Tuesday's Gone

Nine

‘This case.’ Commissioner Crawford spoke with barely concealed irritation. ‘Are you winding it up?’

‘Well,’ began Karlsson, ‘there are several –’

‘I looked at the preliminary report. It seems pretty straightforward. The woman’s not all there.’ The commissioner tapped the side of his forehead with a finger. ‘So the outcome doesn’t matter much. The victim was killed in a frenzy. She’s already in a psychiatric hospital anyway, out of harm’s way.’

‘We don’t even know who the victim is yet.’

‘Drug-dealer?’

‘There’s no evidence for that.’

‘You’ve done a search through missing people?’

‘Nothing there. I’m about to interview the other residents of the house to see if they can move us forward.’

‘I’m not convinced this is a good use of your time.’

‘He was still murdered.’

‘This isn’t like your missing children, Mal.’

‘You mean people don’t care?’

‘It’s all about priorities,’ said Crawford, frowning. ‘Take Jake Newton with you, at least. Show him the crap we have to deal with.’

Karlsson started to speak but Crawford interrupted him. ‘For God’s sake, wrap this one up for me.’

Today Jake’s trousers were thin-striped corduroys and his shoes were a pale tan, highly polished with yellow laces. He put up an umbrella as he got out of the car – for it was now pouring with a rain that was thickening towards snow – and walked into the house with care, holding his buttonless jacket closed with one hand. The barriers had been taken down, the crowds had long since gone, and there was no sign that a crime had ever been committed here, except for the tape across Michelle Doyce’s door. There was the same rubbish in the hall, the same smell of shit and decay that coated the back of Karlsson’s throat and made Jake Newton wince. He pulled a large white handkerchief out of his pocket and blew his nose several times, unnecessarily. ‘A bit close in here, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t think they have a cleaner,’ said Karlsson, leading the way upstairs, taking care where he stood.

Later, talking to Yvette, he wasn’t sure which of the three interviews had made him feel the most depressed. Lisa Bolianis was the loneliest. With her creased and reddened face, her thin arms and legs but drinker’s pot belly, she looked as though she was in her forties but turned out to be only thirty-two. She was an alcoholic, who had lost her children and her home. She reeked of cheap spirits as she spoke in flat, mumbling sentences. Karlsson could see bottles under her bed, and several dirty blankets stacked on top of it, along with a torn pink eiderdown. Her clothes were in two black bin bags in a corner. She said that Michelle Doyce was ‘nice enough’ but knew nothing about her and nothing about the man who had been found in her room. She said lots of strange men came to the house but she didn’t mix with them and she wouldn’t be able to recognize anybody if they showed her a picture. She’d had enough of men: they’d never done her any good from her step-father onwards. She had cold sores at the corners of her mouth; when she tried to smile at Karlsson, he could see them cracking. He had his notebook in his hand but didn’t write anything in it. He didn’t really know why he was there – Yvette and Chris Munster had already talked to her: what had he been expecting? All the while, Jake stood by the door, twitching uncomfortably and picking imaginary pieces of lint off the sleeve of his jacket.

If she was the loneliest of the inmates, Tony Metesky was the one who seemed furthest from the reaches of society – a vast, scared ruin of a man, who wouldn’t meet Karlsson’s eye, and who rocked back and forth and talked without making sense, disconnected words and fragments of sentences. The needles had been cleared away. A team from the council had come in their special uniforms, like police divers, and it had taken them a whole day to clean the room. Karlsson tried to ask him about the dealers who had taken over his room, but Metesky wrung his dimpled hands together and his blubbery face screwed up in terror.

‘You’re not in trouble, Tony,’ Karlsson said. ‘We need your help.’

‘Not me.’

‘Did you see anyone go into Michelle Doyce’s room – any of the people who came here?’

‘Like a big baby, that’s me. Won’t tell nobody. Fat smelly baby.’ He laughed anxiously, looking into Karlsson’s face for an answering smile.

‘The men who came here, they threatened you, didn’t they?’

‘It’s all right.’

Karlsson gave up.

Jake didn’t accompany him into Michael Reilly’s room, but chose to wait in the car. He’d been warned about Reilly’s dog. It was chained to the radiator but kept lunging forwards to snarl at Karlsson, who was starting to think the radiator was in danger of coming away from the wall. The air was thick with the smell of dog hair and dog shit, and of the dog food in the plastic bowl on the floor. But Michael Reilly was the most voluble of the three remaining residents. He paced round and round the room, jabbing his forefinger in the air. Metesky was a freak, and that Lisa Bolianis couldn’t see what was going on under her own nose, but he, Michael, could tell him a thing or two. He wanted to co-operate fully with any investigation. Did they know, for instance, that kids came to get their drugs here – and that means kids, no more than fourteen? It wasn’t right. He knew he wasn’t one to talk, but those days were in the past for him; he’d served his time and cleaned up his act and was going straight now; he just wanted to help.

‘I see that,’ said Karlsson, gravely. He’d spent enough time in the Met to recognize a crack addict. ‘Can you tell us anything about Michelle Doyce?’

