Tuesday's Gone

Fifty

‘Would you like to come in for coffee?’ said Frieda.

‘No, thanks,’ said Karlsson. ‘You like walking, don’t you? Let’s go for a walk.’

He headed north, his hands plunged into the pockets of his dark coat. His face looked swollen in the fiercely cold wind. When they reached Euston Road, it was already jammed in both directions with the largely stationary commuter traffic.

‘You’ve got to love it, haven’t you?’ he said, and turned left, walking so briskly that Frieda had almost to run to keep up with him.

She grabbed him by the arm, forcing him to stop. ‘Karlsson,’ she said. ‘I know what this is about.’

‘What?’

‘When I was in the station, I saw Jake Newton. He wouldn’t meet my eye. He’s delivered his report, hasn’t he?’

Karlsson was silent, breathing out clouds of vapour. ‘That sharp-suited little cunt,’ he said. ‘I cannot believe we took that grinning little fucking oaf along with us and let him fart around with his fucking fly-on-the-wall act.’

‘So he’s not too keen on freelance contracts,’ said Frieda.

‘Oh, he’s keen on contracts. For the office work, bureaucracy, management, there’ll be freelance contracts out of our fucking arse.’

‘Karlsson,’ said Frieda. ‘You don’t have to do the big sweary policeman thing for my benefit. It’s fine. So, I’m out.’

‘Yes, Frieda. You’re out.’

‘Not that I was ever really in. After all that, you never got a contract for me to sign.’

‘Well, that’s the whole point about money-saving measures,’ said Karlsson. ‘You don’t expect them to save money, do you? “Dysfunctional operational procedures”. Those were his words. “Management organization unfit for purpose”. Those were more of them. Do you know what makes it worse? I tried to impress him. I feel like some teenage boy who’s tried to impress a girl he didn’t really like in the first place and she’s laughed at him. It’s not just you. There are going to be cuts everywhere.’

Frieda put her hand on his arm again, gently this time. ‘It’s all right,’ she said.

‘And after all you did in this case, getting the Welleses, I can’t believe it.’

‘It’s all right.’

He pushed his hands more deeply into his pockets and looked embarrassed. ‘And despite me being sarcastic with you and shouting, it was, you know … having you around … I mean, anything’s better than someone like Munster.’

‘Yes,’ said Frieda. ‘Me too.’

‘How do you get out of this place?’

‘This way,’ said Frieda, and turned east. ‘But what about Beth Kersey?’

‘I told you,’ said Karlsson. ‘It’s in hand.’ He gave a faint smile. ‘You remember Sally Lea, the name in Poole’s notebook?’

‘The one we never found.’

‘It’s not a woman,’ said Karlsson. ‘It’s a barge on the Lea river up near Enfield.’

‘How do you know?’

‘There was an incident yesterday. A resident of the adjacent barge called the emergency services. He’d been stabbed by a young woman. She had stolen food from him. She was acting strangely, talking to herself, and when accosted, she pulled a knife.’

‘Beth Kersey,’ said Frieda. ‘Did they find her?’

‘No,’ said Karlsson. ‘But they found where she’d been living and a whole pile of Poole’s stuff, papers, photos, the lot. Some officers are going to spend the day going through it, for what it’s worth.’

‘What was this barge like?’ said Frieda.

‘What can I say? A barge is a barge.’

‘I mean inside, where she’d been living.’

‘I didn’t see it myself. But from what I heard, it was pretty gross. It sounds like she’d been stuck there on her own, foraging for herself, ever since Poole died.’

‘Is that it?’ said Frieda. ‘Pretty gross?’

‘I know what you’re saying,’ said Karlsson. ‘You want to go and look at it for yourself. I’m sorry, Frieda. Look, I know it seems messy. We’ll probably never know who Poole really was. We don’t know where he was killed. It looks like the money that the Welleses took from him has been safely stashed somewhere beyond our reach. Clearly that’s one of the things Harry Welles is good at.’ He stopped and looked around. ‘But we got them. And the rest is in hand. We’ve put a protective unit on the Kerseys until we find their daughter, which won’t take long. From what I heard about the state of that barge, she won’t be able to look after herself for long out in the big world –’ He stopped suddenly. ‘And now I’ve got to get to work. Where the hell are we?’

Frieda pointed upwards at the BT Tower. They were standing almost directly beneath it.

‘That looks familiar,’ said Karlsson. ‘Didn’t there used to be a restaurant up there? A rotating restaurant?’

‘Until someone set off a bomb,’ said Frieda. ‘A pity. I’d quite like to go up there. It’s the only place in London where you can’t see the BT Tower.’

Karlsson held out his hand and Frieda shook it. ‘I should probably move to Spain,’ he said.

‘You’re needed here,’ she said.

