Frieda Klein 2 - Tuesday's Gone (48 page)

‘Is that what you feel?’ said
Sandy. ‘That you’d like to get up and walk somewhere?’

‘That’s what I feel most of the
time.’

‘Do you always walk alone?’

‘Not always.’

‘So if you were going to take me for a
walk, where would we go?’

‘Rivers,’ she said.
‘Sometimes I walk along the old rivers.’

‘You mean like the Thames?’

‘No,’ said Frieda.
‘Obviously the Thames is a river. But I don’t mean that. I mean the old
rivers that flow into the Thames. They’re buried now.’

‘Buried? Why would anyone bury a
river?’

‘I wonder that,’ said Frieda.
‘Sometimes I think people invent different kinds of reasons. They’re a
health hazard or they get in the way or they’re dangerous. Sometimes I think
rivers and streams make people uncomfortable. They’re wet, they
move, they bubble up out of the ground, they flood, they dry up. Better just to put them
out of sight.’

‘So which vanished river shall we walk
down?’

‘The Tyburn,’ said Frieda.
‘Would you like to do that at the weekend?’

‘I want you to tell me about it
now,’ he said. ‘Where’s it start?’

‘It should start in Hampstead,’
said Frieda. ‘The source of the river is on Haverstock Hill. There’s a
plaque there. Except that the plaque is only in the approximate place. The actual source
is lost. It’s the only plaque I’ve ever seen that actually makes me angry.
Can you imagine losing the source of a river? You have this spot where a spring bubbles
clear water out of the ground and it flows down to the Thames. Then not only does
someone decide to build on top of it but they actually forget where the spring
was.’

‘It sounds like a bit of a bad
start.’

‘I’m not some kind of tourist
guide. I don’t want you to get the idea that I just love London. In fact, I hate
it a lot of the time. There are bits of it I hate all the time. So, anyway, you’d
walk through Belsize Park towards Swiss Cottage. You can feel the slope that the river
ran down. Then to Regent’s Park and along the side of the boating lake.’

‘As we walk, you can talk me to me
about how you’re feeling,’ said Sandy. ‘I suppose you should be
feeling a bit bruised, especially with all the vicious press coverage.’

Frieda found it strangely easy to talk to
the voice in the darkness, not seeing the response, just feeling him. ‘From when I
was little,’ she said, ‘I used to have a fantasy that I was invisible. I
don’t mean sometimes, I mean all the time, and I mean that I believed I really was
invisible. But it turns out not to be true, so basically I feel like I’ve been
taken out into
the town square, flayed and then had salt and sulphuric
acid rubbed into my flesh.’

‘But you’ll get over
it.’

‘I’m already over it.’

‘So where are we now?’

‘The river probably flows through the
boating pond.’

‘Probably?’

‘It’s hard to find out. And then
we walk out of the park and down Baker Street.’

‘Past Madame
Tussaud’s.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Is it worth going to?’

‘I’ve never been.’

‘Really? Have you been to the Tower of
London?’

‘No,’ said Frieda.

‘I went when I was a kid.’

‘Was it good?’

‘I don’t really remember
it,’ he said. ‘So where are we now?’

‘This is the nice bit of the walk. You
go through Paddington Street Gardens, which is a minute’s walk from Madame
Tussaud’s and nobody knows about it, and across Marylebone High Street and down
Marylebone Lane. Just for a bit you feel that you’re walking along the bank of a
stream as it flows through a little village just outside London. Except there’s no
stream. At least, not one you can see. It’s there somewhere.’

‘You caught them,’ said
Sandy.

‘
They
caught them.’

‘Admittedly you didn’t get full
acknowledgement.’

‘Maybe I like doing without
acknowledgement.’

‘Your invisible thing again. So those
two, that brother and sister, they did all that just for the money? Tortured that guy
and killed him?’

‘This is the bit of the walk I
hate,’ said Frieda. ‘Suddenly
you leave the village and
you’re right in the West End. The river became the boundary between two grand
estates and all that’s left of it is awful big buildings, hotels, offices,
garages. Robert Poole understood everybody but he didn’t understand Tessa and
Harry Welles. He couldn’t talk his way out of that one. They just wanted his
money. It only took one finger for him to give them the details.’

