Tuesday's Gone fk-2

by Nicci French

  Tuesday's Gone

  ( Frieda Klein - 2 )

  Nicci French

  The rotting, naked corpse of a man is found amidst swarms of flies in the living room of a confused woman. Who is he? Why is Michelle Doyce trying to serve him afternoon tea? And how did the dead body find its way into her flat?

  DCI Karlsson needs an expert to delve inside Michelle's mind for answers and turns to former colleague, psychiatrist Frieda Klein. Eventually Michelle's ramblings lead to a vital clue that in turn leads to a possible identity. Robert Poole. Jack of all trades and master conman.

  The deeper Frieda and Karlsson dig, the more of Poole's victims they encounter . . . and the more motives they uncover for his murder. But is anyone telling them the truth except for poor, confused Michelle?

  And when the past returns to haunt Frieda's present, she finds herself in danger. Whoever set out to destroy Poole also seems determined to destroy Frieda Klein.

  Sometimes the mind is a dangerous place to hide.

  Tuesday's Gone

  (The second book in the Frieda Klein series)

  A novel by Nicci French

  To Francis and Julia

  One

  Maggie Brennan half walked, half ran along Deptford Church Street. She was talking on the phone and reading a file and looking for the address in the A–Z. It was the second day of the week and she was already two days behind schedule. This didn’t include the caseload she had inherited from a colleague who was now on permanent sick leave.

  ‘No,’ said Maggie, into the phone. She looked at her watch. ‘I’ll try to get to the meeting before you finish.’

  She put the mobile into her pocket. She was thinking of the case she’d just come from. A three-year-old with bruises. Suspicious bruises, the doctor in A&E had said. Maggie had talked to the mother, looked at the child, checked out the flat where they lived. It was horrible, damp, cold, but not obviously dangerous. The mother said she didn’t have a boyfriend, and Maggie had checked the bathroom and there was no razor. She had insisted that he had fallen down the stairs. That’s what people said when they hit their children, but even so, three-year-olds really did fall downstairs. She’d only spent ten minutes there but ten hours wouldn’t have made much difference. If she removed the child, the prosecution would probably fail and she would be disciplined. If she didn’t remove the child and he was found dead, there would be an inquiry; she would be fired and maybe prosecuted. So she’d signed off on it. No immediate cause for concern. Probably nothing much would happen.

  She looked more closely at the A–Z. Her hands were cold because she’d forgotten her gloves; her feet were wet in their cheap boots. She’d been to this hostel before, but she could never remember where it was. Howard Street was a little dead end, tucked away somewhere towards the river. She had to put her reading glasses on and move her finger around on the map before she found it. Yes, that was it, just a couple of minutes away. She turned off the main street and found herself unexpectedly next to a churchyard.

  She leaned on the wall and looked at the file on the woman she was going to see. There wasn’t much at all. Michelle Doyce. Born 1959. A hospital discharge paper, copied to the Social Services department. A placement form, a request for an evaluation. Maggie flicked through the forms: no next of kin. It wasn’t even clear why she had been in hospital, although from the name of it, she could see that it was something psychological. She could guess the results of the evaluation in advance: just sheer general hopelessness, a pathetic middle-aged woman who needed somewhere to stay and someone to drop in just to keep her from wandering the streets. Maggie looked at her watch. There wasn’t time for a full evaluation today. She could manage a basic check-up to make sure that Michelle was not in imminent danger, that she was feeding herself – the standard checklist.

  She closed the file and walked away from the church into a housing estate. Some of the flats were sealed up, with metal sheets bolted on to the doors and windows, but most were occupied. On the second level, a teenage boy emerged from a doorway and walked along the balcony, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his bulky jacket. Maggie looked around. It was probably all right. It was a Tuesday morning, and the dangerous people were mostly still in bed. She turned the corner and checked the address she’d written in her notebook. Room One, 3 Howard Street. Yes, she remembered it now. It was a strange house that looked as if it had been built out of the same materials as the housing estate and then had decayed at the same rate. This hostel wasn’t a proper hostel at all. It was a house rented cheaply from a private landlord. People could be put there while the services made up their minds about what to do with them. Usually they just moved on or were forgotten about. There were some places Maggie only visited with a chaperone, but she hadn’t heard anything particular about this one. These people were mainly a danger to themselves.

