Dark Saturday

by Nicci French

  “Tell me if it’s too hot.”

  She poured jug after jug of water over the heavy tangle of hair, running her fingers through it to separate out the knots. A small moan came from Hannah.

  “Too hot or cold?”

  “No.” The word was almost a wail. “Please.”

  “Close your eyes. I don’t want you to get soap in them.”

  Hannah shut her good eye. Frieda squirted shampoo on to her scalp and massaged it in, bringing thick coils of hair up into the lather. She felt the bones of Hannah’s skull and she watched her bruised face soften and her heavy body relax. She was thirty-one years old. All of her adult life had been lived in this place where she had been bullied, ostracized, drugged, beaten, shut into a cell, abandoned to the torment of her own mind.

  “I talked to Jason Brenner,” Frieda said. She could feel Hannah flinch and tense under her fingers. “He mentioned the River Effra. He said you loved the idea of it. Do you remember that?”

  Frieda felt a slight movement under her hands. Was Hannah shaking her head? Was it a denial?

  “It’s something I share with you,” said Frieda. “The idea of a river like the Effra, hidden, covered up, forgotten, but still flowing under the streets and pavements.”

  Frieda wasn’t sure if Hannah was even listening to her. Was she just talking to herself? She rinsed off the shampoo and then repeated the process, then slid a hand under the back of Hannah’s head to lift her into an upright position. She rubbed her hair dry. Then, starting with the last few inches of the thick hair, she began to tease out the knots, pulling clumps of loose hair from the comb every few seconds. She remembered how she used to wash Chloë’s hair for her and how her niece had shouted and wriggled. Hannah sat quite still and Frieda couldn’t tell if she was enjoying or enduring the experience. Gradually the hair became smooth and sleek.

  “I think your face suits a side parting,” said Frieda, remembering how Hannah looked in photos of her as a teenager. “There.”

  She gathered Hannah’s hair in a thick, damp ponytail and tugged off the band tying her own hair back to secure it.

  “Do you want to see?” she said. She gave Hannah a hand and pulled her to her feet, then turned her to face her reflection. The two women looked at Hannah in the mirror, taller and bulkier than Frieda, utterly shabby in her sweatshirt and her grubby drawstring trousers, with a discolored face. She stared at herself, then with a surprising delicacy lifted a hand and touched her cheek softly, her split lip.

  “Me,” she whispered.

  “You, Hannah.”

  Frieda sat by her fire with a tumbler of whisky. The wind blew in gusts against the window, and the flames threw strange shadows round the dimly lit room.

  She thought about Shelley Walsh, her turbulent past and her ordered present, and in the background the mother who had never mothered her. She thought about Hannah Docherty, bruised and bowed over, and all the years she’d spent in a kind of Hell. And then other images came into her mind as she looked into the fire: those missing girls; Mary Orton, the old woman she had been unable to save; that fierce old journalist, Jim Fearby, who had died in his obsessive quest for the truth; Sandy, the man she had once loved, whom she had left, and who had been murdered. So many people she would never see again.

  The cat came into the room and wound itself round her legs. Frieda bent down to scratch its chin and felt something missing under her fingers. She lifted the cat onto her lap: the thin leather collar was no longer there. She put the cat onto the floor and went to the front and then the back door, drawing the bolts shut, standing for a moment in the quietness of the hall, listening to the wind blow.

  INTERLUDE EIGHT

  Hannah Docherty lies and stares up into the darkness. In Westow Park, children running around, little Rory, her mother, a blanket on the grass. Her mother leans in close, smelling of perfume, spices, roses.

  “Under here,” says her mother, “there is a hidden river. It begins here in this park. When it rains, the park gets wet, down there at the bottom. It’s the river trying to get back to the surface.”

  “No,” says Hannah.

  “Yes,” says her mother. “Long ago it was a stream and people could walk by it and children could paddle in it but it was covered up. But it’s still here and it flows from here to the River Thames, miles and miles away.”

