by Nicci French
Frieda stood quite still. She felt as though someone had hit her hard in the stomach. ‘What?’ Her voice sounded calm enough.
‘Dr Saul Klein. The Saul Klein. The one the hospital wing is named after. He’s your grandfather.’
‘And?’
‘But that’s just fantastic. He’s a legend, a pioneer. Why didn’t you say?’
‘Why would I?’
‘Did you know him?’
‘No.’
‘It must be special, though.’
‘Must it?’ Frieda felt very cold, as if she was standing in an icy shadow.
‘So it runs in your family?’
Jack was clearly uneasy now. This wasn’t going the way he had expected.
‘What does?’ she asked sharply, and he looked disconcerted.
‘Being a doctor.’
‘My father wasn’t a doctor.’
‘What was he?’
‘You’ll be late, Jack.’
‘What for? I’m not expected anywhere.’
‘Then I’ll be late.’
‘Oh. Right. I’ll be on my way, then.’ He hovered at the open door, his scarf flapping and his face turning blotchy in the raw air.
‘Goodbye.’
After he had gone, Frieda returned to her chair by the fire and sat for several minutes, staring blindly into its leaping flames. Then she picked up the newspaper and word by word, page by page, read the story. Then she crumpled it into small balls and fed it into the fire.
‘How often do you see your sister?’ Frieda asked.
She had met Rose Teale first a year and a bit ago, when Rose still didn’t know if she even had a sister any more. Then, she had been an anxious and guilty young woman, still haunted by the little girl she had lost sight of on the way home from school and never seen again. She had felt responsible, not just for the tiny Joanna, disappearing into thin air, but also for her parents and their agony. Her mother had remarried and had two more children, but her father had started drinking, sitting in his poky, grimy flat, surrounded by pictures of his lost daughter, addled with whisky and sorrow.
She had seen her a few times since her sister had been returned, and if anything Rose Teale was more tormented now than she had been before. Joanna, who had been a tiny, knock-kneed, vulnerable, gap-toothed child when she was taken, had come back unrecognizable. Their reunion had been a failure, and Joanna had a robust, jeering contempt for Rose, for her parents, for the world they represented.
‘Not very often,’ said Rose. ‘She’s not keen to see me. I can understand that,’ she added hastily, ‘given everything she’s been through.’
‘Do you want to see her?’
Rose looked at her, biting her lower lip. ‘Honestly? Not really. I dread it. But I feel I should.’
‘Because she’s your sister?’
‘Because she’s my sister. Because of everything she’s gone through. Because …’ She stopped.
‘You still think it was your fault?’
‘Yes, although I know everything you’re going to say.’
‘Then I won’t say it. Have you read her book?’
Rose shook her head. ‘I will, some time,’ she said. ‘I feel I should know what she has to say.’
‘Do you have a copy?’
‘They sent me an early copy. There was a note with it saying she wanted me to see it.’
‘Can I have a look?’
Rose appeared nervous. ‘I know from the paper that she’s not very nice about you. I’m sorry.’
‘It’s OK,’ said Frieda. ‘That’s not why I want to see it.’
The cover of An Innocent in Hell showed a silhouette of a tiny girl with her arms raised in appeal. In the background, there was a lurid red pattern, suspiciously like flames. Frieda opened it. Under the dedication (‘To all of you who have suffered, without hope of rescue’) was a scrawled message: ‘To my sister Rose: with forgiveness and understanding, from your little sister Jo-Jo.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Frieda.
‘It’s all right,’ said Rose. ‘She means well.’
‘You think so?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Can I borrow it?’
‘Really? You’re going to read it?’
‘Yes. I’ll bring it back as soon as I have.’
‘I’m in no hurry.’
‘Good. She’s lucky to have you.’
