The Kings of London

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For Lisa

At the end of the summer a man takes his sick father to hospital.

The French have voted in de Gaulle again. Robert Kennedy has been shot. The Americans, stuck deep in Vietnam, are swinging behind the Republican, Richard Nixon, instead. The Soviets have just sent the tanks into Prague. It is autumn 1968. And London is always London and the rain that has been falling on it all summer is still falling.

The nurse behind the desk is plump and has a distracting moustache. She holds a gnawed biro in one hand and asks questions like, ‘Any allergies?’

It is late night, or maybe early morning. The man is tired. It feels as if he has not slept for days. ‘No.’

And, ‘Next of kin?’

‘Just me.’ Because he’s thinly built the man looks taller than he is. He is in his early thirties, from a generation that still dresses conventionally. A pale mackintosh. Cherry Blossom Light Tan shoes. A grey suit.

‘Any other relations?’ she asks him.

‘No.’

‘No one at all?’

The man shakes his head. The weariness shows in the dark skin beneath his eyes.

She takes her pencil and writes ‘NONE’ on the form.

It has been a long night. One of too many.

‘Where can you be contacted in an emergency?’

‘I’m a policeman,’ says the man, as if that’s an answer. And he gives the number of his local station in Marylebone.

‘There’s a waiting room at the end of the ward, if you like,’ she says, pointing with her biro. Somewhere a radio plays an idiotic song by Alma Cogan.

‘No. I’d better go now,’ he says. ‘I’ll be back later to see how he is.’

The policeman is usually good with details but will remember little of this. Days of looking after his father between shifts has left him exhausted. Long disturbed nights after work. The dribbles of luke-warm soup around the old man’s mouth. The bed baths and bedpans. Always the startled look in his father’s pale eyes. Bringing his father to hospital today is a relief. He has had enough.

But he will regret that he did not stay longer. Really, there was no need to go straight back to work. He could have stayed just a few more hours. This is the cold black stone that will sit in his chest.

It has been a bad year. Right now he just wants to keep moving. To pause for too long would be to give in to the sadness of it.

As he goes to the stairwell to leave the building he is surprised to find that the world outside is still dark and quiet. He checks his watch. Ticka-ticka Timex. It is still only twenty minutes past five. The days have been so disorientating, so fractured. He had been inside the hospital so long he had imagined it would be daytime now, but it is still three hours before he needs to be at work. It would make sense to stay.

He pauses on the cold staircase. Not enough time to go back to the flat he shares with his father and sleep. And if he catches the bus to Marylebone, he will be much too early.

So he sets off walking. Out of the hospital, into the silent street.

He walks down through to Islington, down Caledonian Road, past torn posters advertising Judy Garland at the Talk of the Town, all the time cold wind at his back. The pavements are still empty, save for the occasional man returning from a night shift, or nurse waiting for the first bus.

It is six by the time the man reaches King’s Cross and the sky is the colour of cigarette ash. The postmen are delivering letters. The milkmen are delivering milk. Men in pinstripes are starting to arrive from their suburban homes, leather briefcases swinging as they walk.

‘They say it might be days yet,’ he tells the office typist, who arrives at work forty minutes after him. She is young, wears a lot of hairspray and bright cardigans. She has smudged her mascara, he notices, but he doesn’t tell her.

‘You poor love,’ she says.

‘Don’t worry about me,’ he says, ‘I’m fine.’ He keeps his head down, hoping she’ll get the message that he doesn’t want to talk about it.

‘I can get you something from the canteen, if you like?’

For an hour or so he sits at his desk, sharpening pencils, pretending to type reports.

And when the call comes in about some firemen discovering a body in a burned-out house in Carlton Vale he volunteers to be the officer at the scene without even thinking about his father. It will give him something to do.

He is down the stairs and out of the office and into the CID Wolesley in less than two minutes. An unexplained death is something to occupy the mind.

‘Paddy. Message for you.’

He doesn’t hear the voice, first time.

‘Are you up there, Paddy?’

Or the second. The man is squatting, examining the remains of a room, concentrating on what he sees.

‘Paddy!’

A room. A fireplace. A dull ooze on the floorboards.

‘Paddy Breen!’

They have taken the body away earlier that morning. All that remains is this dark stickiness that had escaped from the roasting skin.

The detective sergeant is absorbing it all. An empty can of lighter fuel. Floorboards seared black. An old armchair burned back to the springs. He is taking it all in. He has seen worse. It would have been a quick death.

‘Sergeant Breen!’

He hears this time: ‘What?’

‘Someone on the radio asking for you, sir.’

The house had been long derelict. One of a row bombed out during the war and still not pulled down. The walls bare, the plaster falling from the ceiling. Everything is uniformly black after the fire. He takes a last look around the room because so much depends on what you find in these first few hours. This is what he is good at.

‘Coming,’ he says quietly, picking up the empty can of fuel.

And he starts to make his way carefully down the charred stairs holding the empty can between finger and thumb. The black grease that coats walls after a house fire is everywhere. He already has it on his shoes but he’s trying hard not to get it on his jacket.

At the bottom of the stairs, a man in a fireman’s uniform says, ‘Went up bloody quick, by the look of it,’ and then hacks and gobs onto the bare floor.

‘Right,’ says Breen. He holds up the can. ‘This what started it?’

‘Got to be,’ says the fireman. ‘Too quick not to be petrol or something like it, poor stupid bugger.’

‘Did it himself? By accident?’

‘See it every now and then, yep.’

‘Could this have caused such a big fire?’

The fireman stuck out his lower lip. ‘Maybe,’ he said.

Breen nods and steps outside.

