by Nicci French
‘He needed looking after.’
‘I made him tea,’ said Michelle. ‘He needed tidying up. He was messy.’ She paused. ‘Where is he? Where’s he gone?’
‘He had to go away,’ said Frieda. She looked at Andrew. He gave a cough and stood up. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s been nice meeting you both but I’m afraid …’
‘Hang on.’ Frieda turned to Michelle. ‘Can you excuse us for a moment?’
She took Berryman’s arm and led him a few yards away.
‘What do you make of her?’
He shrugged. ‘Seems lucid enough to me,’ he said. ‘Mildly dissociative. But not worth coming to Lewisham for.’
‘That man she was talking about,’ said Frieda.
‘Yes?’
‘When a social worker called on her, the man was sitting on her sofa. He was naked and he was dead and in an early state of decay. She had been living with him during that time. So?’
Berryman was silent. Then a slow smile spread across his face. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘All right.’
‘My first question,’ said Frieda, ‘is that this is so weird, so completely off the wall, that maybe she’s faking. She could have killed the man. She probably did kill him. And now she’s pretending to be crazy.’
‘She’s not faking.’ Berryman’s tone was almost one of admiration. ‘Nobody could fake that.’
‘We still don’t know the identity of the man, whether he was a friend or relative of hers, or whether she even knew him.’
‘Who cares about that?’ Berryman wandered up the ward to where some people were sitting, watching TV. Frieda saw him leaning over a bed. When he came back he was carrying a small brown teddy bear.
‘Did you ask if you could borrow that?’
Berryman shook his head. ‘The woman was asleep. I’ll put it back later.’
He walked over and sat down in front of Michelle. He put the bear on his lap. ‘This is a bear,’ he said. She looked puzzled. ‘Where do you think he lives?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t know about them.’
‘If you had to guess,’ he said. ‘Do you think he lives in a forest or a desert?’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ she said. ‘He lives here.’
‘And if you had to guess, what do you think he eats? Little animals? Fish?’
‘I don’t know. Just what people give him, I suppose.’
‘I think that’s a good guess.’
‘Is he hungry?’
‘I don’t know – what do you think?’
‘He doesn’t look hungry, but sometimes it’s hard to tell.’
‘You’re right, it is.’ He smiled at her in delight. ‘Thanks very much.’
Then he got up and walked along the ward, tossing the bear from one hand to the other.
‘Excellent,’ he said, as he returned to Frieda. ‘What I’ll need to do is pop her into the MRI but I think I can guess what I’ll find. There’ll be lesions of some kind in the inferior temporal cortex and the amygdala and –’
‘Sorry,’ Frieda interrupted. ‘What’s this about?’
Berryman looked around, almost as if he’d forgotten Frieda was there.
‘She’s terrific,’ he announced firmly. ‘We just need to get her into a laboratory.’
‘No,’ said Frieda. ‘What we need to do is to cure her, then find out who the man is and who killed him.’
Berryman shook his head. ‘It won’t be curable. Steroids may relieve some cranial pressure.’
‘But why is she behaving like that?’ Frieda asked.
‘That’s the interesting bit. Have you heard of Capgras Syndrome?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘It’s brilliant,’ he said. ‘I mean, unless you get it. People start believing someone close to them, like their wife or husband, has been replaced by an impostor. Did you ever see that movie Invasion of the Bodysnatchers? Like that. The point is, when we look at someone we know, our brain does two things. One bit recognizes the face and another bit tells us that we have an emotional bond to that person. If that second bit doesn’t work, the brain decides there must be something wrong with the person because we’re not feeling anything for them.’
‘But that’s not what Michelle Doyce is doing.’
‘No, no,’ said Berryman, gesturing towards Michelle as if she were a wonderful exhibit. ‘She’s better. There’s an even rarer syndrome that Alzheimer’s patients sometimes – well, hardly ever – get, in which there’s an emergence of delusional companions. It means they invest objects with life, just as Michelle Doyce did with that teddy bear. But she’s even more interesting than that. You know how toddlers, all toddlers, start out as animists –’
‘Which means?’
