by Nicci French
She removed her hands and nodded.
Quarry watched as slowly, patiently, Dugdale extracted information from her. Her husband, as they already knew, was a rep for a sanitary supply company – toilet paper, soap, paper towels – and spent much of his time in his car. She worked in a garden centre, although she didn’t know much about plants. Before that, she had been a PA in an architect’s firm, but that had gone bankrupt a few years ago. They had been married for twenty-seven years, and Geoffrey Kernan’s mother was still alive. He had an older brother, to whom he was not close. Sarah Kernan told them he had been worried about work recently, and been working harder than ever.
‘Everyone’s having a hard time,’ she said. ‘I’ve been in and out of work myself.’
She said he had no enemies (they all say that, thought Dan Quarry, looking at her startled face, at the son’s blotchy one), and she couldn’t think of a single reason why anyone should have killed him.
‘He’s just Geoffrey,’ she said. ‘Or Udo.’ She gave a snuffling laugh.
‘Udo?’
‘His middle name. He said there was a part of him, a secret part, that wasn’t boring, English Geoffrey, but more mysterious Germanic Udo. It was like a family joke.’
‘I see. But whichever one, you can’t think of any reason why he should have been killed?’
‘No. He got angry sometimes, irritable. But everyone does, don’t they?’
Dugdale asked her about the past few weeks, who her husband had seen, what he had done, anything that stuck in her mind.
She frowned, staring down at her cooling tea. ‘We saw Peggy,’ she said. ‘And he went to the pub last Saturday, but not for long. He wasn’t here that much because he was working.’
‘Where was he working?’
‘I don’t know exactly. But it was round here – Essex and London, I mean. Sometimes he goes as far as Derby, Sheffield, and a few weeks ago he had to go to Cardiff. But not the last week. And when he wasn’t working, he spent most of his spare time in the garden, digging up plants and things. We’re having a patio laid and so everything needs replanting.’
They all looked out at the cratered garden.
‘The man who’s doing it only comes in when he feels like it. So it’s been a bit of a slow process. It made Geoff mad.’
‘What else made him mad?’
‘I did sometimes,’ said Ned. He aimed at a laugh, but it wobbled, came out as a broken guffaw. ‘He thought I drank too much. And didn’t work hard enough. He didn’t know why I had to go to university and build up debts. He thought I should learn something proper, do an apprenticeship.’
Dan Quarry tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Fathers and sons,’ he said amiably. ‘Don’t you go beating yourself up.’
Dugdale stood. He was bulky but surprisingly agile. ‘So, Mrs Kernan,’ he said. ‘There are things I’ll be wanting from you. A diary of the last few weeks. If you don’t have things written down already, do you think you can write them out for me as best you can remember? Everything you remember. Names of everyone he saw, everything he did, places he went to.’
She nodded.
‘And then I’m going to want all his correspondence, his bank details, bills, things like that.’
‘Why?’ demanded Ned.
‘Just routine stuff,’ said Dugdale. ‘I assume he has a computer.’
‘A laptop.’
‘I’ll be needing that.’
Sarah Kernan stared at him, stricken. He saw there were stains on her towelling robe.
‘The car outside, is that the car he normally drove?’
‘Yes. We’ve just the one.’
‘Then I’ll need to take a look at that. If you could give us the keys.’
Without a word, she stood up, went over to a hook near the garden door and brought down a bunch of keys.
‘We’ll do our best not to be intrusive,’ he said. ‘But this is a murder case.’
He nodded at Quarry.
An hour later, Dugdale and Quarry left the house, carrying boxes of letters, receipts, bills, invoices. They’d taken his computer, together with the small notebook in which, Sarah Kernan said, her husband had written down his various passwords. They also had his satnav, along with the log he had made of all his journeys, with mileage written down alongside each.
As they got into the car, Quarry looked at his phone. Six missed calls. All from his wife. Soon to be ex-wife. He’d call later. When he was alone.
‘Everything all right?’ asked Dugdale.
‘Fine,’ said Quarry, starting the car.
