The Kings of London Read online

  ‘Him and a fucking horse,’ said another copper.

  And the band carried on playing ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’ as Danny sat on the step laughing and crying, waiting for the ambulance to arrive.

  Tozer said, ‘So it was Danny that tried to kill you?’

  Back in the dance hall everyone was staring at Breen.

  ‘That time at your flat?’

  ‘What did I do to him?’

  ‘Oh, Paddy, you’re such a twat.’

  Marilyn was back at their table downing brandy and crying onto the tablecloth. Breen and Tozer stayed well away, found a pair of stools at the bar. Tozer had taken off her shoes because her feet hurt. Inspector Creamer and his wife approached. She still had a cigarette in one hand and a champagne glass in the other.

  ‘Did I hear right? You were attacked?’

  ‘Not really, sir.’

  ‘I won’t have fighting,’ he said. ‘You lot are going to have to bloody shape up. There are ladies here.’

  He walked away, his wife waddling after him.

  Tozer said, ‘Marilyn’s as mad as he is, you ask me. They deserve each other. Shall we get really drunk?’. ‘Really, really drunk.’

  ‘You look like you are already.’

  She smiled slightly crookedly. ‘I haven’t even started. That poor bloody woman in Margate though. I keep thinking about her. She’s so scared, but I keep thinking she was just as frightened of us as the bad people.’

  ‘Maybe we are the bad people,’ said Breen. ‘I mean, not us. But the police.’

  ‘Yep,’ she said. ‘Maybe you are.’

  Carmichael came up with his dolly bird on his arm. ‘Aye, aye,’ he said. ‘I missed all the excitement. Who’d have thought he was jealous of you, Paddy.’

  ‘Can we go?’ said Sequin Girl. ‘I’m bored.’

  Carmichael said, ‘Don’t you want to have another dance?’

  ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘The band’s square. Can we leave now?’

  ‘There’s a couple of tossers from Paddington Green going at it in the lobby,’ said Carmichael. ‘Normally they’d have drawn a crowd by now but nobody’s bothered tonight. The main event’s already happened.’ Sequin Girl was dragging him away. ‘1968 is the year you were saved by a deaf horse, Paddy Breen.’

  ‘I need to speak to you, John,’ said Breen. ‘About those squatters.’

  ‘Next week,’ Carmichael said.

  Tozer said, ‘You look pale. Have another drink.’

  ‘Of course I’m pale,’ said Breen. ‘Bloody hell.’

  ‘At least you know now… who it was, trying to do you in.’

  Breen nodded. His head hurt.

  ‘Poor Paddy. I should take you home and look after you.’ She leaned forward and kissed him gently. ‘No funny stuff, mind you.’

  ‘I thought you wanted to stay and get drunk on the free booze.’

  ‘I’ll manage.’ While the barman wasn’t looking she reached over the bar. Breen looked at her bony, awkward body, stretched across the width of the counter. Her skirt rode up, showing her bare legs. All the other women in the room were wearing tights.

  And as he looked away from her bare skin he caught Marilyn’s eye. She was looking at him and Tozer with pure, sodden hatred.

  When Tozer sat back on her bar stool she was holding something which she stuffed into her handbag before Breen could get a good look at it.

  ‘If we leave together there’s going to be gossip whether you sleep in my dad’s bed or not.’

  ‘I’m only here a couple of days more. Let’s get a taxi,’ Tozer said. ‘Can you afford it?’

  Out on the street, while Breen was looking for a passing cab to hail she pulled the bottle she’d stolen out of her handbag and said, ‘Chivas Regal? Is that any good?’

  ‘Is that all?’ said Breen as the taxi rattled across the London potholes, ‘Just a couple of days?’

  THIRTY

  Breen lay in his narrow bed, with Tozer taking more than her fair share of the space. She was snoring.

  The luminous hands of his travel clock said it was gone eight in the morning. He needed to pee and his head hurt. They had drunk too much.

  Tozer had crawled into his bed at around four-ish, and had fallen straight to sleep. They had not had sex. His father’s bed lay empty in the small room next door. No one had slept there since his father had died.

