Play With Fire Page 4

  ‘I do not know that word,’ said the caretaker, looking at Breen for an explanation.

  ‘My colleague means that we only have your word for it – because you were alone.’

  Haas shrugged, looked away. ‘Ah. Alibi. I understand. Yes. You have only my word.’ He stood and turned his back to them.

  Outside, the photographer had arrived, a large man, grumbling about having to lift his lights up the stairs. ‘About bloody time,’ said Wellington.

  Breen and Mint followed the caretaker down to the floor below.

  ‘Crikey,’ was the first thing Mint said when he saw the pinkness of the room. They stood on the white carpet, looking around the room, gazing at the artifice of it. There was a pile of Jackie magazines on the table. The giant teddy bear sat on the sofa, as if watching them.

  The Beatles smiled.

  ‘And how old was she?’ asked Breen.

  ‘I don’t know. No no no. This was all theatre business.’

  ‘Theatre business?’

  ‘Täuschung. Illusion. Her job. She was not a child. She was a woman.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  There was a small kitchenette to the right of the front door; a large main room, and two bedrooms. The first bedroom was the bigger of the two. Like the living room, almost everything in it was pink, including the bedsheets. It was a double bed, with a Union Jack bedcover and a yellow cloth rabbit placed on top of the pillows.

  There were toys on the floor. A doll’s house. A pink Dansette record player. All over the bedroom walls were more photographs of pop stars, stuck with Sellotape. Breen recognised some of them: The Kinks, The Who, Mary Hopkin, The Monkees.

  ‘She pretended,’ said Haas. ‘Swinging London. You know?’

  Among the photographs, Breen noticed the picture of a soft-faced young man with bright white hair. He was clutching a guitar. The photo was signed in black felt pen. ‘Best wishes.’ The signature was indecipherable.

  ‘Who’s that?’ he asked Mint.

  ‘It’s that dead bloke, Sarge,’ he said. ‘In the papers.’

  There was a dressing table artfully scattered with bottles of colourful nail varnish and make-up.

  ‘And this was her bedroom?’

  Breen pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, put it around the wardrobe door handle to open it.

  ‘No. This was where she worked. Her own bedroom was across the corridor.

  One half was full of ordinary clothes, a mac, a cocktail dress. The other side was full of what appeared to be costumes.

  There were three school uniforms and a pink flouncy thing with ruffles, several brightly patterned miniskirts, tops with stripes and polka dots, and two pairs of bright, patent-leather thigh-length boots.

  ‘She was a specialist,’ said Haas. ‘She knew how much you English men liked young girls. That was the name she used. Julie Teenager. She was quite well known, I believe. A pop star.’

  ‘Julie Teenager?’

  ‘And you didn’t have any problem with that? In your house?’ asked Mint.

  ‘It is not my house,’ he said flatly.

  ‘Must have cost a bit to rent this place,’ said Breen.

  ‘Nineteen pounds ten a week,’ said Haas.

  Mint raised his eyebrows. It was a lot for a flat in London, especially around here; Breen paid less than a quarter of that, but that was in Stoke Newington. ‘She must have been earning a whack, then,’ said Mint.

  ‘I never asked her.’

  ‘You have the key to this flat. When you didn’t see her, did you let yourself in?’

  ‘No. Miss Bobienski’s maid Florence knocked on my door on Friday night to ask if I had seen her. She was worried. She had heard nothing from her. There were men coming.’

  ‘Customers.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘But she didn’t report anything to the police?’

  Haas smiled. ‘Obviously not. The police do not always treat people like her well, perhaps.’

  ‘So the maid had a key too?’

  The caretaker nodded.

  ‘Friday night? And the lift was definitely not working then?’

  ‘As I have said.’

  ‘She dressed up as a teenager?’ asked Mint. ‘For men?’ He looked shocked.

  ‘She looked younger than she was, I think,’ said Haas.