  “Why was it covered?” says Hannah.

  “I don’t know,” says her mother. “Maybe it was in the way.”

  “What’s it called?”

  “Effra,” says her mother. “It’s called the River Effra.”

  Ever since, Hannah had thought about where the river went and how it knew where to go. Later, as a teenager walking through Brixton, smoking weed with friends, she had looked up as if in a dream and seen the street sign: Effra Road. She felt as if the river had hidden and survived, then secretly followed her down the hill from Norwood.

  Once she had been at a party in a squat in Vauxhall. It was the last days of the squat. They were going to be evicted. It was like a wake. She had mentioned the Effra and a shy young man with glasses and a long thin scarf and dark clever eyes had said, “It’s here.”

  She’d said, “What do you mean, it’s here?”

  And he’d said, “It runs under this building. It comes out into the Thames at Vauxhall Bridge, just over the road.”

  So, as the sun came up, she and the boy had left the party and walked over the nightmarish junctions of Wandsworth Road and leaned over the railings and couldn’t see where it came out. And they smoked and looked at barges passing on the river and up at the MI5 building above them, and Hannah never saw the boy again and never saw the River Effra.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Frieda announced her name at the front desk. A young officer led her through the police station, upstairs, along a corridor that passed an open-plan office, round a corner to an office on the far side. He knocked and pushed it open. A woman was sitting at a desk, typing on a keyboard. She looked up with a frown. The officer announced Frieda’s name.

  “All right, all right,” she said. “You’d better sit down.”

  Detective Chief Inspector Isobel Sharpe didn’t look like Frieda’s idea of a detective. With her dark-framed glasses, her curly hair tied up in a bun, she looked more like the forbidding head of a girls’ school.

  “I hope you’re expecting me,” said Frieda.

  “Karlsson rang me from his sick bed,” Sharpe said.

  “He said you were the person to talk to about missing persons. He said it was your special subject.”

  “I was on a Royal Commission about them.”

  “That sounds like a good thing.”

  “It was like most commissions. It took two years and we made recommendations and nothing changed. What can I do for you?”

  “You sound a bit senior to do this. I’m interested in finding a woman. That’s probably not the sort of thing you do.”

  “I almost certainly can’t help you.”

  “Oh.”

  “But now that you’re here you might as well sit down and tell me about it.”

  So Frieda sat down at the desk opposite her and said everything she knew about Justine Walsh, which was very little. When she was finished, DCI Sharpe didn’t speak for a moment. Then she tapped on her keyboard.

  “What are you doing?”

  “The national database.”

  “Are you allowed to do that?”

  DCI Sharpe looked puzzled. “I’m a police detective.”

  “This isn’t an official police inquiry.”

  “Karlsson vouched for you. Just so long as you aren’t planning to commit a criminal offense.” She paused, then looked at Frieda with a sharper expression. “You’re not, are you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “It’s just that I’ve heard about you.” She looked at the screen with more attention. “There’s four Justine Walshes. A victim of domestic abuse in Stockport in 2012. Born in 1978. Another charged with fourteen c
ounts of shoplifting in 1999.”

  “Where?”

  “Norwich.”

  “That doesn’t sound right.”

  “One more who was robbed in the street in Stockwell. She’s too old: eighty-three. And the other entry is from the early nineties in Birmingham. So there’s nothing useful.”

  “I didn’t expect anything like that,” said Frieda. “She led a rackety sort of life and then she suddenly went missing. Her daughter hasn’t seen her since. I wanted to talk to you about that. Isn’t it almost impossible for people to disappear nowadays, with credit cards and mobile phones?”

