Frieda Klein 2 - Tuesday's Gone (42 page)

‘Who is he?’ Harry was beside
her.

‘A friend of
Frieda’s.’

‘For a recluse, she seems to know a
lot of people.’

A young girl had joined the man now, her
bright yellow plaits swinging wildly.

‘Where’s she got to?’

‘She was talking to Sasha and a man
wearing high-heeled boots and a tiara so I came to see how you were doing. She’ll
be back.’

‘Everything all right?’

‘Very all right.’

‘Harry,’ she said, with a note
of warning.

‘I’m just having some
fun.’

Frieda tried to escape from the party
without anyone noticing her, as she always did. She hated the ritual of farewells,
hovering at the door. After she had collected her coat, Josef accosted her clumsily on
the stairs.

‘Frieda,’ he began, then
stopped. ‘I forget … no, yes, I finish with Mary Orton and she give me
something …’

‘I’m going to have a talk with
you,’ said Frieda, ‘when you’re sober. What if you’d been
arrested for punching that photographer?’

‘But I think it might be
important.’

‘What if he’d had a journalist
with him? Then Karlsson wouldn’t have been able to pull strings and you’d
have been back in Ukraine.’

Josef looked crestfallen.
‘Frieda …’

‘No,’ she said.
‘I’ve got to rush.’

It was only half past nine. She took the
Underground from Clapham North all the way to Archway. She walked up
Highgate Hill, past the stone cat, safe behind its grille. She was glad she had only
drunk water. She wanted a clear head. As she reached Waterlow Park she stood and looked
through the locked gates. The clouds had gone and the moon was bright on the grass,
which glistened slightly, still wet from the earlier rain. Suddenly she looked round.
Had she heard something? A step? A cough? Or did she feel someone looking at her? There
was a group of teenagers on the other side of the road. A couple, arm in arm, walked
past her.

It took her barely a minute to reach the
wedding party. In the main room, the dinner was over, the guests clustered. The air
hummed with their talk, and music was playing. Some people were on the wooden dance
floor – including a gaggle of children, who were holding hands and giggling, kicking up
their legs and knocking into each other. There was a table at the far end on which stood
tall vases of flowers and the remains of the feast. Frieda saw a tall, dark-haired woman
in a long ivory dress with red flowers in her hair, moving slowly in the arms of a man
with ginger hair. That would be her, she thought.

She stood, unnoticed, and watched. It was
like an old film, grainy and slightly blurred. A man came past holding a tray of
champagne glasses and, seeing her, he offered her one but she shook her head. She could
still go away, and for a moment it was as if her life hung suspended in front of her.
One move and everything would change.

Now she saw him. He was standing at the far
end of the room, his head bent towards an older woman who was talking animatedly. He
wore a dark suit and a white shirt that was open at the neck. He looked thinner, she
thought, and perhaps older as well, but she couldn’t tell because he was too far
away from her and the room lay like a year between them.

Frieda took off her coat and her red scarf
and put them on
a nearby chair. She did what she always did when she
was scared: pulled back her shoulders, lifted her chin and took a deep, steadying
breath. She started across the space, and it seemed to her that everything around her
slowed: the dancers, the music, her own footfall. Someone brushed against her and
apologized. The woman in the ivory dress, Sandy’s younger sister, spun gently by,
with his cheekbones and his eyes and the seriousness of his happiness.

Then she was there and she waited until
something made him turn his head and there he was, looking at her. He didn’t move,
just looked into her eyes and she felt that a hole was opening up inside her, undoing
her. He didn’t touch her or smile.

‘You came.’

Frieda made a small gesture with her hands,
palms upwards. ‘I found that I had to.’

‘What do we do now?’

‘Can we go outside?’

‘Shall we go into the park?’

‘It closes at dusk,’ Frieda
said.

He smiled. ‘That’s the sort of
thing you know, isn’t it? Which parks close at night and which
don’t.’

‘But there’s a terrace at the
back.’

They made their way out. His sister saw them
and started to say something, then stopped. Frieda didn’t pick up her coat, and
the cold air hit her but she welcomed it. She felt alive again, and it didn’t
matter if it was pain or gladness that coursed through her.

