A Song for the Brokenhearted Page 35
‘Nothing more than that?’
‘It was meant for the British Legion. There had been a fete. Mum had all the money.’
‘You took it?’
‘I just wanted some proper clothes. I wanted to be fab, like all the girls on TV. They were just giving it to old people, anyway. But then I bought them and I couldn’t wear them because they’d know. It doesn’t feel like so much now. I always make stupid mistakes. One mistake after another.’
He held up his bloody hand. It didn’t throb so much that way. ‘Think about it. If you hadn’t been here we would never have got him,’ he said.
‘I lied to you.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
They lay on their backs on the cold ground, exhausted.
A V of geese flying overhead, all perfectly spaced.
THIRTY-TWO
He has cooked breast of lamb slowly in the oven, then coated it in egg and breadcrumbs.
The rich smell fills the flat.
The table is laid for six. Breen doesn’t have enough chairs, but Elfie has brought down one of hers from upstairs. Her boyfriend has called to say he’ll be working late at the advertising agency and they are to start without him.
‘Typical,’ says Elfie. ‘He’s working on this ad campaign today with Twiggy. It’s for the new Mini.’
‘I met her once,’ says Amy. ‘She came to the cinema.’
Carmichael hadn’t turned up yet, either. He must be working late too.
Breen has painted the entire flat. All the old wallpaper is covered. The front room is white and modern-looking now. He has bought a new Swedish armchair and thrown out the big old dark one of his father’s. He has put a framed poster from a Rembrandt exhibition over the fireplace. And he’s bought one of those big Japanese paper lampshades, though it hangs too low from the basement ceiling and sometimes he knocks it as he passes. He should have bought something smaller. Maybe he needs to find a bigger flat instead, now there will be three of them.
His bedroom is white, too. The spare room, however, has yellow walls and red skirting boards. The colour hurts Breen’s eyes, but Helen likes it. It’s her room now. You’d never know his father had lived there in his dying days.
There is still work to be done. In Elfie’s flat they’ve painted the floorboards. It makes the whole place look light and European, somehow. Breen thinks he should do the same.
He is back at Marylebone CID. A familiar grind, but he is happy there. It is a novelty coming home to a flat with a woman in it. Helen has stopped saying she’ll move out when she’s had the baby, though she insists it’s only temporary, staying here. When he bought a cot for the baby from Swan & Edgar, Helen was angry at first. She said she was planning on getting one second-hand from Brick Lane. But they’ve put it up in her room, at the end of the bed, anyway. She’s in there now, doing her make-up while he chops the vegetables.
His hand is still bandaged. He’s been learning to type one-handed. He was never that good with two anyway.
Helen emerges from the bedroom finally in a black-and-white maternity dress. She’s cut her hair as short as it’s ever been. ‘I look like crap,’ she says, staring down at her belly.
‘You look beautiful,’ he says.
‘Pervert,’ she says.
She’s not as pregnant as Elfie, though. Elfie is huge, a fecund half-sphere poking from under her cotton top. Unlike Helen, who looks uncomfortable being pregnant, Elfie luxuriates in it. She has brought knitting with her and sits at the table, clicking needles.
‘Where’s John?’ Helen asks Amy.
‘Bloody pub, I expect. Friday night. He said he’d be here at seven.’
Elfie says, ‘You’re lucky, Helen. I’d love to have grown up on a farm.’
They have been talking about Hibou. Her parents had come from Buckinghamshire to visit her at the farm this week to see where she had made her new life.
Amy has brought a bottle of Mateus Rosé and they’ve opened it already. Elfie says she can’t drink any more, it makes her feel ill.
‘I’ll have yours then,’ says Helen.
‘Know what I read in the papers today? James Fletchet is going into politics,’ says Elfie. ‘They say he’s been offered a job as a shadow minister, for whenever they get Wilson out.’
Amy says, ‘I don’t believe in politics.’
Helen lights a cigarette and says, ‘God. Shut up about James bloody Fletchet, won’t you? You go on about him all the time. It’s like you fancy him or something.’
Elfie says, ‘I do, actually. I think he’s quite cool for his age. Racy. Know what I mean?’
Amy and Elfie laugh; Helen doesn’t.
In April Breen and Helen had to travel to Exeter to go to the coroner’s court for the inquest into the murder of Eloisa Fletchet. Fletchet stayed away. Breen was glad of that. If she’d seen him, he wouldn’t have been surprised if Helen had tried to kill him.
‘Think about it. You two are heroes. You saved the life of a peer of the bloody realm,’ Elfie says. She reads every little detail of the case in the papers and quizzes Breen or Helen about them whenever she has the chance.