‘Nice.’

‘But they got a taste for it.
It’s funny …’ Frieda paused. ‘You’re sure you don’t
want to sleep?’

Again she felt his touch.

‘I wouldn’t want to sleep
tonight, even if I could.’

‘Well,’ she continued,
‘there’s a difference between doing something and being something but they
merge into each other. I mean, you play the piano a bit, and then more and more, and at
some point you become a pianist. That’s who you are. That’s your identity.
They killed Robert Poole just for the money. They got trapped into killing that poor
woman, Janet Ferris, and at that point they thought, We can do this. It stopped being
just about the money and became about power. They got off on it. That’s why they
got involved with the investigation. It was about control, about showing they were
better than us. Harry took it even further. If he could get to me, if he could fuck me,
that would be the real demonstration of his control.’

There was a silence for a time.

‘You were on to him?’ said
Sandy. ‘It wasn’t going to happen, was it?’

‘He was never my type. The one who
really interested me was Robert Poole.’

‘Is he your type?’

‘No, no,’ said Frieda.
‘What haunts me is that he was a bit
like me. Or I’m a bit
like him. But he was better than me. At least, he was too good for himself. He was just
a conman. He only needed to steal their money, but he had too much empathy. He was too
interesting. It caught up with him.’

‘You couldn’t save him,’
said Sandy. ‘His death was like, I don’t know, the stipulation, the basis
for it all. Anyway, where are we now?’

‘It gets better,’ said Frieda.
‘We cross Piccadilly and we’re at Green Park. You look across it and you can
almost see the riverbed, where it ought to be. We walk through the park, except that
it’s probably blocked by the preparations for the wedding.’

‘What wedding?’

‘You know, the wedding. The royal
wedding.’

‘Oh, that.’

‘But we make our way across, then
round the edge of Buckingham Palace. The actual river flows under the palace. When
I’m dictator and all the hidden rivers of London are exposed again, the palace
will have to be demolished …’

‘A small price to pay.’

‘And then we get to Victoria, which is
even worse than the bit around Grosvenor Square. It’s like a Fascist traffic
island in the middle of a motorway and then a horrible street that’s like the back
of a hotel, where the deliveries are made and the rubbish taken out. But then you walk
down Aylesford Street to the river and that’s nice.’

‘Do you finally get to see the
Tyburn?’

‘You’re not meant to,’
said Frieda. ‘It flows in a pipe under a house on the Embankment. But I once went
round the side, climbed over the railing and down some metal steps on to the mud by the
river at low tide. I sat by the outlet. After all that it was just a dribble. Hardly
worth the trouble.’

‘I can’t
believe it,’ said Sandy. ‘You remember all that.’

‘I do the walks in my head sometimes.
To try to get to sleep. It doesn’t work.’

‘You should be a cabby,’ said
Sandy.

‘Thanks.’

‘No, I’m serious.’

‘I’m serious, too.’

‘But don’t they have to do
that … what’s it called? The Knowledge. The examiner asks them how to
get from, I don’t know, Banbury Cross to the Emirates Stadium and they have to
describe it street by street.’

‘I don’t think Banbury Cross is
a real place.’

‘But you can do that. And they have
special brains, don’t they, cabbies?’

‘The ones I meet don’t seem to
have particularly special brains.’

‘But they do,’ said Sandy.

‘They have an enlargement in their
mid-posterior hippocampus,’ said Frieda, ‘due to the enhanced neural
activity in the region. And we’re finished. We can go home.’

‘That’s my kind of walk,’
said Sandy. ‘The kind you don’t need to get out of bed for. And you’re
done.’

‘Except that poor Beth Kersey and Dean
Reeve are still out there. We’re warm in bed and they’re out in the
world.’

‘They’re not your
problem,’ said Sandy. ‘They’re being dealt with.’

During the next morning, Frieda was
perfectly able to play the role of a therapist. She leaned forward in her chair, she
asked appropriate questions, she took a tissue from the box and handed it to a weeping
woman. She rearranged appointments. At the end of each session she took accurate notes
and made brief plans for the future.

