Freya

by Anthony Quinn

  ‘A few. He’s out more often than I am.’

  ‘But you didn’t meet Chrissie?’

  Nancy looked at her curiously. ‘No. Why d’you ask?’

  ‘Oh, no reason. I’ve been writing a piece about her, and I wondered what someone like Robert thought of her. You wouldn’t imagine politicians and models had that much in common.’

  Nancy blinked, considering. ‘You’d have to ask Robert,’ she said with a glance at Freya, who realised from that unlikely projection that the subject was closed.

  Though still sore and swollen she hated to mope in a hospital room, and at the end of the week she checked herself out of the place. Nancy drove them back to London; Freya sat numbly in the passenger seat, sunglasses shading her red-rimmed eyes. They had set off from London only days before in giddy high spirits, and were returning exhausted and hollowed out with grief. Freya felt as though she had aged in years, not days. And yet somehow their living through this trauma had secured a bond between them stronger than one that could ever have derived from contentment. When Nancy was preparing to leave her at Canonbury Square, having carried her bags up to the flat, they stood in the darkened hallway holding on to one another like survivors of a hurricane.

  She took sick leave from work, and then found herself unable to settle to anything at home. It was difficult to concentrate on a book for five minutes at a time. She watched television, without much interest; it all seemed so tinny and frictionless. She busied herself around the flat, finding distraction in chores. She covered everything with dust sheets and painted the walls white, then decided it looked too antiseptic and started again, choosing duck-egg blue. One night she woke in violent alarm, remembering the appalling mess – ‘the murder scene’ – she had left in the bathroom at that cottage, and telephoned her father. Stephen, woken from sleep (it was 2 a.m.), blearily explained that it had all been taken care of, they’d got cleaners in, and the owner had been more than understanding about it …

  Her face at night in the bathroom mirror had a wary, chastened look, like the mugshot of a convicted criminal. The ripeness that had filled out her chest and stomach would fade; she would return to her old skinny self. She had briefly been two; now she was alone again. For the first time she saw something precarious in her beauty. Though men and women had always been attracted to her she had no great gift for companionship. She had been too proud – unforgiving. Whenever people had got close she had withdrawn from them; she thought she could afford to refuse. A moment of carelessness had led to disaster. She knew an effort would be required to avoid a solitary life; but she didn’t know if she could make it. Or even if she wanted to.

  This haze of self-interrogation was broken when Fosh telephoned her from the office one morning. He had just developed a roll of film he had taken at the Corsair, the last of the photos to feature Chrissie and her court of hangers-on. He thought he might have found what Freya was looking for.

  ‘The woman who’d been at Chrissie’s flat – Frances? – dark-haired, petite, thirtyish. This one’s a dead ringer. Only thing is, I asked this copper friend of mine to have a look. He recognised her all right, but thought her name was Bridget, not Frances.’

  ‘Damn. So it’s not our woman?’

  ‘Well, not unless she’s changed her name recently. Vickery, my mate at the Yard, said she looked very like someone he knew called Bridget.’

  Freya sighed. ‘I’d like to see them anyway.’

  ‘Right. When are you coming in? I can leave them on your desk here –’

  ‘No! For Christ’s sake, don’t. I’m pretty sure someone’s been snooping around there, checking up on me.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘I wish I was. Ever since Brock spiked my Chrissie obit there’s been something funny going on. Stuff has gone missing from my desk. I’ll give you odds that if you leave those photos around they’ll have disappeared by tomorrow.’

  There was a pause at the end of the line. He thinks I’ve gone nuts, she told herself. Fosh’s voice came back: ‘All right. I’ll meet you somewhere.’

  The cafe by the Shepherd’s Bush bus depot was busier than the last time she’d been there. She and Fosh were among the few not wearing the grey-and-black livery of London Transport workers. Fosh gazed around at the uniformed patrons taking their leisure, smoking, reading the paper. A couple at the next table were playing a listless game of dominoes.

  ‘There’s a lot of stoical faces in this room,’ observed Fosh, dropping his voice.

  ‘Driving a bus in London would probably incline you to stoicism,’ said Freya, looking towards the door. ‘There she is.’

