In a small road in Poplar that led through
boarded-up estates towards the Lea river, a storm drain flooded. At just after three in
the morning, the drain cover was dislodged. About ten minutes later, a clump of hair
floated to the surface. Beneath it, something glimmered faintly.
But it wasn’t until eight twenty-five
the next morning, when the rain had eased to an icy drizzle, that a teenage boy walking
his terrier came across the remains of a body that was unmistakably human. Unmistakably
that of a woman.
Frieda had woken at five. She liked being
in her small, orderly house when the weather outside was wild. Everything was battened
down against the rain that flew in bullets against her windows; the gusts of wind
sounded like a stormy sea, the foamy rush of an incoming tide. She lay for a while, not
thinking, simply listening, but gradually thoughts clarified and pushed their way into
her consciousness. The thoughts were
people and she could see their
faces: Sandy, who was far away but whose fingers touched her when she was asleep, whose
arms wrapped around her at last; Alan, with his brown spaniel eyes, who had left his
wife and disappeared; his identical twin Dean, dead for more than a year but who stalked
her dreams again, always with that amiable and nasty smile; Dean’s wife, Terry;
Terry’s sad and careful sister Rose. And then there was Michelle Doyce, with her
fading face and her strong, blistered hands, who talked to dead men and stuffed dogs as
if they could understand everything she said. Frieda turned towards the window, waiting
for the first light to appear through the curtains. Words and phrases flickered through
her mind, tiny lights in the darkness. She tried to separate her anxieties and give them
a proper name.
Just before six, she got up, pulled on a
dressing-gown and went downstairs to light the fire in the living room and make herself
a pot of coffee. It was Sunday: she had no patients to see, no conferences to attend, no
duties to see to. She had planned to go for a walk through the watery streets, visit the
flower market, buy provisions, pop in at her friend’s café, Number 9, for a
bowl of porridge or a cinnamon bagel, perhaps spend an hour or so making a drawing in
her study, which was like an eyrie at the top of her narrow house. Instead, she sat by
the fire, occasionally crouching to blow strength into the flames, drank mug after mug
of coffee, and attempted to sort through the events of her week and the murky emotions
that had been stirred up by the hearing and by Karlsson’s surprise reappearance in
her life.
Then the doorbell rang.
Karlsson looked strange on Frieda’s
doorstep, as if he was in fancy dress. He was wearing black jeans, a sweater and a
leather jacket, and was damp from the rain. His hair was wet and clung to his skull,
making him look older and thinner.
‘You gave me a shock,’ she said.
Anxiety curled through her: he was not bringing good news. ‘You’re not
wearing a suit.’
‘It’s Sunday,’ he
said.
‘Can I get you a coffee?’
‘I don’t think so. Another time
perhaps.’
‘Are you going to come in?’
‘Just for a minute.’ He stepped
over the threshold. ‘I wanted to tell you that we’re having a meeting about
the case tomorrow morning. We’re probably winding it up. I’d like it if you
were there. You’ve probably got a patient, though.’
‘What time?’
‘Nine thirty.’
‘I’ve got a gap. I could come
for an hour.’
‘Good. Someone you probably know is
going to be there. Dr Hal Bradshaw.’
‘I’ve heard of him.’
‘He does some profiling for us.
He’s pricey but the commissioner’s keen on him.’
‘I don’t want to get into a turf
war.’
‘We’ll be deciding whether to
send the case to the CPS. Will you come?’
‘All right,’
said Frieda. ‘But you didn’t arrive at my house early on a Sunday morning to
tell me about a meeting.’
‘No.’
Now that the moment had come, he felt
unwilling to speak the words.
She looked at him with concern. ‘Come
through to the kitchen. I’ll make us that coffee – I’m having some myself
anyway and you look like you could do with it.’
He followed her and she pulled a packet of
coffee beans from the fridge. She took a white poppy-seed roll from a bag and put it on
a plate for him. He stood by the window and watched her, not speaking. Only when the mug
of coffee was in front of him and he had taken off his jacket did she sit down opposite
him.
‘Tell me, then.’
‘With all the rain,’ he said,
‘there’ve been floods.’ He stopped.
‘Floods …’ Frieda prompted
him.