Frieda didn’t want to read the book in her house. She needed to be somewhere neutral. She thought of taking it to Number 9, but even that felt too close to home. In the end she did what she had done a few times before: she walked to Great Portland Street and got on the Circle Line, heading east. She knew that to do the entire loop would take about fifty minutes, maybe an hour. It was early on Sunday evening and the train was almost empty. There was a young woman dressed in a pink tutu and a tartan jersey, who got off at King’s Cross, and an elderly man who read the Bible, marking passages with a pencil, and stayed on until Liverpool Street. After that, she was alone in her carriage until she reached Monument, when a family got on for a couple of stops. Frieda made notes as she read An Innocent in Hell, looking up occasionally as they reached a station to make sure she didn’t miss her stop. The train nosed its way under the City – deserted at the weekend, the streets empty and the tall buildings lit up but abandoned – then Westminster and St James’s Park, the rich enclaves of Kensington, and finally she was heading back towards her stop. She closed the book and emerged into the windy night, deep in thought.
Twenty-six
‘He made me feel attended to.’ The woman made a self-deprecating grimace. Although she had been visiting her sister and her family in the south of France so recently, her thin face was pale and weary. ‘Less alone, I suppose you could say. He was a special kind of person.’
It was half past seven on Monday morning, and Frieda was sitting in Janet Ferris’s kitchen with a cup of tea in front of her. Outside, it was raining and the sky was a leaden grey. Janet Ferris was the practice manager of a nearby GP surgery and had agreed to meet Frieda before work, although she had said she didn’t think there was anything else to add to what she had already told Yvette Long about Robert Poole. He had just been a neighbour, she said, a very nice, very kind neighbour, whom she would miss.
The kitchen was small and had old-fashioned floral wallpaper, red tiles and mismatched chairs round a brightly polished wooden table. Frieda saw that everything was scrupulously clean. There were herbs on the windowsill and a bowl of oranges on the work surface, next to a blue pot of hyacinths whose fragrance filled the room. A charcoal drawing hung on the wall beside the small white-painted dresser. A page cut out from a magazine was stuck to the fridge, with a list of sustainable fish on it. A small transparent bird-box filled with seeds was attached to the outside of the large window. Frieda had the sense of a self-sufficient, frugal, virtuous life, where everything was in its place. She also took in Janet Ferris’s ringless hands, her sad eyes, the worry lines on her face, which was bare of makeup, the sensible clothes that hung off her slim frame, camouflaging her. She had a voice that was soft, low and very pleasant to listen to.
Frieda nodded to the small tortoiseshell cat curled up on a wicker chair under the window. ‘Is that his cat?’
‘Yes. I thought it was all right for me to keep him. I don’t think there was anybody else to look after him.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘I don’t even know if he had one. Bob used to call him the Mog. So that’s what I call him now: Moggie. It didn’t seem right to change it.’
‘How long had Robert Poole lived here?’
‘Mr Michkin would know exactly. About nine months, I think.’
‘How did you two meet?’
A faint smile twitched her lips. ‘We nodded at each other a couple of times, coming in and out of the house. And then one Sunday morning – it must have been a couple of weeks after he moved in – he turned up with a great big bowl of early summer strawberries. He said someone
had given them to him but he couldn’t eat them all, and would I like some?’
‘That was nice.’
‘Yes. I accepted, and then he said that I could only have them on one condition: that I invited him in to share them. It became a bit of a joke between us. Every so often he would turn up with something – cherries, a tin of biscuits, a big wedge of cheese – and say I had to help him eat it. The last time, it was mince pies.’
‘So he was a friend, not just a neighbour?’
Bright spots appeared on Janet Ferris’s cheeks. ‘I wouldn’t say that. It was just occasionally. But it was nice.’
‘What did you talk about?’ Frieda was trying to keep her voice neutral. She sensed that Janet Ferris wanted to talk to someone, let out the shy and dammed-up feelings inside her, but would only do so if she didn’t feel pressed.
‘I don’t know, really. Odd things.’ Frieda waited. ‘I used to tell him what I was reading. I read a lot. Victorian novels mostly. Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens and Mrs Gaskell.’
‘Did he read a lot too?’
‘I’m not sure. I got the impression he did – but I can’t remember him talking about specific books. I think I used to talk more than him. Which is odd, because I’m not much of a talker.’