‘On the radio now, sir.’

Breen gets into the passenger seat and lays the can on the dashboard, then pulls out a handkerchief and wipes the smut off his hands.

‘Delta Mike Five,’ he says into the receiver. ‘Breen here.’

And he should have called up the hospital then when the first message came through. Though it was probably already too late. The doctor will say it was a urinary infection that finally killed him, but his father had been dying for years, burning away slowly from the inside.

His father had almost killed himself in a fire six years ago, leaving the gas on under a pan. He had escaped with a bandaged arm. It was the first sign that he was unravelling. After the fire he had moved in to Breen’s care.

So, Tomas Breen, builder, of Knocancuig, Tralee, dies alone that September afternoon. At the same moment as the nurse places the sheet over him, his son is staring hard at a different body, one as black as the room it was found in, in a white-tiled room in another hospital, half a dozen miles away. He stares at the dead man in the hope that something will start to make sense. An unidentified dead man in a cold room.

Breen kept the photos of the burnt body in his in-tray. Three black-and-whites. One of the man’s disfigured face, teeth showing through burnt lips. One of the whole corpse, taken from the side. One of the whole room, showing the position of the body. Every now and again, as the weeks went past, they rose to the top. Sometimes the other officers in Marylebone CID caught him looking at them, peering closely.

Skin cracked like a spit-roast pig. Pale flesh and fat showing from below. Knees bent slightly.

Autumn turned to winter and the identity of the body remained a mystery. Other cases came and went. Nixon won.

Detective Sergeant Cathal Breen started to clear his father’s belongings out from his flat, but never quite finished the job. He bought his first Beatles record, but only played it a few times. Music like that was for a younger generation. He thought about combing his hair differently and maybe growing his sideboards longer, but didn’t. He was thirty-two. It would look ridiculous.

Precisely why the fire had started remained unexplained, officially at least, though Wellington, the police surgeon, said that a bottle had been found melted into the skin of the corpse. That and the empty can of lighter fuel meant it was probably an accident, and though Breen still questioned whether a single can could have created such an intense blaze, nobody else seemed that bothered by the fact. It was
some drunken vagrant attempting to light a fire to keep himself warm in the wet weather, most likely. That was enough for Wellington.

Breen kept at the case longer than he knew he should. He returned to the white hospital room several more times to look at the charred corpse. Most of the skin on the man’s face had been burned away, so it was hard to know what he would have looked like. There were no obvious signs of trauma on the flesh that was left. The longer he remained unidentified, the longer it seemed likely that he had been a dosser. Breen began to assume he had been one of the thousands of Irish labourers who were flooding into London now, desperate for work. Wellington confirmed this when he told Breen there were traces of concrete dust in the material on his trousers.

Breen wrote notes. He knocked on doors of boarding houses and asked if any of their tenants had done a bunk. He drew maps, marking out the locations of all the building sites in the area. He visited the Garryowen and the Palais on the weekend, where they danced to showbands playing ‘Boolavogue’ and ‘Liverpool Lou’ and other teary waltzes. In the Irish dance halls there were two or three men to every woman. Anyone know of a man who’s gone missing? One less would give the rest of us a bloody chance.

At first other officers ignored his obsession. The man’s father had died recently. He was not himself. Good man, Paddy Breen. Not one of the boys, exactly, but, you know, a good man.

But as time passed, Breen knew they were becoming irritated by him. This was not a real case for a CID man. Bloody Paddy Breen. Still wasting time on that no-hoper. Not pulling his weight.

There was other work to be done. Real people who had died in fights and robberies. Not alky immigrants whom nobody would miss anyway. Bloody Irish. Paddy excepted, of course. It was clearly just an accident so why was he so bothered about it?

‘Don’t waste your effort on jobs nobody’s going to thank you for,’ Sergeant Prosser had said, more than once. Breen noticed how it
infuriated Sergeant Prosser that a fellow officer could waste so much time on a lost cause.

The inspector was kinder, letting Breen have his way at first. Once, in late November he caught Breen with the photos laid out on his desk. They were a little dog-eared now, yellowing already.

‘For God’s sake, Breen’ he said. Very quietly. One man to another.

Inspector Bailey was an old-school policeman. Decent enough, but a stickler. He didn’t like to see officers stepping out of line like this. Where would you be if coppers went around just investigating the cases that got under their skin? ‘Still think he’s a labourer of some sort, do you?’ Inspector Bailey asked.

‘Yes, sir.’

A pause. ‘Your father was Irish, wasn’t he, Sergeant?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Bailey had nodded. Had given Breen an uncomfortable look. Other people in the room stopped their typing and listened. ‘And he was a builder, I believe?’ said Bailey. ‘Your late father.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘It’s understandable that a man is upset when his father dies,’ he said.

Breen didn’t answer.

‘Buck up, Paddy,’ the inspector said, briefly laying his hand on Breen’s shoulder before walking away, shutting himself in the small room that was his office.

And there was an embarrassed pause in the CID office. At the next desk Constable Jones, the youngest officer in CID, was staring, mouth open. Breen glared back at him until Jones looked down at his typewriter and pretended to be searching for a letter among the keys. The gentle hum and clatter of the office returned.

Breen knew what was going on in their heads. Paddy was not thinking straight. His obsession was nothing to do with the burnt man. This was about his father. It was like a penance.

Sometimes there was no answer. Sometimes things didn’t work out. There was not a solution to every crime. People died alone and
unloved. He had never really bothered to find out who his father was when he was alive. He had not been curious enough.

Even if he did find out all about who the burnt man was, it wouldn’t change a thing. Breen knew that.