Frieda Klein 2 - Tuesday's Gone (45 page)

Everything changed. There were lights,
lights so harsh that they were like jangling sounds so that she couldn’t see
anything and couldn’t hear anything. There were lights and there was shouting and
she could cry out and breathe. She had been deep, deep under water, and now she been
pulled out and was lying on the shore. Michelle Doyce breathed and
breathed. She couldn’t. It was like she couldn’t pull the air inside her.
Her breathing didn’t work. She couldn’t get the air in. She started to panic
and flap and cry and shout. She flapped like a fish on the land, drowning in the
air.

Then she felt a hand, cool on the side of
her face, and a voice speaking to her out of the blinding light. She felt a breath on
her face, a sweet and cool breath.

‘Michelle,’ said the voice, soft
and close. ‘Michelle. It’s all right. It’s all right. You’re all
right.’

The voice spoke like it was telling her a
story, soothing her to sleep. She felt the cool breath on her face. She felt she could
breathe again, as if she was breathing in that cool breath, as if it was going straight
inside her.

‘Michelle, Michelle,’ said the
voice.

Michelle Doyce opened her eyes. The light
dazzled her so much that she could see nothing except blue and yellow dots popping her
eyes. Slowly a face took shape. She heard the words and felt the voice’s fingers,
cool and slow on the side of her face. She knew the face. The woman with the dark eyes
and clear voice.

‘You,’ said Michelle Doyce.

‘Yes,’ said the woman, close, so
she could feel her clean breath. ‘It’s me.’

Karlsson took Frieda by the crook of her
arm, in an unfamiliarly protective gesture.

‘They’ve had their rights read
to them and they both have legal representation with them now. As you can imagine Tessa
Welles is aware of her legal situation.’

‘Have you been in with them
already?’

‘I was waiting for you.’

‘I came as soon as I could. I
didn’t want to leave Michelle alone.’

‘Is she all right?’

‘For a woman in Hell, she’s all
right. I called Jack. She knows and likes him. He’s not threatening. She finds the
colour of his hair soothing. I said I’d go back later. And I’m going to call
Andrew Berryman, a doctor who knows about Michelle. We’ve got to help her.
She’s a suffering human being, not a medical curiosity. We can’t just leave
her here in wretchedness and confusion and fear. We owe her that much at
least.’

Karlsson looked at her with concern.
‘Are you all right?’

‘I used her as bait,’ said
Frieda. ‘That seems to be what I do with people I’m supposed to be caring
for. She was like a worm with a hook pushed through her and I did it to her.’

‘You got the fish, didn’t
you?’

‘First, do no harm,’ said
Frieda.

‘What?’

‘It’s the oath that doctors are
meant to swear.’

Tessa was sitting in the
interview room, her hands folded on the table in front of her, looking composed,
although Frieda noticed that there were shadows under her eyes and every so often she
licked her lips. The man who sat beside her was in his late fifties; he had a thin,
clever face; his eyes were bright and watchful.

Yvette and Karlsson sat opposite Tessa;
Frieda took a seat to one side. Tessa swung her head round and stared at her; there was
a very faint smile on her lips, as if she knew something that Frieda didn’t.

‘Miss Welles,’ said Karlsson,
courteously. ‘You understand your rights and that everything you say is being
recorded.’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ve been arrested on
suspicion of the attempted murder of Michelle Doyce last night. We shall also be
questioning you in respect of the murders of Robert Poole and Janet Ferris. Is that
clear?’

‘Yes,’ said Tessa, in a detached
tone.

‘Your brother is next door.
We’ll be talking to him as well. We just wanted to hear your side of the story
first.’

Tessa looked at him and said nothing.

‘All right. Perhaps you should hear
our version of your story.’ Karlsson picked up a folder and leafed through it,
allowing the silence to settle around them. The muscle in Tessa’s jaw tightened,
but she didn’t move.

‘Robert Poole,’ said Karlsson,
at last. ‘You met him in November of 2009, when he came to your office with Mary
Orton, who wanted you to make a new will in his favour. You chose not to proceed. You
mistrusted his motives.’

Tessa stared straight ahead, not meeting
Karlsson’s gaze.

‘You were quick to
recognize that,’ said Frieda. ‘It was impressive.’

‘But then you saw him again,’
continued Karlsson. ‘What happened?’