‘So, books.’
Janet Ferris looked down at her hands, which were thin, with blue veins and smooth, pearly nails. ‘He was easy to say things to,’ she said, in a voice that Frieda had to strain to hear. ‘I once told him I wished I’d had children. That it was my big regret in life. It was when he brought the mince pies over. Just before Christmas. Christmas is a hard time. I have lots of friends and I’m not alone on the day, but it’s not the same as for people with families. I told him I’d always wanted children, and once I was with a man and thought we’d have a family together. But it didn’t work out – and then it was somehow too late. You know how it is – time slips by. You can’t say when you’ve crossed the line into becoming a childless woman, but one day you realize that’s what you are.’ She looked at Frieda. ‘Do you have children?’
‘No. What did he say, when you told him this?’
‘He didn’t try to tell me it didn’t matter, which is what most people do. He talked about parallel lives. That we’re accompanied by other selves, people we might have been, and how painful that can be.’
Frieda felt as though something was shifting in her mind, loosening. She had a sense of the dead man, sitting at this table, listening to a lonely middle-aged woman talk of her regrets. ‘Did you feel he was also talking about himself?’ she asked.
‘Maybe. I should have asked him. I can’t believe he’s dead, someone like him. It hasn’t sunk in – though sometimes I think about the empty floor above me, the space he used to be in. It doesn’t seem real, though.’
‘He understood loneliness. Do you think he was lonely?’
‘Perhaps. Or an outsider.’
‘Do you know where he was at Christmas?’
‘I was in Brighton, with my cousin’s family. I think he said he was going away for a day or so – but I don’t know. He was here when I got back.’
‘Did you ever meet his friends?’
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘I never saw anyone else go to his flat at all. He went out quite a lot. He was often away for days at a time.’
‘So you don’t know if he had family, close relationships, love affairs?’
‘No. He never said and I didn’t ask. We didn’t have that kind of relationship.’
‘And you don’t know if he was straight or gay?’
‘Oh, I’m sure he liked women. He was …’ She frowned. ‘I’m sure he liked women,’ she repeated.
‘Why?’
Janet Ferris blushed. ‘Just the way he was.’ She lifted her empty mug to hide her confusion. ‘He was a bit of a flirt – not in a crass way, just to make you feel special.’
‘Handsome?’
‘Not obviously. But he grew on you.’
She looked away and Frieda studied her: a clever, kind and lonely woman who’d been a bit in love with Robert Poole. And Robert Poole had drawn her out, cheered her up, listened to her, made her feel – what was her expression? – attended to.
‘Do you know where he was before he lived here?’
‘I’ve no idea. You’ve made me realize how little I knew about him. I was selfish.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Do you know what?’ She stopped, flushing again.
‘What?’
‘You remind me of him. The way I can say things to you.’
‘Is that what he was like?’
‘Yes. And now he’s gone.’
Once Janet Ferris had left for work, Frieda had twenty minutes or so before she needed to leave herself, to be in time for her first patient of the week. And so she went upstairs to Robert Poole’s first-floor flat. The tape had been removed from the door and there was no sign that any police officers had been there at all. But Yvette Long had told her, very sternly and as if Frieda had already disobeyed her, not to touch or disturb anything so she simply walked very slowly and quietly from room to room. In the small hall, one coat and one thick jacket hung from a hook and there was a furled black umbrella in the corner. In the living room, there was a green corduroy sofa and matching armchair, a low coffee-table, a beige rug, a medium-sized television, a small chest of drawers, in which, Frieda knew from reading the report, the notebook had been found, and an empty newspaper rack. There were no photographs, no knick-knacks or mess. There were a few pictures on the walls. They looked to Frieda like pictures the landlord had bought as a job lot – a photo of the Eiffel Tower at night, a bland and murky Madonna and Child, a pink sun rising or setting over the sea, and Monet’s poppy fields. Only one painting, of two bright and almost abstract orange fish, looked as though it might have been Robert Poole’s individual choice, not just a tired cliché occupying a bit of wall space. The books on the set of shelves, which were ranged in order of size, not subject, were a bit more revealing: three large illustrated volumes on town gardens, a thick paperback that looked like a builder’s manual, North and South by Mrs Gaskell, Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens, several books about getting fit, a guide to forensic medicine. Frieda stood for several minutes in front of them, frowning.
