The Kings of London Read online

  He had been shot. Yet he was curiously calm. He had to get up before Cox had a chance to fire again.

  Slowly Breen tried to stand, first making the mistake of trying to use his left arm to push him upwards. It didn’t seem to be working properly. Or even at all.

  He was taking too long. His movements were too slow. It was as if the air had thickened around him, turning to honey.

  He figured out that if he rolled onto his front he could use his good arm to push him upwards.

  Where was Cox? Finally upright, he looked around him. Cox was nowhere.

  He remembered the sight of him falling backwards and inched towards the edge of the building. Not too close because he was starting to feel dizzy now, unsteady on his feet.

  Leaned forward as far as he dared. Looked down.

  There was no sign at all of Cox in the darkness on the ground below.

  Gone.

  He had been inches from the edge when he’d fired.

  Breen leaned forward a little further. No noise. Nothing. Until a huge groan rose from the stadium behind the block.

  He looked around again. No one except for the shape of the dead constable. Had Cox escaped down the stairs?

  Breen had the strange sense that Cox had never been there. He had completely disappeared.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  It seemed to take an age, descending the stairs in the darkness.

  One step at a time. Going a little slower each floor. Light-headed. Knowing he had to make it downstairs soon or they might not find him before it was too late.

  Had Cox fallen? Breen had seen bodies of those who had jumped before. If they landed cleanly it was not so bad. If they hit anything on the way down the bodies were smashed to pieces: they became blood, guts, bone and meat.

  Somewhere around the fifth floor his legs gave way under him. He sank slowly to the ground.

  Damn. He lay on the stairs, wondering if they would come for him in time, and he thought about how Shirley Prosser had manipulated Cox to become a killer. Her weapon of vengeance. Maybe she was in Spain, or South America now. Life would not be easy for her in a new country, with Charlie to look after. A beach somewhere.

  He listened. It was still quiet. Nobody was coming for him yet.

  Slowly he stood again, panting. He was shivering now too. The blood on his back was like ice.

  He moved more slowly now, counting stairs, feeling his way down in the dark. He was losing too much blood.

  He sank down onto the floor again. Exhausted. It would be nice to sleep. If only this floor were more comfortable. He must have passed out for a second. When he opened his eyes, Tozer was standing above him, inviting him to some pop concert. At first he was pleased to see her. Her smile looked so beautiful, he thought. How had she known to find him here? Then he remembered that he had been shot and was irritated that she could be talking about something so trivial as bloody pop music. But when she held out her hand to him, he tried to raise himself up to go with her. Then he jerked awake. Nobody was there.

  If he died, who was going to come to his funeral? he wondered. Pathetic, really. Stupid way for it all to end.

  Tozer had been right all along. He had been a sucker for a woman in distress. He had never understood women at all. Perhaps she could come to the funeral.

  The pain was growing now. He wished it would stop.

  And then there was a voice shouting at him. It was Deason.

  ‘Help me,’ he was shouting to someone.

  The pain of being lifted, someone on each side, was excruciating. Whiteness filled his whole skull, obliterating his vision. They dragged him down the stairs, feet slapping against the steps. Two floors of pain so wild and vicious that Breen was pleading for them just to drop him on the ground.

  Eventually they dragged him to the cold flat tarmac outside, laying him flat.

  ‘Where’s Cox?’ they were shouting.

  Somebody was shouting. ‘Call an ambulance now. This man’s been shot.’

  ‘Jesus. Is he dead?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  They hadn’t heard the gunshot either, Breen realised.

  ‘Where’s Cox?’ Deason was shouting at him.

  Breen said, ‘He killed the constable.’

  Deason leaned in to hear what he was saying. Breen realised his voice was weak. He must have lost a lot of blood. But he rolled his head from side to side on the tarmac. There was no body he could see that had fallen from the building.

  This was strange. This was where he should have fallen, wasn’t it? Was he on the right side of the building?

  He was looking up at the huge monolith above him. Oddly beautiful in the orange light against the blue-black sky. Perhaps he had lost his sense of direction. Maybe he had fallen another way.

  ‘He fell,’ said Breen. ‘I couldn’t stop him.’

  They shone the torch all around where they were, but the ground was empty. Then upwards, but the torch was too weak to show anything above the seventh or eighth floor.

  ‘Nobody fell.’

  ‘I saw him. I think I saw him.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Should we check the other side?’ suggested a young constable.

  They went to look, sweeping the torch left and right. Nowhere to be seen.

  Deason knelt beside Breen.

  ‘There’s an ambulance coming. Keep awake.’

  ‘He was there. And then he wasn’t.’

  He lay on his back on the cold ground, looking up at the building, its long lines reaching upwards into the blackness.

  ‘I mean,’ Deason was saying, ‘he can’t just vanish. He was a fat little bastard.’

