A second time he opened the door to the shed. Nolan looked up. “Did you forget something?” he said.
“You were going to say something about what happened to my mother and father.”
The man’s face stayed blank. “I said it wasn’t important.”
Breen picked up the newspaper and wiped the mud off his leather shoes. “If it’s not important, what is it then?”
The man changed tack. “If he hadn’t told you, he didn’t want you to know.”
Breen balled the dirty newspaper up and threw it into a bin, then started on his other foot with a fresh sheet. The man took a cigarette from his shirt pocket, offered one to Breen, who refused it. “I’m not sure it’s my place to say, if he did not tell you.”
“My father is dead.”
“Yes. But I would like to respect his wishes.”
Breen sat in the chair in front of Nolan’s desk. “Respect my wishes. I have no relations. My parents are both dead. No one to tell me if you don’t.”
“True enough,” said the foreman. He sucked on his cigarette a minute, blew smoke out through his nose, then said, “So you don’t know why your father and mother left Ireland?”
“Because he hated it. He thought it was a backward place.”
“Maybe so. But there was more to it than that. Your mother was a schoolteacher in the local village. She was ten years older than him, a married woman herself. She fell pregnant by him. Did you not know any of this?”
“No.”
“Can you imagine the ruckus?”
“I didn’t know any of it. Only that they were in love.”
“When you were born, it would have been a terrible scandal, of course. The Church wanted to take you into an orphanage and raise you so they could brush the whole episode under the carpet. The stink it would have caused in a little place like he came from.”
“I never knew.”
Nolan stubbed the cigarette out and immediately lit another. “Your mother’s husband was a dry old stick. He worked on the railway, I believe. There was no such thing as divorce, of course. And so they eloped with you to England.”
Breen tried to imagine his quiet father leading such a daring, romantic life, but could not.
“She died not long after they were here. You wouldn’t remember her, I don’t suppose?”
“Sometimes I think I remember her. I’m not sure though.”
“You would have been only one or two, I think. Maybe three. I’m sure she’s been there, looking after you. Of course the Church offered to take you in again. But your father would have none of it. He thought them a bunch of lousy hypocrites for the stink they caused in the first place. So he raised you on his own. And looking at you, he did a very fine job of it, I would say.”
“He never told me any of this.”
“I don’t think he was proud of taking another man’s wife. I don’t think he was proud of having a son out of wedlock. He was a very proud man, Tomas Breen. He was very proud of yourself too. He talked about you all the time at work, you know. ‘Cathal has done this,’ ‘Cathal has done that.’”
“He did?”
“Of course he did. A fine boy like you.”
Breen looked into the older man’s eyes. There were little pale crescents below each pupil, veins in the yellowed whites. Breen would have liked to believe the foreman was not just saying this out of kindness.
A workman in a donkey jacket knocked on the door and threw it open. “Someone’s only gone and put diesel in the big cement mixer. The engine’s jiggered.”
“Jesus. I’ll be along in a minute,” Nolan called. “Leave us alone a second.”
Breen stood up to go. The old foreman shook his hand warmly. “And now somebody else’s son is dead. I hope you find the truth of it. You’ll excuse me for saying that most of the police in England could not give a one-legged fuck for another dead Irishman.”
“No,” said Bailey.
“This lot, they’re girls, sir. Sixteen, seventeen years old. They’re not going to want to talk to me. If I had Constable Tozer with me…”
“Firstly, there is no need,” said Bailey. “We know who killed Morwenna Sullivan.”
“I’ve turned it over and over, sir,” said Breen. “I can’t see how Major Sullivan could have done it.”
“Secondly, there are plenty of other lady police constables. CID is not a matchmaking agency, Sergeant.”
Breen stood in front of Bailey’s desk, blinking. “What, sir?”
“You heard what I said. Any woman constable will do perfectly well.”
“Tozer really understands this world, sir.”
Bailey quivered as he spoke. An old branch about to fall from an older tree. “It is not our job to understand their world. This is precisely why…” The older man looked him in the eye. Breen stared into the pale flecks around his iris. “Precisely why I’ve been opposed to women officers doing men’s work all along. Any more questions?”
“Bugger that for a game of soldiers,” said Tozer, when Breen told her what had happened. “Miss the chance to be outside George Harrison’s house on official business?”
“Why don’t we go at the weekend? You wouldn’t be on duty then.”
“You really don’t like breaking the rules, do you?”
“Saturday?”
“I can’t do tomorrow. One of the women in A4 is getting married. A bunch of us promised to go shopping with her. I can’t imagine anything worse.”
“Sunday then?”
“Sunday and Monday I’m on shift. How about Tuesday?”
“OK. See you then.”
“What about the shindig?” she said.
Breen looked at her. “Are you coming? I thought…”
“After you said I could be useful, how could I refuse?”
Breen wondered if he had time to go to the barber’s before the party on Saturday. On second thoughts, maybe he should let his hair grow a bit.
He was looking around for a constable to drive him to the building site in Paddington when a car drove into the car park at the back of the station, high speed, siren blaring, breaking to a halt behind the back door. Carmichael leaned out of the window of the Escort. “There you bloody are. Jump in.”
“What’s going on?”
“You seen Prosser anywhere?”
Breen stood on the stone stairs that led up to the main police building. “He’s gone out somewhere. He didn’t say where.”
“Never mind. Get in.” Carmichael reached back and opened the car door.
“Why?”
“Just get bloody in.”
Breen got in the back. Jones was behind the wheel.
“Go, Batman,” Carmichael ordered Jones. Jones floored the accelerator and the car roared onto the road, siren wailing, cars scattering to left and right. On Seymour Street, Jones braked to let a schoolteacher anxiously herd a crocodile of schoolchildren off a zebra crossing, then accelerated past.
“What’s happening?”
“Surprise,” said Carmichael, leaning backwards from the front seat.
The car zigzagged between a lorry and a motorbike. “Out of the way,” shouted Jones.
“Tell me.”
“Like I said, surprise.”
Breen pressed himself into the backseat, feet wedged against the base of the seat in front. “Slow down. What’s the hurry?”
“Don’t be a girl,” said Jones.
“You’ve got blood on your collar,” Breen said to Carmichael.
“Where?” Carmichael turned and pulled down the sunshade on the passenger side and examined his pink-striped shirt. There was a splodge of blood on the right point. “Shit. So I have. I’ll never get that out.”
“Soak it in vinegar when you get home. That’s what my wife does,” said Jones, sawing in and out of the parting cars, heading south down Great Portland Street and across Oxford Street.
“Relax,” said Carmichael. “It’s a bit of fun, that’s all.”
Jones switched off the siren. “That’s better.”
They swung right into Wardour Street and then cut back to the bottom of Berwick Street where the market was just packing up. Jones pulled up behind another police car.