‘I’ve nothing to say,’
said Tessa.

‘It won’t matter.’
Karlsson turned to Frieda. ‘What do you think happened?’

‘We’re not here to listen to
speculation,’ said the solicitor. ‘If you have questions to put to Miss
Welles, then go ahead.’

‘I’m inviting Dr Klein to put a
scenario to your client. That’s a kind of question. She can then confirm or deny
it.’ He looked at Frieda, who had been thinking hard.

She pulled a chair over from the wall and
sat beside Karlsson, facing Tessa. Now Tessa stared at Frieda. For a moment she thought
of the children’s game where you had to stare at each other and try not to
laugh.

‘I never met Robert Poole,’
Frieda said. ‘I’ve never even seen a photograph of him. At least, not when
he was alive. But I’ve met so many people he got involved with that I almost feel
I knew him. When you refused to execute the will, most people would have felt humiliated
or exposed but he would have been intrigued by you. He was used to having power over
people, but you’d escaped him. You were a challenge. So he got back in touch. What
did he say? Perhaps he wanted to explain the situation to you, show you it wasn’t
the way you thought.

‘You were intrigued as well, and a bit
amused. There was something charming about the way he just wouldn’t give up. So
you began an affair with him out of a certain curiosity, just to see how he
worked.’

A contemptuous smile formed on Tessa’s
face. ‘That
pornographic fantasy says more about you than it
does about me,’ she said.

‘And then he fell for you. He saw you
as a kindred spirit. You encouraged him, and he told you about Mary Orton, Jasmine
Shreeve, Aisling and Frank Wyatt.’

‘And Janet Ferris,’ said Yvette
harshly.

‘Leave that for a moment,’ said
Frieda. When she resumed, it was almost as if she were talking to herself, puzzling
something out. ‘There was something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
Jasmine Shreeve, Mary Orton, the Wyatts, his victims. They were obviously hiding things,
in their different ways, and they felt guilty and ashamed and upset. They contradicted
themselves. That’s what people do. They’re not coherent. Things don’t
add up. But you weren’t like that. Your relationship with Poole was completely
uncomplicated. You were the only person he never got to. It was just about the
money.’

She glanced at Karlsson, who nodded.

‘Once you discovered how much money he
had,’ Karlsson said, ‘and how he’d got it, the idea was simple. The
best person to steal money from is someone who’s stolen the money himself because
he can’t go to the police. Did he tell you about the money to try and impress you?
So you and your brother decided to help yourself. Harry knew about bank transfers and
setting up fake accounts. Con the conman.’

‘No,’ said Frieda.

‘What do you mean?’

‘It wasn’t just stealing stolen
money,’ she said. ‘It was even better than that. When did you discover that
he was using a stolen identity? Did he boast about it to you? Or did Harry discover when
he checked up on him?’ Tessa
just stared at her, but
didn’t speak. ‘Because that’s even better,’ Frieda continued.
‘Not just stolen money that won’t be reported to the police, but stolen from
a non-existent person, someone with no history.’

‘It wasn’t me …’
Tessa began, but stopped.

‘Was it Harry’s idea?’
said Frieda. ‘It doesn’t matter. You know, I’ve tried not to think
about the last few minutes of Robert Poole’s life. You probably imagined that a
threat would be enough, like in the old days when you could get a confession just by
showing the instruments of torture.’ Suddenly, she felt as if she were alone with
Tessa and her voice became quiet. ‘What was it? A bolt cutter? A pair of
secateurs? But he didn’t believe you, did he? He didn’t think you, Tessa
Welles, would really go through with it. So you crammed a rag of some kind into his
mouth and then you did it. It’s hard to cut off a finger, the bone and the tendon
and the gristle, but you, or Harry, did it and he told you what you wanted to know to
get at the money. Then you strangled him. But that was easy after the finger.

‘But this wasn’t an
improvisation. It wasn’t a Plan B. You knew about the Wyatts. You knew Poole had
helped himself to her necklace. You knew where you were going to dump the body in order
to frame Frank Wyatt.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said the
solicitor. ‘Is there a question somewhere in this?’

‘It’s all a question,’
said Karlsson. ‘Will Tessa Welles admit to it?’

The solicitor looked at Tessa, who shook her
head.

