by Nicci French
Karlsson looked about him; he saw a heron sitting motionless in the tree opposite. ‘Well. I’m by the river.’
‘I just thought I should keep you in the loop.’
‘Thanks.’
‘It’s probably nothing. But we’ve been investigating the leak that led to Dean Reeve knowing where Frieda was.’
‘Go on.’
‘We think – don’t know, mind, it’s probably just a red herring, but it makes sense of things that we can’t explain otherwise – that it might have been the girl.’
For a moment, Karlsson’s mind went blank. ‘Girl?’
‘Lola Hayes.’
‘Oh, fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.’
‘What is it?’
But Karlsson had ended the call. He punched in Yvette’s number. ‘Get Lola,’ he said.
‘What? Where are you?’
‘I’m at the mouth of the Wandle, like she said. But she might have sent me to the wrong bloody place. Yvette, find out where I should be.’ He heard the despair in his voice.
‘Wait.’
He could hear Yvette moving through the house. Then running. He heard her calling Lola’s name.
‘She’s gone,’ Yvette said. ‘She’s disappeared. Why would she do that when she was so scared?’
‘Find her. Call Dugdale and tell him.’
‘I will. What are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know. She could be anywhere at all. And where’s Dean? Has Lola told him where to go?’
Frieda was getting near the spot. Her hair was damp from the drizzle, but she didn’t mind that. She had always liked walking in the cold and the wet; it unknotted her thoughts and calmed her mind. Sometimes she felt that all those miles and miles of walking were lodged in her bones, like a kind of knowledge. Those nights when she couldn’t sleep and slipped on her clothes, heading out into the empty darkness. The secret rivers whose courses she had followed, feeling the shape of them beneath her feet, sometimes stopping to hear them murmur through grates on the roads. All the things that lay out of sight but powerful, the secret history of a city that appalled and enthralled her.
Near here, Alan had been killed by his twin, Dean. And so it had all started. That was why she had to come to this place: back to the beginning. Brown leaves drifted through the still air to the pavement. Frieda held out her hand and caught one as it fell. It was supposed to be lucky. She didn’t believe in that kind of luck, but she put it into the pocket of her coat anyway. Walked on.
While dozens of police officers were being sent out to search for Lola Hayes, Dugdale sat in his office with Dan Quarry.
‘Perhaps she’s gone to the next hidden river,’ he said. ‘You know Frieda’s theory – that Reeve was killing people on hidden rivers, in order to send her a message. So what’s the next one, after Counter’s Creek?’
The two of them looked at the map he’d pulled up on the computer. Quarry pointed. ‘The Wandle and then the Falcon.’
‘They’re both miles long,’ Dugdale said. ‘We need lots of officers – and even then it’s just a guess.’ He made up his mind. ‘I’ll send some officers to patrol them both. We need to do something.’
‘This might turn out to be a panic without proper cause,’ said Quarry. ‘We don’t know Lola is the source of the leaks, it’s just a possibility. And even if she is, we don’t know that she’s told Reeve where Frieda’s going.’
‘We’ll find out soon enough,’ said Dugdale. ‘One way or another.’
Karlsson put his fingers to his temples, and closed his eyes. Where would Frieda go? London was so vast and messy and complex, spreading its tentacles out like a monster, swallowing up little hamlets, invading its own edge-lands, always spreading, always mutating. Frieda could be anywhere.
‘Think,’ he said to himself. ‘Think.’
Once he had found her by imagining her thought processes on the day of Sandy’s funeral. He remembered that brief moment, when they’d sat together on Parliament Hill and she’d said her private goodbyes. So where would she be now? By Sandy’s grave? Walking one of her rivers? If she needed to think, if she was in trouble, where would she go? And why, he asked himself, wouldn’t she go to him?
The tide was waning and the Wandle was draining away, leaving just a trickle of water running through the mud banks. Karlsson turned and started to walk, but slowly, because he didn’t know in which direction he was heading; he felt as though he was going in circles.
