The Kings of London (33 page)

Breen said, ‘It was stronger than he realised?’

‘The squat sold good heroin. They got it from the clinics. That was what Hibou was doing. All of them in the Paradise Hotel. They’re registered addicts. They were getting prescriptions and selling some of it to fund the squat.’

‘He was getting them addicted so he could sell their heroin?’

‘Maybe. Only the clinics were giving them less and less, I suppose. So they started getting it from the gangs.’

The porter was blowing a whistle, walking down the platform towards them.

‘Another thing. Frankie Pugh was still alive when Jayakrishna called Tarpey. He had overdosed, but he was still alive. They told Tarpey to send a doctor. But he never did. Jayakrishna says he was too scared of a scandal.’ The carriage jolted. ‘He let him die instead. Then they panicked, I reckon. Tried to cover it all up.’

Breen’s desk had been cleared by the time he returned to the office. The balding man had moved to a desk facing the wall. He didn’t say a word about it.

Wellington called at around three.

‘I’ll put you through to Detective Sergeant Breen directly, Dr Wellington,’ said the new woman, all hoity-toity.

He missed Marilyn, in spite of everything.

‘I just called to say you were right, Breen,’ said Wellington. ‘The body from the fire was John Knight.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Of course I’m bloody sure. I have Knight’s dental records.’ Maybe he was still angry at Breen for proving him wrong about Francis Pugh.

Breen sat down and called up Deason at Scotland Yard.

‘You heard?’

‘Yes. You were right. It was Knight.’

‘Any news of Harry Cox?’

‘Not a rustle. We’re keeping an eye on the ports. He may have changed cars. The Bristol would be pretty conspicuous.’

‘What about Shirley Prosser?’

‘Long gone. Last seen before Christmas in a boarding house in Margate,’ said Deason. ‘We talked to the landlady. She left in a taxi heading for Dover.’

‘What date was that?’

‘Why?’

‘Just curious.’

Deason hesitated as if he was unsure he wanted to share this bit of information with Breen. A man from a different department, who had been a suspect in this investigation. ‘Four days before Christmas,’ he said eventually.

‘Spain,’ Breen said. ‘Johnny Knight had talked about escaping there. Perhaps she’s there too. Or Greece.’

Franco’s Spain was a mess. It was easy enough for criminals and runaways to hide there. Greece was no better, both countries run by dictators.

After he put the phone down, Breen did the calculation. Four days before Christmas. That was the day he and Tozer had visited them. She had taken his money and left just as soon as she could. He had given her the means.

Breen went home after work, but when he got there he could hear the rock music coming from the flat above. It wasn’t just the volume. It was the deliberate moronic thump of it. The artificiality of the electric music.

He went straight to the front door and knocked on it. A woman with short hair opened the door. She smiled at him. ‘It’s the man from downstairs,’ she called above the music.

The man stuck his head out of the living-room door.

‘What is it?’

Breen said, ‘Your music is too loud. Turn it down.’

‘Sure, man.’ And he turned away, probably intending to ignore Breen as he had always done before.

‘No,’ said Breen. ‘Really.’ And he pulled out his warrant card and showed them that he was a policeman.

The man looked at the card for a second, then said, ‘Bloody hell.’

The woman’s smile vanished. Breen was shocked to see how scared she looked.

Afterwards he felt a little ashamed of what he had done, using his power as a policeman this way. Flashing a warrant card.

But the music was much quieter after that. They were afraid of him now. He would sleep, at least.

On Friday a cardboard box addressed to Breen arrived at Marylebone. It was from Scotland Yard and contained all the notebooks and papers they had taken from him.

It included the photographs of the burnt man. Breen laid them out on his desk for one last time, side by side.

For over three months he had puzzled over the identity of the man who had died the night his father went into hospital.

The puzzle of who he was had been solved, but nothing was fixed. Nothing had been made better. He had thought that the identity of the dead man would mean something bigger, but it didn’t. It meant something small and mean and greedy. A man who died over money. And whoever it was that had killed Knight had not been caught. And he had still let his father down. He had failed to love the man who had raised him alone.

