The Kings of London (5 page)

He took a sheet of cardboard he’d ripped from a used packet of Quaker porridge oats and started listing the payees, leaving out ordinary-looking payments: the GPO, the Gas and Water Boards and the Greater London Council. Stephens Brothers, Shirtmakers. Regent Shoes. Dougie Millings the tailor. Dolly’s in Jermyn Street. Foale & Tuffin in Panton Street. Apple Tailoring. A shop called Hung On You. Another called Dandie Fashions.

It took almost three hours to list each payee, and by the time he’d finished, the back of the cardboard was completely covered. If Harold Wilson’s Labour government were union men and grammar school intellectuals, the sons of miners and labourers, Francis Pugh didn’t see himself as one of them. He was a dandy; one of the beautiful people.

Swinging London was just a small, exclusive part of the city. Francis Pugh had either been part of it, or had badly wanted to be.

Breen slept badly. He woke in a dream in which men jumped out at him with knives. ‘I’ll bloody cut you for what you bloody done.’ After that, he could not get back to sleep again.

He had fallen out of the habit of sleeping through the night.

As his dementia had taken hold, his father had lost track of the hours. Breen would often wake to find all the lights on in the flat, his father sitting by the front door with a suitcase at the ready. ‘Is it time yet?’ he would ask.

‘Not yet, no,’ Breen would reply, and make a cup of warm milk for them both.

‘I thought I heard them calling my name.’

‘Just the wind.’

‘Later then?’

‘A lot later, yes.’

The proportions of things changed at night. The volume of the ticking travel clock. The lump in a mattress. The memory of a night with Helen Tozer, naked in this bed and the shape of her back against his.

Tonight he rose, switched on the light and began to search for something to do. The front room was tidy. He had replaced all the papers in their boxes. The plates from supper were washed up, dried and put back in the cupboard.

He took his brogues and carefully brushed wax into the leather, spitting on them occasionally. He added a second layer of wax, then a third, each time rubbing them shiny with the buffing brush. He was a man who polished his shoes.

He held them up to the light bulb. They shone, but he could still see the scuff marks left where he had stumbled amongst the debris. Then he looked around for something else to do.

The picture on which he had carried the pile of papers was still there, leaning face down against the wall. There was a gas fire in the fireplace. Above it, Breen had put a faded reproduction of a Cézanne he had bought in Petticoat Lane. He took down the old print and put up the black-and-white dots.

It looked bright and airy. Optimistic. Clean. New. And disturbingly meaningless. A void. Like the plain white cover of the new Beatles record he had bought a few weeks before.

It wasn’t that the picture looked out of place amongst his belongings. More that it made the rest of his flat look out of place.

He considered taking it down again and replacing it with the dark print of two men in hats playing cards, but he didn’t. Instead he sat looking at it for a while, waiting for it to say something to him.

‘I had plans this weekend,’ complained Jones. ‘Bloody nobs, getting themselves killed.’

Jones was driving one-handed and fast. He wore a pale-blue long-sleeve hand-knitted cardigan. Breen wrinkled his nose. ‘Are you wearing perfume?’

‘What?’ said Jones.

‘It smells like perfume,’ said Tozer who was sitting in the back.

‘’k off.’

London looked grey and dirty. At least it wasn’t raining today.

Tozer sniffed again. ‘It’s not me, that’s for sure.’ She leaned forward towards Constable Jones. ‘It
is
you. You’re wearing perfume.’

‘It’s aftershave,’ protested Jones.

‘Aftershave?’ said Breen.

‘Whatever it is, it stinks.’

‘My wife says she likes it. She says it’s nice.’ He was only twenty. His wife was a year older. Coppers married young; that way you got out of shared rooms in a police house into your own flat.

‘It’s all right for you two,’ said Jones. ‘You probably got nothing better to do. I had plans this weekend.’

‘Thanks very much,’ said Breen. ‘What plans, anyway?’

‘Decorating,’ he said. ‘Doing the kiddy’s room. Dulux. No expense.’

‘You looking forward to the baby?’ asked Tozer.

‘Course,’ said Jones, looking away.

For a Saturday morning, the traffic was unusually slow. Jones
honked the horn and waved to get the attention of a pedestrian. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Over there.’

Breen looked. Ahead, a woman in a black coat was yanking a boy of about ten years old up the street. The boy’s movements were clumsy, uneven. One foot dragged.

‘He looks like he’s one of the bloody Flowerpot Men, don’t he, poor bugger?’ Jones honked the horn again, but the woman didn’t seem to hear it.

‘Who’s that?’ asked Tozer.

The boy appeared to wobble as he walked, as if his limbs were beyond his control.

‘That’s Sergeant Prosser’s boy, Charlie.’

