‘He understood loneliness. Do you
think he was lonely?’
‘Perhaps. Or an outsider.’
‘Do you know where he was at
Christmas?’
‘I was in Brighton, with my
cousin’s family. I think he said he was going away for a day or so – but I
don’t know. He was here when I got back.’
‘Did you ever meet his
friends?’
‘No.’ She shook her head.
‘I never saw anyone else go to his flat at all. He went out quite a lot. He was
often away for days at a time.’
‘So you don’t know if he had
family, close relationships, love affairs?’
‘No. He never said and I didn’t
ask. We didn’t have that kind of relationship.’
‘And you don’t know if he was
straight or gay?’
‘Oh, I’m sure he liked women. He
was …’ She frowned. ‘I’m sure he liked women,’ she
repeated.
‘Why?’
Janet Ferris blushed. ‘Just the way he
was.’ She lifted her empty mug to hide her confusion. ‘He was a bit of a
flirt – not in a crass way, just to make you feel special.’
‘Handsome?’
‘Not obviously. But he grew on
you.’
She looked away and Frieda studied her: a
clever, kind and lonely woman who’d been a bit in love with Robert Poole. And
Robert Poole had drawn her out, cheered her up, listened to her, made her feel – what
was her expression? –
attended to.
‘Do you know where
he was before he lived here?’
‘I’ve no idea. You’ve made
me realize how little I knew about him. I was selfish.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Do you know what?’ She stopped,
flushing again.
‘What?’
‘You remind me of him. The way I can
say things to you.’
‘Is that what he was like?’
‘Yes. And now he’s
gone.’
Once Janet Ferris had left for work, Frieda
had twenty minutes or so before she needed to leave herself, to be in time for her first
patient of the week. And so she went upstairs to Robert Poole’s first-floor flat.
The tape had been removed from the door and there was no sign that any police officers
had been there at all. But Yvette Long had told her, very sternly and as if Frieda had
already disobeyed her, not to touch or disturb anything so she simply walked very slowly
and quietly from room to room. In the small hall, one coat and one thick jacket hung
from a hook and there was a furled black umbrella in the corner. In the living room,
there was a green corduroy sofa and matching armchair, a low coffee-table, a beige rug,
a medium-sized television, a small chest of drawers, in which, Frieda knew from reading
the report, the notebook had been found, and an empty newspaper rack. There were no
photographs, no knick-knacks or mess. There were a few pictures on the walls. They
looked to Frieda like pictures the landlord had bought as a job lot – a photo of the
Eiffel Tower at night, a bland and murky Madonna and Child, a pink sun rising or setting
over the sea, and Monet’s poppy fields. Only one painting, of two bright and
almost abstract orange fish, looked as though it might have been Robert Poole’s
individual choice, not just a tired cliché occupying a
bit of
wall space. The books on the set of shelves, which were ranged in order of size, not
subject, were a bit more revealing: three large illustrated volumes on town gardens, a
thick paperback that looked like a builder’s manual,
North and South
by
Mrs Gaskell,
Our Mutual Friend
by Charles Dickens, several books about getting
fit, a guide to forensic medicine. Frieda stood for several minutes in front of them,
frowning.
Then she moved to the kitchen. There was a
teapot and a cafetière on the work surface; four identical brown mugs hanging from
hooks; six matching tumblers and six matching glasses on the shelf; six white plates,
six white bowls, oven gloves and a tea towel by the side of the hob. She took the
tea-towel and used it to open the store-cupboard. One bag of flour, one of sugar, a
packet of muesli and another of cornflakes, a box of mince pies, a jar of instant
coffee, English breakfast tea, quick-boil rice. There was nothing in the fridge. It must
have been cleared out once the police had finished their search and taken away anything
they considered evidence.
In the bedroom, there was a small double
bed, neatly made up with a blue duvet and pillowcase, and a single chair near the
window. There were cloth slippers under the chair, a striped dressing-gown hanging from
the door, an open ironing board with the iron, its cord coiled around it, on top. A lamp
stood on the bedside table, plus a packet of paracetamol and a book with a garish cover
that turned out to be short stories about the Wild West. When Frieda, using her sleeve
to cover her hand, pulled open the wardrobe, the long mirror inside it swung past her
and she was momentarily startled by her own reflection. There were rows of ironed
shirts, plain and patterned, tailored and loose, several pairs of trousers, two jackets,
one in sober tweed, the other a macho leather one with studs. On the wardrobe floor were
sturdy leather boots, trainers, brogues. Frieda pursed her lips,
then lifted the piles of T-shirts and jerseys that were stacked on the wardrobe’s
interior shelves.
