by Nicci French
‘What for?’
‘I don’t know. For my real life to begin: the life I was supposed to have.’
‘Real life?’ Frieda’s words hung in the air between them.
‘Real life, real love. I don’t know.’
Once, he had said to her, ‘I know you.’ He had looked into her eyes and he hadn’t smiled and she could feel his gaze finding its way through the tunnels and secret doorways of her mind.
What had he seen? What had he found as he gazed into her? Had he found the real her, the one nobody else could reach?
The body doesn’t matter. Not any more. The splitting skin and the scabby mouth, the cropped and greasy hair, the protruding ribs and the strange bruises that have begun to flower on the pale, grubby flesh, unused to sun. What matters is the soul. ‘Don’t listen to anything,’ the voices say to you. He said, ‘I know you.’ Put that in the scales. ‘I know you.’ That counted for everything.
Thirty-four
Their meeting was at seven, when it was still not fully light outside. There was yellow-brown tea that nobody drank and Garibaldi biscuits that none of them ate – Yvette took a large dusty bite of one, then looked surprised by her own action and embarrassed by the crunching sound she made, just when she was supposed to be talking, while Jake Newton looked at her pityingly.
She laid a chart on the table, and Karlsson, Frieda and Chris Munster leaned forward to look at it. Jake tipped himself back in his chair, keeping himself balanced with his forefingers in a way that alarmed Yvette and irritated Karlsson.
‘We thought we should try and account for what he did in his days,’ said Yvette, still swallowing biscuit, ‘where he was, who he saw, try and establish a pattern and any gaps.’
‘Go on.’
‘It’s not exact, of course. We don’t know enough, and a lot of it relies on memory. But look. These are the days he saw Mary Orton. She’s in green. Jasmine Shreeve is red. The Wyatts are blue. The days he met up with Janet Ferris are dotted around, not surprisingly, and there are various days that are free. But it seems quite regular, doesn’t it? I mean, more regular than you’d expect – as if he had a system and set aside times for each of the people he wanted something from.’
‘Mm,’ said Karlsson, musingly. ‘It does. Good work.’
‘But the odd thing is there are sets of days when he just disappears from the radar. Like, every ten days or two weeks, there are three or four days when there’s no trace of him and, as far as we can tell, he wasn’t in his flat either.’
‘So you think he was with someone else?’
‘Possibly. Someone we haven’t traced yet.’
‘Maybe another victim.’
‘It’s a thought, anyway.’
‘Has there been any response to the poster?’
‘You know – dozens of people have come forward claiming knowledge but they’re all dead ends.’
‘He’s like a gardener, isn’t he?’ said Frieda.
They all looked at her.
‘What do you mean “he’s like a gardener”?’ said Yvette. ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
‘What you’ve done makes me think of gardening,’ said Frieda. ‘Gardening’s all about different stages. You’re planting seeds, watering plants, picking fruit, pruning dead wood. It looks to me as if he was in various stages of cultivating the people we know about. There are the ones he had only contacted by phone or presumably was going to contact at some point. Then there’s our couple in Brixton, our first leads to him, whom he had visited once. There’s Janet Ferris, to whom he seems to have been the perfect neighbour, kind and attentive. There’s Jasmine Shreeve – he had something on her but hadn’t used it yet, as far as we know. Then the Wyatts. He’d managed to extract money from Aisling and it seems unlikely he wouldn’t have put more pressure on her. Mary Orton, of course, he had deceived out of a large amount of money and also tried to persuade her to change her will.’
‘You’re right,’ said Karlsson.
‘If there’s someone else we don’t know about, someone he was seeing in those gaps, I wonder where he or she fits into this. Was he done with them? Was he just getting started? Or was this person further along the line than any of them? Con men, they don’t just cheat people of money. They like to have power. There are studies of people who have conned their victims for no financial gain at all – it can be a grandiose project, to make themselves feel all important.’
Chris Munster spoke for the first time. ‘What I want to know,’ he said, ‘is who is bloody Sally Lea?’
