by Nicci French
‘If that’s true,’ Frieda said impassively, ‘then she was acting under duress. She can’t be blamed for it.’
‘Did you know that Lola had been in communication with him?’
Frieda looked out of the window for a few moments. Quarry saw her clench and unclench her hands.
‘She should never have got involved with me,’ she said softly. ‘I warned her.’
‘That’s not an answer,’ said Dugdale, grimly.
‘Have you heard of moral luck?’
‘I don’t care about moral luck just now. There’s no point in your trying to defend Lola Hayes. She’s confessed. We know what she did.’
Frieda shook her head. ‘I disagree. There is a point in trying to defend her.’
‘Look,’ said Dugdale, who was now sounding exasperated. ‘We’re on your side and you’re treating us like the enemy. Think of it from my point of view. We have to present a version of what happened. Dean Reeve was found floating in the canal with his throat cut and a bullet in his leg. We found the knife in the canal but we haven’t found the gun. This suggests that there was at least one other person at the scene.’
‘I can’t tell you anything about that.’
‘You mean you won’t. Frieda, I completely understand the wish to revenge yourself against Dean Reeve, after all he’s done to you and so many other people.’
Finally, Dugdale saw he’d provoked a response. Frieda gave a slight start and looked at everyone present. ‘You think I wanted revenge?’ she said in disbelief. ‘You think I wanted to be a part of his sick game? What I wanted was for him to be arrested and put on trial. Clearly it didn’t work out that way.’
‘Why didn’t it?’
‘I wish I could help you.’
‘Did you see him die?’
‘I was there, clearly.’
‘You were more than there. When you were found, you had been in the water. His blood was on your clothes, on your skin. In your hair.’
She blinked twice, like a camera lens clicking. Quarry, watching her intently, could have sworn she was reliving Reeve’s death.
‘There was a lot of blood,’ she said.
‘You’re not giving us anything,’ said Dugdale, helplessly.
‘You’ve got Dean Reeve’s body. What else do you need?’
Karlsson was waiting for her. They walked out of the police station together. Out on the front steps it was blustery with a few drops of rain.
‘Dugdale doesn’t look happy,’ he said. ‘He’s got that look I’ve seen before when police try to interview you.’
‘Will you do something for me?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’
‘You don’t know what it is yet.’
He shrugged.
‘Will you make sure Lola isn’t charged?’
‘You know what she did? She almost got you killed. When she had a chance to save you, she sent me to the wrong place.’
‘Lola had terrible, terrible luck. She’s just another of Reeve’s victims.’
‘It’s not really up to me. Dugdale will give a file to the Crown Prosecution Service. They’ll decide.’
‘But you’ll do it anyway.’
Karlsson laughed. ‘In your next life, you’re going to be an attack dog. The sort that bites you and never lets go.’
‘Come to Frieda’s, Mum,’ said Chloë.
‘What? What? Oh, my God. Why?’
‘Just come to Frieda’s.’
‘Sorry,’ said Jack, to the woman with pink hair. ‘We’re finishing early today. The till is closed.’
‘But I need cheese for my dinner party!’
‘Here.’
He wrapped a slab of Brie for her, then a large wedge of crumbly blue, and handed them both across.
‘How much do I owe you?’
‘Nothing at all.’
‘Come on,’ said Reuben to Alexei. ‘You can do your homework another day. Put on your shoes.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘To Frieda’s house.’
FIFTY-THREE
Yvette opened the door of the boxy little room. One window high in the wall let in the last of the day’s mild sun, and Frieda entered.
Lola was at the table, her head resting on her arms, her hair spread out. At the sound of the door, she lifted her head. Her face was smeared with weeping and her eyes red. At the sight of Frieda, she gave a small moan and shrank back.
Frieda pulled up a chair and sat opposite her. ‘Well, Lola,’ she said. ‘It’s over.’
‘Do you know?’ whispered Lola. ‘About me?’