They drew level, inching up Maida Vale. The woman was dark-haired, thin-faced. A bit too skinny for her age, perhaps. She caught sight of Jones in the car, smiled and waved. Her son stopped and stared at the car and smiled too. ‘Hi, Jonesy,’ she called, waving.

‘He’s a spazz,’ said Jones. ‘Ask me, she should have put him in a home.’

Breen watched her taking her son by the arm. ‘A spastic?’

‘I didn’t expect her to look like that,’ said Tozer, looking back at her through the rear window.

‘Like what?’ said Jones.

‘I don’t know. Kind of, not exactly pretty, I suppose, but…’

‘I’d give her one,’ said Jones.

‘You’re pathetic, Jonesy,’ said Tozer. ‘Admit it, Prosser wasn’t exactly Steve McQueen.’

He drove on, up Hamilton Road towards Marlborough Place.

‘I mean, imagine having a baby that turns out to be like that, though,’ said Jones. ‘Christ.’ A flicker of the eyes. Nerves, thought Breen.

Outside the flattened house, a paperboy was about to prop his bike against the kerb.

‘Oi!’ Jones rolled down his window. ‘Move that.’

The boy pulled the bike away, grumbling. In one hand, he held the
morning’s copy of
The Times
, unsure of what to do with it. The house he had been going to deliver it to wasn’t there anymore.

A single copper stood marching on the spot to keep his feet warm in the November chill. A mother with a large black pram paused for a cigarette in front of the remains. ‘Isn’t it awful,’ she said. ‘Poor bugger.’

They started with a cigarette break on the pavement, blowing smoke into the still air, while the coppers gathered around them. They knew that Francis Pugh lived here alone; there was no immediate wife or family on hand to talk to.

‘And no girlfriend or nothing?’ said Tozer.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Or boyfriend even?’

‘What? A pansy?’ said Jones.

‘I don’t know,’ said Breen. Until he could talk to the family there was so little they knew about him. He listened to Jones trying to organise the coppers.

‘Right,’ said Jones. ‘You lot take odd numbers.’

A groan. Breen stubbed out his first cigarette of the day on the pavement and walked up the narrow gravel path to the house next door, pushing past overgrown shrubs that invaded from either side. A man dressed in a cream jacket with a bright blue cravat stood at the door. ‘I haven’t slept,’ he said. ‘I kept thinking my house was going to fall down. Can you imagine?’

He was in his sixties, maybe older, thin and fragile. ‘They said it’s safe but I’m not terribly sure. Are you here to ask about the unpleasantness?’ His hair was dyed an unlikely shade of black. He looked Breen up and down. ‘I suppose you’d better come in.’

Breen waited in the living room while the man made a cup of tea, emerging from the kitchen finally with a porcelain cup and saucer that rattled as he walked. The man sat down at a small, ornate desk. Behind him, there was a thin crack in the striped wallpaper. Breen wondered if it was new.

‘I never really liked being semi-detached anyway,’ he said drily. ‘Of course, the council have offered me one of their little flats, but can you imagine? I don’t trust these skyscrapers. They’re always falling down all over the place, aren’t they? I’d rather be crushed under a pile of bricks, like poor Mr Pugh.’

‘Did you know him?’

‘Not in the slightest. He was really not my sort,’ said the man with a twitch of the lips. He had the sort of papery voice the old have when they smoke too many cigarettes.

‘Did he have a girlfriend?’

The man looked sour. ‘Billions. Do you have a fag, by any chance?’

Breen noticed he had a packet of Park Drives on the coffee table in front of him. An effeminate brand of cigarette, Breen thought. He felt in his pocket for his own; he bought one packet of ten every other morning from the newsagent before he caught the bus and used them to divide up his day. He didn’t like giving them away, but he handed one over. The man’s fingers were stained with nicotine. He leaned forward to light it and sucked hard, pulling in his cheeks.

‘Anyone regular? Anyone you’d recognise?’

The man made a face. ‘I’m not a bloody snoop, if that’s what you’re suggesting,’ he said, and blew smoke through his nose. ‘Besides, the girls never lasted long,’ he said. ‘He discarded them. You’d often hear some dreadful floozie weeping by the door. For pity’s sake. He wasn’t that good-looking.’

‘But no one you’d recognise?’

There was a patch of unshaved hair under his left nostril. ‘As I said, I’m not interested in young girls.’

‘But Mr Pugh was?’

The click of spittle in his mouth. ‘Clearly.’

‘There must have been someone who called regularly.’

The man turned his head away. ‘The truth is, I’m half blind. Can’t hardly see a thing. A bit of a handicap. I’d ask you to sit closer, but I’m not that keen on policemen either.’

‘Did you hear anything unusual last night?’