The booming in her head had gone. The sharp hunger had gone, and the fug of dizziness. Everything had a sharp outline. She could see clearly now, and her thoughts were like knives.
She was his inheritor. She would not let him down.
She stood up from the narrow bed, the ruckle of sheets and itchy blanket. Her clothes hung off her and, with her fingers, she could feel how sharp her bones were: pelvis, collarbone, ribs, wrists, shoulder blades, her wings. To fly. At school she had been plump, with soft round hips. Curvacious, her mother had said. Podgy, her enemies had jeered. Now she was lean and hard. An instrument. His instrument.
She made her way to the long cupboard under the bows of the boat, which stretched into darkness at its point. He had said that she mustn’t, on any account. She had sworn: cross my heart and hope to die. But everything had changed. The rules were gone and the waiting was over.
She reached into the cupboard and pulled out the first packet, which was wrapped in several plastic bags against the wet, and put it on the table. Three more followed. Then she began.
Frieda only just got to the hospital in time. She was supposed to meet Jack in the lobby, by the rack of get-well cards, but he was late and she saw him as he came hurtling through the revolving doors, his face flushed. He was wearing an odd jumble of garments – weekend clothes, she thought, or got-out-of-bed-in-a-hurry clothes: balding velvet jeans that used to be dark red, a shirt with brown and green geometric patterns under a cardigan with reindeers on it, probably a Christmas present from his parents, she decided. Only one of his trainers had laces in it so that he ran with an asymmetric hobble, sliding one foot along the ground to stop the shoe falling off.
‘Sorry,’ he gasped. ‘Alarm clock. Public transport. Have you been waiting long?’
‘Just a few minutes. It’s fine. We don’t have an appointment or anything. It’s just a visit. I thought you’d be interested to meet her and I know she likes visitors. We’ll have coffee after and you can tell me about Carrie.’
They walked up the stairs and along the corridor of gaudy murals, wheelchairs and Zimmer frames, then through the double doors and into the ward. The woman in a Victorian nightie who did jigsaws was no longer there, but everything else looked unchanged. The bed that Michelle Doyce had occupied was now filled by a very large woman who stared at them blankly.
‘She’s through there,’ said the nurse, gesturing towards a door. ‘On her own. Orders.’ She raised her eyebrows at them, inviting a humorous response.
Frieda nodded. ‘Good.’
Michelle Doyce’s new room was small and poky, with peeling light green walls. It would have been unremittingly grim but for a large window that let natural light into the room and led on to a fire escape. The metal stairs spiralled down to a courtyard that was filled, Frieda saw, with a nearly empty skip and several overflowing refuse bins. She couldn’t imagine any of the patients she had seen managing to manoeuvre their way down to safety. There was a cockroach under the miniature sink in the corner. She opened the window, picked the insect up with a tissue and dropped it neatly into the skip below. Jack pulled a face.
Michelle Doyce was sitting in the metal chair beside her bed. On the bedside table were several small scraps of paper, three plastic bottle tops in a row, an old pill docket, whose compartments now contained small curls of fluff and hair, five jigsaw pieces and a few thin tabs of soap, presumably collected from the bathroom bins. This, Frieda reflect
ed, was Michelle Doyce’s way of making herself at home.
Michelle put a finger to her lips as they approached. ‘They’re sleeping.’
‘We’ll be quiet,’ said Frieda. ‘Can we sit at the end of the bed, or do you want us to stand?’
‘You can sit if you’re careful. He can stand.’
Jack held out his hand. ‘I’m Jack,’ he said. ‘Frieda’s friend. I’m glad to meet you.’
Michelle Doyce looked at his outstretched hand as if she didn’t know what it was, and after an awkward moment he dropped it to his side, but then she leaned forward and picked it up, examining it curiously, running her finger over his callouses, tutting over a broken blood vessel and torn nail, murmuring to herself.
‘Look,’ she said, turning it over so the palm lay upwards in her grasp. ‘Life lines.’
‘Will I live long?’ Jack asked, smiling.