  A car was driving onto the site, rumbling over the uneven track that led up to the buildings.

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘His wife, I expect.’

  ‘What if he got down the other stairs?’

  The car was driving closer.

  ‘Door’s still locked, in’t it?’

  ‘He fell,’ said Breen again. ‘I saw him.’

  There seemed to be people everywhere running around them.

  Cox had flown away, maybe. Why did Breen find that funny?

  But then, from far above them, a brief scream.

  Breen had a glimpse of Cox’s face, head down, eyes white, sailing towards him. It took only two or three seconds for his body to fall from the top of the building to the bottom.

  Then he felt the tarmac tremble as Cox hit.

  And just as the headlights from an approaching car lit the spot, Cox’s body was there, splayed out on the tarmac, just a foot from where one of the constables stood. Eyes staring at Breen still.

  And the woman in the car, behind the headlights, was open-mouthed at the sight of her husband’s body, head cracked open, brains leaking onto the blackness of the ground.

  ‘Fucking hell!’ He had missed the young policeman by inches. He was blubbering in shock.

  Gravity had been suspended. Usual rules don’t apply. This was a dream, anyway, probably. Sleep.

  But people kept shouting. Cox’s wife got out of the car. ‘It’s not…’ she said. ‘It’s not him.’

  ‘He almost bloody hit me,’ said the constable who’d been standing there, his voice high.

  ‘Sit down,’ someone was saying. ‘You’ve had a shock.’

  Cox’s half-head, crumpled, but eyes still wide. Less than a yard away.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘That’s not him,’ said the woman, a little louder this time.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ shouted the constable.

  Breen whispered, ‘No. It really is him.’

  Cox: lying next to him like a badly folded suit. Dropped from the night sky.

  The pain had lessened for a while when they’d laid him on the ground, but now his shoulder was starting to sing. Was the bullet still in him, or had it emerged out the other side?

  ‘He must have been bloody up there all this time, clinging on to something with his fingers
.’

  ‘Christ.’

  ‘Maybe he got caught on something.’

  The window Breen had opened, maybe. Clothing snagged until it gave way.

  Mrs Cox was crying, he realised, through the haze that was starting to wrap around him.

  The constable who had been missed by inches was weeping too.

  It felt a human thing to do. He was crying too now, he realised. He thought he was, at least. It was hard to tell. He wished he had cried all those weeks ago when his father died.

  There was an ambulance coming soon. He thought he could hear it. The oddly beautiful sound of a bell ringing, a long way away.

  ‘Stay awake, Sergeant. Please, stay awake.’

  But he was not sure he could be bothered to. He felt so exhausted. He’d had so much to think about. And now he didn’t have to, anymore. And the tarmac around him seemed to melt and swallow him whole.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  The room above the kitchen is warm. The Aga is on below. He finds he sleeps a lot in the heat.

  The bed is old and comfortable. The doctor says he should stay in bed a few more days, at least.

  Sometimes Hibou comes in with tea she has made from rosehips and honey. It’s not as bad as it sounds. She is being treated by the same doctor as Breen is, Tozer says.

  Helen Tozer’s mother brings more conventional cups of tea, refusing to believe that Breen doesn’t like them. ‘Drink it and you’ll feel better,’ she says.

  He would love a real coffee but thinks it probably doesn’t exist this far west of London.

  The doctor says his arm will be OK. The bullet smashed his collarbone, shattering it, sending fragments of bone down into his shoulder. But they’ve put metal in there instead, joining two bits of broken bone.

  Tozer knocks on his door sometimes to ask if he is all right. He screams often in his sleep, they tell him. He dreams about Cox on the tarmac beside him. In some dreams he lies there. In others he stands up again.

  It is Tozer’s sister’s room. Her dead sister. Nightmares are to be expected.

  Tozer often looks tired. She has lost weight, if that’s possible. The farm is a lot of work. Her father has given up on everything. He’s never recovered. It’s all down to her now to keep it going. A young woman running a whole dairy farm, keeping the family going.

  Breen was driven down here in the back of an ambulance after a few days in hospital in London. Tozer had insisted on it. There was no one else to look after him, she said. And no one to object to her insisting, either.

  They say his left arm will not move that well for a while.

  Today he gets up in his pyjamas and goes slowly downstairs. Mrs Tozer is cooking lunch. Beef stew and dumplings.

  ‘Oh,’ she says, surprised to see him up. She runs round, moving chairs, fetching a blanket for him. ‘Joining us for lunch, are you?’

  It’s a first. Breen apologises for causing so much trouble.

  She laughs. ‘No trouble.’

  ‘Extra mouths to feed,’ he says.

  ‘No trouble at all,’ she says, and looks out of the small square window into the farmyard.

  ‘It’s good to have the girl here,’ she says.

