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

by Nicci French

  ‘But if you’re right – and you probably are – when he sees policemen standing outside my door, he’ll just bide his time.’

  ‘Whereas your plan is what?’ said Karlsson. ‘If you’re not guarded, you can draw him out and then we can catch him in the act. Is that it?’

  ‘Before the act.’

  ‘You know that plans have a way of going awry.’

  ‘He’s out there. They’re both out there.’

  ‘What is it you want?’ said Petra, sharply. ‘Do you think you’ll prove something by gambling with your own life? If he got to you and you pressed your panic button or whatever you’ve got in mind, and we arrived just too late, would that be worth it, sacrificing your life for someone like him? We’ll get Daniel and Lee Blackstock the old-fashioned way, by looking and waiting and making enquiries, and it’s not very glamorous but it’ll work in the end.’

  ‘He’s not that clever,’ said Karlsson.

  ‘You don’t have to be that clever to kill people,’ said Frieda. ‘It’s not hard. Blackstock’s a pathetic mediocrity, but he killed Morgan Rossiter and he attacked Reuben and Jack. And he kidnapped a police officer and almost killed her. What else is he going to do?’

  Suddenly there was a rattling sound. It was Frieda’s phone vibrating on the counter next to the cooker. She got up and went over to it.

  ‘Who is it?’ said Karlsson.

  ‘It’s a number I don’t recognize.’

  Karlsson turned to Petra. ‘Have you got her phone under surveillance?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  Frieda looked at them both enquiringly. The phone stopped ringing. ‘Well, that solves that problem,’ she said.

  ‘I think you should call the number back,’ said Petra, picking up the phone. ‘I’m putting it on speaker, if that’s all right.’ She took her own mobile from her pocket. ‘I’m going to record it.’

  ‘It’s probably just someone trying to sell me double-glazing,’ said Frieda.

  ‘Let’s see, then.’

  Petra put the phone back on the table, in front of Frieda. She placed her mobile beside it. Then she pressed the return-call button on Frieda’s phone. All of them leaned forward. Frieda felt they were like three participants in a séance. There was a click from her phone but no other sound. Petra nodded urgently at Frieda.

  ‘Is someone there?’ asked Frieda. She was almost angry to feel a tremor in her voice.

  ‘Is that Frieda Klein?’ The voice spoke slowly and deliberately. There was a slight slurring in the speech, but she recognized the speaker immediately.

  ‘Daniel?’

  ‘I’ve got a message for you. I …’

  ‘Where are you?’

  There was a pause.

  ‘I’ve got a message …’

  ‘How do I know this is really you? Tell me something about where you are.’

  Another pause.

  ‘I’ve got a message for you, Frieda.’

  Frieda was starting to speak again but Karlsson shook his head and put his finger over his lips.

  ‘I send you flowers. Is that any way to behave?’

  Petra, with a puzzled expression, was mouthing a question. Karlsson took an unopened letter from a pile on the table.

  ‘You send people after me and I send them back to you.’

  Karlsson was writing on the envelope and then held it up. He had written one word: ‘Reading.’ Frieda nodded.

  ‘But I won’t send Daniel Blackstock back to you.’

  He was saying each word separately and slowly. Frieda wondered if he was trying to communicate something. Probably he was just drugged or scared. As she listened, Frieda tried to get some sense of the space in which Daniel Blackstock was. Big or small? Hard surfaces or soft? Any exterior noises? She couldn’t make out anything.

  ‘Daniel is a child who has been bothering the grown-ups and we know what happens to bad children.’

  Frieda gestured despairingly at Karlsson.

  ‘Bruce Stringer told me about his wife. Christine Stringer. Tell Christine that he cried when he told me about her and he cried about his children and then he pleaded for his life. Frieda Klein, Frieda Klein. How could you?’

  There was another pause. There was a coughing, snuffling sound.

  ‘I like your house. I like its smell. I like its feel. I’m sorry if I damaged it but I needed to return your property.’

  Now there was something like a sob in his voice and a groan.