‘That they don’t make a distinction between their sister or their doll or even the wind blowing or a stone rolling down a hill. For them a leaf is falling because it wants to fall. As they grow up, the brain develops, and we can only interact with the world by making constant subconscious decisions about what in our environment is like us and is responsible and makes decisions, and what doesn’t. If I twisted your ear, you’d make a screaming sound, and if I scrape my foot on the floor it’ll make a screaming sound. You and I know that there’s a difference. I’d guess that when someone gets Michelle into a lab …’
‘I’m not sure that will be possible.’
‘It would be a crime not to,’ said Berryman. ‘And when she’s investigated, I’d bet that she’s either been a chronic drinker or drug addict, or that she’s suffered a severe head injury or, most likely, she’s got a brain tumour. So whoever’s investigating her probably needs to get a move on.’
‘She’s a person. A suffering person.’
‘A very interesting suffering person,’ said Berryman. ‘Which is more than you can say for most people.’
‘So her evidence, all the statements she’s made, are just gibberish.’
Berryman thought for a moment. ‘I wouldn’t say that. She doesn’t see the world the way we do. There’s probably not much point in asking whether she killed that man because she doesn’t know the difference between being dead and being alive, but she felt to me like someone who was trying to tell the truth as she saw it. I’d guess it’s pretty frightening. It must feel like she’s been born into a different, very strange kind of world. You could try paying attention to what she says about it. And that’s what you do, isn’t it?’
‘And you don’t?’ said Frieda.
Berryman’s expression hardened. ‘I sometimes feel like carrying around a little card, which I’d give to people like you. It would say that a lot of the science that ends up helping people is undertaken by men and women who are doing it for its own sake, and that going around weeping for those who suffer doesn’t mean you’re actually doing anything to help them. Except that that’s a bit too much to fit on a little card, but you know what I mean.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Frieda. ‘You came all this way with a strange woman on your day off. That was a good thing.’
His expression relaxed. ‘I think she should be moved to a ward by herself.’
‘Do you?’
‘Certainly. Being surrounded by people will not help her one bit. She needs quiet.’
‘I’ll ask,’ said Frieda, doubtfully.
Berryman waved his hand. ‘Leave it to me. I’ll see to it,’ he said airily.
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’ He considered Frieda for a moment. ‘You’re working with the police?’
‘At arm’s length.’
‘How did that come about?’
‘Some other time,’ said Frieda. ‘It really is a long story.’ She turned to look at Michelle Doyce, who hadn’t picked up her magazine and was staring in front of her. Then Frieda thought of something quite different. ‘That syndrome,’ she said.
‘Which one?’
‘The one where they think someone they love has been replaced.’
‘Capgras Syndrome.’
‘It mus
t be terrifying,’ said Frieda. ‘I mean, so terrifying that we can’t really imagine how terrifying.’
As they entered the lobby, she stopped him. ‘Can you wait for me for just a couple of moments?’
‘Do I have a choice?’
‘Thanks.’
Frieda went into the hospital shop. There were racks of magazines, shelves of crisps, sweets and unhealthy-looking drinks, a paltry collection of shrivelled apples and dried-out oranges, books of Sudoku and, in the corner, a basket of toys. Frieda went over and started rummaging through them.
‘Can I help you?’ asked the woman at the desk. ‘Are you looking for anything in particular?’
‘A teddy bear.’
The woman’s face softened. ‘You’ve a child in there,’ she said. Frieda didn’t contradict her. ‘I’m not sure we have actual teddies, though. There’s a very popular doll that cries when you sit it up.’
‘I don’t think so.’
Frieda pulled out a green velvet frog with protuberant eyes, then a rag doll, with long, spindly legs, and a small, shabby-looking snake. Near the bottom of the basket was a squashy dog, with soft floppy ears and button eyes. ‘This will do.’
She ran up the stairs to the ward and stopped at the desk.
‘Do you think you can give this to Michelle Doyce in bed six?’
‘Don’t you want to give it her yourself?’
‘No.’
The nurse shrugged. ‘All right.’
