She is still shaking. She imagines the boy’s body flying upwards, struck by the cab. A limp shape on the black roadway. There would have been such a fuss. And of course she would have got all the blame. She pulls a hanky from her pocket and wipes the wet from her eyes. There is a pause.
“I can’t if you’re watching.”
“I’m not watching,” she protests. She turns her back and waits for the boy to pee.
She knows what will happen, of course. The boy will tell on her for calling him stupid, for letting go of his hand in the middle of the road. “Listen. I promise I won’t tell your mummy that you were a naughty boy in the road. That can be our secret, can’t it?”
The boy doesn’t answer.
“I don’t need to tell her. So let’s keep it between ourselves.”
The boy is still silent.
“I’ve got a packet of Spangles in my room. I’ll give you some.”
“I don’t want to wee here,” says the boy solemnly.
“Oh for goodness’ sake.” She turns angrily. He is standing there, hands at his undone flies, looking straight at the pile of debris. He looks pale. It must be the shock from the near miss with the taxi, she assumes. “What’s wrong with here? I thought you wanted to go?” She assumes this is part of some upper-class tic he has learned. We only urinate in the proper place. “Get on with it. Baby needs to have her feed.”
“I don’t want to wee-wee on the lady,” he says.
For a second, Nanny does not understand what he is saying. What lady?
The boy starts to cry. It’s a whining noise that lacks his usual volume and indignation. Something is wrong. Then, as she bends down to the height of the small child, she catches sight of a dark glimmer, from under the bottom of the dirty orange mattress. In the darkness she makes out a nose, a lip, curled up, frozen in Elvis-like half-sneer. A woman’s face, eyes open and glistening unblinkingly in the squalor of the pile of rubbish.
Amazingly, Baby has drifted back to sleep through the shouting and the squealing of brakes of the near miss on Hall Road, but Nanny’s brief staccato scream is enough to wake her now. She begins to howl up a storm. Curtains twitch. Faces appear at the windows of the flats above.
Two
It had been a mistake to go to work yesterday.
Breen had not been himself. He had not been ready. He had been tired. He had stayed on too long after his shift because he had not wanted to go back home to be alone.
The details of what had happened last night were not clear to him. There had been a knife. There had been blood. There had been fear. Afterwards, he had scribbled notes in the hospital corridor but when he had tried to read them later at home they made little sense. He could not understand why he had behaved the way he did.
The nurse had said Sergeant Prosser would be OK. They were only flesh wounds though he had bled a lot. Breen had hung around the hospital to see him for himself but it was 1:30 in the morning and the nurse in her starched white hat had hissed, “He’s asleep, poor man. Go home to bed, get some sleep yourself and let the bugger be.”
He had not slept.
Now, stepping off the Number 30, he walked slowly into the wind. A route he’d taken a thousand times before. Each street corner was familiar, yet vivid. Things he had never noticed before included a paving stone cracked in three by two parallel lines, a front door with a postcard of the Virgin Mary on it, held with rusty drawing pins. The quality of grayness in the morning light seemed more menacing.
A few yards ahead, a GPO van pulled up. By the time Breen was level with it, the driver was already pulling thick wads of letters from the belly of the postbox, stuffing them into a hessian sack. As he passed, one single white letter slipped from his hand and fell on the pavement. Immediately, a gust of wind caught it and flipped it over, sent it skeetering back from where Breen had just come.
“You dropped one,” called Breen, pointing at the letter that was tumbling away down the street.
The postman didn’t even look up, just gave the tiniest shrug, then clipped up the top of the postbag. Breen set off running after the letter. The first time he was close to it another blast lifted it tumbling down the street again. The second time he caught up with it, stamping his shoe down on the envelope. “Got it,” he shouted, but when he looked round the postman and his van were already gone. He posted the letter back into the box and walked on.
Turning off into Wigmore Street, his skin began to feel clammy and his scalp had started to prickle. His pace slowed. He tried to suck in air more evenly, exhale more slowly. He paused and took out a packet of No. 6. Cigarette number one. A scabby-footed pigeon pecking at a crust of sandwich fluttered away, wing beats startlingly loud. He looked around for a bench or something to sit on to catch his breath, but there wasn’t one. And he was already late.
The familiar music of one-finger typing and unanswered telephones. The smell of smoke and floor polish.
The desk sergeant didn’t even look up from his paper as Breen walked past. He almost managed to make it to his desk before anyone said anything. It was big John Carmichael who spotted him first, new leather jacket, white shirt pinching slightly at his fleshy neck, fag stuck to his lower lip.
“What happened, Paddy?” he asked quietly.
“Anyone know how Prosser is?” Breen asked.
Jones, the youngest one in the office, looked up and said, “Look what the cat sicked up.”
He thought he heard someone mutter the word “cunt.”
Jones, red-faced with anger at him, said, “He says you ran and left him on his own to face the Chink with the blade.”
All eyes on him, Breen moved past them and sat at his desk. The morning light filtered through the canvas blinds. Olivetti typewriters filled with triplicate forms, white on top, yellow in the middle and pink underneath. The picture of the Queen. Blackstone’s Police Manual and Butterworth’s Police Procedure. Green enamel lampshades hanging from the ceiling, comfortably coated in dust.
“You just bottled it and ran out on a fellow copper.”
“Shut up, Jones. More to it than that, isn’t there, Paddy?”
Jones said, “I’m just saying what happened, that’s all.”
A black-and-white photograph of a charred arm sat at the top of Breen’s in-tray. His stomach lurched. He turned it upside down.
“Prosser should get a medal. As for you…”
“Now, now,” said Carmichael. “Come on. How are you then, Paddy?”
“I’m OK.”
“Why you even sticking up for him, Carmichael?”
“We were worried about you, mate.”
“Reckon not.”
“Stop it, Jones.”
“Prosser said you ran so fast he thought you were training for the Mexico Olympics.”
“Have you seen him?”
“Went to the hospital this morning. He’s OK. No thanks to you. What in hell were you thinking?”
“Come on, lads. Give the man a break. We all have our bad days.”
Jones snorted. “Be fucked.”
“Language!” shouted Marilyn from the other side of the room. “That’s enough.”
“Oooooh,” hooted Jones. “I’ll give you some language, love.”
The door to Bailey’s office opened. All heads looked down. The one-fingered typing restarted.
“Ah,” said Bailey. “I was wondering what the noise was. Breen. Inside, please.” He nodded towards his office.
He closed the door behind Breen, then sat slowly in a chair behind his desk. He was a thin man with a lined face and deep-set eyes. A white speck of toothpaste stuck in the corner of his mouth. Stubble left in the cracks of skin by his safety razor.
“Have you written your report into what happened last night?”
“Not yet, sir.”
Bailey chewed his bottom lip, then said, “Make sure you write it all down while it’s fresh in your mind.”
In Breen’s two years in D Division, he had seen younger men leapfrog Bailey, becoming Superintendents, joining C1 or one of the other close-knit units like the Flying Squad. Men promoted over his head, men going places, who walked with the swing of people who know they are on the rise. Bailey played by the rules. He was from the army generation. Honest, stiff-backed, hard-working. If he smoked, it was Senior Service, never an American brand.