Tuesday's Gone

by Nicci French

  Forty-four

  When Frieda woke, it was four in the morning. His body was warm and smooth against her. She slipped out from under the covers. In the dark she was able to find clothes and pull them on. She picked up her coat and scarf and held her shoes in her hand, so they wouldn’t clatter on the wooden floor. She heard a murmur from the bed. She leaned down and softly kissed the back of his head, the nape of his neck.

  As she began to walk, she felt as if she were still asleep. It was dark and still and cool. She walked up Golden Lane, which turned into Clerkenwell Road and she realized she was making her way along what had been London’s city walls. Once, this would have been a walk through gardens and orchards and across streams. That would be what the tourist guides would tell you. But Frieda thought of what must have come after that: the sheds, the rubbish heaps, the jerry-built houses, the squatters, the chancers, as the countryside slowly gave up and died.

  She turned to make a circle back towards home. Now it was offices and council estates and small galleries, and the traffic that never stopped and a few stragglers, ending the day or beginning it, on the pavements. Someone approached her and asked if she wanted a cab. She pretended not to hear.

  This night, or this morning, the city felt slightly different. Was it the clarity that comes from the cold darkness and the dark stillness? That she had opened herself to someone again? She thought about the night and felt a shiver. She looked around. She had been walking almost unconsciously and needed to orient herself. At this time of day, three, four hundred years ago, it would have been busy, full of carts loaded with food, livestock being driven into city. She looked up and saw the street name, Lamb’s Conduit Street, and smiled at it as if it were echoing her thoughts. It sounded sweet, but by this part of their journey the lambs would have started to stir and become agitated, smelling the stink of the Smithfield slaughterhouses blown up from the river.

  She looked around. Again that feeling. Always she walked in London at night because it was there that she felt alone and untouched. Now it was different, and it wasn’t just the thought of Sandy, asleep in his flat. It was something else. She thought of playing Grandmother’s Footsteps as a little girl. You looked round to see if you could catch anyone moving. Every time you looked, the players would be still but closer. Until they got you.

  When she arrived home, it was half past five. She took off her clothes. She could smell him on her. She stood in the shower for twenty minutes in the spray of water, trying to lose herself, trying not to think, but she couldn’t stop herself. She realized she had to phone Karlsson. It was still much too early. After she was dry, she sat in her armchair downstairs, tired but fiercely awake, her eyes stinging. She heard birds singing outside. Against all the evidence, spring was coming. Just after seven she got up and made herself coffee and toast. At one minute past eight, she phoned Karlsson.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said.

  ‘How did you know?’

  There was a pause. ‘You do know about mobile phones?’ he said. ‘That your name shows up when you ring me?’

  ‘You probably don’t want to hear from me.’

  ‘I always want to hear from you.’

  ‘I know you were disappointed in my interview with Frank Wyatt.’

  ‘We all have our off days.’

  ‘It wasn’t an off day,’ she said.

  ‘You didn’t get him to confess.’

  ‘That’s true,’ said Frieda. ‘Are you charging him?’

  ‘As I said, we’re putting the file together. I’m just trying to tie up some loose ends. I’m going over to the Michelle Doyce flat today. We’re going to have some of the contents boxed up.’

  ‘When are you doing it?’

  ‘I’ve got some meetings this morning. Some time in the afternoon.’

  ‘Can I come? I’d like to see it.’

  ‘You’ve seen it already, haven’t you?’

  ‘I saw it from the outside, when we looked at the alley, but I never went in.’

  ‘All right,’ said Karlsson. ‘You can join us.’

  ‘Could I see it before they start packing things up?’

  ‘I’ll meet you there at half past ten.’

  The phone rang again.

  ‘You ran away.’

  ‘I didn’t run away. I needed to get away. I needed to think.’

  ‘About how you’d made a mistake.’

  ‘No, not about that.’

  ‘So I’ll see you.’

  ‘Yes, you’ll see me.’

