“Nothing serious, I hope?”
“Nothing serious.”
“And will you be coming to our shindig on Saturday, darling?”
“Well…”
“Oh, don’t be shy.”
“I’m not sure if you really need any more single men, by the sound of it.”
“Well then, bring a friend.” She looked from Tozer back to Breen.
It was only when they got out onto the Marylebone Road, where a horse-drawn dray was patiently trotting slowly along, forcing the traffic to crawl slowly behind it, that Tozer asked, “What was that lah-di-dah in the lift saying?” They walked across the road, making their way between the honking cars.
“Would you like to come with me?” Breen asked.
“Is there a party? How super. I’m game for any shindig, darling.”
“Shut up.”
“Don’t be shy, darling.”
He stopped, mid-traffic. “Do you want to go?”
“Are you asking?” she said.
“It would be useful,” he said, thinking that might be an encouragement.
“Useful?” She frowned. “You want me to go to a party? To be useful?”
“It’s Ezeoke’s party. I’m only going because of the case.”
“Useful?”
Why did he find it so difficult to come out with it and ask her to the party? “I haven’t been to a lot of parties in the last few years.”
“You surprise me,” she said, walking on ahead.
Had he always been so bad at this? he wondered as he walked back across the road to the police station.
Twenty-four
In Hammersmith, Breen tiptoed through the mud to the wooden shed at the back of a building site. He wished he had worn different shoes.
“Come in,” said a voice when he knocked on the door.
The foreman sat behind a desk in a wooden hut crammed with filing cabinets and map chests. The makeshift room was heated to a fug by a pale green paraffin stove.
“God there,” said the man. “You look the very spit of him.”
Breen wiped his shoes on a newspaper on the floor. His father had always insisted he had his mother’s looks.
John Nolan wore a brown jacket over blue overalls; he stood and came towards Breen to take his hand and shake it. “I’m very pleased to meet the son of Tomas Breen.” A rough hand, like his father’s used to be before the old skin softened. “Take a seat. Just move them papers.”
Breen sat on the wooden chair opposite the desk.
“It is terrible news. I would have liked to come to the funeral if you’d have told me.”
“I’m sorry. I should have called you before.”
“I understand, of course. You had things you had to do.”
That felt like a reproach.
“But he was a great man. Very, very respected.” John Nolan opened the drawer of a filing cabinet and pulled out a bottle of Bell’s and two glasses.
“Was he?”
“Naturally. Doing what he did for us, you understand.”
“What do you mean?”
Nolan offered a cigarette. “Your father was the man who gave me my first job in the building trade here in England. He gave a great many of us our first job. I hadn’t seen him for years. I wish I had kept in touch with him, but when he retired it was as if he disappeared.”
The man was awkward now; he fiddled with a yellow pencil, flicking it from hand to hand. “And educated, so. He could quote from every one of the works of Shakespeare, you know.”
“Yes, I know.”
He poured two glasses and gave one to Breen, then raised it solemnly. “Tomas Breen. A great man,” he said, chinking his glass against Breen’s, then downing it in one.
Breen did the same; the alcohol scalded his throat.
“I am a Kerry man myself. To men like me who came over here, it was a pleasure to find an Irishman who knew the way things worked. He took us under his wing. He knew how to look after us. We all knew Tomas Breen. There’s not a ganger in London who wouldn’t have spoken respectfully of him.”
At home, Breen’s father had been quietly dismissive of the Irishmen he worked with. They arrived by the boatload, desperate and uneducated, carrying dreams of sending fortunes home. Many of the gangers treated them badly, keeping them in beer but paying them a pittance. The English hated them and put up cards in their windows: No Blacks, No Irish. “Ignorant bogtrotters” his father called them, but Breen never knew whether this was part of wanting to put his son off a manual trade. His father had imagined Cathal as a doctor, a scientist or an academic of some sort.
“You must be feeling the loss still.”
“I am,” said Breen.
“He would have been proud of you,” said the foreman. “You being a policeman.”
“You would think so,” said Breen.
Nolan looked around fifty, his skin darkened from the work outdoors. “He was, I am sure of it. He raised you on his own, did he not? A remarkable thing.”
“He did. My mother died when I was young.”
“Of course. We knew that, but he didn’t talk about it a great deal. That was a terrible loss to him. And he too proud to accept help from the Church.”
Somewhere outside a piledriver started its regular thumping.
“My father didn’t think much of the Church.”
“No, he did not,” the foreman said. “But I’m sure St. Peter will forgive him that on account of his goodness. He had reason, naturally.”
“What do you mean?”
Nolan looked wary. “On account of what happened to him and your mother.”
Breen frowned. “What was that?”
The foreman paused. He picked up the glasses and put them back in the cabinet, unwashed. “It’s of no importance. You said on the phone you were trying to find the identity of a missing man.”
Breen took out a notebook. Nolan crossed to a gray filing cabinet, pulled out a sheet of paper and handed it to Breen.
“It’s a worksheet. If you’re a foreman you fill one in for each week. Payday on Friday.”
Breen looked at the name on the top of the sheet. Patrick Donahoe. The worksheet consisted of seven boxes, one for each day of the week. The sheet was headed, “Week commencing September 30, 1968.” The boxes marked Monday and Tuesday were ticked but all the rest were blank.
“I asked around like I said I would. It’s a small world. You only have to be in London a couple of years and you know everyone on the building sites. That’s the name I came up with.”
“Where was he working?”
“Paddington. Not so far from where your man was found.” He pointed to the worksheet. “As you can see, he didn’t come in on the Wednesday. They thought it must be because he had a sore head. It was his birthday, you see, on the Tuesday.”
There was a calendar on the wall advertising a plant-hire company. A topless girl sat uncomfortably astride a blue moped in November’s picture. Somebody had circled her nipples with a pen.
“But he didn’t come in on the Thursday either and they haven’t seen him since?”
“That’s right. And he’s never been in to collect his wages.”
“Do you have any record of an address for him?”
“I do. He was a first cousin of the foreman there from back home. They had took him on here as a favor to his father.”
“Have they contacted his father to ask if he’s been in touch?”
“Naturally. And no. I’m afraid he has not.”
“How old was he?”
“It was his twentieth birthday. And they bought him a bottle of whisky to celebrate it.”
“A bottle?”
“Yes.”
Breen said nothing, but took down the man’s father’s address.
“They said he was a nice fellow too.”
“And was he in the habit of going missing?”
“They are all missing men, after a fashion. They should be at home looking after the farms and chasing girls, but instead they’re here building flats and getting drunk.”
Halfway back across the building site he stopped. The mud was almost up to his socks.
“You should have worn boots,” said a man in a flat cap.
“Bugger off.”
The slow regular thud of the piledriver seemed to shake the ground he stood on. But instead of heading forward towards drier ground, he turned back through the ooze, towards the foreman’s hut again. Mud sucked at his feet. He could feel the moisture seeping into his socks through the gap around the tongues of his shoes.