‘Robert Poole’s flat was
interesting,’ continued Frieda. ‘I don’t mean your painting, which was
hanging in Janet Ferris’s kitchen. We know about that. I mean that you
weren’t clever enough about the evidence in his flat.’

‘What do you
mean?’ said Karlsson, twisting his head to look at her. ‘There wasn’t
any.’

‘That’s right,’ said
Frieda. ‘They left everything relating to his victims, but there was no reference
to Tessa at all. Pages had been torn out of Poole’s notebooks but the names of the
victims were left there. Which suggested that the pages had been torn out by someone
else.’

‘What it suggested to you is not
evidence,’ said Tessa’s solicitor.

‘You killed Robert Poole,’ said
Karlsson. ‘You killed Janet Ferris.’

‘The coroner’s verdict was
suicide.’

‘You killed Janet Ferris,’
repeated Karlsson. ‘And you tried to kill Michelle Doyce because you thought she
knew something.’

There was a faint flicker in Tessa’s
face.

‘She didn’t.’ Frieda
leaned forward once more. ‘Michelle Doyce was no threat to you. She had nothing to
tell me; I just let you and Harry believe that, God forgive me.’

‘That’s enough for now,’
said her solicitor, standing up.

‘You would have killed her, just in
case,’ Frieda continued quietly. ‘You and your brother. How does it
feel?’

‘I don’t know what you’re
talking about.’

‘How does it feel to find out what
you’re capable of?’

‘Enough. My client has nothing further
to say.’

‘You’re going to have to think
about that, Tessa. Over the years.’

Harry Welles was wearing a thick grey
pullover and black jeans. It was the first time that Frieda had seen him casually
dressed: he had always been in a suit or a smart jacket, carefully groomed and
impeccable. She considered him: many
people would think him an
attractive man. He had the self-conscious charm of one who is confident of getting his
own way. Olivia positively cooed when she talked of him.

She took her seat in the corner and met his
eyes. His solicitor was a woman, young, trim and pretty, who gestured with her hands
whenever she spoke, and sometimes tapped her pink-tipped fingers on the table.

He had no comment about the torture of
Robert Poole, no comment about his murder, nothing to say about the planted evidence and
the dumping of the body, silence over Janet Ferris’s death.

‘I don’t get it,’ said
Karlsson. ‘You were caught in the act of attempting to murder Michelle Doyce.
It’s cut and dried. You’re going down, you and your sister. You’ve got
nothing to lose. Why not tell us? It’s your last option.’

‘As you say,’ replied Harry,
pleasantly, ‘you don’t get it.’

‘You think nobody is quite as clever
as you,’ said Frieda. ‘Isn’t that right?’

‘I was wondering when you’d
speak.’

‘You and Tessa think that you’re
superior to everyone else and it makes you feel impregnable.’

‘It takes one to know one.’

‘And contemptuous.’

‘I wasn’t contemptuous of you,
was I? On our little dates?’ He raised his eyebrows at her.

‘Our dates?’ Frieda gazed at him
speculatively. ‘Do you want to know what I thought about them? I’ve been on
dates with other men, and sometimes they were interesting, and sometimes they were
embarrassing, and sometimes they were charged with possibility. With our dates, there
wasn’t anything. It was like a performance. There was nothing behind the
words.’

‘Fuck you. You
won’t be so calm when everything comes out. You like your privacy, but I
know
things, Frieda. You’ll be surprised by the things I know.’
He leaned towards her. ‘I know about your family, your father, your
past.’

Karlsson stood up, with a violence that sent
his chair skidding across the floor. ‘As your solicitor should have said, this
interview is over.’

He turned off the tape recorder, then went
to the door and held it open for Frieda. ‘Thank you,’ she said, then looked
at Harry for the last time.

‘You called him Bob,’ she
said.

‘What?’

‘You asked about Bob Poole when we
were in the pub. That was stupid of you, don’t you think? After that I knew for
certain. One word, Harry. One syllable.’

Then she left the room, her chin raised.

‘Are you OK?’ asked
Karlsson.

‘I’m fine.’

‘That stuff he said about –’

‘I said, I’m fine. It’s
all right. It’s over.’

‘You’re sure.’

‘But there’s something
else.’

‘Go on.’

‘Dean Reeve. Hear me out. I know
he’s alive. I think I sense him sometimes. I can’t get rid of the feeling
that I’m in danger.’