by Nicci French
‘They both said they’d been down in the summer.’
‘Yes. That would be right.’
‘So, not for eight months or so.’ It felt cruel to press her.
Mary Orton lifted her eyes. ‘Eight months,’ she said softly.
‘Did you tell either of them about Robert Poole helping you with the house?’
‘I didn’t like to. I didn’t want them to feel guilty.’
‘Because you’d already told them about the leak?’
‘I don’t like to make a fuss. They said it was probably nothing and, anyway, it would be all right when the spring came.’
‘I see.’
‘Your friend Josef,’ said Mary Orton, visibly brightening. ‘He’s done a marvellous job with the roof and the boiler.’
‘I’m glad he could help you.’
‘Such a nice young man. He tells me stories about his country and I tell him about what London used to be like. He is very fond of my lemon drizzle cake. And he said he would make me a honey and poppy-seed loaf that he used to eat as a boy, although he’ll probably forget.’
‘I’m sure he won’t,’ said Frieda.
‘People are so busy nowadays. But when you’re old and live alone, time goes so fast and yet at the same time very slowly. It’s odd, isn’t it?’
‘It is odd.’
‘Nobody tells you, when you’re young, what it will be like.’
‘What is it like?’
‘You become like a ghost in your own life.’
Just before they left, Karlsson stopped in front of the wooden urn that contained the ashes of Mary Orton’s husband. He touched it very gently with his forefinger, following the whorls in the grain. ‘This is lovely and very unusual. Who made it for you?’
She came over to where he stood, looking tiny beside him. ‘It was made from an elm tree that fell over in our garden years ago. It felt right for Leonard’s remains to be in something made from a tree he used to love.’
‘Mm.’ Karlsson nodded encouragingly. ‘Can you remember the name of the people who made it?’
She frowned, thinking, then said: ‘A company called Living Wood. I think. Though I could check. If I’ve kept the papers. Why?’
‘It caught my eye. It’s beautiful.’
She beamed at him. Frieda saw the way he bent towards the old woman respectfully and turned away from them, feeling strangely moved.
‘Why did you want to know who’d made that little urn?’ Frieda asked, once they were back in the car.
‘Mrs Orton, Jasmine Shreeve and Aisling Wyatt all have beautiful things made from wood in their house. It might be a connection.’
‘Oh! Yes, I see.’
‘Only might.’
‘That was perceptive.’
‘Why, thank you, Dr Klein.’
‘Why have you taken up smoking?’
He glanced round sharply. ‘Who says I have?’
‘Haven’t you?’
‘Can you smell it on me?’
‘No. Just extra strong mints.’
‘I don’t want my children to know,’ he said, and was about to add something when he checked himself.
‘You can say it, you know.’
‘No. I don’t think I can.’ He turned on the windscreen wipers and the headlights. ‘God, don’t you hate February?’
Thirty-two
Living Wood was based in a small industrial unit in Dalston, occupying the bottom floor of a building that also housed an animal charity, a company making hats and a manufacturer of signs. Inside there was a different world. Wooden planks leaned against every inch of the walls. In the middle of the room there were large machines, saws and planes, one of which was being run by a young man in a white vest, stooped over his work with sweat on his bare shoulders. The rich smell of resin hung in the air. Yvette had to shout to make herself heard. The man turned off the machine and stood up, wiping the back of his hand across his forehead.
She held up her badge. ‘Are you in charge of this company?’
‘That’s my dad. He’s away. You can ask me.’
The man looked at Munster, who was examining a machine, perhaps a vice, with a huge heavy blade.
‘Careful,’ said the man. ‘That’ll have your arm off if you press the wrong button.’
‘We have a list of names,’ said Yvette. ‘I want to ask you if they mean anything to you.’
‘All right.’
She handed him the typed list. He glanced at it. ‘They’re customers,’ he said. ‘A couple of them I don’t recognize. I’d have to check on the computer but they might be as well.’ He went over to a small space, partitioned off from the rest of the room, where there was a filing cabinet and a computer. He sat at it, tapped at the keys, opened a file of names and scrolled down it.
‘All except the last,’ he said. ‘Sally Lea. I don’t know her and she’s not on our computer. We’ve made things for the others, some of them more than once. The Coles, for instance, we made them a bed out of an old ash tree that had blown down. Beautiful bit of wood. It took months.’
‘So you’re saying they all bought things you made.’
‘We’re not a shop, as you can see. People bring us wood from their garden and we turn it into objects. Usually bowls and chopping boards – but anything actually. Mrs Orton – we made her an urn for her husband’s ashes.’
‘How do your customers find you?’
‘We’ve got ads in a couple of magazines. Magazines for people who’re doing up their homes.’
‘Was someone called Robert Poole a customer?’ said Yvette.
‘Robbie?’ He looked at them curiously. ‘No. He wasn’t a customer. He worked here.’
‘Did he? When?’
