She's Leaving Home (16 page)

“Can we do this in the morning? It’s late. We’ve had a terrible shock.”

“She was an idealist,” said her mother, rubbing her mouth. “Concerned about Vietnam and all sorts of things like that.”

“All that left-wing mush.”

“You see, I was wondering whether she might have been arrested on a demonstration or something. I thought it might be a way of finding her. So Mal went to the police, too, while he was up there and reported her as a missing person.”

“Really?” Tozer looked at Breen.

“That’s right.”

A motorbike roared up the lane outside the house. Breen noticed that the gaps in the old sash windows had been stuffed with newspaper to keep them from rattling in the wind.

“You see,” said Breen, “we had no record of her as a missing person.”

“You didn’t?”

There was a pause. “I don’t suppose police records are always up to date,” said the major.

“If you’d reported her in early October…You definitely reported her missing?”

“Well, not exactly,” said the major.

They all looked at the major. “Mal?”

“You see, I was going to go and report her missing, but then it seemed a bit silly. Because she’d been out of touch before.”

“Oh, Mal.”

“And she always did get back in touch. Eventually. I didn’t want to bother the police. I thought she was bound to turn up, sooner or later.”

“You lied to me. You said you’d gone.”

“I didn’t want you to worry. I thought I’d be able to find her myself. Or she’d just turn up out of the blue.”

“You’re sodding unbelievable.”

“She was always running off, wasn’t she, Julia?”

“I hate you. You bloody liar.”

He looked at Breen sorrowfully, giving a small shrug as if to say, “See what I have to put up with?”

“And you had no other leads to go on,” said Breen, “apart from this address you dropped her off at?”

Julia, still glaring at her husband, shook her head.

“No names of her girlfriends?”

“Please,” said the major, “we’re exhausted.” He stood and poured himself a whisky.

“Don’t get sloshed, Mal.”

“The pot is calling the kettle black, dear.”

Julia Sullivan snorted. “I knew I shouldn’t have let you go alone.”

“It wouldn’t have made any bloody difference anyway, would it?”

Tozer said, “May I use your telephone, Major?”

“It’s in the hallway.”

“Any brothers or sisters?”

Julia Sullivan gulped air.

“That’s enough. I’m going to have to ask you to leave now,” said the major.

Julia Sullivan stood, followed her husband to the whisky bottle and poured herself another two fingers.

Breen stood. “We’ll need to make arrangements for you to identify her.”

“Oh God.”

“Out. Now.”

She dropped back down onto the sofa and sat, legs tucked under her, glass in her lap, staring down at it, saying nothing. A half-completed crossword on the table. A copy of the
Radio Times
. A big damp house with a couple and their dog.

The major strode to the living-room door and opened it. “Please. Just go away. Leave us alone.”

“If there are any diaries, letters, anything you have that would help us understand who she was. We will return them to you.”

They left Julia slumped on the sofa in the living room and joined Tozer, who was standing in the hallway. The major closed the door carefully behind him and said quietly, “Morwenna had one brother, you see. He died in a motorcycle accident this May.”

“I am very sorry. This must be very hard for you both,” said Tozer.

“Yes.”

“Shall we say eleven o’clock?”

The major stood in the porch, backlit from the hallway, and shook hands awkwardly.

“We need to find a bed and breakfast.”

“We’re going to the farm. I just spoke to my mother on the phone.”

“I could still find a hotel.”

“It’ll be fine. Much nicer than a B and B.”

Breen would have preferred the anonymity of a motel room, but he was too exhausted to argue. They drove down the dark lanes, lights on full beam. There were no other cars on the road. Looking out of the side window, Breen could see nothing, only a heavy blackness. At the brow of a hill Tozer braked sharply as a big pale bird almost flew into the windscreen, blinded by the light.

“Barn owl,” she said, and picked up speed again only to brake once more. A sheep stood in the middle of the road, eyes glowing like moonstones in the headlights.

Eventually they joined a bigger road, with the occasional car coming the other way, full beam lights dimming as they rounded corners before the starless dark returned.

“She was drunk.”

“Yes.”

“Just saying.”

“Why did he lie? About going to the police about her?” he asked.

“Families are complicated. Fathers and daughters.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Take it from me.”

“He was hiding something.”

“Maybe.”

“And they didn’t ask why,” said Breen.

“What do you mean?”

“Wouldn’t you expect a man to ask the why questions? Why do you think they killed her? Why?”

“To be told a member of your family is dead is a terrible thing,” she said. “He was in a diz.”

“A lesbian daughter, at that.”

“Tomorrow.”

“Yes.” He was too tired to think any further. “Tomorrow.”

The darkness around them was total. He had never seen such a blackness. He lay his head against the side of the car and closed his eyes as Tozer drove down winding roads.

