Dark Saturday

by Nicci French

  “In Belsize Park,” he said. “People with too much money.”

  “Can I see the photos?”

  Josef seemed puzzled but he tapped on his phone, then handed it over.

  Frieda was looking at a long garden that had been turned into a building site, with three figures in the distance, by the kitchen door, one in a hard hat. They had their backs to her, but still . . . It was the set of the shoulders. Her guts coiled and her throat thickened.

  She drew her finger across the screen. A wall with a hole torn through it. Again, and a section of a loft conversion. Then a group of builders drinking tea. There. Was it? Was it?

  “Frieda,” Josef was saying. “Frieda.”

  She drew her finger once more across the screen for the next photo, and now he slid into view, full on, unmistakable. She sat very still, staring at the image she held in her hand. Solid and strong, with broad shoulders. Hair clipped right down and graying now. Brown eyes with those small pupils. That amused half-smile. Yes, she remembered the smile. And she was absolutely certain that he was smiling at her, imagining the day when she would see this photograph. He had posed for her. Dean Reeve, her ghost.

  At last she put the phone on the table, screen up so the figure was visible. “This man.”

  “Marty? He was my mate on the site. He helped me.”

  Frieda remembered Josef talking of Marty, how he had worked alongside him; how he had covered for him when he was helping her; how he had been there when the police had interviewed him in the garden and, putting two and two together, had understood Josef knew Frieda. And she remembered, too, how this Marty had spent time with Sasha’s little boy, Ethan, when Sasha was ill. Ethan had taken a shine to him. Marty. She felt the blood coursing through her body, pulsing in her wrists, drumming in her heart.

  “Where is he now?” she asked.

  Josef held his hands out, palms up. “Gone away.”

  “Where?”

  “I not know, Frieda. Frieda? What?”

  “You have no idea where he is?”

  “He say he is free always. Finish job, then off again.”

  Frieda reached out and turned the phone upside down. She made herself look Josef in the eyes, although she didn’t want to see his expression. “This isn’t Marty,” she said. “This is Dean.”

  Josef’s mouth opened but he made no sound.

  “Dean Reeve,” continued Frieda.

  “No,” said Josef. “No. Big mistake, Frieda.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “This is Marty. He say.”

  “It’s Dean.” Now Frieda looked away from Josef and into the flames. She was talking to herself, not Josef. “The man who abducted Joanna Teale when she was a tiny child and turned her into his brainwashed wife, who abducted Matthew Faraday and would have killed him, who murdered the research student Kathy Ripon, who killed his own twin brother and who slept with the dead man’s wife, who killed Beth Kersey to save me, who burned down Hal Bradshaw’s house to avenge me, who tortured and killed the man who raped me to avenge me, who is stalking me and protecting me and trying to control my life. Who the world thinks dead. This is Dean.”

  Josef stood up. “He trap me, pretend to be my friend,” he said. “Tell me. I do anything.”

  “He’s been in my house, Josef.”

  “Your house? Here? When?”

  “I’ve had a feeling that someone’s been here, changing things around a bit. He wants me to know, or suspect.”

  “But how?”

  “He could have taken my keys from your jacket and got spares cut.” Josef didn’t reply. “He could, couldn’t he?”

  “This fucking bad, Frieda.”

  “Yes.”

  “You must not be here.”

  “I’m not going to run away again. But I have to change every lock in the house. Do you know a good locksmith who would come out at once, even though it’s late?”

  “Yes. My friend Dritan from Poland. He has shop on Mare Street but I know him. He come if I ask.”

  At the mention of Mare Street, Frieda felt a flicker of memory, but she pushed it away for later.

  “Good. And send me that photograph, please. I’ll talk to Karlsson about what we should do.”

  “We get him,” said Josef. He held up the vodka bottle in a kind of pledge, then drank.

