‘February,’ said Sasha,
sidestepping a puddle, ‘should be abolished.’
She was walking with Frieda along a street
lined with modern office blocks, whose height blocked out the sky and made the dark day
seem darker. Everything was black and grey and white, like an old photograph: the
buildings were monochrome, the sky chilly and blank; all the men and women – but they
were mostly men – walking past them, with their slim laptop cases and umbrellas at the
ready, wore sober suits and coats. Only the red scarf around Frieda’s neck added a
splash of colour to the scene.
Frieda was walking swiftly, and Sasha,
although she was the taller, had to make an effort to keep up.
‘And Tuesdays,’ she went on.
‘February is the worst month of the year, much worse than January, and Tuesday is
the worst day of the week.’
‘I thought that was supposed to be
Monday.’
‘Tuesdays are worse. It’s
like …’ Sasha paused, trying to think what it was like. ‘Monday’s
like jumping into ice-cold water, but you get a shock of excitement. On Tuesday
you’re still in the water but the shock has worn off and you’re just
cold.’
Frieda looked round at her, noticing the
winter pallor that made her seem frailer than usual, although there was no hiding her
unusual beauty, even bundled up in a heavy coat, with her dark blonde hair tied severely
back.
‘Bad morning?’
They turned past a wine bar
and briefly out on to Cannon Street, into the blur of red buses and taxis. Rain started
to spit.
‘Not really. Just a meeting that went
on longer than necessary because some people love the sound of their own voices.’
Sasha suddenly stopped and looked around. ‘I hate this part of London,’ she
said, not angrily, but as if she’d only just realized where she was. ‘When
you suggested a walk, I thought you were going to take me along by the river or to a
park. This is just unreal.’
Frieda slowed. They were walking past a tiny
patch of fenced-in green, untended and full of nettles and overgrown shrubs.
‘There was a church here,’ she
said. ‘It’s long gone, of course, and the graveyard as well. But this tiny
bit survived, got forgotten about somehow, among all the offices. It’s a fragment
of something.’
Sasha peered over the railings at the
litter. ‘And now it’s where people come for a cigarette.’
‘When I was little, seven or eight, my
father took me to London.’
Sasha looked at Frieda attentively: this was
the first time she had ever mentioned any member of her family or brought up a memory
from her childhood. In the year or so since they had known each other, she had told
Frieda almost everything about her own life – her relationship with her parents and her
feckless younger brother, her love affairs, her friendships, things she kept hidden from
view suddenly exposed – but Frieda’s life remained a mystery to her.
The two of them had met just over a year
ago. Sasha had gone to Frieda as a patient and she still remembered their single
session, when she had told Frieda, in a whisper and barely lifting her eyes to meet
Frieda’s steady gaze, how she
had slept with her therapist. Her
therapist had slept with her. It had been an act of confession: her dirty secret filling
the quiet room and Frieda, leaning forward slightly in her red chair, taking away the
sting and shame by the quality of her attention. Sasha had left feeling drained but
cleansed. Only later had she learned that afterwards Frieda had gone straight from their
session to the restaurant where the therapist was sitting with his wife and punched him,
creating havoc, smashing glasses and plates. She had ended up in a police cell with a
bandaged hand, but the therapist had declined to press charges and insisted on paying
for all the damage at the restaurant. Later, Sasha – who was a geneticist by profession
– had repaid the debt by surreptitiously arranging a DNA test on a piece of evidence
Frieda had lifted from the police station. They had become friends, yet it was a
friendship unlike any that Sasha had ever known. Frieda didn’t talk about
feelings; she had never once mentioned her ex, Sandy, since he had gone to work in
America, and the only time Sasha had asked her about it, Frieda had told her with
terrifying politeness that she didn’t want to discuss it. Instead, Frieda talked
about a piece of architecture, or a strange fact she had unearthed about London. Every
so often she would invite Sasha to an exhibition and sometimes she would call and ask
her if she was free for a walk. Sasha would always say yes. She would break a date or
leave work in order to follow Frieda through the London streets. She felt that this was
Frieda’s way of confiding in her, and that by accompanying her on her rambles, she
was perhaps taking some of the edge off her friend’s solitude.
