Frieda Klein 2 - Tuesday's Gone (10 page)

‘I wish she could just tell us,’
said Yvette. ‘It sounds a bit abstract to me.’

‘She is telling us,’ said
Bradshaw. ‘You just have to listen – with all due respect.’

Commissioner Crawford
nodded. Frieda looked across at the young woman and saw her flush crimson and her fists
clench on the table for a moment, before she let them uncurl again.

‘Did you see Dr Klein’s
notes?’ asked Karlsson.

Bradshaw gave another snort. ‘Since Dr
Klein is present, I’m not sure I should comment,’ he said. ‘But I
really don’t think it’s necessary to chase up incredibly rare fantasy
psychological syndromes. No offence, but I thought the notes displayed a certain
naÏvety.’ He turned to Frieda and smiled at her. ‘I heard from the
nursing staff that you bought a teddy bear for Michelle.’

‘It was a stuffed dog.’

‘Was that part of your examination or
part of your treatment?’ said Bradshaw.

‘It was something for her to talk
to.’

‘Well, that’s very touching.
But, anyway, to business.’ He tapped a cardboard file that lay on the desk in
front of him and directed his remarks once more to the commissioner. ‘It’s
all in here. It’s my conclusion that this is a slam dunk. She clearly fits the
profile. Obviously she won’t be fit to plead, but you can close your
case.’

‘What about the missing finger?’
asked Frieda.

‘It’s all in here.’
Bradshaw picked up the file. ‘You’re an analyst, aren’t you? It all
fits. What do you think cutting off a finger symbolizes?’

Frieda took a deep breath. ‘Your
argument,’ she said, ‘is that Michelle Doyce, having killed this man and
stripped him naked, wanted to symbolize cutting off his penis by cutting off his finger.
Why didn’t she cut off his penis?’

Bradshaw smiled again. ‘You need to
read my report. She’s a psychopath. She arranges the world in terms of
symbols.’

Karlsson looked at his deputy.

Yvette shrugged. ‘It
just seems too vague to me, too theoretical,’ she said. ‘You don’t
convict someone based on symbols.’

‘But she’s mad,’ said the
commissioner, harshly. ‘It won’t matter anyway,’

‘What about you?’ Karlsson
turned to Frieda as if Crawford hadn’t spoken. Frieda could sense his anger,
rather than see it. A vein ticked in his temple.

‘I’m not an expert on
this,’ she replied. ‘Not like Dr Bradshaw. I don’t know. I mean, I
really
don’t know.’

‘But what do you
think
?’ said Karlsson.

Frieda looked back up at the ceiling tiles.
Definitely random, she decided.

‘I just can’t believe that
Michelle Doyce committed that murder. I’ve been trying to construct scenarios in
my mind in which she does it and none of them makes sense.’

‘I’ve just provided a
scenario,’ said Bradshaw.

‘Yes. That’s what I
mean.’

‘But the body was in her flat,’
said Commissioner Crawford, impatiently. She turned, and he leaned towards her, banging
his hand on the table to make his point. She could see spittle at the corners of his
mouth. ‘Of course she must have killed him. Did someone else come in and leave it
there? If we don’t believe she did it, what the hell do we do?’

‘What I wrote in my notes is that we
should listen to her.’

‘But all she’s doing is rambling
about boats.’

‘Yes,’ said Frieda. ‘I
wonder what she means by that.’

‘Well.’ Frieda almost thought
Karlsson was trying not to smile. ‘There’s Dr Bradshaw’s theory about
rivers and women and all that.’

Frieda thought for a moment.
‘That’s the big thing I have trouble with,’ she said. ‘I mean, I
have trouble with all of it, but especially with that. The thing about Michelle is that
I
don’t think she talks in symbols. I think she lives in a world
where everything is real. That’s her curse.’

Karlsson looked across at Bradshaw.
‘Well?’

‘I saw a woman in the corridor with a
tea trolley,’ Bradshaw said. ‘Do you want her opinion as well?’

Karlsson looked back at Frieda, raising his
eyebrows. There was a long silence that she didn’t see any reason to break.

‘I agree with Dr Klein,’ he said
finally.

‘Fuck it, Mal.’

‘Michelle Doyce might have killed this
man, but since when is “might” enough for us?’

‘I want this case closed.’

