Frieda Klein 2 - Tuesday's Gone (12 page)

Frieda glanced at the list: remains of one
dead cat minus its tail, forty-eight syringes, two dirty nappies, seven
condoms … She looked around the room, oddly compelled by
what
was clearly a forensic examination of everyday litter. She turned to Karlsson. ‘Is
that it, then?’

‘As far as Crawford is concerned, the
case is closed. I’m now investigating a nasty case of domestic abuse,’
Karlsson said, by way of answer. ‘Sixty-three stitches in the poor woman’s
face from being repeatedly hit with a broken bottle, four fractured ribs and a badly
bruised kidney. It’s the third time she’s been injured in the last eighteen
months, and each time so far she’s withdrawn the complaint and gone back to her
charming husband. I’m trying to persuade her to press charges this
time.’

‘I don’t want to hold you up
any more. Maybe you can just leave me here for a few minutes to look around.’

‘So you can find something we’ve
missed?’

‘Now that I’m here.’

‘Be my guest. Get them to buzz me from
Reception when you’re done.’

Karlsson left and Frieda closed the door.
She took off her coat and laid it with her scarf and shoulder bag on a metal chair but
kept her gloves on. The first category was the largest: rotten food. There were chicken
bones with shreds of flesh hanging off them, apple cores, the remains of bread rolls
with the toothmarks still visible in some, foil containers full of different kinds of
unspeakable greasy gloop, a small heap of rotten pulpy tomatoes, a few knobs of
chocolate, lots of flabby grey chips smeared with tomato, pieces of what Frieda took to
be battered fish, fragments of pies in different states of decay. She looked at them all
swiftly and moved on to the next category, which was packaging: crisps packets,
cigarette packets, sweet wrappers, old plastic bags, beer cans, Coke cans, cider cans,
empty vodka and wine bottles, polystyrene cups. Then came clothing: one child’s
flip-flop, two trainers with their soles peeled
back, a woman’s
once-white shirt from M&S missing an entire sleeve, a woollen scarf covered with
what smelt like dog shit, a greying bra (size 36B), men’s running socks with
balding heels.

Frieda moved on: nappies and condoms;
syringes; dead tailless cat; unidentifiable very dead rodent with innards spilling onto
the counter; newspapers and magazines, dating back as far as 23 January; flyers for
various gigs and takeaways; fragments of broken pottery, including one nearly complete
bowl with an Indian-tree pattern on it that reminded Frieda of her grandmother;
batteries; the rusting casing of a mobile phone and three plastic lighters; coins in
mostly one- and two-penny denominations, though there were a few euros as well.

The final space on the surface had been
reserved for all that couldn’t be categorized: a small, dusty heap of cigarette
stubs, matches, tiny scraps of paper and cardboard, hair grips, metal tabs from
cans.

Frieda sighed. She put on her coat and scarf
and slung her bag over her shoulder. But she didn’t leave at once. She stood in
the middle of the room, looking from one section to the next, frowning. Then she walked
over to the flyers and picked through them again. She extracted one and, holding it
between her thumb and forefinger, she left the room, shutting the door behind her.

‘Is that it?’ said Karlsson. He
was sitting behind a desk piled high with paper. On the shelf behind him Frieda saw the
photographs of his two little children, a flaxen-haired girl with a cleft in her chin,
like his, and an older boy with big, anxious eyes. She had met them once, when she had
visited his flat in Highbury, but couldn’t remember their names.

‘It’s not local.’ Frieda
pushed the torn, crumpled, grubby
flyer under Karlsson’s nose.
‘All the others were from nearby. This one’s got a Brixton area code.
Look.’

‘And?’

‘So why was it there?’

Karlsson leaned back, his hands behind his
head. ‘Amazing how people get about these days,’ he said companionably.
‘Look at me. I travelled all the way in to work from Highbury and this evening
I’m actually going to visit someone in Kensal Rise. That’s nothing compared
to Yvette. She comes in from Harrow.’

‘This is from a little alleyway.
It’s not a place for passers-by.’

‘There were people buying drugs in the
house. People shooting up in the alleyway.’

‘With receipts?’

‘Even heroin addicts buy
things.’

‘Have you noticed the writing on the
back?’

