There was a long silence before he said, “Sorry. Yes.”
“You are such a bloody fool.”
The major sat, wounded and inept.
“And we did try to find her, didn’t we, Mal?”
“Yes. We did.”
“Mal had some business in London. I suggested he look for her.”
“When was this?”
“Three weeks ago, maybe.”
“Why didn’t you go?”
“Mal didn’t want me to.”
“It was work. I had an important meeting. She would have been deathly bored.”
Breen said, “Can I ask where were you on October the thirteenth?”
“Me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Was that the day she…?”
“Yes.”
“Sunday the thirteenth of October,” said Breen again.
“For God’s sake. I was here. Wasn’t I? I’m hopeless on days of the week.”
“He was here,” said his wife. “It was the bloody parish council meeting, remember?”
“That’s right. Parish council meeting. State of the village-hall roof. Vandalism of the bus stop. That kind of thing.”
“Mallory has been playing the country squire since we moved into this ridiculous pile.”
“And, Major Sullivan, you went to London…?”
“That would have been the week before.”
“You went up Thursday and came back Friday.”
“When you went to London, where did you look?”
“I went back to that place on Westbourne Grove. And then the place on the Edgware Road.”
“Did you talk to people there?”
“Of course. But no one knew where she was. At least, they wouldn’t tell someone like me. I’m the establishment. They were all on pot or something awful.”
“Can we have that address?”
“Can we do this in the morning? It’s late. We’ve had a terrible shock.”
“She was an idealist,” said her mother, rubbing her mouth. “Concerned about Vietnam and all sorts of things like that.”
“All that left-wing mush.”
“You see, I was wondering whether she might have been arrested on a demonstration or something. I thought it might be a way of finding her. So Mal went to the police, too, while he was up there and reported her as a missing person.”
“Really?” Tozer looked at Breen.
“That’s right.”
A motorbike roared up the lane outside the house. Breen noticed that the gaps in the old sash windows had been stuffed with newspaper to keep them from rattling in the wind.
“You see,” said Breen, “we had no record of her as a missing person.”
“You didn’t?”
There was a pause. “I don’t suppose police records are always up to date,” said the major.
“If you’d reported her in early October…You definitely reported her missing?”
“Well, not exactly,” said the major.
They all looked at the major. “Mal?”
“You see, I was going to go and report her missing, but then it seemed a bit silly. Because she’d been out of touch before.”
“Oh, Mal.”
“And she always did get back in touch. Eventually. I didn’t want to bother the police. I thought she was bound to turn up, sooner or later.”
“You lied to me. You said you’d gone.”
“I didn’t want you to worry. I thought I’d be able to find her myself. Or she’d just turn up out of the blue.”
“You’re sodding unbelievable.”
“She was always running off, wasn’t she, Julia?”
“I hate you. You bloody liar.”
He looked at Breen sorrowfully, giving a small shrug as if to say, “See what I have to put up with?”
“And you had no other leads to go on,” said Breen, “apart from this address you dropped her off at?”
Julia, still glaring at her husband, shook her head.
“No names of her girlfriends?”
“Please,” said the major, “we’re exhausted.” He stood and poured himself a whisky.
“Don’t get sloshed, Mal.”
“The pot is calling the kettle black, dear.”
Julia Sullivan snorted. “I knew I shouldn’t have let you go alone.”
“It wouldn’t have made any bloody difference anyway, would it?”
Tozer said, “May I use your telephone, Major?”
“It’s in the hallway.”
“Any brothers or sisters?”
Julia Sullivan gulped air.
“That’s enough. I’m going to have to ask you to leave now,” said the major.
Julia Sullivan stood, followed her husband to the whisky bottle and poured herself another two fingers.
Breen stood. “We’ll need to make arrangements for you to identify her.”
“Oh God.”
“Out. Now.”
She dropped back down onto the sofa and sat, legs tucked under her, glass in her lap, staring down at it, saying nothing. A half-completed crossword on the table. A copy of the Radio Times. A big damp house with a couple and their dog.
The major strode to the living-room door and opened it. “Please. Just go away. Leave us alone.”
“If there are any diaries, letters, anything you have that would help us understand who she was. We will return them to you.”
They left Julia slumped on the sofa in the living room and joined Tozer, who was standing in the hallway. The major closed the door carefully behind him and said quietly, “Morwenna had one brother, you see. He died in a motorcycle accident this May.”
“I am very sorry. This must be very hard for you both,” said Tozer.
“Yes.”
“Shall we say eleven o’clock?”
The major stood in the porch, backlit from the hallway, and shook hands awkwardly.
“We need to find a bed and breakfast.”
“We’re going to the farm. I just spoke to my mother on the phone.”
“I could still find a hotel.”
“It’ll be fine. Much nicer than a B and B.”
Breen would have preferred the anonymity of a motel room, but he was too exhausted to argue. They drove down the dark lanes, lights on full beam. There were no other cars on the road. Looking out of the side window, Breen could see nothing, only a heavy blackness. At the brow of a hill Tozer braked sharply as a big pale bird almost flew into the windscreen, blinded by the light.
“Barn owl,” she said, and picked up speed again only to brake once more. A sheep stood in the middle of the road, eyes glowing like moonstones in the headlights.
Eventually they joined a bigger road, with the occasional car coming the other way, full beam lights dimming as they rounded corners before the starless dark returned.
“She was drunk.”
“Yes.”
“Just saying.”
“Why did he lie? About going to the police about her?” he asked.
“Families are complicated. Fathers and daughters.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Take it from me.”
“He was hiding something.”
“Maybe.”
“And they didn’t ask why,” said Breen.
“What do you mean?”
“Wouldn’t you expect a man to ask the why questions? Why do you think they killed her? Why?”
“To be told a member of your family is dead is a terrible thing,” she said. “He was in a diz.”
“A lesbian daughter, at that.”
“Tomorrow.”
“Yes.” He was too tired to think any further. “Tomorrow.”
The darkness around them was total. He had never seen such a blackness. He lay his head against the side of the car and closed his eyes as Tozer drove down winding roads.
He was woken by her, gently knocking his shoulder. They were at a farmhouse where a woman stood in the light of a low door.
Tozer’s voice, fuzzing into his head: “Don’t tell her about our case. It’ll only upset her. I’ll invent something.”
It seemed to take an age for Breen to remember where he was. He stared blearily at Tozer. She was outside now, throwing her arms round the woman at the door, kissing her on the neck. By the time he had made it out of the door, Tozer was already pulling their two suitcases from the boot.
It was a cottage with small windows, roughly rendered. “Don’t stand in the cold. Come on in,” said the woman, a rounder, shorter, older version of her daughter, with a thicker Devon accent.