She didn’t go straight back to the
hospital but took the bus to Belsize Park and walked towards the Heath. After a long
winter’s corridor of darkness and unyielding cold, spring was arriving – in the
new warmth of the air, in the daffodils that were everywhere. The sticky buds were just
beginning to unfurl on the horse-chestnut trees. After the
ice and the
darkness, balmy days would arrive, long evenings and soft mornings.
She rang the bell, waited, rang again.
‘What?’ said the voice on the
intercom, sounding cross.
‘Dr Berryman? It’s Frieda
Klein.’
‘It’s Sunday. Don’t you
ever bother to ring ahead?’
‘Can I talk to you for a
moment?’
‘You are talking to me.’
‘Not like this. Face to
face.’
There was an exaggerated sigh, and then he
buzzed her up. She followed the stairs to the top flat, where he was waiting by the open
door. ‘I was playing the piano,’ he said.
‘How’s it going?’
‘Not much progress.’
‘I’ve come about Michelle
Doyce.’
‘Is she still alive?’
‘Yes.’
‘Any developments?’
‘Yes. You and I are going to make sure
she is put in a more appropriate institution, where she is properly cared for and can be
surrounded by the things she loves.’
‘We are?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘Not because she is a medical
curiosity but because she’s in distress and she is our responsibility.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really.’ Frieda nodded at
him. ‘It was you who gave her the teddy, wasn’t it?’
‘I don’t know what you’re
talking about.’
‘Pink, with a heart stitched on to its
chest.’
‘The shop had a lousy
selection.’
‘Don’t worry – I won’t
tell anyone. You don’t know how
much trouble it caused,’
said Frieda. ‘But it was a nice thing to do. And it helped, in a way.’
As she walked down the stairs, she heard the
sound of badly played Chopin behind her.
‘Did you see the news today?’
Yvette asked Munster. ‘Money for the police is being cut by twenty-five per cent.
How the hell are we going to manage that? I’ll probably be working at
McDonald’s in six months. If I’m lucky.’
‘It’s about efficiency,’
said Munster. ‘Cutting bureaucracy. Frontline services won’t be
affected.’
‘Crap,’ said Yvette. ‘The
bureaucracy is me, sitting here trying to prepare a file for the CPS. How’s that
going to be cut? That’s what that idiot Jake Newton was here for, wasn’t it?
Looking for who to cut. Where is he, by the way?’
‘I suppose he’s writing his
report, just as we’re writing ours. Speaking of which, we’ve got to explain
these pictures for our report.’
‘Oh, shit,’ said Yvette.
‘I was hoping someone else would deal with them. It’s like, I don’t
know, like an old sweater. A bit of wool comes loose and you think you’ve sorted
it but then something’s gone wrong with the sleeve. What I can’t understand
is that you’ve killed someone, you’ve got the body dangling in front of you
and you start rearranging the pictures. And moving furniture around. Is this just some
crazy theory of Frieda Klein’s? Couldn’t they have just moved two of the
pictures? Take the big one to cover the patch, move the furniture. Replace the smallest
picture with the one they’d brought. Wouldn’t that be simpler?’
‘There’s a reason why not. I
just can’t think of it.’
Karlsson came into the room, followed by
Frieda.
‘Everything all right?’ asked
Karlsson.
‘We were talking
about the pictures,’ said Yvette. ‘For the report. We can’t get it
straight in our heads.’
‘Frieda?’ Karlsson turned to her
and waited.
Frieda considered for a moment. Yvette
thought she seemed tired, dark around her eyes.
‘OK,’ she began. ‘Six
pictures of different sizes. Poole took the third smallest, stowed it under his bed and
replaced it with the picture he’d taken from Tessa Welles, the one he gave to
Janet Ferris and that she then put back.’ She gave a small sigh. ‘Poor
thing. Sometimes I think it’s people’s attempt to do the right thing that
destroys them. Anyway, imagine the scene. Tessa and Harry Welles have killed her. The
picture they have brought is too small for the space, but it will fit where the second
smallest picture hung. The second smallest picture will fit where the smallest picture
hung. There is still a gap, which they cover with the next biggest picture, so they move
each picture to cover the smaller patch. This leaves them with one large blank patch,
which they cover by moving the dresser, and one little painting, which they take away
with Tessa’s.’