  She looked up at the house. On the second floor a broken window was blocked up with brown cardboard. There was a tiny paved front garden and an alley that went along the left side of the house. Beside the front door a bin bag had burst, but it had only added to the rubbish that was strewn everywhere. Maggie wrote a one-word note. There were five buzzers next to the front door. They didn’t have labels next to them but she pressed the bottom one, then pressed it again. She couldn’t tell whether it was working. She was wondering whether to knock on the door with her fist or look through the window when she heard a voice. Looking round, she saw a man right behind her. He was gaunt with wiry ginger hair tied back in a ponytail, and piercings right across his face. She stepped to one side when she saw the man’s dog, a small breed that was technically illegal, though it was the third she’d seen since she’d left Deptford station.

  ‘No, he’s a good one,’ the man said. ‘Aren’t you, Buzz?’

  ‘Do you live here?’ Maggie said.

  The man looked suspicious. One of his cheeks was quivering. Maggie took a laminated card from her pocket and showed it to him. ‘I’m from Social Services,’ she said. ‘I’m here to see Michelle Doyce.’

  ‘The one downstairs?’ the man said. ‘Haven’t seen her.’ He leaned past Maggie and unlocked the front door. ‘You coming in?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  The man just shrugged.

  ‘Go on, Buzz,’ he said. Maggie heard the clatter of the dog’s paws inside and up the stairs, and the man disappeared after him.

  As soon as she stepped inside, Maggie was hit by an odour of damp and rubbish and fried food and dog shit and other smells she couldn’t place. It almost made her eyes water. She closed the front door behind her. This must once have been the hallway of a family house. Now it was piled with pallets, tins of paint, a couple of gaping plastic bags, an old bike with no tyres. The stairs were directly ahead. To the left, what would have been a door to the front room was blocked up. She walked past the side of the stairs to a door further along. She rapped on it hard and listened. She heard something inside, then nothing. She knocked again, several times, and waited. There was a rattling sound and then the door opened inwards. Maggie held out her laminated card once more.

  ‘Michelle Doyce?’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ said the woman.

  It was difficult for Maggie to define even to herself exactly what was strange about her. She was clean and her hair was brushed, but perhaps almost too brushed, like that of a small child who had wetted her hair and then combed it so that it lay flat over her head, thin enough to show the pale scalp beneath. Her face was smooth and pink, with a dusting of fuzzy hair. Her bright red lipstick extended just a little too far off her lips. She wore a baggy, faded, flowery dress. Maggie identified herself and held out the card.

  ‘I just wanted to check up on you, Michelle,’ she said. ‘See how you a
re. Are you all right? All right in yourself?’

  The woman nodded.

  ‘Can I come in?’ said Maggie. ‘Can I check everything’s OK?’

  She stepped inside and took out her notebook. As far as she could tell from a glance, Michelle seemed to be keeping herself clean. She looked as if she was eating. She was responsive. Still, something felt odd. She peered around in the shabby little anteroom of the flat. The contrast with the hallway of the house was impressive. Shoes were arranged in a row, a coat hung from a hook. There was a bucket with a mop leaning against the wall in the corner.

  ‘How long have you been here, Michelle?’

  The woman frowned. ‘Here?’ she said. ‘A few days.’

  The discharge form had said the fifth of January and today was the first day of February. Still, that sort of vagueness wasn’t really surprising. As the two women stood there, Maggie became aware of a sound she couldn’t quite place. It might be the hum of traffic, or a vacuum cleaner on the floor above, or a plane. It depended on how far away it was. There was a smell also, like food that had been left out too long. She looked up: the electricity was working. She should check whether Michelle had a fridge. But, by the look of her, she’d be all right for the time being.

