Frieda Klein 2 - Tuesday's Gone (43 page)

‘No,’ Frieda said slowly.
‘I don’t mean that. It’s just that nothing seems to fit. We’re
standing in a crime scene that isn’t really a crime scene. The victim seems to be
the main perpetrator. And the motives are obvious, but they don’t seem enough. And
then there’s Janet Ferris. She must have been killed because she saw something.
Let’s say, for the sake
of argument, that it was Frank Wyatt.
Why would he have gone there? We’d already connected him to Poole.’

She shook her head.

‘I don’t feel we’re seeing
the whole story. I keep thinking about Beth Kersey. Poole used people. He tried to
change Mary Orton’s will but failed. He took some money from the Wyatts. Probably
he was going to steal from Jasmine Shreeve. What was he going to do with Beth Kersey?
Have you had any luck getting her medical details?’

‘That’s a dead end,’ said
Karlsson.

‘It’s not. It’s
crucial.’

‘We can access her medical records if
she’s a suspect or a victim of a crime. At the moment she is an adult who
hasn’t even been reported missing. But for the moment we’re here because you
said you wanted to be here.’

‘All right, all right,’ said
Frieda, trying to clear her mind. ‘So, the idea is that Michelle Doyce found
Robert Poole’s body outside in the alley by the house. She brought him in and
stripped him and washed his clothes and folded them up, in the process probably removing
any hair or fibres.’

‘That’s right.’

‘She tried to help,’ said
Frieda. ‘She saw Robert Poole as someone in trouble and she tried to be a Good
Samaritan but in the process she ruined things.’

‘Exactly. She couldn’t have done
a better job of getting rid of the evidence if she’d done it
deliberately.’

Frieda looked around, trying to take it all
in. The sheer mass of it made her head ache. ‘This really is like her mind,’
she said. ‘When most of us go out we bring back things in our memory or maybe we
take a photo. But she just brought the things back.’

‘She was a real magpie,’ said
Karlsson.

‘Yes.’ Frieda
frowned. ‘Yes, she was.’

‘You make that sound interesting.
It’s just what you say about people who collect things.’

Frieda looked at the window. The day had
gone grey. ‘Are there lights?’

Karlsson went to the doorway to switch on
the ceiling light, and then, with his foot, an old standard lamp in the corner. Frieda
stepped forward and looked at it more closely. Suspended from short pieces of thread
around the frame that held the lampshade were what looked like beads and pieces of
glass. Frieda peered at them one by one. ‘Magpies don’t collect just
anything,’ she said. ‘They collect sparkly things.’

‘I don’t know much about
them,’ said Karlsson. ‘When I see them, they’re mainly pecking at dead
pigeons.’

Frieda took a new pair of surgical gloves
from her pocket and put them on.

‘Are you still buying those
yourself?’ said Karlsson. ‘We can get them for you.’

‘Remember what Yvette said about
Michelle Doyce? That she was the saddest woman she’d ever met? This room is like
that. Those dead bits of bird, the newspaper, the old cigarette butts smoked by other
people. They contain a sadness that I don’t even want to think about. But the
sparkly things are different. They’re pretty.’

‘If you like that kind of
thing.’

‘Come and look at these.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes.’

Karlsson stepped forward.

‘What do you see?’ she
asked.

‘Bits of glass.’

She cradled one of the other little dangling
objects in her gloved hand. ‘What about this one?’

‘It’s a
bead.’

‘Describe it to me.’

‘Well, it’s not exactly a bead.
It’s a sort of shiny metal cube, with a bit of blue at the centre.’

‘I think the blue might be lapis
lazuli,’ said Frieda. ‘And the shiny metal could be silver.’

‘Nice.’

‘What else?’

‘Are you serious?’ asked
Karlsson.

‘Yes.’

He strained his eyes. ‘There’s a
little metal thing on two of the sides.’

‘Which is?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Do you think it may be for attaching
it to something?’

‘Maybe. Or maybe not.’

‘And look,’ said Frieda.
‘There are two more here and one on the other side. Just the same.’

She stood back. Her eyes had been dazzled by
the proximity of the bulb. ‘There should be others.’

‘You mean beads like that?’

‘Yes. Beads like that.’

She began pacing around the room.

‘Frieda …’

‘Shut up,’ said Frieda.
‘Find the others.’

