by Nicci French
‘OK,’ she began. ‘Six pictures of different sizes. Poole took the third smallest, stowed it under his bed and replaced it with the picture he’d taken from Tessa Welles, the one he gave to Janet Ferris and that she then put back.’ She gave a small sigh. ‘Poor thing. Sometimes I think it’s people’s attempt to do the right thing that destroys them. Anyway, imagine the scene. Tessa and Harry Welles have killed her. The picture they have brought is too small for the space, but it will fit where the second smallest picture hung. The second smallest picture will fit where the smallest picture hung. There is still a gap, which they cover with the next biggest picture, so they move each picture to cover the smaller patch. This leaves them with one large blank patch, which they cover by moving the dresser, and one little painting, which they take away with Tessa’s.’
‘Wasn’t there an easier way?’
‘It depends how you look at it,’ said Frieda. ‘You’ve got to remember that they were in a state of extreme stress. There was a body hanging in front of them. They were having to improvise. They solved one problem at a time, and I think they managed it pretty well. There was another reason as well. By moving all the pictures, they disguised which was the important one.’
‘I think I’ll have to see it written down,’ said Munster.
‘There is the alternative theory,’ said Yvette. ‘Which is that Poole just wanted to rearrange his pictures.’
‘That was what I thought,’ said Karlsson. ‘So this morning we went to Tessa Welles’s flat. We found the painting, the real one with the bloody pine tree and the moon, and they’ve got it downstairs where they’re going over it. Unofficially there are several sets of prints on the frame.’
‘So they would have got away with it if they hadn’t made a mistake with the bloody pictures?’ asked Munster.
‘No. Lots of small things didn’t add up. But it was all vague at first,’ said Frieda. ‘With everyone else Poole met, he found their weakness, got under their skin. But Tessa got under Poole’s skin. That was interesting. Their eagerness to get involved with me seemed a bit strange. It may sound crazy, but it was as if they wanted to become part of the inquiry.’
‘It doesn’t sound crazy at all,’ said Karlsson. ‘It’s part of our training. It’s not at all uncommon for perpetrators to hang around the fringes of the investigation, even to try and get involved. It’s to do with control. At least, that’s what the textbooks say.’
‘The Welleses were big on control,’ Frieda said. ‘It all smelt funny to me but finding Aisling Wyatt’s necklace was the key thing.’
‘Which implicated the Wyatts,’ said Munster.
‘The people it definitely didn’t implicate were the Wyatts. I know that people leave things at murder scenes, but not an expensive necklace. It’s just the sort of thing that Poole would have helped himself to, though, and shown off to Tessa. Even given to her.’
‘So why did it end up in Michelle’s flat?’ said Munster.
‘I walked the route from the Wyatts’ flat along the river to where Michelle Doyce lived. Tessa and Harry Welles must have checked the same route in their car. They wanted to dump the body as close to the Wyatts’ place as possible, and Howard Street is closest to where you could pull a car up to an alley and leave a body without being seen. And they put Aisling’s necklace in his pocket. It was as if they thought the police were really thick and needed to be led by the nose.’
‘How did you know that Tessa had had an affair with Poole?’
Frieda shrugged. ‘It was more or less a guess,’ she said. ‘Poole stopped sleeping with Aisling Wyatt at about the time he met Tessa. It seemed likely. When Tessa described the idea as pornographic, I knew I’d been right. But even when I’d started to feel queasy about Tessa and Harry Welles, I knew that probably none of it counted as real evidence. Even Harry calling him ‘Bob’ to me, that one time. And whatever you think of me, I do understand you can’t simply follow your intuition. That’s what lynch mobs do. I felt certain the Wyatts were innocent but that someone else could be guilty aside from Harry and Tessa. What about Beth Kersey, for instance?’ She rubbed her face. ‘So I used Michelle Doyce as bait. For my sins.’
‘You were sure they’d kill her to protect themselves?’ said Munster.
‘I felt they had a taste for it,’ said Frieda. ‘And that this was something they could do. I’d imagine that murder gets easier after the first one or two.’
