by Nicci French
‘Thank you for your help.’
‘Someone did come once, but they didn’t even go and visit her. They just left her a bag of doughnuts at the front desk.’
‘Doughnuts,’ said Frieda, softly, to herself more than to Mrs Lowe.
‘She was always very partial to doughnuts.’
‘Yes,’ muttered Frieda. ‘I know. Her son, Dean, used to bring them to her.’
‘It must have been someone else, then.’
Frieda waited until she was several streets away from River View Nursing Home before pulling out her mobile and calling the number she had copied on to it that morning. She then walked to Gallions Reach, but travelled only as far as Canning Town where she changed trains for Stratford. It was a foggy day, and in the wet, cold air, the half-built Olympic Village took on a ghostly appearance – scaffolded buildings and segments of domes and towers surfaced from the dank mist, below which Frieda could make out vans and diggers and crowds of men in hard hats.
It took her fifteen minutes to walk to Leytonstone, where she turned up the long, straight road of Victorian terraced houses shrouded in the grey light to number 108. Frieda didn’t hurry: she was trying to order her thoughts and to prepare what she was going to say. That she must say it she finally had no doubt. She rang at the dark green door, hearing its double chime in the distance, and had the eerie sense of being back in a previous life. She almost expected Alan to answer, standing before her with his sad brown eyes and his apologetic smile.
It was Carrie who came to the door, in a yellow jersey that made her pallor more obvious, and she wasn’t smiling. ‘You’d better come in,’ she said.
Frieda stepped inside, wiping her boots carefully on the doormat and hanging her coat up. ‘Thank you for agreeing to see me.’
‘You didn’t give me much choice. Shall we go through to the kitchen?’
It was the same as it had always been, neat and pleasing, with one half given over to domestic appliances and the other to Alan’s tools. On dozens of shelves, divided into small compartments, were his screws and nuts and bolts, his fuses and washers and keys. Carrie noticed Frieda’s glance and smiled wryly. ‘He didn’t take any of his stuff. I kept thinking he would come back so I didn’t clear it out. Stupid, isn’t it, when he’s obviously not coming back? Only I don’t know how to begin.’
‘There is something you should know.’
‘About Alan? I knew it. You do know where he is.’
‘It’s about Alan, yes. You should sit down.’
Carrie obeyed, looking wary, as if anticipating a blow.
‘This is going to be a shock, and perhaps you won’t believe me, but I am certain that Alan is dead.’
Carrie’s hands flew to her mouth. Her grey eyes stared at Frieda. ‘Dead?’ she whispered. ‘Dead? Alan? My Alan? But … when? When did he die?’
‘On the twenty-fourth of December 2009.’
Carrie’s hands slid away from her mouth, which was working uselessly, mouthing words she couldn’t utter. She leaned forward slightly in her chair and her head lolled to one side. ‘What are you …?’ she said thickly, in a voice that was scarcely recognizable as her own. ‘I was with him after that. I was with him at Christmas. I told you.’
‘I believe that Dean killed Alan on the day your husband went to meet him.’
Frieda paused for a moment, so that Carrie could begin to see the implication of what she was saying. ‘He swapped clothes, strung him up, wrote a suicide note for himself, came home to you, as Alan, and you called the police. You know the rest.’
Carrie said something that Frieda couldn’t make out. The voice came from her belly, low and guttural. Then she sprang up and flung the table over; it caught Frieda on the shin and crashed to the floor in a scream of breaking china and screeching wood on tile.
‘You fuck.’
‘Carrie.’
Frieda grasped Carrie by her wrists and tried to hold her steady, but although she was smaller than Frieda, rage made her strong. Frieda could see the spittle on her chin and the white patches on her cheeks, as if someone had pressed a thumb deep into them.
‘Get off me. Don’t touch me. Don’t come near me. Do you hear?’
Frieda wrapped both arms around Carrie’s body from behind, gripping her fiercely. ‘Carrie,’ she repeated.
Carrie surged in her arms. The back of her head was against Frieda’s mouth. She kicked at Frieda’s leg and, wrenching her head round, tried to bite Frieda’s shoulder. ‘It’s not true,’ she howled, low and hoarse. ‘It’s a lie. You’re lying to me. It’s not true. Alan’s not dead.’
