‘But the odd thing is there are sets
of days when he just disappears from the radar. Like, every ten days or two weeks,
there are three or four days when there’s no trace of him and,
as far as we can tell, he wasn’t in his flat either.’
‘So you think he was with someone
else?’
‘Possibly. Someone we haven’t
traced yet.’
‘Maybe another victim.’
‘It’s a thought,
anyway.’
‘Has there been any response to the
poster?’
‘You know – dozens of people have come
forward claiming knowledge but they’re all dead ends.’
‘He’s like a gardener,
isn’t he?’ said Frieda.
They all looked at her.
‘What do you mean “he’s
like a gardener”?’ said Yvette. ‘What’s that got to do with
anything?’
‘What you’ve done makes me think
of gardening,’ said Frieda. ‘Gardening’s all about different stages.
You’re planting seeds, watering plants, picking fruit, pruning dead wood. It looks
to me as if he was in various stages of cultivating the people we know about. There are
the ones he had only contacted by phone or presumably was going to contact at some
point. Then there’s our couple in Brixton, our first leads to him, whom he had
visited once. There’s Janet Ferris, to whom he seems to have been the perfect
neighbour, kind and attentive. There’s Jasmine Shreeve – he had something on her
but hadn’t used it yet, as far as we know. Then the Wyatts. He’d managed to
extract money from Aisling and it seems unlikely he wouldn’t have put more
pressure on her. Mary Orton, of course, he had deceived out of a large amount of money
and also tried to persuade her to change her will.’
‘You’re right,’ said
Karlsson.
‘If there’s someone else we
don’t know about, someone he was seeing in those gaps, I wonder where he or she
fits into this. Was he done with them? Was he just getting started?
Or
was this person further along the line than any of them? Con men, they don’t just
cheat people of money. They like to have power. There are studies of people who have
conned their victims for no financial gain at all – it can be a grandiose project, to
make themselves feel all important.’
Chris Munster spoke for the first time.
‘What I want to know,’ he said, ‘is who is bloody Sally
Lea?’
The booming in her head had gone. The sharp
hunger had gone, and the fug of dizziness. Everything had a sharp outline. She could see
clearly now, and her thoughts were like knives.
She was his inheritor. She would not let him
down.
She stood up from the narrow bed, the ruckle
of sheets and itchy blanket. Her clothes hung off her and, with her fingers, she could
feel how sharp her bones were: pelvis, collarbone, ribs, wrists, shoulder blades, her
wings. To fly. At school she had been plump, with soft round hips. Curvacious, her
mother had said. Podgy, her enemies had jeered. Now she was lean and hard. An
instrument. His instrument.
She made her way to the long cupboard under
the bows of the boat, which stretched into darkness at its point. He had said that she
mustn’t, on any account. She had sworn: cross my heart and hope to die. But
everything had changed. The rules were gone and the waiting was over.
She reached into the cupboard and pulled out
the first packet, which was wrapped in several plastic bags against the wet, and put it
on the table. Three more followed. Then she began.
Frieda only just got to the hospital in
time. She was supposed to meet Jack in the lobby, by the rack of get-well cards, but he
was late and she saw him as he came hurtling through the
revolving
doors, his face flushed. He was wearing an odd jumble of garments – weekend clothes, she
thought, or got-out-of-bed-in-a-hurry clothes: balding velvet jeans that used to be dark
red, a shirt with brown and green geometric patterns under a cardigan with reindeers on
it, probably a Christmas present from his parents, she decided. Only one of his trainers
had laces in it so that he ran with an asymmetric hobble, sliding one foot along the
ground to stop the shoe falling off.
‘Sorry,’ he gasped. ‘Alarm
clock. Public transport. Have you been waiting long?’
‘Just a few minutes. It’s fine.
We don’t have an appointment or anything. It’s just a visit. I thought
you’d be interested to meet her and I know she likes visitors. We’ll have
coffee after and you can tell me about Carrie.’
They walked up the stairs and along the
corridor of gaudy murals, wheelchairs and Zimmer frames, then through the double doors
and into the ward. The woman in a Victorian nightie who did jigsaws was no longer there,
but everything else looked unchanged. The bed that Michelle Doyce had occupied was now
filled by a very large woman who stared at them blankly.
