “Frances Briggs enjoyed it,” Tozer said. “I swear.”

“What was it like?”

“It was like being in this nightmare.” Every few hours she had woken and tried for as long as she could to pretend to be asleep, hoping that they would not drug her again. “They were rowing. Shouting at each other. Okonkwo wanted them to give themselves up. He’s dead, isn’t he?”

“The police shot him. As he was trying to escape.”

She nodded. “One time he untied me. I’m not sure when this was. He told me to get away, but I was too tired. I couldn’t move. I kept falling asleep. And then Mrs. Briggs kept saying she had this boat and they could get away to France on it. It was crazy.”

“Why didn’t they go? They had plenty of time. They were a day ahead of us.”

“I don’t know. It was weird. Ezeoke kept delaying. Said he wanted to get some money. Said they could take their time. You know what I think?”

“What?”

“He was afraid. You know, big African man. But he’d never actually lived there or anything. He’d only been there once to bring back his African wife, you know?”

“Maybe. I think you’re right. I think he had built up this big thing about Africa in his head.” He thought of his father: a man who had never gone home.

“I think he was nuts all along, you know. Right from the start. Right from that first time we met him.”

They sat at his desk and Breen told her how he had found her missing from Portobello Road, and how it had taken so long to find her car.

“It was horrible,” he said.

“Really?” She smiled. “You and Carmichael?”

“Yes.”

“I was wrong about him,” she said.

“Yes.”

And how they had searched the neighborhood until they heard that Professor Briggs was on the move.

“Lucky,” she said.

“Lucky. We were very lucky.”

That night after the pub and the drinks and the retelling of stories and rowdy cheers, they caught a taxi to his flat and had sex in his single bed, Tozer clinging to him fiercely.

Afterwards, as she lay there, he took a towel and wrapped it around his waist, then went to the living room and put on one of the new records he’d bought, and turned the record player up, full volume, so they could hear it from the bedroom.

The record started with a roaring noise that dissolved into a thumping song with pianos and guitars stomping out a rhythm, almost childishly. They lay on the bed together, listening. It felt good to move on. A new him. Everything beginning.

“This is the one,” she said, as another track started, a single note ringing out on a piano, overlaid by a wailing guitar. “I’m not sure if that’s George or Eric,” she said, as if they were both personal friends.

“Eric?”

She stood and started to dance, naked, leaping from foot to foot. “Eric Clapton,” she shouted. “It’s incredible, great, isn’t it? So fab.”

Laughing, he watched her dancing shamelessly above him. Her skinny body jumping around the small bed next to him so the springs creaked. He hoped the neighbors could hear. Sex had never been like this before. It had always been wordless and in darkened rooms.

She dropped down onto the bed, laughing too, and pulled the sheet over her. “How long is it, since you…did it?” She laughed.

“Three years,” he said. “You?”

“Three years? That’s ridiculous.”

“And?”

“I’m not telling. Not three years, that’s for certain.”

He picked up the album’s sleeve. It was a plain white square, inscrutable and blank. It seemed to say, “Think nothing.” He was envious of Tozer’s ecstatic reaction, her thoughtless lust for the music. The distance between them remained.

“I like it,” he said. “It’s good. Even the eight minutes of noise.”

She leaned down and kissed him on the forehead. “To be honest,” said Tozer, “I think that one is total rubbish.”

“Really? I thought it was, you know, good.”

“I’m a bit disappointed, really,” said Tozer. “I mean, there’s good stuff on it, but it doesn’t really sound like the Beatles. Most of the time it sounds like four blokes doing weird stuff. It’s not really the Beatles anymore, know what I mean?”

“I liked it.”

“It makes me feel sad. It sounds like they’re falling apart. Shall I turn it over?”

When she was back, he said, “What did you mean when you said you’d never make a copper?”

She leaned over and felt for her packet of cigarettes. He looked at the long line of vertebrae twisting down to her buttocks as she padded her palm around the floor under the bed looking for the matches. The beauty of her bone beneath the skin.

“Want one?”

He shook his head. He had smoked his five cigarettes for the day.

“I’ve decided I’m leaving the police,” she said. “I don’t fit in.”

“Of course you do,” he said, though he didn’t really believe it. She didn’t fit in. That was what he loved about her. It was what she stood for: the importance of not having to fit in.

“You look shocked,” she said.

“I am.”

“I’m sorry about that time at Paddington in the rain. I felt really bad, leaving you there. I was acting like a big kid.”

“Yes,” he said. “You were.” She hit him on the arm.

“I’m going back to the farm,” she said. “I’m going to look after it for my dad. Mum says he’s getting worse. He can’t cope anymore.”

He sat up and looked at her. He had only just slept with her for the first time and now she was going away. “I thought you didn’t want to live there anymore. I thought you couldn’t stand living there.”

“I didn’t. I don’t. But I’m allowed to change my mind, aren’t I?”

Breen was silent. The music next door seemed too loud now.

“It’s what I know. I can make a go of it, I think. Do things differently.”

He wondered at her ability to be one thing one minute, another the next. “Why?”

“I used to think I had to save the world to make up for what happened to my sister. I don’t really think that anymore. The world carries on without me. And people get killed all the time, don’t they? Besides. I don’t think my mum can cope anymore with Dad.”

She got up, naked, and said, “I’m just going to the toilet.”

He lay in bed, breathing in the scent she left behind. She came back a few minutes later with a bottle of Scotch she had found in his kitchen and poured two small glasses. He brushed his hand over her face, past the plaster on her forehead.

“I don’t have to save anyone anymore. Just myself. I’ll leave saving people to you,” she said.

His clothes were folded neatly by the bed. Hers were scattered across the floor.

“Don’t you want to find her killer anymore?”

“Course I do. But I realized that we may never find out who he is. That’s the reality, isn’t it? It’s too long now. And it’s so horrible it makes me cry, but I’ve got to live with that. We don’t always know, do we? Even when we do. Even when we arrest people. Or shoot them. It’s a lot messier than we like to say.”