‘Oh, no.’ She patted his hand softly, then let it go. ‘Not you.’
Jack looked disconcerted, although he tried to smile.
‘Do you remember me?’ Frieda asked.
‘You introduced us.’
‘My name’s Frieda. We talked about the man who lived in your room.’
‘He never came back to me.’
‘Do you still miss him?’
‘Where is he?’
‘He’s safe now.’
Michelle Doyce nodded. She made one of her floating gestures, tracing a vague outline in the air with her blunt fingers.
‘What do you remember about him?’
‘His poor hand.’ She turned her face to Jack, her milky eyes. ‘Worse than yours.’
‘Just his hand? There’s nothing else? Nothing you picked up?’
‘I never steal. I look after things.’
‘I know that. Is there anything you need?’
‘In the end.’
‘Where’s your dog?’
‘Everyone leaves. Ports and rivers.’
‘But your dog, has he left you?’
‘They’ll wake.’
She pointed at the brown blanket pulled over the pillows.
‘Is he in there?’
‘Friends now. It took time.’
‘Can I see?’
‘Promise.’
‘I promise.’
With infinite gentleness, Michelle turned down the blanket. ‘There,’ she said proudly.
Under the blanket lay not just one soft toy, but two: the floppy-eared dog with button eyes that Frieda had given her, and a small pink teddy bear with a red heart stitched on to its chest.
‘That’s good,’ said Jack. ‘They can keep each other company.’
‘Here.’ Michelle lifted the dog into his arms, positioning it carefully.
‘Where does the other one come from?’ asked Frieda.
Michelle looked at her uncomprehendingly.
‘Did someone bring him?’
‘I look after her.’
‘I can see that. But how did she come here?’
‘You never can tell.’
‘So you have no idea how Michelle Doyce came by the teddy?’
‘That’s what I’m saying.’ The ward manager spoke loudly and deliberately, as if Frieda was hard of hearing or slow to understand.
‘Or when she got it.’
‘That’s right. No idea.’
‘Someone must have given it to her.’
‘It’s just a cheap little bear,’ the woman said. ‘Maybe she took it from someone else’s bed, or maybe someone threw it away and she picked it out of a bin. What’s your problem? It makes her happy. She spends every minute of the day looking after them.’
‘I need to find out if someone else has been to visit her. How long do you keep your CCTV footage?’
‘What footage?’
‘I’ve seen several cameras round the hospital.’
‘Oh, them. They’re just for show. Where do you think we’d get the money for the real thing? This isn’t one of your hospital trusts, you know. It’s hard enough to pay our nurses or get people to clean the floors, let alone have all the mod cons.’
‘So there wouldn’t be anything on film?’
‘I don’t think so. Not from here at any rate. There’s a camera at the entrance but they only keep footage for twenty-four hours.’
‘I see. Thank you.’
Jack and Frieda sat in the downstairs café, which was really just two Formica tables in a corner of the lobby, next to the shop where Frieda had bought the button-eyed dog. A man in overalls trundled past them with a trolley full of magazines and newspapers that he threw in large bundles on to the floor. Frieda ordered a green tea from the bored-looking woman behind the counter, and Jack a cappuccino with chocolate on top and a dried-out blueberry muffin.
‘Poor Michelle Doyce,’ he said. There was a line of froth above his upper lip.
‘She seems much happier now.’
‘Because of those toys?’
‘They’re not toys to her. They’re living creatures she can look after and love, and be loved by in return. It’s what most of us want, after all.’
‘Yes,’ said Jack, gloomily.
‘Tell me about Carrie. You’ve seen her twice, I think. How’s it going?’
‘Well.’ Jack brightened. He broke off a crumbling lump of muffin and posted it into his mouth. ‘I was so nervous. It was like going on stage. I took ages choosing what to wear, which isn’t like me.’
‘It’s natural,’ said Frieda. ‘So how did it go?’
