Day of the Dead

by Nicci French

  Frieda drummed on the table with her fingers.

  ‘What?’ said Lola. ‘Say something.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘It would be fun,’ said Lola.

  ‘Fun.’

  ‘You say it like it’s a dirty word.’

  Frieda smiled slightly. ‘You don’t know what you’re getting into,’ she said.

  ‘But you’ll protect me?’

  Frieda looked full on at Lola. Those eyes again. ‘You’ll do what I say.’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘You won’t lie to me.’

  ‘Of course I won’t.’

  ‘There are different ways of lying. It won’t happen the way you expect. It’ll seem like the right thing to do, but it won’t be.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘You don’t need to,’ said Frieda. ‘That’s why we have rules. That’s why we make promises.’

  ‘All right, I promise. But you’ll protect me? For a while.’

  ‘We’ll give it a try.’

  THIRTEEN

  The two of them walked out of the café and Frieda told Lola to wait while she went into a newsagent’s. She emerged and handed Lola an Oyster card.

  ‘Don’t do anything that can be traced,’ she said.

  ‘Isn’t that going too far?’

  ‘Let’s try that for the moment,’ said Frieda. ‘Going too far.’

  ‘Am I really doing this?’

  ‘I don’t know. Are you?’

  ‘I’ve got nothing. My passport, my laptop, my clothes. Everything. It’s all back in my flat.’

  Frieda nodded. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘We’ll go there. Five minutes. Take what you can carry in one shoulder bag. Where do you live?’

  ‘I’m sharing a flat just off Holloway Road.’

  ‘Good. We can walk.’

  ‘Can’t we take an Uber?’ Lola saw Frieda’s disapproving expression. ‘I forgot. Walking is what you do.’

  As they crossed Junction Road and went through Tufnell Park, Frieda didn’t speak. She just strode so quickly that Lola almost had to run to keep up with her.

  ‘The funny thing,’ said Lola, ‘is that I’ll probably never know whether this was the right thing to do.’

  ‘I think you’ll know,’ said Frieda.

  After twenty minutes’ walk, they were standing in front of a large, dark-bricked terrace house, almost in the shadow of Holloway Prison. Frieda looked around. She couldn’t see anybody. Not that that meant anything.

  ‘We’re on the second floor,’ said Lola.

  ‘We?’

  ‘My flatmate, Jess. She’s probably my best friend as well.’

  ‘Make an excuse for going away.’

  ‘Do you want to come up and meet her?’

  ‘Of course I don’t.’

  ‘You’d like her.’

  ‘I’ll stay here,’ said Frieda. ‘Remember. Five minutes.’

  It was closer to ten minutes later when Lola re-emerged with a bulky canvas bag over her shoulder. Frieda immediately set off in the direction of Holloway Road.

  ‘I was talking to Jess,’ Lola said. ‘I said I was going away to work on my dissertation and that I wasn’t sure when I’d be back, but it’d be several days at least, maybe more.’

  ‘Was she all right with that?’

  ‘Jess is all right with everything.’

  They jumped on a bus in Holloway Road. At Camden Town they changed to another bus. At first Lola recognized the areas they were passing through, Chalk Farm, Swiss Cottage, but then they changed buses again and she stared out of the window at residential streets and busy roads and warehouses and she felt like she could have been in any city. It seemed as if she had gone into another world, another life, and she wanted the old one back. It must have shown on her face because Frieda looked at her with concern and gave the first smile Lola had seen from her. She put her hand on Lola’s arm. ‘You just need to trust me,’ she said.

  For a moment Lola felt a wave of relief and then the wave seemed to recede. It was a physical feeling. Trust. It was so easy to say that. But how did you know who to trust? She wished she had paid more attention while reading through the files and press cuttings. She remembered enough to know that people close to Frieda Klein, people associated with her, people who had just crossed her path, had got killed. But had they trusted her or had they failed to trust her?

  She was woken from these confused thoughts by Frieda’s voice. ‘This is where we get off.’