And at that thought, an idea struck him and he was running, hope and fear tearing at his chest.
FORTY-NINE
Reuben McGill was actually pulled out of a therapy session, leaving a young woman crying and Paz offering her tissues and bringing her coffee.
When Chloë’s phone rang, she was in a workshop wearing noise-excluding headphones. One of her colleagues had to gesture in front of her to get her attention.
Alexei answered the phone at Reuben’s house. He said his father was on site somewhere. No, he didn’t know where. Nobody else knew anything either.
Professor Hal Bradshaw took off his glasses and stepped away from the lectern, leaving his text behind him. He was reaching the climax of the lecture. It was always more effective, he had found, over the years, when it was delivered as if in the inspiration of the moment.
‘It’s all very well to think about crime in here, here in the safety of our lecture hall, of our libraries, of our laboratories. But at a certain point, the psychologist of crime, the philosopher of crime, needs to go out into the world, to learn what a crime scene is really like, to see it, to smell it, almost to taste it.’ He paused for effect. A girl in the front row had gone very white. Young people nowadays, Bradshaw thought. ‘We should consider the criminal as a sort of artist and the crime scene as his work of art.’ He waited for a beat. ‘Or her work of art. Every crime is a text. It is our job to learn to read it.’ Another pause to let the meaning sink in. ‘That’s all for this week.’
There was clattering and rustling and chattering as the students got up and collected their bags and drifted out of the lecture hall in groups. Bradshaw picked up his papers and put them into his shoulder bag. As he started to leave, he saw that there was a figure still seated at the back of the hall near the door. It was slumped over, the knees pulled up. He couldn’t tell whether it was male or female or even whether it was conscious. He nudged the figure gently and a pale, stained face of a young woman looked up at him. The eyes seemed to stare through him. Year by year he found it harder and harder to tell them apart, but she was familiar.
‘You’re …’ he began, but the name wouldn’t come to him.
‘Lola,’ she said, in a croaky voice. ‘Lola Hayes. I came to see you.’
‘Are you all right? You don’t look well.’
‘I’m not well.’
Bradshaw was uncertain about what he should do. As a psychologist, he could see that this was a woman in deep distress but he wasn’t her doctor. He wasn’t even her teacher. He sat down next to her. ‘Shall we get some help for you?’
She was shivering. He took her arm and tried to pull her to her feet but she shook him away.
‘I’m taking you to the nurse,’ he said. ‘If you won’t come, I’ll have to call for help.’
Lola stood up and immediately wobbled, and Bradshaw had to reach out to stop her falling.
‘Easy,’ he said. ‘Are you ready?’ He put his arm round her and led her slowly and awkwardly out of the lecture hall into the corridor. He felt self-conscious leading Lola through the groups of students chatting or tapping on phones. Some turned to stare at them. A girl asked if everything was all right but he waved her away. He just needed to get her downstairs, into the nurse’s room, and he would have done his duty. It wasn’t enough to be a teacher now. You had to be their parent and childminder and therapist rolled into one. Lola herself seemed entirely unaware of her surroundings.
Getting Lola down the stairs was a cumbersome process. At one point she stumbled, Bradshaw grabbed her, she tried to escape hi
s grasp and, for a farcical moment, he thought the two of them might tumble down the stairs.
Finally, they arrived at the nurse’s room. Bradshaw opened the door and led Lola into the waiting room. There was nobody there. He was tempted to leave her but decided not to. People got sued for things like that. Too many people had seen him leading her down there. He looked around rather desperately at all the posters advertising services for mental health and sexual health and gender issues. He sat her down on one of the plastic chairs lined against the wall. Then he knocked on the door leading into the treatment room. There was a pause and the door opened and the nurse appeared. They had met many times but Bradshaw couldn’t remember her name.
She frowned at him. ‘I’ve someone in with me,’ she said. ‘Terrible nosebleed.’ She looked past Bradshaw at Lola. ‘Is it an emergency?’
‘She’s in a state of distress.’
‘I’ll be out as soon as I can. Can you stay with her?’