Frieda felt Carrie’s body tense and then go limp. She made a gagging noise and then, as Frieda relaxed her hold, bent forwards and started to vomit on to her kitchen floor. Frieda put a hand on her forehead and held her, then eased her on to the chair that was still standing. Carrie crumpled on to it like a rag doll. Frieda found some kitchen towel and wiped Carrie’s mouth, pushed her hair back from her sweaty face. Then she picked up the fallen table and Carrie laid her head on it and started to weep in retching sobs that sounded as though she might weep up her organs and her heart, turn herself inside out.
Frieda picked up the other chair, then used several squares of kitchen roll to wipe up the vomit and flush it down the next-door lavatory. Returning, she filled a washing-up bowl with hot, soapy water and scrubbed the floor. She boiled the kettle and made a pot of strong tea. She heaped four teaspoons of sugar into a mug and added a big splash of milk. She pushed it in front of Carrie, who lifted her face, swollen with weeping.
‘Just a bit,’ said Frieda. ‘Are you cold?’
Carrie nodded. Frieda ran upstairs and came back with a quilt she’d removed from the bed. ‘Wrap this round you and drink your tea.’
Carrie sat up. She tried to hold the mug but her hands were shaking so badly that Frieda took it from her and held it to her lips, tipping it carefully until Carrie could take small gulps.
At last, Frieda said, ‘Have you understood?’
Carrie wrapped the quilt more tightly around her body so that only her face was showing. She looked like a beaten animal.
‘Carrie?’
She nodded. ‘I’ve understood,’ she whispered.
‘Do you believe me?’
‘Alan had this habit.’ Carrie’s voice was hoarse from her weeping. ‘He always used to take bits of my food, or drink half of my tea, even when he had his own. I’d be eating a biscuit and he’d lean over and pop it into his mouth, or pick up my sandwich and take a large bite out of the middle of it, the best bit, very casually as if he didn’t even know he was doing it. I’d turn my head, and when I turned back, there’d be his toothmarks in my Jaffa cake or something. It irritated me but it was like a running joke between us. Even when things were at their very worst, even when he’d lost his appetite for anything, he went on nicking my food. I often think that’s what makes a marriage work, not the big obvious things, like sex and children, but all those habits and routines and funny tics, the little things that drive you mad but bring you close.’ She wasn’t looking at Frieda any more, but down at the table, and speaking in a voice so quiet that Frieda had to lean forward to hear it. ‘He took my food because my food was his food. My life and his life hadn’t got any boundaries. We’d kind of merged. The day he left …’ She gulped. Her blotchy face twitched. ‘The day the man I thought was Alan left, we were sitting on the sofa and I’d warmed up two mince pies. We never had Christmas pudding at Christmas. We liked our luxury mince pies from M&S, with cream, it was one of our traditions – and for once he didn’t take any of mine. I made a joke out of it. I held it up to his lips and said, “What’s mine is yours and what’s yours is yours,” or something stupid like that. But he just smiled and said he’d got his own. Later, once he’d gone away, I thought it was a demonstration of his separateness – he wasn’t eating my food because he no longer wanted me. Do you see?’
Frieda nodded but said nothing. She stood up and refilled Carri
e’s mug, adding more sugar.
‘He made me one cup of tea,’ Carrie continued, in a dreary voice. ‘That same day. Usually I made the tea but I’d done all the cooking and I asked him to get me a cup. He made a song and dance of it. He put the mug on a tray, with milk in a little jug and sugar in a china bowl, even though I don’t take sugar. I thought he was being funny and romantic. I didn’t get it. He just didn’t know, did he? He didn’t know how I took my tea.’
‘I’m so very sorry, Carrie,’ said Frieda.
‘I slept with him,’ cried Carrie. ‘I had sex with him. For the first time in months and months, because Alan – he couldn’t. It was good.’ Her face contorted as if she would throw up again. ‘It was the best it had ever been. Ever. Do you understand? Do you?’
Frieda nodded again.
