Frieda Klein 2 - Tuesday's Gone (49 page)

‘That will only meant anything when
Poole was alive.’

‘No. Don’t you see? She would
try to carry out his wishes. And if he wished Mary Orton dead – Yvette, will you tell
Karlsson what I’ve told you?’

There was another pause. ‘I’ll
pass on your concern. But, Frieda, can’t you just give this a rest? We’ve
been shafted by that bastard Newton and we’re trying to pick up the pieces. The
case is over. Please. I’m sorry it happened this way, but we’ve got our own
problems.’

‘Just tell Karlsson,’ Frieda
said.

But the phone had gone dead. She tried Mary
Orton’s number again but, as before, it rang and rang. Who else was there to ring?
Was it possible that Josef was still working there? Or nearby? She rang him and went
straight to voicemail. She stared out of the window. The traffic wasn’t as bad as
it might have been. As they crossed the river, she rang Yvette again.

‘Have you called Karlsson yet?’
she said.

‘I’ve told you. I’ll
contact him when I can. Now, please …’

The phone went dead again. Frieda stared at
it. At first she felt dazed. There was nothing she could do. And then she thought of one
thing she could do. What did it matter now anyway? She dialled 999.

‘Emergency services. Which service,
please?’

‘Police.’

There was a click and a whirr, then another
female voice. ‘Hello, police. What is the nature of the emergency?’

Frieda gave Mary
Orton’s address. ‘I’ve seen an intruder.’

‘When was this?’

‘A couple of minutes ago.’

‘Can you give any
description?’

‘No … Yes, I saw a knife.
That’s all.’

‘We’ll arrange to send a car.
Name, please.’

Frieda imagined what Karlsson or Yvette
would think of this. She felt as if she had cut the last fraying bit of thread that
attached her to them. But it was the things you didn’t do that mattered more than
the things you did.

As the taxi turned into Mary Orton’s
road, Frieda expected to see brightly coloured cars, flashing lights, but there was
nothing. Jake Newton was right, she thought. Bloody hopeless. She handed a twenty-pound
note to the driver.

‘I haven’t got any
change,’ he said.

‘Just keep it.’

She walked towards the house. She
hadn’t planned for this moment. She moved to press the bell, then saw that the
door wasn’t quite shut. She pushed at it and it opened. Had a policeman on the
beat arrived? Was Josef working there? She stepped inside.

‘Mary?’ she shouted. ‘Mrs
Orton?’

There was no reply. She felt her heart
beating too strongly; she felt it in her neck and in her chest. There was a sour taste
in her mouth. It was lactic acid, caused by the breakdown of oxygen. You got it when you
ran fast or when … She called again. What to do? She couldn’t phone the
police. She’d already done that. Where the hell were they? Some false alarm
somewhere probably. This was probably a false alarm. She walked through to the kitchen,
her footsteps sounding horribly loud, as if they were telling her she was somewhere she
wasn’t meant to be.

The kitchen was empty. There was a mug on
the table
half filled with tea or coffee, an open newspaper. Frieda
leaned over and touched the mug. It was warm. Not hot like tea that had just been made,
but warmer than the ambient temperature. Mary Orton could have gone out, forgotten to
shut the door. She turned and left the kitchen. Was there any point in looking round the
house? She opened the door to the front room and stepped inside. She felt an immediate
lurching, gulping shock. Mary Orton was lying on the carpet by the bookcase across the
room from the door. Frieda knew about these things and she felt her cognitive faculties
close and narrow. She was looking at Mary Orton as if through a long tube.
Frieda’s first thought was that she’d fallen, like people of Mary
Orton’s age so often do. They fall and break a hip and sometimes they can’t
get up and nobody finds them and they die. Then, almost dully and slowly, Frieda saw
that what she had taken for a shadow of something across Mary Orton and the shadow of
Mary Orton on the cream carpet was actually blood. Mary Orton’s blood. She ran
across to her, trying to remember the pressure points. Anatomy had been such a long time
ago.

Mary Orton was lying sprawled as if she had
tried to roll over on to her back and failed.

‘Mary,’ Frieda said, coaxingly.
‘Mary, I’m here.’ Frieda looked into her eyes. She saw the tiniest
flicker of something, a glimmer that puzzled her.