  DCI Sharpe pushed her chair back from her desk. She seemed almost amused. “That’s what people think,” she said. “People ask why we don’t have a proper register of missing people, with everyone on it. Just build a bigger computer and plug it into Facebook and Twitter. Get better identity cards, more CCTV cameras. The problem is that going missing is a bit of a philosophical problem. There are people who run away, who move away, who escape, who get bored, who go on holiday and stay there. They fall in love and run off with someone, they fall out of love and run off to escape someone. They are abused teenagers or persecuted gays or girls forced into marriage. They’re men having midlife crises or wives tired of the husbands’ midlife crises. They are going abroad on a gap year or they are going abroad to join an Islamist army or they are just emigrating.”

  “I get the point.”

  “I could go on and on.”

  “You don’t need to.”

  “And somewhere in all that, there are a few real missing people: people in danger, criminals on the run, Alzheimer’s patients gone wandering, lost children. That’s the problem. We used to have the National Missing Persons Bureau. Then, for reasons I never quite understood, we changed it to the UK Missing Persons Bureau. The name may have changed and the software may look different but the problem remains the same. We’ve got lots and lots of information and not much knowledge.”

  “It seems strange to me,” said Frieda, “that a grown woman, a mother, with a troubled daughter, just suddenly goes missing and there’s no police investigation, no nationwide search.”

  “Because everything that you’ve told me about her, her circumstances and her family history, indicates that she’s the sort of person likely to move away, to leave her old life behind. The police might make some brief inquiries but it would quickly be designated a lost-contact case. They wouldn’t even give it a case number.”

  Frieda thought for a moment. It felt like there was nothing more to be done. “Karlsson told me you were the expert on finding people. It sounds more like you’re the expert on not finding people.”

  “Yes, Karlsson told me about you as well.”

  “You mean that I’m rude and badly behaved.”

  “He put it more gently than that.”

  “But what you’re really saying is that you can’t help me.”

  “What I’m trying to say is, first, that missing people aren’t a simple category; second, as you say, it’s harder to disappear than it used to be, so the people who manage it are really hard to find.”

  Frieda stood up. “Thank you for giving me your time.”

  “If there’s anything else I can do, just call me.”

  Frieda looked at DCI Sharpe, who was peering at her screen. Her attention was already elsewhere. “What if she’s dead?”

  DCI Sharpe glanced up, as if it was an effort to engage with Frieda once more. “What?”

  “You’re right. Justine Walsh was the kind of woman who would walk out on her life. But just for that reason, she wasn’t the kind of woman who could have sustained it. She would have turned up somewhere, or run out of money and come back. Also, she was worried about her daughter. She would have checked on her.”

  “I don’t know anything about that. What I know is that people run out on their families and often they don’t look back.”

  “But what if she died?”

  “You mean if she disappeared and died and was never found?”

  “Yes.”

  “If Justine Walsh died and her body hasn’t been found after all these years then it probably never will be.”

  “There’s another category. What if she disappeared and was found but wasn’t identified?”

  “The overwhelming majority of people who are found are identified.”

  “We know that Justine Walsh isn’t in that category. And you’ve told me there’s a whole group we can’t investigate. So why not try the group we can investigate?”

  DCI Sharpe smiled, almost reluctantly. “We should have had you on our commission.”

  “You wouldn’t want me on a commission. So what about it? The bodies of women that are found and not identified. Is that another group that’s too big to investigate?”

  DCI Sharpe shook her head slowly. “No. It’s not a big group at all. You don’t even need the police database for it. Pull the chair around to this side of the desk.”

  Frieda did as she was told and sat next to the detective as she tapped at the keyboard.

  “So what was the date she was last seen?”

  “I don’t know. Some time in 2001, I think.”

  More tapping.

  “There we are,” said DCI Sharpe.

  Frieda looked at her screen. A collection of boxes had appeared. It looked like a social media site that might have been created in the Soviet Union. There were portraits in different styles—some looked like drawings done by teenagers or by talentless street artists. Two looked like tailors’ dummies with no features. One had just a few objects, an earring, a brooch, a belt; another contained a piece of fabric.

