The Kings of London (31 page)

Upstairs there was a New Year’s Eve party.

Tozer called that evening.

‘I’m shagged out,’ she said. ‘And we’re short of hay already ’cause it was such a rubbish summer. I can play “Sunshine Superman” on the guitar though. Driving my dad mad.’

‘How is he?’ asked Breen. ‘Your father?’

‘The farm is worse than I thought. The cows are in a bad state. He kept them out in the pasture too long in the autumn and they suffered. Yield is way down. He doesn’t even talk much. What was it you wanted?’

Then he told her about the meeting with Tarpey. Tarpey had told him how Rhodri Pugh had tried to get his son off heroin. He had paid for blood transfusions and other quack cures. None of them had worked. And then about how they had become increasingly worried he was going to be arrested, exposed in the papers as an addict. For the last year, Pugh’s department had been taking a new hard line on drug taking. Lock up the addicts. Cut off the demand.

Then Tarpey had discovered that the Drug Squad were watching the squat, getting ready to raid it. Tarpey realised that if they were raided they would almost certainly start to shout about the cabinet minister’s son they had been suppling with drugs. It would not look good for the ministry. He went to Pugh; told him what was going on. Pleaded with him to act. For the good of the Party. Reluctantly, Pugh pulled strings. The investigation was dropped. Effectively from that point onwards, the Paradise Hotel was now dealing drugs under police protection.

‘Bloody hell,’ said Tozer.

‘Don’t you swear in this house,’ said someone in the background. Tozer’s mum.

‘Then Tarpey says he got a phone call from Jayakrishna one night saying that Francis Pugh had overdosed on heroin. Jayakrishna knew that if it came out in the papers he’d lose everything. They only had protection as long as they were keeping Frankie Pugh’s addiction a secret. So he suggested they cover it up.’

‘So the stupid hippie buggers blew the whole lot up?’

‘Helen. I told you!’

‘And stripped his arms and legs of skin to hide the heroin tracks.’

‘And did their best to empty him of blood in an attempt to stop them being able to test the body for opiates.’

‘My God.’

Breen told Tozer about the deal they’d made, sitting in the park overlooking the Thames. Breen said he would keep Tarpey’s secret as long he promised to make Jayakrishna set up a meeting between Tozer and Hibou. If Hibou wanted to go, Jayakrishna would have to let her.

‘Or I said I’d go to the papers. That way the whole deal would come down.’ Pugh would be exposed, not only as the father of a drug addict but as a minister who abused his power to protect his reputation. Jayakrishna would lose the house. ‘Tarpey rang me today. It’s all set up.’

‘Bloody, bloody hell.’

‘Helen. I’m not having that.’

He could hear Tozer shouting, ‘Shut up, Mum. For once. This is bloody important!’ Then she spoke into the handset again. ‘But if you went to the papers, that would have been your career over.’

‘Possibly,’ said Breen.

They talked a little longer until Tozer said she had to run. There was a problem with the milking machine.

‘Happy New Year, Paddy. You deserve one.’

He sat without moving for a long time after the call. Upstairs
somebody broke something. A glass or a bottle. She was right. He did deserve a good one.

Dangerous to be so pleased with himself. His father had always taught him never to be sure of anything. At any moment the rug could be pulled from under you. But his father had been a bitter and disappointed man. Maybe he didn’t have to be one himself.

The party carried on late into the morning. Maybe two or three o’clock. There had been dancing in the room above his head. Thumping on the floorboards. Cheers. Loud singing of ‘Auld Lang Syne’.

It was dark when Breen woke.

Welcome to 1969.

Seven in the morning. Cold and dark. It didn’t feel like a good one. He turned up the wireless, loud as it would go, in the hope that they would hear it above. The race was on to get the first supersonic airliner into the air.

He did sit-ups. He had made a resolution to himself at midnight. He would get fitter this year.

After twenty-three, his stomach hurt too much. He rolled over onto his front to try some press-ups. That was when he noticed a small piece of paper on the floor just under the bookshelf. A rectangle, maybe two inches by three. He stood and scooped it up. It was a handwritten address. He looked at it, eyes wide.

Unbelievable.

The name said Harry Cox, but the careful italic handwriting was his father’s.

