Tuesday's Gone

Fourteen

Frieda sat down at her desk. She opened her drawing pad and stroked the grainy page gently, the way she always did, almost as a superstition. She took the photograph out of its buff envelope and laid it on the desk. The creamy eyes of the dead man stared up at her. Except they weren’t staring up at her. When you look at a face, you concentrate on the eyes because you feel you’re looking in at a person who can look back at you. But these eyes were just a clouded vacancy. The whole head was puffy and swollen. The flesh had cracked on the temple and in the right cheek.

She picked up a soft lead pencil. She never drew faces or figures, only objects: bridges, bricks, iron railings, old doorways, broken pottery and lopsided chimneys. And normally, when making a drawing, she would be looking at the details, the flaws, the cracks, the discolorations. This time she wanted to see beneath them. What had he been like before? She started with what hadn’t changed: the eyebrows, the hair. The cheekbones were prominent, even with all the swelling and the decay. He had a firm chin. The lips were thin, the ears flat against the skull. What about the nose? She reduced it slightly. She could only guess the contours of the face and jaw line. Narrower but not gaunt, she decided. The hair was dark brown, so she made the eyes dark as well. She sat back and looked at it from a distance. It was a face, certainly. Was it the face? She folded it in half and put it in her shoulder bag.

In the computer forensics lab in the City, Yvette Long was standing at the shoulder of a young man with straggly hair and a ginger moustache. He was a forensic anthropologist and he was seated at a computer, pressing buttons and typing in information from a sheet of paper at his side. All the while, he hummed a tune, over and over again, that she supposed was from an opera, but she didn’t know anything about opera.

‘I’m using 3-D graphics for this,’ he said, breaking off mid-hum.

Yvette nodded. She knew – he told her every time she came down here.

‘TLC/Tk scripting,’ he added. ‘Very smart stuff.’

‘Mm,’ said Yvette. She didn’t know what it meant, but she knew that a face was growing on the screen in front of them on the interlocking mesh of lines.

‘You understand it’s quite a generic image we’re producing. You could have a three-dimensional reconstruction made up from this.’

‘I don’t think we’ll be needing that.’

The face was quite thin, with a straight nose and ears that lay flat against the head. A high forehead. Brown hair. Brown eyes. A prominent Adam’s apple.

Although they couldn’t know it, it wasn’t so different from the face that Frieda had drawn, though the eyes were more vacant and the mouth less curved.

‘That’ll do,’ said Yvette. ‘That’ll do nicely.’

By eight forty, Frieda was in her consulting room. She had twenty minutes before her first patient, so she made herself a cup of tea and stood by the window that looked out on to the vast construction site. When she had first come there, that space had been a row of Victorian houses. She had seen families moved out, windows and doors boarded up. Then the squatters had arrived and they, too, had been ejected. A fence had been put up round the area, with large signs warning the public to keep clear. Bulldozers and cranes had appeared; a wrecking ball had swung through the rooftops and walls, and whole houses had toppled as if made from matchsticks. Men in hard hats had drunk their tea on top of the rubble; Portakabins had been erected. A year ago, this site had been cleared of every last standing stone and had become an empty wasteland, waiting for the brand new development to begin. It was still waiting. There was one lonely crane still parked in the centre, and a Portakabin remained, though its windows were smashed, but all the diggers had gone, the workers had gone. The plan had been put on hold, like so many plans in this city, at this time. And in the meantime, kids had found their way in through gaps in the fence to reclaim the area; they stood about in gaggles in the evening, smoking cigarettes or drinking, and sometimes in the morning they would gather there before school.

Today eight or nine of them were playing football. Frieda watched them as they tore over the muddy, churned-up ground, yelling to each other to pass. Their school clothes were beginning to look the worse for wear. Perhaps nothing would ever get built here, she thought. Perhaps it would turn back to a kind of natural wilderness in the centre of the urban density where children could play, gangs could fight each other, and homeless people could retreat from shop fronts.