  He was conscious that he had his pyjamas on, but that she was dressed in a pair of cotton knickers and nothing else. The closeness of her skin. The rise and fall of her shoulders. Even the smell of cigarettes in her hair smelt good. He tried not to think too hard about it. He prayed she would not wake and notice his erection.

  He was not used to this. He had grown up in a woman-less house; yes, he had slept around a little in his teenage years and a few times in his early twenties, but that seemed like a long time ago. Looking after his father had left him little time for women. A few weeks ago he and Tozer had had sex and it had been good. But she was young; it hadn’t meant anything to her.

  He thought about Shirley Prosser instead. A woman his age. A more responsible woman who knew, like him, what it was to have to care for someone. She was more his type, wasn’t she?

  At around half past eight he couldn’t take the pressure on his bladder any longer, so he edged out of bed slowly, springs creaking. He grabbed his clothes off the chair and tiptoed away.

  The flat was freezing. He switched on the electric bar fire in his living room, put another couple of half-crowns in the meter, went to the kitchen and filled the kettle with water, then put it on the hob.

  There was a hard frost outside. Black stalks of dead plants rimmed with white outside the window. It was the last Sunday before Christmas.

  The newsagent’s stall by the police station was busy. ‘Sunday Times,’ he said, handing over a shilling. Moon rocket launches. Peace talks in Vietnam. Civil Rights march in Londonderry.

  He walked down to Joe’s cafe and bought fresh bagels and smoked salmon.

  Back at the flat, he peeked in on Tozer. She was laid across the bed now, arms splayed out, a single nipple poking out above the blankets. He looked at her a little too long, then retreated to the kitchen to put the coffee on and to look for a bottle of aspirin.

  She appeared at the kitchen doorway looking white. ‘That coffee smells off,’ she said. ‘You don’t have any ordinary, do you?’

  ‘I feel rubbish,’ she said, lying on the sofa.

  He handed her a cup of Nescafé and two aspirin. She had found his dressing gown and was wearing it. It looked huge on her, bare feet poking out of the bottom.

  ‘Are you hungry?’

  She scowled at him. Best to leave her alone. He would have liked the chance to talk to her about where they stood, but the time never seemed right. He fetched a blanket and laid it over her, then sat in his father’s chair reading the paper with the bagel sitting on a sideplate on one side of him and his coffee on the other. Tozer left hers to grow cold.

  ‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ she said.

  He fetched the washing-up bowl from the sink and laid it next to her on the sofa.

  ‘What’s that smell?’

  ‘Smoked salmon,’ he said.

  ‘Can you eat it somewhere else?’

  He sighed, stood up and took his half-finished bagel and put it in the fridge, then returned to his coffee and paper. ‘I told Creamer I wanted to speak to him. I should tell him what I know. What I think I know.’

  ‘He’s an arse,’ she said. ‘First day in, he pinched my bum.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  She shrugged as if it happened all the time.

  Breen looked at her. ‘Aren’t you going to miss all this?’

  ‘I love London,’ she said. ‘I’ll go crazy down in Devon. But I’ve no choice. You looked after your dad, didn’t you? I’m the only one, now. You know what it’s like. I have to go back.’

  Breen nodded.

  Breen kept his father’s address
book in his father’s bedside table. He went to get it, then flicked through and found John Nolan’s name written in his father’s spidery hand.

  He dialled him.

  ‘Who are you calling?’ asked Tozer.

  ‘A friend of my father’s.’

  The phone rang and rang. Breen was about to put the phone down when it finally picked up.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘John? It’s Cathal Breen.’

  ‘We were just coming in from Mass,’ said Nolan.

  Breen heard the sound of children shouting in the background. A house full of people. He felt envious of the warmth of it. The opposite of his silent flat.

  ‘John, you were working for Morton, Stiles and Prentice, weren’t you?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I’m looking for some background into a case that may involve the building trade.’

  Breen could hear Nolan calling, ‘Mary? Can we fit in another for lunch?’

  Breen said, ‘I don’t know, John… That’s kind but I’m with someone right now.’

  ‘A girlfriend?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘Not exactly?’ Nolan was laughing. ‘Mary, what about an extra two? Bring her along as well.’

  ‘She may not want to come with me…’

  ‘What’s that?’ said Tozer.

