Frieda Klein 2 - Tuesday's Gone (11 page)

‘How do you mean?’

‘There was a fire, remember? What I
heard is that there was nothing left. When it’s rebuilt, it’ll be like a
Madame Tussaud’s replica of the real
Cutty Sark
. It’ll be another
fake bit of London for the tourists to look at.’

‘Does it matter?’

‘Don’t you care if people
mistake a crappy heritage museum for real life?’

Frieda glanced at Jack’s wretched
face. Maybe breakfast at her local coffee shop would have been a better idea.
‘Real life is an overrated idea,’ she said.

‘Is that supposed to comfort
me?’

‘Comfort? No, Jack. We’re going
down here.’

They entered a doorway in a small domed
building by the river, and entered a battered, creaky lift operated by a man wearing
headphones, singing along to a song that only he could hear. Jack didn’t speak as
it descended. The doors opened and he saw the tunnel stretching ahead of them in a long
gentle curve.

‘What is this?’ Jack said.

‘The tunnel under the
river.’

‘Who uses
it?’

‘It used to be for the dockers to walk
to work on the Isle of Dogs. It’s mostly empty now.’

‘Where are we headed?’

‘I thought I’d buy you
lunch.’

Jack was surprised. They’d never eaten
lunch together before. ‘Aren’t you working?’

‘A patient cancelled. Anyway, I need
to think things through. Walking helps me think.’

‘Even when I’m here moaning
about my problems.’

‘Even then.’

Jack listened to the echoes of their steps
in the tunnel and tried not to think of the weight of the water above. ‘You mean,
think about this dead man?’

‘I’m thinking about the woman
they found him with. The one who was looking after him.’

They entered the lift at the other end. The
operator was reading a magazine. Jack looked at Frieda. ‘I guess that some jobs
are worse than mine.’

They came out into the wind and rain on the
north side of the river.

‘Don’t do that again,’
Frieda said.

‘What?’

‘Talk about someone like him as if
he’s deaf, as if he’s too stupid to understand.’ She walked swiftly,
in long, smooth strides, looking suddenly stern.

‘Sorry,’ he said humbly.
‘You’re right. But what can you do about the woman?’

‘She clearly didn’t kill
him,’ said Frieda.

‘She’s in an institution now,
right? And that’s where she’ll stay, whatever happens. So …’

‘You sound like a policeman,’
said Frieda. ‘Like the commissioner.’

Frieda led them on a path
along the bank of the Isle of Dogs. On the left side there were flats, converted
warehouses, compact modern houses. On the right was the widening river and beyond, on
the other side, scrubby wasteland. They walked briefly along a busier road, then Frieda
turned off into a smaller street and suddenly they were in an old inn: a warm,
oak-beamed room, the chink of wine glasses, the rise and fall of conversation and the
crackle of an open fire; young women in white aprons sailing past with dishes held high
on one hand.

They sat at a table with a view across the
water. Frieda looked out. ‘You can understand why all those old sea captains came
back here when they retired. It was the nearest they could get to being at
sea.’

‘I noticed all those names in
Deptford.’ Jack took his seat opposite her. He picked up a menu and looked at it
intently, concealing his nervousness. What was he going to eat? It depended on Frieda.
Did she expect them to have a full meal, like beef pie or salmon
en
croûte
, or should he have a bar snack?

‘What names?’

‘The street names. They reminded me of
studying the Spanish Armada at school. Fisher Road, Drake Road or whatever.
There’s probably a Nelson Road somewhere, or is that too late?’

‘Say that again.’

‘Sorry?’

‘The names.’

Jack repeated them. A young woman put a
basket of bread rolls on the table and he tore a large piece off one and stuffed it into
his mouth, realizing how hungry he was.

‘Are you ready to order?’ asked
a waitress.

Frieda paused. Jack waited for her to go
first.

‘No,’ said
Frieda, slowly. ‘We’ve got to go.’

‘What do you mean?’

Frieda stood up and pulled a crisp
five-pound note from her wallet, which she laid on the table under the basket of bread
rolls.

‘Come on.’

‘That was quick,’ he said, but
she was already on her way out. He had to run to keep up with her.

‘You remember Jack Dargan?’
said Frieda to Karlsson, after he’d got out of the car. ‘A colleague of
mine.’

