Tuesday's Gone

Twelve

‘You remember Jack Dargan?’ said Frieda to Karlsson, after he’d got out of the car. ‘A colleague of mine.’

Karlsson nodded at Jack. ‘Funny to meet in Deptford. What are you even doing over here?’

‘Jack and I had things to discuss,’ said Frieda. ‘I thought it would be a good place for a walk. It’s an interesting area.’

‘So I’ve heard.’ Karlsson looked through some railings at the remains of a warehouse. ‘But mainly it’s a dump.’ He pushed his hands into the pockets of his jacket. ‘Before you say anything, I’d like to point out the reality of the situation. What is probably going to happen is that the CPS will read the file and decide that Michelle Doyce is unfit to plead, which I’m sure you agree with. At that point, the British taxpayer will be saved the cost of a trial as well as any further police investigation. Michelle Doyce will finally get the medical attention she should have received in the first place and you can get back to your patients.’ He paused. ‘We’ll probably never know exactly what happened.’

‘I think I know what Michelle Doyce was saying,’ said Frieda.

‘I hope it was a confession,’ said Karlsson. He looked at her, then at Jack, whose face showed the faint trace of a smile that quickly vanished. ‘Well? What was it?’

‘Follow me.’ Frieda set off along the street towards the house, the two men walking quickly to keep up. ‘I was talking to Jack about the history of this area. Did you know that it was somewhere along here that Queen Elizabeth knighted Francis Drake?’

‘No, I didn’t,’ said Karlsson. ‘I visited the Cutty Sark when I was at school.’

‘It’s all a fake, apparently,’ said Frieda.

Now they had turned into Howard Street and Frieda stopped. They looked at the house. Number three.

‘In a way,’ she said, ‘what I like about this area is that there’s nothing left. Four, five hundred years ago there were orchards here and shipyards and it’s where Francis Drake came and moored his boat after he had sailed round the world, and it’s all gone. They just built warehouses on top of it and then it all got bombed in the war and then they built the housing estates.’

‘Frieda,’ said Karlsson, with a slight edge to his voice, ‘I’m really hoping that this is leading somewhere –’

‘It was Jack,’ Frieda cut in.

Karlsson looked across at Jack, who turned red and seemed both pleased and baffled.

‘He reminded me that the names of the streets survive, even when the buildings have been knocked down. The shipyards and docks are gone but not the streets that were named after them.’ She pointed up at the street sign. ‘Look. Howard Street. Wasn’t he the admiral of the Armada?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Karlsson.

Frieda walked towards the house and stood in front of it. She turned to Karlsson. ‘Andrew Berryman said I should try listening to Michelle Doyce. When we asked her where she had met the man, she kept talking about Drake and the river.’

‘Fluvial,’ said Karlsson. ‘Isn’t that what Dr Bradshaw said?’

‘Fluvial?’ echoed Jack.

‘Well, that was a load of crap,’ said Frieda.

‘He’s a leading authority,’ said Karlsson.

‘She was just trying to answer the question.’

‘Then why didn’t she answer it more clearly?’ said Karlsson.

‘She doesn’t see the world the way we do. But she did her best.’ Frieda led them along the front of the house to where a walkway passed along the side. It was blocked off at the far end. ‘Drake’s Alley,’ she announced.

‘And?’ said Karlsson.

‘Michelle Doyce collects things,’ she said, ‘brings them back to her flat and arranges them.’

‘Are you saying she collected a dead body?’

‘I think that’s what she told us.’

There was a long silence while Karlsson thought hard.

‘You think Michelle Doyce found a dead body here and carried it back to her flat?’

‘She wouldn’t need to carry it,’ said Frieda. ‘It’s – what? – fifteen, twenty feet from here to her front door. And it was an emergency. She must have thought she was helping him.’

Karlsson nodded slowly. His face wore a look of concentration. And almost, Frieda thought, a kind of rueful amusement.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Good. Stand back now. This might be a crime scene. I don’t think we should blunder in.’

‘What about your commissioner?’

‘I’ll inform him,’ said Karlsson. ‘In due course.’

The three of them stood and gazed into the alley. It was a muddy, gravelly path, littered with pieces of paper and shopping bags; used needles were strewn around. A bin bag had been dumped in the far corner.

‘Bradshaw might still be right,’ said Frieda. ‘Michelle might have been talking about men and women. You know, boats and rivers.’

‘Someone needs to go through all that stuff,’ said Karlsson, as if she hadn’t spoken. He took out his phone. ‘Fortunately there are people who do this for us.’

In February, the days are still short. She knew it was February, and she even knew the date because she had made herself a calendar. She had been good at art at school; it had been her favourite subject. Even now, if she closed her eyes, she could make herself remember the feeling, when she was very little, of dipping the thick brush into the pot of paint, then running it across the blank page, seeing the bright, steady line following it.

The pictures in this calendar were of trees. A tree for each month. When she was a girl, she had had a sketch pad, which she kept in the top drawer of her desk. In it, she had made a painting of each of the trees in her garden: ash, oak, beech, hornbeam, false acacia; apple tree and plum tree and walnut tree. She had spent hours shading in the trunks, trying to get the leaves right. She never painted towns, houses, people – all those eyes staring at you, faces peering out of windows when you didn’t know you were being looked at. Strangers behind you, or in corners, in shadows. She preferred empty landscapes. She liked the desert and the sea and wide lakes.

He had brought her the paper, several pencils and coloured crayons. He hadn’t brought a sharpener, though, so she’d had to use the knife she pared potatoes with. There was a page for the tree, and a page that she divided into a grid for all the days. Thirty days have September, April, June and November … It had taken ages, but she had time. That was one thing she did have, while she was waiting. She had sat at the little table and, instead of a ruler, she had used a book about gardening that he had left behind on one of his visits. She couldn’t write down the days that each date fell on – that would have been too complicated and, anyway, she had made the calendar in September and now it was the following year. 2011: February 2011.

In each square she wrote down what she had done during the day. It wouldn’t give anything away:, she never put down things that were important. She wrote: ‘20 press-ups’, ‘2 cups of tea’, or ‘bad migraine’, things like that. She had run out of migraine tablets, but he would bring them when he came. She only put a small star in the top right-hand corner of each square on the days that he was with her. That was how she knew that it was three weeks and three days since he had been there. He had never been away that long, not even when he was on a mission.

The tree for February was a beech, although few except her would recognize that because its branches were bare. She liked the smooth grey bark of a beech tree and the fluted column of its trunk. At the trunk’s fork, she had put in the tiny initials of her name and his. Nobody would ever see it, but she knew it was there – like a lover’s carving. She did it with each tree, in a different place. It was a secret code. She hadn’t even told him because perhaps he wouldn’t like it, but after this was over, she would tell him and he would wrap his arm around her shoulders and kiss her on the top of her head or on the side of her jaw just beneath her ear and tell her how proud he was of her and of what she had endured for his sake. He needed her. Nobody had ever needed her before. It was because of this that she had given up everything: her home, her family, her comfort, her safety, herself.

She put her face to the window and looked out at the grey sky that was darkening towards night. Days were short and nights were long, and it was cold and she wanted him to come.