  “You think so?” Frieda took a sip of her whisky and waited for its burn to fade. She felt oddly disconnected, as if all of this was happening at a distance. Hadn’t she known all along it was Dean, stealing into her house, putting his fingers on all of her possessions, drinking from her mugs and creeping upstairs to riffle through her drawings that she let no one see, to look at her bed, touch her sheets, run his hands through her clothes? She shuddered. How could you protect yourself against someone who wasn’t really there, or catch someone if he was already a ghost?

  Dritan arrived with two huge canvas bags. He and Josef shook hands and clapped each other on the back before he turned to Frieda. He was small and dark, with thin fingers, weathered skin and eyes that were almost black.

  “Thank you for coming out so late,” said Frieda.

  He shrugged. “Josef asked me. I mean, told me.”

  “I want every lock changed, on the windows as well as the doors.”

  “How secure do you want them to be?”

  “What do you recommend?”

  “The double-format Avocet ABS cylinder, front and back.”

  “Is that good?”

  “It prevents the snap and bump key attack.”

  “And that’s important?”

  “What people don’t understand is that most cylinders have sacrificial leads that can be snapped, but the Avocet is designed to snap twice and—”

  “I’ll take them.”

  “How many keys?”

  “Two.” One for her; one to leave with Karlsson, she thought. No one else must have one.

  “Rods for windows and fixing points top and bottom. Are you happy with that?”

  “Look, I don’t know about locks. Just make this house as secure as possible. I should have done it before.”

  “It won’t be cheap.”

  “But will it be quick?”

  “Josef will help me. We will be done by midnight.”

  Frieda made them both tea, then called Karlsson but got his voicemail. She left no message. She went up to her bedroom and stood for a while, looking around her. What had he touched? What had he done in here? This house was her safe place, her bolthole against the world, where she came to be alone, and Dean Reeve had been here. She went to the bed, pulled off the duvet, the sheets and pillowcases and threw them into the corner of the room. She could put on clean sheets, but she didn’t want to use the duvet or the pillows. They were contaminated. She took the sleeping bag Chloë used sometimes from the top of her cupboard and unrolled it, laying it on the bare mattress. She looked at all of her clothes hanging from the rail. He knew what she owned, what she wore. She went into the kitchen and collected a roll of garbage bags, returning to the bedroom with them. She pulled all the clothes off their hangers and stacked them on top of the bed linen, not looking at any of them. She opened the top drawer of her chest and removed all her underwear, then her T-shirts from the second drawer, then her jerseys. She swept every bottle or tub of lotion into a bag. Her perfume. Her scarves. She took the dressing-gown from the back of the door and threw that away as well, and her slippers. She took the towels from the bathroom, her toothbrush, her flannel.

  In the kitchen, paying no attention to a bewildered Dritan and Josef, she took all the food from the fridge and tipped it into the bin. She poured the milk down the sink. She put every mug and cup and glass into the dishwasher and turned it on. She went up to her garret. Tomorrow she’d have to get her laptop looked at to make sure he hadn’t hacked into it. She picked up her sketchpad and leafed through it. Had he seen these? She remembered her drawing of the Hardy Tree, whose roots grew among a huddle of gravestones in St. Pancras chur
chyard. A few days ago she’d found it was no longer there. Dean had taken it. At last she felt anger burn through her. He might have found her out, but she was going to find him.

  While they were still hard at work and the house vibrated with the noise of drills and hammers—though the midnight deadline had gone—Frieda walked through the rain to the twenty-four-hour supermarket in Holborn and bought underwear, a toothbrush and toothpaste, towels, a pair of jogging trousers and a long-sleeved running top from the limited sportswear section. That would have to do until tomorrow. She also bought milk, bread, butter and a jar of marmalade; a large bottle of whisky. She saw only two other people in the shop, drifting up and down the aisles. Their footsteps echoed.