  ‘Where are you?’ said Frieda, urgently. ‘Are you with Dean Reeve? Tell me.’

  When Daniel Blackstock spoke, the words came even more slowly, as if each one was an effort.

  ‘Frieda Klein, I once told you that it wasn’t your time. Why do you not listen? Frieda. Stop fighting. Stop trying. We are all just leaves on a tree and it’s nearly September and autumn is coming.’

  ‘Stop,’ said Frieda. ‘Just let him go. He’s got nothing to do with this.’

  ‘Frieda, please, I …’ And now, suddenly, Daniel Blackstock’s tone was entirely different, as if for three words it was really him speaking, but then the line went dead. The three of them stared at the phone.

  ‘What the hell was that?’ asked Petra.

  ‘I think you can call off the protection,’ said Frieda.

  ‘That could have been a deception. To make us drop our guard.’

  ‘Did it sound like that to you?’

  ‘We still need to find him.’

  ‘Daniel Blackstock has been found,’ said Frieda.

  ‘What was that about “bad children”?’

  ‘I think that he is going to be punished.’

  ‘Like Bruce Stringer?’

  ‘I think worse than Bruce Stringer.’

  ‘Punished for what?’

  ‘For barging in where he wasn’t wanted.’ Frieda stood up.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Karlsson asked.

  ‘I’m going for a walk.’

  ‘I would offer to come along.’

  ‘I know. But you need to go to Yvette.’

  ‘Can I come?’ asked Petra.

  ‘If you want.’

  ‘I do.’

  The two women walked through the streets together. For a long time, they were silent and the shadow of the long day lay over them. At last Petra spoke. ‘You did well.’

  Frieda glanced round but didn’t reply.

  ‘But it’s strange, isn’t it, that this should feel like an ending?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We met nearly six months ago, when a body was found under your floorboards.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then we were looking for Dean Reeve. We found Daniel Blackstock – or you did. But we haven’t found Dean Reeve.’

  ‘No, we haven’t.’

  ‘He’s still out there.’

  Frieda nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said very softly, looking straight ahead. ‘He is.’

  61

  He sat by her bed, under the sour glow of the strip lighting. Sometimes he watched her face and sometimes he watched the monitors above her: the line that zigzagged across the screen, sometimes rising in a series of steep peaks and sometimes almost levelling out. There were tubes everywhere, attached to different parts of her body. It would have been hard to hold her hand if that was what he had wanted to do, but he didn’t want that. It seemed presumptuous to touch her as she lay unconscious when he’d never touched her before, except for a pat on the shoulder, a grasp of her hand as he helped her through some high entrance or over a wall.

  He thought of all that they had done together over the years, the cases they had solved and the ones where they had failed. He thought of her grumpy, clumsy, stalwart presence; her heavy boots and her scowl and the way she blushed. Now she was both Yvette and a stranger. It wasn’t just that she was so thin that her face was startlingly changed, all the features enormous, almost cartoonish. It was that without her anxious, self-conscious expression she had become someone he didn’t know. Her eyes were closed, her mout
h slightly open; her chest rose and fell with her shallow breathing.

  Nurses came in and out of the room, but quietly. They bent over Yvette, looked at the monitors and her charts, checked the little bags that were dripping their contents into her veins, left again. A consultant came in with his junior doctor and they spoke in hushed whispers, then departed. Shortly after Karlsson had arrived, the acting commissioner had paid a visit. She had said little but she had stood at the side of the bed and looked at Yvette for several minutes, her face tight.

  At just past three in the morning, Frieda arrived. She pulled up a chair and sat on the other side of Yvette and gazed steadily at her. An hour or so later, Josef came with Reuben and Chloë and Jack. Frieda heard them in the corridor, explaining why they needed to be let in, and then the door opened and they filed into the little room and stood awkwardly at the foot of the bed. Josef, whose stubble was almost a beard and whose face was grimy, pulled a small bottle from his jacket’s inner pocket, took a swig, then passed it to Jack, who did the same. Frieda saw that Jack was wearing striped orange and green pyjama trousers under his coat and his hair stood up in wild peaks. His left hand was huge in its cast. Chloë had on an old boiler-suit and her face, devoid of make-up, looked bruised with tiredness. In fact, Reuben was the brightest of any of the ramshackle group whose lives Daniel Blackstock had tried to destroy.

