Sunday Morning Coming Down: A Frieda Klein Novel (7)

by Nicci French

  ‘What Frieda says. Who cares what Frieda says?’ Burge rapped her desk angrily. ‘We just need to find him.’

  16

  Frieda saw two patients, then walked from her consulting room to Islington, where she went down on to the canal path. There were joggers, and children on scooters, dog-walkers, cyclists, all out in the warm weather. The ground was hard underfoot after weeks without rain; the leaves on the trees were limp. Soon it would be autumn. What a year it had been, starting with the darkness and pain of the Hannah Docherty case, straight into the horror of finding Bruce Stringer’s body under the floorboards. Then the last six months of a case going cold. And now, when it had felt like it was over, Chloë: Chloë left under the Hardy Tree. It was like a picture she couldn’t read.

  She remembered Myla’s parting question: people talked to Frieda, but whom did she talk to? Perhaps that was what she did: she carried the stories that people gave to her, holding them safely inside herself. So many stories, her little consulting room was full of them; her brain, her body, felt heavy with them. Self-deluding ones, self-protective ones, and also ones that were raw and terrible. But what about her story? Whom did she give that to? She’d had therapy herself, of course, but even then had been very aware of choosing what to say and what to keep secret. Reuben had been her therapist many years ago. She had trusted and admired him – but she hadn’t told him everything. When people got too close, she pushed them away. She talked to her patients about the power of speaking, of making words and narratives, but she kept silent, guarded her secret self. No one was having that.

  A small girl on a tricycle wove across her path. Frieda lifted her gaze and saw she was near the park: it was time to see whether Chloë’s new friend was as nice as her niece seemed to think. She realized that she wanted it to be him. She bit her lip so hard she tasted blood: she wanted Chloë to have been abducted by a creep whom she thought she liked, injected with sedatives, kept for three nights for reasons she could hardly bear to think about. She wanted that, because otherwise it had been Dean.

  Klaus laughed a lot. He had laughed, nervously, when Frieda said on the phone that she was Chloë’s aunt and needed to talk to him. He laughed when, on meeting at the entrance to Victoria Park, he trod in dog shit and had to spend the next several minutes trying to wipe it off on the bleached grass. And he gave a short, embarrassed laugh when Frieda asked him when he’d last seen Chloë.

  ‘Perhaps you’ve got the wrong idea.’ His English, though heavily accented, was impeccable. ‘Chloë and I met only a week ago. I’m really not sure why you want to talk to me. Your call was a surprise.’

  Frieda couldn’t work out if he was sweet, irritating or even sinister. She glared at him. ‘You haven’t answered my question.’

  Klaus cast her a baffled look, then shrugged. ‘I last saw Chloë the night I met her, last Tuesday.’

  ‘You haven’t seen her since then?’

  ‘No. I have met her once only. Which explains my surprise at your call.’

  ‘Have you spoken to her?’

  ‘Yes. A few times. I would like to see her again.’ They passed a pond where a few ducks bobbed. ‘Excuse me, I am not a rude person, but I would like to know why you’re asking me these questions before I answer any more. Chloë is an adult. She doesn’t need protecting.’

  ‘Where were you on Friday night?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Chloë told me you had arranged to meet her.’

  ‘No. We had said perhaps we would meet. That is not the same.’ He was no longer laughing. ‘Please, what is this?’

  ‘Did you see her?’

  ‘Why are you asking?’

  ‘Something happened to Chloë.’

  He stopped. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Someone slipped a drug into her drink.’ She stared hard at him as she spoke. ‘Then they took her somewhere, we don’t know where, and they kept her there for the weekend.’

  ‘Oh, no.’

  ‘So you will understand why I am asking you if you met Chloë on Friday night.’

  ‘You can’t think that I – that it was me …’

  ‘And if you didn’t meet her, where you were instead.’

  ‘You think I might have done this?’

  ‘And where were you on the weekend?’

  ‘This is nothing to do with me.’

  ‘You haven’t asked.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘If she was sexually abused.’