For a few minutes they didn’t speak. The two men were thinking hard, about different things.
‘You can look through all this stuff,’ said Dugdale.
‘What?’ said Quarry. His mind had been on the call he’d have to make later to his wife.
‘The stuff in the boxes. I want you to go through it.’
‘Am I looking for anything in particular?’
‘An ordinary man disappears for no reason so look for something out of the ordinary.’
‘They were arguing,’ said Quarry.
‘Everyone argues,’ said Dugdale. ‘Even married couples. Maybe especially married couples.’
Quarry didn’t answer.
‘Any other thoughts?’ asked Dugdale. ‘What do we know?’
‘Nothing,’ said Quarry.
‘Really?’ Dugdale raised his eyebrows.
‘The killer wanted to be noticed,’ Quarry said hesitantly.
‘That’s possible.’ He nodded at him. ‘Most murderers try to hide the bodies. They bury them.’
‘So I’ll go through his bank statements.’
‘There’s another thing,’ said Dugdale. He held up the satnav. ‘Try the recently found destinations. See where Geoffrey Kernan was in the last days before his death.’
‘His wife said he drove all over the place.’ Quarry laughed. ‘I might end up in Scotland.’
‘But she said he was in the London area in the final week.’
‘Right. How far back shall I go?’
‘Let’s see how you get on.’
‘What are you going to do?’ asked Quarry.
‘Before anything else, I’ll have a look at what’s on his computer.’
Back at the station, Quarry made an excuse and walked out to the car park. He needed a cigarette. He lit it and took several drags. Then he pulled his mobile from his pocket and turned it on. Several texts pinged on to the screen, and more notifications of missed calls. He was about to turn it off again when it rang. Maggie’s name appeared, as if she knew he was there.
‘Fuck,’ he said, but he answered it anyway. ‘I’m in the middle of something.’
‘This won’t take long.’ Her voice was clipped. For a second, he remembered how she used to talk to him, as if she were about to laugh, as if there were a secret joke just the two of them shared. She used to call him Danny, the only person apart from his mother who called him that.
‘Go on.’
‘You know why I’m ringing.’
‘I’ll get it to you soon.’
‘That’s not good enough. I need it now. It’s part of our agreement.’
‘I said I’ll get it to you.’
‘I can’t go on borrowing from my dad.’
‘Maggie, I’ve explained to you –’
‘This is your daughter. Never mind what else you did, what you did to me, this is Lucy we’re talking about.’
‘I’ll get it.’ He wanted to shout but he made himself speak calmly. ‘By the end of the week. I promise.’
‘I’ll call my solicitor. I don’t want to but I will. And, Dan?’
‘What now?’
‘I don’t want to do this, you’re her father, but I’ll stop you seeing her. If you can’t even pay that bit of money towards her upkeep, you don’t deserve to see her.’
After the call ended, he felt winded. His legs were trembling. He was leaning on the door of a police car. He had a sudden impu
lse to punch the window, see if he could smash it with his fist. The pain of it, the blood, would drown out everything else. He shook another cigarette loose from the pack and lit it, sucking the smoke deep into his lungs.
Dugdale pulled on gloves, lifted the lid of the computer and turned it on. The screen glowed. Icons sprang up. He typed in the password that Sarah Kernan had given him, then opened up the emails. Geoffrey Kernan hadn’t been much of a correspondent. There were online orders. Nothing interesting: light fittings, paint, ink cartridges. There were a few emails from his son, but they seemed to be about practical things. The ‘sent’ box was, at first glance anyway, equally uninspiring.
Dugdale clicked on the browser and opened History. He frowned, clicked again, sat back in his chair and scratched his head. There was nothing at all: the history had been erased. He stared at the computer as if it could give him an answer, then closed it, stood up, and delicately picked it up in his gloved hands. What had Geoffrey Kernan wanted to hide?