Over the last few weeks there have been several sympathetic articles written about Fletchet. About the tragic loss of his wife. About the embittered and disgraced policeman turned drug dealer and murderer who was jealous of his success and wanted to kill him. They finally printed extracts from the furious letters Doyle had written in Nairobi. But there is no mention of Fletchet being a torturer in those articles. They sound like the ravings of a madman. Instead, Fletchet is described in the papers as a heroic former settler who was a key figure in combating the brutality of the Mau Mau. Fletchet would be relieved that Helen had killed Doyle; it would have been inconvenient if he’d been arrested. What happened in Kenya was best forgotten.
‘I like living above people who lead such exciting lives,’ says Elfie. ‘I’ve told all my friends.’
Helen rolls her eyes. According to the society pages, Fletchet’s been a regular gambler, staking large sums at the Clermont Club. There is no tutting, only sympathy. A man trying to run from his sorrows.
‘I know what you said about him, but do you actually believe James Fletchet really tortured those people?’ says Elfie. ‘I don’t. They would have said that in the papers, if it had happened. There’s been nothing about it. I mean… Doyle was mad, wasn’t he? They said he’d taken LSD. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had made it all up. It does your head in, you know?’
Helen refuses to look at any of the papers. She says it makes her feel sick, thinking about him. He got away with what he did. His sort always do.
‘Can we change the subject? All that’s done with now.’
Though Breen knows it isn’t. It’s still there in their heads. The pictures of Alexandra. The vision of Eloisa’s body. The gun firing at Doyle’s face.
He’s been sleeping better, though, finally. There’s still a scab on the stub of his finger, but the doctor says it’s healing well.
The lamb is looking dry. It should have been served half an hour ago at least, but Carmichael is still not here. He looks at his watch. It’s unlike him not to have rung.
‘It was all so… wild, that’s all,’ Elfie says.
Amy takes the knitting away from Elfie, holds her hand and says, ‘I think they don’t want to talk about it any more, OK?’
‘OK. I’ll shut up. But I just want to say, what they did was so fab.’
‘What are you going to call the baby?’ asks Amy, to change the subject.
‘Jimi,’ Elfie says, without hesitation. ‘After Jimi Hendrix.’
‘What if it’s a girl?’
‘Jeanne, after Jeanne Moreau,’ she says.
Amy turned to Helen. ‘What about you? Have you decided on a name yet?’
Helen looks down at her growing belly.
‘Alex,’ says Breen.
Helen looks at him and smiles.
‘What if it’s a girl?’ asks Amy.
&nbs
p; ‘Alex,’ says Helen.
They wait a little longer, but Carmichael still doesn’t come, so Breen serves the food and opens another bottle of wine. He pours a glass for Helen, another for himself and Amy, and they eat and talk, about pop records and Ted Heath and Concorde and the theatre, and it feels good to be here, eating food in his flat with friends. It’s like, after years, he has finally rejoined the world.
The baby will be born soon. He will help look after it, even if Helen won’t let him marry her. What is that going to be like? He has so little experience of real families. He doesn’t want to say, but though he’s excited, he’s a little bit scared too.
He’s disappointed in the lamb. It was slightly overdone, but the women all say it’s delicious. Especially for a man. He’s almost finished his when he looks up from his plate, thinking he hears Carmichael coming down the stairs. Amy looks up too, expectantly, but it’s only Elfie’s boyfriend, who is somewhat drunk and isn’t hungry but still has another glass of wine anyway.
Breen recognises the look in Amy’s eye, though. Part disappointment, part exasperation. And a little bit of apprehension too. Has something happened to him?
He picks up his wine and takes too large a gulp. And before they know it the second bottle is empty and Elfie and her boyfriend say goodbye and go back upstairs, but Carmichael is still not here.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This book is a work of fiction, though the details of the torture are real. They are taken from Caroline Elkins’s Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (Jonathan Cape, 2005), compiled from the testimony of Kikuyu witnesses. I also relied on David Anderson’s excellent Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (Orion, 2005).
Thanks, yet again, to Jon Riley and Rose Tomaszewska for all the clever things they said, and to Nick de Somogyi for not losing his mind unravelling my timelines over the course of three books. Also to the five kind people mentioned in my dedication, and to Jeff Humm, Karolina Sutton and Jane McMorrow.
About the Author
WILLIAM SHAW is an award-winning pop-culture journalist who has written for The Observer, The Independent, and The Telegraph, as well as the New York Times, Wired, and Details. His previous novels to feature Breen and Tozer are She’s Leaving Home and The Kings of London. Shaw lives in Sussex, England.
williamshaw.com
@william1shaw
williamshawwriter
Books by William Shaw
A Song for the Brokenhearted
The Kings of London
She’s Leaving Home
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Contents
COVER
TITLE PAGE
WELCOME
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BOOKS BY WILLIAM SHAW
NEWSLETTERS
COPYRIGHT
Copyright
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2015 by William Shaw
Author photograph by Ellen Shaw
Cover design by Matt Tanner
Cover copyright © 2016 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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First United States ebook edition: January 2016
Originally published in Great Britain as A Book of Scars by Quercus, June 2015
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ISBN 978-0-316-24689-7
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