Karlsson nodded at Jack. ‘Funny to
meet in Deptford. What are you even doing over here?’

‘Jack and I had things to
discuss,’ said Frieda. ‘I thought it would be a good place for a walk.
It’s an interesting area.’

‘So I’ve heard.’ Karlsson
looked through some railings at the remains of a warehouse. ‘But mainly it’s
a dump.’ He pushed his hands into the pockets of his jacket. ‘Before you say
anything, I’d like to point out the reality of the situation. What is probably
going to happen is that the CPS will read the file and decide that Michelle Doyce is
unfit to plead, which I’m sure you agree with. At that point, the British taxpayer
will be saved the cost of a trial as well as any further police investigation. Michelle
Doyce will finally get the medical attention she should have received in the first place
and you can get back to your patients.’ He paused. ‘We’ll probably
never know exactly what happened.’

‘I think I know what Michelle Doyce
was saying,’ said Frieda.

‘I hope it was a confession,’
said Karlsson. He looked at her, then at Jack, whose face showed the faint trace of a
smile that quickly vanished. ‘Well? What was it?’

‘Follow me.’ Frieda set off
along the street towards the house, the two men walking quickly to keep up. ‘I was
talking to Jack about the history of this area. Did you know that it was somewhere along
here that Queen Elizabeth knighted Francis Drake?’

‘No, I
didn’t,’ said Karlsson. ‘I visited the
Cutty Sark
when I was
at school.’

‘It’s all a fake,
apparently,’ said Frieda.

Now they had turned into Howard Street and
Frieda stopped. They looked at the house. Number three.

‘In a way,’ she said,
‘what I like about this area is that there’s nothing left. Four, five
hundred years ago there were orchards here and shipyards and it’s where Francis
Drake came and moored his boat after he had sailed round the world, and it’s all
gone. They just built warehouses on top of it and then it all got bombed in the war and
then they built the housing estates.’

‘Frieda,’ said Karlsson, with a
slight edge to his voice, ‘I’m really hoping that this is leading somewhere
–’

‘It was Jack,’ Frieda cut
in.

Karlsson looked across at Jack, who turned
red and seemed both pleased and baffled.

‘He reminded me that the names of the
streets survive, even when the buildings have been knocked down. The shipyards and docks
are gone but not the streets that were named after them.’ She pointed up at the
street sign. ‘Look. Howard Street. Wasn’t he the admiral of the
Armada?’

‘I don’t know,’ said
Karlsson.

Frieda walked towards the house and stood in
front of it. She turned to Karlsson. ‘Andrew Berryman said I should try listening
to Michelle Doyce. When we asked her where she had met the man, she kept talking about
Drake and the river.’

‘Fluvial,’ said Karlsson.
‘Isn’t that what Dr Bradshaw said?’

‘Fluvial?’ echoed Jack.

‘Well, that was a load of crap,’
said Frieda.

‘He’s a leading
authority,’ said Karlsson.

‘She was just trying to answer the
question.’

‘Then why didn’t she answer it
more clearly?’ said Karlsson.

‘She doesn’t see the world the
way we do. But she did her
best.’ Frieda led them along the front
of the house to where a walkway passed along the side. It was blocked off at the far
end. ‘Drake’s Alley,’ she announced.

‘And?’ said Karlsson.

‘Michelle Doyce collects
things,’ she said, ‘brings them back to her flat and arranges
them.’

‘Are you saying she collected a dead
body?’

‘I think that’s what she told
us.’

There was a long silence while Karlsson
thought hard.

‘You think Michelle Doyce found a dead
body here and carried it back to her flat?’

‘She wouldn’t need to carry
it,’ said Frieda. ‘It’s – what? – fifteen, twenty feet from here to
her front door. And it was an emergency. She must have thought she was helping
him.’

Karlsson nodded slowly. His face wore a look
of concentration. And almost, Frieda thought, a kind of rueful amusement.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Good.
Stand back now. This might be a crime scene. I don’t think we should blunder
in.’

‘What about your
commissioner?’

‘I’ll inform him,’ said
Karlsson. ‘In due course.’

The three of them stood and gazed into the
alley. It was a muddy, gravelly path, littered with pieces of paper and shopping bags;
used needles were strewn around. A bin bag had been dumped in the far corner.

