Frieda Klein 2 - Tuesday's Gone (30 page)

‘So you’re saying they all
bought things you made.’

‘We’re not a shop, as you can
see. People bring us wood from their garden and we turn it into objects. Usually bowls
and chopping boards – but anything actually. Mrs Orton – we made her an urn for her
husband’s ashes.’

‘How do your customers find
you?’

‘We’ve got ads in a couple of
magazines. Magazines for people who’re doing up their homes.’

‘Was someone called Robert Poole a
customer?’ said Yvette.

‘Robbie?’ He looked at them
curiously. ‘No. He wasn’t a customer. He worked here.’

‘Did he? When?’

He thought for a moment. ‘Beginning of
last year, just for a few months.’ Another man pushed open the door of the
workroom with his shoulder and came in carrying two cardboard cups of coffee.
‘Darren, these two are detectives. They’re asking about Robbie
Poole.’

‘Why did he leave?’ asked
Yvette.

The two men exchanged looks.

‘Is there a problem?’ said
Darren. ‘We don’t want to cause any trouble.’

‘There’s been a
crime.’

‘It ended badly,’ said the young
man. ‘Some money went missing. I felt really rotten about it.’

‘You thought it was him?’

‘We thought it might
have been. It seemed the only explanation. We confronted him and he was in a real state
about it. It was bad. For everyone.’

‘But he left.’

‘I gave him a couple of weeks’
wages to tide him over. Is he OK?’

‘He’s dead.’

‘What?’

‘He was murdered.’

‘Fuck.’

‘Fuck,’ repeated Darren, with
awe. ‘Fucking fuck.’

‘We found these names in his
flat.’

‘Jesus. Why?’

‘That’s what we’re trying
to find out.’

‘Dead!’

‘You’ve been very helpful. We
might be back in touch.’ Yvette smiled at him. ‘But I don’t think you
should feel guilty about letting him go,’ she said.

When Harry picked Frieda up on Friday
evening, he didn’t tell her where they were going. She got into the back of the
taxi beside him and he peered down at the screen of his phone. ‘I don’t even
know myself yet,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Not knowing is part of the
fun,’ he said. ‘It’s in Shoreditch. That’s all I can tell
you.’

‘I don’t understand. What
happens when we get to Shoreditch?’

Harry tapped the phone. ‘Leave it to
this,’ he said. ‘It’ll tell us.’

‘All right,’ said Frieda.
‘I’ll trust it.’

‘I need to warn you about
something,’ said Harry. ‘I want to begin by being completely
honest.’

‘That’s always a bad
sign,’ said Frieda.

‘No, really. I just want to tell you
in good time that you need to beware of my sister. Tessa Welles lives part of her life
as a law-abiding solicitor but she almost always has an ulterior motive.’

‘Why do I need to know
that?’

‘She phoned me straight after
she’d met you, telling me all about you. She told me that she wouldn’t rest
until she’d brought us together.’

Frieda glanced out of the window before
answering. ‘I just said I’d come for a meal,’ she said at last.

‘I know. I guess what I want you to
tell me is if you’re involved with anyone else.’

‘No.’

‘That’s good. Why do I think
there’s a
but
coming?’

‘I don’t know. I wasn’t
going to add anything.’

‘Perhaps you’ve just broken up
with someone.’

Frieda met his grey-blue gaze. How long ago
was ‘just’? She had parted with Sandy the December before last. She
suspected that Harry would think fourteen months was a long time; most people would. How
do you measure absence? There had been minutes that had become hours, and hours that had
been like a desert with no horizon. There had been days dull and deadened as lead, and
whole weeks when she’d had to force herself forward, inch by inch, across their
expanse. How do you know when your heart is ready once more? Perhaps, for someone like
her, the heart was never ready and had to be forced open.

‘There was someone recently,’
she replied softly.

‘Fortunate someone.’

‘No. I don’t think
so.’

‘But it’s over?’

‘He went away.’ Far away, she
thought. America, another continent. ‘And I don’t want to talk about
it.’

‘I can’t imagine how anyone
–’ Harry broke off. ‘Sorry. We’ve only just met and I don’t want
to blunder in.’

‘It’s OK.’

‘But I think you’re
beautiful.’

‘Thank you. Now, have you worked out
where we’re going or is it still a mystery to us both? We’re nearly at
Shoreditch.’

