Frieda Klein 2 - Tuesday's Gone (19 page)

‘Including the name of the couple in
Brixton whom your old friend found.’

‘You mean Frieda Klein? She’s
not an old friend, she’s someone who helped us. And now that you mention her, I
should say that I want to use her on a more permanent
basis.’

Yvette frowned. ‘What for?’

‘She can be useful to us.’

‘Fine.’

‘By which you mean not
fine.’

‘It’s your decision,’ said
Yvette, hating how her voice sounded. Her cheeks burned scarlet. She was sure that
Frieda Klein didn’t turn an unbecoming red whenever she was embarrassed – but,
then, perhaps Dr Klein never felt embarrassed.

‘That’s right, and I’ve
made it, and now we can concentrate on Robert Poole. How far have you got with the names
in the notebook?’

Chris Munster picked up a pad of paper.
‘We’re going to work our way through them. A few will be easy to find and
others may take longer. We’ve already made an appointment to see a Mary Orton.
We’re going straight after this meeting. She sounded rather flustered on the phone
– she’s an elderly lady, lives alone. Apparently Robert Poole had been helping her
repair her house in some way. We’re going to start distributing that visual
we’ve had drawn up. That might flush out a few more people who knew
him.’

‘Right, it should be –’ Karlsson
was interrupted by the phone ringing. He picked it up, listened, frowned, jotted
something on his notepad. Putting it down, he said, ‘They’ve talked to the
bank.’ He tore the page off his notepad and handed it to Yvette.
‘We’ve got a next of kin, a brother in St Albans. Go and see him. And about
that money in his account. It’s gone. It was transferred out of the account on the
twenty-third of January. I want the two of you to go and break the news to the brother
and find out anything you can about Robert Poole, photos, documents, whatever.’
He looked at his watch, then, picking up the notebook, stood up,
pushing back his chair. ‘Right. With a bit of luck, we’ll find someone
who’s suddenly acquired three hundred and ninety grand and we can wrap this up
quickly.’

Karlsson had to ring several times before
he got through to Frieda. ‘I left a message,’ he said. ‘Two
messages.’

‘I was going to ring,’ she said.
‘I’ve been with patients all morning.’

He gave her an account of the way the case
was developing, about the notebook. Frieda didn’t say much in reply.

‘We’ve found a member of
Poole’s family,’ he said. ‘A brother. Yvette’s on her way to see
him.’

‘It seems things are
progressing,’ said Frieda.

She sounded detached and Karlsson caught
himself feeling resentful, as if he wanted Frieda’s full attention and knew he
wasn’t getting it. There was a long pause.

‘Some of the team have been checking
through the names in Poole’s notebook,’ Karlsson said finally. ‘One of
them is an old woman called Mary Orton who lives in Putney. Poole was organizing
building work for her. It wasn’t finished when he disappeared.’

‘Yes?’

Karlsson took a deep breath. ‘That
friend of yours you brought round to me once, Josef. He’s a builder,
no?’

Karlsson could almost hear her soften over
the phone.

‘That’s right.’

‘Is he good? And
trustworthy?’

‘Yes, he is.’

‘I thought you could go and talk to
her and bring your builder friend with you, suss out what Poole actually did. He might
even get some work out of it. What with the job not having been finished. According to
Chris, she’s an old
woman whose husband has died and sons live
away. I think she’s a bit lonely.’ There was another pause. ‘Unless,
of course, you’re only interested in doing things when you do them without telling
me.’

‘I think he’s available for
work,’ Frieda said. ‘But I’ll need to check with him.’

‘That would be kind of you,’
said Karlsson, and gave her the Putney address.

‘Did she say anything about Robert
Poole?’ asked Frieda.

‘She said he was nice and
polite,’ said Karlsson. ‘That’s what they all say. Nice and
polite.’

‘Have you ever done this
before?’ asked Yvette Long.

Chris Munster was driving and didn’t
look round. ‘In my first year,’ he said. ‘A kid had been knocked over
and I went along with a sergeant to tell the parents. The mother answered the door and I
just stood in the background while he told her. We were talking to her and then the
father came home from work and we stood there while she told him. The bit I remember was
my sergeant hovering around like someone who was about to leave a party. Those parents
partly wanted us to go and leave them to it. At the same time they couldn’t let us
go. They kept talking about him and asking if we wanted tea. I’ve done it a few
times since then but that’s the one I remember. What about you?’