  When she got back, she took a tumbler from the dishwasher, opened the whisky and poured in a couple of inches, adding a small amount of water. She took it into her living room, but couldn’t make herself sit down. Energy coursed through her. The cat was lying asleep in the armchair. She drank the whisky slowly, peat and disinfectant, but still felt icily clear.

  “Done,” said Josef in the doorway.

  “Thank you both very much. How much do I owe you?”

  “I’ll send the bill,” said Dritan. “Special discount for Josef’s friend.”

  “And it’s secure?”

  “They are good locks, the best.”

  “So nobody can get in?”

  “If someone really wants to get in, nothing’s going to stop them. These locks will slow them down. That’s the best I can promise.”

  “I see.”

  “Tomorrow I can organize alarms for you, if you want. Cameras in every room.”

  “You think that would make a difference?”

  “It would make some difference. But you know yourself, alarms go off when they shouldn’t, especially when you have a cat, and the police often don’t respond anyway. It’s your choice. It depends on how worried you are.”

  “All are worried,” said Josef.

  “All I’m saying is that there’s good security and bad security, but no absolute security. Every lock can be broken, every house entered in the end.”

  “No alarms,” said Frieda. “No cameras.” She wasn’t going to give Dean any more power over her.

  THIRTY-ONE

  At half past seven the next morning, Frieda knocked at Karlsson’s door and waited, wondering if he was still in bed. But then she heard the tapping sound of his crutches, a crash as something fell to the floor, a curse. The door opened.

  “Frieda!”

  “Sorry it’s so early.”

  “No. It’s fine. Come in. Coffee?”

  “Please, if that’s OK.” She had been up all night scrubbing surfaces, scouring her bath and her fridge, washing china and cutlery.

  Karlsson made his way into the kitchen and she followed him. “Shall I make it?”

  “No. I’m getting used to doing everything propped up on these bloody things. I haven’t fallen over in ages.” He took in her jogging trousers and top. “You look unusually sporty. Have you run here?”

  “I threw away my clothes.”

  “A spring-clean. But without spring.” He gestured through the window to the sodden garden.

  “All of them.”

  “Why?”

  “And all my sheets and towels.”

  “Hang on a minute.” There was a roar from the coffee grinder. “There. What’s going on?”

  She watched him as he poured boiling water over the coffee, then heated some milk and poured it into a small jug. He did everything meticulously, taking a cloth to wipe up spilled drops on the surface. For some reason, this carefulness made her feel sad for him. He handed over her coffee, then lowered himself onto a chair, his leg stretched out.

  Frieda took her mobile from her pocket and pulled up the image Josef had sent her. She passed it to Karlsson, who stared at it without expression, his mouth a hard line.

  “Is this who I think it is?” he said at last.

  “It’s Dean, yes.”

  He laid the phone faceup on the table between them. “You’re absolutely sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not his brother?”

  “It’s Dean.”

  “When was it taken?”

  “Eight or nine months ago.”

  “How did you get this?”

  “He worked with Josef last summer on that house in Belsize Park. He went under the name of Marty. He was Josef’s friend, his mate. He and Josef looked after Ethan when Sasha had her collapse.”

  “I was there,” said Karlsson, very softly, under his breath.

  “In the house?”

  “In the garden. I was there. I think I saw him.”

  “It’s not your fault.” The words she had used to Josef.

  Karlsson laid his hand over the phone, then lifted it up again, as though the image would have disappeared, like a magic trick.

  “Josef had a set of my keys with him. He must have taken them and got them cut.”

  “He has your keys?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I got a locksmith round last night and had all the locks changed. But he did. I knew someone had been in my house, rearranging things. He wants me to know.”

  “Right,” said Karlsson. “Right.”

  “That smile. It’s for me. He’s smiling for me.”

  “We’ve got to do something.”

  “What?” said Frieda. “He’s officially dead. Nobody will believe me. They’ll just think it’s another symptom of my paranoia.” She stopped abruptly. “You do, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Good. But who can I turn to? Who can stop this?”