The gas could have been on for hours, seeping down into the house’s basement. It would have accumulated there slowly. The firemen had gone through the rubble looking for some kind of detonation mechanism. A match tied to an alarm clock striker, maybe, but they hadn’t found anything yet in all the mess. Though the doctor had not yet completed his report, Breen reckoned the man would have been dead for a few hours before the explosion.

‘Unusual?’ said the man, stretching all four syllables of the word as far as they could go. ‘Apart from a socking big bang?’ He curled his lip.

‘Before that, obviously.’

‘No. I don’t believe I did.’

‘I can’t see a car. Do you know if he had one?’

‘I don’t think Mr Pugh drove,’ he said. ‘He used taxis a lot. Used to keep them waiting outside for ages. Wasteful.’

‘What sort of time of day? Was he going out in the daytime or the evening?’

‘Never the morning. God, no. He didn’t keep what you might call conventional hours. And he’d be back all times of night. Sometimes in the small hours. The taxis would wake me up. I never complained about it, mind you. Never complain.’

There was a framed photograph of a young man on the wall behind where he sat. It was a studio portrait. Stood in a circle of light, a young man with brilliantined dark hair, a touch of make-up on the eyes.

‘Is that you?’

The same small smile.

‘You were an actor?’

He turned his head slightly sideways, as if inviting Breen to recognise him. Breen didn’t.

‘Yes. I am an actor,’ he said, after a pause. Emphasis on ‘am’.

‘Have you been in anything I’d have seen?’

The man scowled, tugged at an ear lobe. ‘You’re far too young
to have seen me in anything. You haven’t drunk your tea. Is there anything wrong with it?’

Breen said, ‘You didn’t like Mr Pugh very much, did you?’

‘Is that part of Harold Wilson’s new Britain? It’s now compulsory to like your neighbour, is it? No. I didn’t like him, as a matter of fact. Him and all his women. Sexual liberation. The permissive society. I don’t approve of it, really.’ He patted down his jacket pocket as if looking for something.

‘May I have a quick look in your garden?’

‘The young think they can have everything they bloody want these days. Why should they? If I couldn’t have it, why should they?’

‘The garden,’ said Breen.

‘If you must,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid I’ve neglected it rather.’

He let him out of the French window at the back of the living room. It was overgrown. The grass was long and dead-looking. Brambles were starting to creep across what had been a lawn. The beech hedge that surrounded his garden had become straggly. There were gaps where you could see the houses behind. They were big, three-storey Victorian homes, but much less grand than the mansions on Marlborough Place.

By the back door of what must have been his kitchen lay a pile of rusting tin cans that he must have tossed there. They were all the same. Campbell’s Cream of Tomato Soup.

‘There,’ the man said when Breen came back inside, wiping his feet. ‘Now, have you got enough?’

Outside Pugh’s house, a group of kids gathered. One was snapping away with a camera.

‘You a copper, mister?’

Breen ignored them.

‘I heard he was sliced up by gangsters. They cut off his thingy.’

A girl with a big knitted scarf wound around her head giggled.

‘That’s what they said.’

‘Who said?’ said Breen.

‘Everyone. Is it true?’

‘No,’ said Breen.

‘You’re a liar,’ said the boy.

Breen pushed the gate open and walked around the rubble to the back garden of the dead man’s house. A garden without a home. Broken glass and wood lay strewn on what had been a large gravel rectangle with a small Japanese-looking shrine, sitting in the middle. Maybe Indian. At the rear grew a line of bamboo, too tall to see over.

He could hear someone moving in the garden beyond.

Breen looked around. Seeing the wooden kitchen chair, he lifted it across the gravel and placed it next to the bamboo, then stood on it, parting the stiff green stems.

There was a woman, head tied up in a bright scarf. She was thin, boyish, with a long floral skirt, a white cotton blouse and a small waistcoat. She was pinning up a line of clothes. A line of greyish-white nappies, each one clipped to the next.

Behind her, a makeshift vegetable garden, a row of beans blackened from the frosts.

He watched the woman for a while. It was November and the air was cold, but she wore nothing on her feet. She picked each nappy from a large wicker basket, then took another pin from a cloth bag tied around her waist.

As she leaned towards the basket, Breen saw the outline of a breast, pale, smooth and soft. A dark nipple. Under her white cotton blouse, she was bra-less. The glimpse of her breast was gone in a second. She stood and pinned another half-dozen terry cloths to the line. He stayed a little too long, watching.

Pale skin under white cotton.

‘What you looking at?’

It was Jones.

How long had he been standing there, watching her? He flushed and
the woman looked up, startled at the sound of voices. Breen jumped down from the chair, ashamed of himself.

‘I was trying to figure out if anyone could have seen into the house.’

‘Let me have a look,’ said Jones, standing on the chair.

Breen stood there, wondering if he was watching the young woman too.

‘I don’t think so. This stuff is far too thick to see through properly,’ he said.