Frieda Klein 2 - Tuesday's Gone (3 page)

‘Michelle Doyce?’

She looked at him with eyes that were very
pale, almost like the eyes of a blind person, but didn’t reply.

‘I’m Detective Chief Inspector
Malcolm Karlsson.’ He waited. She blinked. ‘A police officer,’ he
added.

‘Have you come a long
way?’

‘No, I haven’t. But I need to
ask you some questions.’

‘I have come a very long way. You may
well ask.’

‘This is important.’

‘Yes. I know it.’

‘The man in your flat.’

‘I’ve been entertaining
him.’

‘He’s dead, Michelle.’

‘I cleaned his teeth for him. Not many
friends can say that about their guests. And he sang for me. Like the sounds of the
river at night, when the dog has stopped barking and the shouting and crying dies
down.’

‘Michelle, he’s dead. The man in
your flat is dead. We need to find out how he died. Can you tell me his name?’

‘Name?’

‘Yes. Who is he? Was he?’

She looked puzzled. ‘Why do you need a
name? You can ask him.’

‘This is a serious matter. Who is
he?’

She stared at him: a strong, pale woman with
uncanny eyes and large reddened hands that floated in vague gestures when she spoke.

‘Did he die in your flat, Michelle?
Was it an accident?’

‘One of your teeth is chipped. I am
quite fond of teeth, you know. I have all my old teeth under my pillow, just in case
they come, and a few of other people’s, but that’s rare. You don’t
find them so often.’

‘Can you understand what I’m
asking you?’

‘Does he want to leave me?’

‘He’s dead.’ Karlsson
wanted to shout it, to use the word like a stone that would shatter her incomprehension,
but he kept his voice calm.

‘Everyone goes in the end. Though I
work so hard.’

‘How did he
die?’

She started to mumble words he
couldn’t make out.

Chris Munster was making a preliminary
assessment of the rest of the house. It repulsed him. It didn’t feel like a
criminal investigation at all: it was about people who were hopeless, who had slipped
through the cracks. This upstairs room was full of needles: hundreds, no, thousands of
used needles covering the floor so at first he’d thought it was some kind of
pattern. Dog shit here too, most of it old and hardened. Bloodstained rags. One thin
mattress with nasty stains near the middle. Right now, he didn’t care who’d
killed the man downstairs. He just wanted to empty everyone out of this house, torch it
and get out, breathe some clean air, the colder the better. He felt dirty all over,
outside and in. How could people live like this? That fat man with the red-veined eyes
and the livid skin of the drunk, hardly able to speak, hardly able to balance his bulk
on his small feet. Or the skinny dog-owning one, with his punctured arms and scabby
face, who grinned and scratched himself and bobbed around: was this his room and were
these his needles? Or maybe it was the dead man’s room. That was probably it. The
dead man would turn out to be part of this household from Hell. Fucking landlord.
They’d been pushed in here, the hopeless misfits, the ones society didn’t
know how to deal with, had no money to treat and abandoned so that now the police had to
clear up the mess. If the public knew, he thought, his feet in their heavy boots sliding
among the syringes, if they knew how some people lived and how they died.

Karlsson was on his way into the case
meeting when he met Commissioner Crawford in the corridor. He was in conversation with a
tall young man who was wearing a shiny blue suit and a brightly patterned orange and
green tie. He had slightly oversized black-framed glasses. Everything about him, from
his strictly parted hair to his pointy green leather shoes, seemed to signal a degree of
irony.

‘Mal,’ said the commissioner,
‘have you got a moment?’

Karlsson held up the file he was
carrying.

‘Is it that body in
Deptford?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you sure it’s a
murder?’

‘No, I’m not.’

‘Then why are
you
handling
it?’

‘Nobody can make any sense of
it,’ said Karlsson. ‘We’re trying to decide what to do.’

The commissioner gave a nervous laugh and
turned to the other man. ‘He’s not always like this,’ he said.

The commissioner was expecting some sort of
joshing retort from Karlsson but he didn’t get one and there was an awkward
silence.

‘This is Jacob Newton,’ said the
commissioner. ‘And this is DCI Karlsson, the man I was telling you about.
He’s the one who got the Faraday boy back.’

The two men shook hands.

‘Call me Jake,’ said the
man.

‘Jake’s going
to be around for a few days, looking at procedures, structures, that sort of
thing.’