Frieda turned to go, but at the double doors she stopped. Out of sight, she saw the nurse hand the dog to Michelle. Frieda watched intently: Michelle sat the dog beside her on the pillow and nodded at it respectfully. Then she put out one finger and touched its nose, smiling shyly; she picked up her glass of water and held it under its snout. Her face wore an expression of tender solicitousness and anxious happiness; it had taken that little. Frieda pushed the doors and slipped through them.
Some days she slept. It was wrong, she knew, but torpor would settle on her and she would curl herself up into a ball of body and thick clothes and damp hair and close her sticky eyes and let herself go, drifting down through murky dreams, green weeds and silky, shifting mud. She was half aware that she was asleep: her dreams would get tangled up with what was going on around her. The footsteps on the towpath, the rise and fall of voices, shouted instructions coming from the rowing boats that passed her boat.
When she woke, she would feel thick and stale with sleep. And guilty. If he could see her, he would be angry. No, not angry. He would be disappointed. Let down. She hated that. She remembered her mother’s slumped shoulders, the brave smile that wavered and disappeared. Anything was better than disappointing people.
On this day she had let herself sleep, and when she jerked awake, she couldn’t remember where she was – saliva on her chin, her hair itchy and her cheek sore from the rough fabric of the seat where she lay. She couldn’t remember who she was. She was nobody, just a lumpy shape without a name, without a self. She waited. She let herself know herself again. She pressed her forehead against the narrow window and stared outside at the shifting river. Two grand swans sailed past. Vicious, vicious stares.
Nine
‘This case.’ Commissioner Crawford spoke with barely concealed irritation. ‘Are you winding it up?’
‘Well,’ began Karlsson, ‘there are several –’
‘I looked at the preliminary report. It seems pretty straightforward. The woman’s not all there.’ The commissioner tapped the side of his forehead with a finger. ‘So the outcome doesn’t matter much. The victim was killed in a frenzy. She’s already in a psychiatric hospital anyway, out of harm’s way.’
‘We don’t even know who the victim is yet.’
‘Drug-dealer?’
‘There’s no evidence for that.’
‘You’ve done a search through missing people?’
‘Nothing there. I’m about to interview the other residents of the house to see if they can move us forward.’
‘I’m not convinced this is a good use of your time.’
‘He was still murdered.’
‘This isn’t like your missing children, Mal.’
‘You mean people don’t care?’
‘It’s all about priorities,’ said Crawford, frowning. ‘Take Jake Newton with you, at least. Show him the crap we have to deal with.’
Karlsson started to speak but Crawford interrupted him. ‘For God’s sake, wrap this one up for me.’
Today Jake’s trousers were thin-striped corduroys and his shoes were a pale tan, highly polished with yellow laces. He put up an umbrella as he got out of the car – for it was now pouring with a rain that was thickening towards snow – and walked into the house with care, holding his buttonless jacket closed with one hand. The barriers had been taken down, the crowds had long since gone, and there was no sign that a crime had ever been committed here, except for the tape across Michelle Doyce’s door. There was the same rubbish in the hall, the same smell of shit and decay that coated the back of Karlsson’s throat and made Jake Newton wince. He pulled a large white handkerchief out of his pocket and blew his nose several times, unnecessarily. ‘A bit close in here, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t think they have a cleaner,’ said Karlsson, leading the way upstairs, taking care where he stood.
Later, talking to Yvette, he wasn’t sure which of the three interviews had made him feel the most depressed. Lisa Bolianis was the loneliest. With her creased and reddened face, her thin arms and legs but drinker’s pot belly, she looked as though she was in her forties but turned out to be only thirty-two. She was an alcoholic, who had lost her children and her home. She reeked of cheap spirits as she spoke in flat, mumbling sentences. Karlsson could see bottles under her bed, and several dirty blankets stacked on top of it, along with a torn pink eiderdown. Her clothes were in two black bin bags in a corner. She said that Michelle Doyce was ‘nice enough’ but knew nothing about her and nothing about the man who had been found in her room. She said lots of strange men came to the house but she didn’t mix with them and she wouldn’t be able to recognize anybody if they showed her a picture. She’d had enough of men: they’d never done her any good from her step-father onwards. She had cold sores at the corners of her mouth; when she tried to smile at Karlsson, he could see them cracking. He had his notebook in his hand but didn’t write anything in it. He didn’t really know why he was there – Yvette and Chris Munster had already talked to her: what had he been expecting? All the while, Jake stood by the door, twitching uncomfortably and picking imaginary pieces of lint off the sleeve of his jacket.
