by Nicci French
“Your Dr. Klein. What’s she up to?”
“In what sense?”
“What’s she doing with that prankster?”
“You mean Levin?”
“Don’t play dumb. I know what’s going on. She’s been perverting the course of justice down in Thamesmead. She’s got hold of your Yvonne woman . . .”
“Yvette. And I’m sure it’s authorized. But I’m not the person to ask: I’m on sick leave.”
“I know what’s going on, Mal, that’s all I’m going to say. And tell Dr. Klein from me that I’ve got my eye on her.”
“This,” said Shelley Walsh, in a whispering hiss, “is getting very irritating.” She separated the last word out into its four syllables. “Why are you here again? I told you to let everything be.”
“I know, but—”
“And who’s she? Who’s he?”
“This is my colleague Sasha Wells. And this is her son, Ethan.”
“Your colleague?” Shelley opened her eyes very wide; she raised her immaculate eyebrows. “And her son? Why is her son here? One of you is bad enough. What will everyone think?” She glanced around wildly, as if there would be neighbors staring from every window.
“Could we come in?” asked Frieda.
“No! I’ve said everything I wanted to say. I’ve said more than I wanted to say. I want you to leave. Now. Or I’ll call the police. And that little boy is standing on my flowerbed.”
“The police know we’re here,” said Frieda.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Please. If we could just come in.”
“This has gone too far,” said Shelley, standing back from the door so that they could file into the house. “Wipe your feet,” she said to Ethan. He stared up at her with his dark, serious eyes, then shuffled his muddy shoes on the doormat.
It was eleven in the morning and the kitchen was filled with the smell of baking.
“I won’t offer you coffee,” said Shelley, “because you won’t be staying that long.”
“Can I have milk?” asked Ethan.
“Milk?” Shelley looked at the little boy as if he was speaking a foreign language.
“We’ll get some later,” said Sasha to Ethan, laying a hand on his head.
“If you say “please”,” said Shelley.
“Please.”
She poured milk into a tumbler, almost up to the brim, and handed it to Ethan, who drank it with his eyes fixed on her over the rim.
“Thank you,” said Sasha, in her soft, clear voice. “What a lovely kitchen. I wish I could keep things as neat as this.”
“I consider it my job.”
“I think we may have found your mother,” said Frieda.
Shelley put her hand against her chest, then her throat. “What do you mean, found? I don’t want her to be found. I don’t care. I told you. How dare you go around finding people?”
“Shelley, listen. If it is your mother, then she is dead.”
“My mother?”
“Perhaps.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because you need to know. The body of a woman was discovered in a shallow grave in south London, and we think it may be Justine Walsh’s. Which is why we are here now.”
“When was it discovered?”
“In April 2010.”
“That’s four years ago. It could be anyone. Why should it be her?”
“We need a sample of your DNA,” said Frieda. “Then we can test it against hers.”
“Why should I care anyway? 2010 means that there were nine years when she didn’t bother to try and find me.”
“It had been there for many years.”
“How many?”
“I don’t know?”
“Nine?”
“It’s possible.”
“I don’t understand.”
The oven started to make a pinging sound.
“Shall I look at your cake?” asked Sasha.
“They’re biscuits. She just went missing.”
“Until we know if it’s your mother, we can’t work out what actually happened,” said Frieda. “Sasha is a geneticist. She has come to take a DNA sample, if you’ll consent to that.”
Sasha put a tray of biscuits she had taken from the oven on the surface and nodded at Shelley. “It will take about five seconds,” she said. “It’s very simple. It’s just a swab I wipe inside your mouth. I have a consent form for you to sign.” She opened up her leather case and drew out a form.
Shelley stared at it. “Then you’ll know if it’s her?”
“Yes.”
“How long will it take?”
“A few days,” said Sasha.
“What if I don’t want to know?”
“Can I have a biscuit?” asked Ethan.
“Don’t you want to know?” asked Frieda.
“I don’t know.”
“You might find it helps you to know at last,” said Frieda.
“I’m doing well,” said Shelley. “In my life. My husband doesn’t know anything about that time.”
“Have you thought he might want to know and to help?”
“I’m not that person any more.”
She picked up the pen and stood poised above the form. Then, as if in a great hurry, she wrote her signature across the bottom and handed it to Sasha. “Have a biscuit,” she said to Ethan. “Have as many as you like. Take them all. We never eat them. I don’t know why I make them.”
Sasha drew on a pair of thin plastic gloves. She took a small sealed bag from her case and took out a swab. “I’m just going to wipe the inside of your cheek and under your tongue and above your teeth,” she said to Shelley. “OK?”
Shelley nodded. She squeezed her eyes shut and opened her mouth wide, looking suddenly like a small child.
“Done,” said Sasha, after a few seconds. “Thank you.” She put the swab into a transparent container, then pulled off her gloves.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“Good. Now go away.”
“I’ll phone Yvette and see what she can do,” said Frieda, as they left.
An email from Saul Tait arrived: This is weird, but, yes, I do remember Hannah wearing it. She used it to tie her hair back when she went for runs. I remember clearly.