‘Wasn’t there an easier
way?’
‘It depends how you look at it,’
said Frieda. ‘You’ve got to remember that they were in a state of extreme
stress. There was a body hanging in front of them. They were having to improvise. They
solved one problem at a time, and I think they managed it pretty well. There was another
reason as well. By moving all the pictures, they disguised which was the important
one.’
‘I think I’ll have to see it
written down,’ said Munster.
‘There is the alternative
theory,’ said Yvette. ‘Which is that Poole just wanted to rearrange his
pictures.’
‘That was what I thought,’ said
Karlsson. ‘So this morning we went to Tessa Welles’s flat. We found the
painting, the real
one with the bloody pine tree and the moon, and
they’ve got it downstairs where they’re going over it. Unofficially there
are several sets of prints on the frame.’
‘So they would have got away with it
if they hadn’t made a mistake with the bloody pictures?’ asked Munster.
‘No. Lots of small things didn’t
add up. But it was all vague at first,’ said Frieda. ‘With everyone else
Poole met, he found their weakness, got under their skin. But Tessa got under
Poole’s skin. That was interesting. Their eagerness to get involved with me seemed
a bit strange. It may sound crazy, but it was as if they wanted to become part of the
inquiry.’
‘It doesn’t sound crazy at
all,’ said Karlsson. ‘It’s part of our training. It’s not at all
uncommon for perpetrators to hang around the fringes of the investigation, even to try
and get involved. It’s to do with control. At least, that’s what the
textbooks say.’
‘The Welleses were big on
control,’ Frieda said. ‘It all smelt funny to me but finding Aisling
Wyatt’s necklace was the key thing.’
‘Which implicated the Wyatts,’
said Munster.
‘The people it definitely didn’t
implicate were the Wyatts. I know that people leave things at murder scenes, but not an
expensive necklace. It’s just the sort of thing that Poole would have helped
himself to, though, and shown off to Tessa. Even given to her.’
‘So why did it end up in
Michelle’s flat?’ said Munster.
‘I walked the route from the
Wyatts’ flat along the river to where Michelle Doyce lived. Tessa and Harry Welles
must have checked the same route in their car. They wanted to dump the body as close to
the Wyatts’ place as possible, and Howard Street is closest to where you could
pull a car up to an alley and leave a body without being seen. And they put
Aisling’s necklace in his pocket. It was as if they thought the
police were really thick and needed to be led by the nose.’
‘How did you know that Tessa had had
an affair with Poole?’
Frieda shrugged. ‘It was more or less
a guess,’ she said. ‘Poole stopped sleeping with Aisling Wyatt at about the
time he met Tessa. It seemed likely. When Tessa described the idea as pornographic, I
knew I’d been right. But even when I’d started to feel queasy about Tessa
and Harry Welles, I knew that probably none of it counted as real evidence. Even Harry
calling him ‘Bob’ to me, that one time. And whatever you think of me, I do
understand you can’t simply follow your intuition. That’s what lynch mobs
do. I felt certain the Wyatts were innocent but that someone else could be guilty aside
from Harry and Tessa. What about Beth Kersey, for instance?’ She rubbed her face.
‘So I used Michelle Doyce as bait. For my sins.’
‘You were sure they’d kill her
to protect themselves?’ said Munster.
‘I felt they had a taste for
it,’ said Frieda. ‘And that this was something they could do. I’d
imagine that murder gets easier after the first one or two.’
‘So,’ said Karlsson,
‘it’s the end of the case. We’ve found Robert Poole’s killers,
and Janet Ferris’s. The one person we haven’t found and never will is Robert
Poole himself. That’s not even his name. He’s not Edward Green either.
He’s a mystery, a blank.’
‘Perhaps that’s why he was so
successful at what he did,’ added Frieda. ‘He became whoever people wanted
him to be, became like a mirror for the victims, reflecting back to them the self they
wanted to see. He was the son Mary Orton didn’t have, the lover Aisling Wyatt had
lost in her husband, the friend and confessor for Jasmine Shreeve. He
was everyone and no one, the perfect conman. I wonder who he was to himself, what he
saw when he looked in the mirror he held up to himself. Did he see anything?’
‘This is the time when we’re
supposed to go to the pub and celebrate.’
