The doorbell rang again. This time it was a young man in a tweed cap that looked too small for him, brim pointing upwards. He approached the counter and asked for a cup of tea.
“Cor, look at them two.” He nodded at the pair of greasers who were kissing again. “I bet she fucks him,” he said quietly. “What you think? I bet she likes it too. I bet she fucks anyone. I’d fuck her.”
Joe said nothing. While he served the tea, the young man said in a quiet voice. “Hey, I got something good for you. Do you want to buy any watches? Gold watches going cheap.”
Joe replaced the large teapot on the table and said, “What do I need to tell the time for? This bloody place never bloody closes.” He turned back to the chip basket, lifting it from the hot fat.
The young man blinked a couple of times. It could have been a nervous tic. “I thought you Yids liked a bit of tom.”
“A bit of tom? God save us. Talk English, schmuck. You watch too much television.”
“Tom. Tomfoolery,” the guy whispered. “You know, jewelry.”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake go home,” said Joe quietly. The chips were still too pale. He dropped them back into the bubbling oil.
Next the young man turned to Breen. When he’d come in, Breen had thought he was only about twenty. Now he looked closer he could see fine lines around his eyes, and veins breaking in the skin. “What about you, mate? Nice stuff.”
Joe said, over his shoulder, “You’re barking up the wrong tree there, my friend. I told you, if you know what’s best for yourself, get lost.”
The young man was offended. “I’m just trying to earn a living like the rest of you,” he said.
Joe snorted. He cracked first one egg, then a second, onto the hotplate and wiped his brow with his forearm.
“Shockproof,” said the man to Breen, picking up his mug of tea. “Gold straps. Roman numerals. Guaranteed to five yards underwater.”
Breen put down his coffee and reached inside his jacket pocket. For a second the man’s face lit up, thinking he was about to make a sale, until Breen pulled out his wallet and opened it. “Do as he says. Get lost.”
The man slapped his cup back down, spilling brown tea over Joe’s Formica counter, and was gone into the night in half a second.
“You could have waited till he paid,” muttered Joe.
“Keep your hair on,” said Breen, putting his warrant card back into his jacket pocket. “I’ll get it.”
Joe wiped down the surface with a gray dishcloth. “Flash that flipping thing around in here anymore and I won’t have any customers at all.” He put two plates onto the counter and tipped the chips onto them, then slid two eggs from the hotplate. “Egg and chips twice,” he called.
The greaser couple broke from their kiss and the man stood to fetch the plates. Breen pulled out his notebook and flicked through the pages he had written. His notes were densely scribbled and unmethodical. It was as if he had forgotten how he used to arrive at a scene and patiently record first the time of day, then the position of the corpse, and so on. Across the bottom of a page he had written “River Tiber.” He borrowed a pencil from Joe and turned to a clean page and started sketching what he remembered of the scene behind the flats. He had added diagrams to police notebooks before, but never drawings, even though he had a talent for it. Art had been one of the few subjects he had done well in at school. His father had never been able to hide his disappointment at the mediocrity of his son’s academic results, but the day before the funeral, Breen had discovered a small roll of the drawings he had done at school carefully tied in red ribbon, tucked in a box his father had brought with him to the flat.
He drew the downward curve of her back and the pure roundness of her behind, her arms folded awkwardly. “What you drawing?” said Joe.
Breen closed the notebook rapidly and put it back into his pocket.
It was quiet now. In an hour or so the morning shift would start arriving on their way to work. Joe went to his LP collection and spent a while looking through it, pulling out a record, replacing it, eventually picking out another. There was a record player just to the right of the counter. Joe took the black disc out of its sleeve and laid it on the turntable, then lifted the needle and dropped it carefully.
There was a moment of crackle, then a piano began to play slow descending notes. A cello joined in for a short phrase, then the rest of the string quartet, until they all gave way to the cello exchanging conversational phrases with the piano.
The woman looked up. “What in hell’s that?”
“Leave it,” said her boyfriend, pausing from his chips.
Joe came out front and sat down on a plastic chair and took out a cigarette and tapped it quietly on the table in front of him, then lit it and smoked as the music played. No one spoke. The only other noise was the clatter of cutlery on plate and the sigh of one of the old insomniacs who gathered at Joe’s in the smaller hours. It was one of those times when the unsatisfactory complexity of the world fades far enough into the distance for the moment to become a thing in itself. Making a shape out of such sadness seemed to offer a safety from it. Breen sat and listened as his coffee cooled. The moment lasted for two or three whole minutes before the bell rang and a bobby on his beat came in, the door’s bell ringing dissonantly against the music.
“Aye, aye, Joe,” said the copper. “Cup of tea. Two sugars. An’ turn down that old racket, why don’t you?”
Five
On Wednesday morning the first post brought a letter from his father’s solicitor. There were no surprises. He knew the contents of his father’s will already. A few shares that were not worth much and around two thousand pounds that had been left over after paying for the nurses to look after him. Enough to give up the police, if he wanted, and live off what was left over for a year or maybe more. Maybe go to Ireland. He had never been. Or maybe buy a car. He had never owned one of those either. He put the letter in a drawer and walked up to Church Street to catch the bus to St. John’s Wood.
Mr. Rider was in this time.
He was a small, round, middle-aged man who lived alone. He wore a Marylebone Cricket Club tie with a brown cardigan and opened the door with a smoking briar pipe in his hand.
“And?” he said.
“May I ask a couple of questions, sir?”
He eyed Breen up and down and pulled on his pipe. Breen took out his warrant card and showed it to him. The man peered at it. “What about?”
“The murder of a young woman.”
“Ah. Yes. Of course.” He opened the door and beckoned Breen in.
Rider’s apartment was spartan: no television in the living room, no pictures on the walls. A complete set of Encyclopaedia Britannica and six volumes of The Second World War by Winston Churchill filled the bookshelf above a desk on which sat a solitary black and white photograph, framed in silver, of a young woman in army uniform.
“You said the murdered woman was a prostitute. I wonder how you knew.”
“I beg your pardon?” Mr. Rider stood still, blinking at Breen.
Breen repeated what he had said.