‘And it wasn’t Alan. It wasn’t my darling, darling, hopeless Alan. Alan was dead, strung up like some criminal. And I didn’t know and I didn’t grieve and I fucked his foul, murdering brother and I was happy. I was so happy, lying tangled up in the dark with the man who killed Alan and then had sex with me and listened to me crying out in pleasure, oh, and then heard me telling him how it had never been this good before. Argh! This is – I can’t –’
She stood up, her face chalky, and rushed from the room. Frieda could hear her being sick again, then the lavatory flushing and water running. Carrie returned, sat down again and fixed her red-rimmed eyes on Frieda.
‘You are sure?’ she said.
‘Yes, I am. But I don’t have evidence. Not the sort the police would accept.’
‘Can’t you do a DNA test? I’ve got his toothbrush. His comb.’
‘Their DNA was the same,’ said Frieda. ‘Anyway. What matters is what you think.’
‘I believe you.’ She seemed flatly calm now.
‘Carrie, you must hold on to the fact that Alan did not leave you and he always loved you. You loved him and were loyal to him. You’ve got nothing to reproach yourself for.’
‘How could I not know, not feel it? And now I can never make it right. I can never take Alan in my arms again and hold him and comfort him and hug him to me until he feels safe again. I can never be forgiven by him. This is what it will be like until the day I die. Oh, my poor sweet Alan. Nothing ever went right for him, did it? Of course he wouldn’t have left me – how did I not know that?’
Through that dark, wet day, Frieda sat in the kitchen and listened as Carrie talked about Alan, about Dean, about her loneliness and childlessness, about grief and anger, hostility and self-disgust. She heard her talk of hatred – for Dean, of course, but also for her, Frieda, who had sucked Alan into a vortex from which he had never returned, for the police who hadn’t stopped him, for herself – and of her desire for revenge. She heard of Carrie’s early days with Alan, and how she had known on their first date that she would marry him because of the way he had said her name – with flushed shyness, and as if he was uttering some solemn and precious oath. Frieda made numerous cups of tea and, later, a boiled egg that Carrie listlessly poked pieces of toast into. Only when Carrie had called her friend and asked her to come over did she leave, promising to call her the following day, and even then, she didn’t go straight home by cab or train, but walked there through the London streets, winding her way westwards as the day turned to evening and the fog became sleety darkness. Her mind was crowded with thoughts and ghosts: Carrie’s staring white face, Alan’s eyes, which had always reminded her of a spaniel’s, timid and pleading, and the jeering smile of Dean, who had been dead but was now alive again. Somewhere in the world.
Twenty-one
‘So,’ said Karlsson to Yvette Long and Chris Munster, ‘this is what we have, and stop me if I get it wrong.’ He ticked items off his fingers as he spoke. ‘One, a murder victim, confirmed by DNA to be the Robert Poole who lived in the flat in Waverley Street, whose body was found naked in a disturbed woman’s room, having been collected from an adjacent alley, whose job we don’t know, whose friends haven’t missed him, and whose neighbour says that he was charming, helpful, kind and would always water her plants for her.’
Karlsson stopped and took a sip of water, then continued, ‘Two, Mr Poole’s bank statements.’ He picked them up and waved them. ‘The most recent of which show that he had just under three hundred and ninety thousand pounds in his current account. I don’t know what that’s about. We’re checking with the bank as we speak.’ He looked at his watch. ‘They should have phoned by now. Anyway, three, a flat of which Yvette made a preliminary search, as well as the scene-of-crime team. No passport, no wallet, in fact, no personal documents of any kind. Nor is he on Facebook or Twitter, or any of the other social networks. But there’s a notebook, with several pages ripped out, in which there are a handful of names, some addresses, scrawls and doodles. Correct, Yvette?’
‘Including the name of the couple in Brixton whom your old friend found.’
‘You mean Frieda Klein? She’s not an old friend, she’s someone who helped us. And now that you mention her, I should say that I want to use her on a more permanent basis.’
Yvette frowned. ‘What for?’
‘She can be useful to us.’
‘Fine.’
‘By which you mean not fine.’