‘Yesterday morning someone’s dog
came across some bodily remains floating in a storm drain in Poplar. In the next couple
of days, they’re doing the full identity check. Dental records, probably. But I
know what they’re going to find.’
Frieda was quite still. She gazed at him
with her dark eyes. He put out a hand and laid it across hers for a second. She
didn’t respond, but neither did she pull away.
‘Kathy Ripon,’ she said at
last.
Kathy Ripon: the young research student whom
Professor Seth Boundy, specialist in identical twins and their genetic implications, had
sent to Dean Reeve’s house the December before last, following information that
Frieda had given him. Kathy Ripon, who had never been seen since but whose parents still
waited for. Kathy Ripon, who lay across Frieda’s conscience like an unyielding
boulder, and
whose narrow, intelligent face appeared to her in dreams
and in waking hours.
‘There was a locket,’ said
Karlsson, quietly, removing his hand and picking up his mug of coffee.
Frieda had known that Kathy Ripon was dead.
She’d known it a hundred per cent. But, even so, she felt as if she had been
punched in the stomach. Speaking was a great effort. ‘Do the parents
know?’
‘They were told yesterday afternoon. I
wanted you to know before you saw it in the papers.’
‘Thank you,’ said Frieda.
‘It was different from the
children,’ said Karlsson. ‘Dean didn’t need her. He didn’t want
her. He just had to get her out of the way. She was probably dead by the time we heard
she was missing.’
‘Probably. Maybe.’ She made a
great effort to look at Karlsson. ‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘What? For being the bringer of bad
news?’
‘Yes. You didn’t need
to.’
‘Yes, I did. There are some things
–’ He was interrupted by a harsh electronic version of ‘The March of the
Toreadors’. He took his phone from his pocket and looked at it.
She saw his face become grim.
‘Work?’
‘Family.’
‘You should go.’
‘Yeah. Sorry.’
‘That’s fine,’ said
Frieda.
After she had let him out, she scarcely
moved, just leaned her head against the inside of the door. She tried to stop herself
thinking about what it must have been like. That sort of empathy is no good to anybody,
she told herself. But still. There had been all the celebrations about the children
being found, triumphant press conferences, and all the time Kathy
Ripon
had been under the ground with nobody coming for her: a clever young woman,
hard-working, anxious to please her boss, standing eagerly with her notebook and her
researcher’s questions on the rim of the black hole of Dean Reeve’s life –
and then being sucked into it.
Frieda hoped so much that Karlsson was right
and that Kathy Ripon had died quickly, had not been toyed with or buried alive. You
heard of such things: victims knowing their would-be rescuers were above them, but
unable to make them hear. She shuddered. For a moment, her little house – huddled in the
mews and surrounded by tall buildings, its rooms dim and painted with rich dark colours
– felt like a vault rather than a refuge, and she like an underground creature hiding
from the bright world.
And then, like a body rising to the surface
of a murky lake, the thought came to her of Carrie Dekker talking about Alan, her
husband, Dean’s identical twin. How he’d disappeared. She pressed her head
harder against the door, feeling her brain working, her thoughts hissing. She
couldn’t stop herself: the past was seeping into the present and there were things
she needed to know. She wondered why she was doing this. Why was she going back?
On Monday morning, she had an eight
o’clock session with a man – he seemed more like a boy – in his mid-twenties, who
sat crouched over in his chair, his bulky body shaken by sobs for the first ten minutes,
and then, stumbling from his seat and sinking down beside her, tried to get her to hug
and hold him. He so badly wanted reassurance, a mothering presence to tell him that
everything would be all right, that she would take the burden of it all for him. He was
lonely and loveless and lost, and he wanted someone to care for him. He thought that
Frieda could become his mother-figure, his friend, his
rescuer. She
took him by the chapped hand and led him back to his seat. She handed him a box of
tissues and told him to take his time, then waited in her red chair while he wept and
mopped his streaming face, all the while sobbing out apologies. She watched him in
silence until his weeping subsided when she asked, ‘Why did you keep saying
sorry?’
‘I don’t know. I felt
stupid.’
‘Why stupid? You felt sad.’
‘I don’t know.’ He stared
at her helplessly. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know
where to begin. Where shall I begin?’
