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things. A carton of bandages still sat on the dresser and his walking frame was still by the door. On the telephone table a pile of the notes he had left for the women he had paid to look after his father while he was at work. The nurse’s folded zed bed, tucked into the corner of the room. A tangle of wires from a single socket powered the radio-gram, two standard lamps, the electric clock and the television.
    His father had stayed here for the last six years of his life but had never liked it. He had lived on his own in Fulham until the day he had forgotten about a pan of sausages and set fire to the kitchen of his flat. Breen had had to move out of the police section house on Mare Street to rent this place. It had a spare bedroom that his father could use until he was well enough to move back on his own. That had never happened.
    It seemed too early to start moving his father’s belongings. They still cluttered the flat: his photographs and books, his records by Italian tenors, his poetry and his novels and his collection of walking sticks, even the leather armchair Breen was sitting in now.
    Normally Breen enjoyed cooking for himself. From the age of ten or eleven he had taken over cooking the meals for himself and his father. Tonight, though, he just heated a can of beans. He went to cut a slice of bread to go with it, but the loaf in the bread bin was sprouting gray mold.
    He ate the beans on their own in front of Olympic Grandstand . He was watching a girl from the USSR who was doing floor exercises to some thumping piano music—she was beautiful in a scary, Soviet kind of way—when the electricity clicked off. The light on the television shrank to a small line, then a single dot, then disappeared into blackness.
    Breen sat there a minute, eyes adjusted to the darkness. The sounds of the street seemed louder now. When his eyes began to make out dull shapes, he stood and felt around for the electric meter by the front door. He usually left a pile of half crowns on top but they were all gone. He dug one out of his pocket, fed it into the slot and turned the handle. The television came back to life, blaring a national anthem he didn’t recognize.
    After he’d washed the plate and put it on the rack he smoked his fifth and last cigarette, then dressed in his pajamas and went to bed, worn thin by the day.
    He sat in bed looking through his police notebooks, one for the dead man, the other for the dead girl. He hadn’t even begun to write his report about what had happened to Prosser last night. He fell asleep trying to remember what he had meant when he had written “Ask about the doors.”
      
    Four hours later he woke, unable to return to sleep. He switched on the light by the table, and lay awake for a few minutes, then he got up and shaved.
    Outside it was dark. He walked down Kingsland High Street, deserted at two in the morning but for the occasional car, pavements silver with rain. The late summer was slipping into winter with little in the way of autumn in between.
    He passed shops with their wooden shutters down, barrows chained to trees, piles of rubbish and dogs that growled from behind locked gates. Below the pavement, water trickled noisily through drains.
    At Dalston Junction he arrived at Joe’s All Night Bagel Shop. It never closed, serving tea and coffee to lorry drivers delivering at Ridley Road market and to the taxi drivers waiting for the early shift to begin. The front of the cafe was painted bright red. In the window was a handwritten sign that read 7 days without a bagel makes one weak .
    Joe, leaning on the counter reading a novel, looked up as he came in. “Hello, my friend,” he said, and spooned coffee into a mug without asking. Joe only served instant. When Breen had told him he should buy one of the machines like the coffee shops in the West End and start serving real coffee, he had said, “And maybe get a skiffle band to play for my customers too.”
    “Teacakes are half