‘And,’ continued Frieda,
‘what was he to Beth Kersey? That’s what I keep wondering. Where is she? Is
she still alive? Poole preyed on people’s weaknesses, their sadness, their little
failures. But Beth Kersey’s vulnerability is on a different level.’
‘I don’t know what to say,
Frieda,’ said Karlsson. ‘Except what about that drink?’
‘No,’ said Frieda.
‘I’m going to see Lorna Kersey.’
As she left the office, she saw Commissioner
Crawford and Jake Newton at the end of the corridor. Newton glanced at her, then
away.
A woman brought them coffee in the garden
room. Outside, a man was working in the rose garden, pruning, tying up branches. Frieda
found it difficult to believe they were in the middle of London.
‘I thought you were coming to bring me
news,’ said Lorna.
‘I came because I want your
help,’ said Frieda.
‘It’s meant to be so easy to
find people nowadays, with mobile phones and the Internet and everything.’
‘But that’s not the issue. As
far as the police are concerned, your daughter is an adult and she’s free to leave
home and disappear, if that’s what she wants.’
‘But she’s not an adult,’
said Lorna. ‘Or, at least, she’s not well.’
‘That’s why I’m
here,’ said Frieda. ‘I need to find out more about her mental state. You
said that she had experienced schizophrenic episodes, but that can be anything from mild
delusions to a complete loss of autonomy. I mean, you can be a danger to yourself and to
other people. For example, did
you
ever feel threatened by your
daughter?’
‘Oh, no,’ said Lorna. ‘She
wasn’t overtly hostile, or not usually. She was always trying to help. That was
her problem. When she was a teenager, she tried to paint her own room.’
‘That doesn’t sound so
bad,’ said Frieda.
‘It was the way she did it. It was
disastrously messy but there was always something more than that, something
frightening.’ Lorna picked up her coffee cup, then put it down without drinking
from it. ‘I’ve had my own difficulties in my
life from
time to time. You may look at this house and think everything’s fine with
me.’
No, Frieda thought. She didn’t think
that for a single moment.
‘I know what it’s like for
things to feel a bit meaningless sometimes,’ Lorna continued. ‘But you have
your family and your friends and your work to help you keep stable. But with Beth, in
her bad patches, it was seeing what life could be like if all of that was
gone.’
‘I know she could be a victim.
I’m asking if she could also be violent,’ said Frieda.
‘I don’t want to talk about
things like that,’ said Lorna. ‘I just want her to be safe.’
Frieda glanced out of the window. The
gardener was cutting a rose bush back so hard that it was little more than a collection
of stumps. Could it survive that? ‘Was your daughter ever forcibly committed for
psychiatric treatment?’
Lorna shook her head in disapproval.
‘We didn’t want anything like that,’ she said. ‘She received
help when she needed it.’
‘Was she seeing a psychiatrist at the
time she disappeared?’
‘She was receiving some treatment,
yes.’
‘Do you know the details of the
treatment?’
‘No,’ said Lorna. ‘But I
don’t think it was much help.’
‘Do you remember the doctor’s
name?’
‘I don’t think she was right for
Beth. She got worse, if anything.’
‘But what was her name?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Lorna
said impatiently. ‘Dr Higgins, I think.’
‘Do you remember her first
name?’
Lorna was growing visibly more irritated.
‘E-something.
Emma, maybe. Or Eleanor. They weren’t any
help, though. None of them.’
It had been a bad night. They’d been
angry with her, a chorus of angry voices, shrill and harsh and high and low and
jangling, and she didn’t know how to make them stop. They were Edward’s
words, things he’d said to her, but they had come alive inside her skull and they
wouldn’t stop – he wouldn’t stop. Beth knew she had to leave. Was it the
sort of thing you could run away from? She felt like she had the worst kind of headache,
the one that feels like insects inside your head, chewing and crawling and scratching,
and she wanted to escape so that the ache would stay behind. She thought of setting fire
to herself, burning the insects to death, like when people set anthills on fire and the
ants run round and round in circles as if that would do any good. Or she could get into
a freezer, like the chest freezer her parents had in their scullery. It would be such a
relief to get inside, into the fierce cold, sharp as a knife, pull down the top, lie in
the dark and feel the insects go to sleep.