‘It’s your decision,’ said Yvette, hating how her voice sounded. Her cheeks burned scarlet. She was sure that Frieda Klein didn’t turn an unbecoming red whenever she was embarrassed – but, then, perhaps Dr Klein never felt embarrassed.
‘That’s right, and I’ve made it, and now we can concentrate on Robert Poole. How far have you got with the names in the notebook?’
Chris Munster picked up a pad of paper. ‘We’re going to work our way through them. A few will be easy to find and others may take longer. We’ve already made an appointment to see a Mary Orton. We’re going straight after this meeting. She sounded rather flustered on the phone – she’s an elderly lady, lives alone. Apparently Robert Poole had been helping her repair her house in some way. We’re going to start distributing that visual we’ve had drawn up. That might flush out a few more people who knew him.’
‘Right, it should be –’ Karlsson was interrupted by the phone ringing. He picked it up, listened, frowned, jotted something on his notepad. Putting it down, he said, ‘They’ve talked to the bank.’ He tore the page off his notepad and handed it to Yvette. ‘We’ve got a next of kin, a brother in St Albans. Go and see him. And about that money in his account. It’s gone. It was transferred out of the account on the twenty-third of January. I want the two of you to go and break the news to the brother and find out anything you can about Robert Poole, photos, documents, whatever.’ He looked at his watch, then, picking up the notebook, stood up, pushing back his chair. ‘Right. With a bit of luck, we’ll find someone who’s suddenly acquired three hundred and ninety grand and we can wrap this up quickly.’
Karlsson had to ring several times before he got through to Frieda. ‘I left a message,’ he said. ‘Two messages.’
‘I was going to ring,’ she said. ‘I’ve been with patients all morning.’
He gave her an account of the way the case was developing, about the notebook. Frieda didn’t say much in reply.
‘We’ve found a member of Poole’s family,’ he said. ‘A brother. Yvette’s on her way to see him.’
‘It seems things are progressing,’ said Frieda.
She sounded detached and Karlsson caught himself feeling resentful, as if he wanted Frieda’s full attention and knew he wasn’t getting it. There was a long pause.
‘Some of the team have been checking through the names in Poole’s notebook,’ Karlsson said finally. ‘One of them is an old woman called Mary Orton who lives in Putney. Poole was organizing building work for her. It wasn’t finished when he disappeared.’
‘Yes?’
Karlsson took a deep breath. ‘That friend of yours you brought round to me once, Josef. He’s a builder, no?’
Karlsson could almost hear her s
often over the phone.
‘That’s right.’
‘Is he good? And trustworthy?’
‘Yes, he is.’
‘I thought you could go and talk to her and bring your builder friend with you, suss out what Poole actually did. He might even get some work out of it. What with the job not having been finished. According to Chris, she’s an old woman whose husband has died and sons live away. I think she’s a bit lonely.’ There was another pause. ‘Unless, of course, you’re only interested in doing things when you do them without telling me.’
‘I think he’s available for work,’ Frieda said. ‘But I’ll need to check with him.’
‘That would be kind of you,’ said Karlsson, and gave her the Putney address.
‘Did she say anything about Robert Poole?’ asked Frieda.
‘She said he was nice and polite,’ said Karlsson. ‘That’s what they all say. Nice and polite.’
‘Have you ever done this before?’ asked Yvette Long.
Chris Munster was driving and didn’t look round. ‘In my first year,’ he said. ‘A kid had been knocked over and I went along with a sergeant to tell the parents. The mother answered the door and I just stood in the background while he told her. We were talking to her and then the father came home from work and we stood there while she told him. The bit I remember was my sergeant hovering around like someone who was about to leave a party. Those parents partly wanted us to go and leave them to it. At the same time they couldn’t let us go. They kept talking about him and asking if we wanted tea. I’ve done it a few times since then but that’s the one I remember. What about you?’
‘A few times,’ said Yvette. ‘More than a few. I always feel nervous in advance. I look at the front door and feel guilty about what I’m going to do to them. They open the door and sometimes you can tell that they know even before you say anything.’ She looked at him. ‘It’s the next exit.’