Frieda Klein 2 - Tuesday's Gone (35 page)

‘So what was his final opinion?’
asked Yvette.

‘His
provisional
opinion is
that it was suicide.’

‘Well, there we are.’

‘His job isn’t to provide a
theory,’ said Karlsson. ‘It’s to report on the state of the body. Our
job is to keep options open.’

‘We’ve got lots of options
open,’ said Yvette. ‘They’re all bloody open.’

‘That’s why we’re having
this meeting.’ Karlsson took an angry bite from his sandwich and the others waited
for him to swallow. ‘At any moment, Crawford is going to ask where we’ve got
to and, to be honest, I don’t exactly know what we’re going to say. We
don’t know who Poole really was. We don’t know within five days when he was
killed, so we can’t check alibis in any useful way. We don’t know where he
was killed, so we’ve got sod-all forensics. We know roughly how he was killed but
we don’t know why his finger was cut off.’ He paused for thought. ‘We
know too bloody much about
why
he might have been killed. He was a conman and a
thief. If someone fucked my wife, I’d want to kill them. If someone fucked my wife
and got her to steal my money, I’d want to cut his finger off, feed it to him and
then strangle him with my bare hands. If someone cheated my mother I’d want to
kill him. If someone tried to get my mother to change her will so that she’d leave
everything to a fucking conman, I’d want to kill him. If someone blackmailed me
over my drinking problems, I’d also want to kill him. So …’

‘But the Orton sons’ alibis
check out. Jeremy Orton was
tied up day and night with some company
takeover deal, and Robin Orton was in bed with flu.’

‘Alibis,’ said Karlsson,
wearily. ‘I don’t know. He could have got out of bed. And aren’t there
high-speed trains from Manchester?’

‘Two hours and five minutes,’
said Yvette. ‘What about Jasmine Shreeve?’

Karlsson gave a sour laugh. ‘From the
sound of the TV programmes she used to make, I’d give him a free pass for conning
her.’

‘
House Doctor
wasn’t
that bad,’ said Munster.

‘It bloody was,’ said Yvette.
‘Looking at people’s psychology from their wallpaper.’

‘It was more of a guilty
pleasure.’ Newton was in a good mood today, positively bouncy.

‘Enough of the TV reviewing,’
said Karlsson. ‘However good or bad she was, she seems to have got off lightly.
Maybe he really liked her, maybe he hadn’t got around to conning her or maybe he
conned her in a way we haven’t found out about yet. And then there’s the
possibility that he conned the wrong person, someone we don’t even know about,
perhaps someone in the past, and they caught up with him and taught him a
lesson.’

‘That’s a lot of maybes,’
said Yvette.

‘And our main witness is insane and
delusional. And our other main witness is dead.’ He took another bite of his
sandwich. ‘None of this is good. But the question is: what do we do
now?’

There was a long silence in which the only
sound heard was of sandwiches being chewed.

‘Well?’ said Karlsson.

‘All right,’ said Yvette.
‘There are actually lots of things we know.’

‘Go on.’

‘We know that he earned his money by
conning rich people. We know he slept with Aisling Wyatt and that he was probably going
to blackmail Jasmine Shreeve. He fleeced Mary Orton and tried to make her change her
will. As you say, there are lots of motives here – although the Jasmine Shreeve motive
appears to be like the one for the Orton sons, a motive she didn’t yet know about.
We know he had a shed-load of money that someone stole – or he put somewhere else, and
we haven’t managed to find out where.’ She paused. ‘Yet. We also now
know how he found his victims.’

‘Do you?’ Newton leaned forward.
‘I didn’t know about this.’

‘Sorry,’ said Karlsson. ‘I
wasn’t aware we had to keep you up to date with all the details of our
cases.’

‘They all used the same bank?’
guessed Newton. ‘Or they all shopped at Harrods?’

‘The second guess is warmer. They all
bought very expensive items made of wood from a company where Poole briefly worked. When
he left, he took the list of clients with him, presuming – rightly, it seems – that they
all had money to spare.’

‘That’s clever,’ said
Newton.

Karlsson thought he was enjoying himself far
too much. ‘Unfortunately, it doesn’t get us much further on.’ He
turned to Yvette. ‘What do you think we should do next?’

‘We lean on Aisling and Frank Wyatt.
Separately.’

‘Lean on?’ said Karlsson.
‘Meaning?’

