She touched the top of her head and brought her fingers down; there was a small smear of redness.
“Here,” he said, pulling her head towards him. There was a little spot of blood in her hair, but no sign of any wound.
“What the…?”
Breen was out of the door, running back up the narrow path past the pond. By the time she caught up with him, back in the woods, he was staring upwards. Twenty feet above their heads was a small tree house, built around the trunk of a tall beech tree.
“My God.”
There were planks across the bottom of the structure. Something dark had made an oval stain on the wood. Slowly, drop by drop, it fell to the ground.
Twenty-one
Breen stamped his feet in the cold to try and get his muscles back under his control.
“They’ll be here soon,” said Tozer, looking up at the tree.
“They’ll be here soon,” Breen shouted, hoping whoever was in the tree house could still hear.
Walking towards the edge of the woods to try and get a better view of the tree house, they found the Jaguar covered in a green tarpaulin. She had driven it up a muddy track and left it at the side of the field. Breen lifted the tarpaulin; the front driver side light was smashed.
“You think she shot herself when she heard us?”
He nodded. “I think so. She pulled the ladder up after herself so no one could see she was up there.”
“She’s almost certainly dead, sir.”
Breen had nothing to say.
Tozer stamped her feet to keep warm. “So, what do you reckon? Major Sullivan goes up to London, has some sort of argument with his daughter. Ends up killing her. When we come down here and tell Julia Sullivan her daughter’s dead, she figures out he’s killed her, takes a shotgun and shoots him and runs away here, because it’s a place she used to live with her daughter. Then she shoots herself?”
Breen’s neck was aching from looking up at the tree house. “It’s possible.”
“You think it was hearing me, seeing us, that made her do it?”
“I don’t know.”
“God. Everything we do is wrong, isn’t it?”
Breen didn’t answer. The view from here was no better. He walked back into the woods. The blood at the base of the tree house looked black in the dimming light.
Sergeant Block stood below, collar turned up. “Unbe-fucking-lievable.”
It was almost dark by the time a fire engine had arrived with ladders. The blood had stopped falling a long time ago. On the uneven ground the firemen were trying to wedge chocks under the base of a long ladder to make it steady enough to reach the tree house.
Tozer had fetched a tartan rug from the boot of the Morris Oxford. It was covered in dog hair, but she’d placed it round Breen’s shoulders to try and stop him shivering.
“Why didn’t you tell me you thought she was here?” said Block.
Breen pulled the blanket tighter round him. “You know, I wish I had. Then it would have been you here, instead of us.”
“You didn’t tell us you were coming down to interview the Sullivans. You turn up there and one of them ends up dead. You didn’t tell us you knew where Julia Sullivan was hiding and now she’s probably dead as well.”
“I didn’t know for sure she was here.”
“You obviously had an idea.”
“She’d still have shot herself the moment she saw you coming.”
Block spat onto the leaves on the ground. “Maybe I wouldn’t have just blundered in without knowing if she was here or not in the first place. If it is her.”
“Move please, gents,” said a fireman, carrying a long coil of rope to the ladder.
They stood back a little way. The fireman slung the rope over his shoulder and began to climb the ladder. It was dark now and another fireman trained a strong torch up to help him see. In the beam of light, the blood on the timbers shone red. At the top of the ladder, the fireman spent what seemed like minutes tying the top rungs to the tree. Breen trod impatiently below. Eventually the man switched on his own torch and put his head up into the trapdoor.
He shone the torch down, dazzling them. “It’s a woman,” he called.
“I should take a look,” said Breen.
“You can read my report. I’ll send you a copy. Now get out of here.”
Breen shook his head. “I should see the scene.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Block. “Get out of here, the pair of you.”
They stood a while longer, while the firemen tied pulleys to the tree so they could begin to lower the body down, before Breen turned his back and walked to the car, Tozer following behind.
“Tosspot,” said Tozer, turning on the engine. “Block.”
She switched on the interior light and leaned across to Breen’s seat, her body across his, and pulled down the sun visor. She tried to peer at the top of her head in the vanity mirror. “Is there blood there? I can’t see.”
She flattened her dark hair down onto her head and stretched her eyes upwards, but could see nothing.
“I want a bath.” She released the clutch and the car lurched forward. “I feel like Lady Macbeth.”
The car shot down the small lanes.
Breen sat, hand gripping the side of the seat. “He was right, though. We made a mess of it and because of that she’s dead.”
Twenty-two
Three in the morning, Tuesday night, the only customer in Joe’s All Night Bagel Shop was listening to the music Joe was playing on his gramophone. Tonight he was playing jazz.
“You should find another job,” said Joe. “Something with a night shift.”
“You’re just trying to get someone to replace your daughter now she’s had a baby.” Breen read a copy of yesterday’s Times that someone had left on the counter. It was full of the American election.
Joe took a pull from his tiny rolled-up cigarette and coughed. “You couldn’t even wash up. I wouldn’t let you in a million miles of my kitchen anyway. You’d turn the milk sour.”
“My dad was always telling me to get another job.”
“It’s best left to the stupid ones. The ones who have no imagination.”
“Is that a compliment?”
Joe snarled. “Go home to bed. You’ve got to be up in four hours to go to work.”
The bell over the door rang and a policeman came in. Breen recognized him from several nights before, and he said exactly the same thing: “Turn that racket down.”
“Talk of the devil,” said Joe, taking the needle off the record.
He took an aluminum teapot off the shelf and spooned tea leaves into it.
“Can I have the key to your bathroom, mate?” asked the constable. Joe took it off a nail by the till and handed it to the policeman.
Breen turned over a page with the headline “Vietnam may lose Hubert Humphrey the Presidency”; the next announced, “Nigeria’s General Gowon says ‘Final Offensive’ Will Be Decisive.” He read the article; it was about the Biafran war. It said the general had been trained at Sandhurst. His Federal troops had encircled Biafra, cutting the secessionist state off from the sea. The Biafran advance on the Nigerian capital had been turned back. Instead, the rebel troops had been pushed back inside their own borders. The journalist seemed to think it would all be over in a matter of weeks. “You know anything about this Biafran war, Joe?” he said.
“Since when have you been interested in foreign affairs?”
“I met a Biafran man. A doctor.”
“Very educated, the Biafrans. They call themselves the Jews of Africa. Though I’m not sure having a persecution complex is enough to make you the Chosen People.”
“The man I met thinks they will win the war. This article here says they don’t have a chance and that it will all be over in weeks.”
“Which do you believe?”
“The newspaper, I suppose.”
“There will always be people who say a war will be over by Christmas. We could have stopped it all if we’d wanted to. What happened to your sidekick?” Joe asked Breen.