“No phone calls or anything?”
“Not a dickie.”
Breen wrote down his name and a phone number. “Let us know if you see any more of your suits going on sale, will you?”
The man ignored the card, leaving it on the counter.
“Got a nice V-neck jumper that will go a treat with that shirt if you like,” he said.
He took stairs two at a time now. Panting, hand on the brass railing, he met Constable Tozer on the way down. She was carrying a mug full of tea in one hand and a rock cake in the other.
“Hello,” they both said.
“How’ve you been?” he asked, getting his breath.
“OK. Busy. You know.”
“You’ve cut your hair.” It was shorter than before. The sides now barely covered her ears, giving her an even more tomboyish look than usual.
She moved her head to the left, then the right to give him a proper view. “The girls say I look like a feller.”
“I like it,” he said.
“Thanks.”
“You still at Harrow Road?”
“All done there now. How’s the shoulder? Getting better?”
“Pretty much.” Stilted conversation. The familiarity they had had when they were away together had gone.
“You going to court tomorrow to watch Pilcher?”
“What’s that?”
“The John Lennon thing. He’s up for sentencing for that drug raid.”
“Are you going?”
“Might do. Bunk off. Never know, might get an autograph.”
“Mind you don’t get into trouble.”
“I don’t care.” She grinned. “All the hippies are saying Pilcher probably planted the drugs anyway, and it’s not too unlikely, let’s face it. It’s sick.”
A throng of uniformed men came barging down the stairs. “Oi, oi, Helen,” one of them said. “Coming round my place later?”
“Bugger off.”
“Mind you don’t spill your tea, love.”
When they’d gone, she said, “Any luck with your man in the fire?”
“He was a dosser, Wellington reckons. So does Prosser.”
“What’s Prosser got to do with it?”
“Bailey put us both on to it. Trying to knock our heads together, I think.”
“Prosser’s still mad at you, you know. He came into the section house last week calling you a…name.”
“What name?”
“A prick, if you want to know.”
Breen smiled. “I hardly see him. He’s never around. Always off on some business. I don’t ask.”
“He’s been visiting his son, I expect. He’s not been well.”
“His son? I didn’t know…”
“A spastic. He don’t talk about it, but everyone knows. He pays for him and everything. His wife looks after him. His ex, I mean. He’s still got the police flat, though. I don’t think he’s told them. That way he keeps it to himself.”
“I never knew.”
She nodded. He put his foot on the next step up.
“What about the girl?” she asked.
“Nothing new. Sometimes these things just grind to a halt.”
“I know.” The hardness in her face again.
“Of course.”
They both stood there, waiting for the other to move on. Police-men and — women came and went up the stairs. “It’s an awful shame. Do you think her father did it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t suppose we ever will.”
“That’s the way it goes, isn’t it? Well,” she said. “My tea will be getting cold, sir.”
“Yes,” he said, and went on his way, up the stairs. When he got to the office he kicked himself for not having the balls to invite her to come to Ezeoke’s party. In case she said no.
Not knowing where to go next with Morwenna Sullivan, he concentrated on the unidentified man, walking around the building sites in the neighborhood where the body was found. “You want to come?” he asked Prosser.
“No. You’re OK.”
“Everything OK with you?”
“Why shouldn’t it be?”
“I heard your son was ill.”
“Mind your own fucking business,” said Prosser.
Not for the first time, London was being built by the Irish. The men Breen met on building sites were young and muscular, still brown from a summer under the English sun.
“No. No one gone missing from here,” they’d say automatically, not meeting his eye.
They were nervous of the police, unwilling to talk. Only when he told them he was trying to find the identity of a dead man did they start to open up.
“Anyone gone missing?” said a young man from County Offaly. “Sure. We’ve all gone missing-haven’t we, boys?”
As a teenager he’d asked his dad for summer jobs working on the building sites. His father had always refused. He hadn’t wanted him mixing with these men.
He was standing at the bottom of a block they were creating as part of the new Abbey Estate. A tower of concrete rose upwards; a spine onto which the flats were being attached, like ribs to a backbone.
“Is there anyone from this site who’s been missing since October the second?” he repeated, above the churn of a cement mixer.
Heads were scratched. The workforce was often a fluid one. Men would leave if they received a better offer from another foreman. Or they would simply disappear.
“Joey, maybe.”
“No, Joey was in yesterday. He had busted his toe,” said a man with a voice that sounded much like Breen’s father’s. “That’s why he’d gone a bit quiet.”
“Are you a Kerry man?”
“God sakes no. I’m from Cork.”
“Close.”
“That’s libelous talk.” The man’s smile showed broken teeth. High above them a crane dangled a great wing of precast concrete.
“Detective Sergeant Breen. Is that an Irish name?”
“My father was from Tralee.”
“And you’re a policeman now? Oh God. There’s hope for us all.”
He wanted to say his father had been a builder too. Instead he asked, “How big is this one going to be?”
“Eighteen floors,” said the man. “Four flats on each floor. Seventy-two homes on as much land as it takes to keep a horse.”
“If it was you, Spanky, you’d take one of those flats and keep a horse in it too, I expect.”
“Now how would I get it in the lift?”
“What about Paudie?” said another voice.
“You could lure it in with a lump of sugar.”
“Paudie? No. He’s working over Hammersmith this week, I believe.”
“Working? When did they start to call what Paudie did work?”
“It would have to be a fuckin’ big lump of sugar to get a horse into that tiny lift.”
“Is it a missing man you’re after looking for?”
“We have found some remains of a man. We can’t identify him.”
“God there. That’s no good.”
“Poor bastard.”
Breen nodded.
“And you think it may be an Irishman?”
“Maybe.”
“Why not? The odds are great, I would say.”
The Cork man took off his red woolen hat and rubbed his thinning hair. “The unfortunate truth of it is, nobody would really mind a fuck if any of us went missing, ’cept for the publicans,” and he spoke with such a sudden sadness in his voice that all the big men around him were quiet for a second.
Until one of them said, “Speak for yourself, you cunt.” And they all started laughing again, louder than before, as if they were all really having a great time.
For a while he stayed there and watched the crane swing the huge hunks of concrete skywards. He wished he had asked his father which buildings he had made. It would have been good, seeing them still standing and knowing that his father had built them.
That night he pulled out his father’s address book. It had lain untouched for the last couple of years in the drawer beside his bed. It was a small one, the black leather worn and cracked, bought from Boots years ago. His father had been a quiet man; he had not had many friends. Though he had worked with them on the building sites, he had not liked the younger Irishmen who had arrived in waves in the ’50s. He had thought them too loud and wild.
The entries were made in his neat, elaborate handwriting, learned in some small schoolhouse in Kerry. Some names, those with whom he’d lost touch or who had died, had been crossed out. A couple of those Breen recognized he copied into his address book; his handwriting was so different from his father’s.