  ‘Is she going to be OK?’ asked Chloë, in a piercing whisper. ‘Will she pull through?’

  ‘Don’t talk as if she isn’t here,’ said Frieda. ‘She can probably hear us.’ She looked back at the figure in the bed. ‘We’re all here,’ she said. ‘Waiting for you.’

  ‘Come back to us,’ said Karlsson. His voice was gravelly with fatigue.

  An hour later Yvette opened her eyes. At first she couldn’t see anything, just a harsh light that made her eyes hurt. Then she saw shapes. She wanted to ask who they were but she couldn’t form the words. She didn’t know where she was, who she was. She tried to remember, but it was like hauling a heavy weight out of a well and it was easier to let it go again. She closed her eyes.

  ‘Yvette.’

  She knew that voice. She didn’t open her eyes but she smiled, though her mouth hurt.

  ‘Yvette,’ said Karlsson. ‘My dear friend.’

  ‘Friend?’ That was her voice, a croak.

  ‘Yes. Of course.’

  She opened her eyes. She could see him now, her boss and the man she loved, who would never love her. And that was Frieda on the other side. Of course. The two of them. But he had called her his friend. At the foot of her bed were other people. She made a huge effort to focus and saw they were most of that group she had always wanted to join. Frieda’s gang.

  ‘Am I dying?’

  ‘No.’ Frieda took her hand between her own and held it. ‘Living.’

  And now Yvette remembered, like a wash of darkness, and with the memory, her body felt the pain and dread again. That knife hacking at her, and the clear understanding that her life hadn’t been what she had hoped for and now it was finished.

  ‘Is it all over?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s all over,’ said Karlsson. ‘You’ve come through.’

  Dawn came softly, greyly. The hospital became once more a place of bustling activity; they could hear the gathering noise of the streets outside. Olivia and Alexei arrived, Olivia haggard and Alexei gazing at everything with his dark eyes. They left Yvette and Karlsson, went down the stairs together and out through the revolving doors into the new day.

  ‘I think,’ said Jack, blinking in the pale light, ‘that it’s time for a very large breakfast. There must be places near here that open early. I’m starving.’

  ‘Then a fry-up for all,’ said Josef, brightening. ‘Many eggs.’ He put an arm round Chloë. ‘You good?’

  ‘I think so. I feel a bit dazed. Breakfast would be nice.’

  ‘Frieda?’ Reuben looked questioningly at her.

  Frieda shook her head. ‘Not me. I need to walk.’

  ‘Can’t you have breakfast first? Or coffee at least?’

  ‘I need to walk,’ she repeated.

  ‘OK. Call us if you want to join us later.’

  ‘Of course.’

  But they knew that she wouldn’t.

  Frieda watched them as they walked away from her: Jack in his loudly striped pyjamas, his hair wild, Olivia in a brave red dress, Reuben in his summer suit with his bald skull gleaming, Chloë with her stout boots and cropped hair, and Josef bulky beside her with his arm around her shoulders, his other hand in Alexei’s, his son tiny beside him.

  When they were out of sight, she turned and walked in the opposite direction, and only then did she let all the thoughts and all the feelings that she had been holding at bay close in on her.

  She walked fast, turning off the main road and down the smaller streets where the day for most people was just beginning. Behind her lay the urban wastelands of Silvertown, the Thames Barrier and the crumbling warehouses, the little house in a deserted cul-de-sac where Chloë and then Yvette had been held. To her left were the gleaming skyscrapers, all the corporate headquarters of global enterprises where men and women in suits were already sitting behind computer screens. She walked on, past shops whose metal shutters were being lifted, past enclaves of terraced houses that had survived the Blitz and modern apartment blocks, large empty churches and small parks. A road-sweeper came towards her, pushing his trolley hung about with bags; she saw that he had attached photographs of his family to the handle.