Karlsson turned it over and smoothed out the
paper. ‘“String”,’ he read out loud. ‘“Straw. Cord.
Stone.”’

‘Do you make anything of
it?’

‘I presume it’s a shopping list.
Maybe whoever wrote it is a DIY enthusiast. There are a lot around nowadays. If I had to
guess, judging from my own experiences last year, I’d say that someone’s
planning to grow strawberries in their garden.’

‘What about the letters?’

‘C, SB, WL. I don’t know,
Frieda. You tell me.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Let’s see, Cabbage, Salted
Butter, Waxed Lemon. Or Cointreau, sesame bagels and washing liquid. Fun as this is, I
don’t really have the time.’

‘I can see that.’

Karlsson pushed the flyer back at her.
‘Listen, I know I persuaded you to get involved. I know you’ve put a lot
into
this. I know you think we’re wrong about Michelle Doyce. I
know Hal Bradshaw is a wanker and his theories are hot air dressed up in pompous
language. What’s more, I even know it’s possible, even likely, that Michelle
Doyce wasn’t the actual murderer. But I’ve got a crime nobody gives a toss
about, I’ve got a corpse with no name, I’ve got a single witness who makes
no sense and is in a psychiatric hospital where she belongs. I’ve got a management
consultant with pointy shoes looking over my shoulder, and I’ve got a commissioner
who’s already moved on. What would you do?’

Frieda held up the flyer. ‘Follow this
up.’

‘Sorry.’

Frieda was about to leave when she thought
of something. ‘Is there a photo of the body?’ she said. ‘Just the
face.’

‘Of course,’ said Karlsson,
suspiciously. ‘Why?’

‘Could I have a copy?’

‘You can’t show it to anyone,
you know,’ he said. ‘It’s not in a good way.’

‘Even so,’ said Frieda.

‘All right,’ said Karlsson.
‘But it had better not end up on your Facebook page.’

‘Can I get it on my way
out?’

‘As long as you promise to
go.’

As she left, she remembered his
children’s names. Mikey and Bella, that was it.

Frieda sat down at her desk. She opened her
drawing pad and stroked the grainy page gently, the way she always did, almost as a
superstition. She took the photograph out of its buff envelope and laid it on the desk.
The creamy eyes of the dead man stared up at her. Except they weren’t staring up
at her. When you look at a face, you concentrate on the eyes because you feel
you’re looking in at a person who can look back at you. But these eyes were just a
clouded vacancy. The whole head was puffy and swollen. The flesh had cracked on the
temple and in the right cheek.

She picked up a soft lead pencil. She never
drew faces or figures, only objects: bridges, bricks, iron railings, old doorways,
broken pottery and lopsided chimneys. And normally, when making a drawing, she would be
looking at the details, the flaws, the cracks, the discolorations. This time she wanted
to see beneath them. What had he been like before? She started with what hadn’t
changed: the eyebrows, the hair. The cheekbones were prominent, even with all the
swelling and the decay. He had a firm chin. The lips were thin, the ears flat against
the skull. What about the nose? She reduced it slightly. She could only guess the
contours of the face and jaw line. Narrower but not gaunt, she decided. The hair was
dark brown, so she made the eyes dark as well. She sat back and looked at it from a
distance. It was a face, certainly. Was it
the
face? She folded it in half and
put it in her shoulder bag.

In the computer forensics
lab in the City, Yvette Long was standing at the shoulder of a young man with straggly
hair and a ginger moustache. He was a forensic anthropologist and he was seated at a
computer, pressing buttons and typing in information from a sheet of paper at his side.
All the while, he hummed a tune, over and over again, that she supposed was from an
opera, but she didn’t know anything about opera.

‘I’m using 3-D graphics for
this,’ he said, breaking off mid-hum.

Yvette nodded. She knew – he told her every
time she came down here.

‘TLC/Tk scripting,’ he added.
‘Very smart stuff.’

‘Mm,’ said Yvette. She
didn’t know what it meant, but she knew that a face was growing on the screen in
front of them on the interlocking mesh of lines.

‘You understand it’s quite a
generic image we’re producing. You could have a three-dimensional reconstruction
made up from this.’

‘I don’t think we’ll be
needing that.’

The face was quite thin, with a straight
nose and ears that lay flat against the head. A high forehead. Brown hair. Brown eyes. A
prominent Adam’s apple.