‘Give me some time alone with Frank
Wyatt and put the following scenario to him: you confronted Robert Poole with what
he’d done, you had a row, there was a struggle, you killed Poole by mistake,
panicked, dumped the body. If he owns up to that, the CPS might well go for
manslaughter,
possibly even a suspended sentence if the judge is
sympathetic.’

Karlsson thought for a moment. ‘What
about the missing finger?’

‘Maybe there was a ring that would
identify him.’

‘So he cut the finger off in a
panic?’

‘That’s how we’ll put it
to him.’

‘And what about the money that was
cleared out of Poole’s account?’

‘Poole could have done that himself to
hide the trail.’

‘And it’s now where?’

‘Buried somewhere. Lost forever. Or in
an account abroad.’ There was another silence. ‘Well, you never clear up
everything.’

‘And Janet Ferris?’

‘Suicide,’ said Yvette,
promptly. ‘While the balance of her mind was disturbed.’

Karlsson gave a grunt. ‘All right. We
pull the Wyatts in for questioning. Before that, we dig up everything we can find about
them.’ He looked at the desk diary. ‘Wednesday morning,’ he said.
‘First thing. Chris, you go and check out alibis for both of them before
then.’

‘I think it’s Jasmine
Shreeve,’ said Newton.

There was a silence and a slow smile grew on
Karlsson’s face. ‘What?’

‘Sorry,’ said Newton.
‘Ignore what I said.’

‘Well, we’ve already got a
psychotherapist working on the inquiry. Why not a management consultant as well? Why do
you think it’s Jasmine Shreeve?’

‘She’s got more to lose than the
others. I’ve seen interviews with her. She still has a hopeless fantasy that
she’s going to have a comeback. If she was humiliated by a conman, it would ruin
any chance of that. And anyone who’s
seen her on TV knows how
needy she is. If she felt she had been betrayed, she could have done
anything.’

‘Thank you for that,’ said
Karlsson. ‘You’ll forgive me if I don’t send you off to interview
Jasmine Shreeve for us. I’ll talk to her myself. And if your theory turns out to
be right, then Yvette and Chris will cook you a slap-up dinner.’

‘Why don’t you do it
yourself?’ said Yvette.

‘That wouldn’t be much of a
reward.’

‘And what’s Dr Klein going to be
doing?’

‘I think she was on the verge of
dropping out.’

‘Why?’ said Yvette. ‘Did
she get fed up?’

‘It looks like she took it out on that
photographer.’ Munster grinned at Yvette, then caught Karlsson’s eye and
stopped grinning.

‘She told me about it,’ said
Karlsson. ‘It wasn’t her, it was two of her friends.’

‘It’s not very
professional,’ said Munster. ‘She gets into the papers. Then there’s a
fight with a photographer and she’s in the papers again. It’s like having
Britney Spears on the inquiry.’

Karlsson shook his head. ‘I think she
felt too involved. She felt she’d let Janet Ferris down.’ He screwed up the
sandwich wrapper and tossed it at a bin. It bounced off the rim on to the floor.
‘It’s not as if we’re doing such a good job ourselves.’

There was a knock on the door and a woman
put her head round. ‘There’s someone to see you, sir,’ she said
apologetically.

Lorna Kersey was in her mid- to
late-forties, Karlsson guessed, with cropped brown hair and round glasses. She was
wearing no makeup, but had chunky earrings and several rings on her small hands. She was
wrapped in a voluminous orange cardigan and was wearing snow boots,
but she still looked cold. Her husband, Mervyn, was a small, plump man with silvering
hair who looked older than her. He sat upright and still in his chair and pressed his
hands together, as if he was praying. Every so often, Lorna would reach out and touch
him gently – on his shoulder, his arm, his thigh – to reassure him, and he would glance
towards her and smile.

‘I don’t want to waste your
time,’ she said.

‘I understand it’s about Robert
Poole. I’m in charge of the case and would be interested to hear anything you have
to say.’

‘Well, that’s the thing. The man
we know isn’t called Robert Poole. He might be someone different.’

‘What is he called?’

‘Edward Green.’

‘Go on.’

‘It was the poster. It was so like
him.’

‘And this man, Edward Green, you
haven’t seen him for a while?’

She grimaced. ‘It’s to do with
our daughter.’

‘Hang on. Your daughter’s not
called Sally, is she?’