‘She’s through there,’
said the nurse, gesturing towards a door. ‘On her own. Orders.’ She raised
her eyebrows at them, inviting a humorous response.
Frieda nodded. ‘Good.’
Michelle Doyce’s new room was small
and poky, with peeling light green walls. It would have been unremittingly grim but for
a large window that let natural light into the room and led on to a fire escape. The
metal stairs spiralled down to a courtyard that was filled, Frieda saw, with a nearly
empty skip and several overflowing refuse bins. She couldn’t imagine any of the
patients she had seen managing to
manoeuvre their way down to safety.
There was a cockroach under the miniature sink in the corner. She opened the window,
picked the insect up with a tissue and dropped it neatly into the skip below. Jack
pulled a face.
Michelle Doyce was sitting in the metal
chair beside her bed. On the bedside table were several small scraps of paper, three
plastic bottle tops in a row, an old pill docket, whose compartments now contained small
curls of fluff and hair, five jigsaw pieces and a few thin tabs of soap, presumably
collected from the bathroom bins. This, Frieda reflected, was Michelle Doyce’s way
of making herself at home.
Michelle put a finger to her lips as they
approached. ‘They’re sleeping.’
‘We’ll be quiet,’ said
Frieda. ‘Can we sit at the end of the bed, or do you want us to stand?’
‘You can sit if you’re careful.
He can stand.’
Jack held out his hand. ‘I’m
Jack,’ he said. ‘Frieda’s friend. I’m glad to meet
you.’
Michelle Doyce looked at his outstretched
hand as if she didn’t know what it was, and after an awkward moment he dropped it
to his side, but then she leaned forward and picked it up, examining it curiously,
running her finger over his callouses, tutting over a broken blood vessel and torn nail,
murmuring to herself.
‘Look,’ she said, turning it
over so the palm lay upwards in her grasp. ‘Life lines.’
‘Will I live long?’ Jack asked,
smiling.
‘Oh, no.’ She patted his hand
softly, then let it go. ‘Not you.’
Jack looked disconcerted, although he tried
to smile.
‘Do you remember me?’ Frieda
asked.
‘You introduced us.’
‘My name’s Frieda. We talked
about the man who lived in your room.’
‘He never came back
to me.’
‘Do you still miss him?’
‘Where is he?’
‘He’s safe now.’
Michelle Doyce nodded. She made one of her
floating gestures, tracing a vague outline in the air with her blunt fingers.
‘What do you remember about
him?’
‘His poor hand.’ She turned her
face to Jack, her milky eyes. ‘Worse than yours.’
‘Just his hand? There’s nothing
else? Nothing you picked up?’
‘I never steal. I look after
things.’
‘I know that. Is there anything you
need?’
‘In the end.’
‘Where’s your dog?’
‘Everyone leaves. Ports and
rivers.’
‘But your dog, has he left
you?’
‘They’ll wake.’
She pointed at the brown blanket pulled over
the pillows.
‘Is he in there?’
‘Friends now. It took time.’
‘Can I see?’
‘Promise.’
‘I promise.’
With infinite gentleness, Michelle turned
down the blanket. ‘There,’ she said proudly.
Under the blanket lay not just one soft toy,
but two: the floppy-eared dog with button eyes that Frieda had given her, and a small
pink teddy bear with a red heart stitched on to its chest.
‘That’s good,’ said Jack.
‘They can keep each other company.’
‘Here.’
Michelle lifted the dog into his arms, positioning it carefully.
‘Where does the other one come
from?’ asked Frieda.
Michelle looked at her
uncomprehendingly.
‘Did someone bring him?’
‘I look after her.’
‘I can see that. But how did she come
here?’
‘You never can tell.’
‘So you have no idea how Michelle
Doyce came by the teddy?’
‘That’s what I’m
saying.’ The ward manager spoke loudly and deliberately, as if Frieda was hard of
hearing or slow to understand.
‘Or when she got it.’
‘That’s right. No
idea.’
‘Someone must have given it to
her.’
‘It’s just a cheap little
bear,’ the woman said. ‘Maybe she took it from someone else’s bed, or
maybe someone threw it away and she picked it out of a bin. What’s your problem?
It makes her happy. She spends every minute of the day looking after them.’