He was woken by her, gently knocking his shoulder. They were at a farmhouse where a woman stood in the light of a low door.

Tozer’s voice, fuzzing into his head: “Don’t tell her about our case. It’ll only upset her. I’ll invent something.”

It seemed to take an age for Breen to remember where he was. He stared blearily at Tozer. She was outside now, throwing her arms round the woman at the door, kissing her on the neck. By the time he had made it out of the door, Tozer was already pulling their two suitcases from the boot.

It was a cottage with small windows, roughly rendered. “Don’t stand in the cold. Come on in,” said the woman, a rounder, shorter, older version of her daughter, with a thicker Devon accent.

Breen tried to take a case off Tozer; it seemed unmanly to let a woman carry his suitcase in front of her mother, but she ignored his outstretched left hand. “He in Alex’s room, Ma?”

“That’s right.”

She disappeared into a door to the side of the wainscoted hallway that ran like a passageway through the middle of the house. Breen stood inside the front door, blinking in the light.

“You’ll be hungry, then?” said Mrs. Tozer. “Edward?” she called, come out here.

Helen Tozer’s skinniness came from her father. He emerged from the living room which was on the opposite side to the door into which Helen had disappeared. Old corduroy trousers and a woolen shirt. Inside, an old television chattered in semi-darkness; the only other light was the pink glow of a two-bar electric fire. “Pleased to meet you,” said the man, holding out a hand.

Breen placed his palm into the leathery skin of the older man’s hand and allowed it to be shaken slowly. He smelled of tobacco and livestock.

“It’s very kind of you to put me up,” said Breen.

The man nodded silently and then went back to his television.

Mrs. Tozer led Breen back into the kitchen, a low-beamed room with a range at one end. “What’s for supper, Ma?” said Tozer, emerging down the narrowest staircase Breen had ever seen.

“Beef stew and dumplings.”

“Home,” said Tozer.

“You should try it more often,” her mother said, wiping her hands on a tea towel.

“I’m busy,” said her daughter, leaning over and dipping a finger into a pot on the range. She pulled out her finger and licked it. “I’m starved,” she said.

Breen lay that night in a narrow bed, under low eaves. A small, uneven room with a latch on the door. A Persian rug, worn but clean. His bed was warm already from the hot-water bottle Tozer’s mother had put in it, wrapped in a knitted cover, though the room was far from cold, warmed from the kitchen range below. The scent of soap and fresh bread. Cotton sheets that had been waving in clean air as they dried. A sprig of dried lavender hanging from the wall close to the head of the bed, its scent deliciously thick. A full belly and a soft pillow.

This was a house of women. He savored the unfamiliar feeling for a few seconds before he fell into a rich, enveloping void.

A
long time later there was music. It had been in his head for some time. Plush and colorful, strange and new, it took on unexpected shapes and shades, twisting into new moods, and he rose through it slowly to consciousness.

There were words too, that made sense at first only in a dreamlike way. He lay not so much listening as absorbing, soaking in the curiosity of it, until finally he rose to a delicious lucidity in which the notes and the songs became clearer. It was about days being few and filled with tears but sung in a strangely upbeat kind of way.

A girl’s voice sang along to the music, something about it being so long since a girl had been gone.

The sun was shining through thin curtains. Helen Tozer was singing along to records in the room next door; her bedroom must have been the other side of the wooden partition.

He rose, still in his pajamas, looking for the bathroom. She was sitting cross-legged on her bedroom floor, LP and single covers scattered around her. In front of her was a small pink plastic record player.

“Sleepyhead,” she said.

“What time is it?”

“Gone eight.”

She was already dressed in a pair of jeans and a cotton blouse. The song ended. She carefully lifted the needle off the LP before the next track started, took the record off the player and replaced it in its sleeve, then picked up another, reading down the names of the tracks.

“I don’t remember. Do you like the Stones?” she asked, not looking up.

Breen shrugged. He yawned. Sleep was hard to shake.

She lowered the needle onto the start of another song, ignoring him, listening intently to the music, nodding her head gently in rhythm. He watched her with distant fascination, as a child might watch a bird digging for worms, then returned to his room, took his wash bag and walked to the bathroom down the hallway.

Mrs. Tozer was below in the kitchen, doing something with empty jam jars. She greeted him with a beaming face, like he was a prodigal returning. “It’s the Devon air, I expect.”

“What?”

“You sleeping so long. The air’s thicker here. It tires you out if you ain’t used to it.”

“Does it?”

“Definitely. And makes you hungry too, I expect. You eat bacon and eggs?”

“Definitely.”

She smiled at him and rubbed her hands on a towel, then pulled open the fridge door and lifted out a plate piled with bacon and set to work.