  Frieda didn’t go straight to the house. She took the Underground and then the Docklands Light Railway across the Isle of Dogs and under the river to the Cutty Sark. She got out and walked west until she was standing outside the Wyatts’ house. There was a light on inside. She turned towards the river. The tide was high, the water pitching against the Embankment. A tourist boat chugged past. Two children waved at her. She continued walking along the bank, first past the other apartments, then a yacht club, fenced off, the entrance to a wharf with a uniformed man sitting in a booth. Guarding what? Frieda thought. He looked at her suspiciously. He stepped outside and walked towards her. ‘Can I help you?’ he said.

  ‘Are you always here?’ she asked.

  ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘I just wondered.’

  ‘I’m not always here,’ he said. ‘But someone is. If you want to know.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Frieda, and continued westwards, past the railings of a primary school and the site of a warehouse being demolished that was entirely boarded up and inaccessible. And then she reached Howard Street and found herself standing outside the house where it had all started.

  ‘Yes,’ she said to herself. ‘Yes.’

  Frieda stared at Michelle Doyce’s living room, then noticed that Karlsson was looking at her and smiling.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘It’s like the sea,’ he said. ‘People can describe it to you, but you have to go and look at it yourself. Quite a collection, isn’t it?’

  Frieda was almost dazed by the room, which was somehow both obsessively neat and horribly chaotic. She saw shoes, stones, feathers and bones of birds, newspapers, bottles, silver wrappers folded into squares, glass jars, cigarette butts, dried leaves, dried flowers, little pieces of metal that looked as if they had been salvaged from machines. There were beads and clothes and assorted cups and glasses. Where even to begin?

  ‘I’d like to see Jasmine Shreeve do one of her programmes here,’ said Karlsson.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘That programme where a psychiatrist judges you by looking at your home? This one would give them a bit of a fright.’ His tone changed. ‘Sorry. I know it’s not funny.’

  ‘Actually, I sometimes think I might learn more about my patients by looking at where they live than listening to what they say.’ She shook her head and said, almost to herself, ‘I should have come here before. This is like looking inside Michelle Doyce’s head.’

  ‘Which is not a pretty sight?’ said Karlsson.

  ‘Poor woman.’

  ‘Have you seen things like this before?’

  ‘I don’t really deal with acute psychiatric disorders,’ said Frieda, ‘but obsessive hoarding is quite a common symptom. You must have heard about people who can’t throw anything away, newspapers, their own shit.’

  ‘All right, all right,’ said Karlsson. ‘That’s too much information. Being here is bad enough without hearing about things that are even worse.’

  Frieda felt herself flush, as if she were going to faint. But the feeling seemed to be in her brain. When she spoke, it was in a whisper: ‘I don’t like this case.’

  Karlsson looked at her curiously. ‘You’re not supposed to like it. It’s not a night at the theatre.’

  ‘No,’ Frieda said slowly. ‘I don’t mean that. It’s just that nothing seems to fit. We’re standing in a crime scene that isn’t really a crime scene. The victim seems to be the main perpetrator. And
the motives are obvious, but they don’t seem enough. And then there’s Janet Ferris. She must have been killed because she saw something. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that it was Frank Wyatt. Why would he have gone there? We’d already connected him to Poole.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘I don’t feel we’re seeing the whole story. I keep thinking about Beth Kersey. Poole used people. He tried to change Mary Orton’s will but failed. He took some money from the Wyatts. Probably he was going to steal from Jasmine Shreeve. What was he going to do with Beth Kersey? Have you had any luck getting her medical details?’

  ‘That’s a dead end,’ said Karlsson.

  ‘It’s not. It’s crucial.’

  ‘We can access her medical records if she’s a suspect or a victim of a crime. At the moment she is an adult who hasn’t even been reported missing. But for the moment we’re here because you said you wanted to be here.’