Although they couldn’t know it, it
wasn’t so different from the face that Frieda had drawn, though the eyes were more
vacant and the mouth less curved.

‘That’ll do,’ said Yvette.
‘That’ll do nicely.’

By eight forty, Frieda was in her
consulting room. She had twenty minutes before her first patient, so she made herself a
cup of tea and stood by the window that looked out on to the vast construction site.
When she had first come there, that space had been a row of Victorian houses. She had
seen
families moved out, windows and doors boarded up. Then the
squatters had arrived and they, too, had been ejected. A fence had been put up round the
area, with large signs warning the public to keep clear. Bulldozers and cranes had
appeared; a wrecking ball had swung through the rooftops and walls, and whole houses had
toppled as if made from matchsticks. Men in hard hats had drunk their tea on top of the
rubble; Portakabins had been erected. A year ago, this site had been cleared of every
last standing stone and had become an empty wasteland, waiting for the brand new
development to begin. It was still waiting. There was one lonely crane still parked in
the centre, and a Portakabin remained, though its windows were smashed, but all the
diggers had gone, the workers had gone. The plan had been put on hold, like so many
plans in this city, at this time. And in the meantime, kids had found their way in
through gaps in the fence to reclaim the area; they stood about in gaggles in the
evening, smoking cigarettes or drinking, and sometimes in the morning they would gather
there before school.

Today eight or nine of them were playing
football. Frieda watched them as they tore over the muddy, churned-up ground, yelling to
each other to pass. Their school clothes were beginning to look the worse for wear.
Perhaps nothing would ever get built here, she thought. Perhaps it would turn back to a
kind of natural wilderness in the centre of the urban density where children could play,
gangs could fight each other, and homeless people could retreat from shop fronts.

She heard footsteps outside. Putting down
her mug, she stood for a while, clearing her thoughts and readying herself, then went
towards her door and opened it into the waiting area. Joe Franklin sat on the sofa, his
head tipped to one side as if he was listening to some sound only he could hear.
Frieda had a chance to examine him before he noticed she was there:
she had been seeing Joe for two and a half years now, twice a week if he managed to turn
up, which he frequently didn’t. Today he was early, which was a good sign, and she
saw that he was properly dressed: his buttons matched up, his shoelaces were tied, his
jeans were held up with a belt, not sliding off his wasted frame, his hair was quite
clean. She saw that his fingernails weren’t dirty and that he had shaved recently.
What was more, as he turned towards her, his eyes were clear and he stood up in one
smooth gesture, no longer toppling upwards like an old drunk. There were weeks and
months when he could barely make it through the day, when all his efforts were a blind
stumble through a slow-motion nightmare, and then there were times like this, when he
emerged from the shadows.

‘Joe.’ She smiled at him
reassuringly and held the door open. ‘Good to see you. Come in, sit down.
Let’s begin.’

At ten to two, Frieda had finished for the
day. Four patients, four stories in her head. She sat for a few minutes, making her
notes from the final session in her notebook with her old fountain pen that Reuben
always mocked her for, calling her old-fashioned. She checked her mobile for messages,
reminded herself that she had to call her niece Chloë later on, and washed her mug
in the little kitchen off her room. She had eaten nothing that day, but she wasn’t
going home just yet. She pulled on her long black coat and wrapped her red scarf twice
round her neck, then set off briskly for Warren Street and the Victoria Line.

A little later, walking up Brixton Road, she
found Andy’s Pizzas within a few minutes. It was easy. She had the flyer. She
looked at the brightly coloured exterior. Andy didn’t just offer pizzas. He
offered hamburgers and chips as well. There
were livid photographs of
them on display. They suddenly made Frieda think of the photographs of the body, and
once she had thought of it she couldn’t stop herself. She walked inside. There
were a couple of plastic tables at the front by the window. At one, a woman was sitting
with a small child and a baby in a buggy. Frieda went up to the counter. A man was
taking an order over the phone. He was balding with a black beard and he wore a red polo
shirt with ‘Andy’s’ printed over the left breast. He put the phone
down and handed the order through a gap in the wall behind him. A hand took it. Frieda
could hear frying and clattering pans. The man looked enquiringly at her.