  She waved across to Ava, who acknowledged her with a characteristic lift of her chin, and began making her way past the tables. Fosh, having taken a look at her, glanced back at Freya with his eyebrows hoisted to a level of candid interest. Before Ava sat down she tipped her head this way and that in an exercise to relieve her neck.

  ‘Long day?’ asked Freya.

  Ava nodded, and took off her cap. ‘I’m back on at six.’

  Freya introduced her to Fosh, who raised his hand in wordless salutation. Once they’d ordered tea she opened the envelope of photographs and drew them out. They were all black and white, ten by eights. Freya watched Ava inspecting them one after another. About halfway through the pack she stopped, and her face creased into a sad smile: she held up a photograph of Chrissie, stepping, almost hopping, across the threshold of the Corsair and offering a little wave as she went. Her hair swung in a curtain, blurrily, behind her.

  ‘That’s the pick of ’em,’ said Fosh, also watching her.

  Ava only nodded, and continued to flip through the photos, which made a sucking noise as each one was slid off the pack. Her even pace, and the little noise, became so monotonous that Freya began to wonder if Ava had forgotten why she was looking through the pictures at all. Her expression never flickered, like a croupier dealing out cards. Hosts of faces that Fosh had caught on film were examined, impassively, and discarded. Until she stopped at one, and without hesitation put her finger over it.

  ‘That’s her. That’s Frances.’

  Fosh looked at it, and then at Freya. ‘Same woman,’ he said with a bemused frown.

  Freya tapped the photograph. ‘Ava, listen. Someone else picked out this woman, but reckoned her name was Bridget – might you have been mistaken?’

  She shook her head. ‘All I know is, I met her a few times an’ she called herself Frances.’

  A conundrum: two people had separately recognised the same woman but couldn’t agree on her name. Freya thought the best thing for it was to talk to the copper and clear up the confusion. Fosh supplied her with his phone number; she took some change from her purse and told them she’d not be long. The telephone box, baking in the sun, reeked of burnt dust and piss.

  DI Vickery from the Met answered on the third ring. Yes, Fosh had told him to expect a call from her, about the Corsair photos …

  ‘To be honest,’ she said, ‘we’re stumped. I’ve just been talking to a friend who said she’d met the woman you identified as Bridget –’

  ‘Bridget Lockwood.’

  ‘Right. She said she knew her as Frances –’

  ‘Oh yeah …?’ She could hear him riffling through papers – bored, possibly – and then joining in a facetious conversation with colleagues at his end. A minute or so later he had refocused his attention. ‘So there’s a confusion over the name. Not unusual with these women.’

  ‘What d’you mean, “these women”?’

  Vickery said, ‘Well, when they’re on the game they often use aliases – more than one.’

  Freya paused. ‘You mean to say this woman’s a prostitute?’

  ‘Yeah. Known to be. Didn’t Fosh tell you?’

  Before ringing off she asked him if he had an address for Frances/Bridget. He didn’t, though he knew that she often frequented a coffee-and-pie stall just by Embankment Tube station. ‘The night shift,’ he added with a dry
chuckle.

  Back in the cafe, Fosh disclaimed all knowledge of the lady’s profession. ‘I think Vickery takes me for more a man of the world than I am.’

  It was plain from Ava’s expression that she’d had no idea, either. ‘I thought she was a friend of Bruce’s,’ she said to Freya, who now wondered what sort of ‘fixer’ Bruce Haddon really was.

  They talked for a while longer. Ava had to clock on again, but before she went she asked Freya how the pregnancy was going.

  ‘Oh, you know …’ she smiled.

  Ava stretched across the table and gave her hand a friendly squeeze. ‘Look after yourself, yeah?’

  They watched her as she weaved back through the tables, and out the door.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell her?’ asked Fosh.

  Freya shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I thought it might upset her.’

  She sensed Fosh taking this in, though it didn’t affect him unduly, for his next utterance had quite a different tone about it. ‘Most beautiful bus conductor I’ve ever seen.’

