“I don’t think you’d have lasted five minutes,” said Breen.
“You’re a liar.”
The ambulance’s bell rang briefly, clearing cars away ahead.
“Did I kill any of your police?” Ezeoke said, when the noise stopped.
“No.”
“A pity,” said Ezeoke. “I should have killed you all. You English.”
“Fuck’s he on about?” said the young policeman sitting next to Breen, blowing out cigarette smoke. Breen noticed the young man’s hand was shaking.
When Tozer returned to Marylebone Police Station, two days later, the coppers lined the corridors and clapped her.
“Oi, oi. Sleeping Beauty’s back.”
“Well done, love,” said Carmichael.
“I heard you had a spot of bother too,” she said, kissing the big man on the cheek. “They said you were on the bog the entire time.”
“Shut up.” Carmichael grinned like an idiot.
“Aye, aye.”
“Think he fancies you, darling.”
“Who said that?”
Somebody started singing, “For she’s a jolly good fellow.”
“Save it for the pub,” said Tozer.
“I don’t know why you’re making all this fuss for someone who got themselves caught,” said Marilyn. The song petered out.
The office quickly returned to normal. Marilyn made tea. Breen went back to his desk to do paperwork.
Tozer followed him to his desk. “I called you yesterday,” she said.
“I was out,” said Breen, “helping out at Joe’s over the weekend. He’s had a stroke. A bunch of us are keeping the place open.” He had visited Joe in hospital; he had spent an hour listening to the slurred words before Joe had fallen asleep, exhausted from the effort of trying to make sense of the strange words and growls that tumbled from his lopsided mouth. He’d looked frightened and thin.
“That’s sad. Is he OK?”
“Not too good.” It was too early to tell whether he would get better, the doctors said. “What about you?”
“I’m OK.”
She pulled out a cigarette and lit it. Bailey came out of his office and opened his mouth to say something, but thought better of it, and walked on. When he was out of earshot, Tozer said, “On the news they said it was a gunfight. They said Ezeoke killed Mrs. Briggs.”
“I know. It wasn’t really like that.”
“Nobody will tell me what really happened.”
Breen stood and walked round to her side of the desk.
“They said Ezeoke was shooting at you.”
“Yes,” he said. “That’s true.”
“Why?”
“I think he felt he had nowhere left to go.”
“Tell me, then. I need to know what happened. It’s like being in a dream, still. Only the opposite. I’m asleep and all this stuff that makes no sense going on around me.”
He sighed. “To be honest, I don’t know where to start.”
“I need to know. It’s driving me bloody nuts.”
Tozer stole an ashtray from Prosser’s empty desk and came back, holding it in her left hand.
“I went to find you,” he said. “But you were gone.”
“I was outside Okonkwo’s for about five minutes and she turned up. I didn’t know whether to run and find you or what. Only, right away, Okonkwo came out and Ezeoke was with him.”
“He was in the shop when we were there.”
“I suppose. The moment they were gone I went up and got the car and followed. I couldn’t stop to phone.” She talked quietly so her voice could not be heard by the others in the office. “He pulled into a breaker’s yard near Walthamstow. I waited a while, then followed him in. Bloody stupid. I’ll never make a copper. Not that it matters anymore. He was waiting for me inside the gates.”
“What do you mean, you’ll never make a copper? You did great.”
“He stabbed me with a needle full of something. When I woke up we were in that car I’d been following. That Mrs. Briggs was driving. What did happen to her?”
“A police bullet. Got her in the face. Carotid artery. They said Ezeoke shot her but they’re just covering their backs. It was never a shotgun. I saw it. It was a bullet wound.”
“It’s so strange to have slept while all that was going on around you.”
“I was scared for you,” he said. “I didn’t know if you were dead or alive.”
She looked away. “I can’t say I’m sorry, whoever did it,” Tozer said. “She was a cow.”
In the house, she said, Frances Briggs had held Tozer’s mouth wide while Ezeoke had forced the tranquillizers down her throat. “It was horrible. I was kicking and struggling. Look.” She pulled up the sleeve of her tunic. “I kept thinking about my sister. What it must have been like for her.”
Breen nodded. There were still marks on her wrist from where the ropes had cut her. “Frances Briggs enjoyed it,” Tozer said. “I swear.”
“What was it like?”
“It was like being in this nightmare.” Every few hours she had woken and tried for as long as she could to pretend to be asleep, hoping that they would not drug her again. “They were rowing. Shouting at each other. Okonkwo wanted them to give themselves up. He’s dead, isn’t he?”
“The police shot him. As he was trying to escape.”
She nodded. “One time he untied me. I’m not sure when this was. He told me to get away, but I was too tired. I couldn’t move. I kept falling asleep. And then Mrs. Briggs kept saying she had this boat and they could get away to France on it. It was crazy.”
“Why didn’t they go? They had plenty of time. They were a day ahead of us.”
“I don’t know. It was weird. Ezeoke kept delaying. Said he wanted to get some money. Said they could take their time. You know what I think?”
“What?”
“He was afraid. You know, big African man. But he’d never actually lived there or anything. He’d only been there once to bring back his African wife, you know?”
“Maybe. I think you’re right. I think he had built up this big thing about Africa in his head.” He thought of his father: a man who had never gone home.
“I think he was nuts all along, you know. Right from the start. Right from that first time we met him.”
They sat at his desk and Breen told her how he had found her missing from Portobello Road, and how it had taken so long to find her car.
“It was horrible,” he said.
“Really?” She smiled. “You and Carmichael?”
“Yes.”
“I was wrong about him,” she said.
“Yes.”
And how they had searched the neighborhood until they heard that Professor Briggs was on the move.
“Lucky,” she said.
“Lucky. We were very lucky.”
That night after the pub and the drinks and the retelling of stories and rowdy cheers, they caught a taxi to his flat and had sex in his single bed, Tozer clinging to him fiercely.
Afterwards, as she lay there, he took a towel and wrapped it around his waist, then went to the living room and put on one of the new records he’d bought, and turned the record player up, full volume, so they could hear it from the bedroom.
The record started with a roaring noise that dissolved into a thumping song with pianos and guitars stomping out a rhythm, almost childishly. They lay on the bed together, listening. It felt good to move on. A new him. Everything beginning.
“This is the one,” she said, as another track started, a single note ringing out on a piano, overlaid by a wailing guitar. “I’m not sure if that’s George or Eric,” she said, as if they were both personal friends.
“Eric?”
She stood and started to dance, naked, leaping from foot to foot. “Eric Clapton,” she shouted. “It’s incredible, great, isn’t it? So fab.”
Laughing, he watched her dancing shamelessly above him. Her skinny body jumping around the small bed next to him so the springs creaked. He hoped the neighbors could hear. Sex had never been like this before. It had always been wordless and in darkened rooms.
She dropped down onto the bed, laughing too, and pulled the sheet over her. “How long is it, since you…did it?” She laughed.
“Three years,” he said. “You?”