‘Right. Of course. Hang on.’ He
looked at his phone again, then opened the glass partition and leaned forward to speak
to the driver. ‘Perhaps you’d better let us off at this junction.’

They got out in Shoreditch High Street.

‘I used to work in an office near
here,’ said Harry. ‘And at the time I thought – in fact, I didn’t just
think, I also said –
that this was one part of London that would never
come up. And about five years later I read an article in a US magazine saying that
Hoxton was the trendiest place on the planet.’ He tapped the screen of his phone.
‘Good. Just follow me.’

They turned off the high street and Harry
led Frieda through a maze of streets, occasionally referring to his phone. ‘Here
we are,’ he said. ‘Allegedly.’

They were standing in front of the steel
door of what looked like a warehouse. Harry pressed a buzzer. A voice spoke through a
hum of static.

‘Harry Welles plus one,’ Harry
said.

There was a click and he pushed open the
door. They walked inside and up some metal stairs. At the top another door opened and a
woman met them. She was large, with glorious blonde hair springing in curls and tendrils
from her head, and was wrapped in a white apron with a single streak of dark red running
down it. She led them inside to a small open-plan apartment, all bare boards and brick
walls, exposed heating ducts and metal radiators. Large windows looked over the City of
London. Of the five makeshift tables, four were already full. The woman led them to the
empty one. They sat down.

‘I am Inga,’ said the woman.
‘And I am from Denmark. My husband Paul is from Morocco. We cook together. I will
bring you wine and food and there is no choice. No allergies, no fads?’

Harry looked at Frieda. ‘Sorry, I
forgot to ask.’

Frieda shook her head and Inga left. She
returned with a jug of white wine and a plate of pickled fish and sour cream. When they
were alone again, Frieda looked across at Harry. ‘What the hell is
this?’

Harry examined his plate. ‘It looks
more Danish than Moroccan,’ he said.

‘No, I mean
this.’ She gestured around her. ‘The whole thing.’

‘Oh, this? It’s a pop-up
restaurant. You can find them if you know where to look.’

‘Pop-up?’

‘They come and go, with strange people
doing their own strange thing for little groups of people.’

‘Is it … well, is it
legal?’ asked Frieda.

‘I hope so,’ said Harry.
‘Anyway, you should know. You’re the policewoman.’

‘Not exactly.’

He poured wine for both of them.
‘I’m fascinated,’ he said. ‘A psychotherapist who works for the
police. How did that happen?’

‘It’s a long story.’

‘Good,’ said Harry. ‘I
like long stories.’

So, while the table filled with little
plates of smoked meats, yoghurts, savoury pastries, Frieda told him about Alan Dekker,
about the search for Matthew, about Alan’s twin, Dean Reeve, and his wife Terry,
who had turned out to be a girl who had gone missing twenty years previously. She edited
the story. She didn’t tell him about Kathy Ripon’s death or about her new
certainty that Dean was still out there somewhere.

Harry was a good listener. He leaned forward
across the table, but not too much, and he nodded, giving small murmurs of attention,
but didn’t interrupt. When she finished, he asked her about the case she was
working on now with this character Robert Poole, and to her surprise, she found herself
telling him. She described Michelle Doyce to him, and then, though she didn’t talk
about his victims, she talked about Poole as well.

‘I can’t quite make him
out,’ she said.

‘Well, you never met
him, did you, and now he’s dead.’

‘I still want to make sense of him.
Perhaps that’s the way to find out who killed him. On the one hand, he was
obviously a conman. At the same time, he made people feel less lonely. He seemed to have
had a knack for understanding their vulnerabilities and for comforting them.’

‘Isn’t that what conmen do? Worm
their way in?’

‘Yes. Maybe. It’s just –’
She stopped.

‘Maybe?’

‘Maybe I feel he was a bit like
me.’

Harry didn’t seem surprised. He
nodded, rolled some bread into a pellet, then said, ‘You mean he was like a
therapist to the people he conned.’

‘Yes.’

‘That must be a pretty uncomfortable
thought.’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘Yet I feel sure you’re a
terrific therapist.’

Frieda snorted. ‘Now you’re just
trying to flatter me. You have no idea if I’m good at it or not.’

‘I’d trust you and I’d
tell you things.’