  ‘Can I have a look round, Michelle?’ she said. ‘Make sure everything’s OK?’

  ‘You want to meet him?’ said Michelle.

  Maggie was puzzled. There hadn’t been anything on the form. ‘Have you got a friend?’ she said. ‘I’d be happy to meet him.’

  Michelle stepped forward and opened the door to what would have been the house’s main back room, away from the street. Maggie followed her and immediately felt something on her face. At first she thought it was dust. She thought of an underground train coming, blowing the warm grit into her face. At the same time the sound got louder and she realized it wasn’t dust but flies, a thick cloud of flies blowing against her face.

  For a few moments she was confused by the man sitting on the sofa. Her perceptions had slowed and become skewed, as if she were deep under water or in a dream. Crazily, she wondered if he was wearing some sort of diving suit, a blue, marbled, slightly ruptured and torn diving suit, and she wondered why his eyes were yellow and cloudy. And then she started to fumble for her phone and she dropped it, and suddenly she couldn’t make her fingers work, couldn’t get them to pick the phone up from the grimy carpet, as she saw that it wasn’t any kind of suit but his naked, swollen, rupturing flesh and that he was dead. Long dead.

  Two

  ‘February,’ said Sasha, sidestepping a puddle, ‘should be abolished.’

  She was walking with Frieda along a street lined with modern office blocks, whose height blocked out the sky and made the dark day seem darker. Everything was black and grey and white, like an old photograph: the buildings were monochrome, the sky chilly and blank; all the men and women – but they were mostly men – walking past them, with their slim laptop cases and umbrellas at the ready, wore sober suits and coats. Only the red scarf around Frieda’s neck added a splash of colour to the scene.

  Frieda was walking swiftly, and Sasha, although she was the taller, had to make an effort to keep up.

  ‘And Tuesdays,’ she went on. ‘February is the worst month of the year, much worse than January, and Tuesday is the worst day of the week.’

  ‘I thought that was supposed to be Monday.’

  ‘Tuesdays are worse. It’s like …’ Sasha paused, trying to think what it was like. ‘Monday’s like jumping into ice-cold water, but you get a shock of excitement. On Tuesday you’re still in the water but the shock has worn off and you’re just cold.’

  Frieda looked round at her, noticing the winter pallor that made her seem frailer than usual, although there was no hiding her unusual beauty, even bundled up in a heavy coat, with her dark blonde hair tied severely back.

  ‘Bad morning?’

  They turned past a wine bar and briefly out on to Cannon Street, into the blur of red buses and taxis. Rain started to spit.

  ‘Not really. Just a meeting that went on longer than necessary because some people love the sound of their own voices.’ Sasha suddenly stopped and looked around. ‘I hate this part of London,’ she said, not angrily, but as if she’d only just realized where she was. ‘When you suggested a walk, I thought you were going to take me along by the river or to a park. This is just unreal.’

  Frieda slowed. They were walking past a tiny patch of fenced-in green, untended and full of nettles and overgrown shrubs.

  ‘There was a church here,’ she said. ‘It’s long gone, of course, and the graveyard as well. But this tiny bit survived, got forgotten about somehow, among all the offices. It’s a fragment of something.’

  Sasha peered over the railings at the litter. ‘And now it’s where people come for a cigarette.’

  ‘When I was little, seven or eight, my father took me to London.’

  Sasha looked at Frieda attentively: this was the first time she had ever mentioned any member of her family or brought up a memory from her childhood. In the year or so since they had known each other, she had told Frieda almost everything about her own life – her relationship with her parents and her feckless younger brother, her love affairs, her friendships, things she kept hidden from view suddenly exposed – but Frieda’s life remained a mystery to her.