‘A few times,’ said Yvette.
‘More than a few. I always feel nervous in advance. I look at the front door and
feel guilty about what I’m going to do to them. They open the door and sometimes
you can tell that they know even before you say anything.’ She looked at him.
‘It’s the next exit.’

They drove off the motorway and there was no
voice except for the satnav, directing them this way and that through residential
streets in St Albans.

‘Ever been here
before?’ asked Munster.

‘I think there are some Roman
ruins,’ said Yvette. ‘I came on a school trip once. I can’t remember
anything about it. I’d probably enjoy it if I went now.’

The satnav told them they’d reached
their destination. They sat for a moment. Yvette checked the printed sheet on her lap to
make sure this was the right address. It was.

Munster looked at her. ‘So are you
nervous now?’ he said.

‘If I did it every day,’ she
said, ‘I’d get used to it.’

‘Are you going to say it or do you
want me to?’

‘I’m in charge,’ Yvette
said.

They got out of the car, opened the gate to
the miniature front garden and took the three steps that brought them into the little
Georgian portico. Yvette pressed the bell, which set off a tinkling chime. A man
answered the door. He was thick-set, with short blond hair, shaved at the sides of his
head, dressed in jeans and a short-sleeved football shirt. He looked at them
enquiringly.

‘Are you Dennis Poole? said
Yvette.

‘That’s right.’

She introduced herself and Chris Munster.
‘Are you the brother of Robert Poole?’

‘What?’ he said, looking
surprised. ‘Why do you want to know?’

‘You
are
his brother?’
said Yvette.

‘Well, yeah,’ said Poole.
‘But –’

‘Can we step inside?’ said
Yvette.

They walked into the front room where the TV
was on with a game show Yvette didn’t recognize. She asked Poole to switch it off.
Instead he turned the sound down.

‘I’m afraid I have to tell you
that your brother’s dead,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘I’m very sorry,’ she
continued. ‘We found his body on the first of February, but it took some time to
identify it.’

‘What do you mean, his
body?’

‘His body was found in a house in
south London. We’ve begun a murder investigation and we’re currently
interviewing witnesses and taking statements. I know this must be a shock.’

‘What do you mean, south
London?’

Yvette was used to this. In shock, people
lose the ability to process information. You have to take things slowly.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I know how difficult this must be for
you. Are you surprised that your brother should have been in that area?’

‘What the hell are you talking
about?’ said Poole. ‘Rob died six years ago. Seven almost. You’ve made
some mistake.’

For a moment Yvette couldn’t speak.
She looked at Munster. He was the one who’d tracked down the birth certificate.
What kind of disastrous error had he made? She took the sheet from the bag she was
carrying.

‘We’re talking about Robert
Anthony Poole,’ she said. ‘Born on the third of May 1981. Huntingdon. Father
James Poole.’

‘That’s right,’ said
Poole. ‘That’s my dad. But Rob died in 2004. Work accident. Some scaffolding
collapsed. The company put all the blame on him. He got fuck-all compensation.
That’s what you should be investigating.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ said
Yvette. ‘There’s clearly some kind of …’ She paused, at a loss.
‘Problem,’ she finished lamely.

‘I’ll say there’s been a
bloody problem.’

She took a deep breath. ‘I’m
extremely sorry about all this,’ she said. ‘I promise you that we’re
going to investigate
and find out what’s happened.’ She
hesitated. ‘Do you have any details about your late brother? Papers?’

‘Up in the attic somewhere. It might
take some time to dig out.’

‘We can wait,’ said Yvette.

Josef was suspicious at first. ‘This
thing,’ he said. ‘Is for charity?’

‘For you or for her?’ said
Frieda.

‘For both.’

‘Karlsson rang me because he thought
you could help. I think she’s been left in the lurch. But if she wants any work
done, she’ll pay for it.’

Frieda thought he seemed a bit better. At
least he smelt clean and he had dressed himself properly; his face was less gaunt, too.
Reuben had told her that he was only working from day to day. Building work was still
slow. He drove her in Reuben’s car. His old van was still sitting, with its flat
battery and its flat tyre, outside the house. The traffic was bad and the journey took
almost an hour.