For a mad second, tired from lack of sleep, he wondered how it could be there. His father had come back from the dead somehow to leave him a note?

Dad?

His eyes went to the corridor, the room where his father had lived. He spilt coffee down his dressing gown, onto the carpet. Impossible. Unreal.

Ghosts.

Then he remembered the card from John Nolan.

They were men of a similar age, raised in the same country schools. Everybody’s handwriting was the same in those days. The piece of paper must have been tucked inside there and fallen out the day before when he opened it.

Calmer now, he turned the paper over. ‘This is where he lives,’ written in the same fine hand. The address was Heathside in Hampstead.

Breen sat finishing his coffee, waiting for the shakes to subside. It was New Year’s Day. There would be few buses running today. Taxis scarce. He would walk. Only seven or eight miles. He ate biscuits and cheddar with a second coffee and planned his route on an
A–Z
.

Harry Cox. He had mentioned Prosser’s name at the party at Kasmin’s gallery. But Prosser was not one of his Met Rugby Club contacts. The connection was through Knight. Breen was sure of it now.

Clissold Park was dark and wet, water slushing under his feet on the pavements. The streets were quieter than he had ever seen them at this time of day.

As he pressed towards Finsbury Park, London was waking to a grey New Year’s Day morning. He had the feeling that his presence was bringing the city to life as he moved through it. Children waking early behind closed doors. Lights came on in living rooms.

On the Seven Sisters Road a beardy tramp sat next to a brazier drinking brandy. ‘Happy Christmas,’ said the man, watery-eyed from drink.

‘Happy New Year,’ said Breen.

The Holloway Road was full of rubbish, sodden by the drizzle, the shops all bolted and shuttered. He trudged onwards, climbing up the slow hill towards Highgate.

He found a petrol station open near Whittington Park and bought a packet of cigarettes from a man in blue overalls, huddled by a paraffin
heater. He never usually smoked this early in the morning but nicotine might clear his head.

The Holloway Road was so quiet he could hear his own footsteps. This was a London he had never visited. A dead zone. Only the occasional car swishing up the wet tarmac.

Marching now, body warming against the cold.

As he moved westwards towards Dartmouth Park, he noticed how the middle classes didn’t have lace on the windows. They dared you to look in to see what they had.

They were switching on lights. Some still had Christmas trees in the windows so you could see how well they had decorated them.

He had been walking an hour and a half now. He felt he was getting closer. A feeling that each step was making sense of the world.

Breen stepped rapidly into the gateway of a garden. A child on a new bike was hurtling down the pavement towards him, chased by an anxious parent. A sudden interruption in the calm of the dead morning.

‘Stop him!’ the father cried. But it was too late. The boy was already far ahead.

‘You stupid, stupid child,’ shouted the chasing father. Breen looked down the hill after them, but they had rounded a corner. He walked on.

The pavements started to fill with men in tweeds with dogs, women in stout footwear. New Year’s Day walks. He must be getting near to the Heath.

It was a big house, just off the Heath. A holly tree in the driveway, still covered in red berries. Two cars parked on the gravel outside. Breen was not a car person. Carmichael loved cars; he dreamed of a Lotus Cortina. Fast, masculine and flashy. Breen had never been bothered. But this time Breen noticed the cars.

Breen thought of the rollercoaster ride he’d seen at Margate. The slow rise to the top and then the crashing descent.

The man at Jumbo Records had mentioned a man in a Bristol. They were not common cars. Carmichael would know about them. There was one parked here, a big shiny grey slug on the gravel.

Breen walked up to the car, peered into the driver’s window. Leather seats. Walnut fascia punctured by dials and a car radio. A pair of kid driving gloves dangling over the steering wheel. A man’s car.

‘Hey, you.’ A voice came from the direction of the house. ‘What do you think you are doing?’

Breen looked. Damn. Harry Cox, slacks and white shirt, was standing at the front door. Way out of his area, Breen had no right to be here.

‘It’s that bloody policeman, isn’t it?’

Though it was only ten in the morning, Cox held a cut-glass tumbler with some kind of spirit in it. A puzzled look on his face. He looked from left to right behind Breen to see if there was anyone else there with him.

‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ Cox said. A twitch of his pale eyebrows. ‘I told Inspector Creamer about you. He said you were suspended. He’ll have you bloody cashiered.’