‘Bradshaw might still be right,’
said Frieda. ‘Michelle might have been talking about men and women. You know,
boats and rivers.’

‘Someone needs to go through all that
stuff,’ said Karlsson, as if she hadn’t spoken. He took out his phone.
‘Fortunately there are people who do this for us.’

In February, the days are still short. She
knew it was February, and she even knew the date because she had made herself a
calendar. She had been good at art at school; it had been her
favourite subject. Even now, if she closed her eyes, she could make herself remember the
feeling, when she was very little, of dipping the thick brush into the pot of paint,
then running it across the blank page, seeing the bright, steady line following it.

The pictures in this calendar were of trees.
A tree for each month. When she was a girl, she had had a sketch pad, which she kept in
the top drawer of her desk. In it, she had made a painting of each of the trees in her
garden: ash, oak, beech, hornbeam, false acacia; apple tree and plum tree and walnut
tree. She had spent hours shading in the trunks, trying to get the leaves right. She
never painted towns, houses, people – all those eyes staring at you, faces peering out
of windows when you didn’t know you were being looked at. Strangers behind you, or
in corners, in shadows. She preferred empty landscapes. She liked the desert and the sea
and wide lakes.

He had brought her the paper, several
pencils and coloured crayons. He hadn’t brought a sharpener, though, so
she’d had to use the knife she pared potatoes with. There was a page for the tree,
and a page that she divided into a grid for all the days. Thirty days have September,
April, June and November … It had taken ages, but she had time. That was one
thing she did have, while she was waiting. She had sat at the little table and, instead
of a ruler, she had used a book about gardening that he had left behind on one of his
visits. She couldn’t write down the days that each date fell on – that would have
been too complicated and, anyway, she had made the calendar in September and now it was
the following year. 2011: February 2011.

In each square she wrote down what she had
done during the day. It wouldn’t give anything away:, she never put down things
that were important. She wrote: ‘20 press-ups’, ‘2 cups
of tea’, or ‘bad migraine’, things like that. She
had run out of migraine tablets, but he would bring them when he came. She only put a
small star in the top right-hand corner of each square on the days that he was with her.
That was how she knew that it was three weeks and three days since he had been there. He
had never been away that long, not even when he was on a mission.

The tree for February was a beech, although
few except her would recognize that because its branches were bare. She liked the smooth
grey bark of a beech tree and the fluted column of its trunk. At the trunk’s fork,
she had put in the tiny initials of her name and his. Nobody would ever see it, but she
knew it was there – like a lover’s carving. She did it with each tree, in a
different place. It was a secret code. She hadn’t even told him because perhaps he
wouldn’t like it, but after this was over, she would tell him and he would wrap
his arm around her shoulders and kiss her on the top of her head or on the side of her
jaw just beneath her ear and tell her how proud he was of her and of what she had
endured for his sake. He needed her. Nobody had ever needed her before. It was because
of this that she had given up everything: her home, her family, her comfort, her safety,
herself.

She put her face to the window and looked
out at the grey sky that was darkening towards night. Days were short and nights were
long, and it was cold and she wanted him to come.

At just past seven on the following
morning, Frieda was standing at the door of a well-lit basement room in the police
station. It was windowless and cold and there was even an underground smell, a tinge of
decay and dirt. It was from the detritus in the alley that had been laid out on the
surfaces with evident care, each item in its own space.

‘You wanted to see it,’ said
Karlsson.

‘Is there anything?’

‘Judge for yourself.’ He entered
the room and Frieda followed him. ‘Obviously we were looking for things like
traces of human blood, bodily fluid, but even if there had been anything like that, the
rain and melted snow would have washed it all away. If the body had been in that alley,
it would have been about two weeks ago. Of course, it would have been nice to find his
missing finger.’

‘There was nothing else?’

‘What? Like a wallet full of cards, or
a set of keys with an address tag on them? No. We have a list of items.’ He waved
a sheet. ‘The boys were very diligent. They even sorted things into
categories.’ He glanced down at the paper. ‘Things like tinfoil cartons
containing the remains of sweet and sour chicken, that kind of thing. Here. A souvenir
for you. They’ll start putting it in bin bags at nine – all that effort just to
repackage rubbish.’