As they parted, Karlsson said, ‘At least you can return to your real life now, Frieda. You can put all this mess behind you. And Dean Reeve. Let him go, will you?’

Frieda didn’t reply. When he had turned the corner, heading down towards Oxford Street, she stopped and leaned against a lamppost. She felt the metal cold against her forehead as she took deliberate deep breaths. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘It’s all right.’

She took her phone from her pocket and switched it on. There was a message and she called straight back. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Things have been a bit funny, but it’s over now … Yes, that would be good … No. Just come to my house.’

Frieda woke in darkness and felt the unfamiliar presence. A sag in the bed, breathing, a touch against her thigh. She moved as if to sit up, get out of the bed, get dressed, leave.

‘Easy,’ said a voice, and Frieda lay down. She felt the sheet pulled back and a hand touching her body and his face against hers, the touch of lips on her cheek, her neck, her shoulders.

‘A friend of mine was at a dinner,’ said Sandy. ‘He was a feisty guy, always up for a disagreement. He got into a row with a woman there, shouted at her, told her to fuck off, stormed out of the place, slammed the front door, found himself in the street and realized he’d walked out of his own house.’

‘All right,’ said Frieda. ‘I get it.’

‘It feels like you’re always about to leave. Just get up and walk away somewhere.’

‘That’s what I do, when I’m afraid. When I can’t sleep, which is most of the time, when my head is buzzing, when I’m confused, when I feel I just can’t stay still, I go out and walk. And walk.’

‘And lose yourself?’

‘No. I don’t lose myself. I know my way around.’

She felt both his hands on her now, his face on her.

‘You smell nice,’ he said.

Frieda didn’t know what she was feeling. Suddenly she thought of herself as very little, her father throwing her in the air and catching her; she was screaming and not knowing whether she was screaming with pleasure or with fear. She ran her fingers through Sandy’s damp hair. She was damp too. ‘I probably smell of you,’ she said.

They lay for a moment in silence, tangled in each other.

‘Is that what you feel?’ said Sandy. ‘That you’d like to get up and walk somewhere?’

‘That’s what I feel most of the time.’

‘Do you always walk alone?’

‘Not always.’

‘So if you were going to take me for a walk, where would we go?’

‘Rivers,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I walk along the old rivers.’

‘You mean like the Thames?’

‘No,’ said Frieda. ‘Obviously the Thames is a river. But I don’t mean that. I mean the old rivers that flow into the Thames. They’re buried now.’

‘Buried? Why would anyone bury a river?’

‘I wonder that,’ said Frieda. ‘Sometimes I think people invent different kinds of reasons. They’re a health hazard or they get in the way or they’re dangerous. Sometimes I think rivers and streams make people uncomfortable. They’re wet, they move, they bubble up out of the ground, they flood, they dry up. Better just to put them out of sight.’

‘So which vanished river shall we walk down?’

‘The Tyburn,’ said Frieda. ‘Would you like to do that at the weekend?’

‘I want you to tell me about it now,’ he said. ‘Where’s it start?’

‘It should start in Hampstead,’ said Frieda. ‘The source of the river is on Haverstock Hill. There’s a plaque there. Except that the plaque is only in the approximate place. The actual source is lost. It’s the only plaque I’ve ever seen that actually makes me angry. Can you imagine losing the source of a river? You have this spot where a spring bubbles clear water out of the ground and it flows down to the Thames. Then not only does someone decide to build on top of it but they actually forget where the spring was.’

‘It sounds like a bit of a bad start.’

‘I’m not some kind of tourist guide. I don’t want you to get the idea that I just love London. In fact, I hate it a lot of the time. There are bits of it I hate all the time. So, anyway, you’d walk through Belsize Park towards Swiss Cottage. You can feel the slope that the river ran down. Then to Regent’s Park and along the side of the boating lake.’

‘As we walk, you can talk me to me about how you’re feeling,’ said Sandy. ‘I suppose you should be feeling a bit bruised, especially with all the vicious press coverage.’

Frieda found it strangely easy to talk to the voice in the darkness, not seeing the response, just feeling him. ‘From when I was little,’ she said, ‘I used to have a fantasy that I was invisible. I don’t mean sometimes, I mean all the time, and I mean that I believed I really was invisible. But it turns out not to be true, so basically I feel like I’ve been taken out into the town square, flayed and then had salt and sulphuric acid rubbed into my flesh.’

‘But you’ll get over it.’

‘I’m already over it.’

‘So where are we now?’

‘The river probably flows through the boating pond.’

‘Probably?’

‘It’s hard to find out. And then we walk out of the park and down Baker Street.’

‘Past Madame Tussaud’s.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Is it worth going to?’

‘I’ve never been.’

‘Really? Have you been to the Tower of London?’

‘No,’ said Frieda.

‘I went when I was a kid.’