  She means Hibou. The same age as Tozer’s sister was. Like someone falling out of the sky unexpectedly. Breen wonders whether it’s Tozer who’s bringing the farm back to life with her energy and work, or Hibou, by filling the space left behind by a dead girl. Even Tozer’s father talks to her, sometimes. He taught her how to change a spark plug in the tractor the other day.

  Hibou is doing well, apparently. She doesn’t talk much, but she’s over the worst. There is some colour in her skin now, at least. Tozer asked her if she wanted them to call her anything different. Her real name, perhaps? But she prefers to be known as Hibou. Tozer tells her she’s a dab hand with the milking machine. A real help.

  At night you can hear real owls round here, too.

  The food smells rich. Almost too rich. Breen doesn’t want to disappoint her by not eating, but he’s not sure he can face it.

  ‘It’s good of you, Mrs Tozer, to put up with me.’

  ‘You miss your father, I expect,’ she says.

  She ladles the stew into a bowl. Before he can stop himself, he says, ‘I wasn’t there, the day he died. I feel bad about that.’

  Mrs Tozer drops gravy onto the top of the cooker. It bubbles and steams in the heat.

  ‘You can’t always be there,’ she says. ‘That’s the sad thing.’

  To change the subject, Breen asks if he can use the phone after lunch. He wants to call London to see if there is any news of Shirley Prosser.

  He doubts there will be. She used him. Not as badly as she’d used Harry Cox though.

  ‘She’s lucky,’ Helen Tozer said yesterday as they walked by the estuary. ‘And smart. She got her revenge on the people who killed the one she loved. I admire her.’

  Breen does not want to think about her too much. She got away.

  He will be off work for weeks, though he’s not sure how long he can stay down here. It’s not that he’s not welcome. But he is not a country person. He misses the city his father raised him in. He’s bored already. This is not where he is from. Hibou fits in here, but he doesn’t. He peers out of the window at the browns of winter. The leafless trees full of rooks.

  The quiet complacency of everyday life. He knows it is not really like this. In this house they all secretly know it too. He can’t live here. He’s not sure Tozer can either, but she has to try.

  She will be coming in soon, talking too loudly, smelling of sour milk and dung.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Few figures have had a bigger influence on the British art scene than Robert Fraser. He was the man who linked the art world of Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton to the Beatles, and the man who gave the Rolling Stones their bohemian credibility through his ultimately destructive relationship with Keith Richards and Anita Pallenberg, who were sharing his flat at the time this book is set. He was also the man who hosted Yoko Ono and John Lennon’s joint exhibition ‘You Are Here’ and who gave Gilbert and George their first exhibition. His life is explored in Harriet Vyner’s brilliant aural history Groovy Bob. I was delighted to discover that book was edited by Jon Riley, who also edited the book you’ve just read.

  Rhodri Pugh is an entirely imagined character, though he would have served under James Callaghan, Labour Home Secretary at the time this book is set. Before becoming Prime Minister in 1976, Callaghan was a key figure in pushing back the so-called British model of drug treatment, in which drug use was regarded as principally a medical problem. In 1971, when James Callaghan introduced the Misuse of Drugs Act, there were fewer than five thousand problematic drug users in the UK. There are now over a quarter of a million, mostly using heroin or cocaine. I owe thanks to Caroline Coon, co-founder of Release, for taking time to talk to me about drug abuse and the state’s response to it in the period the book is set.

  The shambolic ‘Alchemical Wedding’ at the Royal Albert Hall was the first time John Lennon and Yoko Ono performed their ‘Bagism’ artwork. The episode in which the police attempted to prevent women taking their clothes off is taken from a contemporary account in International Times. The Hell’s Angel who stood up to the police that day is identified as Billy Tumbleweed, aka ‘Sweet William’ Fritsch, the San Francisco Hell’s Angel leader, poet and occasional lover of Janis Joplin. He was also the man employed to organise the Rolling Stones’ lethally slipshod security at Altamont in December 1969.

  Huge thanks to Roz Brody, Mike Holmes, Janet King and Chris Sansom for their continued advice and encouragement (particularly Chris, this time, for helping turn the impossible into the plausible); to Laura Wilson, Professor Bernard Knight and Carol Bridgestock for their expert help, and to Jon Riley, Rose Tomaszewska and Nick de Somogyi at Quercus, as well as Joshua Kendall at Mulholland for all their many smart comments. Thanks also, finally, to Jane McMorrow.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

 
; William Shaw is an award-winning pop-culture journalist who has has written regularly for The Observer (London), The Independent, and The Telegraph, as well as the New York Times, Wired, and Details. He lives in Sussex, England.

  williamshaw.com

  @william1shaw

  williamshawwriter

  Books by William Shaw

  She’s Leaving Home

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  Contents

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  WELCOME

  DEDICATION

  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

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  BOOKS BY WILLIAM SHAW