Saturday Requiem (12 page)

Frieda looked at the address and the map and decided to go the long way. She took the train east to Erith. From the station she walked across a main road and through a housing estate to the south bank of the Thames. To the right, across scrubby marshland, she could see the Dartford bridge, like a geometry drawing on a grey watercolour. The distant cars and lorries moved across, north to south, silent and slow, as if she were watching them from a great height. Directly across the river, she could see a jumble of warehouses with containers piled, as if in a children’s game, parked cars, and then along the bank, land that had been scraped clean, scoured grey, and brown earth, ready for something: a factory, storage, housing. Beyond that was heathland and fields and on the horizon a church spire. These were London’s edgelands, a half-abandoned industrial landscape, a half-ruined rural space. Frieda liked it.

She turned left and started to walk along the riverbank away from the sea towards London. Fifty miles to the west, there were parts of the Thames Path that were quietly rural, green, tree-shaded riverbanks, quaint little towns, millionaires’ mansions with trimmed lawns, Henley and Windsor. Here it was different. This was the Thames downstream from London, which veered from being forgotten to being abused, heedlessly built on, demolished and dumped on. It was a place Frieda came to from time to time, usually on bright cold winter days when she needed the wind to clear her head. There were patches of wildness, heathlands,
sometimes bird sanctuaries, but even the green havens felt post-industrial, almost post-apocalyptic, riven with ditches and dykes, precariously reclaimed from the sea or the river or swamps or somewhere in between.

Developers and politicians had called the area the Thames Gateway but the name itself was ambiguous and troubling. Was it a gateway in or a gateway out? From time to time Frieda had struck up conversations with bikers or hikers, old couples, young girls pushing buggies, residents of Greenhithe, Dartford, Purfleet, Belvedere. They could be welcoming or wary, suspicious, even hostile. There was a feeling that they had been pushed out from somewhere or that people from somewhere had been pushed onto them: immigrants, London’s rejects. Even the giant industrial buildings – cement works, sewage treatment facilities – served London but weren’t wanted there. This was one of the places Frieda came when she wanted to think about London. This was what London wanted to forget about, to expel, to suppress.

Frieda walked past a vast supermarket car park and a half-demolished warehouse and a patch of land that was being cleared and flattened by three bulldozers. She reached the sewage works, turned away from the river and walked along the side of it. Gorse bushes and brambles made the path almost impassable. At the other end she emerged on to a newly constructed road. She looked at the rough map she had drawn for herself, turned right, and after a few minutes she had arrived at Oldbourne Drive. It was like a square with one side missing. The houses couldn’t be more than five years old, but already they looked battered without being weathered. There were slates missing on the roofs and the window frames were peeling. The façades looked as if they had been drawn by a small child: a door and a car port on the ground floor, two windows on the first floor, one larger
window on the second. The drive framed a small and very basic children’s playground with a see-saw and bright red metal benches. Frieda made her way to number sixty-three and rang the bell.

The house looked abandoned. It had one of the only driveways without a car on it. But there was a rustling sound and the door opened.

‘Frieda Klein.’

It was said so loudly and enthusiastically that Frieda felt self-conscious and looked around to see if anyone could have heard. There was no one. There were houses, cars, a playground. But still it felt deserted.

Erin Brack was taller than Frieda and large, without being fat, just solid and imposing. She had dark curly hair and brown-framed glasses. She was dressed in a white-and-brown-hooped sweater, black jeans and white training shoes.

‘It was good of you to make time,’ said Frieda, cautiously.

‘Come in, come in.’

Erin Brack almost hustled Frieda inside. There was a stale smell in the house of dampness, old cooking, as well as cleaning fluid and air-freshener, which somehow made it worse rather than better. She gestured around her at the piles of newspapers that were on the floor, the stairs and every visible surface wide enough to support them. Frieda followed her into a living room at the back of the house.

‘Sorry for the mess,’ said Erin Brack. ‘Cleaner’s day off. That’s a joke by the way. I don’t have a cleaner. Take a seat.’

