William Shaw - She's leaving home

“Aye, aye, Joe,” said the copper. “Cup of tea. Two sugars. An’ turn down that old racket, why don’t you?”

On Wednesday morning the first post brought a letter from his father’s solicitor. There were no surprises. He knew the contents of his father’s will already. A few shares that were not worth much and around two thousand pounds that had been left over after paying for the nurses to look after him. Enough to give up the police, if he wanted, and live off what was left over for a year or maybe more. Maybe go to Ireland. He had never been. Or maybe buy a car. He had never owned one of those either. He put the letter in a drawer and walked up to Church Street to catch the bus to St. John’s Wood.

Mr. Rider was in this time.

He was a small, round, middle-aged man who lived alone. He wore a Marylebone Cricket Club tie with a brown cardigan and opened the door with a smoking briar pipe in his hand.

“And?” he said.

“May I ask a couple of questions, sir?”

He eyed Breen up and down and pulled on his pipe. Breen took out his warrant card and showed it to him. The man peered at it. “What about?”

“The murder of a young woman.”

“Ah. Yes. Of course.” He opened the door and beckoned Breen in.

Rider’s apartment was spartan: no television in the living room, no pictures on the walls. A complete set of Encyclopaedia Britannica and six volumes of The Second World War by Winston Churchill filled the bookshelf above a desk on which sat a solitary black and white photograph, framed in silver, of a young woman in army uniform.

“You said the murdered woman was a prostitute. I wonder how you knew.”

“I beg your pardon?” Mr. Rider stood still, blinking at Breen.

Breen repeated what he had said.

Mr. Rider opened and shut his mouth, then fiddled in his trouser pocket for a box of matches, before saying, “I didn’t.”

“You didn’t what, Mr. Rider?”

The room was thick with the reek of pipe smoke. There were no flowers or ornaments; a man’s room. The kind of absence of a woman’s touch that he recognized from his own childhood. “I didn’t know she was a…ah…prostitute.”

“But apparently you told people that you thought she was.”

“No I didn’t.” Pause. “I suppose I may have. I was just guessing. Rather silly of me, really, I see now. It sort of shakes you up, when something like this happens.”

“What made you think she was a prostitute?”

Mr. Rider struck a match to relight his briar pipe, sucking on it furiously. “I mean, there are prostitutes not far from here. After all, you do notice them.”

“You notice them?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you use their services, Mr. Rider?”

The small man blushed and shook his head. “No. Certainly not.”

“I wouldn’t necessarily think the worse of you if you did. I just want to know.”

The man shook his head again. “No. No. I don’t.”

“So you have no particular reason for thinking the dead woman was a prostitute?”

The man said nothing.

“People like to assume the worst of the dead; that it’s their fault for getting killed,” said Breen. A strangled girl. A burned-alive man.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Can I ask where you were on Sunday night?”

“Sunday night?”

“Yes.”

“The night the girl was killed?”

“That’s right.”

“I’d have to think.” The man reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out a small knife and started excavating the bowl of his pipe.

“Take your time,” said Breen.

“I don’t know. Probably went for a walk. Came back here. Had supper. Listened to the wireless. The Light Programme. Same as always.”

“Nothing more definite than that?”

“I don’t have particularly definite days,” said the man with a small, high giggle. “I’m retired. A widower. I live alone. I suppose it’s rather odd to a young man like you, but the days just pass.”

“Try and think.”

“I’m trying,” said the man abruptly and with that the knife slipped. The man gave a small squeak and put his left thumb into his mouth. A dribble of blood trickled down his chin.

“You’ve hurt yourself, Mr. Rider.”

“It’s nothing,” he said quietly, but to do so meant taking his thumb out of his mouth. Blood spilled down his old skin onto a thin Persian rug.

“Hold your hand up. It’ll slow the blood,” said Breen.

Breen went to the bathroom. He found Elastoplast where he would have expected it, in a small cabinet in which Mr. Rider also kept his toothbrush, his razor, a tin of Eno Fruit Salts and an old empty bottle of Yardley English Lavender. A women’s perfume.

He returned with the plasters. “I can manage perfectly well myself,” snapped the man as blood splodged onto the white cuff of his shirt.

Outside again, Breen made it to the end of the walkway, then stopped. For a few minutes he sat on the cold stairs writing his notes. When he looked back he found that he had written a list. “Pipe. Blood rug. Woman in photo. People think worst of dead. Lonely.” Two pages that would sound ridiculous if he was ever required to read it out in court.

Breen looked up at the sound of footsteps. A man he recognized as one of the residents, clutching a stiff broom. “You going to be there all day?” he said.

Breen closed his notebook, put it back into his pocket and stood, then watched the man patiently sweeping the stairs, one at a time.

The debris had all been cleared away. A search of the ground had turned up nothing. Now there was just a patch of bare earth next to the sheds.

The local constables were gathering again in the yard. Jones was there too, hands in his suit pockets, chatting to a couple of the uniformed men. Breen arrived at the bottom of the stairs just as a dustbin lorry was reversing slowly down the small opening between the sheds and the building. Somebody had scrawled on the back of the lorry’s dark green paint, Thunderbird 3 .

“What’s going on?”

“Three guesses,” called one of the binmen jumping off the back of the lorry. Wearing a large canvas apron and a big pair of leather gloves, he waddled to a pair of steel doors and banged back the bolt. There was a huge iron bin that collected the refuse from half of the flats inside.

“Leave it,” Breen said. “I don’t want it taken away.” He called to a nearby constable, “What happened to that copper I told to go through the rubbish?”

“Off sick I heard. Bad back, so he said.”

“Off sick?”

“Yep.”

“Why didn’t anybody tell me?”

“Dunno.”

The binman stood with a chain, ready to latch it onto the big bin.

Breen ran over. “Leave it alone. Come back another time.”

“No skin off mine.”

“What’s going on?” Miss Shankley was leaning over the railings above.

“Sergeant Breen is arresting your dustbins,” said Jones.

The binman banged on the side of the lorry. “Ride ’em out, cowboy,” he shouted. “Police orders.”

“We need to examine the contents,” Breen said.

“Now the buggers won’t be back for another week. It’ll stink the place up,” Miss Shankley called down.

Breen walked across the yard and pulled off the ladder that hung on hooks against the wall.

“Careful with that,” Miss Shankley shouted.

Leaning the ladder against the side of the bin, he said to the young freckle-faced constable who was still standing nearby, “In you go.”

“Me, sir?”

“Yes.”

“Inside that?”

“See what you can find.”

Jones said, “’K that for a lark. She was dumped, Wellington said. Chances are, you get your uniform all mucky for squat, mate. We’re not going to find anything round here anyway.”