  “What am I looking at?” asked Frieda. “Are these bodies found in London? Was that at the time she disappeared?”

  “You don’t understand,” said DCI Sharpe. “This is all of them.”

  “What do you mean, all of them?”

  “These are the unidentified female bodies found since 2001.”

  “In south London?”

  “In the whole of the United Kingdom.”

  Frieda looked more closely and counted the boxes on screen. “But there are only thirteen. I thought there’d be hundreds.”

  “I told you. It’s very rare. Take a look. If one of them interests you, click on it. Or her.”

  Frieda scanned the details. Four were identified as Afro-Caribbean, one as Oriental. “Oriental,” she said. “I didn’t know that was still a thing.”

  “We probably need to look at some of our terminology.”

  Of the rest, one body had been found in Leeds, one in Scotland and one in Birmingham. That left three in Greater London, one in Essex and one with no identifying place at all. Frieda took the mouse and clicked on the last. It had been washed up on a beach in the north-east of Scotland. Probably too far away. One London body was identified as aged eighteen to thirty: too young. Frieda clicked on the Essex body. Found in a car park in 2010. Not decomposed. Of the two remaining bodies, one was described as thirty-five to fifty and “dark European’; the other was twenty-five to fifty and “light European’. Frieda clicked on the dark European. She saw what looked like a passport photograph of a round-faced woman. Below it were the words “Show Sensitive Images’. Frieda clicked on the words, confirmed that she was over eighteen and two more photographs appeared. The same woman, but with her eyes closed, as if she were asleep on a white pillow. Frieda looked at the text. She had been found under a road bridge in 2012. Too late to be Justine Walsh.

  “She must have come over from Romania,” said Frieda. “Or Bulgaria. Or Poland. Or Ukraine. And it didn’t work out. And then she ended it and nobody came for her.”

  “As I said, it’s very rare.”

  “They were all somebody’s child once,” said Frieda. “Which leaves us with one.”

  Frieda clicked on ‘light European,” twenty-five to fifty. She had been found by a dog, in a shallow grave in Denton Woods, south London in April 2010. Body severely decomposed.
r />   “How do they know she was light European?” Frieda asked.

  “Hair color.”

  The particulars were vague: Marks & Spencer underwear, dark trousers, light-colored shirt. Flat leather shoes. No jewelry, no watch, nothing.

  “This one,” said Frieda.

  “There’s no guarantee it’s her,” said DCI Sharpe. “It’s a hundred to one. A thousand to one.”

  “No. This feels right. If you were in Dulwich, with a dead body, and you needed somewhere you knew you’d be undisturbed, that would be a good choice.”

  DCI Sharpe looked at Frieda curiously. “It’s not good to dwell on these things,” she said.

  Frieda shook her head. “These remains. Can I get access to them?”

  “What for?”

  “We need a DNA sample. Then maybe someone can say goodbye to their mother.”

  Frieda took a photograph of the bandanna with her mobile and emailed it to Saul Tait. “Do you remember Hannah ever wearing this?”

  Karlsson was trying to read a novel. He usually read nonfiction—biographies, histories, books about science—and was finding it a bit of an effort. He kept having to go back a few pages. When the phone rang he was almost pleased to be interrupted, but this quickly changed.

  “Mal,” the voice roared. “Is that you?”

  “Of course it’s me.”

  “It’s Crawford here. What the fuck is going on?”

  Karlsson held the phone away from his ear slightly. “I can’t really help you,” he said, as politely as he could manage—his relations with the commissioner had been strained since he’d resigned before he was sacked, and then been reinstated because of Levin’s intervention. “I’m still at home with a cast. It will be a few weeks before I can return to work.”

  “I’m not talking about your leg. I’m talking about that bloody woman.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.” Karlsson did know what Crawford meant. When he talked in that tone, he meant Frieda, but he was trying to gather his thoughts.