Even from there they could look down on the
City and behind them they could still hear the music and see the lights of the
house.

‘Not a day has gone by,’ said
Sandy, ‘when I haven’t thought of you.’

Frieda put out a hand and
ran a finger over his lips. He shut his eyes and let out a small sigh. ‘Is it
really you?’ he whispered. ‘After all this time.’

‘It’s really me.’

When at last they kissed, she felt the
warmth of his hand on her back through the thin fabric of her dress. He tasted of
champagne. Her cheeks were wet and at first she thought she was crying but then realized
that the tears were his, and she wiped them. ‘Where are you staying?’ she
said.

‘At my flat. I was going to sell it.
But it fell through.’

‘Can we go there?’

‘Yes.’

In the taxi they didn’t speak all the
way to the Barbican. They didn’t speak in the lift. When he opened the door of his
flat, it was both familiar and a little sad. A bit musty, a bit abandoned.

‘Turn round for me,’ he
said.

She turned and he undid the zipper of her
shimmering dress, and it fell to the floor. She stood among its green folds like a
mermaid. It had been fourteen months, she thought. Fourteen months since he had left.
The moon shone through the curtains and in its light she looked at his intent face and
his strong body. Then she closed her eyes and lost herself, let herself go.

When Frieda woke, it was four in the
morning. His body was warm and smooth against her. She slipped out from under the
covers. In the dark she was able to find clothes and pull them on. She picked up her
coat and scarf and held her shoes in her hand, so they wouldn’t clatter on the
wooden floor. She heard a murmur from the bed. She leaned down and softly kissed the
back of his head, the nape of his neck.

As she began to walk, she felt as if she
were still asleep. It was dark and still and cool. She walked up Golden Lane, which
turned into Clerkenwell Road and she realized she was making her way along what had been
London’s city walls. Once, this would have been a walk through gardens and
orchards and across streams. That would be what the tourist guides would tell you. But
Frieda thought of what must have come after that: the sheds, the rubbish heaps, the
jerry-built houses, the squatters, the chancers, as the countryside slowly gave up and
died.

She turned to make a circle back towards
home. Now it was offices and council estates and small galleries, and the traffic that
never stopped and a few stragglers, ending the day or beginning it, on the pavements.
Someone approached her and asked if she wanted a cab. She pretended not to hear.

This night, or this morning, the city felt
slightly different. Was it the clarity that comes from the cold darkness and the dark
stillness? That she had opened herself to someone again? She thought about the night and
felt a shiver. She
looked around. She had been walking almost
unconsciously and needed to orient herself. At this time of day, three, four hundred
years ago, it would have been busy, full of carts loaded with food, livestock being
driven into city. She looked up and saw the street name, Lamb’s Conduit Street,
and smiled at it as if it were echoing her thoughts. It sounded sweet, but by this part
of their journey the lambs would have started to stir and become agitated, smelling the
stink of the Smithfield slaughterhouses blown up from the river.

She looked around. Again that feeling.
Always she walked in London at night because it was there that she felt alone and
untouched. Now it was different, and it wasn’t just the thought of Sandy, asleep
in his flat. It was something else. She thought of playing Grandmother’s Footsteps
as a little girl. You looked round to see if you could catch anyone moving. Every time
you looked, the players would be still but closer. Until they got you.

When she arrived home, it was half past
five. She took off her clothes. She could smell him on her. She stood in the shower for
twenty minutes in the spray of water, trying to lose herself, trying not to think, but
she couldn’t stop herself. She realized she had to phone Karlsson. It was still
much too early. After she was dry, she sat in her armchair downstairs, tired but
fiercely awake, her eyes stinging. She heard birds singing outside. Against all the
evidence, spring was coming. Just after seven she got up and made herself coffee and
toast. At one minute past eight, she phoned Karlsson.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ he
said.

‘How did you know?’

There was a pause. ‘You do know about
mobile phones?’ he said. ‘That your name shows up when you ring
me?’

‘You probably don’t want to hear
from me.’

‘I always want to hear from
you.’