“Thank you for putting me up at such short notice.”

“It’s a pleasure. You bring our Helen back to us. She’s been away so long.”

“She brought me, really. I can’t drive at the moment.”

“Yes. I see. I heard you been in the wars.”

“Sort of.”

“Helen says your father died recently.”

“Did she?”

“Maybe she shouldn’t have said.”

“It’s OK.”

“I’m sorry. It’s terrible losing someone close.” A sheepdog poked its head into the open back door. She shooed it away. “She’s a chatterbox. She can’t help it. Always has been.”

“I know.”

She laughed. “Course you do. When she was a child she kept the milk-tanker driver waiting twenty minutes while she told him the story of Dracula and the Three Bears.”

The pan started to sizzle on the range. She laid three slices of bacon in it, one after the other. The kitchen was plain but Breen had the sense that behind the built-in cupboards, doors covered in layers of glossy cream paint, lurked provisions that could see an army through a long winter.

“Would you like two eggs, dearie?”

“One is plenty.”

“Mushrooms? Picked them this morning.”

“Lovely.”

“Was he old?”

“What?”

“Your father?”

“Sixty-seven.”

“And were you close?”

“He brought me up.”

“Was there no one to help?”

He was startled by a large shape moving past the small back window of the kitchen until he realized it was just a cow.

“No. No family here. He was a loner.”

“He must have been a great man, then, raising a fine man like you on his own.”

He nodded. “I suppose he was.”

“Would you like beans?”

“No thanks.”

“You must miss him.”

“I do. Very much.”

“The space left by the ones we love is bigger than we ever think it will be.” Her face was unsmiling.

Tozer came downstairs when Breen was finishing the plate. She took it and washed it up, and dried it. He sat watching her bending over the sink, rinsing crockery under the taps. “What are you talking about?”

“This and that,” said her mother.

“What size are your feet?” she turned and asked Breen, as she picked up a tea towel.

“Eight, why?”

“Do you want to go for a walk round the farm? We’ve got a while before we have to go.”

“That would be nice.”

There was a pile of Wellingtons in a shed at the back of the farmhouse, some single, some in pairs, some so ancient the rubber barely held together. She managed to find a pair that were only one size bigger than Breen’s feet; he sat on a bench in the backyard of the farm, watched by a beady-eyed cockerel, and put them on.

Arriving at night, he had had no idea where they were. Now he could see the land around them. The Tozers’ farm filled a small valley that ran down towards a muddy estuary below the house.

The roundness of the hills made them look like they’d been drawn by a child. Fringing the far side of the water, a long forbidding wood, leaves turning yellow and red.

“This was my kingdom,” said Tozer. She had donned an old duffel coat and wore a red scarf around her neck. “I know every inch.”

The cows had been through the yard a few hours earlier; the ground under their feet had become a thin colloidal ooze, sucking their boots until they reached untrampled grass. There stood a field full of black-and-white cows that gazed at them dumbly. Breen’s London had never touched the senses in such a way as this place did; a thick, autumnal smell of decay filled the air.

“How’s your arm?”

“Not too bad.”

One of the cows started ambling towards them with a slow step that looked menacing to Breen. Another joined in. Tozer seemed not to notice.

“My father, he’s like a sore tooth. Even more than last time I was here. He doesn’t say a word. He said anything to you?”

“No. Just a hello last night. I haven’t seen him this morning.”

The cows came nearer. They seemed much bigger close to, thick with meat and muscle, nostrils emitting drool and steam.

“He’s getting worse, I reckon. He used to laugh all the time. One time I was in this nativity play at school and I had the part of one of the three shepherds. I was so proud because I was playing the part of a farmer. Follow the star, you know? Only with my big police girl’s feet, I tripped up on one of the cows that were lowing and fell right on top of Mary. I knocked Jesus’s head right off. It was this doll, see? And the head rolled right across the stage and ended up under the piano. One of the shepherds had to fish it out with his crook. And you could have heard a pin drop.”

The cows were too close for Breen now. He had fallen back, walking slower, letting Tozer go on ahead alone.

“And then my dad started laughing. Not just tittering. Real loud laughing. Everybody shushing him, and he just couldn’t stop. Half of me was dead embarrassed. Half of me was pleased I’d made him laugh so much.”

She turned and looked at Breen, standing there hesitant, and then back at the two cows that now blocked their way forward.

“Are those animals OK?”

“You’m a bit scared, in’t you?” Extra Devon accent for comic effect.

“Yes.”

She laughed. “They’re only heifers.” She turned back to the cows. “Ga’an,” she shouted, waving her arms. “Get gone.” Instantly, the cows bowed their heads, jerked around and skedaddled back over the field. Breen followed her, avoiding the cowpats.