  They walked through various residential streets and arrived at a warehouse that had been turned into apartments. Frieda stopped outside a black front door, took out her key, unlocked it and they stepped inside. It didn’t feel like a home at all. There was a smell of paint. The floor was wood; the walls were painted white and entirely bare. The living room, which was also the kitchen, contained a wooden table and chair, a sofa and nothing else. The only brightness came from the large windows in the far wall and Lola stepped forward to look out.

  ‘Wow,’ she said.

  She was staring down on the dirty grey water of a canal. On the far side was the towpath. There was a woman pushing a buggy, an old man with a dog: the normal life she was now seeing through glass.

  ‘You like canals,’ she said. ‘You and Dean both.’

  Frieda showed Lola round the spartan flat. There was one bedroom, but the sofa in the main room pulled out into a bed and there was a spare set of sheets. Frieda went over to her computer and Lola saw her face clench as she looked at the screen. Then she filled a kettle with water, before gesturing Lola to sit down.

  ‘Ground rules,’ she said. ‘Number one. Don’t communicate with anyone.’

  ‘What? What about on Facebook?’

  ‘No. Later you should go to a café and put up a post saying you’re going off radar because you’re working on your dissertation, so nobody will worry or try to track you down. Then that’s it.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘You don’t use your card. You don’t email anyone. You can go online and read things, research your dissertation if you want, watch a film. But there can be no output from you. Give me your mobile.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Lola, but she handed it over.

  Frieda opened the window and, before Lola had time to realize what was happening, dropped it into the canal beneath.

  ‘My phone!’ she yelped. ‘I’ve only just got it. What do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘I’ll buy you a pay-as-you-go tomorrow. When this is all over, I’ll get you a new one.’

  ‘Now I won’t even know what time it is. I don’t have a watch. Or, at least, I do. I’ve got a nice one, my gran gave it to me when I turned eighteen, but I left it in the flat.’

  ‘You can ask me the time.’

  ‘That’s not the point. Anyway, this seems extreme to me. Honestly, do you really think it’s necessary?’

  ‘I wish it wasn’t. But, you see, you’ve already stirred things up.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If you go and talk to someone like Liz Barron, what do you think she’s going to do about it?’

  ‘The journalist?’

  Frieda pulled her laptop towards her and read aloud from her screen: ‘ “Fears are growing for the safety of troubled therapist Frieda Klein, forty. She has not been seen since her controversial role in the Daniel Blackstock murder case. Close friends have expressed concern …” And so on and so on. Barron just did what you did, bothered my friends and bothered my colleagues, but she got more out of them than you did. Or probably she just made it up. I can’t imagine Paz expressing concern to Liz Barron.’ Frieda scrolled down the article. ‘You’re mentioned too. Though not by name. “Dr Klein’s disappearance came to light when a student studying Klein and the Dean Reeve case could find no trace of her at her home or at her work.” ’

  ‘That’s not true,’ said Lola, indignantly.

  ‘It doesn’t matter. What matters is that Dean Reeve will read it. He doesn’t like i
t when people think they can get the better of him.’

  Lola stared at her with the scared eyes of a child.

  ‘I’ve seen what he does to them,’ said Frieda, going over to the boiling kettle.

  ‘Don’t say that.’

  ‘Why?’ said Frieda. ‘Do you want me to say that I’m sorry and I didn’t mean to frighten you? Because I absolutely want to frighten you.’

  ‘All right, I’m frightened. I’m frightened and I’m hungry.’

  ‘I can help with the hunger. Hold on to the fear.’

  After they had eaten, Frieda sat at her computer. Lola put on her flannel pyjamas, then sat on the sofa-bed. Everything felt very quiet. She looked at Frieda and Frieda seemed to sense her gaze. They stared at each other in silence for a moment.

  ‘Do you mind if I ask something?’ said Frieda.

  Lola just shrugged.

  ‘It’s difficult to walk out on your life,’ Frieda said. ‘I know, because I’ve done it. I’ve done it more than once. You hurt yourself and you hurt other people. But you’ve just done it.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  Frieda gave a faint smile. ‘You don’t seem like someone who can disentangle herself so easily. What about your family? What will they say?’