‘The old joke is that it used to be
quicker in London when people travelled on horseback,’ said Frieda.

Josef didn’t reply.

‘Except that it’s not really a
joke,’ she said. ‘It’s true, I think.’

Josef just looked ahead.

‘If you’re doing a job in a
London garden,’ she said, ‘and you cut yourself, you need a tetanus shot.
It’s because of the horse shit. In Victorian times, people filled their gardens
with it and the bacteria are still active.’

Silence from Josef. Frieda looked across at
him. He seemed like someone who’d had the fight knocked out of him. Frieda knew
that he hadn’t told Reuben anything about what had
happened.
When she had first seen him, after his secret return, she had said she was ready to talk
to him whenever he felt like it. But perhaps she was going to have to make the first
move.

‘Josef,’ she said,
‘something bad happened at home, didn’t it?’

He stared straight ahead, but she saw his
hands tighten on the steering wheel.

‘Do you want to tell me?’

‘No.’

‘Because you believe that I’ll
think the worse of you?’

‘I know you think the
worse.’

‘Is that why you never told us you
were here?’

‘You are good woman. Is easy for you.
I am bad man.’

‘Josef, everyone’s good and bad.
Everyone makes mistakes.’

‘Not you.’

‘That’s not true,’ Frieda
said energetically. She hesitated, then said, ‘Last Friday, do you know where I
was?’

‘Friday? When we all have dinner with
Olivia?’

‘Before then. I was at the funeral of
Kathy Ripon. You know, the young woman who was snatched by Dean Reeve and whose body was
finally found in the storm drain.’ Josef, negotiating a mini-roundabout, nodded.
‘I was to blame for her death. No, don’t interrupt. I was. I acted hastily,
I didn’t think about what I was doing and she died because of it. So. That’s
me. What about you?’

He asked abruptly, ‘You think I am
good father?’

‘What does that mean? I think you love
your sons and miss them. I think you’d do anything for them. I’m sure
you’ve made mistakes. But they’re lucky to have you.’

He braked, turned his heavy face to her.
‘They do not have me now. They have him.’

‘Him?’

‘Him. She have new man, they have new
papa. They look at him like hero. Suit and tie and cakes on weekend wrapped up in box
with ribbons. They look at me like something on bottom of shoe. Shit,’ he
supplied. ‘Like shit.’

‘Why?’

Cars backed up behind them and started
sounding their horns. Josef moved off again. ‘Because I am shit.’

‘What happened?’

‘She knew about straying.’

‘Straying? You mean, other
women?’

Frieda had also known about the other women.
Josef loved his wife with a sentimental, unwavering attachment, but she’d been in
Kiev and he’d been in London, and for him it had been as if the two worlds were
entirely separate: in one, he had a wife whom he loved, in the other, he
didn’t.

‘She knew,’ Josef repeated.
‘I go home with my presents and my tender heart, all gladness, and my loneliness
gone at last, and she shut the door. Just shut the door, Frieda. My boys see me turned
like a dog away.’

‘Did you ever manage to talk about
it?’

He shook his head from side to side, slowly.
‘I try. I meet new man. Good job. Toys for my boys. Cars that move with radio.
Computer games with shooting and bombs. They not want my cheap little presents, not want
me. Is over. All over. Life turned dust. I come back here again.’

‘So you never actually had a proper
conversation about it?’

‘What to say, Frieda, what to do?
Everything is over. Gone.’

‘To tell her what you feel, to hear
what she feels, to work out if things really are over.’

‘I am nothing,’ said Josef.
‘I have no money. I live in faraway
land. I am wicked when her
back is turned. Why she want me as husband? Why you want me as friend?’

‘I like you,’ said Frieda,
simply. ‘And I trust you.’

‘Trust? Me?’

‘Why else would I ask you for
help?’

His eyes filled with tears.
‘Truth?’

‘Yes. Listen, we’re going to
talk about this more, Josef. But now we’re here. Turn left. This is where Mary
Orton lives.’

Josef found a place to park, and they both
got out.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked,
as they walked down Brittany Road.