Frieda Klein 2 - Tuesday's Gone (8 page)

‘And you don’t?’ said
Frieda.

Berryman’s expression hardened.
‘I sometimes feel like carrying around a little card, which I’d give to
people like you. It would say that a lot of the science that ends up helping people is
undertaken by men and women who are doing it for its own sake, and that going around
weeping for those who suffer doesn’t mean you’re actually doing anything to
help them. Except that that’s a bit too much to fit on a little card, but you know
what I mean.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Frieda.
‘You came all this way with a strange woman on your day off. That was a good
thing.’

His expression relaxed. ‘I think she
should be moved to a ward by herself.’

‘Do you?’

‘Certainly. Being surrounded by people
will not help her one bit. She needs quiet.’

‘I’ll ask,’ said Frieda,
doubtfully.

Berryman waved his hand. ‘Leave it to
me. I’ll see to it,’ he said airily.

‘Really?’

‘Yes.’ He considered Frieda for
a moment. ‘You’re working with the police?’

‘At arm’s length.’

‘How did that come about?’

‘Some other time,’ said Frieda.
‘It really is a long story.’ She
turned to look at Michelle
Doyce, who hadn’t picked up her magazine and was staring in front of her. Then
Frieda thought of something quite different. ‘That syndrome,’ she said.

‘Which one?’

‘The one where they think someone they
love has been replaced.’

‘Capgras Syndrome.’

‘It must be terrifying,’ said
Frieda. ‘I mean, so terrifying that we can’t really imagine how
terrifying.’

As they entered the lobby, she stopped him.
‘Can you wait for me for just a couple of moments?’

‘Do I have a choice?’

‘Thanks.’

Frieda went into the hospital shop. There
were racks of magazines, shelves of crisps, sweets and unhealthy-looking drinks, a
paltry collection of shrivelled apples and dried-out oranges, books of Sudoku and, in
the corner, a basket of toys. Frieda went over and started rummaging through them.

‘Can I help you?’ asked the
woman at the desk. ‘Are you looking for anything in particular?’

‘A teddy bear.’

The woman’s face softened.
‘You’ve a child in there,’ she said. Frieda didn’t contradict
her. ‘I’m not sure we have actual teddies, though. There’s a very
popular doll that cries when you sit it up.’

‘I don’t think so.’

Frieda pulled out a green velvet frog with
protuberant eyes, then a rag doll, with long, spindly legs, and a small, shabby-looking
snake. Near the bottom of the basket was a squashy dog, with soft floppy ears and button
eyes. ‘This will do.’

She ran up the stairs to
the ward and stopped at the desk.

‘Do you think you can give this to
Michelle Doyce in bed six?’

‘Don’t you want to give it her
yourself?’

‘No.’

The nurse shrugged. ‘All
right.’

Frieda turned to go, but at the double doors
she stopped. Out of sight, she saw the nurse hand the dog to Michelle. Frieda watched
intently: Michelle sat the dog beside her on the pillow and nodded at it respectfully.
Then she put out one finger and touched its nose, smiling shyly; she picked up her glass
of water and held it under its snout. Her face wore an expression of tender
solicitousness and anxious happiness; it had taken that little. Frieda pushed the doors
and slipped through them.

Some days she slept. It was wrong, she
knew, but torpor would settle on her and she would curl herself up into a ball of body
and thick clothes and damp hair and close her sticky eyes and let herself go, drifting
down through murky dreams, green weeds and silky, shifting mud. She was half aware that
she was asleep: her dreams would get tangled up with what was going on around her. The
footsteps on the towpath, the rise and fall of voices, shouted instructions coming from
the rowing boats that passed her boat.

When she woke, she would feel thick and
stale with sleep. And guilty. If he could see her, he would be angry. No, not angry. He
would be disappointed. Let down. She hated that. She remembered her mother’s
slumped shoulders, the brave smile that wavered and disappeared. Anything was better
than disappointing people.

On this day she had let herself sleep, and
when she jerked awake, she couldn’t remember where she was – saliva on her
chin, her hair itchy and her cheek sore from the rough fabric of the
seat where she lay. She couldn’t remember who she was. She was nobody, just a
lumpy shape without a name, without a self. She waited. She let herself know herself
again. She pressed her forehead against the narrow window and stared outside at the
shifting river. Two grand swans sailed past. Vicious, vicious stares.