‘Her? She avoided me. I try to be friendly – but with this lot, it’s hard going. The first time I saw her she wanted to give me tea, but she changed her mind. I think it was Buzz. She didn’t like you, did she, Buzz?’ Buzz growled and saliva poured from his open jaws. The radiator trembled. ‘She wasn’t here much, always out looking for stuff. I once saw her down on the riverbank, when the tide was out picking things up from the mud.’

‘Did you ever see her with anyone?’

He shook his head. ‘I never heard her speak much either.’

‘The men who used Mr Metesky’s room, did they ever go into the rest of the house?’

‘I know what you’re getting at.’

‘Then answer the question.’

‘No. They didn’t.’

‘Not into Michelle Doyce’s room?’

‘She kept herself to herself. Quite a sad kind of lady, if you ask me. Why else would she end up in this dump? You wouldn’t be here if you had anywhere else to go, would you? Except I’ve got my dog, eh, Buzz? We keep each other company.’

An unearthly sound came from Buzz’s barrel chest, and Karlsson could see the whites of his rolling eyes.

Frieda walked over Blackfriars Bridge, stopping in the middle to look west towards the London Eye and Big Ben, then east at the smooth dome of St Paul’s, everything flickering and dissolving in the falling snow, which was turning to slush on the pavements. Then she moved swiftly, trying to throw off a feeling of dread and dejection, not pausing at Smithfield Market or in St John Street, and at last she was in Islington, standing in front of Chloë and Olivia’s house, five minutes early for her niece’s chemistry lesson. She knocked and heard feet running to the door. Chloë had grown taller and thinner over the past few months, and her hair was cut dramatically short; it stood up in uneven tufts and Frieda wondered if she’d done it herself. She had kohl smudged round her eyes and there was a new piercing in her nose. She had a fading love bite on her neck.

‘Thank goodness you’re here,’ Chloë said dramatically.

‘Why?’

‘Mum’s in the kitchen with a man.’

‘Is that such a crisis?’

‘She found him on the Internet.’

‘Is that a problem?’

‘I thought at least you’d be on my side.’

‘I didn’t know there were sides.’

‘I’m not a patient, Frieda.’

Frieda wiped her feet on the mat and hung her coat on the hook. She stepped into the wild disorder of the living room and looked around for somewhere to sit. ‘Chemistry?’ she asked.

Chloë rolled her eyes. ‘It’s Friday. What else would I be doing with my fucking life?’

The snow turned back to rain. It rained for the rest of the day and through the night, so heavily that the roads ran with water and in the parks puddles formed and spread into each other. Drains overflowed. Cars sent up blinding arcs of dirty spray. Canals bubbled. In the streets people ran between shops under umbrellas that barely protected them. The drenched world shrank. In the sheets of cold, driving rain, it was barely possible to see to the end of a road or the top of a tree. The brown Thames surged. It rained through the evening and into the night. In houses and in flats, alone or in pairs, people lay in their beds and listened to it hammering against their windows. The wind ripped through the trees, and dustbin lids clattered along streets in the teeming darkness.

In a small road in Poplar that led through boarded-up estates towards the Lea river, a storm drain flooded. At just after three in the morning, the drain cover was dislodged. About ten minutes later, a clump of hair floated to the surface. Beneath it, something glimmered faintly.

But it wasn’t until eight twenty-five the next morning, when the rain had eased to an icy drizzle, that a teenage boy walking his terrier came across the remains of a body that was unmistakably human. Unmistakably that of a woman.

Frieda had woken at five. She liked being in her small, orderly house when the weather outside was wild. Everything was battened down against the rain that flew in bullets against her windows; the gusts of wind sounded like a stormy sea, the foamy rush of an incoming tide. She lay for a while, not thinking, simply listening, but gradually thoughts clarified and pushed their way into her consciousness. The thoughts were people and she could see their faces: Sandy, who was far away but whose fingers touched her when she was asleep, whose arms wrapped around her at last; Alan, with his brown spaniel eyes, who had left his wife and disappeared; his identical twin Dean, dead for more than a year but who stalked her dreams again, always with that amiable and nasty smile; Dean’s wife, Terry; Terry’s sad and careful sister Rose. And then there was Michelle Doyce, with her fading face and her strong, blistered hands, who talked to dead men and stuffed dogs as if they could understand everything she said. Frieda turned towards the window, waiting for the first light to appear through the curtains. Words and phrases flickered through her mind, tiny lights in the darkness. She tried to separate her anxieties and give them a proper name.

Just before six, she got up, pulled on a dressing-gown and went downstairs to light the fire in the living room and make herself a pot of coffee. It was Sunday: she had no patients to see, no conferences to attend, no duties to see to. She had planned to go for a walk through the watery streets, visit the flower market, buy provisions, pop in at her friend’s café, Number 9, for a bowl of porridge or a cinnamon bagel, perhaps spend an hour or so making a drawing in her study, which was like an eyrie at the top of her narrow house. Instead, she sat by the fire, occasionally crouching to blow strength into the flames, drank mug after mug of coffee, and attempted to sort through the events of her week and the murky emotions that had been stirred up by the hearing and by Karlsson’s surprise reappearance in her life.

Then the doorbell rang.