‘Who are you?’ she said out
loud, shutting the door and going into the bathroom, which was as clean and bare as if
it were in a motel: a bath, a washbasin, a toilet, a grey towel, a small round mirror,
shaving foam, a razor blade, dental floss, a flannel, nail clippers …
Frieda returned to the living room and sat
in the armchair. She thought about her own little house on the cobblestoned mews. She
was a private person: there were no photographs on display, letters left out or
postcards pinned to a notice board, yet every room was filled with objects that bore
witness to her life. The chess table at which she used to sit with her father, long ago
in a different world. The cobalt blue bowl from Venice. The painting above the
mantelpiece of a tree in spring. Her grandmother’s old silk dressing-gown, which
Frieda never wore but hung in her wardrobe, its faded greens and reds shimmering. The
mugs in her kitchen, each one different and picked up on her wanderings round London.
The mobile of paper cranes Chloë had made for her. The piece of driftwood, the old
maps of London, the battered pans, the necklace Sandy had given her when they were still
together in the glory days it still hurt her to remember, the books of
photographs … And then, of course, in her little study in the garret, all the
drawings she had done, in soft pencil on thick paper, doodles and more finished pieces
that were like a hidden diary of her days. But here, in Robert Poole’s flat, there
was almost nothing. It wasn’t just that there were no clues: apart from the few
books, it was a blank, a void, a space that was expressionless and lifeless. Perhaps it
was because the man who used to live here was dead so the flat, too, had lost its
animating spirit – but Frieda didn’t think so. She felt
depressed and disturbed just sitting in the room.
Who was Robert Poole? Rob, Robbie, Bob,
Bertie: everyone called him by a different name. His clothes were in different styles –
a leather jacket, a tweed one; brogues and boots; a gentleman’s fitted shirts and
casual sweatshirts. Whenever anyone talked of him, they were talking of themselves – the
selves he had recognized in them and drawn out of them. He was a listener, an attender,
a Good Samaritan. He had taken old Mary Orton’s money but he had listened to her
stories; to Janet Ferris he had shown neighbourly kindness, to Jasmine Shreeve
respectful attention. People liked him yet he seemed to have no friends; people
described him as charming and handsome, yet he seemed to have no relationships. And
after he had been murdered and left in a grotty alley, he had been collected by Michelle
Doyce and sat in her bedsit in Deptford for days, a naked disintegrating corpse, and no
one had noticed he was missing.
Frieda looked at her watch. It was time to
go. In forty-five minutes’ time she would be sitting in her red chair, listening
to Joe Franklin, watching him intently, attending to him, drawing him out. She felt a
small shiver go through her. It was as if the people on Robert Poole’s lists had
been his patients, needing his help.
She had lights behind her eyes and a claw
in her stomach, sharp and dragging weals of pain through her. Her head was thundering.
It wasn’t exactly pain: it was more like a painful sound, a boom of dread that
rose and fell, came nearer and then receded but only to gather strength again. She
needed to think clearly, but how could she do that when her skull was thick with this
loud, savage gale? She used to take pills when she felt like this. One large orange
capsule
with a tumbler of water to wash it down. Her mother had put it
in front of her in the morning and stood there until she was sure she had swallowed it.
But she didn’t have pills any more; it had been a long time, she couldn’t
remember how long. All of that was in the fog of the past she had left behind her. He
had shown her that drugs were just another way of keeping her tame and docile, muffling
her anger, which was righteous and alive. ‘You need purpose, not pills.’ And
he had laid a hand on her forehead, like a kind doctor or a father soothing his sick
child. ‘And you have me now,’ he had said. ‘Always remember
that.’
But she didn’t have him. He
hadn’t come and she was here alone in this dampness and cramp and cold, the wind
outside as bitter as the wind rushing through her head. Thoughts clamouring and jumbled.