  ‘There’s just my parents. They’ve moved to Spain. They’ve got a house in Málaga. I hardly ever talk to them. Or, at least, I do. I call them up but they don’t seem to notice if it’s been a day or a week since we last spoke. I don’t think they miss me. I sometimes think –’ She stopped and looked down at the floor, blinking rapidly.

  Frieda regarded her thoughtfully. Then she asked, ‘What about friends? They might get upset. They might even report you missing.’

  Lola suddenly felt her heart beating hard in her chest. She started to speak but she found it difficult to put into words. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Last year I had a really intense time. Maybe too intense. I’ve got friends, I guess. I always have. Lots of friends in a way. But I pulled back from them a bit. I mean, I still go out and have fun and get drunk and giggle and dance and all that stuff. Good-time Lola. But it’s been a bit of an act in the past few months. I don’t talk to them like I used to. You know. Talk about anything that really matters. It’s all just …’ she waved a hand in the air ‘… stuff. The chats. My father always says I can talk for England. People probably like having me around, but maybe they wouldn’t really notice if I wasn’t there.’

  ‘You’re telling me that both your parents and your friends aren’t attending to you?’ Frieda’s voice was soft.

  Lola flushed. ‘They probably would if I asked them – or, at least, my friends would. But I needed … I needed some space, some time. I think if I let people know I’ve gone away to write my dissertation, nobody will try to track me down. I mean, they know I’m in a bit of a pickle over it. So I’m OK for a week or two anyway.’ There was a long silence; Frieda’s dark eyes were on her. She forced a little laugh. ‘You probably think I should be coming to see you as a patient rather than, you know, whatever this is.’

  ‘This will pass,’ said Frieda. ‘It’s serious. Very serious. But it will pass. Then you can go back to your life and deal with things. Maybe I could be of some help.’

  ‘Yeah, whatever,’ said Lola. She got up and rifled through the bag she’d brought from her flat, lifting out the clothes and toiletries before she found what she wanted.

  Putting the harmonica to her lips, she gave a loud blast on it. That did the trick: Frieda looked up, startled.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Playing my harmonica,’ said Lola, cheerily. ‘Or, rather, making a sound on it. I don’t know how to play. Not yet.’

  ‘Your harmonica.’

  ‘Someone gave it to me on my birthday, but I haven’t got round to using it before. I thought it would be a good time to learn.’

  ‘You did, did you?’

  ‘It can’t be that hard.’ Lola looked at the little silver bar doubtfully. ‘I don’t have any instructions. I’ll find something on YouTube.’

  She put the instrument to her mouth and blew once more, this time emitting a high, brassy shriek. Frieda winced.

  FOURTEEN

  Liz Barron sat in the bar and nursed her gin and tonic, her third of the evening. Or was it her fourth? After the first she had felt sharp and clear and exaggeratedly alert. From the moment she had talked to that student, she’d had the nerve-tingling sense that she was on to a story that nobody else even suspected. But then she had used the second and the third and then maybe the fourth, if there had been a fourth, to calm her down, relax. Recently she’d been doing that more and more. Self-medication.

  She fished the slice of lemon out of the tumbler and slid it into her mouth. Frieda Klein had been her subject for years now. She had interviewed her, door-stepped her, researched her life, spoken to her friends and to her enemies. And Frieda Klein had disappeared and nobody would tell her why. Malcolm Karlsson hadn’t been any help at all, and his sour-faced sidekick had been even worse.

  What was more, she had tried to find Lola Hayes but her friends and tutor said she had gone away recently, to write her dissertation. Nobody seemed to know where she was. But Quarry might be useful. She gave a small smile and lifted her glass again, only to find it empty.

  ‘Would you like another of those?’

  She looked round, tried to focus her blurred vision. A man whose face had a windblown, outdoor look seemed to be smiling at her; she squinted at him.

  ‘Why not?’ she said.

  He went to the bar to order and she watched him from behind. He was lean and, though he wasn’t tall, he looked powerful. His arms were thick.

  ‘Here.’ He put it down in front of her, along with a pint of beer for himself.

  ‘Thank you. I’m Liz.’