‘I was in my room at the Warehouse, waiting, an hour before she came. Paz was a bit startled. Carrie was ridiculously early too. And she was nervous, Frieda. As soon as I saw her, I felt ashamed of my own anxiety. I’d just been thinking of myself, but she was going through the real thing. She came in and sat on the chair opposite me and took a long drink of water, and then I said that although I knew of some of the events in her life that had brought her to me, I wanted her to tell me in her own words. And she started to cry.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I wanted to get up and hug her. But you would have been proud of me. I didn’t do anything.’
Frieda looked at him suspiciously. Was he being sarcastic? ‘What happened?’
‘I gave her a tissue. She finished crying. She apologized. I said she didn’t need to apologize. I said that when she was with me she could say anything, express any emotion. The thing is, she doesn’t know what she feels – whether it’s grief or anger, guilt or humiliation, or the simple sad fact that she doesn’t have a child and all that she ever wanted was to be a mother.’
‘Probably all of those things.’
‘Yeah. Also, I think she was so used to being the strong one for Alan that now she doesn’t know who she is or how to be. That she has to learn again who she is in the world.’
‘It sounds as if it went well.’
‘I still don’t know what that means. The second time, just before she left, she talked about how she’d thought she wanted to talk to someone like you but that now she saw it was better to have a man.’
‘By which she meant better to have you.’
‘Does that sound rude?’
‘No. It makes sense.’ She sipped her green tea. The woman in the shop was cutting open the plastic-wrapped papers and arranging them on racks. ‘I Want My Love Rat Back,’ read one headline.
‘She said she used to hate you,’ continued Jack. ‘She blamed you for everything that happened, but – Frieda? What’s up?’
Frieda pointed towards one of the tabloid newspapers. The Daily Sketch.
‘Oh, my God,’ said Jack. ‘Is that you again? Just ignore it. It’s not worth bothering about.’
‘I can’t ignore it,’ said Frieda. She took the paper from the rack and brought it back to the table.
‘It’s not the main story,’ said Jack.
The main story was about a rock star in rehab. Along the bottom of the front page was a smaller story: ‘Dodgy Doc in Botched Murder Probe’. Alongside
there was a photograph of Frieda.
‘Dodgy,’ said Jack. ‘Isn’t that libellous?’
‘I appeared before a medical tribunal. Maybe that’s enough.’
‘Nice picture, though.’
‘Someone’s taken it without me knowing,’ said Frieda. ‘In the street somewhere. They must have been following me.’
‘Is that legal?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘It’s written by Liz Barron. Who is she?’
‘I’ve met her,’ said Frieda. ‘She knocked at my door.’
‘What did she say?’
‘Nothing. Now shut up. I need to read this.’
Frieda took a sip of her tea. She took a few deep breaths and then she forced herself to read the article word by word. She read the story on the front page and when she turned it to continue reading she gave a start. Accompanying the story was a photograph of Janet Ferris and the sketched portrait of Robert Poole that she herself had made, using the photo of his decomposing face. She finished the rest of the article slowly and deliberately, word by word. Then she sat back.
‘What does it say?’ said Jack.
‘Read it for yourself.’
‘I don’t really want to. Can’t you just tell me?’
‘All right,’ said Frieda. ‘I think the basic point is that at a time when the police force is facing severe funding cuts it’s inappropriate that they should be hiring a therapist. Especially a discredited one. Especially when they already have qualified experts, like Dr Hal Bradshaw.’
‘Is he the one who appears on TV?’
‘That’s what they say. And somehow they’ve tracked down Poole’s neighbour, Janet Ferris. She’s not happy with the way things are going.’ Frieda picked up the paper and looked for the exact quotation. ‘“The police aren’t taking this seriously enough,” she says. “Nobody seems to care. Bob Poole was a lovely man, and he was generous to a fault. He used to bring little gifts over, on the spur of the moment. We swapped books, even did a picture swap. He said it was like a change of scene for us both. I returned it, of course. I returned everything that belonged to him, there’s nothing left. But I still can’t believe I’ll never hear his knock at my door or see his smiling face. He has been abandoned by everybody yet I will never forget him.”’