‘Sally?’ She looked bewildered.
‘No. She’s Beth. I mean, she’s Elizabeth really but she’s called
Beth. Beth Kersey.’

‘Sorry. Go on, then.’

Lorna Kersey leaned towards him. Close-up,
Karlsson could see the creases and lines on her face.

‘We’ve got three daughters. Beth
is the eldest. She’s nearly twenty-two now. Her birthday is in March. Her sisters
are younger. They’re still at school, and I don’t think that helped
much.’ Karlsson saw her swallow, saw how her fingers pressed against the rim of
the desk. ‘She’s always been a troubled girl, from the moment she was born,
you could say. A worry to us.’ She glanced at her husband, then back again.
‘She was unhappy, you see, and angry. She just seemed made that
way.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said
Karlsson. ‘Where is your daughter now?’

‘That’s it,’ she said.
‘We don’t know. I’m trying to explain things, how we got here. What
I’m trying to say is that she was always troubled. School was a problem for her,
though she liked things like art and practical subjects, things she could do with her
hands. And she was strong. She could run for miles and swim in the coldest water. She
didn’t make friends easily.’ She hesitated. ‘I’m sorry, you
don’t want to hear about all of that. What’s relevant is that she had a
wretched adolescence. She thought she was ugly and stupid and she was lonely and very
needy but hard to help. We did everything we could, but it just became worse as she got
older. It was tearing us apart as a household. Then she started getting into
trouble.’

‘What kind?’

‘The trouble that teenagers get into.
Drugs, probably, but there was always an anger, an unhappiness. She could be violent, to
other people and to herself as well.’

‘Was she arrested?’

‘No. There were police sometimes, but
she was never actually arrested. We took her to see people. Doctors. Psychiatrists. She
was referred to a counsellor at the hospital and then we went to someone private. I
don’t know if it was doing any good. Maybe we were just making her feel even more
of an outsider and bad about herself. You don’t know until it’s too late if
what you’re doing is right or wrong, do you? There’s no magic answer to
things like this – you just hope that bit by bit something may change. It was all so –
so mysterious. Baffling. We didn’t know what we’d done to make her like this
and – oh, it got so bad, we didn’t know where to turn.’ She blinked and
Karlsson saw her eyes were full of
tears. ‘I’m making this
too emotional,’ she said, trying to smile. ‘It’s probably not
relevant. Sorry.’

‘Then she met this man.’ They
were Mervyn Kersey’s first words. He had a faint Welsh accent.

‘The man you knew as Edward
Green?’

‘Yes.’

‘How did she meet him?’

‘We’re not sure. But she used to
spend time just walking, sometimes all night. I think she met him then.’

Karlsson nodded. This sounded like Robert
Poole.

‘We didn’t know about him at
first. She didn’t tell us. She just changed. We both noticed it. At first we were
glad: she was calmer, less volatile with us and her sisters. She went out more. We were
just so relieved.’

‘But?’

‘She was very secretive – furtive is
the word, really. We started suspecting that she was stealing money from us. Not much,
but there’d be cash missing from our wallets, stuff like that.’

‘And her sisters’
savings,’ put in Mervyn Kersey. He spoke as if he could hardly bear to squeeze the
words out. Karlsson thought he was ashamed.

‘Did you meet him?’ asked
Karlsson.

‘Yes. I couldn’t believe
it,’ said Lorna Kersey. ‘He was so – what’s the word? – polite,
personable. He was sweet to the girls and lovely with Beth. I should have liked him more
than I did. This will sound awful. I didn’t trust him because I thought he could
have had anyone so why would he choose Beth? I loved my daughter, but I couldn’t
see why a handsome, successful young man like him would go for a plump, unhappy,
unglamorous, under-achieving and angry young woman. It didn’t make sense. Does
that sound callous?’

‘No,’ said Karlsson,
untruthfully. ‘So, what did you think?’

She looked at him
unflinchingly. ‘I won’t say that we’re rich …’ she
began.

‘We are,’ said her husband.
‘By most people’s standards.’

‘The point is,’ she continued,
‘that he would have known we were comfortably off.’

‘You thought he was after your
money?’

‘I worried.’

‘And now she’s gone.’

‘She stole my bank card, emptied my
current account, took a few clothes and went.’

‘Where?’

‘I don’t know. She left a note
saying we had controlled her for too long and tried to make her into someone she
didn’t want to be, and now she was free at last.’

‘Did she go with
Robert … Edward Green?’