‘So,’ said Karlsson, ‘it’s the end of the case. We’ve found Robert Poole’s killers, and Janet Ferris’s. The one person we haven’t found and never will is Robert Poole himself. That’s not even his name. He’s not Edward Green either. He’s a mystery, a blank.’
‘Perhaps that’s why he was so successful at what he did,’ added Frieda. ‘He became whoever people wanted him to be, became like a mirror for the victims, reflecting back to them the self they wanted to see. He was the son Mary Orton didn’t have, the lover Aisling Wyatt had lost in her husband, the friend and confessor for Jasmine Shreeve. He was everyone and no one, the perfect conman. I wonder who he was to himself, what he saw when he looked in the mirror he held up to himself. Did he see anything?’
‘This is the time when we’re supposed to go to the pub and celebrate.’
‘And,’ continued Frieda, ‘what was he to Beth Kersey? That’s what I keep wondering. Where is she? Is she still alive? Poole preyed on people’s weaknesses, their sadness, their little failures. But Beth Kersey’s vulnerability is on a different level.’
‘I don’t know what to say, Frieda,’ said Karlsson. ‘Except what about that drink?’
‘No,’ said Frieda. ‘I’m going to see Lorna Kersey.’
As she left the office, she saw Commissioner Crawford and Jake Newton at the end of the corridor. Newton glanced at her, then away.
Forty-nine
A woman brought them coffee in the garden room. Outside, a man was working in the rose garden, pruning, tying up branches. Frieda found it difficult to believe they were in the middle of London.
‘I thought you were coming to bring me news,’ said Lorna.
‘I came because I want your help,’ said Frieda.
‘It’s meant to be so easy to find people nowadays, with mobile phones and the Internet and everything.’
‘But that’s not the issue. As far as the police are concerned, your daughter is an adult and she’s free to leave home and disappear, if that’s what she wants.’
‘But she’s not an adult,’ said Lorna. ‘Or, at least, she’s not well.’
‘That’s why I’m here,’ said Frieda. ‘I need to find out more about her mental state. You said that she had experienced schizophrenic episodes, but that can be anything from mild delusions to a complete loss of autonomy. I mean, you can be a danger to yourself and to other people. For example, did you ever feel threatened by your daughter?’
‘Oh, no,’ said Lorna. ‘She wasn’t overtly hostile, or not usually. She was always trying to help. That was her problem. When she was a teenager, she tried to paint her own room.’
‘That doesn’t sound so bad,’ said Frieda.
‘It was the way she did it. It was disastrously messy but there was always something more than that, something frightening.’ Lorna picked up her coffee cup, then put it down without drinking from it. ‘I’ve had my own difficulties in my life from time to time. You may look at this house and think everything’s fine with me.’
No, Frieda thought. She didn’t think that for a single moment.
‘I know what it’s like for things to feel a bit meaningless sometimes,’ Lorna continued. ‘But you have your family and your friends and your work to help you keep stable. But with Beth, in her bad patches, it was seeing what life could be like if all of that was gone.’
‘I know she could be a victim. I’m asking if she could also be violent,’ said Frieda.
‘I don’t want to talk about things like that,’ said Lorna. ‘I just want her to be safe.’
Frieda glanc
ed out of the window. The gardener was cutting a rose bush back so hard that it was little more than a collection of stumps. Could it survive that? ‘Was your daughter ever forcibly committed for psychiatric treatment?’
Lorna shook her head in disapproval. ‘We didn’t want anything like that,’ she said. ‘She received help when she needed it.’
‘Was she seeing a psychiatrist at the time she disappeared?’
‘She was receiving some treatment, yes.’
‘Do you know the details of the treatment?’
‘No,’ said Lorna. ‘But I don’t think it was much help.’
‘Do you remember the doctor’s name?’
‘I don’t think she was right for Beth. She got worse, if anything.’
‘But what was her name?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Lorna said impatiently. ‘Dr Higgins, I think.’
‘Do you remember her first name?’