  Her friends had survived, although at a cost: Reuben had been savagely beaten, Jack had been attacked and his hand broken, Chloë had been abducted, drugged and photographed, Yvette had been within minutes of death. Other people hadn’t survived. Morgan Rossiter hadn’t; Bruce Stringer; Daniel Blackstock himself. So many people had died because of Dean, and because of her. She saw all their faces in her dreams; they were her ghosts and they would always haunt her.

  She halted. There was a bike attached to the railings, painted white and garlanded with dead flowers and wreaths: it was one of the ghost bikes marking the death of its owner.

  Josef had ordered the full English breakfast: fried eggs, two rashers of streaky bacon, a large pink sausage, fried bread, fried tomatoes and mushrooms. He squirted tomato ketchup on to his plate and added a dollop of mustard, then stirred three sugars into his coffee.

  ‘Are you really going to eat that?’ asked Chloë, cradling a mug of herbal tea.

  Josef looked puzzled. He speared a mushroom and a chunk of sausage on his fork, dipped it in egg yolk and put it into his mouth. ‘Is good,’ he said. ‘Food comforts.’

  ‘A Bloody Mary would comfort,’ said Olivia, ‘but I don’t think they do that here.’

  They had all gathered. Karlsson had left Yvette for an hour or so and now sat eating a Danish pastry and drinking coffee between Reuben and a puffy-faced Olivia. Alexei sat close to his father, staring around him with brown, anxious eyes.

  They were like survivors after a terrible accident, thought Karlsson, glancing round the table. They didn’t need to talk, but occasionally they’d touch each other on the shoulder or hand, say a few words, smile. Chloë spread marmalade on Jack’s toast for him. Josef munched his way through the pile of food in front of him, occasionally wiping his hand across his mouth.

  But Frieda wasn’t here. Frieda, who was the centre of this unlikely group of friends, yet always stood outside it.

  62

  Her feet had taken her at last to Waterloo Bridge. She stopped in the middle and looked down the river, the city reflected in its brown waters, the lights of the building breaking up in the eddies and swirls.

  She had stood here long ago with Sandy and he had asked her if she would ever live somewhere else: Manhattan, Berlin. She’d told him that you can only have one city, and London was hers. But Sandy’s body had been found near here, pulled by the current. She thought of him, how he had loved her and how she had left him; how he had died. She thought of
poor mad Hannah Docherty in her hospital for the criminally insane. Of the stubborn, obsessive Jim Fearby, who had never given up in his pursuit of the truth and who had been murdered because of it. And there were others, a family of ghosts. So many people she had not been able to save.

  She stood there for a long time, looking down at the great river and thinking with such fierce concentration that she didn’t notice how the crowds of people walking over the bridge were thickening, the sun rising higher in the late-summer sky.

  We are leaves on a tree … Autumn is coming.

  In spite of the warmth, she shivered. Autumn was coming. Darkness was coming. The end was coming.

  At last she turned and walked to the Embankment. Not far from here, her house was waiting for her. In her mind, she went into the cobbled mews, pushed at the blue door and entered. She stood for a moment in the hall, smelling the familiar odour of beeswax polish and books. Then into the living room where a chess table was laid out for a game, a tortoiseshell cat curled in the armchair, and where in the winter the fire always burned. To the kitchen, with its yellow roses on the table and a pot of basil on the windowsill. Upstairs, past her bedroom and the bathroom with its great bath that Josef had installed for her, up the next narrow flight, into her garret study. In her mind, she saw the sketchbook opened at a page, the soft-leaded pencils in a mug, the skylight from which she could see the city laid out around her.

  Her city. Her home.

  But she walked in another direction, through the narrow streets of Soho, and knocked at the familiar door.

  Levin took off his glasses and polished them on his yellow tie. He blinked at her and smiled the smile that never quite reached his eyes.

  ‘I heard the news,’ he said. ‘Well done.’

  She fixed her dark eyes on him. ‘I want you to do something for me.’