SIX
Lola sat in the library. Her eyelids felt heavy. She had been there for nearly three hours. At first it had been interesting because she had simply gone through newspaper cuttings about Frieda Klein. Many of them had been written by a crime correspondent called Liz Barron, who seemed to be the Frieda Klein expert. Frieda Klein, she wrote, ‘is a woman who is drawn to violence, darkness and death’. Lola looked at all the photographs of Frieda Klein over the years and thought Liz Barron might have a point. She never smiled. She had dark hair and dark eyes and she stared out of the newspapers as if she was challenging you.
Lola had made a timeline for all the cases that Frieda Klein had been involved in. It started in 2010 and continued up to the present. It had got a bit complicated, and she’d had to add lots of arrows and circles. There was the case Professor Tearle had mentioned, of the little boy who had been abducted by Dean Reeve. Of course Lola had heard of Reeve, everyone had heard of him, though she was hazy about the details: he was more like a bogeyman, a name that sent shivers up your spine. There was a dead man who’d been found naked on the couch of someone called Michelle Doyce, who was obviously mad and had tried to feed him while he sat there rotting. There was a woman who’d been found dead in her own home, and a case of missing girls that made Lola feel shivery and sad. There was another girl, the following year, who’d been raped and murdered. There was Hannah Docherty, locked away in a hospital for the criminally insane. There was Daniel Blackstock, and the whole media furore when it had at last become public knowledge that what Frieda Klein had always insisted on was true, and that Dean Reeve was alive. Lola stooped over the papers, chewing the end of her pen. Reeve had killed his twin brother, he had disappeared from view, but all these years he had been following Frieda Klein, stalking her, like her obsessive enemy and creepy lover. It made Lola feel a bit spooked just thinking about it.
She tried to make it simpler by colour-coding events. She highlighted deaths in orange, arrests in blue, everything connected to Reeve in green. It was a hopeless mess now, a smudge of colours and criss-crossing lines and exclamation and question marks everywhere. But this wasn’t what Professor Tearle was after. Deconstruct her, he’d said. Unpack her. She half remembered him asking if a crime investigation was actually a form of therapy. What had he meant by that?
That was when it became hard going. She didn’t know why people had to write as if they were tying things up in barbed wire. She had tried to read a paper that Frieda Klein had written on the concept of personality, but had got hopelessly stuck at the first page, with its discussion of pronouns, though she liked the quotation from George Eliot: ‘It’s never too late to become the person you might have been.’ She wrote it down and circled it several time. It appeared Hal Bradshaw had written on Frieda Klein several times. If Liz Barron was the reporter of her external life, Professor Bradshaw had made himself the expert on her inner one. Lola copied some of his terms into her notes: narcissism, self-dramatization, auto-delusion. Bradshaw argued that she craved celebrity and was hollow at her centre. Lola took the Mars bar from her bag. While chewing slowly, she stared at the words in front of her, by a postgraduate student who had written a paper on ‘Dr Frieda Klein and Shattered Autonomy’. She took another bite and now somehow there was chocolate on the paper. Shattered autonomy. That didn’t sound good.
She looked around at the other people, working away, bent over their tablets or notebooks. It was too hot in here. She pushed her trainers off her feet and wriggled her toes. She let her eyes close, just for a moment. The image of Professor Bradshaw floated through her mind, with those under-framed spectacles, and her head lolled.
‘Lola!’ A loud whisper. She jerked awake, saw her friend Denzil grinning at her.
‘I was just thinking about something,’ she said.
‘You were snoring.’
‘Loudly?’
‘Come and have a drink.’
Lola rose with alacrity, pulling on her trainers, picking up her jacket. ‘You bet.’
‘It’s all rubbish,’ she said, over her second glass of wine. ‘She’s seen such awful things. She was raped. Her ex was killed. She’s being stalked by a psychopath. Can you imagine? And all these academic papers do is talk about, I don’t know – confabulation. I’d like to know what it feels like to be her, caught up in all this violence.’
‘So what are you going to do?’
‘I’ll have to cobble something together. Ten thousand words isn’t that long.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘None of the pieces I’ve read seem to get me anywhere.’
‘Is she alive?’
‘Yes.’
‘In London?’
‘I think so.’
‘Well, then.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Go and see her.’