Then she moved to the kitchen. There was a teapot and a cafetière on the work surface; four identical brown mugs hanging from hooks; six matching tumblers and six matching glasses on the shelf; six white plates, six white bowls, oven gloves and a tea towel by the side of the hob. She took the tea-towel and used it to open the store-cupboard. One bag of flour, one of sugar, a packet of muesli and another of cornflakes, a box of mince pies, a jar of instant coffee, English breakfast tea, quick-boil rice. There was nothing in the fridge. It must have been cleared out once the police had finished their search and taken away anything they considered evidence.
In the bedroom, there was a small double bed, neatly made up with a blue duvet and pillowcase, and a single chair near the window. There were cloth slippers under the chair, a striped dressing-gown hanging from the door, an open ironing board with the iron, its cord coiled around it, on top. A lamp stood on the bedside table, plus a packet of paracetamol and a book with a garish cover that turned out to be short stories about the Wild West. When Frieda, using her sleeve to cover her hand, pulled open the wardrobe, the long mirror inside it swung past her and she was momentarily startled by her own reflection. There were rows of ironed shirts, plain and patterned, tailored and loose, several pairs of trousers, two jackets, one in sober tweed, the other a macho leather one with studs. On the wardrobe floor were sturdy leather boots, trainers, brogues. Frieda pursed her lips, then lifted the piles of T-shirts and jerseys that were stacked on the wardrobe’s interior shelves.
‘Who are you?’ she said out loud, shutting the door and going into the bathroom, which was as clean and bare as if it were in a motel: a bath, a washbasin, a toilet, a grey towel, a small round mirror, sha
ving foam, a razor blade, dental floss, a flannel, nail clippers …
Frieda returned to the living room and sat in the armchair. She thought about her own little house on the cobblestoned mews. She was a private person: there were no photographs on display, letters left out or postcards pinned to a notice board, yet every room was filled with objects that bore witness to her life. The chess table at which she used to sit with her father, long ago in a different world. The cobalt blue bowl from Venice. The painting above the mantelpiece of a tree in spring. Her grandmother’s old silk dressing-gown, which Frieda never wore but hung in her wardrobe, its faded greens and reds shimmering. The mugs in her kitchen, each one different and picked up on her wanderings round London. The mobile of paper cranes Chloë had made for her. The piece of driftwood, the old maps of London, the battered pans, the necklace Sandy had given her when they were still together in the glory days it still hurt her to remember, the books of photographs … And then, of course, in her little study in the garret, all the drawings she had done, in soft pencil on thick paper, doodles and more finished pieces that were like a hidden diary of her days. But here, in Robert Poole’s flat, there was almost nothing. It wasn’t just that there were no clues: apart from the few books, it was a blank, a void, a space that was expressionless and lifeless. Perhaps it was because the man who used to live here was dead so the flat, too, had lost its animating spirit – but Frieda didn’t think so. She felt depressed and disturbed just sitting in the room.
Who was Robert Poole? Rob, Robbie, Bob, Bertie: everyone called him by a different name. His clothes were in different styles – a leather jacket, a tweed one; brogues and boots; a gentleman’s fitted shirts and casual sweatshirts. Whenever anyone talked of him, they were talking of themselves – the selves he had recognized in them and drawn out of them. He was a listener, an attender, a Good Samaritan. He had taken old Mary Orton’s money but he had listened to her stories; to Janet Ferris he had shown neighbourly kindness, to Jasmine Shreeve respectful attention. People liked him yet he seemed to have no friends; people described him as charming and handsome, yet he seemed to have no relationships. And after he had been murdered and left in a grotty alley, he had been collected by Michelle Doyce and sat in her bedsit in Deptford for days, a naked disintegrating corpse, and no one had noticed he was missing.