If she was the loneliest of the inmates, Tony Metesky was the one who seemed furthest from the reaches of society – a vast, scared ruin of a man, who wouldn’t meet Karlsson’s eye, and who rocked back and forth and talked without making sense, disconnected words and fragments of sentences. The needles had been cleared away. A team from the council had come in their special uniforms, like police divers, and it had taken them a whole day to clean the room. Karlsson tried to ask him about the dealers who had taken over his room, but Metesky wrung his dimpled hands together and his blubbery face screwed up in terror.
‘You’re not in trouble, Tony,’ Karlsson said. ‘We need your help.’
‘Not me.’
‘Did you see anyone go into Michelle Doyce’s room – any of the people who came here?’
‘Like a big baby, that’s me. Won’t tell nobody. Fat smelly baby.’ He laughed anxiously, looking into Karlsson’s face for an answering smile.
‘The men who came here, they threatened you, didn’t they?’
‘It’s all right.’
Karlsson gave up.
Jake didn’t accompany him into Michael Reilly’s room, but chose to wait in the car. He’d been warned about Reilly’s dog. It was chained to the radiator but kept lunging forwards to snarl at Karlsson, who was starting to think the radiator was in danger of coming away from the wall. The air was thick with the smell o
f dog hair and dog shit, and of the dog food in the plastic bowl on the floor. But Michael Reilly was the most voluble of the three remaining residents. He paced round and round the room, jabbing his forefinger in the air. Metesky was a freak, and that Lisa Bolianis couldn’t see what was going on under her own nose, but he, Michael, could tell him a thing or two. He wanted to co-operate fully with any investigation. Did they know, for instance, that kids came to get their drugs here – and that means kids, no more than fourteen? It wasn’t right. He knew he wasn’t one to talk, but those days were in the past for him; he’d served his time and cleaned up his act and was going straight now; he just wanted to help.
‘I see that,’ said Karlsson, gravely. He’d spent enough time in the Met to recognize a crack addict. ‘Can you tell us anything about Michelle Doyce?’
‘Her? She avoided me. I try to be friendly – but with this lot, it’s hard going. The first time I saw her she wanted to give me tea, but she changed her mind. I think it was Buzz. She didn’t like you, did she, Buzz?’ Buzz growled and saliva poured from his open jaws. The radiator trembled. ‘She wasn’t here much, always out looking for stuff. I once saw her down on the riverbank, when the tide was out picking things up from the mud.’
‘Did you ever see her with anyone?’
He shook his head. ‘I never heard her speak much either.’
‘The men who used Mr Metesky’s room, did they ever go into the rest of the house?’
‘I know what you’re getting at.’
‘Then answer the question.’
‘No. They didn’t.’
‘Not into Michelle Doyce’s room?’
‘She kept herself to herself. Quite a sad kind of lady, if you ask me. Why else would she end up in this dump? You wouldn’t be here if you had anywhere else to go, would you? Except I’ve got my dog, eh, Buzz? We keep each other company.’
An unearthly sound came from Buzz’s barrel chest, and Karlsson could see the whites of his rolling eyes.
Frieda walked over Blackfriars Bridge, stopping in the middle to look west towards the London Eye and Big Ben, then east at the smooth dome of St Paul’s, everything flickering and dissolving in the falling snow, which was turning to slush on the pavements. Then she moved swiftly, trying to throw off a feeling of dread and dejection, not pausing at Smithfield Market or in St John Street, and at last she was in Islington, standing in front of Chloë and Olivia’s house, five minutes early for her niece’s chemistry lesson. She knocked and heard feet running to the door. Chloë had grown taller and thinner over the past few months, and her hair was cut dramatically short; it stood up in uneven tufts and Frieda wondered if she’d done it herself. She had kohl smudged round her eyes and there was a new piercing in her nose. She had a fading love bite on her neck.