Lorna was growing visibly more irritated. ‘E-something. Emma, maybe. Or Eleanor. They weren’t any help, though. None of them.’
It had been a bad night. They’d been angry with her, a chorus of angry voices, shrill and harsh and high and low and jangling, and she didn’t know how to make them stop. They were Edward’s words, things he’d said to her, but they had come alive inside her skull and they wouldn’t stop – he wouldn’t stop. Beth knew she had to leave. Was it the sort of thing you could run away from? She felt like she had the worst kind of headache, the one that feels like insects inside your head, chewing and crawling and scratching, and she wanted to escape so that the ache would stay behind. She thought of setting fire to herself, burning the insects to death, like when people set anthills on fire and the ants run round and round in circles as if that would do any good. Or she could get into a freezer, like the chest freezer her parents had in their scullery. It would be such a relief to get inside, into the fierce cold, sharp as a knife, pull down the top, lie in the dark and feel the insects go to sleep.
But no. That wasn’t allowed. That was what Edward said, what the voices had been saying. Everything went wrong when she thought about what Beth wanted. Everything had always gone wrong. Beth was bad. Beth was the bad person inside her head. What was important was to think of other people. Edward. Everyone else was the enemy. Especially Beth. She would deal with Beth later. But first, dimly, distantly, she felt she should eat, like putting fuel in a car. She just needed to get there, do what Edward wanted, and that would be enough. She found some pieces of the chicken, dry and hard. She chewed at them. She took the last of the bread, rock hard now, smeared it thickly with butter and pushed it into her mouth, chewing it into a thick paste that was difficult to swallow. She needed to wash the paste down with water. Glass after glass of water. The milk smelt of cheese but she drank it anyway. The heavy, full feeling was a comfort, weighing her down, stopping her floating away.
She came out on deck and stepped on to the towpath. It was sunny and cold. The sunlight hurt her. She could even hear it. The voices wouldn’t stop, even in the daytime. Just nagging and nagging at her.
‘Leave me alone, leave me alone,’ she said. ‘I can hear you. I’m doing it. Just leave me alone. They said it to me already, all right?’
Now she heard another voice and this one was just stupid and it was even worse than the others. This voice came out of a real person and he was standing on the towpath next to her. He had long hair and a sort of patchy horrible beard, as if he was ill or something. The man was reaching out and touching her and she could even smell him, he was so close, but she couldn’t see him properly because of the brightness of the sun, which dazzled her. He was a dark shape, with sparks around his edges, like when the sun shone on the ripples on the canal. Then she remembered. She had it with her. She’d been sharpening it the whole night long, like her dad used to. She pulled it out and held it in front of her and the funny thing was that she suddenly saw the man clearly and he looked so surprised.
But it didn’t matter, really, because the main thing was that she had somewhere to go. She turned away from him, where he’d sat down like a fool, and ran away along the towpath, away from the sun.
Like many doctors’ addresses and phone numbers, Emma Higgins’s were unlisted, which meant that it took Frieda three phone calls, two quite long conversations, a promise to meet up for a drink, an Underground journey and a short walk before she found herself outside a smart terraced house in Islington, just off Upper Street. She hadn’t dared to phone. She had only one chance and it would be better face to face.
The woman who opened the door was wearing a purple knee-length dress and large earrings. She had on her party makeup, heavily lined eyes and red lips, blusher on her cheeks. Frieda could hear a hum from behind her and there was a glow from what must be the kitchen at the back of the house. It looked as if she had interrupted a dinner party.
‘Are you Dr Higgins?’
‘Yes,’ she said, puzzled and irritated.
‘I work as a consultant with the police and I’d like to talk to you for just a couple of minutes.’
‘What?’ said Dr Higgins. ‘At this time of night? We’ve got people here.’
‘Just one moment, that’s all. A patient of yours, Beth – or Elizabeth – Kersey, went missing a year ago. She’s still missing but she was involved with someone who was later murdered.’
‘Beth Kersey? Missing?’
‘That’s right. I wondered if you could tell me anything about her.’