  They crossed the corridor. In contrast to the other frivolous rooms, this was monastic. A small space, with a single high window that faced out onto the back of the building, a colour television and a shelf full of novels. On her dressing table here, a small family photograph taken at some smart event.

  Breen picked it up. A couple with a young boy and an infant. The man wore an RAF uniform and held the hand of the young boy dressed in a stiff suit. The woman wore a hat with a single feather in it and clutched the baby in her arms. It looked like it had been taken during the war. He stared at it for a second.

  ‘She never talked about them,’ said Haas, before Breen’d even asked the question. ‘It is a tragedy, now you see the family. He fought Nazis, you see?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Royal Air Force.’ Haas stood stiffly alongside him as Breen flicked open the clips on the back of the wooden frame and took out the photograph.

  On the landing, Wellington looked ostentatiously at his gold wristwatch, still waiting for the photographer to finish his work, as Breen appeared out of the dead woman’s flat. Breen ignored him, shouting up through the hatch to the cameraman. ‘Get photographs of her rooms too, OK?’ Then he turned back to the caretaker. ‘What about the lift?’

  ‘I think the engine is broken. It’s old.’

  Breen grasped the scissor gate and shook it; the metal rattled.

  ‘Careful,’ said the caretaker.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s old, that’s all.’

  Breen pulled the gate open. She would be lying above him now.

  ‘What if the lift wasn’t here? Could I open this door?’

  ‘You’re not supposed to be able to. For safety.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘No. I’m not sure. It’s old,’ said the man. ‘It is not safe. I don’t like it. I tell the landlord we need to close it down. He does nothing. That’s why he is rich and I am poor.’

  Breen led him to the floor below. The gate there was shut. You could see through to the other side of the square spiral stairway, the brown wood banister descending at an angle, dust on the untouched ledge beyond.

  He shook the scissor gate again. It was locked. He thought for a minute, then reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out a penknife and opened the blade. He manoeuvred it into the joint at the side and pushed the blunt edge against the clasp that hooked into the side of the door. A small movement and the lock sprang free. Breen slid back the mechanism. ‘Is it supposed to do that?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s old. I said it already,’ said the caretaker.

  In front of him, the lift shaft was empty. Grabbing the side of the door frame, he peered downwards. There was some litter, dropped onto the floor at the bottom; old cigarette packets, sweet wrappers. Then he looked up, towards the underside of the lift above.

  ‘Where’s the machinery? The motor that makes the lift work? Can I see it?’

  ‘Downstairs,’ said Haas.

  They descended two more floors. There were two small flats in the basement. Between them there was a third door. Haas pushed it open and went inside.

  Everything about the lift was ancient. It must have been installed between the wars. Breen squatted down, peered at the electric motor, looking for signs that it had been tampered with. He could see nothing obvious, but he was not the practical man his father had been. His father had been a builder, an Irish immigrant who had discouraged his son to have any interest in his trade in the hope that he would better himself. By which he had not meant becoming a policeman.

  ‘The engineer says he is coming tomorrow,’ said Haas. ‘Maybe the next day.’

  ‘He c
an’t touch it until we’ve looked at it.’

  ‘How long will that take?’

  ‘I’ll let you know,’ said Breen. On the way out he said, ‘Is this door usually unlocked?’

  Haas shrugged. ‘No. There is nothing valuable here. Some tools. Nothing much.’

  Breen strode up to the ground floor, then down again, and back up, counting stairs. Mint trotted silently behind him. After making a couple more notes, he walked out into sunlight where an ambulance waited outside to collect her body.

  The young men from the new C Department had arrived with their briefcase bags of equipment, powders and brushes, tape measures and scalpels. Most of the men Breen knew in CID resented this new intrusion of science into the job. They’d managed fine without it before.

  Outside, London was looking grubby and ordinary. The huge trees were still, leaves heavy above them in the quiet of a Sunday afternoon.

