A pair of jays chuckled in a bare ash tree.
“What about neighbors? If there are any. They’d have noticed two gunshots.”
“Probably not,” she said. “Specially now it’s shooting season. Everyone round these parts has a shotgun. Popping off all the time at vermin this time of year.”
The lawn was sodden. A pile of leaves had gathered on one side, blown there by the wind. “Where do you reckon she’s gone then?”
“She could be going to London to see her girl. I’d told her the body was at University College.”
“You sure it’s her that killed him?”
“We don’t know anything for sure.”
Breen looked in his notebook and read back what he’d written: Curtains drawn. Cup of tea. Gin bottle in bin. Gordons. 2 bttls empty wine. Beaujolais. M. shot by 12-bore from less than two feet away. Dog second barrel? New car. Job? Money?
“Maybe I should just take you home?” said Tozer.
They walked once around the house before returning to the front door. In the hallway, another copper was on the phone. “One cheese and onion, one ham, two ham and cheese, one bacon. The one with bacon has tomato ketchup. Got any pasties? Never mind. Crisps? How much is that? You’re jokin’. I thought you had a special rate for us coppers…Yeah, that’s a bit more like it.”
Breen peered into the living room. The place was still being unmethodically turned upside down. The drawers from the desk were wide open and there were papers all over the floor. He guessed they were trying to find some document that had the full car registration number on it. If she was still in the car, they would need to pass a description out to other forces.
When the constable had finished ordering food, Breen finally got on the phone to Marilyn. “Tell Jones to put someone down at the morgue at University College. She may be headed there.”
There was the sound of a siren from outside. The constable who’d been ordering the sandwiches was driving away to collect them.
“Yee-haw,” said a lanky copper, smoking a cigarette in the living room. “Did you give him an order, lover?” he asked Tozer.
She shook her head. “Nobody asked me.”
“You can have a nibble of mine then.”
“I’d rather starve.”
Breen squatted down and started looking through the papers they had discarded on the floor.
“Charmer. What are you doing later?”
“Nothing that involves you.”
“Leave her be. She’s a cow,” said an older copper.
“I never forget a face, but I’ll make an exception for you.”
Tozer snorted.
Breen knelt, going through a pile of bills splayed on the floor. A local grocer had written: No credit until this bill is paid!!!! Another note from a garage said: Final demand. There was a Coutts bank statement mixed in with the pile; on 16 August the Sullivans had been overdrawn by?662 14s. 6d.
Breen moved towards the bookshelves. More Austen. An old thumbed copy of Kennedy’s Latin Primer. The Strange Death of Liberal England. He noted a couple of titles, then spotted a leather-bound photo album, tucked beside Brewer’s Phrase amp; Fable.
He sat on the sofa with the album on his knees and started turning the pages. In the first pages there were many photos of Julia. These weren’t snaps. They were taken in studios with expensive cameras, presumably when she was modeling, outtakes of her laughing, or having a cigarette while someone adjusted her hair. As a young woman she had been beautiful.
These gave way to more amateurish photographs. They were of a gang of friends, raucous and daring, who enjoyed striking poses for photos on picnics and at parties. Breen recognized the types. The men from the war who had never settled back into ordinary lives. Men who drank and rode on motorbikes. Women who were attracted to their rawness. One showed Julia at a fancy dress party in a daringly brief bikini, with a papier mache head on a plate and a knife in the other hand. Salome? In one, a woman stood at an easel, painting a portrait of Julia outside a house. In another, a man sat on a porch strumming a guitar. Another, possibly the same man, sat at a typewriter dressed only in underpants.
Breen realized that many of the photographs appeared to have been taken at the same building, a pretty wooden Swiss-style chalet with an old-fashioned wood stove and window boxes. It was surrounded by woods. At first Breen thought the house must be somewhere abroad, but the more he looked, the more he saw the little details: a pint of milk, a copy of The Times on a dining table.
Then Mallory began appearing as part of the gang. The first photo of him was of a younger Mallory in an old open-top MG, grinning at the camera. Another of him on a yacht, knife between his teeth. One at the chalet, dressed as a tribesman in a grass skirt, holding a spear. It was taken before his chest had turned to flab.
A couple of pages later there was a photograph of a wedding, Julia Sullivan, unashamedly pregnant, cradling her bump with one hand and holding a posy in the other. It was a military chapel. There followed snapshots of babies: Morwenna and her brother Nicholas, dates of birth written below in a feminine hand. Then of the children growing up. A birthday party, with hats and bunting, obviously taken at the wooden chalet. Nicholas in a tin pedal car. Morwenna on a pony. By now the gang of friends had disappeared. The photographs were all of Mallory, Julia and the children.
The photos of Morwenna showed her becoming more tomboyish as the years went past. Her hair grew shorter; she was rarely pictured in dresses or skirts. In one she solemnly held a large, dead fish by the tail.
In one of the more recent ones she stood in the doorway of a tree house, arms on hips like Peter Pan, far above the ground. It was taken from below, her looking down triumphantly at the photographer. She was wearing a woolen check shirt and work boots. Near the back he found a recent one: a portrait of her gazing sullenly at the camera, clearly taken in the house they lived in now. He teased those last two out from their corners and put them in his pocket.
“What’s that you’ve got?” said Block. “This is our crime scene, remember, not yours.”
“I need a photo of the dead girl. I’ll send it back to you when I’ve had a copy made.”
The sergeant grunted.
Breen picked up some of the paperwork that had been scattered over the floor by the policemen. It was letters, mostly. He returned to the couch and began to leaf through them. One was from an insurance agent informing them that the contents of Fonthill House were now valued at?2,000 and saying that the premium was overdue. Several others were about Fonthill and came from a solicitor in Exeter and were addressed to Mrs. Sullivan. Flicking through them, he learned that they had bought the house just two years earlier for?11,000. There were no details of the mortgage; it appeared they had bought the property outright. He noted down the solicitor’s address.
After another ten minutes looking through the jumbled correspondence, he said to Tozer, “I’m done here. Let’s take a look at the girl’s bedroom before they turn that upside down too.”
They found it easily enough. So far the children’s bedrooms had remained unscathed. They were both at the back of the house. One was clearly the boy’s. It had photographs of Lamborghinis and Lotuses on the walls. An Exeter City Football Club calendar. A microscope. A dartboard. A crane made of Meccano. A half-built radio-control plane. A picture of Sitting Bull.
Morwenna’s was next to it. There was a wardrobe full of children’s clothes, and a shelf full of books like The Little House on the Prairie and Black Beauty, but little else in the room that suggested a life lived into double figures. A purple gonk lay on the bed.
He opened the chest of drawers. The top drawers were completely empty. Old clothes filled the lower ones, but there was nothing that interested Breen. Her bedside table had a drawer, but that too was empty. There had once been pictures on the walls torn out from teenage magazines, of the Beatles no doubt, and photographs pinned above her bed. All that remained were small marks in the paint where the Sellotape had been removed and the pins pulled out.