‘This case.’ Commissioner
Crawford spoke with barely concealed irritation. ‘Are you winding it
up?’

‘Well,’ began Karlsson,
‘there are several –’

‘I looked at the preliminary report.
It seems pretty straightforward. The woman’s not all there.’ The
commissioner tapped the side of his forehead with a finger. ‘So the outcome
doesn’t matter much. The victim was killed in a frenzy. She’s already in a
psychiatric hospital anyway, out of harm’s way.’

‘We don’t even know who the
victim is yet.’

‘Drug-dealer?’

‘There’s no evidence for
that.’

‘You’ve done a search through
missing people?’

‘Nothing there. I’m about to
interview the other residents of the house to see if they can move us
forward.’

‘I’m not convinced this is a
good use of your time.’

‘He was still murdered.’

‘This isn’t like your missing
children, Mal.’

‘You mean people don’t
care?’

‘It’s all about
priorities,’ said Crawford, frowning. ‘Take Jake Newton with you, at least.
Show him the crap we have to deal with.’

Karlsson started to speak but Crawford
interrupted him. ‘For God’s sake, wrap this one up for me.’

Today Jake’s trousers were
thin-striped corduroys and his shoes were a pale tan, highly polished with yellow laces.
He
put up an umbrella as he got out of the car – for it was now pouring
with a rain that was thickening towards snow – and walked into the house with care,
holding his buttonless jacket closed with one hand. The barriers had been taken down,
the crowds had long since gone, and there was no sign that a crime had ever been
committed here, except for the tape across Michelle Doyce’s door. There was the
same rubbish in the hall, the same smell of shit and decay that coated the back of
Karlsson’s throat and made Jake Newton wince. He pulled a large white handkerchief
out of his pocket and blew his nose several times, unnecessarily. ‘A bit close in
here, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t think they have a
cleaner,’ said Karlsson, leading the way upstairs, taking care where he stood.

Later, talking to Yvette, he wasn’t
sure which of the three interviews had made him feel the most depressed. Lisa Bolianis
was the loneliest. With her creased and reddened face, her thin arms and legs but
drinker’s pot belly, she looked as though she was in her forties but turned out to
be only thirty-two. She was an alcoholic, who had lost her children and her home. She
reeked of cheap spirits as she spoke in flat, mumbling sentences. Karlsson could see
bottles under her bed, and several dirty blankets stacked on top of it, along with a
torn pink eiderdown. Her clothes were in two black bin bags in a corner. She said that
Michelle Doyce was ‘nice enough’ but knew nothing about her and nothing
about the man who had been found in her room. She said lots of strange men came to the
house but she didn’t mix with them and she wouldn’t be able to recognize
anybody if they showed her a picture. She’d had enough of men: they’d never
done her any good from her step-father onwards. She had cold sores at the corners of her
mouth; when she tried to smile at Karlsson, he could see them cracking. He had his
notebook in his hand
but didn’t write anything in it. He
didn’t really know why he was there – Yvette and Chris Munster had already talked
to her: what had he been expecting? All the while, Jake stood by the door, twitching
uncomfortably and picking imaginary pieces of lint off the sleeve of his jacket.

If she was the loneliest of the inmates,
Tony Metesky was the one who seemed furthest from the reaches of society – a vast,
scared ruin of a man, who wouldn’t meet Karlsson’s eye, and who rocked back
and forth and talked without making sense, disconnected words and fragments of
sentences. The needles had been cleared away. A team from the council had come in their
special uniforms, like police divers, and it had taken them a whole day to clean the
room. Karlsson tried to ask him about the dealers who had taken over his room, but
Metesky wrung his dimpled hands together and his blubbery face screwed up in terror.

‘You’re not in trouble,
Tony,’ Karlsson said. ‘We need your help.’

‘Not me.’

‘Did you see anyone go into Michelle
Doyce’s room – any of the people who came here?’

‘Like a big baby, that’s me.
Won’t tell nobody. Fat smelly baby.’ He laughed anxiously, looking into
Karlsson’s face for an answering smile.

‘The men who came here, they
threatened you, didn’t they?’

‘It’s all right.’

Karlsson gave up.