‘I can’t really –’ he began, but she interrupted him.
‘You’re a doctor, aren’t you?’
‘Of a kind. Not that kind, though.’
‘I’ll be as quick as I can,’ she said, and slammed the door.
Bradshaw sighed. The nurse knew Lola was there, so could he leave her now? But the woman had specifically asked him to take care of her. He looked at Lola. He could imagine her wandering away, jumping off something, jumping in front of something. He could imagine the inquiry, the articles in the newspapers. He had written some of those articles. This time it would be him. He sat down in the chair next to her.
‘It looks like it’s just you and me for a while,’ he said. She didn’t answer. Instead she was sitting against the back of the chair, hitting her head lightly against a poster advertising a helpline for LGBT rights. Thump. Thump. Thump. ‘Could you not do that?’ he said. ‘It’s probably not a helpful thing.’
She stopped and instead leaned forward. He thought for a moment she might be about to vomit. He couldn’t remember their previous meeting very clearly but he had a dim impression of eagerness, affability. What could have happened? Boyfriend problems, probably. Or girlfriend problems. These things happened all the time. Even so, this seemed a bit extreme. He leaned his hand forward to touch the back of her head, then stopped himself. You never knew. These things might be misunderstood.
‘Is there something you want to talk about?’ he said.
She gave no sign of having heard what he was saying.
‘I’m a psychologist. You can tell me anything. I’ve heard it all before. Sometimes it helps to say things out loud.’
He felt slightly embarrassed even saying the words. He knew that sometimes it helped saying things out loud and sometimes it made it worse. But just sitting there was a torment. Did this girl need an ambulance? Was she in a psychotic state? He thought not. She looked in a bad way, a very bad way, but she seemed aware of her surroundings. She wasn’t entirely unresponsive. She had been able to walk, with help. It was just this silence. He felt a need to fill it with something.
‘I seem to remember that you were writing your dissertation on Frieda Klein,’ he said, with an attempt at cheerfulness. ‘How’s that going?’ She shook her head. That was some kind of a response at least, if more like a spasm than an attempt at communication. ‘You were going to deconstruct her, weren’t you? Strip away her façade. Sounded like a promising idea. Did you manage it? Have you punctured the Frieda Klein myth?’
At that, Lola sat slowly upright and looked him full in the face. ‘I’ve destroyed her,’ she said.
He gave a nervous little laugh. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ve killed her.’
He coughed and looked around. When was that nurse coming back?
‘Not literally?’ he said. But she didn’t reply. ‘What do you mean you’ve killed her? Is she dead?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Is she injured?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Then what do you mean?’ Now he raised his voice. ‘Tell me. When you say you’ve killed her, what do you mean?’
Still staring at him, without seeming to see him, Lola rubbed her bloodshot eyes and then blinked. ‘I think she’s going to be killed.’
That was it. Bradshaw took his phone out of his pocket and dialled 999. Immediately the voice asked what service he wanted. He had been going to call for an ambulance. This was a clear case of psychosis, surely. He knew case after case of students falling in love and then in hate with their teachers. Teachers and therapists attracted that kind of attention. As he well knew, Frieda Klein attracted that attention more than anyone he had encountered in his entire professional life. She had even attracted his attention. And this attraction could turn into a full-fledged delusion. Students could be so highly strung. There were so many pressures. They could become manic or florid like this, or they could sink into a stupor of depression. Looking at her, Bradshaw thought, as doctors so often had to, of how he would defend his action before an investigation if it all went wrong. There would be no problem. The symptoms were classic. There was no reason to think that this talk of Frieda Klein being killed was anything more than the fantasy of a troubled mind. But he hesitated.
‘Police,’ he said. ‘I need the police.’