  ‘All right, all right,’ said Frieda, trying to clear her mind. ‘So, the idea is that Michelle Doyce found Robert Poole’s body outside in the alley by the house. She brought him in and stripped him and washed his clothes and folded them up, in the process probably removing any hair or fibres.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘She tried to help,’ said Frieda. ‘She saw Robert Poole as someone in trouble and she tried to be a Good Samaritan but in the process she ruined things.’

  ‘Exactly. She couldn’t have done a better job of getting rid of the evidence if she’d done it deliberately.’

  Frieda looked around, trying to take it all in. The sheer mass of it made her head ache. ‘This really is like her mind,’ she said. ‘When most of us go out we bring back things in our memory or maybe we take a photo. But she just brought the things back.’

  ‘She was a real magpie,’ said Karlsson.

  ‘Yes.’ Frieda frowned. ‘Yes, she was.’

  ‘You make that sound interesting. It’s just what you say about people who collect things.’

  Frieda looked at the window. The day had gone grey. ‘Are there lights?’

  Karlsson went to the doorway to switch on the ceiling light, and then, with his foot, an old standard lamp in the corner. Frieda stepped forward and looked at it more closely. Suspended from short pieces of thread around the frame that held the lampshade were what looked like beads and pieces of glass. Frieda peered at them one by one. ‘Magpies don’t collect just anything,’ she said. ‘They collect sparkly things.’

  ‘I don’t know much about them,’ said Karlsson. ‘When I see them, they’re mainly pecking at dead pigeons.’

  Frieda took a new pair of surgical gloves from her pocket and put them on.

  ‘Are you still buying those yourself?’ said Karlsson. ‘We can get them for you.’

  ‘Remember what Yvette said about Michelle Doyce? That she was the saddest woman she’d ever met? This room is like that. Those dead bits of bird, the newspaper, the old cigarette butts smoked by other people. They contain a sadness that I don’t even want to think about. But the sparkly things are different. They’re pretty.’

  ‘If you like that kind of thing.’

  ‘Come and look at these.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Karlsson stepped forward.

  ‘What do you see?’ she asked.

  ‘Bits of glass.’

  She cradled one of the other little dangling objects in her gloved hand. ‘What about this one?’

  ‘It’s a bead.’

  ‘Describe it to me.’

  ‘Well, it’s not exactly a bead. It’s a sort of shiny metal cube, with a bit of blue at the centre.’

  ‘I think the blue might be lapis lazuli,’ said Frieda. ‘And the shiny metal could be silver.’

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Are you serious?’ asked Karlsson.

  ‘Yes.’

  He strained his eyes. ‘There’s a little metal thing on two of the sides.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Do you think it may be for attaching it to something?’

  ‘Maybe. Or maybe not.’

  ‘And look,’ said Frieda. ‘There are two more here and one on the other side. Just the same.’

  She stood back. Her eyes had been dazzled by the proximity of the bulb. ‘There should be others.’

  ‘You mean beads like that?’

  ‘Yes. Beads like that.’

  She began pacing around the room.

  ‘Frieda …’

  ‘Shut up,’ said Frieda. ‘Find the others.’

  She found three, ranged along the windowsill. Karlsson found four in a glass, arranged around the stub of a candle, standing in its own dried wax. Another four were placed along the frame of the door.

  ‘This is like a children’s party,’ said Karlsson.

  Frieda had stopped. She was standing in the middle of the room with her eyes closed. Suddenly they opened. ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘I said, it’s like a children’s party. You know, like an Easter-egg hunt, or something like that.’

  Frieda ignored him. She took the three beads from the windowsill, placed them in the palm of her hand and stared at them closely. She turned to Karlsson. ‘Have you got a torch?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I thought policemen carried torches.’

  ‘In films made in the 1950s. I’m afraid I don’t have a truncheon either.’

  She walked over to the standard lamp, lifted the shade off and held her hand close to the bulb. She looked at the beads so intently that her eyes hurt.

  ‘Yes?’ said Karlsson.

  ‘Look at this one.’ Frieda pointed at one of the beads.