Creamer assigned him a new case that morning. Nothing complicated. Two men had got into a fist fight over a taxi outside Madame Tussaud’s. They were both drunk. One had punched the other on the side of the head and he had gone down hard. The winner of the fight had then disappeared in the taxi.

The beaten man had not got up from the ground. He had been a costermonger from Covent Garden. He died from bleeding on the brain in hospital at around four in the morning.

The dead man’s girlfriend had been more sober than either of the men. She had seen everything. Sitting in the front room of her parents’ house in Finsbury Park, she gave Breen a good description of the other
man. It would be an easy case, Breen reckoned. Not the sort of case they would even be bothering CID with at other times of year. The girlfriend didn’t cry once. Sometimes she even giggled. It hadn’t sunk in yet.

After interviewing her, Breen drove back up to Hampstead in the CID car, peering into driveways and garages, looking for any glimpse of Harry Cox’s car. The
Standard
and the
Evening News
had both carried photographs of Harry Cox and the missing vehicle. ‘London Man Sought Over Police Murder’. Few details though.

Back at his desk that afternoon he tried to get used to the new room. It felt unfamiliar and cold. The new typist’s voice annoyed him. After lunch he called Scotland Yard again. Deason told them they had impounded all the files in Morton, Stiles & Prentice’s office to start figuring out where the money had been going missing.

‘That’s going to take a while, going through the books,’ Deason said. ‘He hid it well.’

‘That would have been Johnny Knight. Making the figures look good,’ said Breen. ‘Any news about Cox?’

‘Nothing,’ said Deason. ‘We got the airports and ports covered. He’s vanished. You any ideas?’

Breen wondered if he had escaped. Were he and Shirley in this together? The thought made him nauseous.

‘No,’ said Breen. ‘Nothing.’

In the afternoon he went to visit Marilyn. She had been transferred to Paddington Green where she was working out her notice.

Nobody knew where she was. He wandered through the big old station, knocking on doors, poking his head around them, looking for her. He found her, eventually, in a small office at the back of the station.

‘I came to see how you are. If you’re OK.’

She thumped a pile of files down onto her desk and said, ‘What do you care?’

She looked different. ‘You’ve had a haircut,’ he said. It was short.

She put one hand up and touched it. ‘It’s supposed to be Mia Farrow,’ she said.

‘I just wanted to ask if there’s anything I can do.’

She closed her eyes and said, ‘Just go away.’

‘What happened to your boyfriend?’

‘They let him go. Don’t know where he is. Don’t care. I’m giving up on men.’

‘I just wanted to say, if you want your old job back, I can put in a word.’

‘Leave me alone,’ she said, turning away. ‘I’m busy.’

She opened a folder and poured the contents into a bin.

The night was silent. The flat above had been cowed into submission. He should have been able to sleep now, but instead he lay awake, aware of the silence.

Saturday was worse. The whole cul-de-sac seemed unnaturally empty and still. He did his shopping quickly in case the phone rang. The moment he was back he called Scotland Yard.

‘Calm down, Breen. We’ll call you.’

He soaked the bandage on his head with a sponge, then gingerly took the dressing off the scab, scowling at himself in the bathroom mirror. The man upstairs had stopped parking his car in front of Breen’s window. Now the silence was starting to irritate him as much as the noise had. He imagined the man in his socks, tiptoeing around the flat.

In the end he decided to take his mind off waiting. He wanted to finish clearing out his father’s room. It would give him something else to think about.

Though he had already taken most of his father’s clothes and books to the Salvation Army, a few belongings remained. There wasn’t much. On the small iron mantel of the fireplace, an ugly carriage clock he had been given as a thank-you from one of the building firms he had
worked for. A small lamp with a red-fringed shade which had come from his father’s house. Plays and poetry, mostly by Irish writers. In the small bedside cabinet a penknife which he had always carried with him. His mother’s ring, which Breen took, wrapped in cotton wool and placed in the drawer of his dresser.

There was a rag-and-bone man who came past on Sundays, cart pulled by a horse. He was putting things in a cardboard box when the phone rang.