‘I need to find out if someone else
has been to visit her. How long do you keep your CCTV footage?’
‘What footage?’
‘I’ve seen several cameras round
the hospital.’
‘Oh, them. They’re just for
show. Where do you think we’d get the money for the real thing? This isn’t
one of your hospital trusts, you know. It’s hard enough to pay our nurses or get
people to clean the floors, let alone have all the mod cons.’
‘So there wouldn’t be anything
on film?’
‘I don’t think so. Not from here
at any rate. There’s a
camera at the entrance but they only keep
footage for twenty-four hours.’
‘I see. Thank you.’
Jack and Frieda sat in the downstairs
café, which was really just two Formica tables in a corner of the lobby, next to
the shop where Frieda had bought the button-eyed dog. A man in overalls trundled past
them with a trolley full of magazines and newspapers that he threw in large bundles on
to the floor. Frieda ordered a green tea from the bored-looking woman behind the
counter, and Jack a cappuccino with chocolate on top and a dried-out blueberry
muffin.
‘Poor Michelle Doyce,’ he said.
There was a line of froth above his upper lip.
‘She seems much happier
now.’
‘Because of those toys?’
‘They’re not toys to her.
They’re living creatures she can look after and love, and be loved by in return.
It’s what most of us want, after all.’
‘Yes,’ said Jack, gloomily.
‘Tell me about Carrie. You’ve
seen her twice, I think. How’s it going?’
‘Well.’ Jack brightened. He
broke off a crumbling lump of muffin and posted it into his mouth. ‘I was so
nervous. It was like going on stage. I took ages choosing what to wear, which
isn’t like me.’
‘It’s natural,’ said
Frieda. ‘So how did it go?’
‘I was in my room at the Warehouse,
waiting, an hour before she came. Paz was a bit startled. Carrie was ridiculously early
too. And she was nervous, Frieda. As soon as I saw her, I felt ashamed of my own
anxiety. I’d just been thinking of myself, but she was going through the real
thing.
She came in and sat on the chair opposite me and took a long
drink of water, and then I said that although I knew of some of the events in her life
that had brought her to me, I wanted her to tell me in her own words. And she started to
cry.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I wanted to get up and hug her. But
you would have been proud of me. I didn’t do anything.’
Frieda looked at him suspiciously. Was he
being sarcastic? ‘What happened?’
‘I gave her a tissue. She finished
crying. She apologized. I said she didn’t need to apologize. I said that when she
was with me she could say anything, express any emotion. The thing is, she doesn’t
know what she feels – whether it’s grief or anger, guilt or humiliation, or the
simple sad fact that she doesn’t have a child and all that she ever wanted was to
be a mother.’
‘Probably all of those
things.’
‘Yeah. Also, I think she was so used
to being the strong one for Alan that now she doesn’t know who she is or how to
be. That she has to learn again who she is in the world.’
‘It sounds as if it went
well.’
‘I still don’t know what that
means. The second time, just before she left, she talked about how she’d thought
she wanted to talk to someone like you but that now she saw it was better to have a
man.’
‘By which she meant better to have
you.’
‘Does that sound rude?’
‘No. It makes sense.’ She sipped
her green tea. The woman in the shop was cutting open the plastic-wrapped papers and
arranging them on racks. ‘I Want My Love Rat Back,’ read one headline.
‘She said she used to hate you,’
continued Jack. ‘She blamed you for everything that happened, but – Frieda?
What’s up?’
Frieda pointed towards one
of the tabloid newspapers. The
Daily Sketch.
‘Oh, my God,’ said Jack.
‘Is that you again? Just ignore it. It’s not worth bothering
about.’
‘I can’t ignore it,’ said
Frieda. She took the paper from the rack and brought it back to the table.
‘It’s not the main story,’
said Jack.
The main story was about a rock star in
rehab. Along the bottom of the front page was a smaller story: ‘Dodgy Doc in
Botched Murder Probe’. Alongside there was a photograph of Frieda.
‘Dodgy,’ said Jack.
‘Isn’t that libellous?’
‘I appeared before a medical tribunal.
Maybe that’s enough.’
‘Nice picture, though.’
‘Someone’s taken it without me
knowing,’ said Frieda. ‘In the street somewhere. They must have been
following me.’
‘Is that legal?’