Breen was still there looking at the photographs when Tozer returned, plate piled with beef, Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes, mashed potatoes, cabbage, parsnips, turnips, coleslaw and fried onions.
“You should eat something, sir. Keep your strength up.”
“Where’s this taken?” He was looking at the photo of Morwenna standing at the doorway to her tree house.
“You think it’s important?”
“I don’t know what’s important right now. I can’t get anything into focus.”
Tozer started eating, sawing through a thick lump of beef.
“Actually it’s more like it’s all in focus, and I can’t sort out what’s important or not.”
“Sounds like a trip.”
“What?”
“LSD. What the hippies take. We had a lecture about it the other day. You take a pill, you can’t tell what’s real and what’s not.”
“Sounds terrifying.”
“Some people like it, though. Mind-expanding.”
Breen lifted up his bare plate. “If we’d not gone to tell them about their daughter, that man would still be alive.”
Tozer slurped in a big chunk of beef and a bit of gravy trickled down her chin. “Oop,” she laughed, picking up her napkin and wiping her face. “Yes, but that doesn’t make it our fault.”
Breen stood up with his plate.
The man at the carvery wore a big white chef’s hat and held a newly lit cigarette. He put it in an ashtray on the next table while he drew off a thick slice of beef. The fat on it looked pale and waxy. Breen watched the knife carving slowly through the flesh.
“I don’t really want meat.”
“Sorry?”
“No meat.”
“No meat?”
“That’s right. I’ll have vegetables.”
“This is a carvery, sir.” There was a long pause. The man glared, put down the carving knife and fork and lifted up a spoon instead. “Potatoes, sir?”
“Thanks.”
“Carrots?”
“OK.”
“Cabbage?”
“I’m fine, thank you.”
“Nothing else? Nice bit of gravy?”
“No thanks.”
He sat down to find that their waitress had pulled up a chair and joined them at the table. “Ciggy break,” she said. “What’s London like?”
They walked back to the farm in the dark. Tozer knew a way that cut across the back of the town, across small wooden footbridges, through damp marsh land and along the side of the river.
Breen jumped as a startled bird clattered out of the reeds close to their feet, sending him into a puddle; the water went in over the top of his brogues. “Damn,” he said.
Tozer laughed.
He joined in. He was a little drunk. After the carafe of wine they had had brandies. The air was still and warm. The day had been a tough one, but he was oddly happy. It was funny, because when he first met Tozer, he had disliked her. She was too opinionated for a woman. Too awkward. These things seemed to matter less now. Was it since he had learned about her sister?
“See up there?”
In the darkness she pointed up the estuary. The tide was full. In the far distance, miles down towards the sea, lights reflected off the water.
“The Beatles stayed there last year. In a hotel. When they were filming Magical Mystery Tour. Imagine that. The Beatles coming to this godforsaken backwater. Alexandra would have been in heaven.”
“Did you see them?”
He had an impulse to take her hand, but she had already started walking again, squelching through the mud. He was glad he hadn’t done it. It was the drink, like last time.
“Me? I was in London, worse luck. Always in the wrong place at the wrong time, me.”
The lights of the farmhouse were ahead of them now, a single bulb lighting the farmyard.
Mr. and Mrs. Tozer were in bed by the time they got in, the house dark and silent. The kitchen was still warm, though. Tozer started opening cupboards. “I know they got some bottles stashed away somewhere,” she said. “Here. I found some Martini. Do you like that?”
“Not for me.”
“There’s a drop of whisky. Want that?”
“A little, then.”
Breen sat at the kitchen table and pulled out the three photos of the dead girl again: the morgue photograph, and the two he had taken from the house.
She sat next to him, so close he could smell the alcohol and cigarettes on her breath. “Promise me one thing. You won’t let my mum and dad see those, will you?”
He took off his left shoe and removed his sock. It was sodden.
“Hang it on the range,” said Tozer.
He sipped the whisky and pulled out his packet of cigarettes. In the last couple of days, he had taken to writing marks on the packet to remember how many he had smoked. Today there were four downward strokes and a fifth, crossing them out. He had already smoked five. He went to put them back in his jacket, then thought better of it.
He smoked the sixth cigarette flicking through the pages of his notebook, glancing up occasionally to look at Tozer, sitting by the range, bare feet up on the surface warming her long legs. It tasted particularly good.
When he came to the address of the solicitor he had found, he asked, “Do you have a phone book?”
Twenty
Breen sat up slowly in bed and looked out of a small, square window onto the estuary below. He slept later here than he ever did at home. His head felt thick and slow.
A cold, bright day. Seagulls wheeling in a blue sky. A group of swans dawdling on the tide, a small red boat chugging against the current in the estuary below. The prettiness of the scene was unnerving. The domesticity reminded him of what he had never had. His good mood was gone. He wished he was back in London, amongst the gray of it. Sighing, he got up to dress. Mrs. Tozer had washed a shirt, a pair of underpants and a pair of socks for him, leaving them neatly folded and piled on a chair.
He was shaving when he heard a car coming down the lane towards the house. He pulled the curtains to one side and saw it was a police car, slowly weaving through the puddles.
When he came down to the kitchen there was a man sitting at the table drinking a cup of tea. Mrs. Tozer was cooking bacon.
“Sergeant Breen?” said the man. He wore a suit that looked too small for him, and had a thin moustache on his upper lip.
“Yes?”
“Sergeant Sharman,” he said. “Plymouth CID.”
“Sharman?”
“A little birdie told me you were involved in a bit of drama. I thought I’d find out what was up.”
Mr. Tozer was there too. His corduroy trousers were tucked into the thick woolen socks in which he stood. He must have just come in from the farm and left his boots outside.
“You spoke to Sergeant Block?” asked Breen.
Sharman shrugged. “You’re in the country now. Everybody knows everyone else’s business round here.”
Mrs. Tozer put the bacon into a sandwich and put it down before Sergeant Sharman. She looked pale. “Fred says you’re here to investigate a dead girl,” she said to Breen. “Only, Helen had said you were down here looking into people who were making dirty films.”
Sharman laughed loudly. “She said what?”
“She said you were looking into a pornography ring.”
“Round here?” said Sharman. “Making smut films?”
“That’s what Hel said.”
“First I heard of it, round here.”
“She told you that because she didn’t want you to know about the case we were working on,” said Breen. “In case it upset you. I’m sorry.”
“Only you’re really down here about a girl that was killed?”
“Yes.”
“A young girl?”
“Seventeen.”
Mrs. Tozer nodded. Her husband was sitting stonily, looking straight ahead, eyes focused on the kitchen wall.
“How was she killed?” There was a flicker in Mrs. Tozer’s eye.
“She was strangled.”
Mrs. Tozer nodded.
“Naked too,” said Sharman. “I looked it up. That’s right, Breen? Nasty business. Got any ketchup?”