Jake didn’t accompany him into Michael
Reilly’s room, but chose to wait in the car. He’d been warned about
Reilly’s dog. It was chained to the radiator but kept lunging forwards to snarl at
Karlsson, who was starting to think the radiator was in danger of coming away from the
wall. The air was thick with the smell of dog hair and dog shit, and of the dog food
in the plastic bowl on the floor. But Michael Reilly was the most
voluble of the three remaining residents. He paced round and round the room, jabbing his
forefinger in the air. Metesky was a freak, and that Lisa Bolianis couldn’t see
what was going on under her own nose, but he, Michael, could tell him a thing or two. He
wanted to co-operate fully with any investigation. Did they know, for instance, that
kids came to get their drugs here – and that means
kids
, no more than fourteen?
It wasn’t right. He knew he wasn’t one to talk, but those days were in the
past for him; he’d served his time and cleaned up his act and was going straight
now; he just wanted to help.

‘I see that,’ said Karlsson,
gravely. He’d spent enough time in the Met to recognize a crack addict. ‘Can
you tell us anything about Michelle Doyce?’

‘Her? She avoided me. I try to be
friendly – but with this lot, it’s hard going. The first time I saw her she wanted
to give me tea, but she changed her mind. I think it was Buzz. She didn’t like
you, did she, Buzz?’ Buzz growled and saliva poured from his open jaws. The
radiator trembled. ‘She wasn’t here much, always out looking for stuff. I
once saw her down on the riverbank, when the tide was out picking things up from the
mud.’

‘Did you ever see her with
anyone?’

He shook his head. ‘I never heard her
speak much either.’

‘The men who used Mr Metesky’s
room, did they ever go into the rest of the house?’

‘I know what you’re getting
at.’

‘Then answer the question.’

‘No. They didn’t.’

‘Not into Michelle Doyce’s
room?’

‘She kept herself to herself. Quite a
sad kind of lady, if you ask me. Why else would she end up in this dump? You
wouldn’t be here if you had anywhere else to go, would you?
Except I’ve got my dog, eh, Buzz? We keep each other company.’

An unearthly sound came from Buzz’s
barrel chest, and Karlsson could see the whites of his rolling eyes.

Frieda walked over Blackfriars Bridge,
stopping in the middle to look west towards the London Eye and Big Ben, then east at the
smooth dome of St Paul’s, everything flickering and dissolving in the falling
snow, which was turning to slush on the pavements. Then she moved swiftly, trying to
throw off a feeling of dread and dejection, not pausing at Smithfield Market or in St
John Street, and at last she was in Islington, standing in front of Chloë and
Olivia’s house, five minutes early for her niece’s chemistry lesson. She
knocked and heard feet running to the door. Chloë had grown taller and thinner over
the past few months, and her hair was cut dramatically short; it stood up in uneven
tufts and Frieda wondered if she’d done it herself. She had kohl smudged round her
eyes and there was a new piercing in her nose. She had a fading love bite on her
neck.

‘Thank goodness you’re
here,’ Chloë said dramatically.

‘Why?’

‘Mum’s in the kitchen with a
man
.’

‘Is that such a crisis?’

‘She found him on the
Internet.’

‘Is that a problem?’

‘I thought at least you’d be on
my side.’

‘I didn’t know there were
sides.’

‘I’m not a patient,
Frieda.’

Frieda wiped her feet on the mat and hung
her coat on the hook. She stepped into the wild disorder of the living room and looked
around for somewhere to sit. ‘Chemistry?’ she asked.

Chloë rolled her eyes.
‘It’s Friday. What else would I be doing with my fucking life?’

The snow turned back to rain. It rained for
the rest of the day and through the night, so heavily that the roads ran with water and
in the parks puddles formed and spread into each other. Drains overflowed. Cars sent up
blinding arcs of dirty spray. Canals bubbled. In the streets people ran between shops
under umbrellas that barely protected them. The drenched world shrank. In the sheets of
cold, driving rain, it was barely possible to see to the end of a road or the top of a
tree. The brown Thames surged. It rained through the evening and into the night. In
houses and in flats, alone or in pairs, people lay in their beds and listened to it
hammering against their windows. The wind ripped through the trees, and dustbin lids
clattered along streets in the teeming darkness.