She found three, ranged along the
windowsill. Karlsson found four in a glass, arranged around the stub of a candle,
standing in its own dried wax. Another four were placed along the frame of the door.

‘This is like a children’s
party,’ said Karlsson.

Frieda had stopped. She was standing in the
middle of the room with her eyes closed. Suddenly they opened. ‘What?’ she
said.

‘I said, it’s
like a children’s party. You know, like an Easter-egg hunt, or something like
that.’

Frieda ignored him. She took the three beads
from the windowsill, placed them in the palm of her hand and stared at them closely. She
turned to Karlsson. ‘Have you got a torch?’

‘No.’

‘I thought policemen carried
torches.’

‘In films made in the 1950s. I’m
afraid I don’t have a truncheon either.’

She walked over to the standard lamp, lifted
the shade off and held her hand close to the bulb. She looked at the beads so intently
that her eyes hurt.

‘Yes?’ said Karlsson.

‘Look at this one.’ Frieda
pointed at one of the beads.

‘It’s a bit grubby,’ said
Karlsson.

‘Do you have something we can put
these in?’

Karlsson took a transparent evidence bag
from his pocket and Frieda dropped them in, one by one.

‘What do you think they are?’
asked Frieda.

‘Beads.’

‘And what do you get if you join beads
together?’

‘A bangle of some kind?’

‘Or if you have more beads?’

‘A necklace, maybe. But aren’t
these just something that Michelle Doyce found somewhere?’

‘That’s exactly what they
are,’ said Frieda. ‘She found them joined together and took them apart and
used them to decorate her room. These are nice. And they look handmade to me. And
valuable. She didn’t just find them on the pavement.’

‘So …’

‘So you’ve got to stop your guys
packing this stuff away. Instead, they’ve got to find as many as they can.
There’ll
probably be fifteen or twenty more, at least. Then show
a photograph of them to Aisling Wyatt. And you said that one of them was dirty. Find out
what the dirt is.’

‘Of course, it could be that
they’re just beads,’ said Karlsson.

When the phone rang, Frieda knew it was
going to be Karlsson. It almost rang with Karlsson’s accent.

‘Do you want the good news or the good
news?’ he said.

‘What happened?’

‘You’re forgiven,’ said
Karlsson. ‘Completely forgiven. Aisling Wyatt has identified the necklace. She
said it “went missing” a few weeks ago. What an amazing coincidence. Our
trophy collector at work again. Robert Poole clearly took things from whoever he conned
and redistributed them: some kind of power game. And that’s not even the best bit.
You knew, didn’t you? Though fuck knows how. The dirt on the necklace was blood.
Robert Poole’s blood.’ There was a pause. ‘You know what this means,
don’t you? It means we can charge Frank Wyatt.’

‘No,’ said Frieda. ‘What
it means is you can’t charge Frank Wyatt.’

‘Joanna,’ said Frieda,
‘where else did Dean like to go? Apart from Margate.’

‘It’s in the book. Can I have
another beer?’

‘Of course. I’ll get one in a
minute. I’ve read the book.’

‘Did you like it?’

‘I thought it was extremely
interesting.’

‘Fishing. He liked to go fishing.
Anywhere – canals and flooded gravel pits and rivers. He could sit there all day with
his tin of maggots. Drove me mad.’

‘What happened to his fishing
rods?’

‘I sold them on
eBay. I didn’t say who they’d belonged to.’

‘Anywhere else, any particular
town?’

‘We didn’t travel much. When he
was a kid, he said he and his ma used to go to Canvey Island.’

‘OK.’

‘Why? Why d’you need to
know?’

‘I’m tying up loose ends,’
said Frieda, vaguely.

Joanna nodded, as if satisfied. Frieda got
her another beer and watched her as she drank it, froth on her upper lip.

‘I’m surprised you’ve got
the nerve,’ she said, when she’d finished it. ‘After
everything.’

‘You didn’t think we’d
meet again?’

‘No. I’m in the new chapter of
my life. That’s what my editor said to me. You belong to the old one.’

It was in the middle of the night when the
voices came back. They started as a murmur that Beth could barely distinguish from the
lapping of the water against the hull and the rustle of the trees by the bank and the
spatter of rain on the roof. She knew the voices were coming for her and she tried to
hide from their anger, shut them out by wrapping a pillow around her head, blocking her
ears, but gradually the voices became clearer, then settled into one voice, harsh,
heavy, deep, coming out of the darkness close by and surrounding her.