‘Yes. I’ve known for some time.’
There was silence in the small room. Lola gazed at her, pupils dilated. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I knew Dean had got to you,’ said Frieda, steadily.
‘But – but I don’t understand. How did you know? When? And if you knew …’ She trailed off.
‘You don’t really need to know the details,’ said Frieda. ‘That’s not what matters.’
‘It is what matters,’ said Lola, helplessly. ‘I’m going to spend the rest of my life going over every moment of what happened in the time I spent with you. What I did, what you did. I need to know everything.’
Frieda thought. Which were the moments when Lola had given herself away?
‘Living in the world is hard enough,’ Frieda began, ‘but lying is harder. It’s like trying to assemble a whole new world, but the bits don’t fit together properly. Holes start appearing. For someone like Dean Reeve, that isn’t a problem. He lived in his lies and fabulations. But for someone like you, a good person, lying is hard.’
‘Stop it with the lecture,’ said Lola, in a bleak tone. ‘How did you know?’
‘It was different things. When I saw you after Jess died, you were wearing a watch, the watch you told me earlier you’d left there. That didn’t fit with your account of finding Jess dead. So something else must have happened.’
‘What a stupid mistake.’
‘If it hadn’t been that, it would have been something else. Then I knew because each time that Dean nearly got to us, it was after you had managed to have a few moments on your own. I assume you borrowed a phone or something and called him. I knew because you hated that Regent’s Park place and yet, after you’d briefly gone out into the park, you didn’t want to leave it.’
‘So you were watching me?’
‘Of course I was watching you. I watch everybody. I only knew for sure after I made a mistake. I told you where the next body was found. But I’d made a mistake. I missed out a river. Beverley Brook was the wrong place, but Dean Reeve put the body there anyway. He was acting on the information you gave him.’
Lola was staring at her with her mouth very slightly open. Her face was working, and she seemed to be trying to say something, but no words came from her.
‘Above all, I knew from your behaviour. It wasn’t just that you were terrified. You often seemed terrified of me – or, at least, of being with me. Sometimes you clung to me and sometimes you avoided me. Sometimes you talked incessantly, as though trying to cover up what you were unable to say. You were scared of silence and of what you might inadvertently reveal. And at other times you were mute. It was very clear to me you were hiding something. Or trying to hide something, at least. Secrets are very hard to carry. They can destroy you.’
‘You knew and you didn’t tell me. All that time.’
‘Yes.’
‘I was in hell,’ said Lola. ‘And all the time you knew. You used me.’
‘I told you many times that there was nothing you couldn’t say to me. I watched you decide, over and over again, to say nothing. But you’re right. In the end, I used you to tell Dean Reeve where I was going to be.’
‘I came to you and you used me. Does that make you feel good about yourself?’
‘We’re not put on this earth to feel good about ourselves. And don’t think of yourself as the main victim in this case. There were a lot of them ahead of yo
u in the queue, and most of them are dead.’ She looked steadily at Lola. ‘Even at the end, when Karlsson found you, you continued to lie.’
‘I had to.’
‘You really think that?’
‘They’re going to arrest me. I’ll be in all the papers. It’ll be, like, Dean Reeve and Lola Hayes. I’ll be in court and everyone will know what I did and hate me.’ She started to sob in earnest, wretched jerky sounds of distress. ‘What about my parents? I’ll go to prison. How will I ever – ever – ever –’ Her frame shook with weeping.
Frieda leaned forward and put a hand over Lola’s, seeing the bitten nails, the rash at the wrist. ‘Lola, you’ve got a difficult journey ahead of you, but that won’t be a part of it. You won’t be charged.’
Lola wiped the back of her hand across her streaming, snotty face. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Just that.’
‘Why?’
‘I assume they don’t think you’d be convicted.’
‘Did you have anything to do with it?’
‘I shared my personal opinion with them.’
