by Nicci French
The boy sat in the corner, his knees pulled sharply up to his chin, his face hidden by a mop of dark blond hair. Every so often he gave a violent shiver but didn’t lift his head, even when Karlsson introduced himself.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Karlsson said. ‘But I’m here to help and I’ll need to ask some questions.’
‘Why?’ whispered the father. ‘Why would anyone kill Ruth?’
At this, a sound broke from the older girl, a sob.
‘Your younger daughter found her,’ said Karlsson, gently. ‘Is that right?’
‘Dora. Yes.’ He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. ‘What’s that going to do to her?’
‘Mr Lennox,’ said Yvette, ‘there are people who can help you with that …’
‘Russell. Nobody calls me Mr Lennox.’
‘We need to talk to Dora about what she saw.’
The wailing from the small shape on the floor continued. Yvette looked helplessly at Karlsson.
‘You can be with your father,’ said Karlsson, leaning down towards Dora. ‘Or if you’d prefer to speak to a woman, not a man, then …’
‘She doesn’t want to,’ said the older sister. ‘Didn’t you hear?’
‘What’s your name?’ asked Karlsson.
‘Judith.’
‘And how old are you?’
‘Fifteen. Does that help?’ She glared at Karlsson out of her unnerving blue eyes.
‘It’s a terrible thing,’ said Karlsson. ‘But we need to know everything. Then we can find the person who did this.’
The boy suddenly jerked up his head. He struggled to his feet and stood by the door, tall and gangly. He had his mother’s grey eyes. ‘Is she still there?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Ted,’ said Russell Lennox, in a soothing tone, moving towards him and holding out his hand. ‘Ted, it’s OK.’
‘My mother.’ The boy kept his eyes fixed on Karlsson. ‘Is she still there?’
‘Yes.’
The boy tugged the door open and ran down the stairs. Karlsson raced after him but didn’t get there in time. The roar ripped through the house.
‘No, no, no,’ Ted was shouting. He was on his knees beside his mother’s body. Karlsson put his arm round the boy and lifted him up, back and out of the room.
‘It’s all right, Ted.’
Karlsson turned. A woman had come in through the front door. She was solid, in her late thirties, with short, dark brown hair in an old-fashioned bob and wearing a knee-length tweed skirt; she also had something in a yellow sling around her chest. Karlsson saw that it was a very small baby, its bald head poking out of the top and two tiny feet sticking out at the bottom. The woman looked at Russell, her eyes bright. ‘I came at once,’ she said. ‘What a terrible, terrible thing.’
She walked across to Russell, who had followed his son down the stairs, and gave him a long hug, made awkward and arms’ length by the baby wedged in between them. Russell’s face stared out over her shoulder, helpless. She looked round at Karlsson.
‘I’m Ruth’s sister,’ she said. The bundle at her chest shifted and gave a whimper; she patted it with a clucking sound.
She had that excited calm that some people get in an emergency. Karlsson had seen it before. Disasters attracted people. Relatives, friends, neighbours gathered to help or give sympathy or just to be part of it in some way, to warm themselves in its terrible glow.
‘This is Louise,’ said Russell. ‘Louise Weller. I rang people in the family. Before they heard it from someone else.’
‘We’re conducting an interview,’ said Karlsson. ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t think it’s appropriate you should be here. This is a crime scene.’
‘Nonsense. I’m here to help,’ said Louise, firmly. ‘This is about my sister.’ Her face was pale, except for spots of red on her cheekbones. ‘My other two are in the car. I’ll get them in a minute and put them somewhere out of the way. But tell me first, what happened?’
Karlsson hesitated a moment, then shrugged. ‘I’ll give you all a few minutes together. Then, when you’re ready, we can talk.’
He guided them up the stairs and gestured to Yvette to follow him out of the room. ‘On top of everything else,’ he said, ‘they’ll need to move out for a few days. Can you mention it to them? Tactfully? Maybe there’s a neighbour or friends nearby.’ He saw Riley coming up the stairs.