Now she waited for Frieda to continue,
knowing better than to press her.
‘We went to Spitalfields Market and he
suddenly said we were standing on top of a plague pit, that hundreds of
people who had died from the Black Death were lying under our feet. They had done
tests on the teeth of some of the corpses that had been excavated.’
‘Couldn’t he have taken you to
the zoo?’ said Sasha.
Frieda shook her head. ‘I hate these
buildings as well. We could be anywhere. But there are the tiny bits they’ve
forgotten to get rid of, the odd space here and there, and the names of the roads:
Threadneedle Street, Wardrobe Terrace, Cowcross Street. Memories and ghosts.’
‘It sounds just like
therapy.’
Frieda smiled at her. ‘Doesn’t
it? Here, there’s something I want to show you.’
They retraced their route to Cannon Street
and stopped opposite the station, in front of an iron grid set into the wall.
‘What’s this?’
‘The London Stone.’
Sasha looked at it dubiously: it was an
unprepossessing lump of limestone, dull and pockmarked, and reminded her of the kind of
uncomfortable rock you perched on at the beach when you were rubbing sand off your feet
before pulling your shoes back on. ‘What’s it for?’
‘It’s protecting us.’
Sasha gave a puzzled smile. ‘In what
sense?’
Frieda indicated a small sign beside it.
‘“So long as the Stone of Brutus is safe, so long shall London
flourish.” It’s supposed to be the heart of the city, the point from which
the Romans measured the scope of their empire. Some people think it has occult powers.
Nobody really knows where it came from – the Druids, the Romans. Maybe it’s an old
altar, a sacrificial stone, a mystical centre point.’
‘You believe that?’
‘What I like,’ said Frieda,
‘is that it’s in the side of a shop and that most people walk past without
noticing it, and that
if it got mislaid, it would never be found
because it looks like a completely ordinary piece of rock. And it means what we want it
to mean.’
They were silent for a few moments and then
Sasha put a gloved hand on Frieda’s shoulder. ‘Tell me, if you were ever in
distress, would you confide in anyone?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Would you confide in me?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘Well. You could, that’s
all.’ She felt constrained, embarrassed by the emotion in her voice. ‘I just
wanted you to know.’
‘Thank you.’ Frieda’s
voice was neutral.
Sasha dropped her hand, and they turned from
the grille. The air had become notably colder, the sky blanker, as if it might snow.
‘I have a patient in half an
hour,’ Frieda said.
‘One thing.’
‘Yes?’
‘Tomorrow. You must be worried. I hope
it goes all right. Will you let me know?’
Frieda gave a shrug. Sasha watched as she
walked away, slim and upright, into the swallowing crowds.
Detective Constable Yvette Long arrived a
few moments before Karlsson. She had got the phone call just fifteen minutes previously
but already a small crowd was gathering in the street: children who ought to be at
school, young mothers with babies in buggies, men who seemed in no hurry to get
anywhere. It was bitingly cold but many of them were not wearing overcoats or gloves.
They looked excited, bright-eyed with curiosity. Two police cars were parked in front of
number three and a barrier had been put up. Just behind it, a thin stringy man with a
ginger ponytail was pacing up and down, up and down, with his barrel-chested dog. Every
so often it sat down and yawned, saliva drooling from its jaws. There was another man,
enormously fat, ripples of flesh encased in his T-shirt, behind the barrier. He was
standing quite still, mopping his shiny forehead, as if it was high summer, not icy
February. Yvette parked and, as she opened the door, DC Chris Munster came out of the
house, holding a handkerchief to his mouth.
‘Where’s the woman who found
him?’
Munster took the handkerchief from his mouth
and put it into his pocket. He made a visible effort to control the working of his face.
‘Sorry. It got to me for a bit. She’s there.’ He nodded towards a
middle-aged African woman sitting on the pavement with her face in her hands.
‘She’s waiting to talk to us. She’s shocked. The other woman – the one
who was with him – she’s in the car with Melanie. She keeps talking about tea.
Forensics are on the way.’
‘Karlsson’s on
his way too.’
‘Good.’ Munster lowered his
voice. ‘How can they live like this?’