‘So you understand?’ Lola sat up straighter and pushed her lank hair behind her ears. ‘You understand why I did it?’
‘I do.’
Lola took both of Frieda’s hands and gripped them tightly. Her face was wild. ‘He killed Jess in front of me. I watched her die.’
Frieda gazed into Lola’s face, waiting.
‘And I didn’t even try to stop him. I just watched as she died.’
‘You could have told me, Lola.’
‘He said he would kill my parents. He was showing me what he would do to them. Don’t you see? I had no choice.’
‘Is that what you say to yourself, that you had no choice?’
‘I don’t know what I say to myself,’ Lola said desperately. ‘I don’t know. I don’t want to be who I am. What shall I do? How shall I ever bear it?’
‘I don’t know. But this is where you start: with looking at what you have been through and what you have done without self-deception. You tell yourself the truth.’
‘I hate the truth!’
‘You don’t need to like it. It’s something we live with, like water or light.’
‘Can you ever forgive me?’
‘That’s the wrong question.’
‘What’s the right one?’
‘Can you forgive yourself?’
Frieda stood up. She put a hand on Lola’s bent head and Lola stared at her, her eyes wet. She looked like an abandoned child. For a moment, Frieda remembered her at their first meeting, when she had wrapped her arms around Frieda and tried to comfort her for all she had been through. ‘You were pulled into a terrible story,’ she said. ‘You’ve been through things that nobody should have to go through. But, though it might not seem like it now, this is also a kind of gift, if you use it courageously. You know yourself in a way that few people are ever able to. You know what you’re capable of.’
She opened the door but Lola scrambled to her feet.
‘Frieda!’
‘Yes.’
‘Will I see you again?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Please don’t go. Don’t leave me.’
‘You should go and see your parents. And you should find someone to talk to about all of this.’
‘Can’t I talk to you? You’re the only person who can understand and make it better.’
‘No, Lola. Our story together is done.’
‘Karlsson?’
‘What?’
‘Have you ever killed anyone?’
‘No, of course not.’
She nodded. ‘Me neither.’
FIFTY-FOUR
Sarah Kernan put down the phone and turned to her sister.
‘That was the police,’ she said, in a stifled voice. ‘They got him. The man who killed Geoff. They got him.’
Standing in the middle of the kitchen, in her slippers, a tea-towel over her shoulder, she started to cry. She didn’t lift her hands to her face, or bend her body. Her shoulders shook and tears rolled down her cheeks. Her sister went to her awkwardly and put her arms around her; they’d never been a family for hugging.
After the call from the police, Jonah Martin’s girlfriend Maiko went softly through the house in her bare feet and sat at the computer. She typed in Dean Reeve’s name and stared for a long time at the image there. Then she entered the name ‘Frieda Klein’. She looked at the stern face, almost feeling that it was looking back at her.
After a few minutes she turned away, laying one hand on the great dome of her belly. The baby often kicked. Sometimes it hiccuped. Now she felt it move under her palm. She imagined it with Jonah’s face.
‘So,’ said Walter Levin to Jock Keegan. ‘She did it.’
Keegan lifted his head. ‘Reeve?’
‘Found floating in the canal with his throat cut. And a bullet in his leg.’
‘A bullet? What’s that about?’
‘Yet to be established,’ said Levin.
Keegan shook his head and smiled. ‘I didn’t think she’d get away with this one,’ he said. ‘I thought she’d pushed her luck too far.’
Levin looked pensive. ‘I put her chances at about fifty–fifty. A little less, maybe, with that girl in tow. We should have known better.’
‘Is she all right?’
‘Apparently.’
Keegan remembered her as he had last seen her, outside those monster houses in Rivingdale Terrace. She had been composed enough, but there’d been an intensity about her that had unsettled him.
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
‘So do you think we can lure her back to help out here?’
‘Of course not.’
Levin gave Keegan a quizzical look. ‘You sound very certain.’