  The two of them had met just over a year ago. Sasha had gone to Frieda as a patient and she still remembered their single session, when she had told Frieda, in a whisper and barely lifting her eyes to meet Frieda’s steady gaze, how she had slept with her therapist. Her therapist had slept with her. It had been an act of confession: her dirty secret filling the quiet room and Frieda, leaning forward slightly in her red chair, taking away the sting and shame by the quality of her attention. Sasha had left feeling drained but cleansed. Only later had she learned that afterwards Frieda had gone straight from their session to the restaurant where the therapist was sitting with his wife and punched him, creating havoc, smashing glasses and plates. She had ended up in a police cell with a bandaged hand, but the therapist had declined to press charges and insisted on paying for all the damage at the restaurant. Later, Sasha – who was a geneticist by profession – had repaid the debt by surreptitiously arranging a DNA test on a piece of evidence Frieda had lifted from the police station. They had become friends, yet it was a friendship unlike any that Sasha had ever known. Frieda didn’t talk about feelings; she had never once mentioned her ex, Sandy, since he had gone to work in America, and the only time Sasha had asked her about it, Frieda had told her with terrifying politeness that she didn’t want to discuss it. Instead, Frieda talked about a piece of architecture, or a strange fact she had unearthed about London. Every so often she would invite Sasha to an exhibition and sometimes she would call and ask her if she was free for a walk. Sasha would always say yes. She would break a date or leave work in order to follow Frieda through the London streets. She felt that this was Frieda’s way of confiding in her, and that by accompanying her on her rambles, she was perhaps taking some of the edge off her friend’s solitude.

  Now she waited for Frieda to continue, knowing better than to press her.

  ‘We went to Spitalfields Market and he suddenly said we were standing on top of a plague pit, that hundreds of people who had died from the Black Death were lying under our feet. They had done tests on the teeth of some of the corpses that had been excavated.’

  ‘Couldn’t he have taken you to the zoo?’ said Sasha.

  Frieda shook her head. ‘I hate these buildings as well. We could be anywhere. But there are the tiny bits they’ve forgotten to get rid of, the odd space here and there, and the names of the roads: Threadneedle Street, Wardrobe Terrace, Cowcross Street. Memories and ghosts.’

  ‘It sounds just like therapy.’

  Frieda smiled at her. ‘Doesn’t it? Here, there’s something I want to show you.’

  They retraced their route to Cannon Street and stopped opposite the stat
ion, in front of an iron grid set into the wall.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘The London Stone.’

  Sasha looked at it dubiously: it was an unprepossessing lump of limestone, dull and pockmarked, and reminded her of the kind of uncomfortable rock you perched on at the beach when you were rubbing sand off your feet before pulling your shoes back on. ‘What’s it for?’

  ‘It’s protecting us.’

  Sasha gave a puzzled smile. ‘In what sense?’

  Frieda indicated a small sign beside it. ‘“So long as the Stone of Brutus is safe, so long shall London flourish.” It’s supposed to be the heart of the city, the point from which the Romans measured the scope of their empire. Some people think it has occult powers. Nobody really knows where it came from – the Druids, the Romans. Maybe it’s an old altar, a sacrificial stone, a mystical centre point.’

  ‘You believe that?’

  ‘What I like,’ said Frieda, ‘is that it’s in the side of a shop and that most people walk past without noticing it, and that if it got mislaid, it would never be found because it looks like a completely ordinary piece of rock. And it means what we want it to mean.’

  They were silent for a few moments and then Sasha put a gloved hand on Frieda’s shoulder. ‘Tell me, if you were ever in distress, would you confide in anyone?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Would you confide in me?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Well. You could, that’s all.’ She felt constrained, embarrassed by the emotion in her voice. ‘I just wanted you to know.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Frieda’s voice was neutral.

  Sasha dropped her hand, and they turned from the grille. The air had become notably colder, the sky blanker, as if it might snow.

  ‘I have a patient in half an hour,’ Frieda said.