  The amber sodium lights made a necklace of illumination along the Embankment. The coffee stall opened for business just before eleven in the evening and closed around two. Its windows carried a hand-painted price list (tea, mug, 4d.) with a claim that their pies were ‘the best around’. Having staked out the place all week Freya had the measure of the clientele, a mixture of night workers from the Tube, closing-time flotsam, cabbies, vagrants and street walkers, the last tending to clot in groups between midnight and one. Ignored at her post on a bench and sipping a coffee so hot it would burn the tip of her tongue, she was able to monitor them at close quarters; she watched as cars idled near the kerb and the women casually dipped their heads to the unseen driver’s window. Now and then one of them would climb in, and the car pulled away, its tail lights blushing.

  Freya at first resisted the temptation to ask around; if the girl knew she was being sought it might scare her away. But when a fifth night disclosed no sighting of her she decided to be more direct. A girl wearing a beehive hairdo and leopardskin coat wandered over to the bench and asked her for a light, Freya gave her a smile along with a book of matches.

  The match flared within the girl’s cupped hand as she sparked up. ‘Slow tonight, isnit?’ she said, exhaling a jet of smoke. ‘You ’ad any luck?’

  Freya half laughed at the girl’s cheerful misapprehension. ‘No, I’m –’ she began, and changed tack. ‘Yeah, it is slow – though actually I’m looking for … I think she’s called Bridget.’

  The girl looked at her. ‘Bridget? She’s right there,’ she said, pointing to a group of her sisters huddling across the road. The girl put two fingers in her mouth and unloosed a piercing whistle. ‘’ERE! Bridget!’

  From the cluster one of them detached herself and approached from across the road; she was short, clad in a miniskirt and thigh boots. She was also blonde, and Freya was about to make an apology when the play of the street lamp picked out something familiar in the girl’s face. Her short-sightedness, and the girl’s newly peroxided hair, might have fooled her indefinitely. She had a swagger about her as she stepped up to Freya, who said, ‘Are you Bridget Lockwood?’

  The girl tipped her head enquiringly. ‘Who wants to know?’

  Freya introduced herself. ‘You knew Chrissie Effingham, right?’

  Bridget made a backing-off motion with her hands. ‘I’m not talkin’ to the papers, love – only get me into trouble.’

  ‘I don’t want to make trouble. I just want to ask you a few things.’

  But she gave only a slow shake of her head. Freya, thinking on her feet, said, ‘I won’t name you. And whatever Haddon paid, I’ll double it.’

  ‘How d’you know he paid me?’

  ‘Because he was desperate.’ She could see Bridget calculating what sort of money she could get. Freya dropped her voice low. ‘I’ve got twenty quid in my purse, right here.’

  Bridget’s expression didn’t change, but a movement of her neck gave her away: twenty was way more than double Haddon’s hush money. She also took up Freya’s offer of a drink, and they moved with their coffees to a shadowed bench by the railings. Close up Freya saw how pretty she was, a heart-shaped face with neat features that became animated in talk. Only the contrast of her dark eyebrows and peroxide-yellow hair hinted at disrepute. On hearing that Detective Inspector Vickery had passed on her name, Bridget said, with a lewd wink, ‘We do each other favours now and then.’

  It transpired that Haddon would sometimes hire her for nights when he was entertaining clients at the Corsair. She didn’t ask who they were, and she wasn’t interested in any case: they were punters, and she got paid by the hour. By degrees Freya shifted the conversation around to that night. She knew Chrissie only slightly, she said, and hadn’t been to her flat before.

  ‘Everything had been fine till Bruce told me to join them in her bedroom. Chrissie got in a right fit – she liked things as it was, just her and her feller –’

  ‘Sorry – her feller?’

  ‘Friend of Bruce’s. He called him “Mr Hooper”, that’s all I knew about him.’

  ‘Why did you answer the phone that night, when Ava rang?’

  ‘Cos no one else would! Chrissie had told us to get out, she was crying and shouting at Bruce, you bloody pimp. Ava wanted to know if she should come over – I said, well, she could, but the way things were goin’ …’

  ‘Ava did go over, but by that time the flat was empty. Except for Chrissie, and she was dead.’

  Bridget shook her head: as she recalled, the party was going strong when all of a sudden Bruce was tearing through the flat, telling everyone to get out. ‘I had no idea what was up. I seen Chrissie’s feller come out of her bedroom –’

  ‘On his own?’