  Breen put his phone over the receiver and said, ‘An old friend of my father’s. Remember? We met him on a building site. He’s inviting me for lunch and—’

  ‘Like, a Sunday lunch?’

  ‘Yes.

  ‘Oh, God. I didn’t think anyone in London ate Sunday lunch. I’d kill for a bit of roast.’

  ‘I thought you were feeling sick?’ said Breen.

  ‘Is that a yes?’ said Nolan. ‘Splendid.’

  A boy in shorts opened the door. ‘Grandad. Two people at the door,’ he shouted. A house in Fulham, bursting with people and noise.

  ‘Bring him in,’ shouted a voice from inside the house. Breen recognised it as Nolan’s.

  ‘That smell,’ said Tozer. ‘I feel better already.’

  Most of the men were in the living room drinking from a keg of beer. The women were in the kitchen, helping with the Sunday dinner. Loud, warm, enveloping. Nolan emerged from the kitchen, wiping his hands on a tea towel. ‘I was just press-ganged to dry up some more glasses. We don’t have enough.’

  ‘If you will spring guests on me at the last minute, what do you expect?’ A bird-like woman, her Irish accent even stronger than Nolan’s.

  ‘This is Cathal Breen, son of Tomas Breen,’ said Nolan. He pronounced his name the way his father had used to, with no ‘th’ sound in the middle, not the way the English did. ‘The young policeman I told you about. And his friend, Miss…?’

  ‘Call me Helen,’ said Tozer, holding out her hand.

  ‘She works with me in CID,’ said Breen.

  The women looked saucer-eyed. ‘A woman in the police? You imagine that in the Garda Síochána? What next?’

  ‘What’s the gardy whatsit?’ said Tozer.

  ‘Would you have a whiskey?’ asked Mrs Nolan.

  ‘My… isn’t that a pretty dress,’ said one of the women, looking at Tozer, eyebrows raised.

  ‘Very fashionable, I would say,’ said Mrs Nolan.

  ‘I was at a party last night,’ said Tozer. ‘I haven’t had a chance to change.’

  And the noise in the kitchen stopped dead for just a second as the full thump of what Tozer had said was taken on board. They looked from Breen to Tozer and back again. Tozer seemed not to notice the sidelong glances of the women.

  ‘A good party?’ asked Nolan, breaking the awkward silence.

  ‘Not bad, if you weren’t a horse,’ said Tozer, taking a glass of whiskey from Mrs Nolan. She looked at the glass for a second. ‘Kill or cure,’ she said.

  ‘I could give you a drop of American Dry in that if you’d prefer,’ said Mrs Nolan.

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ said Tozer, and she took a hearty gulp from the glass.

  ‘Great girl,’ said Nolan, smiling.

  The walls of the dining room were bare except for a brass Jesus impaled on a wooden crucifix, a framed picture of John F. Kennedy and a single postcard from Ireland.

  ‘Cathal Breen is the only son of Tomas Breen of Tralee, God rest his soul, who used to be known as the best foreman in London.’

  ‘Your father is dead, Cathal?’ said one of the women.

  ‘He died in September.’

  Murmurs of sympathy passed around the room. Nolan set about introducing them to the dozen or so men, women and children milling in the room and in the tiny kitchen behind it. They all seemed to be aunts or uncles or cousins.

  ‘I wanted to pick your brain,’ said Breen holding a massive glass of whiskey that Nolan had given him.

  ‘There will be time for that after lunch. These women cook the best roast dinner in West London,’ said Nolan.

  Breen’s father had arrived in London a generation before this wave of immigrants, driven out of Kerry by the scandal of his eloping with a married woman. He had wanted Cathal to have nothing to do with these uneducated families who crowded into London slums. And yet, Breen thought, he and his father would have been made so welcome. His father had kept all this from him. All this companionship lost.

  When they discovered Tozer’s family were farmers, her stock rose a little. They quizzed her about what cows they had, about how many they had, how many they sent for slaughter each year, and seemed impressed by her answers.

  ‘My father’s not well. I’m going back to run the farm in January.’

  ‘Giving up the police?’ said one thin, sharp-nosed woman. ‘No job for a woman anyway, I would say.’