So that was that. She was back to square one with the collection.
TWENTY-SIX
Frieda spent the following afternoon at the Warehouse, seeing patients, then attending a meeting to discuss outreach projects. She had arranged to meet Jack afterwards, and he put his head round the door at exactly five o’clock. “Am I too early?”
“You’re exactly on time.”
“You’re not busy?”
“Come in, Jack.”
He was wearing a red duffel coat, with a stripy scarf, and had a bad cold; his voice was husky and he kept pulling out tissues from his pocket to blow his nose. “I’m taking an unpaid sabbatical,” he announced.
“To do anything particular?”
“To think.”
“About whether you want to continue as a therapist?”
“Are you angry?”
“Why would I be angry?”
“Or disappointed?”
“I’m not your mother, Jack.”
“You’re nothing like my mother.”
“So you’re going to think?”
“I need to think about whether the problem is being a therapist or being me. And then there’s the problem of what else I could possibly do. ’ He ran his fingers through his wild hair. “I could be a gardener, I suppose.”
“Do you like gardening?”
“I’ve never tried it, except that time when your mother made me pull up the weeds in her garden.”
“Which didn’t work out so well.”
“Gardeners make the world a better place.”
“Some gardeners do.”
“Anyway.” His face brightened. “I’ll have six weeks free so I can help you.�
�
“Help with what?”
“Your case.”
“That’s very kind of you but . . .”
“Give me a task.”
Frieda thought for a moment. “It’s complicated. And I’m not sure it’s safe.”
“I don’t mind that.”
“Then you’re a fool.”
There was a knock at the door, and this time it was Reuben putting his head round. “Can anyone join in?” He pulled a chair up to the desk and settled himself into it. “What are you talking about?”
“Jack’s taking a sabbatical,” said Frieda.
“Frieda’s case,” said Jack.
“Yes.” Reuben’s eyes gleamed. “Irresistible, isn’t it? Almost too perfect.”
Frieda looked at him sharply. “What do you mean?”
“Just that: an angry teenage daughter, a controlling mother, an absent father, a charming stepfather, who’s taken his place in the bed. And the little brother—like a lamb to the slaughter. I can imagine giving a lecture on it.”
“Yes,” said Frieda, thoughtfully. “It is. Too much so.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m thinking about the things that don’t add up—or that do add up too neatly.”
Reuben leaned across the desk and found a blank sheet of paper. He took a pen out of his jacket pocket. “What are these things?”
“You really want this?”
“Absolutely.”
“OK. Number one, the layout of the house makes no sense. Or, rather, the order of the deaths. The murderer would have gone past Rory’s room, killed Aidan but not Deborah, waited at least an hour, then killed Rory and his mother. Why would anyone do that?”
“Because they were cruel, and wanted to watch them suffer?” Jack suggested.
“Maybe.”
“Two?” said Reuben.
“Two: Rory was found in bed, in his pajamas. But his blood was also in the hallway and on the stairs. If he wasn’t killed in his bed, what is the staging for? If he was, why is his blood also downstairs?”
Reuben and Jack looked at each other but didn’t speak.
“Three: all the deaths feel different. Incoherent. Rory was lying on his face with the back of his skull caved in. Horrible. Aidan was quite cleanly killed, if that’s the right word for it. It looked calculated and deliberate. Deborah had been savagely beaten.”
“It could be an expression of anger,” said Jack. “Or hatred.”
“It’s the obvious explanation. Four: why were Hannah’s bloodstained clothes so easy to find? Five: why was her alibi so peculiar?”
“What was it?”
“She said she was going to meet her stepfather. But then she changed that to meeting her mother.”
“When people are traumatized they get confused,” said Reuben.
“I know. But it feels odd.”
“Anything else?”
“Seamus Docherty. He’s Hannah’s father, Deborah’s first husband. There was something wrong with his tone, I thought. I want to go back and see him, though. More obviously, Justine Walsh, the mother of Hannah’s housemate Shelley, went missing at the same time and that seems a large, strange coincidence. I think we’ve just found her body and that makes a fourth murder. And a fifth, with Erin Brack’s death, of course. Poor woman.” She looked at Reuben, who had stopped writing. “She was killed because someone believed she had a piece of evidence that would incriminate them.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. But if she did, then I have it now. ’ She turned to Jack, “Which brings me to how you could help me.”
“Good.”
“It won’t be very exciting and it may take a long time. I need someone to help me go through everything I collected from Erin Brack and sort it all into categories.”
“I could do that. What categories?”
“We—I mean, you—could first of all divide the objects between the family members, things that refer or belong to Hannah, Rory, Deborah and Aidan. Obviously there’ll be an overlap.”
“And then?”
“We could make a timeline for each of them, construct a narrative of their last weeks or months. Maybe something will come of it or maybe it’ll amount to nothing at all.”
“But you’ll be there too?”
“Some of the time. There’s one more thing. It’s in a building in Walthamstow, in the yard where Chloë works. Is that a problem?”
Jack flushed. “Why should it be?”