She heard footsteps outside. Putting down her mug, she stood for a while, clearing her thoughts and readying herself, then went towards her door and opened it into the waiting area. Joe Franklin sat on the sofa, his head tipped to one side as if he was listening to some sound only he could hear. Frieda had a chance to examine him before he noticed she was there: she had been seeing Joe for two and a half years now, twice a week if he managed to turn up, which he frequently didn’t. Today he was early, which was a good sign, and she saw that he was properly dressed: his buttons matched up, his shoelaces were tied, his jeans were held up with a belt, not sliding off his wasted frame, his hair was quite clean. She saw that his fingernails weren’t dirty and that he had shaved recently. What was more, as he turned towards her, his eyes were clear and he stood up in one smooth gesture, no longer toppling upwards like an old drunk. There were weeks and months when he could barely make it through the day, when all his efforts were a blind stumble through a slow-motion nightmare, and then there were times like this, when he emerged from the shadows.

‘Joe.’ She smiled at him reassuringly and held the door open. ‘Good to see you. Come in, sit down. Let’s begin.’

At ten to two, Frieda had finished for the day. Four patients, four stories in her head. She sat for a few minutes, making her notes from the final session in her notebook with her old fountain pen that Reuben always mocked her for, calling her old-fashioned. She checked her mobile for messages, reminded herself that she had to call her niece Chloë later on, and washed her mug in the little kitchen off her room. She had eaten nothing that day, but she wasn’t going home just yet. She pulled on her long black coat and wrapped her red scarf twice round her neck, then set off briskly for Warren Street and the Victoria Line.

A little later, walking up Brixton Road, she found Andy’s Pizzas within a few minutes. It was easy. She had the flyer. She looked at the brightly coloured exterior. Andy didn’t just offer pizzas. He offered hamburgers and chips as well. There were livid photographs of them on display. They suddenly made Frieda think of the photographs of the body, and once she had thought of it she couldn’t stop herself. She walked inside. There were a couple of plastic tables at the front by the window. At one, a woman was sitting with a small child and a baby in a buggy. Frieda went up to the counter. A man was taking an order over the phone. He was balding with a black beard and he wore a red polo shirt with ‘Andy’s’ printed over the left breast. He put the phone down and handed the order through a gap in the wall behind him. A hand took it. Frieda could hear frying and clattering pans. The man looked enquiringly at her.

‘Yes,’ said Frieda, looking beyond him at the list of food and prices on the wall. ‘Can I have a green salad? And a bottle of water.’

‘Salad,’ the man shouted. He leaned down and took a plastic bottle from a fridge. He placed it on the counter. ‘Anything else?’

‘That’s fine,’ said Frieda, handing over a five-pound note.

The man slid the change across the counter. ‘The salad’ll be a minute,’ he said.

Frieda took the flyer and put it on the counter. ‘I got your flyer,’ she said.

‘Yeah?’ said the man.

Frieda had worried about this. All it would take was one wrong question, one that made it sound as if she was from the council or the VAT office and they’d clam up and that would be that.

‘I wanted to ask you,’ she said. ‘I was going to get some flyers done myself. I’ve got a little business. I thought I could print some up like you’ve done, get some publicity.’

The phone rang. The man picked it up and took another order.

‘What I was saying,’ Frieda continued, when he was done, ‘was that I was interested in getting flyers like that. I wondered where you got them done.’

‘There’s a printer along the road,’ said the man. ‘They done us a few hundred.’

‘And then what happens? Do they deliver them for you?’

‘They just print them up. My cousin dropped them off.’

‘You mean he pushed them through doors?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Do you know where he did it?’ asked Frieda.

The man shrugged. Frieda felt a sense of hopelessness, as if she were trying to grab something and it was slipping through her fingers.

‘I’m just curious,’ she said. She took the A–Z from her bag and fumbled for the right page. ‘You see, I’d probably end up delivering them myself, so I wanted to know how big an area you could cover. Could you just show me on the map where he went? Or did he just wander wherever he wanted?’