  She nodded. ‘Oh, he looked white as a sheet! I don’t know why he come over to me. Maybe he was grateful I didn’t make a fuss or nothin’ – Chrissie had said Whatja need this tart for when you’ve got me. I could understand it, really. Two’s company an’ that …’

  ‘So you all got out?’

  ‘Yeah, like there’d been a fire alarm. It was only later I wondered what had ’appened.’

  ‘And this man – Mr Hooper – can you describe him?’

  ‘Oh … early thirties, dark hair. Handsome. He was one of Bruce’s clients.’ She stared into the distance for a moment, frowning. ‘One thing he said stuck with me, though, when we was getting taxis outside the flat. That scene with Chrissie must have been on his mind, cos he gives me a fiver and says, “Sorry about that back there – you behaved like a right good chap.”’

  Freya realised she must have shivered, because Bridget looked at her curiously then. She felt herself speaking quite mechanically. ‘They were his actual words?’

  ‘Yeah – a right good chap! Funny thing to say. Here,’ she said, squinting, ‘are you all right?’

  She got back to Canonbury Square just before two in the morning. After leaving Bridget she had driven around the darkened streets for a while, trying to fit the pieces together in her head. Truth wasn’t stranger than fiction; it was just more grotesque, and upsetting. She could have guessed that Bruce Haddon had put his squalid touch on the events of that night. Chrissie had guessed it, too. You bloody pimp. If she hadn’t known before, she rumbled him that night. And yet neither was Chrissie the innocent Freya had thought her. The girl from Bromley whose wide doe eyes seemed to glisten with incorruptible purity and youthful cheer … Of all the men – of all the married men – she could have had, she had to pick him. It was beyond understanding, except that, in some obscure vault of her heart, Freya understood quite well. If the girl had let the secret slip, she could have set her straight, told her what manner of being he was. And maybe that wouldn’t have made one bit of difference, either.

  She waited until ten the next morning before she picked up the telephone. She felt in her nerve endings an impatience that was almost sensual.

  A secretary had asked her to h
old the line. A click, and then his voice, puzzled yet pleased. ‘Freya?’

  ‘Robert.’

  ‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’

  ‘I need to speak to you.’

  ‘OK … I’ll have to consult my diary –’

  ‘I’m afraid this can’t wait.’

  She heard a choked-back laugh at his end. ‘Honestly, I’ve got meetings all day –’

  ‘Cancel them. I’m serious. I found Bridget Lockwood.’

  In the silence she could almost hear him thinking. When he spoke again his tone was cool and urbane. ‘What’s this about?’

  ‘You know what it’s about.’

  This time the pause was longer, and before he could reply she named a time and a place. She half expected him to object, to bluster, like a cornered politician would, but instead he came quietly. ‘All right,’ he said and rang off.

  He entered the square from the Carey Street side. She was sitting at the bench that had once been her favourite, in front of the wrought-iron screen facing the chapel. The morning was warm, though the sky looked sullen and dimly threatening. A crocodile of capped and blazered schoolboys were filing towards the gatehouse, and Robert checked his step to let them pass.

  He twitched a greeting with his eyes as he sat down, not quite next to her. He was wearing a dark narrow-lapelled suit with a crested tie. Surveying their surroundings he said, ‘I get the irony, of course.’

  She looked at him. ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Your choosing an Inn of Court for this … rendezvous. A good place to dispense justice.’

  ‘That’s not why I chose it,’ she replied. ‘It was somewhere I used to come when I was at the Envoy. I once ran into Alex McAndrew here.’

  Robert gave a mirthless little laugh and looked away. ‘Well, I thought there’d be an irony somewhere. By the way, I’m sorry about your – Nancy told me. I gather it was –’

  ‘Pretty grim,’ she said crisply. ‘But I was lucky. If Nancy hadn’t been there I might have just bled out, alone, in a stranger’s bathroom.’

  There was a pause between them, like gunfighters poised to draw. When a little dust had settled on her last remark she began: ‘A lonely death … When I was in hospital I wondered what it had been like for Chrissie. I still can’t believe she meant to do it. I suspect she was so depressed, and drunk, that she forgot how many Tuinal she’d taken. And she drank because, well – the man she loved, or thought she loved, had just invited a prostitute into her bedroom.’