Frieda looked around. She could see that Erin Brack didn’t have a cleaner. There was a chair and a sofa and a wooden kitchen chair but there was nowhere to sit. Every surface was covered with papers, magazines, newspapers. There were plates and mugs and glasses. Even the wall space was covered.
The flowery wallpaper was almost completely obscured by pages ripped out from newspapers, maps, photographs. There were portraits of smiling boys and girls. For a moment Frieda hoped they might be family photos, a precarious trace of normality, of social ties, but Erin Brack followed her gaze and identified them one by one. They were the smiling faces of people who hadn’t known what Fate was preparing for them.

‘I thought you might be at work,’ said Frieda.

‘I’m on sick leave.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘For four years.’

‘That sounds serious.’

‘The doctors find it difficult to pin down,’ said Erin Brack. ‘It’s a constellation of symptoms. I’ve had back problems for years. And breathing difficulties. I have a mood disorder as well. It’s hard to put a simple label on. But you know all about that.’

Frieda didn’t reply.

‘Enough about me. Can I get you some tea? I can go out and buy some biscuits.’ Frieda looked around warily. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll wash some mugs up for us. You’ve got to have tea with me. There’s so much I want to talk about.’

‘Of course,’ said Frieda. ‘Tea would be good. No biscuits. I just want to talk to you about Hannah Docherty.’

‘And I want to talk to you about other things as well. I know about you. I want to talk to you about the Robert Poole case. I’ve got a whole scrapbook on that one upstairs. Follow me while I make the tea.’

Frieda stepped into Erin Brack’s kitchen, then stepped back out again. She was unsure which was worse: what she had seen or what she had smelt. ‘I’ll stay in the living room.’

As she waited, she received a text from Yvette, saying she
had managed to track down three of the people who’d lived in the squat where Hannah had been in the weeks leading up to the murders: she would pick Frieda up the following morning and they would see each in turn. Frieda had just sent a reply when Erin Brack came through holding two mugs. Was it long enough to have actually boiled the water? She gave Frieda a mug with a drawing of a skull on it. ‘I thought that would appeal to your sense of humour.’

‘About Hannah Docherty,’ said Frieda.

‘Completely,’ said Erin Brack. ‘I couldn’t be more excited. But first let me find you a space.’ She lifted a pile of papers from the sofa and threw them onto another pile. ‘It may look disorganized …’ Frieda murmured something polite ‘… but I know where everything is. It’s my own system.’

Frieda sat on the sofa. There was a low table in front of her. She pushed the piles of paper apart so that she could put the mug down. She tapped the mug and ran a finger around the rim. She did everything except drink from it. ‘I’ve heard that you’re a collector,’ she said.

‘In a small way. When there’s a crime that interests me, I want to know everything about it. As much as the police know. More sometimes.’ Erin Brack pushed more papers aside, so that she could sit next to Frieda. She moved close up against her and addressed her in a conspiratorial tone: ‘The police just wanted to put Hannah Docherty away. They didn’t care what really happened. I’m so excited to hear that you’re involved. You feel the same as I do, don’t you?’

‘Have you collected things that belonged to the Dochertys?’

‘I think of myself as a curator.’

Frieda had suspected and now she felt certain. ‘Yes. Did you perhaps go to Seamus Docherty’s house in Hampstead shortly after the murders and remove bin bags that he had taken from his ex-wife’s house?’

‘I did. Three whole bags, and he just threw them away. They didn’t care about what had really happened.’

‘ “They”?’

‘Everybody. The police, the family, even her so-called friends. They just wanted to shove Hannah into prison and forget about her. I wasn’t taking things. I was rescuing them. You know, you can learn a lot about people from what they throw away.’

‘What did you get?’

‘All sorts of stuff. Letters, bits from the house, photos, school reports, bits and pieces. I got other things later as well, from the actual house in Dulwich.’

‘What kind of things?’

‘Oh, whatever they were chucking. My prized possession is a teddy bear that I think belonged to Hannah. Imagine that. I wrote to her about it but she never wrote back. They must have intercepted it.’

Frieda paused. This was the important bit. ‘Would you let me look at them?’