  ‘If she was – oh. No. I mean, was she?’

  ‘Did you meet her?’

  ‘I texted her to say I couldn’t make it. My friend came from Berlin. I was with him. Check on her phone.’

  ‘The SIM card was removed.’

  ‘That explains it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why I haven’t been able to get hold of her. I wanted her to come and join us on Sunday, before he flew back.’

  ‘Can you give me your friend’s name and number?’

  Klaus gazed at her, colour rising in his face, a slow, deep flush. ‘You want to check my story?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You don’t believe me?’

  ‘I want to check.’

  He nodded. ‘His name is Gustav Brenner and I will give you his mobile.’ He took his own phone out of the pocket of his jeans and scrolled down before holding it out to her to copy. ‘Satisfied?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I met Chloë once. I liked her. She was fun. That’s all.’

  ‘I’ll call Gustav.’

  Chloë was up and dressed, in denim shorts and an oversized shirt. Her face was a healthier colour and her hair was still damp from the shower.

  ‘Jack’s coming round in a few minutes,’ she said.

  ‘I’m glad you’re feeling better.’

  ‘I am. He was being very sweet on the phone. He said he’d bring lots of different kinds of cheese for me to try.’ She gave a small laugh. ‘It’s his way of comforting me.’

  When Jack Dargan had been supervised by Frieda, an awkward and romantic young man, he had, to Frieda’s alarm, become involved with Chloë. But that relationship was over, and he was no longer sure he wanted to be a psychotherapist. Instead, he had started working on an artisanal cheese stall on the South Bank and had become something of a cheese zealot, offering soft wedges wrapped in waxed paper as gifts wherever he went. He seemed, thought Frieda, happier than she’d ever known him. ‘There are worse comforts,’ she said.

  ‘He’s growing a beard.’

  ‘Everyone has beards now.’

  ‘It’s a completely different colour from his hair. He looks like a pirate. Not necessarily in a good way.’ She ran her fingers through her damp hair. ‘Frieda, there is something I think I remember.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A sound. Not just of the car.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Planes.’

  Frieda tried to hide her disappointment. ‘It’s a good sign that you’re beginning to remember. Maybe more will come back.’

  ‘No. They were close by. I mean, really, really close. Like they were almost on top of me.’

  Frieda thought for a moment. ‘What sort of plane?’ she said.

  ‘How should I know? I don’t know anything about planes.’

  ‘I mean, was it a big plane? Was it a little plane? I’m trying to think whether you were near a flying club or an airport.’

  Chloë considered for a moment. ‘It wasn’t one of those little two-seaters. They sound like toy planes. It had a heavier sound.’

  ‘Was it really big, like a 747?’

  ‘It was big,’ said Chloë, a bit doubtfully. ‘But not big-big. I once went to the house of a friend of a friend in Southall and it was right under the Heathrow flight path. There were giant jets going over the roof every minute and the ground shook and there was this deep roaring engine sound. It wasn’t as huge as that.’

  ‘Were they taking off or landing? Or both?’

  ‘This is like a dream
that I’ve almost completely forgotten. I can’t remember things like that.’

  ‘Was it a constant sound or a sound that passed overhead?’

  ‘You won’t let it go, will you?’

  ‘Compare it to something.’

  ‘What do you mean “compare it to something”? Do you want me to say it sounded like a bee or a motorbike?’

  ‘All right,’ said Frieda. ‘Did it sound like a bee or a motorbike?’

  ‘Well, it didn’t sound like a bee.’

  ‘What about a motorbike?’

  Chloë closed her eyes for a few seconds. Then she opened them again, blinking as if the light was too much for her. ‘It wasn’t like a motorbike, really. But you know when someone rides along a street on a motorbike, revving it, showing off?’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ said Frieda.

  ‘That’s probably not much help.’

  ‘I don’t know. It might be.’