‘Except you haven’t.
You’ve just been asking me questions and listening to me.’

‘Ask me something.’ He held his
hands out, palms upwards. ‘Anything.’

‘Anything?’

‘Absolutely anything.’

‘Do you do your job because you like
money?’

‘Hmm. No, I do it because I understand
money, and how it changes people.’

‘Go on.’

‘A good accountant or financial
adviser is a kind of artist. You can turn people’s money into the most amazing
creative possibilities, things they would never have dreamed of.’

‘So that they
don’t pay tax on it?’ said Frieda.

Harry gave a humorous frown.
‘You’re not from the Inland Revenue, are you?’ he said.
‘It’s just about seeing possibilities. For me, it’s not really about
the money at all. It’s like counters in a children’s game.’ He looked
around the room. ‘It’s like this. You asked if it was legal. Strictly
speaking, it probably isn’t. They’ve found a grey legal area somewhere
between a restaurant and a private dinner party. And in that area they can develop their
Moroccan-Danish creativity. What do you think?’

‘It’s London,’ said
Frieda.

Harry looked puzzled. ‘What do you
mean?’

‘Grey areas,’ she said.
‘The things that happen in secret, good things, bad things, strange
things.’

‘Which is this?’ Harry
asked.

‘Good, I think,’ she said.
‘Until one day there’ll be a fire here or somewhere similar and it
won’t seem such fun.’

Harry’s face fell. ‘There speaks
the policewoman.’

‘I’m not a
policewoman.’

‘Sorry, of course you’re not.
Next question.’

‘Why are you still single?’

‘I don’t know.’

Frieda raised her eyebrows and waited.

‘I didn’t think I’d be
single at thirty-eight. I’ll be forty soon – I always thought at forty I’d
be settled down: wife, kids, house, you know. The life you’re supposed to have. Of
course I’ve had relationships, some short and some long, and once upon a time I
was engaged to a woman I thought I loved and who, I thought, loved me and then, well, it
didn’t work out. It petered away and sometimes I can hardly remember what she
looked like or felt like, as if it was a dream that happened to someone else. I think
I’ve always felt …’ he frowned and took a gulp of wine
‘… always felt that I was waiting.’

‘What
for?’

‘I don’t know. For my real life
to begin: the life I was supposed to have.’

‘Real life?’ Frieda’s
words hung in the air between them.

‘Real life, real love. I don’t
know.’

Once, he had said to her, ‘I know
you.’ He had looked into her eyes and he hadn’t smiled and she could feel
his gaze finding its way through the tunnels and secret doorways of her mind.

What had he seen? What had he found as he
gazed into her? Had he found the real her, the one nobody else could reach?

The body doesn’t matter. Not any more.
The splitting skin and the scabby mouth, the cropped and greasy hair, the protruding
ribs and the strange bruises that have begun to flower on the pale, grubby flesh, unused
to sun. What matters is the soul. ‘Don’t listen to anything,’ the
voices say to you. He said, ‘I know you.’ Put that in the scales. ‘I
know you.’ That counted for everything.

Their meeting was at seven, when it was
still not fully light outside. There was yellow-brown tea that nobody drank and
Garibaldi biscuits that none of them ate – Yvette took a large dusty bite of one, then
looked surprised by her own action and embarrassed by the crunching sound she made, just
when she was supposed to be talking, while Jake Newton looked at her pityingly.

She laid a chart on the table, and Karlsson,
Frieda and Chris Munster leaned forward to look at it. Jake tipped himself back in his
chair, keeping himself balanced with his forefingers in a way that alarmed Yvette and
irritated Karlsson.

‘We thought we should try and account
for what he did in his days,’ said Yvette, still swallowing biscuit, ‘where
he was, who he saw, try and establish a pattern and any gaps.’

‘Go on.’

‘It’s not exact, of course. We
don’t know enough, and a lot of it relies on memory. But look. These are the days
he saw Mary Orton. She’s in green. Jasmine Shreeve is red. The Wyatts are blue.
The days he met up with Janet Ferris are dotted around, not surprisingly, and there are
various days that are free. But it seems quite regular, doesn’t it? I mean, more
regular than you’d expect – as if he had a system and set aside times for each of
the people he wanted something from.’

‘Mm,’ said Karlsson, musingly.
‘It does. Good work.’