FIFTY
Years earlier, when Frieda had first walked along the canals, they had been almost deserted, inhabited by the odd illegal cyclist, a few eccentric fishermen, gangs of young men you brushed past without making eye contact. Today she had walked past the new office buildings, the coffee shops, the runners, the au pairs and young mothers pushing buggies, the houseboats double-parked, their smoking chimneys reeking of coal and fragrant wood. She had walked along the side of Victoria Park and seen lines of little schoolchildren in their yellow high-visibility jackets, fitness classes. But beyond that, turning onto the River Lea, the towpath became quieter and then entirely deserted.
This was the spot. There was an old dock, off the canal, which must once have been used for unloading goods for a depot that no longer existed. Once you turned off the canal – as Frieda now did – you were completely out of sight of the main towpath, under an old bridge. This was the spot. This was where Dean’s brother had died. Frieda had once thought the spot marked the end of something, but really it was the beginning of everything.
She leaned on a railing and looked down into the water. Normally she liked to look at flowing water, rivers, tides. But this water was stagnant, unmoving, cut off from the main body of the canal, which itself lurched and rippled rather than flowed. Frieda took a breath. She had a feeling of immense calm and of acceptance. She wasn’t thinking of Dean, but of her father, whom she had loved a great deal and who had taken his own life when she was a teenager. She had found his body. Not a day had gone by when she hadn’t remembered that moment, looking into his dead face and sightless eyes. It was the last time she had prayed, to a God she didn’t believe in but whose help she had begged. She knew that the entire course of her life had been shaped by those few seconds. The knowledge that she had failed to rescue her father, or even adequately recognize his pain until it was too late, meant that over and over again she had had to recognize the pain of others and try to rescue them. As if by rescuing them, she could rescue him; rescue herself. Now, staring into the brown water, she let herself remember her father as he had been years before his death. Not sad. Not hopeless. As someone alive, full of energy and hope. She called him into her mind; she saw his face; she smiled at him. What a journey it had been.
When she heard a scuffling sound nearby, behind her, she didn’t turn around. She didn’t even move.
It didn’t happen the way Hal Bradshaw had expected. He’d expected a policeman might arrive in an hour or two, ask a few questions, maybe take a statement. Instead he was transferred to one police officer, then to another, then patched through to a crackly mobile phone line. He was told to stay where he was and not let Lola Hayes out of his sight. Not for a second.<
br />
‘Fucking follow her into the toilet, if necessary,’ said a voice on the phone.
‘What?’ said Bradshaw, but the line was dead.
While he was still collecting his thoughts, he heard the sound of a siren, then another. He dimly thought there must be a fire somewhere. He heard the sound of heavy footsteps outside and the door opened. He saw the face of the porter, the man who sat in a little wooden lodge at the front entrance. Bradshaw had never seen the man outside his lodge. Then another person whose name he didn’t quite know.
‘This is the place,’ said the porter, and two male and two female uniformed officers walked past him. One of the women stepped ahead.
‘Are you Dr Bradshaw?’
‘Yes.’
‘And this is Lola Hayes?’
‘Yes.’
The woman stepped away, unclipped her radio and spoke into it. There was a crackling sound. She turned back and leaned over Lola. ‘Where’s Frieda Klein?’
Lola looked up, glassy-eyed, and shook her head and twisted, like she was in pain, but didn’t speak.
‘I don’t think she’s in a condition to answer questions,’ said Bradshaw.
The officer stepped back and spoke into her radio. ‘She won’t say anything. OK.’
She looked back at Bradshaw. ‘You’re to stay here. Both of you.’
‘I think she actually needs to go to a hospital. I should have probably called an ambulance.’
‘Later, maybe. You need to stay here. They’re on their way.’
‘The ambulance?’
‘No.’
He was standing in a small recess in the wall under the bridge. As he edged slowly forward, he saw her leaning on the railing, lost in her thoughts. He wanted to hold that moment, to look at her before she looked at him, before she knew he was there. Before it happened. What was she thinking about? Was she ready? Because at last it was her time. All these years, all the waiting, and they were here. Back at the beginning, at the ending.
He stepped out. He was between her and the main towpath, cutting off any possibility of escape. At last she looked round, then raised herself from the railing and stood, facing him.