Hungry too. Potatoes eaten. Gas all finished. This morning she had stirred a stock cube
into cold water, then drunk its salty undissolved granules. It had made her want to gag.
Her lip had healed, more or less, but when she looked in the little mirror the puckered
scar looked like a sneer. He wouldn’t like that. And she thought she was beginning
to smell, though she still tried to rub the hard nub of soap into her skin and into her
clothes as well, which hung in sodden trails round the cabin. Nothing dried
properly.
How long had it been? She took her calendar
of trees and held it up to the narrow window, squinting at it. Most of January, and more
than half of February, but she seemed to have stopped crossing off the days. Perhaps it
was already March. Perhaps spring was coming, yellow daffodils and opening buds, warmth
in the sun. She didn’t think so. It didn’t feel like spring.
But it was too long, even if it was still
February. Twenty-eight clear, twenty-nine in each leap year. Was it a leap year? You
could ask a man to marry you. But you couldn’t ask if
he
wasn’t there. Alone. Alone in a world full of cruel strangers and people with
deceiving smiles. What had he said? ‘I will always return. If I don’t come,
you’ll know that they’ve got me.’ Kissing her forehead, brave. She had
to be brave too. She had to continue without him, and do the things he wanted to do. She
was the fuse and he had lit her; she was the bomb and he had set her ticking. That was
all that was left now.
In the last two weeks, Joe Franklin had
been in a far better state than he had been in for months, even years: he wore jeans and
an ironed shirt; his laces weren’t trailing; his fingernails were clean and cut;
his hair was brushed; his face was freshly shaved. Usually, he sat forward in his chair,
hunched over himself, his head held in his hands and often obscured by them, but today
he had sat back, his head lolling against the chair rest, like a convalescent who was
weak but with the sense of life trickling back into him. He even smiled twice, once when
he spoke of licking out a cake bowl when he was little, and once when he told her that a
friend was coming round that evening and they were going to eat sea urchins together:
‘Did you know you could eat sea urchins?’ Frieda hadn’t known. She
noticed the way his face changed and softened when pain ebbed out of it. He looked years
younger.
Her final session of the morning was with a
middle-aged man called Gordon, who spoke in whispers through his fingers, as if he was
ashamed of himself. He was trapped by his own frantic insecurities, by the knots
he’d tied himself into, and Frieda’s job was slowly, carefully, to go into
his world and bring him back out. Sometimes she felt as if she was building a castle one
grain of sand at a time.
When it was over, she went and opened her
window for a few minutes and leaned out, inhaling the cold damp air, letting the wind
blow through her. There was still no work on the building site, but she saw that some
kids had made a den out of the planks they’d collected, and as she watched, three
young
boys ran across to it and inserted themselves through an opening
in the wonky structure. She remembered that it was half-term: Chloë had told her
very firmly that they were having no chemistry lessons this week; she was on
holiday.
She closed the window again and wrote her
notes on the last session, but before she had finished, the phone rang. It was Josef.
‘Where are you?’ she said.
‘With the woman,’ he said.
‘Mrs Orton. Doing the house. Fixing here and there.’
‘Is she all right?’
‘Can you come?’
‘Is there a problem?’
Josef replied, but the line was bad or he
was speaking quietly so Frieda couldn’t make out what he was saying.
‘Can you speak louder?’ she
said. ‘I can’t hear what you’re saying.’
‘Better if you come,’ said
Josef. ‘You can come now?’
‘Is something wrong?’
‘You can come now?’
Frieda gave up. ‘Yes,’ she said.
‘I can come now.’
The door was opened by a man Frieda
didn’t recognize. He was in his fifties, with thinning short grey hair, and was
dressed in grey corduroy trousers and a checked shirt. He looked at her with a
frown.
‘I’m Robin Orton,’ he
said, and led her through. In the kitchen, Mary was sitting at the table with another,
slightly older, man. He was also casually dressed, with black jeans and a navy blue
sweater zipped up to the neck. Slightly older, slightly bulkier, slightly balder. To
Frieda it looked like dress-down day at an office where the employees would have been
happier in their normal suits. ‘This is my brother, Jeremy,’ said Robin.