  SIX

  When he got home at six, Helen was still sitting in his father’s old armchair; there was no sign that she had moved. The ashtray contained eight partly smoked cigarettes; it looked as if she had had a couple of puffs from each then put them out.

  ‘Well?’ she said.

  He went to the fridge and pulled out a bottle of Bass and opened it, then returned to the living room and sat down.

  ‘A prostitute. She called herself Julie Teenager.’

  ‘Was she pretty? They love it when it’s a pretty girl.’

  ‘Not pretty any more,’ said Breen.

  She nodded. ‘Grim?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. She picked at her nails. ‘One of her clients?’

  ‘Too early, really.’

  Reaching over to the coffee table, she lifted up her packet of cigarettes to light another. ‘Go on.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What are the details?’

  ‘Give me a minute. I just got in. Have you eaten anything?’

  ‘Toast. Loads. I was starving.’

  ‘You can’t just eat toast all day.’

  She shrugged, sucked on her cigarette. ‘I can. I didn’t even know there were brothels in Harewood Avenue.’

  He left her in the living room and went to cook an omelette with pieces of bacon and some chives that he’d bought the day before, after they’d got back from Hyde Park.

  ‘It wasn’t a brothel. She was a specialist. She dressed up as a teenager,’ Breen called from the kitchen. ‘School uniforms. Pop music. Everything.’

  ‘That’s horrible.’

  When he’d finished, he cut the omelette into two, took it into the living room and put it down on the dining table. He watched her picking out the green bits, like she always did, and covering the rest with tomato sauce.

  ‘How old was she?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I think probably mid-twenties.’

  A little older than Helen herself. ‘And was she raped?’

  Helen was always direct; unlike the men Breen worked with, she didn’t find it hard to talk about these things.

  He put down his fork. He wasn’t so hungry. ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. She was in an ordinary dress. She still had everything on.’

  ‘Dressed for work?’

  ‘Actually, that’s a good point.’

  ‘What sort of dress?’

  ‘You know… Just a dress. Like something you’d wear.’

  ‘I don’t wear dresses.’

  ‘Yes you do.’

  ‘Only ’cause I’m pregnant.’

  He sighed. ‘Like something you’d wear if you did wear dresses.’

  ‘So not exactly dressed for work, then.’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘How was she killed?’

  ‘Head injury, Wellington said.’

  ‘You had him, today?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That man’s an idiot,’ she said, dolloping more ketchup onto her plate.

  ‘He’s probably right, though. You could see from the state of her.’

  She nodded thoughtfully. ‘So, what? It was in her home?’

  ‘I’m not sure where she was assaulted yet. Possibly in her flat, yes, or somewhere nearby. Her body was dumped on top of the lift. I don’t think that was where she was killed. She’s been missing for at least two days, probably three, but nobody reported her. And then the caretaker found her.’

  ‘How the hell did she get there?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’ He held out his plate to her.

  She scraped his half-eaten omelette onto the remains of hers and dug her fork into it. ‘Her pimp?’

  ‘She worked with a maid. I’m trying to track her down.’

  ‘Ask the women police in D Division. Maybe they’ll know. Specially if it was so close to the station.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘We know all that stuff that goes on; the stuff you blokes never notice. They’re saying they’re going to merge us into the rest of the Met now. All that’s going to change. They’ll make us more like you lot.’ Breen noticed that she still used the first person, even though she wasn’t a copper any more. ‘I think they’ll lose something, to be honest. We’ll just be annoying old farts like you.’

  It was Sunday night; there was nothing on television. At nine Helen got up and said, ‘I’m tired.’

  ‘You haven’t done anything all day.’

  ‘I know. It’s bloody exhausting,’ she said, without smiling. Another half-smoked cigarette had burned out in the ashtray, leaving a curl of grey ash.

  He listened to her in the bathroom preparing for bed. She closed the bedroom door behind her without saying goodnight.

