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

broom. “You going to be there all day?” he said.
    Breen closed his notebook, put it back into his pocket and stood, then watched the man patiently sweeping the stairs, one at a time.
      
    The debris had all been cleared away. A search of the ground had turned up nothing. Now there was just a patch of bare earth next to the sheds.
    The local constables were gathering again in the yard. Jones was there too, hands in his suit pockets, chatting to a couple of the uniformed men. Breen arrived at the bottom of the stairs just as a dustbin lorry was reversing slowly down the small opening between the sheds and the building. Somebody had scrawled on the back of the lorry’s dark green paint, Thunderbird 3 .
    “What’s going on?”
    “Three guesses,” called one of the binmen jumping off the back of the lorry. Wearing a large canvas apron and a big pair of leather gloves, he waddled to a pair of steel doors and banged back the bolt. There was a huge iron bin that collected the refuse from half of the flats inside.
    “Leave it,” Breen said. “I don’t want it taken away.” He called to a nearby constable, “What happened to that copper I told to go through the rubbish?”
    “Off sick I heard. Bad back, so he said.”
    “Off sick?”
    “Yep.”
    “Why didn’t anybody tell me?”
    “Dunno.”
    The binman stood with a chain, ready to latch it onto the big bin.
    Breen ran over. “Leave it alone. Come back another time.”
    “No skin off mine.”
    “What’s going on?” Miss Shankley was leaning over the railings above.
    “Sergeant Breen is arresting your dustbins,” said Jones.
    The binman banged on the side of the lorry. “Ride ’em out, cowboy,” he shouted. “Police orders.”
    “We need to examine the contents,” Breen said.
    “Now the buggers won’t be back for another week. It’ll stink the place up,” Miss Shankley called down.
    Breen walked across the yard and pulled off the ladder that hung on hooks against the wall.
    “Careful with that,” Miss Shankley shouted.
    Leaning the ladder against the side of the bin, he said to the young freckle-faced constable who was still standing nearby, “In you go.”
    “Me, sir?”
    “Yes.”
    “Inside that?”
    “See what you can find.”
    Jones said, “’K that for a lark. She was dumped, Wellington said. Chances are, you get your uniform all mucky for squat, mate. We’re not going to find anything round here anyway.”
    “We need to check the bins,” said Breen, ignoring him. “Up,” he ordered.
    “It reeks, sir.”
    The other coppers jeered. “Go on, Pigpen.”
    “So. What are we going to do then, sir?” one of the local constables asked Breen.
    “Keep on with the door-to-door.”
    A half-dozen local officers were milling around, fecklessly waiting. Breen had asked for more but this was all he had been sent today. The assumption that the girl was going to turn out to be a dead prostitute was already having its effect. The force would not waste resources.
    “Move, then,” ordered Breen.
    A couple of them groaned. The novelty of an escape from the drudgery of the beat had already worn off. The officers were a mixture of the young and inexperienced and older coppers who didn’t like any officer telling them the way to do things.
    Breen asked them to gather round. A circle of men surrounded him. “We’ll do this street, then move on to Abbey Road. OK? Take a house each and work your way down. Be imaginative. Try and find out if anyone—”
    “Sir?” interrupted one.
    “Yes?”
    “We already done this street yesterday.”
    “Yes, I know,” answered Breen. “And?”
    “And like I said, we already done that.”
    “We questioned the occupants in daylight, just after the murder,” he said. “Half the people would have been at work. They’ll have been home now and had a chance to talk about it some more. Now we need to do it all over again to find out what they’re saying today. We haven’t even found the nanny who first