She's Leaving Home by William Shaw Read Free Book Online

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.
    Mr. Rider opened and shut his mouth, then fiddled in his trouser pocket for a box of matches, before saying, “I didn’t.”
    “You didn’t what, Mr. Rider?”
    The room was thick with the reek of pipe smoke. There were no flowers or ornaments; a man’s room. The kind of absence of a woman’s touch that he recognized from his own childhood. “I didn’t know she was a…ah…prostitute.”
    “But apparently you told people that you thought she was.”
    “No I didn’t.” Pause. “I suppose I may have. I was just guessing. Rather silly of me, really, I see now. It sort of shakes you up, when something like this happens.”
    “What made you think she was a prostitute?”
    Mr. Rider struck a match to relight his briar pipe, sucking on it furiously. “I mean, there are prostitutes not far from here. After all, you do notice them.”
    “You notice them?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Do you use their services, Mr. Rider?”
    The small man blushed and shook his head. “No. Certainly not.”
    “I wouldn’t necessarily think the worse of you if you did. I just want to know.”
    The man shook his head again. “No. No. I don’t.”
    “So you have no particular reason for thinking the dead woman was a prostitute?”
    The man said nothing.
    “People like to assume the worst of the dead; that it’s their fault for getting killed,” said Breen. A strangled girl. A burned-alive man.
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “Can I ask where you were on Sunday night?”
    “Sunday night?”
    “Yes.”
    “The night the girl was killed?”
    “That’s right.”
    “I’d have to think.” The man reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out a small knife and started excavating the bowl of his pipe.
    “Take your time,” said Breen.
    “I don’t know. Probably went for a walk. Came back here. Had supper. Listened to the wireless. The Light Programme. Same as always.”
    “Nothing more definite than that?”
    “I don’t have particularly definite days,” said the man with a small, high giggle. “I’m retired. A widower. I live alone. I suppose it’s rather odd to a young man like you, but the days just pass.”
    “Try and think.”
    “I’m trying,” said the man abruptly and with that the knife slipped. The man gave a small squeak and put his left thumb into his mouth. A dribble of blood trickled down his chin.
    “You’ve hurt yourself, Mr. Rider.”
    “It’s nothing,” he said quietly, but to do so meant taking his thumb out of his mouth. Blood spilled down his old skin onto a thin Persian rug.
    “Hold your hand up. It’ll slow the blood,” said Breen.
    Breen went to the bathroom. He found Elastoplast where he would have expected it, in a small cabinet in which Mr. Rider also kept his toothbrush, his razor, a tin of Eno Fruit Salts and an old empty bottle of Yardley English Lavender. A women’s perfume.
    He returned with the plasters. “I can manage perfectly well myself,” snapped the man as blood splodged onto the white cuff of his shirt.
    Outside again, Breen made it to the end of the walkway, then stopped. For a few minutes he sat on the cold stairs writing his notes. When he looked back he found that he had written a list. “Pipe. Blood rug. Woman in photo. People think worst of dead. Lonely.” Two pages that would sound ridiculous if he was ever required to read it out in court.
    Breen looked up at the sound of footsteps. A man he recognized as one of the residents, clutching a stiff