“What?”
“Drive the car.”
“But you can’t.”
“Been driving tractors since I was eight, sir. Otherwise you’ll have to go back to the station, won’t you?”
He nodded. If he went back now he would be sent home sick. “Women officers aren’t authorized to drive cars.”
“Just for today. You’ll probably be all right tomorrow, won’t you?” She lit the cigarette for him, throwing the match out of the sidelight. “No one has to know.”
Cars coming the other way stared, wondering why a police car was stopped in the middle of the road, lights flashing.
“Tell you what,” she said. “I’ll change over just before we get there if you like.”
The car inched forward until they reached the cause of the jam. Big new Greater London Council blocks were starting to spring up all over London; they were building new flats here too. These were small fry compared to some of them, just four stories high, and already half built. A lorry unloading bricks blocked half the road and a workman was directing cars around it, but he was doing so in a half-hearted, haphazard way, one or two vehicles at a time.
Tozer honked the horn, but the sudden burst of noise didn’t help. The workman trying to direct the traffic panicked. He tried to make a Commer van that was coming towards them back up to let the four or five cars in front of the police car come through, but there was a big red Number 2 bus right behind the van. There was no space for it to move backwards.
“For pity’s sake.” The policewoman wound down her window and shouted, “Oi! Get a bloody move on! Want some chewing gum, sir?”
“No thanks.”
A gust of wind blew a pale white curtain of concrete dust across the road into the constable’s open window. She wound it up, swearing, brushing the pale flecks from her woolen suit.
Now a foreman had come out and was adding to the confusion by shouting at the workman directing traffic and pointing to the police car.
“Cathal Breen,” the constable said, pronouncing the “th” in the name. “When they said your name first, I thought it sounded like you were a woman,” she said. “Kathleen. No offense meant.”
He looked over at her. “It’s pronounced Cah-hal,” he said.
“Cathal. What kind of a name is that?” she asked.
“Irish,” he said. “My parents came over before the war. What about you?”
“My parents?” asked the woman, turning towards him, a puzzled look on her face.
“No, your name.”
“Tozer,” she said, looking ahead again. “Helen Tozer. Pleased to meet you.”
The traffic started to move again. He hoped she wasn’t going to talk this much all the time.
“The girls say you went mental a couple of days back, is that true?”
He looked at her. “Mental?”
“Sorry, sir. I mean…You did something, and Prosser ended up getting stabbed.”
“You know Prosser?”
“God, yeah. We all know Prossie. He lives in police flats near the women’s section house. Since his wife walked out on him he’s always hanging round.”
“Do you like him?”
“Not much.”
“I went mental? Is that what they say?”
“Yep.”
He watched a crocodile of schoolchildren in blazers and caps walking up the pavement.
“I’m just saying, you know,” said Tozer. The traffic cleared. She accelerated past a man on a motorbike.
“Do you have to drive so fast?” said Breen.
“They said Prossie went into a shop on his own where there was a robbery taking place.”
He still had to write the report for Bailey. Martin amp; Dawes. The modern men’s outfitters. By the time he arrived, Prosser’s car was already there and the back door to the shop was wide open; Prosser was inside. The thieves had been calmly loading rails of clothes into the back of a parked van.
“Chinks with knives, they said. Bloody hell. I hate knives,” said Tozer.
Two Chinese men; one kitchen knife, eight-inch blade. He was on the car radio outside calling for backup when Prosser had emerged a minute later, covered in his own blood. The thieves had made it out of the front of the shop, abandoning the van. Pure fury in Prosser’s eyes as he looked at Breen.
“Personally, I wouldn’t say it was your fault, exactly,” she said. “If he’d done it according to the book, he shouldn’t have gone in there until you got there.”
“Bully for you. Slow down.”
“Like I said, just saying.” She swung a quick right and pulled up by the murder scene. “This where she was found, then?”
He sat in the car, looking ahead.
“Sir?”
“Near the end of the sheds over there.”
She was silent for a while. “You would have thought somebody would have noticed their daughter had gone missing,” she said eventually. “I mean.”
“You’d be surprised,” said Breen, looking out of the car window. Rain had started to spatter against it.
“Be honest, sir, I think we’re wasting our time around here. Like Jones said this morning. Body was just dumped, wasn’t it? Whoever put it here could have come from miles off.”
“You think that?”
“I mean, I know it’s not my place, sir. Only I can’t help-”
“If the body was dumped, why here?”
Tozer frowned. “Just chance, I reckon. Someone was looking for a badly lit spot. That’s my point. There’s no reason to restrict our search to this area.”
“Tozer, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’ve been in CID half an hour…”
“Sorry, sir.” She stared at the steering wheel.
“Look. See these shed doors?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Until last Friday, all the locks were broken. The doors were all open. They’d been that way for a month or more. Anyone walking past would have been able to see that. But they were fixed two days before the murder. I’m guessing whoever dumped her was expecting to be able to leave her in one of these sheds for a few hours, maybe a day, until they could take her somewhere else. It would have to be someone local to have noticed that the doors were all open. And then they got here and found they’d all been locked…”
“…And panicked and dumped the body under a mattress?”
“Yes. Which means the murderer could be someone who walks down this road a lot. Probably every day. OK?”
“Right.” She nodded, and looked up and down the street with renewed interest. “Wow. So it could be someone living in any of these houses?”
“Possibly.”
At that moment the door of the shabby Victorian house next to the lock-ups opened, and a large black man emerged, pausing on the doorstep to look up and down the street. You couldn’t fail to notice him. Blacks were not common around this neighborhood; besides, he was dressed conspicuously, in a beige linen Nehru jacket, whose thin vicar-ish collar circled his large neck. It was the sort of suit that you saw African leaders wearing in the newspapers; businesslike, but deliberately un-British. The man, carrying a fat brown leather briefcase, checked his watch and then surveyed the street again.
Breen opened the car door and called after him, “Sir?” The black man appeared not to hear at first, or maybe pretended not to. Breen shouted louder. “Hey! Sir!”
The man turned, slowly, with great deliberateness towards Breen. He was a large man; his chest strained at the linen of his suit. “Yes?”
“Detective Sergeant Breen,” he called. “I’m investigating the death of a young woman whose body was found close to your front door.”
The man stood at the top of his front steps and looked back down at Breen. He smiled. “You need to speak to me now?”
“It is a murder we’re talking about,” said Breen.
A taxi was driving slowly towards them, “For Hire” lit in orange on its roof, checking house numbers.
“Of course, of course,” said the man, nodding. “But I am late for an appointment now. Would it be possible to arrange a time?” He spoke in the kind of accent that one only acquires in an English public school. “Shall we say, eleven a.m. tomorrow?”
“First things first. What’s your name?” said Tozer, pulling her pencil out from the elastic around her notebook. Breen looked at her, eyebrows raised.