‘As certain as I am of anything. She’ll never come back here, and she’ll never go back to the police. She’s done with all of that.’
‘Oh, not at once, of course. Give her time to recover. But –’
‘No. Don’t you see? Dean Reeve is dead. She’s done.’
Carrie Dekker, wife of Alan, Dean Reeve’s twin, bent down and put her arms round her dog for comfort. The man who had killed her husband, who had impersonated him for a day and a night, was gone. But too late for her, childless and alone.
Matthew Faraday, sitting in front of the computer, heard the front door open and then bang shut.
‘Matthew! Matthew!’ It was his mother, calling up the stairs in a voice that sent a prickle of dread through him. ‘Come and see this.’
Eight years ago – red-haired, freckled, gap-toothed – he had become the most famous child in the country when Dean Reeve had kidnapped him. He remembered it in nightmarish snatches – a locked room, a boot in his face, a homesickness that had been so fierce and bitter it seemed to have entered his bones. Even today he would often wake up crying. But he remembered Frieda Klein like a bright image, unanchored from the events that surrounded her. She had stood beneath his window with snowflakes in her hair; she had pulled him out of the tomb, back into life.
Charlotte Beck, exhausted, sank onto the sofa with her daughter, who had at last fallen asleep. She knew there was a bottle of wine in the door of the fridge. But to get it she would have to stand up and that suddenly felt like too much effort. She picked up the remote control and flicked through the channels. Suddenly she glimpsed a face and halted, turning up the volume.
It was him, the man who had sat on the pavement beside her, who had told her she had done well and helped her home, and whom the police had asked her about later. She listened to the report, trying to make sense of it. She saw the face of a woman called Frieda Klein and realized she had met her too.
She sat dazed, her little daughter’s head warm and heavy on her shoulder: for a few moments she had been caught up in the story of Dean Reeve and Frieda Klein.
She pressed her lips to the top of her baby’s silky head. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Who would have dreame
d it?’
FIFTY-FIVE
Frieda would have preferred to return to her house alone. She had imagined it so many times over the past weeks – opening the door and stepping into the clean and silent space. She had even rehearsed it that very morning, getting as far as the hall, stroking the cat and feeling the rooms empty and waiting for her like a promise.
Instead, she got a welcome party. As the car nosed its way past the press into the mews, she saw the lights downstairs were on behind the closed shutters. As she made her way to the house with Karlsson, the blue door swung open and she saw Chloë framed there, her face almost tragic with emotion.
‘Frieda,’ she said. ‘Oh, thank God.’
‘Hello,’ said Frieda, stepping in and closing the door on the small crowd in the mews.
‘Frieda!’ shrieked a voice, and there was Olivia, aiming a champagne bottle at her and struggling with the cork that soon enough shot past Frieda’s ear with a loud noise, while spumes of white froth splattered the floor. Behind her, Frieda saw the little cat streak up the stairs.
‘Frieda,’ said Reuben, emerging from the kitchen. He was wearing his dandiest waistcoat. ‘You had us all worried.’
Jack’s head appeared over Reuben’s shoulder. He was smiling and bobbing his head and running his hand through his wild hair. He was wearing an orange shirt and striped trousers and had a narrow moustache that gave him a slightly comical air.
‘Let her through,’ said Karlsson.
‘Perhaps you’d like a bath,’ said Chloë. ‘We bought you some foam.’
It felt to Frieda like the house didn’t belong to her yet; she was its guest. She looked at all the shining faces, smiled or tried to smile, took a glass from Olivia’s outstretched hand, though she didn’t like champagne much.
‘Thank you,’ she said. Her voice rasped slightly and she looked away from them all. ‘Where’s Josef?’
‘Josef here,’ he said, coming down the stairs, Alexei just behind him.
‘Hello,’ she said.
He made an unsteady bow and Frieda saw he had been drinking. His brown eyes burned at her and he put a hand on his heart; for one moment she thought he would burst into song.