‘Indeed. We’re trying to do just
that, but –’

‘No! You’re not listening.
I’m beginning to think you’re taking your eye off the ball. I mean that I
want this case closed right now. I agree with Dr Bradshaw. This Doyce woman did it.
I’m overruling you, Mal. Send the file to the CPS.’

‘Sorry for wasting your time,
Frieda.’

‘It wasn’t your fault. What are
you going to do now?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘About the case.’

‘You heard. I’m sending the file
to the CPS. She’ll be unfit to plead. Case done and dusted, commissioner
satisfied, Michelle Doyce safe in a psychiatric hospital for the rest of her
life.’

‘But if you think she didn’t do
it?’

Karlsson shrugged. ‘Welcome to my
life.’

Jack Dargan looked around. ‘This is
different,’ he said. ‘Not necessarily in a good way. I preferred it when we
had our meetings at Number 9. I could do with a cappuccino and one of Marcus’s
brownies.’

They were walking down Howard Street in the
sleety drizzle. Jack’s face looked raw, where it was visible. He was wearing a
green bobble hat with side flaps and a checked brown and orange scarf wrapped several
times round his neck. Whenever he wasn’t speaking he pulled it up over his mouth.
He’d also put on an ancient bright blue anorak with a broken zip. He’d
forgotten to wear gloves, though, and kept blowing on his hands. Frieda was Jack’s
mentor and Jack her trainee, but today he looked more like her truculent nephew.

‘In ten years’ time, five, this
area will be all done up. Houses like this will have been pulled down to make way for
offices,’ said Frieda, stopping in front of number three.

‘Good.’

‘They’ll still have to find a
place to dump all the misfits and the rejects, all the hopeless, forgotten
people.’

‘Is it where your man was
found?’

‘He’s not exactly my man, but
yes.’

‘So why are we here? You told me the
case was closed.’

‘It is closed. They’ve decided
Michelle Doyce did it and she’s unfit to plead. I just wanted to see where she
lived. I thought you and I could talk better while we walk.’

She turned and led Jack
back up Howard Street towards Deptford Church Street.

‘I don’t know that I’ve
got anything worth telling you,’ muttered Jack.

‘I’ve been your supervisor for
nearly two years.’

‘That’s the bright spot in my
week. Other than that …’ He looked away so she couldn’t see his
face.

‘Other than that?’

‘I like talking about people’s
problems – just not to them. I’m interested in it all in theory, but sitting in
that little room hearing someone tell me about what their step-father said to them when
they were six – it feels pointless. Or maybe I’m no good at it. I try to listen
and then I catch myself thinking about what I want to eat for lunch or what film to go
and see. People’s lives are mostly so
dreary
.’

Frieda looked at him attentively.
‘What’s
your
life like?’

‘I tell you what
was
good –
last year, that time with Alan and Dean, being involved with all that, even on the edge
of it. When it seemed relevant and there was some kind of answer – like a key fitting
into a lock and the door swinging open. Most of the time it’s just me and them in
a room saying stuff.’

‘Stuff,’ said Frieda. ‘Is
that all it is?’

‘You know what I think, Frieda? I
think I’m only still doing it because of you. Because I want to be like you.
Because when I’m with you it all seems to make sense. Most of the time I think
what we do might be a great con, a joke played on people who feel heroic because they
suffer and that’s all they want to talk about.’

‘You sound resentful. You almost sound
as though you’re saying, “And what about me?”’

‘They give me a nasty mess and I pat
it into some kind of shape. It could be any kind of shape, it doesn’t really
matter.
I want to tell them to look outside themselves at the real
world. There’s proper suffering out there. Rape and violence and sheer, grinding
poverty.’

Frieda touched him on the shoulder. They had
turned off Deptford Church Street and come to a small church, set back from the road,
with an old tower. A skull-and-crossbones was set on one of its gate posts and a charnel
house to the right.

‘St Nicholas was the patron saint of
sailors,’ said Frieda, as they went through the gates and into a small graveyard.
‘It’s what you’d expect in a church by the docks.’

‘I haven’t been into a church
since my grandma’s funeral,’ said Jack.

‘This one used to be in the
countryside. It was all orchards and market gardens and small boats tied up at the
wharves. Pilgrims to Canterbury would pass through it. Christopher Marlowe was killed in
a brawl in a house nearby. They carried the body here.’