She pushed the map across the counter towards him. A sound came from behind him and a polystyrene container appeared in the gap. The man took the salad and gave it to Frieda. There was chopped cabbage and carrot and onion and a slice of tomato, with a swirl of pink liquid across it. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘About this map.’

The man sighed. He leaned down and put his forefinger on the page. ‘I told him to go along Acre Lane and do all the streets along it on that side.’

‘Which streets?’

The man circled his finger around. ‘All those,’ he said. ‘Until he ran out.’

It looked like a lot of streets.

‘And there were three hundred?’

‘Five, I think. We’ve got a pile in the shop.’

‘And this was about a fortnight ago?’

The man looked puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I wondered how well it worked,’ said Frieda. ‘Whether it made lots of people ring up for pizza.’

‘I don’t know,’ said the man. ‘A few, maybe.’

‘All right. Thanks for your help.’ She turned to go.

‘Hang on. You forgot your salad.’

‘Yes, right.’

She walked out of the shop and, feeling guilty, waited until she was thirty or forty yards away, well out of sight, before she crammed the salad container into an overflowing bin.

As she sat on the underground train, returning north, she looked at the back of the flyer once more, though she knew the words by heart. It was laid out like a shopping list. String. Straw. Cord. Stone. Why would you buy those? What would you use them for? Why would you need to buy both string and cord? Were they actually different in some technical DIY sense that she didn’t recognize? Was there a job that string couldn’t do for which you needed cord? It sounded like something outdoors, unless this had a medieval theme. Weren’t Elizabethan taverns scattered with straw? Or perhaps it was a drinking straw. Frieda stared at the list until her head hurt. When she came out of Warren Street station she kept going over and over it. Was she missing an obvious connection? She played mental games. You could tie straw with string. Or a cord. What about the stone? She thought of David and Goliath, except that that was a sling and a stone.

What would you do with those four things? Who might know? One name came straight into her mind. She couldn’t meet him but she could phone him; in fact, she should have phoned him long ago, just so that he knew she was thinking of him. As soon as she came into her house, she flicked through the leather-bound notebook she kept by the phone. She found the number and dialled. It rang and rang, and she was preparing to leave a message when there was a click.

‘Frieda,’ said the voice.

‘Yes, Josef. Hello! It’s good to hear your voice after all this time. How are you? Are you doing all right there? We miss you.’

‘How am I?’ he said. ‘That is a big question. I don’t know the answer.’

‘Has something happened, Josef?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Frieda, how are you? How are things with you?’

‘Just the same,’ she said. ‘On the whole. But I want to hear about you. I should have called. I’m sorry I didn’t.’

‘That is OK,’ he said. ‘Life is busy for all. Many things happen, things that do not do well on the phone.’

‘I keep looking at the weather,’ Frieda said. ‘Whenever I get the chance, I check the weather in Kiev. That’s you, isn’t it? The last time I saw, it was minus twenty-nine. I hope you’re wrapping up warm.’

There was a long silence, followed by a strange sort of moan.

‘Are you all right?’ asked Frieda. ‘Are you still there?’

‘Frieda, I am not in Kiev at the moment.’

‘Oh. Where are you?’

He said something she couldn’t make out.

‘Sorry? Is that somewhere in the countryside?’

He said the name again.

‘Can you speak more slowly?’

He said the three syllables one by one.

‘Summertown?’ said Frieda. ‘You mean, like Summertown in London?’

‘Yes,’ said Josef. ‘Not like. The Summertown in London. That one.’

It was several seconds before Frieda could speak coherently. ‘You’re … you’re only about five hundred yards away.’

‘It is possible.’

‘What the hell are you doing here?’

‘I have been in complications.’

‘I need to see you.’

‘No good.’

‘I’m your friend, remember?’ Frieda said. ‘Come to my house. Right now.’