‘Was it good?’

‘I don’t really remember it,’ he said. ‘So where are we now?’

‘This is the nice bit of the walk. You go through Paddington Street Gardens, which is a minute’s walk from Madame Tussaud’s and nobody knows about it, and across Marylebone High Street and down Marylebone Lane. Just for a bit you feel that you’re walking along the bank of a stream as it flows through a little village just outside London. Except there’s no stream. At least, not one you can see. It’s there somewhere.’

‘You caught them,’ said Sandy.

‘They caught them.’

‘Admittedly you didn’t get full acknowledgement.’

‘Maybe I like doing without acknowledgement.’

‘Your invisible thing again. So those two, that brother and sister, they did all that just for the money? Tortured that guy and killed him?’

‘This is the bit of the walk I hate,’ said Frieda. ‘Suddenly you leave the village and you’re right in the West End. The river became the boundary between two grand estates and all that’s left of it is awful big buildings, hotels, offices, garages. Robert Poole understood everybody but he didn’t understand Tessa and Harry Welles. He couldn’t talk his way out of that one. They just wanted his money. It only took one finger for him to give them the details.’

‘Nice.’

‘But they got a taste for it. It’s funny …’ Frieda paused. ‘You’re sure you don’t want to sleep?’

Again she felt his touch.

‘I wouldn’t want to sleep tonight, even if I could.’

‘Well,’ she continued, ‘there’s a difference between doing something and being something but they merge into each other. I mean, you play the piano a bit, and then more and more, and at some point you become a pianist. That’s who you are. That’s your identity. They killed Robert Poole just for the money. They got trapped into killing that poor woman, Janet Ferris, and at that point they thought, We can do this. It stopped being just about the money and became about power. They got off on it. That’s why they got involved with the investigation. It was about control, about showing they were better than us. Harry took it even further. If he could get to me, if he could fuck me, that would be the real demonstration of his control.’

There was a silence for a time.

‘You were on to him?’ said Sandy. ‘It wasn’t going to happen, was it?’

‘He was never my type. The one who really interested me was Robert Poole.’

‘Is he your type?’

‘No, no,’ said Frieda. ‘What haunts me is that he was a bit like me. Or I’m a bit like him. But he was better than me. At least, he was too good for himself. He was just a conman. He only needed to steal their money, but he had too much empathy. He was too interesting. It caught up with him.’

‘You couldn’t save him,’ said Sandy. ‘His death was like, I don’t know, the stipulation, the basis for it all. Anyway, where are we now?’

‘It gets better,’ said Frieda. ‘We cross Piccadilly and we’re at Green Park. You look across it and you can almost see the riverbed, where it ought to be. We walk through the park, except that it’s probably blocked by the preparations for the wedding.’

‘What wedding?’

‘You know, the wedding. The royal wedding.’

‘Oh, that.’

‘But we make our way across, then round the edge of Buckingham Palace. The actual river flows under the palace. When I’m dictator and all the hidden rivers of London are exposed again, the palace will have to be demolished …’

‘A small price to pay.’

‘And then we get to Victoria, which is even worse than the bit around Grosvenor Square. It’s like a Fascist traffic island in the middle of a motorway and then a horrible street that’s like the back of a hotel, where the deliveries are made and the rubbish taken out. But then you walk down Aylesford Street to the river and that’s nice.’

‘Do you finally get to see the Tyburn?’

‘You’re not meant to,’ said Frieda. ‘It flows in a pipe under a house on the Embankment. But I once went round the side, climbed over the railing and down some metal steps on to the mud by the river at low tide. I sat by the outlet. After all that it was just a dribble. Hardly worth the trouble.’

‘I can’t believe it,’ said Sandy. ‘You remember all that.’

‘I do the walks in my head sometimes. To try to get to sleep. It doesn’t work.’

‘You should be a cabby,’ said Sandy.

‘Thanks.’

‘No, I’m serious.’

‘I’m serious, too.’

‘But don’t they have to do that … what’s it called? The Knowledge. The examiner asks them how to get from, I don’t know, Banbury Cross to the Emirates Stadium and they have to describe it street by street.’

‘I don’t think Banbury Cross is a real place.’

‘But you can do that. And they have special brains, don’t they, cabbies?’

‘The ones I meet don’t seem to have particularly special brains.’

‘But they do,’ said Sandy.

‘They have an enlargement in their mid-posterior hippocampus,’ said Frieda, ‘due to the enhanced neural activity in the region. And we’re finished. We can go home.’

‘That’s my kind of walk,’ said Sandy. ‘The kind you don’t need to get out of bed for. And you’re done.’

‘Except that poor Beth Kersey and Dean Reeve are still out there. We’re warm in bed and they’re out in the world.’

‘They’re not your problem,’ said Sandy. ‘They’re being dealt with.’