Breen dropped the carriage clock, breaking the glass, scrabbling for the phone.

‘We thought you’d want to know. We found the car,’ said a man’s voice.

‘Deason? Is that you?’

‘Stay where you are. We’ll come and pick you up.’

‘Not him though?’

‘No. Not him. Arsenal. That’s not so far from you, is it?’

A flicker of paranoia. Had Cox been coming for him? The car arrived five minutes later, blue light flashing, a constable driving.

The man from upstairs watching from the window.

The Bristol 404 was parked in a side street just off the Hornsey Road. Locals came out of their front doors into the cold afternoon air to mutter and nudge each other and to watch the coppers as they searched the car and questioned people. The police had broken into a sidelight window but there was nothing inside. Sergeant Deason was looking at a map of the area.

‘Nice car,’ he said to Breen.

‘How long has it been there?’

‘A couple of days,’ said Deason. He wrinkled his nose. ‘Maybe three.’

The driving gloves were on the steering wheel, just as he had seen them before. ‘You asked his wife if she knows why he’d be coming here?’ Breen asked him.

Deason nodded. ‘She had no idea. We’ve sent a car for her.’

It was cold. A pale frost had formed on the Bristol’s windscreen.

‘He might have just dumped it. Swapped it for something less conspicuous.’

Breen left Deason and the car, walking around the streets to try and get a feel for the neighbourhood. What would have brought Cox here? Had there been another car parked somewhere? He doubted it. He would have taken the driving gloves.

Or someone to pick him up? Possible. But why would they have met here? There was a small furniture factory close to where the car had been found. Run-down Victorian houses. Hopscotch in chalk on the pavements. Also in chalk: ‘KILL ALL THE NIGGS’. There were new tower blocks to the east, still unoccupied. Huge, ugly things, black outlines in the sky.

A huge roar came from the east.

‘Highbury,’ said a constable. ‘Arsenal playing Sheffield.’

Breen looked at his watch. The football must have just started. How long would the match last? The streets were empty now. When the match finished they would be packed.

‘Is there a phone anywhere?’ he asked the sergeant.

‘Main road,’ said the copper.

He walked to the road and dialled John Nolan’s number.

‘Cathal? Coming around for lunch again this Sunday?’

‘Harry Cox was bent,’ Breen said. ‘On the take. Double-counting for materials.’

‘No surprise. They’re all bent, far as I’m concerned,’ said Nolan. ‘Are you OK?’

‘Not so bad,’ said Breen. ‘Not so good either. I’m surprised how much I’m missing my father. We didn’t even like each other that much.’

Another roar from the crowd. Nolan said, ‘Sorry? I couldn’t hear you. There’s an awful noise on the line.’

‘Cox has done a runner. Any idea where he’s gone?’

‘Barely knew the man, Cathal. Are you OK? Christmas on your own. It’s hard.’

‘They found his car on Hornsey Road,’ said Breen.

A pause. ‘Where, exactly?’ Nolan pronounced the last word as if it had an extra syllable.

‘Annette Road. By Tollington Road.’

‘The Citizen Estate,’ said Nolan. ‘We built that one. Four fucking big boxes. Been empty all this time. Nobody wants high rise since Ronan Point.’ Ronan Point. Those twenty-two storeys of tower block that had partially collapsed in that gas explosion last May. ‘Can’t say I blame them,’ Nolan said. ‘So now the council are stripping out all the gas fittings and replacing them with the electric to say the place is safe.’

In the phone box, Breen turned, trying to see the tower blocks he had been looking at earlier. ‘And Morton, Stiles and Prentice are doing the work?’ he said.

‘Right,’ Nolan said. ‘Tying a pretty bow on a pig.’

‘So Harry Cox would know the place?’

‘Sure of it,’ said Nolan.

Breen put the phone down, then went back to the sergeant and pointed to the tower blocks. Four large dark rectangles. Ugly, black-windowed and dead.

‘In there?’ said the sergeant.

‘Maybe,’ said Breen. ‘His company built the place.’

‘Wouldn’t be very smart, would it? Leave your car right next to where you’re hiding.’