  ‘Why not?’ said Tozer.

  The whiskey was kicking in already.

  Breen drew the conversation away from her, ‘You’re still working on the Westway?’

  Nolan nodded. ‘Years of work in that still,’ he said.

  Breen wandered into the kitchen. ‘Can I give you a hand with anything?’ he offered Mrs Nolan. He peered into the pot on the hob and said, ‘Shall I drain those potatoes for you?’

  The women turned and looked puzzled.

  ‘I cook,’ said Breen, watching one of them pouring away the water from the carrots down the plughole, thinking, That would have gone well in a gravy.

  ‘I’m sure we’ll manage perfectly well,’ the woman said, as if offended by the enquiry.

  They ate with little ceremony, starting as soon as the plates were on the table, so that by the time Mrs Nolan sat down, after filling the men’s glasses with beer, most people’s plates were already almost empty. And before she had had a chance to finish her own she was standing again, offering seconds and not taking no for an answer when Breen protested that he could eat no more. Even Tozer refused a second plateful.

  Apple pie for pudding. Afterwards the men went out into the garden and stood in the cold air and Nolan handed around cheap cigars. ‘She won’t have them in the house,’ he complained. ‘Imagine having to smoke outdoors. It’s not civilised.’

  ‘That was delicious,’ said Breen. ‘Thank you.’ Though the meat had been gristly and the vegetables boiled to death, it had somehow tasted good. A taste of home that never was. Perhaps it was the unfamiliar feeling of sitting at a big family table. For Breen, it had always just been himself and his father, sitting in their plain kitchen, his father complaining that the mash had bits in it.

  Nolan led Breen to one side and said, ‘What was it you wanted to ask me about? Another missing man?’

  ‘In a kind of way,’ said Breen. ‘Have you ever heard of a man called Johnny Knight?’ he asked.

  Nolan shook his head.

  ‘He worked for Morton, Stiles and Prentice. He’s a quantity surveyor – was.’

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘I think.’

  ‘Plenty of pen pushers around building sites these days. I never heard of him though.’ He took a puff on his cigar and blew o
ut smoke. The men sat at garden chairs on a large concrete patio.

  ‘It’s nice what you’ve done here,’ said Breen.

  Nolan shrugged. ‘My wife wanted it. She says the garden gets too much mud in the house. She’d like the whole thing covered over in concrete if she had her way.’

  ‘And there’s always a little spare concrete on a building site,’ said Breen.

  Nolan looked mock-outraged. ‘Is that what you came here for? To accuse me of stealing from my own building sites?’

  Breen said, ‘It’s my job.’

  ‘Maybe the odd bag does go missing now and then,’ said Nolan.

  Breen looked at the concrete. It had been painted green.

  ‘You could hide a few bodies under that,’ said Tozer.

  ‘Maybe I have,’ said Nolan.

  ‘What about Harry Cox? Do you know him?’

  ‘Harry Cox? Fat bugger with less hair than a billiard ball?’

  ‘That’s him.’

  ‘Met him a couple of times. Senior fellow. Working on the Westway. A smooth bastard. Doesn’t show his face down our way much. Why do you ask?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Breen. ‘A contract like the Westway, though. It would be worth a lot of money.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Nolan. ‘Hundreds of thousands. And the Westway is just a little part of it. That’s just the first of the ringways. There are supposed to be a bunch of them.’

  ‘Will you do me a favour, John? I want to find out about him. Do you know where he lives?’

  ‘Why? Has he done something wrong?’

  ‘I’d appreciate it if you didn’t ask.’

  ‘No problem, Cathal. I’ll nose around.’

  Breen said, ‘I like your family. They’re nice people.’

  ‘You’re almost family to me,’ said Nolan. ‘Think of it that way.’ They sat in silence for a little while longer, until Nolan asked, ‘You still going back to Ireland, you think?’

  ‘I’d like to.’

  ‘Don’t expect too much, Cathal. We’ve had the bollocks ripped out of us.’

  They walked as far as Hammersmith to catch the tube train. There were only a few running on a Sunday.

  Breen went up to the ticket booth and dug in his pocket for change, but there was no one at the counter.