‘There’s someone to see you, sir,’ he said. ‘He says you know him.’
‘Who is he?’ said Karlsson.
‘Dr Bradshaw,’ said Riley. ‘He doesn’t look like a policeman.’
‘He’s not,’ said Karlsson. ‘He’s a sort of consultant. Anyway, what does it matter what he looks like? We’d better let him in, give him a chance to earn his money.’
As Karlsson walked down the stairs and saw Hal Bradshaw waiting in the hall, he saw what Riley meant. He didn’t look like a detective. He wore a grey suit, with just a speckle of yellowish colour to it, and an open-necked white shirt. Karlsson particularly noticed his fawn suede shoes and his large, heavy-framed spectacles. He gave Karlsson a nod of recognition.
‘How did you even hear about this?’ Karlsson asked.
‘It’s a new arrangement. I like to get here when the scene is still fresh. The quicker I get here, the more useful I can be.’
‘Nobody told me that,’ said Karlsson.
Bradshaw didn’t seem to be paying attention. He was looking around thoughtfully. ‘Is your friend here?’
‘Which friend?’
‘Dr Klein,’ he said. ‘Frieda Klein. I expected to find her here, sniffing around.’
Hal Bradshaw and Frieda had worked on the same case, in which Frieda had very nearly been killed. A man had been found lying naked and decomposing in the flat of a disturbed woman, Michelle Doyce. Bradshaw had been convinced that she had killed the man; Frieda had heard in the woman’s meandering words some kind of sense, a distracted straining towards the truth. Gradually she and Karlsson had pieced together the man’s identity: he was a con man who had left behind him many victims, each with motives for revenge. Frieda’s methods – unorthodox and instinctive – and her actions, which could be obsessive and self-destructive, had led to her dismissal during the last round of cuts. But clearly this wasn’t enough for Bradshaw. She had made him look stupid and now he wanted to destroy her. Karlsson thought of all of this. Then he thought of a dead woman lying a few feet away, and a family grieving, and swallowed his angry words.
‘Dr Klein’s not working for us any more.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Bradshaw, cheerfully. ‘That’s right. Things didn’t go very well at the end of that last case.’
‘It depends what you mean by “well”,’ Karlsson said. ‘Three murderers were caught.’
Bradshaw pulled a face. ‘If the consultant ends up in a knife fight and then spends a month in intensive care, that’s not exactly an example of success. In my book, at least.’
Karlsson was on the point of saying something but again he remembered where he was.
‘This is hardly the place,’ he said coolly. ‘A mother has been murdered. Her family are upstairs.’
Bradshaw held up a hand. ‘Shall we stop talking and go through?’
‘I wasn’t the one talking.’
Bradshaw stepped inside and took a deep breath, as if he were appraising the aroma of the room. He moved towards the body of Ruth Lennox, treading delicately to avoid the pool of blood. He looked towards Karlsson. ‘You know, blundering into a crime scene and being attacked, doesn’t count as solving a crime.’
‘Are we talking about Frieda again?’ said Karlsson.
‘Her mistake is to get emotionally involved,’ he said. ‘I heard she slept with the man who was arrested.’
‘She didn’t sleep with him,’ said Karlsson, coldly. ‘She met him socially. Because she was suspicious of him.’
Bradshaw looked at Karlsson with a half-smile. ‘Does that trouble you?’
‘I’ll tell you what troubles me,’ said Karlsson. ‘It troubles me that you seem to feel competitive with Frieda Klein.’
‘Me? No, no, no. Simply concerned for a colleague who seems to have lost her bearings.’ He gave a sympathetic grimace. ‘I feel very sorry for her. I hear she’s depressed.’
‘I thought you’d come to look at a murder scene. If you want to discuss an earlier case, we should go somewhere else.’
Bradshaw shook his head. ‘Don’t you think this is like a work of art?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘We need to think, what is he trying to express? What is he telling the world?’