‘He’s desperate’ said Breen. ‘Smart has nothing to do with it.’

There was a caretaker’s hut. Deason pressed the ‘In case of emergency’ button and eventually a jobsworth appeared with bunches of keys. He had beer on his breath.

‘Have you seen anybody in any of the buildings?’

The man took offence. ‘No. ’Cause there isn’t nobody there.’

‘So you say,’ said Breen.

‘You telling me I don’t know my job?’

The sergeant looked at the buildings. ‘How many floors?’

‘Nineteen. All of them.’

‘I’ve only got three men. This could take us the whole bollocking day,’ said Deason.

‘Any chance we can get more local men on this?’ said Breen.

‘With the footie? You have to be pulling my leg.’

They stood on raw earth by the side of the empty buildings.

‘How long they been finished?’ Deason asked the caretaker.

‘The last one, three months. No bugger wants them now,’ he said. ‘Scared to move in. They’re having to strengthen them all. Bloody mess.’

Breen craned his neck back. Dark clouds moved across the top of them, making the buildings seem to topple slowly backwards.

The four buildings were identical. Anyone’s guess which he might be in, if he was in any.

‘Lifts working?’ said the copper.

The caretaker shook his head. ‘No electric,’ he said.

‘Fuck that for a game of whatsit,’ Deason said.

Another tidal roar from the stadium.

‘You wait here. I’ll go up,’ said Breen.

Deason looked uncertain. ‘We reckon he’s a killer.’

‘If he’s up there, he’s seen the police cars. He’ll try to disappear unless we nail him now. Once the match is finished we’ll have no chance catching him.’

‘Be my guest.’ Breen had been right. A plodder.

Breen craned his neck upwards. This is where the rich had decided poor people should live. ‘I’ll take one of your men. One young enough to climb eighteen flights of stairs. The rest stay here to make sure he doesn’t run.’

Deason nodded. ‘I got all night,’ he said. He shouted to a constable, told him to accompany Breen up the towers.

There was a torch in Deason’s car. Breen borrowed another one from the caretaker.

‘Which one first?’ said the caretaker.

‘Eeny meeny,’ said the constable.

‘That one,’ said Breen, pointing. ‘What about the doors to the flats?’

‘All unlocked inside,’ said the caretaker. ‘Just the main doors.’

The constable walked with a stoop. Six foot six or more. Huge. Didn’t seem to tire though. Breen’s legs were singing with pain by the tenth floor of the first tower. There were two staircases, presumably for safety. They split up and took a staircase each, meeting on each floor as they arrived. Looking into each flat, then spiralling on up the concrete stairs. Precisely seventeen steps for each floor.

Four o’clock and the light was almost gone. They had borrowed a torch but hadn’t switched it on yet. By the time they reached the top of the first tower Breen was panting for breath.

On the landing outside the lift Breen opened a metal window and looked out. Sunlight in a pale-yellow line below a grey sky. The floodlights shone over Highbury stadium.

‘Fag?’ said the lanky policeman, taking one out. He talked slowly, smiled a lot. His hair was longer than it should have been, curling over the top of his ears. The sort of copper Tozer would have gone for.

Breen shook his head. ‘I don’t think my lungs are up to it.’ He could make out the outline of King’s Cross station on the skyline to the south.

‘Tell you what, though. Bit bloody high up here. I wouldn’t like it.’

‘I’d prefer it if there was a lift,’ said Breen.

‘Vertigo,’ said the copper. ‘Got it terrible.’

‘Six foot something and you’re scared of heights?’ said Breen.

‘Further to fall,’ said the copper, dropping a half-smoked ciggie onto bare concrete. ‘Race you down then.’

And he set off, bootnails clacking on the concrete stairs.

At the eighth floor of the second tower they paused for breath again.

‘Almost halfway now,’ said the constable.

Breen was conscious of the fact that the constable was now always first up the stairs to the next floor. Breen arrived, panting for breath, to find the policeman already searching the rooms.

‘I don’t know if I’ll make all four,’ said Breen. ‘My chest is going to explode.’