  On her way out, she met Jack. Chloë was right about his fledgling beard, which was a gingery-brown beside the tawny red of his hair. Today he was wearing a green shirt with the sleeves rolled up to reveal tattoos along both forearms, and carrying a brown-paper bag carefully, as though it were breakable. He raised one hand in greeting. It seemed a long time ago that he’d been her acutely self-conscious and adoring student.

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘Better than she was. She’s expecting you.’

  As Frieda walked home, she barely noticed her surroundings. She was thinking of airports: Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted. She said the names to herself. Strange how they’d kept the names of the little villages they’d obliterated. And she thought of Chloë. Chloë was a young woman now, but for Frieda she still contained all the earlier Chloës: the reckless student, the angry teenager. When Frieda looked at her, she even still saw the toddler taking her first steps. Over the years Frieda had cared for her, taught her, even lived with her. And now, because of her niece’s connection with her, Chloë had been drugged and held captive. When Frieda thought of it, she felt angry and also ashamed. She wanted to say to Dean Reeve: ‘If you want anyone, come for me.’

  She remembered the times long ago when she had met Dean Reeve, over in east London, beyond where the Lea River meets the Thames, in Poplar. Suddenly she stopped. She had thought of something.

  17

  Frieda got out at Pontoon Dock station. She had taken the Docklands Light Railway from Bank through a landscape that was part Hong Kong office buildings, part building site, part industrial wasteland, with just a few fragments of the old East End dotted here and there. She looked across the manicured new park towards the water. She could see the Thames Barrier, like a row of giant scallop shells that had been jammed into the riverbed.

  But that wasn’t where she needed to go. Frieda turned away from the river and crossed the road, which was shaking with concrete-mixer trucks, one after the other. She turned left, and walked along a chain-link fence, then right into a residential street. This was Silvertown, a strange little enclave trapped between the river and the road on one side, and the vast Royal Victoria Dock circling it on two sides. There were a few older houses that had been missed by the bombs in the Blitz and forgotten by the government and the developers. On the right there was a giant building site, in what looked like the aftermath of a violent civil war. On her left was the new housing development, radiating out in rows.

  Frieda walked on until she reached the dockside. When she had first moved to London, many years before, she had sometimes come here. It was a forgotten part of the city, empty warehouses, a defunct dock, bomb sites that nobody had thought of building on. The people who had lived there in the older houses – the dockers, the stevedores and their families – were long gone.

  It had all changed. On the water, a wet-suited water-skier was being dragged along on a cable. On the far side was the giant conference centre and hotels with names you would find in any city anywhere in the world. Along the dockside were the remnants of cranes, kept as sculptures. There were apartment buildings and waterside cafés and wine bars. Probably on a weekend it would be bustling but now it was almost deserted. And it was quiet.

  Chloë had specifically excluded the wide-bodied jets she would have heard if she had been in the shadow of Heathrow. Would Dean have taken her out to Luton or to one of the towns around Stansted? Chloë had been grabbed in Walthamstow, up at the north-east edge of London, so it was possible. Stansted was just a short drive up the M11. But the planes seemed wrong there as well. Big, Chloë had said, but not big-big.

  Frieda heard a soft rumbling, growling sound. This was what she had come for. She turned to her right and, almost absurdly, a plane emerged from behind a half-demolished warehouse and passed over her. It was a medium-sized passenger plane and gained height quickly. In a few seconds it was over the river and then it was small and quickly lost in the clouds.

  In the newspaper office, a young man wearing a polo shirt, shorts and flip-flops was pushing a trolley between the desks, many of which were abandoned. He stopped at one and handed across a brown A5 envelope.

  ‘A handwritten letter,’ said Daniel Blackstock. ‘Don’t get many of those nowadays.’

  The young woman at the facing desk, an intern who was eager to please, gave a small, nervous laugh.

  Blackstock slid his finger under the gummed flap and looked inside. ‘It’s a photo,’ he said, puzzled.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ asked the intern, her eyes bright with curiosity.

  He held it up so that she could see.

  ‘God! Who’s that?’ the woman said.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Then he turned the picture round and looked at the back. ‘Oh, shit.’

