She fell silent. The smoke fug thickened around them. The hubbub of the pub had reasserted itself now. Tozer’s joke about the barmaid had broken the ice. Breen’s beer had left a ring of wetness on the dark wood table. He put his finger in the spilled liquid and drew lines out from the circle so that it looked like an infant’s drawing of the sun, rays spreading outwards.
“They found her on the second day, in the woods just a couple of hundred yards from our house.”
He thought of the girl under the mattress. The drizzle trickling down her cold body.
“I was at school when they found her. I remember Mrs. Wilton, our headmistress, coming to get me out of maths class. Her face was as pale as a nun’s arse and I remember she had an ink mark right next to her mouth from chewing a pen or something, and I couldn’t stop staring at it all the time she talked. I knew even before she opened her mouth, though, that they must have found her, just by looking at her. Alex had been raped and knifed. There were bruises all over her. That’s why they didn’t want me to see her. He had piled sticks and leaves on top of her and just left her. They say the foxes had been at her.”
She said all this in a matter-of-fact voice, but took another large gulp from her rum and black at the end of it. Breen thought: her sister must have struggled a long time with injuries like that.
They sat in silence together for a while.
“Was that why you joined the police, then?”
“What? To find who killed my sister? Not at the beginning.”
A bearded tramp stuck his head round the door. The barmaid shouted a single word: “Out.” The head disappeared again.
“I fell in love.”
Breen watched her twisting a stud round in her earlobe. A small gold dot on pink skin.
“Not really love at all, actually. Stupid. This copper fancied me. He was a detective sergeant, as it happens. He was on the case.”
“Oh.”
“That summer, the house was full of policemen. They were always round the place. We thought they were going to find Alex’s killer. We loved them, me and Mum and Dad. We couldn’t do enough for them. Our house was like their bloody country club. We were the best bloody thing that happened to them.”
The pub was quiet. People talked in low voices to each other. There was only the noise of traffic passing in the High Street, and the occasional click of balls from the table next door.
“We used to serve them tea and toast with cream on it. I could swear they were all a stone heavier by the end of the winter. I loved it. All the talk of evidence and stuff. My dad says I’ve always been a bit of a tomboy. I liked the company.”
In the public bar, someone broke a glass. The sound of ironic cheering followed.
“I wouldn’t say he was good looking, even, but he was important. And he fancied me. And I’m eighteen. And if a man like that says he loves you, you’re supposed to like them back. Do you want more crisps?”
When Breen returned from the bar with two more packets, she said, “I found I liked the police, though. Being around with them. Everything that had happened to my family was wrong and they were there to put it right. So I started saying I wanted to join too.”
“What did your father say?”
“He was OK about it. He’s pretty much given up on the farm these days, since Alex was killed. She was found on our land, see? In the spinney down by the railway track. She’d been there those two days. I think that’s what spoiled it for him.” She looked down.
“And the boyfriend? Was he keen on you joining the police?”
“I thought he was, at the beginning. Then, first time I came back from training in Bristol with my uniform and all, he met me at the station and asked me to marry him. He expected me to chuck it all in and go to live with him in a police house in Torquay. And have lots of little police babies. I think he thought it was just a phase.”
“And?”
“And I was only, what, nineteen? Me and all the police wives waiting for the boys to come home drunk on a Friday night? He never took it seriously, me wanting to join the police. So I chucked him.”
“How did he take it?”
She put a handful of crisps in her mouth and chewed on them thoughtfully. “Not great. He’d bought a ring and everything.”
“What about the investigation?”
She pursed her lips. “One time they thought they’d found the boy who did it. It’s strange. You can focus all your hatred on someone real. You think that makes it easier, but actually it just makes things even more complicated. Turned out to be soft in the head. If you’d asked him if he’d killed John F. Kennedy he’d have said yes. They let him go after a week. After that, nothing.”
“Oi, copper,” said a voice. A middle-aged man with a mournful face was looking over at them from the bar. “You going to be in here long? Only, Val here”-he nodded at the barmaid-“says we got to be on our best behavior till you’re gone.”
There was a laugh. “Take as long as you like,” said the barmaid. “It makes a change.”
“Charming.”
Tozer fished out her purse for the money to buy another drink. Breen shook his head and took a ten-shilling note from his pocket. He returned with the third round and asked, “Did you have any thoughts about who killed your sister?”
“You deal with people like me all the time. You must know what goes through our heads.”
“Yes. I do.”
“Never being sure why someone was killed. It’s nothing that ever adds up. We start to look at everyone we see. Everyone we know. You look at the guy who drives the milk tanker up to the farm. The boys who ride motorbikes up on the farm tracks. The old guys with the fishing rods who go down to the estuary.”
The bell rang for last orders. “We should head back,” Breen said quietly.
“Even my dad, you know? That thought enters your head, eventually. You start to doubt everything.”
The old guys shuffled to the bar for their last pint.
“You got any food in your place?” said Tozer. “I’m starving.”
Breen thought: a tin of tomatoes, a loaf that was probably stale, a tin of herrings, a piece of elderly cheese and a couple of onions.
Joe’s All Night Bagel Shop was busy, full of people who’d dropped in after work, but Tozer was the only woman in the place. A couple of Chinese men sat at one table playing cards. A gaggle of Pakistanis were bickering loudly as they drank tea in the corner together.
“Oi, keep it down,” shouted Joe as he brought Tozer’s fry-up.
“It’s like the bloody United Nations in here,” said Tozer, looking around her wonderingly.
“Isn’t it?” said Joe. “Nobody agrees with anyone else here.” He turned and shouted again at the Pakistanis, then asked Breen, “What’s wrong with your arm? Someone have a go at you?”
Tozer tucked into her food. Sausages, beans, double egg, fried onions, mashed potatoes. Breen watched her eat, amazed.
“What if the person who did it was a lover?” asked Tozer, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. Breen wondered for a second whether she was talking about their case or that of her murdered sister, until she added, “That’s why no one came forward to say she’s gone. Because he’s not reporting it.”
He nodded. “That’s what gets me too. And why the parents didn’t come forward.”
“How long is it going to take to track them down?”
“Not long. We should know something on Monday.”
They sat in silence a while. He watched her work her way through the plate, and as she did so, the cafe quieted, other customers leaving for their homes or for their night shifts. When the last of the baked beans was hoovered away, she sat back in her chair.