“I’ll make sure it’s good with Chloë as well.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
Frieda was in her consulting room, writing up her notes on a session, when her phone rang. She looked at it and saw Yvette’s name on the screen.
“Yes?”
“Hello? Hello? Is that Frieda?”
“Of course it’s me. So?”
“I’ve got the result back.”
“Yes?”
“I don’t know whether it’s good news or bad. I’m not clear whether you expected—”
“Just tell me.”
“It’s not a match.”
There was a long pause. Frieda didn’t know what to say.
“Hello? Frieda? Are you still there?”
“I’ll call you back later, Yvette. I need to think.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Later.” Frieda hung up. Suddenly she felt stifled and trapped by being indoors. She got up, put on her jacket and left the building. She headed north toward Regent’s Park. She needed to clear her head, to see grass and trees. But when she got to Euston Road she stopped on the south side and watched the traffic, the buses and the lorries that made the pavement tremble beneath her feet. What a terrible road it was. She watched a young woman on a bicycle coming from the east, impossibly vulnerable. A huge cement truck passed her and it looked as if she might be blown over by it. But she wasn’t. Frieda turned and walked back to her house. She let herself in and went up the stairs to her little study. She opened a drawer and quickly found what she was looking for: an envelope. She opened the envelope and checked that the comb—the comb she had used on Hannah Docherty—was still there.
She took out her phone. “Yvette. I’ve got another sample.”
“I can’t just keep doing this.”
“Just one more and then I’m done.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“I’ll bring it over now.”
The next day was Saturday and Frieda spent the weekend in a sort of suspension. She had planned to go to Walthamstow to take another look at Erin Brack’s collection but couldn’t face it. Not today. She met Sasha, as she did every weekend, and they walked with Ethan to Clissold Park and kicked a ball around with him. And they went and drank coffee. Sasha asked what had happened with the DNA sample and Frieda said to wait. She wasn’t sure yet. Sasha looked at her curiously and didn’t pursue it. The rest of the weekend Frieda spent mostly alone. She felt as if she was in a dream. She had started a process, and until she discovered what was going to happen, nothing really mattered. On the Sunday she met Reuben and they walked across Hampstead Heath, into the wild part where it felt like you weren’t in London at all—you couldn’t see any buildings, not even the Shard. You couldn’t hear traffic. There were just the jet trails in the sky. Reuben asked what was happening and Frieda just said, “Wait.”
On Monday afternoon, just after four, there was a ring at Malcolm Karlsson’s front door. Getting out of his chair was awkward and his walking was still slow, so the bell rang again.
“I’m coming, I’m coming,” he shouted. When he opened the door, Frieda and Yvette were standing outside. “What is it?” he said.
“How’s the leg?” said Frieda.
“Still broken. Now, what’s up?”
“We wanted to tell you first,” said Frieda.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” said Yvette.
Frieda tried to take Karlsson’s arm to help him back to his chair but he shook it off and toppled.
Yvette caught him and the two of them almost fell over. Finally he managed to lower himself back into his chair.
“You’re clearly getting more mobile,” said Frieda.
“All right,” said Karlsson. “What have you got to tell me?”
“It’s about the Docherty inquiry,” Frieda began.
“Frieda had this idea,” said Yvette. “She checked the bodies of women who had been found but not identified in the past thirteen years.”
“What for?”
“Justine Walsh, the mother of Shelley Walsh, disappeared at the time of the Docherty murders.”
“Who’s Shelley Walsh?”
“She was a friend, or associate, of Hannah Docherty’s. A body was found a few years later in some woods in south London, fairly nearby. We checked the DNA to see if was Justine Walsh. It wasn’t.”
“Was that worth coming here to tell me?”
“It was Deborah Docherty.”
Karlsson looked at the two women. Yvette’s eyes were bright with excitement. Frieda was looking at him with a kind of curiosity. “I don’t understand.”
“Frieda got a DNA sample from Hannah Docherty. It matched with the body.”
“But Deborah Docherty’s body was found in the house,” said Karlsson. “With her husband and son.”
“No,” said Frieda. “Deborah Docherty’s body was found nine years later, severely decomposed in Denton Woods.”
“But what about the body in the house?”
“The police are investigating that,” said Yvette. “They’re doing another DNA test.”
“But we know what they’ll find,” said Frieda.
“That girl’s mother?” said Karlsson.
“That’s right. Justine Walsh.”
Karlsson had been leaning forward in his chair. Now he sank back. “So what does that mean?”
“What it really means,” said Frieda, “is that the Hannah Docherty inquiry has been reopened. Now the police can do what they should have done in the first place. I’m through with it.”
There was a pause. Karlsson and Yvette exchanged glances.
“What?” said Frieda.
“It’s just I’ve never heard that from you,” Karlsson said. “The idea of letting the police get on with their job.”
“What do you want me to do? Start interviewing witnesses on my own?”
Karlsson managed a smile. “That’s what you do, isn’t it? But maybe the team on the investigation won’t be receptive to your peculiar talents. Not like me. Besides, don’t you want to know what actually happened?”