But all the time her mind was elsewhere. She
had the feeling, which almost took her over, that something somewhere was wrong. Her
first thought was that it was within her own mind. Working with Karlsson and the police
had been a sort of drug to her, and now that it had been snatched away from her, she was
experiencing withdrawal symptoms. Was it all vanity? Was she missing the excitement and
the attention? She remembered Thelma Scott, who had come to see her and offered her
help, left her card. Frieda thought it might be time to start seeing a therapist
again.

And she thought of Sandy. He was in London
for work, but it was just a few weeks. In a month he would be back in New Jersey. What,
really, were the reasons that had made it seem impossible for her to go with him?
‘We’re all afraid to acknowledge the freedom we really have.’ Someone
had said that to her once. Was it Reuben? Or had she read it? Was she afraid to face up
to her own freedom?

But mainly she thought of other things. Or,
rather, she was aware of them. They were like strange noises outside in the darkness.
She didn’t know whether they were calling her or coming for her. She felt an urge
that she could hardly
define but that was telling her just to get
away, to go anywhere. At twelve o’clock, after the last session of the day, she
went into the tiny bathroom she had next to the consulting room, poured herself a glass
of water and drank it straight down, then another. After, she sat and finished her notes
on the session.

She walked slowly back to her house. She
didn’t feel hungry. Mainly she felt she needed to lie down, get some sleep.
Pushing her front door open, she saw the normal pile of letters. She picked it up. It
was mainly junk mail; there was a gas bill, an invitation to a conference and, finally,
a letter with no stamp, which must have been delivered by hand. There was nothing
written on the envelope except her name in a vaguely familiar hand. Yes, Josef. She
wondered why Josef would push a letter through her door instead of coming to see her.
Had she been pushing him away? Him, too? Well, yes. She remembered their hasty words at
Sasha’s party. There was something he had wanted to tell her and she had rebuffed
him. She tore the envelope open and read the letter:

Dear Frieda,

Sorry. You are cross I know.
Sorry for that. I try to talk to you. Here is paper from Mrs Orton. She want to
burn it. I say I show to you. Sorry. I see you soon maybe.

Your best,

Josef

Frieda looked at Mary Orton’s will. For
just a few seconds she stood in furious thought, staring at the wall.

‘Oh, my God,’ she said suddenly,
ran through to the living room, found her notebook and flicked through the pages. She
found Mary Orton’s number and dialled it. The
phone rang ten
times, fifteen times. She rang off and just stood in her room for almost a minute,
paralysed with indecision. She pushed the notebook into her pocket and ran out of the
house. She hailed a taxi in Cavendish Street and gave the driver Mary Orton’s
address. He pulled a face.

‘Bloody hell,’ he said.
‘What way shall we go, do you reckon?’

‘I’m not the taxi driver,’
Frieda said. ‘What about Park Lane, Victoria and then south of the river?
Everywhere’ll be jammed this time of day anyway.’

‘All right, love,’ said the
driver, and pulled away.

Frieda dialled another number. She’d
wanted Karlsson, but Yvette answered.

‘I’m sorry about what
happened,’ she said.

‘That’s fine. Is Karlsson
there?’

‘He’s not available.’

‘I need to speak to him. It’s
really, really important.’

‘I can get a message to
him.’

Frieda contemplated her phone. She felt like
banging it on the floor of the taxi. ‘Perhaps you can help,’ she said,
forcing herself to speak calmly. ‘I just got a message from Josef. My friend, a
builder, who was helping Mary Orton with her house. Mary Orton made another will. She
left a third of everything to Robert Poole.’ There was a silence. ‘Yvette,
are you there?’

‘Sorry, Frieda, didn’t you get
the memo? You’re not working with us any more.’

‘That doesn’t matter.
Don’t you see? This will changes everything. I think it’s likely that Poole
was going to kill Mary Orton, once he knew that he would inherit hundreds of thousands
of pounds at her death.’

‘Well, it’s lucky he’s
dead instead, then.’

‘But Beth Kersey
isn’t.’

‘It’s all
right, Frieda. We’re guarding the parents.’

‘The parents were never in danger. I
talked to Lorna Kersey. Beth never threatened them. She tries to do things for people,
what she thinks they want. It’s when she does that, or when people try to stop
her, that she turns violent. Very violent. You need to arrange protection for Mary
Orton.’