It was angry with her. It asked questions
she couldn’t answer. It made accusations. It knew her secrets and her fears.

‘You let him down.’

‘No, I didn’t let him
down.’

‘He went away and you forgot
him.’

‘No, I didn’t forget
him.’

The voice said terrible things to her, told
her that she had done nothing, that she was nothing, that she was useless. She told him
about the photographs and the documents but the voice just continued with its harsh
accusations.

‘It’s the same. It’s
always the same. I speak and you don’t listen.’

‘I do listen. I do listen.’

‘You’re nothing. You do
nothing.’

Beth started crying and waving her head from
side to side,
banging it against the wooden wall above her bunk,
anything to shut the voice out. Slowly, as the room grew lighter, the voice faded and
left her aching, rubbing her tear-blotched face.

She got up and searched through
Edward’s papers until she found the pages she wanted. She wasn’t nothing.
She wasn’t useless. She stared at the words and stared at them, committing them to
memory, saying them to herself over and over again in a sing-song voice. Then she
fumbled through the cutlery drawer until she found what she wanted. The knife and the
stone for sharpening it. She remembered, from when she was a child, her father in the
kitchen telling her mother, ‘Women don’t understand.’ And then
she’d hear the noise, the knife edge scraping against the grey stone with the hint
of a spark. ‘This is how you sharpen a knife. This is how you sharpen a
knife.’

Frieda took a deep breath before she made
the call.

‘Frieda,’ Harry said.

‘You sound cross.’

‘You can tell that from just one
word?’

‘But you are.’

‘Why would that be, Frieda?’

‘Where are you now?’

‘Where am I? I’m near
Regent’s Park, with a client.’

‘Are you free?’

‘When?’

‘Now. For a quick lunch. I’ve
got an hour.’

‘Nice of you to fit me in.’

‘I’d like to see you for lunch,
if you have the time.’

‘I don’t know,’ he said.
‘All right, then. Where?’

‘There’s a little place
that’s quite near you – Number 9,
Beech Street. Quite near my
house. I can be there in ten minutes.’

‘I’ll get a taxi. One thing,
though: I don’t really like being made a fool of.’

‘I understand that.’

‘Back to wearing dark clothes, I
see.’

Frieda glanced down at what she was wearing,
all blacks and sombre blues, and smiled. ‘I guess so.’

‘I liked what you were wearing last
night.’

‘Thank you.’

‘You looked beautiful.’

She didn’t reply, but studied the
offers chalked up on the board. Marcus came over to take their order. His eyes were
bright with curiosity.

‘Goat’s cheese salad,
please,’ she said briskly.

‘Same,’ said Harry.

‘And tap water.’

‘Same.’ He put his chin in his
hands and studied her, thinking she looked tired. ‘So what happened?’ he
asked.

‘You mean last night?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Come on, Frieda.’

‘I’m not being coy. I want to be
honest about it. I didn’t know in advance that I was going to leave like that. I
just had to. I can’t really explain.’

‘You could have told me, though. I was
waiting for you to come back and feeling idiotically happy. Then bit by bit I realized
you’d deserted me and I was this stranger at a party who’d been
dumped.’

‘I just couldn’t stay
there.’

‘I thought …’ He stopped
and gave an awkward smile.
‘I thought you liked me. Were coming
to like me, at least.’

‘I do. I’m sorry I left you like
that last night. It was wrong of me.’

Their salad arrived. Marcus winked at
Frieda, who raised her eyebrows at him sternly.

‘Is it because of all the things that
are going on?’ asked Harry, prodding his goat’s cheese with a fork. He
didn’t really like salads. Or goat’s cheese. ‘With this investigation
and all that you’ve had to go through, I mean. That woman who killed herself, I
forget her name, and the newspaper articles and the general ugliness of it all. It must
be tough.’

Frieda considered. ‘I sometimes think
I made a mistake in getting involved at all,’ she said at last. ‘I’m
not entirely sure what my motives were. I’ve always said, always believed, that
you can’t solve the mess of the world, only the mess inside your own head. Now
I’m interviewing suspects and wandering around crime scenes. Why?’