  ‘Graham,’ he said. ‘I was half scared to approach you.’

  ‘Scared?’ She gave a low laugh. ‘I don’t think I’m that scary.’

  ‘You looked deep in thought.’

  ‘I was.’

  She took a deep swallow of her drink and felt it slide down her throat, clean and viscous. Her bones felt soft and her thoughts swam in her head.

  ‘Are you going to tell me why?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She looked at him and took another sip. The bar was almost empty. ‘That depends.’

  ‘What does it depend on, Liz?’

  ‘How quickly I drink this.’

  They both laughed. He lifted his beer but didn’t drink any.

  ‘I don’t want to pry,’ he said. ‘Perhaps it’s personal. Maybe you were thinking of a man.’

  ‘Wrong!’ She leaned forward. ‘I was certainly not thinking of a man. I was thinking of a woman.’ She sipped her gin. It seemed to be almost all gone. ‘Not in a personal way,’ she added.

  ‘Then how?’ said the man. His voice was soft, almost caressing. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I haven’t really got anything to tell. Not yet. I’m a journalist and I’ve got a hunch I might be on to something. Or, rather, someone.’

  ‘This woman.’

  ‘Yes. Do you ever have the feeling that there’s something you want, just out of sight and out of reach, and if you’re careful and clever, you’ll be able to get hold of it?’

  The man nodded. ‘I do,’ he said. ‘I like to fish. I sit by the water and I wait. I can wait all day. I wait until the line twitches. Even the smallest tug and I feel it. I’m a patient man, Liz.’

  Her mobile, which was lying screen down on the table, started to rattle and she turned it over. It was a text from Dan Quarry and she gave a small smile of satisfaction.

  ‘Good news?’ asked the man.

  ‘I’ve been fishing too,’ she said. ‘This is the tug on the line.’

  He chuckled, watching her intently.

  ‘I should go,’ she said, looking at her watch. ‘I can still get the last train.’

  She stood up, surprisingly steady on her feet, and he rose too.

/>   ‘I’ll walk you to the station,’ he said. ‘It’s dark out there. Dark and cold.’

  FIFTEEN

  Dugdale stared round the room at the start of the daily meeting. ‘Let’s have a round-up, starting with Lee Samuels.’ He turned to the young detective who was newly recruited to the team. ‘Malik. What have you got?’

  The detective glanced down at his notes, gave a small cough. ‘I talked to his girlfriend and she said he’d been rather depressed recently. He was out of work and drinking a bit too much. It seems he flew off the handle with her quite a bit.’

  Dugdale felt a flicker of interest. ‘How badly?’

  Malik shook his head. ‘To kill him, take the body to Hampstead Heath, put it on a bonfire? She didn’t seem quite the type. Too small for a start.’

  ‘You never know. Anyway, go on.’

  ‘His parents both live in Derby. They don’t know much about his life since he moved to London. He was last seen on September the twenty-sixth, when he had a drink with friends at a pub in Royal Oak, and he was reported missing on September the twenty-ninth, so he must have been killed, or at least taken, between those two dates.’

  ‘Anything more?’

  ‘The autopsy shows that Samuels was strangled,’ he said. ‘Like Kernan. Probably with thin wire, though. There was no evidence of significant decomposition before the body was placed on the bonfire. The site was muddy and by the time Forensics got to it –’

  ‘I know, I know,’ said Dugdale. ‘Total disaster. So were any traces found?’

  The detective looked back at the notes. ‘There were grooves nearby, but the man who built the fire confirms that he transported much of the wood by wheelbarrow so they probably come from that.’

  ‘Anything from CCTV, Kevin?’ asked Dugdale, to a sandy-haired detective on his left.

  ‘We’ve looked at all the cameras in the area, and they show us nothing remarkable – but, then, we don’t know what we’re looking for. There were hundreds of cars but we don’t know where to start.’

  ‘What else?’ Nobody spoke. Dugdale sighed, scratched the side of his face and then said, ‘All right. We’re working on the assumption that Kernan and Samuels were killed by the same person. Let’s turn to Kernan. Dan, what have you found out?’