‘Mary,’ said Frieda, and saw
once again a minuscule movement in her eyes. And then Frieda realized what the movement
signified. Barely alive, Mary Orton was not looking at Frieda but past her, over her
shoulder, and Frieda thought, Oh, no. Oh, no. She felt a punch, hard and hot in her
back, to one side, and from then on everything happened with great foggy slowness. So
she had time to think,
How slow everything is. And she was punched
again, and now it was in her stomach. And she had time to think, Why am I being punched?
After that, she was able to remember, quite calmly, that she had read of how being
stabbed didn’t feel at all like being stabbed. It didn’t feel sharp. It felt
blunt, like being hit by a fist in a boxing glove. Frieda raised her arms in some kind
of defence but the next punch came on her leg and quite suddenly it was wet and warm.
Frieda knew that she couldn’t stand up any more but she didn’t fall. She
stayed where she was, and Mary Orton’s cream carpet came up to meet her. She lay
face down on it. She could feel the rough threads on her lips and she was now very, very
tired. All she wanted was to sleep. She realized that this was what it was like to die
and that she mustn’t die so she made the most terrible, horrible effort to raise
herself.

She saw a face, a girl’s face. She had
found Beth; Beth had found her. It seemed to be far away, like in a dream. Then, from
being slow, everything speeded up. There was a rush of sensations, noises, movement. She
felt movement, she was moving herself, and then everything slowed down once more and
became dark and first very warm and then very cold, and she felt her head fall back and
then her leg started to hurt and then really hurt, so that she cried out and she almost
did see something and someone, but it was too much effort and the pain faded, and she
fell deeply, gratefully asleep.

It wasn’t like waking. It was too
patchy and painful and messy. She woke in fragments and flashes: a dirty white ceiling,
faces leaning over her, faces saying things she didn’t understand, the smell of
soap and wetness on her body, being turned over, muttered conversations. Faces she
recognized: Sandy, Sasha, Josef, Reuben, Jack, Karlsson, Olivia, Chloë, even
Yvette. Some of them cried, some of them smiled. They came close and laid their hands on
her shoulder, her face, and she couldn’t tell them that she knew they were there.
They talked to her. They talked about her in whispers. Josef sang Ukrainian lullabies
between sobs and Sasha read her poetry. Outside in the corridor she heard Chloë
shouting at someone, her voice hoarse with fury, and she wished she could tell her
angry, clumsy niece that it didn’t matter, nothing mattered so very much, but she
was unable to move her lips. Inside, a part of her found something funny. The Frieda
Klein reunion party. She couldn’t turn over. Sometimes she felt she was choking.
Mostly she slept.

And then one day a voice said to her,
‘Frieda, can you hear me? Blink if you can hear.’ She blinked.
‘I’m going to count to three, then we’ll pull the tube out and you
should cough and breathe. All right, one, two, three.’

Frieda felt like her insides were being
pulled out through her mouth, as if she were vomiting them, and then she coughed and
coughed.

‘That’s a good girl,’ said
the voice.

‘I’m not a girl,’ Frieda
said huskily, and she started to say
that she wasn’t good but it
didn’t feel worth the effort. There was more sleep, with occasional vague flashes.
Was that Sasha in a chair by the bed reading a book?

There she was again, a hand on hers, looking
down at her. This time she spoke to her, in her low and kindly voice: ‘Can you
hear me, Frieda?’

She couldn’t hear what she said back.
She leaned closer and closer until she was whispering in her ear. ‘Water,’
she said.

Sasha lifted her head so gently and tipped
the glass. The water was warm and stale and delicious.

‘Frieda?’ Sasha said. ‘The
doctor’s going to see you tomorrow. If you’re up to it.’

‘You said I could tell you.’

‘What?’

It was very hard to form the words.
‘When I needed to talk.’

She tried to find words, holding on to
Sasha’s slim cool hand while the machine behind her bleeped.

‘It’s all right,’ said
Sasha, kissing her cheek. ‘We can talk later.’

‘One day,’ said Frieda, sinking
back beneath dark waters.

The next day was different. Frieda woke,
and was properly awake. She sat up and saw the ward she was in: three beds opposite, and
two between her and the window. A woman across the way was complaining to a nurse, and
behind a screen next to her she could hear the voice of an old woman saying the same
word – ‘teacher’ – over and over again. The day was grey and she felt awful.
Her throat was ragged and almost the whole of her body ached. A trolley arrived with
breakfast, some kind of porridge, milky tea, orange juice, all of it disgusting.