‘Maybe I should just leave you to it,’ said Karlsson.
‘I imagine that you think this is a simple burglary gone wrong.’
‘I’m trying to avoid quick conclusions,’ said Karlsson. ‘We’re gathering evidence. Theories can come later.’
Bradshaw shook his head again. ‘That’s the wrong way round. Without a theory, data is just chaos. You should always be open to your first impressions.’
‘So what’s your first impression?’
‘I’ll be delivering a written report,’ said Bradshaw, ‘but I’ll give you a free preview. A burglary isn’t just a burglary.’
‘You’ll have to explain that to me.’
Bradshaw made an expansive gesture. ‘Look around you. A burglary is an invasion of a home, a violation, a rape. This man was expressing anger against a whole area of life that was closed to him, an area of property and family ties and social status. And when he encountered this woman, she personified everything that he couldn’t have – she was at the same time a well-off woman, a desirable woman, a mother, a wife. He could have run away, he could have struck her a simple blow, but he’s left us a message, just as he left her a message. The injuries were directed to her face, rather than to her body. Look at the splashes of blood on the wall, so out of proportion to anything that was needed. He was trying to literally wipe an expression off her face, an expression of superiority. He was redecorating the room with her blood. It was almost a kind of love.’
‘A strange kind of love,’ said Karlsson.
‘That’s why it had to be so savage,’ said Bradshaw. ‘If he didn’t care, he wouldn’t have to do something so extreme. It wouldn’t matter. This has an emotional intensity.’
‘So who are we looking for?’
Bradshaw closed his eyes before he spoke, as if he was seeing something nobody else could see.
‘White,’ he said. ‘Early to mid-thirties. Strongly built. Unmarried. Of no fixed abode. No steady job, no steady relationship. No family connections.’ He took out his phone and pointed it in various directions around the room.
‘You need to be careful with those images,’ said Karlsson. ‘Things have a way of ending up online.’
‘I’m cleared for this,’ said Bradshaw. ‘You should take a look at my contract. I’m a criminal psychologist. This is what I do.’
‘All right,’ said Karlsson. ‘But I think we should leave. The scene-of-crime team need to take over.’
Bradshaw slipped his phone into his jacket pocket. ‘That’s fine. I’m done. Oh, by the way, give Dr Klein my best. Tell her I’ve been thinking of her.’
As they left, they met Louise Weller coming back into the house. The baby was still slung round her, but now she was towing a tiny boy by the hand. At her heels stomped a slightly older girl, stocky like her. Even though she was wearing a pink nightgown, and pushing a toy buggy in which a doll was swaddled, she reminded Karlsson of Yvette.
Louise Weller gave him a brisk nod. ‘Families should rally round,’ she said and, like a general leading a reluctant army, she marched her children into the house.
THREE
At twenty-five past three in the morning, when it was no longer night but not yet day, Frieda Klein woke up. Her heart was racing and her mouth was dry, her forehead beaded with sweat. It was hard to swallow or even to breathe. Everything hurt: her legs, her shoulder, her ribs, her face. Old bruises flowered and throbbed. For a few moments she did not open her eyes, and when she did, the darkness pressed down on her and spread out in all directions. She turned her head towards the window. Waiting for Wednesday to end, for the light to come and the dreams to fade.
The waves came, one after another, each worse than the one before, rising up and crashing over her, pulling her under, then spitting her out ready for the next. They were inside her, thrashing through her body and her mind, and they were outside. As she lay there, greyly awake, memories mixed with fading dreams. Faces gleamed in the darkness, hands reached out to her. Frieda tried to hold on to what Sandy had said, night after night, and to haul herself out of the tumult that had invaded her: It’s over. You’re safe. I’m here.