There was a pause. Dr Higgins seemed to be remembering something. ‘Of course I can’t,’ she said, with an almost disgusted expression. ‘She was a patient of mine. You know that. What the hell do you think you’re doing, coming to my house at night, asking me about something private?’
‘I don’t need to know any clinical details,’ Frieda said. ‘I want to find her and I’d like to know, even in general terms, about the kind of risks involved with her condition.’
‘No,’ said Dr Higgins. ‘Absolutely not. And, in fact, I want your name, so I can make a complaint about your behaviour.’
‘You’ll need to get to the back of the queue,’ said Frieda.
‘What are you talking about? And if you’re working with the police, where are they? How did you get my address?’
A man appeared beside her, in a blue cotton shirt, loose outside his blue jeans. ‘What’s going on, Emma?’
‘This is someone who says she’s a doctor …’
‘A psychotherapist,’ said Frieda.
‘Even worse, she says she’s a psychotherapist and she wants to know about Beth Kersey.’
The man looked startled, then angry. ‘Beth Kersey? Do you know her?’ he said.
‘No.’
The man took Emma Higgins’s left hand and held it up. ‘Do you see that? What do you think it is?’
There was a pale line, three or four inches long, on Dr Higgins’s forearm.
‘It looks like a scar,’ said Frieda.
‘It’s called a defence wound,’ said the man. ‘Do you know what that is?’
‘Yes, I do,’ said Frieda. She looked at Dr Higgins. ‘Did Beth Kersey do that to you?’
‘What do you think?’ said the man.
‘I need your opinion,’ said Frieda. ‘She’ll have been without her medication for a long time. What are the risks?’
‘The answer is “No comment,”’ said Dr Higgins. ‘As you well know, if you want access to her medical records you need a court order. And I’m also going to make that complaint.’
She shut the door without another word. Frieda stood by the railings and, as she dialled Karlsson’s number, she heard raised voices from inside, the man saying something and Dr Higgins answering angrily.
Karlsson sounded tired. When she told him about Dr Higgins, she expected that he would be irritated by her acting without telling him and interested in what she had found out. But he didn’t react at all.
‘Don’t you see?’ she said. ‘She’s violent.’
‘It’
s all in hand,’ said Karlsson.
‘What do you mean? You need to step up the search for her and you need to establish who may be at risk.’
‘I said, it’s all in hand. And we need to talk.’
‘Shall I come into the station?’ said Frieda. ‘I’m seeing patients all morning but I could come afterwards.’
‘I’ll come to you. When’s your first patient?’
‘Eight o’clock.’
‘I’ll be outside your house at seven fifteen.’
‘Karlsson, is something up?’
‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’
Fifty
‘Would you like to come in for coffee?’ said Frieda.
‘No, thanks,’ said Karlsson. ‘You like walking, don’t you? Let’s go for a walk.’
He headed north, his hands plunged into the pockets of his dark coat. His face looked swollen in the fiercely cold wind. When they reached Euston Road, it was already jammed in both directions with the largely stationary commuter traffic.
‘You’ve got to love it, haven’t you?’ he said, and turned left, walking so briskly that Frieda had almost to run to keep up with him.
She grabbed him by the arm, forcing him to stop. ‘Karlsson,’ she said. ‘I know what this is about.’
‘What?’
‘When I was in the station, I saw Jake Newton. He wouldn’t meet my eye. He’s delivered his report, hasn’t he?’
Karlsson was silent, breathing out clouds of vapour. ‘That sharp-suited little cunt,’ he said. ‘I cannot believe we took that grinning little fucking oaf along with us and let him fart around with his fucking fly-on-the-wall act.’
‘So he’s not too keen on freelance contracts,’ said Frieda.
‘Oh, he’s keen on contracts. For the office work, bureaucracy, management, there’ll be freelance contracts out of our fucking arse.’
‘Karlsson,’ said Frieda. ‘You don’t have to do the big sweary policeman thing for my benefit. It’s fine. So, I’m out.’
‘Yes, Frieda. You’re out.’