Karlsson was puzzled. ‘Are you from
the Met?’

The man smiled, as if Karlsson had said
something unintentionally amusing.

‘No, no,’ said the commissioner.
‘Jake’s from McGill Hutton. You know, the management consultancy.’

‘I don’t,’ said
Karlsson.

‘It’s always useful to have a
fresh pair of eyes. We can all learn lessons, especially in these days of budget
reorientation.’

‘You mean
“cuts”?’

‘We’re all in this together,
Mal.’

There was another silence that lasted just a
little too long.

‘They’re waiting for me,’
said Karlsson.

‘Mind if I come along?’ said
Newton.

Karlsson looked quizzically at the
commissioner.

‘He’s got a free hand,’
said Crawford. ‘Go anywhere, see anything.’ He clapped Karlsson on the back.
‘It’s not as if we’ve got anything to hide, is it? You can show Jake
what a lean team you run.’

Karlsson looked at Newton. ‘All
right,’ he said. ‘Join the tour.’

Yvette Long and Chris Munster were sitting
at a desk drinking coffee. Karlsson introduced Newton, who told them to pretend he
wasn’t there. They immediately looked ill at ease and self-conscious.

‘Anyone else coming?’ Karlsson
asked, and Yvette shook her head.

‘Autopsy’s this
afternoon,’ said Karlsson. ‘Wouldn’t it be good if it was a heart
attack?’

‘You thought he might have been
strangled,’ said Yvette.

‘I can hope,
can’t I?’ said Karlsson.

‘It’s the dog I feel sorry
for,’ said Munster. ‘These guys, they live in shit, they can’t hold
down a job, but they’ve always got a bloody dog.’

‘From the fact that I haven’t
heard anything,’ said Karlsson, ‘I’m assuming that the deceased has
not been identified as one of the other residents.’

‘All accounted for,’ said
Munster. He picked up his notebook. ‘Lisa Bolianis. Aged about forty, I think.
Apparent drink problem. I talked to her. Not very coherent. She said she’d seen
Michelle Doyce once or twice. Never with anyone else.’ He pulled a face. ‘I
don’t get the impression that these housemates are meeting much around the
barbecue. Michael Reilly – our dog owner. Got out of prison in November. Three and half
years for possession and distribution of a class-A substance. He said he’d nodded
to her in the hall. She didn’t care much for his dog. He didn’t see her with
anyone either.’ He looked down at his notebook. ‘She collected things.
She’d come back with bagfuls of stuff she’d bought or found or
whatever.’

‘We saw that in the flat.’

‘Anyone else?’

Munster looked back at his notebook.
‘Metesky. Tony Metesky. I could hardly get him to talk at all. Wouldn’t look
at me. He’s clearly got some kind of mental problem. I’ve rung Social
Services about him and someone’s meant to ring me back. His room was in a real
state, even by the prevailing standards. There are needles on the floor, hundreds of
them.’

Karlsson frowned. ‘His?’

Munster shook his head. ‘Cuckooing, I
reckon.’

‘What’s that?’ asked
Newton. The three officers all glanced at him and he looked embarrassed.

‘Cuckooing,’ said Munster,
‘is when a dealer identifies a
vulnerable person and uses his
accommodation as a base for activity.’

‘I suppose that Mr
Whatever-his-name-is didn’t give you any information about the
deceased.’

‘I could hardly get any sense out of
him at all.’

‘What kind of place is this?’
asked Yvette.

Munster shut his notebook. ‘I think
it’s where they put people when they can’t think what else to do with
them.’

‘Who owns the house?’ asked
Karlsson. ‘Maybe the dead body is the landlord.’

‘The owner is a woman,’ said
Munster. ‘She lives in Spain. I’m going to call her, check she’s
actually there. She owns several houses and uses an agent. I’m getting the
details.’

‘Where are they all now?’ asked
Karlsson.

Munster nodded across at Yvette.

‘Michelle Doyce is back in
hospital,’ she said. ‘The others are still there, as far as I
know.’

‘Still there?’ said Karlsson.
‘It’s a crime scene.’

‘Not strictly speaking. Until we get
the autopsy result, it may just be a matter of failing to register a death and I
don’t suppose any court will find Michelle Doyce fit to plead. As for the rest of
them, where are they supposed to go? We’ve been ringing the council and we
can’t even find a person to talk to about it.’