She stretched her hand out to where he should have been lying. But he had gone back to America. She had accompanied him to the airport, dry-eyed and apparently composed even when he gathered her to him with anguish on his face to say goodbye; had watched him go through into Departures until his tall figure was no longer visible; had never told him how close she had come to asking him to stay, or agreeing to go with him. The intimacy of their last few weeks, when she had let herself be cared for and felt her own weakness, had stirred up feelings in her that she had never before experienced. It would be too easy to let them sink back into the depths. It wasn’t the pain of missing that she dreaded but the gradual easing of that pain, busy life filling up the spaces he had left. Sometimes she would sit in her garret-study and sketch his face with a soft-leaded pencil, making herself remember the exact shape of his mouth; the little grooves that time had worn into his skin; the expression in his eyes. Then she would lay down the pencil and let the memory of him wash through her, a slow, deep river inside her.
For a moment, she let herself imagine him beside her – how it would feel to turn her head and see him there. But he was gone, and she was alone in a house that had once felt like a cosy refuge yet, for the last few weeks – since the attack that had nearly killed her – had creaked and whispered. She listened: the pulse of her heart and then, yes, there was a rustle by her door, a faint sound. But it was only the cat, prowling the room. Sometimes, in this pre-dawn limbo, Frieda found it a sinister creature – its two previous owners were dead.
Had something woken her? She had a muffled sense of a sound entering her sleep. Not the distant rumble of traffic that in London never ceases. Something else. Inside the house.
Frieda sat up and listened but heard nothing except the soft wind outside. She swung her feet to the floor, feeling the cat wind its body round her legs, purring, then stood, still weak and nauseous from the night terrors. There had been something, she was certain, something downstairs. She pulled on tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt and made her way on to the landing, then, step by step, gripping the banisters, down the stairs, stopping halfway. The house she knew so well had become unfamiliar, full of shadows and secrets. In the hall, she stood and strained to hear but there was nothing, nobody. She turned on the lights, blinking in the sudden dazzle, and then she saw it: a large brown envelope lying on the doormat. She stooped and picked it up. It had her name written in bold letters across it: Frieda Klein. A line slashed underneath diagonally, cutting into the final n.
She stared at the handwriting. She recognized i
t, and now she knew that he was near – in the street outside, close to her home, to her place of refuge.
In a fever, she pulled on a trenchcoat and pushed her bare feet into the boots by the front door. She took the door key from the hook and then was out into the darkness, cool April breeze in her face, the hint of rain. Frieda stared around the unlit little cobbled mews, but there was no one there and as fast as her sore body would go, she half hobbled and half ran out on the street, where the lamps threw long shadows. She looked up and down it. Which way would he have gone: east or west, north or south, towards the river or up into the maze of streets? Or was he standing in a doorway? She turned left and hurried along the damp pavement, swearing under her breath, cursing her inability to move quickly.
Coming out on to a wider road, Frieda saw something in the distance – a bulky shape moving towards her, surely human but larger and stranger than any human could possibly be. It was like a figure from her nightmares and she pressed her hand against her heart and waited as it came closer and closer, and then at last resolved into a man slowly pedalling a bike, with dozens, hundreds, of plastic bags tied to its frame. She knew him, saw him most days. He had a wild beard and glaring eyes and cycled with slow determination. He wavered past, staring blindly through her, like Father Christmas in a bad dream.
It was no use. Dean Reeve, her stalker and her quarry, could be anywhere by now. Sixteen months ago, she had helped unmask him as a child-abductor and murderer, but he had escaped capture and killed himself. Two months ago, she had discovered that he had never died: the man who had hung from a bridge on the canal was in fact his twin, Alan, who had once been Frieda’s patient. Dean was still in the world somewhere, watching over her, protective and deadly. It was he who had saved her life when she had been attacked by a disturbed young woman with a knife, though Mary Orton, the old woman Frieda had come to rescue, had died. He had slid out of the shadows, like a creature from her own worst dreams, and hauled her back from the darkness. Now he was telling her that he was still watching over her, a loathed protector. She could feel his eyes on her, from hidden corners, in the twitch of a curtain or the chink in a door. Was this how it would always be?