Halfway across the field she paused and stared at a distant clump of trees tucked in the fold of a hill, where three fields came together.

“Is that it?” he asked her. “The place where they found your sister?”

She nodded, turning away from him so he could only see her back. A large wide-winged bird circled over the clump of trees.

“How did they reckon he took her there? Or was she there already?”

She felt in her coat pocket for her packet of cigarettes, pulled one out. “I don’t know. I really don’t. I’ve tried thinking it through a million times and I don’t know.”

The field dipped down towards the estuary. The tide was out and flocks of birds were picking at the dark brown mud that stretched out far into the distance. Thousands of them, small clumps of gray and brown against the dark mud.

Tozer began making her way along the edge, keeping away from the mud by ducking under the scrawny oak limbs.

“Me and Alex used to swim there. We taught ourselves. Neither of our parents could swim. Each summer it was like a competition. First one in.”

“Isn’t it muddy?”

“Bit.”

“Didn’t you mind?”

“No. She went in one hot day in May when the water was still freezing. I beat her next year by going in in April. God it was cold, though. Made your bones hurt.”

“So you won?”

“No. She beat me in the end.”

He stopped. There was a piece of china under his foot. Picking it up he examined it; a cracked triangle of blue willow pattern, fringed by a little weed on each edge. A piece of a small angular bridge. He looked around him. There were dozens of small worn pieces of pottery among the stones, and frosty bits of glass too, green and brown and blue.

“The New Year before she was killed, Mum and Dad were out at a party, so we had a party of our own. Just me and her. Fireworks and everything. Well, some sparklers,” she said. “We’d sneaked a couple of bottles of Bulmers into the barn and built a fire out back. Happy New Year. I drank too much and fell asleep by the fire and missed it all. She woke me up some time after midnight, stark naked in the moonlight, teeth chattering. She said, ‘Pinch, punch, first of the month…and oh, by the way, I beat you.’ She had gone in at five minutes past. She was soaking. Her skin was blue. I remember her, standing there, skinny as a ghost, goose bumps, shaking with the cold. But she’d beat me.”

“That could have been dangerous.”

“Says the man who is scared of cows…”

“I wasn’t scared.”

“You mean she could have killed herself or something?” she said.

“No.”

“She could have saved someone else the bother?”

She walked on ahead, down the narrow causeway of rocks and shells. Breen tottered along behind her, trying to avoid falling. His socks had fallen down into his wellingtons and his feet were cold.

“I thought if I got in at the stroke of midnight next year I’d beat her and she’d never be able to beat me again. Never got the chance. She caught bronchitis, though. Served her bloody right.”

Birds hung in the air above the farm, like the one he’d seen over the spinney where they’d found her sister’s body. She saw him looking at them and said, “Butcher birds.”

They rounded a corner, startling a group of ducks who took off, squawking angrily. They flew off across the mudflats, out towards the sea.

“It’s beautiful here,” he said, because it was true and because he thought she’d like to hear him say it.

“Isn’t it?” she said. She picked up a stick and beat a path through brambles, back into a field. “I can’t stay here anymore, though. It’s all ruined for me.”

The car splashed through mud on the way out of the Tozers’ farm, engine roaring up the steep road out of the valley up towards Dartmoor and then west towards Cornwall.

In daylight, the countryside looked no less wild. Dead bracken and granite rocks. Stunted trees bent in the wind. Ground that looked thick with water. Sheep huddled against stone walls. It made Breen feel cold just looking at it. The sun disappeared into cloud. They had left the warmth of the lower valleys behind. As they approached Liskeard, a low mist closed in.

In the daylight, Tozer took the lanes fast, braking for bends at the last minute which did nothing for Breen’s nerves.

Driving up the lane out of the town towards the Sullivans’ house, they came to another bend. Suddenly, round the hedge-blind corner, a car came roaring out of the mist.

Breen tried to shout “Brake!” but nothing came out. There was not enough time anyway because the other car was coming so fast. Hemmed by high banks on either side, the lane left little room for escape.

Tozer yanked the steering wheel to the left. Branches cracked across the windscreen. A dazzle of glass exploded all around. In that millisecond Breen wondered if he had put his seat belt on. Or if the car was even fitted with them.

Again, at what seemed the same moment, his body was thrown forward towards the glove compartment. Then sideways. He was conscious of a loud bang, and the world distorting as the other vehicle smashed into them. The smell of brake asbestos and rubber.

And then suddenly it was still. No birdsong, just the sound of another car engine roaring down the hill, away, noise gradually receding. And pain in his arm.

Someone began swearing quietly. “Oh, fuck.”

Must be Tozer. He was relieved to hear her voice.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck.” Almost like a song sung to soothe a child. “We were lucky, hey?”

Cautiously he opened his eyes.