‘Do they not care that one of their
own hostels might be being used as a centre for drug-dealing?’ asked Karlsson.

There was a pause.

‘Well,’ said Yvette, ‘if
we could find someone in Social Services and get them down here, what they would
probably say is that if we suspect a crime then it’s a matter for us to
investigate. Which we probably won’t do.’

Karlsson tried not to catch the eye of Jake
Newton. This might not have been the best introduction to police work.
‘So what we’ve got,’ he said, ‘is a woman serving tea and buns
to an unidentified naked rotting man, whose only distinguishing feature is the missing
finger on his left hand. Could the finger have been removed to get a ring
off?’

‘It was the middle finger,’ said
Munster. ‘Not the ring finger.’

‘You can have a ring on your middle
finger,’ said Karlsson. ‘Who the hell is this guy?’

‘Don got prints off him,’ said
Munster. ‘It wasn’t much fun, but they got them. And they didn’t get a
match.’

‘So what do we think?’ said
Karlsson. ‘Where do we start?’

Munster and Yvette looked at each other.
They didn’t say anything.

‘I don’t know what I
think,’ said Karlsson, ‘but I know what I hope.’

‘What?’

‘I hope he had a simple heart attack
and this crazy woman panicked and didn’t know what to do.’

‘But he was naked,’ said Yvette.
‘And we don’t know who he is.’

‘If he died of a heart attack,
it’ll be someone else’s problem.’ He frowned. ‘I wish someone
could make sense of what Michelle Doyce is saying.’

As he spoke, a face came into his mind,
unsmiling and dark-eyed: Frieda Klein.

‘Please take a seat, Dr
Klein.’

Frieda had been in the room several times
before. She had come to seminars here as a trainee; she had led seminars here as a
qualified analyst; once, she had even sat where Professor Jonathan Krull was now, with a
sixty-year-old therapist, whose name had since been removed from the British
Psychoanalytic Council’s register, in the seat she occupied today.

She took a deep, steadying breath and sat,
folding her hands in her lap. She knew Krull by reputation and Dr Jasmine Barber as a
fellow practitioner. They were on friendly terms and Dr Barber now looked awkward,
finding it hard to meet Frieda’s eyes. The third member of the team was a squat,
grey-haired woman in a violently pink jumper who was wearing a neck brace. Above it, her
wrinkled face was shrewd and her grey eyes bright. Frieda thought she looked like an
intelligent frog. She introduced herself as Thelma Scott. Frieda felt a tremor of
interest: she had heard of Thelma Scott as a specialist in memory and trauma, but had
never before met her. The only other person in the room sat at the far end of the table:
she was there to take notes of the proceedings.

‘As you know, Dr Klein,’ said
Professor Krull, glancing down at the sheets of paper in front of him, ‘this is a
preliminary investigation into a complaint we have received.’ Frieda nodded.
‘We have a code of ethics and a complaints procedure to which as a registrant you
have subscribed. We
are here today to investigate the complaint against
you and to make sure that one of your patients has not been a victim of poor
professional practice, and that you have behaved in a safe and appropriate manner.
Before we begin, I need to make clear that none of our decisions or findings have the
force of law.’ He was reading from the paper in front of him now. ‘Moreover,
whatever we decide does not affect the right of the individual making the complaint to
take legal proceedings against you, should they choose to do so. Do you
understand?’

‘Yes, I do,’ said Frieda.

‘Also, this screening committee is
made up of three psychotherapists who are here to give impartial professional
consideration to the case. Have you any reason for doubting the impartiality of any of
us, Dr Klein?’

‘No.’

‘You have chosen to have no
representation.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Then we can begin. The complaint has
been made by Mrs Caroline Dekker, on behalf of her husband Alan Dekker. You can confirm
that Alan Dekker was your patient?’

‘Yes. I saw him in November and
December 2009. I’ve written the dates of each session down.’ She brought out
a typed sheet and slid it across the table.

‘Mrs Dekker claims that her husband
came to see you in a state of acute distress.’

‘He was experiencing severe panic
attacks.’

‘She also claims that, far from
helping him, you used him as a –’ Krull looked down at his notes ‘– pawn in
a police investigation. That you acted like a detective, not a therapist, casting
suspicion on him, and indeed reported him to the police, making him a suspect in a case
of child abduction, that you violated your pledge of patient confidentiality and
furthered your own career at the expense of his peace of mind and
future happiness.’