After he had left and she had written up
her notes, Frieda walked to Warren Street station and caught the tube. The train stopped
in a tunnel for fifteen minutes. A crackly voice had talked about a ‘body under a
train at Earl’s Court’ and there had been a murmur of discontent.
‘It’s not even on the same line,’ a woman next to her had muttered, to
nobody in particular. Frieda got out at the next station, looked for a taxi in the cold
rain and didn’t find one, then just walked. Even so, she was only a few minutes
late for the meeting. There were five people sitting around a table: Karlsson,
Commissioner Crawford (whom she had never met but had seen on television the year
before, talking about the tremendous police work that had been done to recover Matthew
and how he didn’t want to take all the credit), and Yvette Long (who gave her a
puzzled look, as if she wondered what she was doing there). There were also two men she
didn’t recognize – someone the commissioner introduced as Jacob Newton, who peered
at her as if she was some interesting specimen in a museum of curiosities, and Dr Hal
Bradshaw. He looked as though he was in his early fifties, his curly dark hair streaked
with grey. He was wearing a pin-striped suit, but the stripes were in a shade of green.
When Karlsson described Frieda’s
part in the Dean Reeve case to
him, Bradshaw frowned at her.
‘I don’t quite see the
need,’ he said to Commissioner Crawford. ‘Just my opinion, of
course.’
‘I want her here,’ said
Karlsson, firmly. He turned to Frieda. ‘Dr Bradshaw was about to give us his
assessment of the murder scene and of Michelle Doyce’s state of mind. Dr
Bradshaw?’
Hal Bradshaw coughed. ‘You all
probably know my methods,’ he said. ‘It’s my view that murderers are
like artists, like storytellers.’ Crawford nodded approvingly and sat back in his
chair as if at last he felt on safe ground. ‘The scene of a murder is like the
murderer’s work of art.’
As Bradshaw got into his stride, Frieda
leaned back in her chair and stared up at the ceiling. It was made of polystyrene tiles
with a rough grey pattern, which gave them the appearance of paving stones.
‘When I saw the photographs, I felt
like I was looking at a chapter from one of my own books. I feel like I’m giving
away the punch line at the beginning of the joke, but it was instantly clear to me that
Michelle Doyce was a highly organized psychopath. Now, when I use a phrase like that,
most of you think of a man cutting up women. But I’m using the term strictly. It
was clear to me that she entirely lacked empathy and thus she was able to plan the
murder, carry it out, arrange the crime scene, then continue to lead a normal
life.’
‘Did you decide all this before you
talked to her?’ Karlsson asked.
Bradshaw turned to him with an expression of
tolerant amusement. ‘I’ve been doing this job for twenty-five years. You get
a sixth sense for these things, the way an art expert can instantly spot a fake Vermeer.
Of course, I then interviewed Michelle Doyce, to the extent that it’s possible to
interview her.’
Frieda was still staring at
the polystyrene tiles. She was trying to establish whether the streaked pattern repeated
itself or whether it was truly random.
‘Did she confess?’ asked
Karlsson.
Bradshaw snorted. ‘The crime scene was
her confession,’ he said, addressing most of his remarks to the commissioner.
‘I’ve looked at her file. She has led a life of utter failure and
powerlessness. This crime and this crime scene were her final belated assertion of some
kind of control of her life, some assertion of sexual power. “Here is a naked
man,” she was saying. “This is what I can do to him.” Men have
rejected her all her life. Finally, she decided to fight back.’
‘That makes sense,’ said
Commissioner Crawford. ‘You agree, Mal?’
‘But did she say anything,’
Karlsson said, ‘when you asked her about the body?’
‘She wouldn’t answer
directly,’ said Bradshaw. ‘She just babbled about the river and about ships
and fleets. But if the story I’m telling is right, which I’m sure it is,
then this isn’t just nonsense. This is her way of explaining herself. Obviously
she lives near the river. She could almost see it from her house. But the way I read it,
the river is the great symbol of the woman. The fluvial woman.’ Frieda looked down
from the tiles just in time to see Bradshaw make a flowing gesture with his hands to
accompany his words. ‘And the ships and the fleet,’ he continued, ‘are
symbols of the man. I think what she is telling us is that the river, with its feminine
tides and currents, is sweeping the male boat out to sea. Which is a form of
death.’