He thought for a moment. ‘Beginning of last year, just for a few months.’ Another man pushed open the door of the workroom with his shoulder and came in carrying two cardboard cups of coffee. ‘Darren, these two are detectives. They’re asking about Robbie Poole.’
‘Why did he leave?’ asked Yvette.
The two men exchanged looks.
‘Is there a problem?’ said Darren. ‘We don’t want to cause any trouble.’
‘There’s been a crime.’
‘It ended badly,’ said the young man. ‘Some money went missing. I felt really rotten about it.’
‘You thought it was him?’
‘We thought it might have been. It seemed the only explanation. We confronted him and he was in a real state about it. It was bad. For everyone.’
‘But he left.’
‘I gave him a couple of weeks’ wages to tide him over. Is he OK?’
‘He’s dead.’
‘What?’
‘He was murdered.’
‘Fuck.’
‘Fuck,’ repeated Darren, with awe. ‘Fucking fuck.’
‘We found these names in his flat.’
‘Jesus. Why?’
‘That’s what we’re trying to find out.’
‘Dead!’
‘You’ve been very helpful. We might be back in touch.’ Yvette smiled at him. ‘But I don’t think you should feel guilty about letting him go,’ she said.
Thirty-three
When Harry picked Frieda up on Friday evening, he didn’t tell her where they were going. She got into the back of the taxi beside him and he peered down at the screen of his phone. ‘I don’t even know myself yet,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Not knowing is part of the fun,’ he said. ‘It’s in Shoreditch. That’s all I can tell you.’
‘I don’t understand. What happens when we get to Shoreditch?’
Harry tapped the phone. ‘Leave it to this,’ he said. ‘It’ll tell us.’
‘All right,’ said Frieda. ‘I’ll trust it.’
‘I need to warn you about something,’ said Harry. ‘I want to begin by being completely honest.’
‘That’s always a bad sign,’ said Frieda.
‘No, really. I just want to tell you in good time th
at you need to beware of my sister. Tessa Welles lives part of her life as a law-abiding solicitor but she almost always has an ulterior motive.’
‘Why do I need to know that?’
‘She phoned me straight after she’d met you, telling me all about you. She told me that she wouldn’t rest until she’d brought us together.’
Frieda glanced out of the window before answering. ‘I just said I’d come for a meal,’ she said at last.
‘I know. I guess what I want you to tell me is if you’re involved with anyone else.’
‘No.’
‘That’s good. Why do I think there’s a but coming?’
‘I don’t know. I wasn’t going to add anything.’
‘Perhaps you’ve just broken up with someone.’
Frieda met his grey-blue gaze. How long ago was ‘just’? She had parted with Sandy the December before last. She suspected that Harry would think fourteen months was a long time; most people would. How do you measure absence? There had been minutes that had become hours, and hours that had been like a desert with no horizon. There had been days dull and deadened as lead, and whole weeks when she’d had to force herself forward, inch by inch, across their expanse. How do you know when your heart is ready once more? Perhaps, for someone like her, the heart was never ready and had to be forced open.
‘There was someone recently,’ she replied softly.
‘Fortunate someone.’
‘No. I don’t think so.’
‘But it’s over?’
‘He went away.’ Far away, she thought. America, another continent. ‘And I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘I can’t imagine how anyone –’ Harry broke off. ‘Sorry. We’ve only just met and I don’t want to blunder in.’
‘It’s OK.’
‘But I think you’re beautiful.’
‘Thank you. Now, have you worked out where we’re going or is it still a mystery to us both? We’re nearly at Shoreditch.’
‘Right. Of course. Hang on.’ He looked at his phone again, then opened the glass partition and leaned forward to speak to the driver. ‘Perhaps you’d better let us off at this junction.’
They got out in Shoreditch High Street.
‘I used to work in an office near here,’ said Harry. ‘And at the time I thought – in fact, I didn’t just think, I also said – that this was one part of London that would never come up. And about five years later I read an article in a US magazine saying that Hoxton was the trendiest place on the planet.’ He tapped the screen of his phone. ‘Good. Just follow me.’
They turned off the high street and Harry led Frieda through a maze of streets, occasionally referring to his phone. ‘Here we are,’ he said. ‘Allegedly.’
They were standing in front of the steel door of what looked like a warehouse. Harry pressed a buzzer. A voice spoke through a hum of static.
‘Harry Welles plus one,’ Harry said.
There was a click and he pushed open the door. They walked inside and up some metal stairs. At the top another door opened and a woman met them. She was large, with glorious blonde hair springing in curls and tendrils from her head, and was wrapped in a white apron with a single streak of dark red running down it. She led them inside to a small open-plan apartment, all bare boards and brick walls, exposed heating ducts and metal radiators. Large windows looked over the City of London. Of the five makeshift tables, four were already full. The woman led them to the empty one. They sat down.