  Karlsson closed his eyes for a moment. “If I didn’t have this bloody cast on,” he said at last. “We know he’s in London, anyway.”

  “Or has been.”

  “You have to move out of your house, Frieda.”

  “You think he wouldn’t find me? I’m as safe there as anywhere. And, anyway, I’m done with all of that. I’m not going on the run again.”

  “We’ve got to get the case reopened.”

  “You think Crawford’s going to allow that?”

  “He’ll have to. And you should tell Levin about it.”

  “I thought of that.”

  “He’s got the kind of power I don’t. He can make things happen.”

  Levin was sitting in his shirtsleeves and braces at a desk piled with files. There was a fire in the small grate, a carafe of red wine on the mantelpiece. He managed, thought Frieda, to turn everywhere into a gentlemen’s club, and he was apparently too polite to notice she was wearing running clothes and walking boots.

  “I want your help.”

  “That wasn’t the agreement.”

  “This isn’t about the Dochertys.”

  “Tell me.”

  Frieda told him. The expression on his face was inscrutable. Every so often he took off his glasses and turned them over in his hands, then replaced them, delicately tapping them back onto his nose. She showed him the photograph of Dean.

  “Wait here a moment,” he said.

  He went out of the room, and when he returned, it was with Keegan. He looked exhausted.

  “Frieda has a problem,” said Levin. “Tell him, Frieda.”

  She did. Keegan glowered at her throughout, pacing about the room. One day, she thought, he would have a heart attack out of pent-up anger, or perhaps it was only with her that he was so angry. But when she finished, he didn’t argue with her. He stared intently at the photograph on her phone and then at the multiple images of Dean Reeve that Levin pulled up on his computer.

  “Don’t ask me if I’m sure,” said Frieda.

  “I can tell you’re sure. That doesn’t mean you’re right, of course.”

  “I am.”

  “I’ve a friend.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “He used to be in the Met with me. He finds people.”

  “People like Dean?”

  “Anyon
e. He’s a bit like you.”

  “I don’t know what you mean by that.”

  “Like a dog with a bone.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I can ask him to take a look.”

  “Thank you.”

  Keegan grunted and gave a dismissive shrug.

  “I mean it. Thank you. After all our differences.”

  “We can still have those.”

  Frieda went to a department store and bought a pair of black trousers, three shirts, a thin gray jersey and some underwear. There was a thought that she had stowed away and now she pulled it out. Mare Street. What seemed like a long time ago, Yvette had told her that, according to Malik Gordon, Ben Sedge’s sidekick on the Docherty case, one of the police officers, had been so distressed by the murders that she had left the Met and opened a florist’s on Mare Street.

  Frieda took a bus there, getting off at Dalston Lane and walking south along the canal. A few years ago, it had been a run-down area; now it was full of young men with beards and round glasses, young women in bright clothes, bars selling vegan food. After five minutes, she came to a flower shop, Jane’s Blooms, and walked into the cool, damp green of its interior. There were buckets of flowers everywhere, bright and perfumed. The bell jingled as she closed the door and a young woman looked up from the counter, where she was counting long-stemmed roses.

  “Can I help?”

  “Is this the only florist on Mare Street?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “I’m looking for the woman who started it.” She forced her memory back to the police reports she had read, sitting in the small office in Levin’s house. It seemed like years ago. “Jane Farthing. Is she here?”

  “Yes, she’s doing flowers for a funeral. Is she expecting you?”

  “No. But I won’t take long.”

  Jane Farthing came out from the back, wiping her hands on a large apron. She had curly brown hair, freckles on the bridge of her nose and a professionally friendly smile. “Yes?”

  “My name is Frieda Klein. I was hoping to talk to you about something that happened a long time ago, when you were a police officer.” She saw the color spread over Jane Farthing’s face and down her smooth neck. “It’s all right. There’s nothing at all to be alarmed about. I’m looking into the Docherty case again and someone mentioned that you’d been involved.”