‘I know you were
disappointed in my interview with Frank Wyatt.’

‘We all have our off days.’

‘It wasn’t an off day,’
she said.

‘You didn’t get him to
confess.’

‘That’s true,’ said
Frieda. ‘Are you charging him?’

‘As I said, we’re putting the
file together. I’m just trying to tie up some loose ends. I’m going over to
the Michelle Doyce flat today. We’re going to have some of the contents boxed
up.’

‘When are you doing it?’

‘I’ve got some meetings this
morning. Some time in the afternoon.’

‘Can I come? I’d like to see
it.’

‘You’ve seen it already,
haven’t you?’

‘I saw it from the outside, when we
looked at the alley, but I never went in.’

‘All right,’ said Karlsson.
‘You can join us.’

‘Could I see it before they start
packing things up?’

‘I’ll meet you there at half
past ten.’

The phone rang again.

‘You ran away.’

‘I didn’t run away. I needed to
get away. I needed to think.’

‘About how you’d made a
mistake.’

‘No, not about that.’

‘So I’ll see you.’

‘Yes, you’ll see me.’

Frieda didn’t go straight to the
house. She took the Underground and then the Docklands Light Railway across the Isle of
Dogs and under the river to the
Cutty Sark
. She got out and walked west until
she was standing outside the Wyatts’ house. There was a light on inside. She
turned
towards the river. The tide was high, the water pitching
against the Embankment. A tourist boat chugged past. Two children waved at her. She
continued walking along the bank, first past the other apartments, then a yacht club,
fenced off, the entrance to a wharf with a uniformed man sitting in a booth. Guarding
what? Frieda thought. He looked at her suspiciously. He stepped outside and walked
towards her. ‘Can I help you?’ he said.

‘Are you always here?’ she
asked.

‘Why do you want to know?’

‘I just wondered.’

‘I’m not always here,’ he
said. ‘But someone is. If you want to know.’

‘Thank you,’ said Frieda, and
continued westwards, past the railings of a primary school and the site of a warehouse
being demolished that was entirely boarded up and inaccessible. And then she reached
Howard Street and found herself standing outside the house where it had all started.

‘Yes,’ she said to herself.
‘Yes.’

Frieda stared at Michelle Doyce’s
living room, then noticed that Karlsson was looking at her and smiling.

‘What?’ she said.

‘It’s like the sea,’ he
said. ‘People can describe it to you, but you have to go and look at it yourself.
Quite a collection, isn’t it?’

Frieda was almost dazed by the room, which
was somehow both obsessively neat and horribly chaotic. She saw shoes, stones, feathers
and bones of birds, newspapers, bottles, silver wrappers folded into squares, glass
jars, cigarette butts, dried leaves, dried flowers, little pieces of metal that looked
as if they had been salvaged from machines. There were beads and clothes and assorted
cups and glasses. Where even to begin?

‘I’d like to
see Jasmine Shreeve do one of her programmes here,’ said Karlsson.

‘What do you mean?’

‘That programme where a psychiatrist
judges you by looking at your home? This one would give them a bit of a fright.’
His tone changed. ‘Sorry. I know it’s not funny.’

‘Actually, I sometimes think I might
learn more about my patients by looking at where they live than listening to what they
say.’ She shook her head and said, almost to herself, ‘I should have come
here before. This is like looking inside Michelle Doyce’s head.’

‘Which is not a pretty sight?’
said Karlsson.

‘Poor woman.’

‘Have you seen things like this
before?’

‘I don’t really deal with acute
psychiatric disorders,’ said Frieda, ‘but obsessive hoarding is quite a
common symptom. You must have heard about people who can’t throw anything away,
newspapers, their own shit.’

‘All right, all right,’ said
Karlsson. ‘That’s too much information. Being
here
is bad enough
without hearing about things that are even worse.’

Frieda felt herself flush, as if she were
going to faint. But the feeling seemed to be in her brain. When she spoke, it was in a
whisper: ‘I don’t like this case.’

Karlsson looked at her curiously.
‘You’re not supposed to like it. It’s not a night at the
theatre.’