‘I am Inga,’ said the woman. ‘And I am from Denmark. My husband Paul is from Morocco. We cook together. I will bring you wine and food and there is no choice. No allergies, no fads?’
Harry looked at Frieda. ‘Sorry, I forgot to ask.’
Frieda shook her head and Inga left. She returned with a jug of white wine and a plate of pickled fish and sour cream. When they were alone again, Frieda looked across at Harry. ‘What the hell is this?’
Harry examined his plate. ‘It looks more Danish than Moroccan,’ he said.
‘No, I mean this.’ She gestured around her. ‘The whole thing.’
‘Oh, this? It’s a pop-up restaurant. You can find them if you know where to look.’
‘Pop-up?’
‘They come and go, with strange people doing their own strange thing for little groups of people.’
‘Is it … well, is it legal?’ asked Frieda.
‘I hope so,’ said Harry. ‘Anyway, you should know. You’re the policewoman.’
‘Not exactly.’
He poured wine for both of them. ‘I’m fascinated,’ he said. ‘A psychotherapist who works for the police. How did that happen?’
‘It’s a long story.’
‘Good,’ said Harry. ‘I like long stories.’
So, while the table filled with little plates of smoked meats, yoghurts, savoury pastries, Frieda told him about Alan Dekker, about the search for Matthew, about Alan’s twin, Dean Reeve, and his wife Terry, who had turned out to be a girl who had gone missing twenty years previously. She edited the story. She didn’t tell him about Kathy Ripon’s death or about her new certainty that Dean was still out there somewhere.
Harry was a good listener. He leaned forward across the table, but not too much, and he nodded, giving small murmurs of attention, but didn’t interrupt. When she finished, he asked her about the case she was working on now with this character Robert Poole, and to her surprise, she found herself telling him. She described Michelle Doyce to him, and then, though she didn’t talk about his victims, she talked about Poole as well.
‘I can’t quite make him out,’ she said.
‘Well, you never met him, did you, and now he’s dead.’
‘I still want to make sense of him. Perhaps that’s the way to find out who killed him. On the one hand, he was obviously a conman. At the same time, he made people feel less lonely. He seemed to have had a knack for understanding their vulnerabilities and for comforting them.’
‘Isn’t that what conmen do? Worm their way in?’
‘Yes. Maybe. It’s just –’ She stopped.
‘Maybe?’
‘Maybe I feel he was a bit like me.’
Harry didn’t seem surprised. He nodded, rolled some bread into a pellet, then said, ‘You mean he was like a therapist to the people he conned.’
‘Yes.’
‘That must be a pretty uncomfortable thought.’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘Yet I feel sure you’re a terrific therapist.’
Frieda snorted. ‘Now you’re just trying to flatter me. You have no idea if I’m good at it or not.’
‘I’d trust you and I’d tell you things.’
‘Except you haven’t. You’ve just been asking me questions and listening to me.’
‘Ask me something.’ He held his hands out, palms upwards. ‘Anything.’
‘Anything?’
‘Absolutely anything.’
‘Do you do your job because you like money?’
‘Hmm. No, I do it because I understand money, and how it changes people.’
‘Go on.’
‘A good accountant or financial adviser is a kind of artist. You can turn people’s money into the most amazing creative possibilities, things they would never have dreamed of.’
‘So that they don’t pay tax on it?’ said Frieda.
Harry gave a humorous frown. ‘You’re not from the Inland Revenue, are you?’ he said. ‘It’s just about seeing possibilities. For me, it’s not really about the money at all. It’s like counters in a children’s game.’ He looked around the room. ‘It’s like this. You asked if it was legal. Strictly speaking, it probably isn’t. They’ve found a grey legal area somewhere between a restaurant and a private dinner party. And in that area they can develop their Moroccan-Danish creativity. What do you think?’
‘It’s London,’ said Frieda.
Harry looked puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Grey areas,’ she said. ‘The things that happen in
secret, good things, bad things, strange things.’
‘Which is this?’ Harry asked.
‘Good, I think,’ she said. ‘Until one day there’ll be a fire here or somewhere similar and it won’t seem such fun.’
Harry’s face fell. ‘There speaks the policewoman.’
‘I’m not a policewoman.’
‘Sorry, of course you’re not. Next question.’
‘Why are you still single?’
‘I don’t know.’
Frieda raised her eyebrows and waited.
‘I didn’t think I’d be single at thirty-eight. I’ll be forty soon – I always thought at forty I’d be settled down: wife, kids, house, you know. The life you’re supposed to have. Of course I’ve had relationships, some short and some long, and once upon a time I was engaged to a woman I thought I loved and who, I thought, loved me and then, well, it didn’t work out. It petered away and sometimes I can hardly remember what she looked like or felt like, as if it was a dream that happened to someone else. I think I’ve always felt …’ he frowned and took a gulp of wine ‘… always felt that I was waiting.’
‘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.