‘Is that allowed?’
‘Why not? You can get her to do your work for you.’
Lola thought for a moment. Seeing Frieda Klein. Talking to her. Suddenly it sounded easier than reading about her.
Dear Frieda Klein, I hope you don’t mind me contacting you like this, out of the blue. My name is Lola Hayes and I’m a student of criminology …
But the email Lola sent to the address she found in the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy register bounced straight back: ‘Your message cannot be delivered to the following recipient’. There was no phone number to call and, of course, she was ex-directory.
Lola looked at the photos of Frieda Klein with her unsmiling mouth and her clear gaze; she looked at her notepad with its barely decipherable scrawls. She knew from the cuttings that she had a house in Saffron Mews, just off Tottenham Court Road. According to Google, that was about eight minutes’ walk from where she was sitting.
Lola buttoned up her jacket. Her mother always said there was no time like the present.
Lola liked the look of the little house in Saffron Mews. It was narrow, squeezed between lock-ups to the left and council flats to the right, and had a blue door. Standing back on the cobbles and tilting her head, she could see there was a skylight in its roof. It looked cosy, she thought, and felt a stab of homesickness. She had grown up in Herefordshire, the only child of parents who had both been in their forties when she was born, and as soon as she had left for university, they had sold their house and moved to Spain, near Málaga. The last time she’d been there she’d got such bad sunburn that there were even blisters behind her knees. After what had happened this summer, with the referendum, perhaps they’d be coming back again, but for now, she had the feeling of being without a real home.
There were no lights on and the shutters on the ground-floor window were folded shut on their hinges. That could mean someone was at home, or that they weren’t. She went to the door and knocked on it firmly, waited, knocked again. Once it was clear no one would answer, she stooped and tried to peer in through the letterbox. She saw a wooden floor, letters stacked neatly on a ledge, a coat hanging from a hook and, straight ahead, the stairs going steeply up.
She pressed her face to the narrow strip of window between the shutters and squinted into a small, book-lined room. Just beneath the window there was a chess table, with the pieces arranged irregularly over it. Lola had never learned to play chess, but she recognized that someone was halfway through a game. At the other end, two chairs sat in front of a small fireplace. The fire was laid, waiting for a match to be put to it. There was a pot plant with orange flowers on the little table, a book with a plain green cover beside it. The room was immaculately clean and tidy.
Lola straightened up and turned away. No one was in. She would have to find Frieda Klein another way.
Dan Quarry stayed late, working his way through the papers. He hated this side of police work, but for the moment it felt like a welcome escape. If he wasn’t doing this he would be at home with the TV, a frozen meal, a few cans of beer. He’d put the bank statements in order, which Geoffrey Kernan hadn’t bothered to do, and now was going through each one. So far, he hadn’t found anything. He looked at the clock on the wall and gave himself half an hour more. Then he’d get a sandwich from the canteen and continue. This was going to take a long time.
Bill Dugdale took the free London paper that was being held towards him as he entered the Underground station and opened it once he was on the train. The mayhem in Hampstead was on the front page, mostly in pictures. Geoffrey Kernan’s murder was on page three, next to a photograph of him that must have been taken years ago. There was a photo of Dugdale as well, taken at the press conference just a few hours ago. His shirt was only half tucked in; he looked large and dishevelled.
He turned the paper over so he could only see the sports headlines on the back. Two days in, and he had almost nothing.
SEVEN
It was a complicated Underground journey to Swiss Cottage. After leaving the station, Lola kept needing to check her phone. But it was better than sitting in a library. Finally she found herself in front of an industrial-looking building that felt out of place in this upmarket residential area. She looked at the brass plate next to the door: The Warehouse. She looked up at the building. Well, it did look like an old warehouse, although a warehouse that had been spruced up with bright colours around the windows and a colourful abstract tiled frieze running the length of the façade just under the roof. She pushed the plate-glass door open and stepped into a small foyer, all wood and bright cushions and a comfy sofa, and a woman of about her own age sitting behind a desk staring down at her phone. She looked up.