  He woke, sweating, short of breath, filled by a sense that his arms and legs were tied. He lay still, too terrified to move them, in case he was right.

  It took almost a minute before he summoned the will to reach out his arm and switch on the light. He blinked in the sudden brightness.

  He looked down. His pyjamas had ridden up. The scars were still pink on his stomach.

  The one thing that was OK about her sleeping in a separate room was that she didn’t know about this. He had thought that these episodes were going away; he hadn’t had one for two or three weeks.

  It was the sight of the dead woman, of course.

  When the photographer had gone, he had ascended the ladder again to watch as Wellington had carried out his duties. Her back had been arched over the machinery at the top of the lift, both hands splayed above her head. In the darkness her eyes had looked heavily made up; that and the deep curl of her hair and the soft, child-like curves of her face had made her look a little like Clara Bow, until Wellington had shone his torch on the absence of her eyeballs. Red, dark holes.

  He sat on his bed, unable to get back to sleep for thinking about her. If she had been dumped there, how had it been done? Had it been planned, or had it been an act of panic? She was small; child-like. She had traded on that. She would have been easy to lift. Anyone could have managed it.

  A door opened; a light came on outside. Helen was awake too. He looked at his watch. Just gone three in the morning.

  ‘Helen?’ he said.

  She peered round the door to his bedroom, holding a glass of water in one hand and another paperback in the other. ‘It’s like trying to sleep with a two-bar electric fire strapped to your stomach.’

  He moved aside, shifted the pillows and patted the bed beside him. ‘I couldn’t get that woman out of my head,’ he said, though that hadn’t been what woke him.

  ‘Me neither.’

  When Helen had been a teenager, her own sister had been murdered and left in a ditch in Devon. It was why she had wanted to escape to London and become a policewoman in the first place.

  In the end, it had been Breen who had tracked down her sister’s killer, not before he had murdered again; the scars were a reminder he had almost killed Breen too.

  At some point he noticed it was light outside. When he looked at Helen, she had fallen asleep, her book on the mo
und below her small breasts, its spine cracked.

  He tried to get back to sleep himself, but she had somehow slid across the bed and he found himself perched on the edge. In the end he got up and sat, snoozing, in the armchair in the living room for an hour until it was time to get up to go to work.

  When he tiptoed into the bedroom Helen was snoring gently. She was still fast asleep when he left into the bright morning light. This is what he did. He found out who killed people. He had done it before. He had done it for Helen.

  It was a terrible world; it was a sunny day. Though his father may have wanted better for him, there was no other job in the world, he thought, that he should be doing.

  SEVEN

  When Breen had arrived at D Division, the CID room at Marylebone had been comfortable. The solid old wooden desks must have been there since the 1930s; no one had painted the place in years. Nicotine had yellowed the ceiling and walls. It had been lived in; manly.

  Creamer had changed all that. He had sent all the old furniture to the tip, replacing it with neat, steel-framed tables with easy-to-clean Formica tops. There were new, lightweight typewriters that were small enough to be put away in drawers, and the latest beige telephones that the new secretary, Miss Rasper, could pass calls through to at the press of a button.

  Instead of the heavy old desks, filled with long-forgotten files, old tobacco tins, broken pencil sharpeners, knives removed from teenagers and unanswered correspondence, each officer now only had two slim drawers in which to keep all their belongings.

  Outdated manuals on roadcraft and criminal law had been binned. The walls had been stripped of all the old pictures and newspaper cuttings and repainted a bright, clean white.

  The dark old floorboards, worn down by generations of officers’ boots, were now covered with blue linoleum.

  But however modern Creamer had tried to make the room, the old Victorian station, with its old metal windows and stone sills, still asserted itself. There was an annoying buzz on the new phone lines that no one from the GPO could seem to fix. The lino was already dotted with black cigarette burns.

  ‘Sorry, Paddy. Bit tied up, yesterday. All OK?’ Creamer looked around for an ashtray for his cigar.