‘I think we need to have a chat,’ said Breen.

‘I have nothing to say to you. I’m going to phone your boss. Are you mad? Just coming up here to me and my family. This is a bloody outrage.’

‘Shirley Prosser,’ said Breen. Just her name.

Cox hesitated long enough.

‘You know her, don’t you?’ Until then he had not realised it. She had said she didn’t know him. She had lied.

‘What do you want?’ He looked around. ‘Just you? No other police?’

‘Just me.’

Quieter now. ‘Is it money?’ A slight sneer to the voice.

‘I’m not like Sergeant Prosser, if that’s what you mean. I just want to talk.’

Cox said, ‘You’re right. We should talk,’ He looked behind him for
a moment. ‘I’m not having you come in the house,’ he said. ‘My family are here. Come around the side.’

Cox was the sort of man who had a tradesman’s entrance. He closed the front door quietly behind him. Breen followed him to the side of the house, past a grey wooden door, down an alleyway.

If Shirley had lied about Cox, what else had she lied about?

At the other end of the path he found himself standing in front of a huge, carefully clipped garden. A lawn mown in stripes. Not a weed in it. Neat beds, full of brown perennials waiting their turn. A child’s swing hung from the branch of a huge cedar tree.

‘It’s beautiful,’ Breen said and turned.

Just in time to see Cox swinging a spade at his head.

He had been an idiot.

He wasn’t aware of the spade hitting him, just that he had lost consciousness for a second. He came to on the ground, struggling on hands and knees. He started crawling. There was blood on his face.

Cox was coming to hit him again. All the energy in his fat frame was straining upwards ready to bring the spade down on him. Luckily the alleyway was narrow. There was not much room to swing the tool in. It clanged off the wall and cracked half-heartedly into Breen’s shoulder.

He was on all fours now. If he could stand, he could run, Breen thought sluggishly. If he didn’t run, Cox would kill him.

He had killed before. He was sure of it now. But Cox was raising the spade a third time, ready to smash it down onto him.

And Breen saw movement at the end of the alleyway.

Outlined by the light at the end of the pathway, a girl in a blue best dress, blue ribbons in her hair, mouth wide.

Almost ridiculously English. A daddy’s girl, all made from sugar and spice.

‘Daddy?’

A second’s hesitation. Enough for Breen to recover a little.

She was staring at a man on his knees, blood coming from the wound on Breen’s head. Her father, open-mouthed, holding a spade.

The girl started bawling.

He shouldn’t have come here alone. He shouldn’t have come here at all. He should have run the moment he saw the Bristol.

As he was sluggishly struggling to his knees, the girl still screaming, a woman appeared. She was in her forties, elegant even in a striped apron, a smudge of flour on her chin.

Breen finally made it to his feet. Looked quickly behind him. Harry had run. Disappeared. Gate wide open behind him.

‘Where’s Harry?’ Breen shouted. He was standing now, swaying.

The woman – Cox’s wife? – was open-mouthed. Dumbstruck and horrified. A stranger in her garden, screaming at her, head covered in blood.

‘Where did he go?’ shouted Breen.

She found her voice. ‘Help, help, help!’

Breen wiped the wetness from his eyes. He stumbled back down the alleyway to the driveway in time to see the Bristol disappearing through the gate, spitting gravel behind it.

The woman had followed him and was standing behind him screaming, ‘Get out! Get out of here.’

She had picked up the discarded spade and was waving it at him.

‘Where’s the phone?’ he shouted.

Another child, a boy this time, in corduroy shorts and a blazer, appeared at the front door.

Breen pushed past him.

‘Get out of my house!’ screamed the woman. She looked terrified.

Breen looked around for the telephone, but it wasn’t in the hallway.

‘Phone,’ he said again.

The woman just stood there, horrified.

‘I’m a policeman. Where’s the phone?’

But the woman was beyond speaking. He ran down the corridor
into the kitchen. A big room. Pots of peeled vegetables on the hob. The smell of pork. Spices.

No phone though. From there into the living room. Huge. Harry Cox’s taste in art came home with him. A big Patrick Caulfield painting above the fireplace. A neat Christmas tree with electric lights. The startled little girl and boy looking at him, eyes like pennies.