  ‘It’s a bit grubby,’ said Karlsson.

  ‘Do you have something we can put these in?’

  Karlsson took a transparent evidence bag from his pocket and Frieda dropped them in, one by one.

  ‘What do you think they are?’ asked Frieda.

  ‘Beads.’

  ‘And what do you get if you join beads together?’

  ‘A bangle of some kind?’

  ‘Or if you have more beads?’

  ‘A necklace, maybe. But aren’t these just something that Michelle Doyce found somewhere?’

  ‘That’s exactly what they are,’ said Frieda. ‘She found them joined together and took them apart and used them to decorate her room. These are nice. And they look handmade to me. And valuable. She didn’t just find them on the pavement.’

  ‘So …’

  ‘So you’ve got to stop your guys packing this stuff away. Instead, they’ve got to find as many as they can. There’ll probably be fifteen or twenty more, at least. Then show a photograph of them to Aisling Wyatt. And you said that one of them was dirty. Find out what the dirt is.’

  ‘Of course, it could be that they’re just beads,’ said Karlsson.

  When the phone rang, Frieda knew it was going to be Karlsson. It almost rang with Karlsson’s accent.

  ‘Do you want the good news or the good news?’ he said.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘You’re forgiven,’ said Karlsson. ‘Completely forgiven. Aisling Wyatt has identified the necklace. She said it “went missing” a few weeks ago. What an amazing coincidence. Our trophy collector at work again. Robert Poole clearly took things from whoever he conned and redistributed them: some kind of power game. And that’s not even the best bit. You knew, didn’t you? Though fuck knows how. The dirt on the necklace was blood. Robert Poole’s blood.’ There was a pause. ‘You know what this means, don’t you? It means we can charge Frank Wyatt.’

  ‘No,’ said Frieda. ‘What it means is you can’t charge Frank Wyatt.’

  ‘Joanna,’ said Frieda, ‘where else did Dean like to go? Apart from Margate.’

  ‘It’s in the book. Can I have another beer?’

  ‘Of course. I’ll get one in a minute. I’ve read the book.’

  ‘Did you like
it?’

  ‘I thought it was extremely interesting.’

  ‘Fishing. He liked to go fishing. Anywhere – canals and flooded gravel pits and rivers. He could sit there all day with his tin of maggots. Drove me mad.’

  ‘What happened to his fishing rods?’

  ‘I sold them on eBay. I didn’t say who they’d belonged to.’

  ‘Anywhere else, any particular town?’

  ‘We didn’t travel much. When he was a kid, he said he and his ma used to go to Canvey Island.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Why? Why d’you need to know?’

  ‘I’m tying up loose ends,’ said Frieda, vaguely.

  Joanna nodded, as if satisfied. Frieda got her another beer and watched her as she drank it, froth on her upper lip.

  ‘I’m surprised you’ve got the nerve,’ she said, when she’d finished it. ‘After everything.’

  ‘You didn’t think we’d meet again?’

  ‘No. I’m in the new chapter of my life. That’s what my editor said to me. You belong to the old one.’

  Forty-five

  It was in the middle of the night when the voices came back. They started as a murmur that Beth could barely distinguish from the lapping of the water against the hull and the rustle of the trees by the bank and the spatter of rain on the roof. She knew the voices were coming for her and she tried to hide from their anger, shut them out by wrapping a pillow around her head, blocking her ears, but gradually the voices became clearer, then settled into one voice, harsh, heavy, deep, coming out of the darkness close by and surrounding her.

  It was angry with her. It asked questions she couldn’t answer. It made accusations. It knew her secrets and her fears.

  ‘You let him down.’

  ‘No, I didn’t let him down.’

  ‘He went away and you forgot him.’

  ‘No, I didn’t forget him.’

  The voice said terrible things to her, told her that she had done nothing, that she was nothing, that she was useless. She told him about the photographs and the documents but the voice just continued with its harsh accusations.