‘Totally,’ said Erin Brack, cheerfully. ‘I’d be honoured.’

‘Could I do it now?’

‘There’s a bit of a problem with that.’

Uh-oh, Frieda thought. ‘What sort of problem?’

‘I said I’ve got my own way of arranging things. This house is like my own museum. It’s like a cross between a museum and a library and a warehouse and a few other things, and I have to live here as well.’

‘Could you at least show me?’

‘No problem.’

‘Now?’

‘As soon as you’ve finished your tea.’

Frieda looked down at her mug. Something was floating in it. It might have been a tea leaf but it might not. ‘Maybe straight away?’

‘All right,’ said Erin Brack. ‘I’ve got two rooms upstairs where I keep things.’

Frieda looked around her. ‘Aren’t you keeping things here?’

‘Sort of. Some of them. But this is also where things are kept while waiting to be arranged.’

Frieda followed her up the stairs. Erin Brack turned the handle of a door on the first floor, then leaned against it, pushing.

‘Is something wrong?’ asked Frieda.

‘It’s a bit full.’

‘What is?’

‘The room.’ She was breathing heavily. ‘Sometimes the piles tip over against the door. Can you give me a hand?’

Frieda pushed at the door as well. It moved a couple of centimetres and then stopped.

‘It needs a sharp heave,’ said Erin Brack. ‘We’ll do it together. On three. One, two,
three
.’ They both shoved the door hard and it shifted forward. From inside there was a clatter and something shattered. There was enough of a gap now for Erin Brack to squeeze through into the room. Frieda followed her. At first it was hard to make anything out because the curtains were drawn. Frieda could just see shapes.

‘There’s a light by the door.’

Frieda felt on the wall and found the switch. The sudden bright light made her blink. It was difficult to say how high the piles were because the floor was out of sight. As on the ground floor, there were papers and magazines, but more of them, some in piles, others just lying where they had been thrown or dropped. There were also objects. It looked like a car-boot sale, and there was almost too much to take in. Frieda saw a bird cage in a tin bath; there was a pile of
electrical devices, a radio, a clock, a food mixer, a bicycle wheel with no tyre, and much, much more.

‘Is all this from the Docherty case?’ said Frieda, with a feeling of despair.

‘No. This is stuff that is from the first half of the alphabet. But I’m not completely consistent. Sometimes I go by the first name and sometimes by the second, then forget which I’ve done.’

‘Are they all murder cases?’

‘Mainly. There are some others I’d like you to look at.’

‘Not just now.’

‘As you can see, it might be a bit of challenge at first for you.’ Frieda nodded. ‘What I’ll do, now that we’ve got to know each other, is go through it and dig things out for you.’

‘All right.’ Frieda turned and forced her way back out through the door. This was going to be more difficult than she had anticipated. She walked down the stairs and stood by the front door. There wasn’t much more to be done.

Erin Brack was behind her. ‘Do you ever want an assistant?’ she asked.

‘How do you mean?’

‘I’ve always wanted to do what you do.’

‘This is a one-off,’ said Frieda, quickly. ‘The real help you can give is by showing me anything that might be useful.’

‘You’re going to be surprised,’ said Erin Brack. ‘There are things the police never knew.’

‘Why didn’t you tell anyone?’

‘Nobody wanted to know. I’m telling you.’

‘Like what?’

‘I told you. I’m going to go through it all. Get it arranged. Then you can come and see it.’

‘All right,’ said Frieda. She didn’t know whether to be pleased or dismayed. ‘Let me know whenever you’re ready.’
She took a card from her pocket, wrote her number on it and handed it across.

Erin Brack looked at it and smiled. ‘I read about the Dean Reeve case,’ she said.

‘Yes, it was in the papers.’

‘I think you’re right.’

‘In what way?’

‘I don’t think he really died. I think he’s still out there. I know that nobody believes you. I know what it’s like not to be believed. But I believe you. That may be some comfort.’

‘Thank you.’

Frieda turned and left. She walked back down towards the river. When she got there she leaned on the railings and stared at the water that, an hour earlier, had been flowing through London.