A nurse bustled across and
said to Frieda, ‘He’s here.’

There, standing at the end of the bed, was a
very distinguished-looking middle-aged man in a pin-striped suit and a bow tie. Through
her bleary consciousness, Frieda managed to feel irritated. Why do consultants still
wear bow ties even when they know it’s a cliché?

He smiled down at her. ‘How’s
our phenomenon?’ he said.

It took an effort, but Frieda could speak
now. Even to herself, she sounded hoarse and halting, like someone who had just learned
to speak. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

He sat on the edge of the bed, still
smiling. ‘I’m Mr Khan,’ he said. ‘Your surgeon. I saved your
life. But you saved it first. I’ve never seen anything like it. You have a medical
degree, yes?’ Frieda nodded. ‘Even so. Quite remarkable.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Frieda.
‘What’s remarkable?’

‘You don’t remember?’ said
Mr Khan. Frieda shook her head. ‘It’s understandable in the circumstances.
One of the stab wounds resulted in a penetrating trauma that sliced a femoral artery. As
you clearly realized, you would have bled out in a minute or two. Before you passed out,
you managed to apply a tourniquet to your own leg.’

‘I didn’t,’ said
Frieda.

‘You were in a state of severe
shock,’ said Mr Khan. ‘I have to say that tourniquets are no longer
recommended. You risk necrotic damage but not in this case. We had you in theatre in
under an hour.’ He was about to pat her leg but stopped himself. ‘You were
lucky with the stab wounds to the back and abdomen, if I can put it like that. Neither
of them struck an organ. But, as they say, it only takes one. We worried about your leg
at first, but you’ll be fine. You may have to delay your triple-jump training
until the Olympics after next, but apart from that …’

‘Mary Orton,’ said Frieda.

‘What?’

‘What about Mary Orton?’ said
Frieda.

Mr Khan’s smile faded. ‘A friend
of yours is here,’ he said. ‘He’ll answer any questions. If
you’re strong enough, that is.’

‘Yes,’ said Frieda. ‘I
am.’ She lay back on the pillow and saw Karlsson’s face appear above her.
She thought of a cloud floating overhead, or a zeppelin. Maybe it was the
painkillers.

‘You look terrible,’ she
said.

‘We can do this another time,’
he said. ‘The nurse said you needed to rest.’

‘Now,’ said Frieda. ‘Mary
Orton.’

Karlsson looked to the side, as if he were
waiting for someone else to speak. ‘She was pronounced dead at the scene,’
he said. ‘I think she’d been dead for some time.’

‘No,’ said Frieda. ‘She
was alive. I remember her eyes. They were moving.’

‘They said she’d lost a lot of
blood. I’m so sorry.’

Frieda felt tears hot on her face. Karlsson
reached for a tissue and dabbed them away.

‘We let her down,’ said Frieda.
‘We failed her.’

‘The paramedics had enough on their
hands with you. The other two were beyond help.’

‘The other two?’

‘Mary Orton and Beth
Kersey.’

‘What?’ said Frieda, trying to
raise herself from the pillow. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Easy, easy,’ said Karlsson, as
if he were soothing a restless child. ‘Don’t worry. There won’t be any
trouble.’

‘What do you mean, trouble?’

‘There’s no problem at
all,’ said Karlsson. ‘Quite the opposite. You’ll probably get a
medal.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Frieda.
‘I don’t remember anything.’

‘You
don’t?’

Frieda shook her head. She tried to think.
It all seemed dim and far away.

‘I was stabbed first from
behind,’ she said. ‘I didn’t even see her. Or at least – I barely
remember. But there’s something. I was losing blood, a lot of blood, and I passed
out. I remember hearing something. That’s all.’

‘I see this all the time,’ said
Karlsson. ‘You’ll probably never recover the memory. But it was easy to
reconstruct what happened when we saw the scene. Christ, there was blood everywhere.
Sorry, you don’t need to hear this.’

‘But what happened?’

‘We can save this for later,
Frieda.’

‘Now,’ said Frieda. ‘Tell
me.’

‘All right, all right,’ said
Karlsson. ‘It’s clear what must have happened. You acted out of
self-preservation. After you were stabbed, you must have fought over the knife while you
were bleeding yourself. You got hold of the knife and stabbed her in
self-defence.’

‘How?’