‘Which is his grave, then?’

‘It’s unmarked. He could be
anywhere.’

Jack shivered and stamped his feet and
looked around at the flats that surrounded the church. ‘It’s gone down a bit
in the world since then.’

‘It’ll come up again.’

They made their way back to the road that
ran along the river. On the other side they could see the towers of Canary Wharf, lights
glittering in the February gloom, but here it felt deserted. A tiny primary school
seemed to be closed, even though it was a Tuesday in February. They walked past a
breaker’s yard, piles of twisted rusting metal visible through the iron gates,
nettles and brambles erupting over the wall, which was topped with coils of barbed wire.
There were several boarded-up houses with smashed windows, and then an
ancient industrial unit with cracking walls, whose fence bore the faded legend
‘Guard Dogs on Patrol’. Jack walked further up the tiny street and pressed
his face against some railings. He could see a deep, muddy pit where a building had
stood, and on the far side of it the façade of a warehouse, through whose ruined
arches he could see, over the muddy waters, the gleaming skyscrapers of Docklands.

‘All ready for the developers,’
said Frieda, pointing at the notice to keep out.

‘I prefer it as it is.’

They continued along the river, past a
rotting wooden pier. The low tide had exposed plastic crates and old bottles on the
shore. Frieda thought about Jack’s heavy, oppressive discontent, and waited for
him to speak again. At the same time, she pictured Michelle Doyce here, picking up all
those things Karlsson had told her about – tin cans, round stones, dead birds, forked
sticks – and carrying them back to her room to arrange. Making a shape out of mess, as
Jack put it: the instinct in us all, something deeply human and fearful.

Glancing across at Frieda’s smooth
profile, her chin held up in spite of the icy wind, Jack felt the familiar grip of his
adoration for her. He wanted her to look him in the eye and tell him that everything
would be all right, that he would be all right, there was no need to worry and that she
was going to help him. She would never do that. If there was one thing he had learned
from her, over all the time they had spent together, it was that you had to take
responsibility for your own life.

He took a deep breath and cleared his
throat. ‘There’s something I should tell you,’ he said. Now he’d
come to it, it was hard to say it out loud: his chest felt tight. ‘I’ve been
slipping a bit.’

‘Slipping?’

‘I’ve missed a
few sessions.’

‘With your patients?’

‘Yes. Not many,’ he hastened to
add. ‘Just occasionally – and a few I’ve arrived late for. And I’ve
kind of stopped seeing my own therapist so regularly. I’m not sure she’s
right for me.’

‘How long has this been going
on?’

‘A couple of months. Maybe
more.’

‘What do you do when you don’t
go or when you arrive late?’

‘Sleep.’

‘You pull the covers over your
head.’

‘Yes,’ Jack said. ‘And
it’s not a metaphor. An actual cover over my actual head.’

‘You know, don’t you, that for
the people who come to you this may be the most important fifty minutes of their week –
and that they might have screwed up all their courage to come?’

‘It’s really, really bad.
I’m not making excuses.’

‘This doesn’t sound like just a
problem with therapy. You sound a bit depressed to me.’

They kept walking. Jack seemed to be looking
at something in the river. Frieda waited.

‘I don’t know what that word
means,’ he said eventually. ‘Does it mean down in the dumps or does it mean
something more?’

‘It means you’re lying in bed
with the covers over your head, letting your patients down and yourself, worrying that
you’ve made the wrong career choice and you don’t seem to want to
change.’

‘What should I change?’ They
were walking past sparkling new gabled houses with front gardens and balconies. It felt
a long way from Deptford.

‘I think that the first thing you need
to do is stop lying in
bed, letting down people who badly need you. You
get up however you feel, and you go to work.’

Jack looked at her, his cheeks flushed in
the cold. ‘I thought you dealt with feelings.’

‘You can think about that. We can talk
about it. In the meantime, you do your job.’

‘Why?’ asked Jack.

‘Because that’s what we
do.’ Frieda stopped and nudged him. ‘On a normal day I’d show you the
Cutty Sark
but it’s still being mended so you can’t see a
thing.’ It was true: the ship was completely hidden from view by boards.

‘It’s better this way,’
said Jack. ‘It’s all a fake anyway.’