Yvette and Karlsson pulled on paper
overshoes. He gave her a reassuring nod and, for a moment, put his hand on the small of
her back, steadying her. She took a deep breath.
Later, Karlsson would try to separate all
his impressions, put them in order, but now it was a jumble of sights and smells and a
nausea that made him sweat. They walked through the rubbish, the dog shit, the smell,
half sweet and so thick it caught in the back of the throat. He and Yvette made their
way to the door that wasn’t blocked off. They stepped inside, into a different
universe of order: it was like being in a library, where everything was meticulously
catalogued and stored in its allotted space. Three pairs of ancient shoes, on top of
each other; a shelf of round stones; another shelf of bird bones, some of which still
had matted feathers stuck to them, a tub of cigarette butts lying side by side, another
plastic container with what looked like hair balls. He had time to think, as he passed
into the next room, that the woman who lived here must be crazy. And then, for a while,
he stared at the thing on the sofa, the naked man sitting upright, in a halo of slow,
fat flies.
He was quite slender, and although it was
hard to tell, didn’t seem old. His hands were in his lap, as if in modesty, and in
one of them was an iced bun; his head was propped up with a pillow so that his open
sulphurous eyes stared straight at them and his lopsided, stiffened mouth leered. His
skin was a mottled blue, like a cheese left out for too long. Karlsson thought of the
acid-washed jeans his little daughter had made him buy for her. He pushed the thought
away. He didn’t want to bring her into this setting, even in his
mind. Leaning forward, he saw vertical marks striping the man’s torso. He must
have been dead for some time, judging not just from the way his skin had darkened where
the blood had puddled on the underside of his thighs and buttocks, but also from the
smell that was making Yvette Long, standing behind Karlsson, breathe in shallow, hoarse
gasps. There were two full cups of tea by his left foot, which was curled upwards at an
unnatural angle, the toes splayed. He had a comb stuck into his light brown hair, and
lipstick on his mouth.
‘Obviously he’s been here some
time.’ Karlsson’s voice sounded calmer than he had expected.
‘It’s warm in the room. That hasn’t helped.’
Yvette made a noise that might have been
agreement.
Karlsson forced himself to look more closely
at the mottled, puffy flesh. He waved Yvette over. ‘Look,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘At his left hand.’
The tip of the middle finger was missing
from above the knuckle.
‘It could be a deformity.’
‘It looks to me like it’s been
cut off and the wound hasn’t healed properly,’ said Karlsson.
Yvette swallowed before she spoke. She
absolutely wasn’t going to be sick. ‘I don’t know,’ she said.
‘It’s hard to tell. It looks a bit mushy but it could be …’
‘General decomposition,’ said
Karlsson.
‘Yes.’
‘Which is happening at an advanced
rate because of the heat.’
‘Chris said the bar-fire was on when
they arrived.’
‘The autopsy should tell us.
They’ll need to get a move on.’
Karlsson looked at the
cracked window and its rotting sill, the thin orange curtains. There were things that
Michelle Doyce had collected and ordered: a cardboard box of balled-up, obviously soiled
tissues; a drawer full of bottle-tops, colour-coded; a jam jar containing nail
clippings, small yellowing crescents. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ he
said. ‘Talk to her and the woman who found him. We can come back later, when
he’s been taken away.’
As they left, the forensic team arrived,
with their lights and cameras, face masks, chemicals and general air of professional
competence. Karlsson felt relieved. They would take away the horror, turn the ghastly
room boiling with flies into a well-lit laboratory where the objects would become data
and be classified.
‘What a way to go,’ he said, as
they went back outside.
‘Who the hell is he?’
‘That’s where we
start.’
Karlsson left Yvette talking to Maggie
Brennan and went to sit in the car with Michelle Doyce. All he knew about her was that
she was fifty-one years old, that she had recently been discharged from hospital after a
psychological evaluation that had come to no real conclusions about her mental health,
and that she had been living in Howard Street for a month, with no complaints from
neighbours. This was the first time Maggie Brennan had visited her: she was standing in
for someone else, who wouldn’t have paid a visit because she had been on sick
leave since last October.