  His editor examined the photograph. ‘And?’ he said.

  ‘That was my reaction,’ said Blackstock. ‘But look at the other side.’

  He turned it. The name ‘Chloë Klein’ was written in large block capitals. ‘Should I know who she is?’

  ‘Frieda Klein’s niece.’

  ‘And this is interesting why?’

  ‘I made a couple of calls,’ said Blackstock. ‘She went missing for a few days. The police think she might have been taken by the killer.’

  ‘Blimey. It is interesting.’ The editor thought for a moment, then shook his head. ‘We can’t run it, though.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because we need to give it to the police.’

  ‘It’s a scoop.’

  ‘It’s a scoop we can’t use. I’m sorry, Daniel.’

  ‘I’ll try to get you less interesting stuff in future.’

  ‘That’s enough.’

  Daniel Blackstock turned to leave the room, still holding the envelope gingerly. But at the door he stopped. ‘There’s another way. I could give it to Frieda Klein. She can give it to the police.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘A favour. It might come in useful.’

  The editor hesitated, then nodded. ‘Go for it.’

  Frieda walked to one of the cafés. It was a sunny morning so she sat at a table outside. There was no other customer, inside or out. A young woman came out; she was talking on the phone and didn’t hurry to complete the call. Finally she was done and looked at Frieda expectantly. She had been speaking in a language that reminded Frieda of when she had heard Josef ringing home to his wife in Kiev, pleading, arguing, justifying. She wondered if this woman was Ukrainian as well but didn’t ask. People didn’t like it. They thought you might be an immigration official or police in plain clothes. So she just ordered a black coffee, and when it arrived, she took a sip and started to organize her thoughts.

  She hated terms like ‘must have’ and ‘surely’ and ‘probably’. Yet she felt almost certain that this was the area where Chloë had been kept during those two lost days. As if in confirmation, another plane flew over and up. A small plane in the heart of London. Where else could it be?

  This was where Dean Reeve might have chosen. Frieda knew that people are territorial and that crimes
are territorial. Seven years earlier she had visited the house where Dean had lived with another of his victims. Now he was celebrated as a murderer from Poplar. Frieda had heard that he featured in an East End murder tour: a double-decker bus, painted black, drove around sites associated with Jack the Ripper, the Kray brothers, the Richardson gang and Dean Reeve.

  She ordered a second coffee and went on thinking, scowling in fierce concentration. Dean Reeve had hovered on the edge of her life, like a blurred image just out of her range of vision, but there had always been a clarity, a purposefulness to his actions. If Frieda did A, Dean responded with B. There had been a cruel logic in the murder of Bruce Stringer and he had told her so himself: That’s what you get for coming after me. But what was he responding to in taking Chloë, and what was the message? That he could get at her friends and family? She already knew that. He could have done anything to Chloë but he had done nothing.

  Only one thing was obvious. The death of Daniel Glasher and its accompanying letter had seemed like an ending, a drawing of a line. Now, somehow and for some reason, the violence had started again. She was being told something. But what was it?

  18

  Frieda was at her home, taking notes on an upcoming session, when the phone rang. It was Yvette Long.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ said Frieda.

  ‘Why should anything be wrong? Is this a bad time? I wanted to talk to you about something. In person.’

  Frieda looked at her watch. ‘Maybe later. I’m seeing a patient in an hour.’

  ‘It won’t take long.’

  ‘Oh, all right. Are you nearby?’

  ‘I’m about two feet from your front door.’

  ‘Why didn’t you just ring the bell?’

  ‘I know you value your privacy.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ She opened the door. Yvette was dressed casually in jeans and a leather jacket. ‘Do you want to come in?’ said Frieda.

  ‘You like walking, don’t you?’

  ‘Has something happened?’ Frieda asked, as they entered Fitzroy Square.

  ‘I passed,’ said Yvette.

  ‘Hey,’ said Frieda. ‘That’s terrific. So you’ll be promoted?’