She's Leaving Home by William Shaw Page A

Miss Pattison’s. Miss Pattison looked slightly startled by the physical contact, but Tozer smiled at her confidently and said, “I know it’s hard and that you’re busy, but you will ask around, won’t you?”
    Miss Pattison hesitated. “Well…”
    “For a fan? Please?” Tozer took the girl’s photo, wrote her own name and a phone number underneath and passed it to the woman.
    “For a fan?” Miss Pattison was murmuring. “Yes, of course I will.” She smiled back at Tozer. “For a fan.”
      
    Breen clattered down the concrete stairs, glad to be out of that stuffy room.
    “You all right, sir?”
    “You keep asking me that.” It was late in the afternoon now. A man was wheeling a barrow with a single half-empty crate of apples on it north from Covent Garden.
    “Well, frankly, sir, you look done in.”
    “I’m fine.”
    They wandered down towards the market where the last of the costermongers were packing up. The day was ending. Soon the next batch of lorries would be arriving from somewhere in Kent, stacked with onions and potatoes. Tozer took out the signed photo of George Harrison that Miss Pattison had given her as they left and looked at it. “I think he’s gorgeous, even with the beard. I bet you don’t even have a favorite Beatle, do you, sir?”
    Breen shook his head. “I missed all that,” he said. “Too old.”
    “I never met anyone who didn’t have a favorite Beatle. Even my gran has her favorite.”
    “Who’s that?”
    “Paul McCartney, course,” she said. “Go on. You have to have one.”
    The rain shone on the cobblestones outside. “I’m not really much of a pop music fan,” he said apologetically.
    “Go on, you have to pick one.”
    He laughed. “Um…I don’t know. Ringo Starr?”
    She stuck her tongue out. “No, no. You’re not taking this seriously. You’d never be a Ringo. You’re more of a John Lennon man.”
    “Am I?” He paused.
    “Clearly. You’re the troubled one.”
    She didn’t seem to mind his awkwardness. He asked, “Who is your sister Alexandra’s favorite Beatle?”
    She went quiet.
    “Your sister, Alexandra?”
    Tozer looked away and said, “Oh God. She was Lennon all the way. Even had the hat, didn’t you notice?”
    “No,” said Breen. For the second time he noted the tense: “was.”
    The smell of old cabbages hung in the air in the old market. They walked around for a while in silence. Eventually Breen said, “When we saw the dead girl, you told me you’d never seen a dead body before.”
    “I hadn’t,” Tozer said. She looked at him curiously, then walked on.
    They drifted slowly back towards the car. On King Street two men stood in the side doorway of a shop that had been converted into a hippie nightclub. It announced itself in painted letters on the door: Middle Earth . The men were clutching electric guitars; one had long shoulder-length hair and an Afghan, the other big corkscrews of hair, pale blue circular glasses and a gold-braided military jacket a horseman in the Light Brigade might have worn.
    One of the guitar cases was painted as a Union Jack. If it was supposed to be ironic, the irony was lost on Breen. To be English and young is to be superior. Britannia waives the rules. At the best of times, Breen had felt alien in this country. Faced by this, doubly so. These people were only a few years younger than Breen, but they lived in a different world. Men of Breen’s generation had grown up wanting to wear better suits than their fathers. This lot didn’t want suits. They weren’t looking for careers, weren’t waiting to enter the world of middle age. Gazing at Breen they seemed to say, “Everything you stand for is ridiculous.” Even though Breen wasn’t sure he had ever stood for very much at all. Maybe that was what fired their contempt.
    The shop’s glass was covered in gaudy posters for groups with names like the Pink Floyd, the Nice and the Pretty Things, hiding whatever lay behind. The two hippies