‘Yes,’ said Frieda, looking beyond him at the list of food and prices on the wall. ‘Can I have a green salad? And a bottle of water.’
‘Salad,’ the man shouted. He leaned down and took a plastic bottle from a fridge. He placed it on the counter. ‘Anything else?’
‘That’s fine,’ said Frieda, handing over a five-pound note.
The man slid the change across the counter. ‘The salad’ll be a minute,’ he said.
Frieda took the flyer and put it on the counter. ‘I got your flyer,’ she said.
‘Yeah?’ said the man.
Frieda had worried about this. All it would take was one wrong question, one that made it sound as if she was from the council or the VAT office and they’d clam up and that would be that.
‘I wanted to ask you,’ she said. ‘I was going to get some flyers done myself. I’ve got a little business. I thought I could print some up like you’ve done, get some publicity.’
The phone rang. The man picked it up and took another order.
‘What I was saying,’ Frieda continued, when he was done, ‘was that I was interested in getting flyers like that. I wondered where you got them done.’
‘There’s a printer along the road,’ said the man. ‘They done us a few hundred.’
‘And then what happens? Do they deliver them for you?’
‘They just print them up. My cousin dropped them off.’
‘You mean he pushed them through doors?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Do you know where he did it?’ asked Frieda.
The man shrugged. Frieda felt a sense of hopelessness, as if she were trying to grab something and it was slipping through her fingers.
‘I’m just curious,’ she said. She took the A–Z from her bag and fumbled for the right page. ‘You see, I’d probably end up delivering them myself, so I wanted to know how big an area you could cover. Could you just show me on the map where he went? Or did he just wander wherever he wanted?’
She pushed the map across the counter towards him. A sound came from behind him and a polystyrene container appeared in the gap. The man took the salad and gave it to Frieda. There was chopped cabbage and carrot and onion and a slice of tomato, with a swirl of pink liquid across it. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘About this map.’
The man sighed. He leaned down and put his forefinger on the page. ‘I told him to go along Acre Lane and do all the streets along it on that side.’
‘Which streets?’
The man circled his finger around. ‘All those,’ he said. ‘Until he ran out.’
It looked like a lot of streets.
‘And there were three hundred?’
‘Five, I think. We’ve got a pile in the shop.’
‘And this was about a fortnight ago?’
The man looked puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I wondered how well it worked,’ said Frieda. ‘Whether it made lots of people ring up for pizza.’
‘I don’t know,’ said the man. ‘A few, maybe.’
‘All right. Thanks for your help.’ She turned to go.
‘Hang on. You forgot your salad.’
‘Yes, right.’
She walked out of the shop and, feeling guilty, waited until she was thirty or forty yards away, well out of sight, before she crammed the salad container into an overflowing bin.
As she sat on the underground train, returning north, she looked at the back of the flyer once more, though she knew the words by heart. It was laid out like a shopping list. String. Straw. Cord. Stone. Why would you buy those? What would you use them for? Why would you need to buy both string and cord? Were they actually different in some technical DIY sense that she didn’t recognize? Was there a job that string couldn’t do for which you needed cord? It sounded like something outdoors, unless this had a medieval theme. Weren’t Elizabethan taverns scattered with straw? Or perhaps it was a drinking straw. Frieda stared at the list until her head hurt. When she came out of Warren Street station she kept going over and over it. Was she missing an obvious connection? She played mental games. You could tie straw with string. Or a cord. What about the stone? She thought of David and Goliath, except that that was a sling and a stone.
What would you do with those four things? Who might know? One name came straight into her mind. She couldn’t meet him but she could phone him; in fact, she should have phoned him long ago, just so that he knew she was thinking of him. As soon as she came into her house, she flicked through the leather-bound notebook she kept by the phone. She found the number and dialled. It rang and rang, and she was preparing to leave a message when there was a click.
‘Frieda,’ said the voice.
‘Yes, Josef. Hello! It’s good to hear your voice after all this time. How are you? Are you doing all right there? We miss you.’
‘How am I?’ he said. ‘That is a big question. I don’t know the answer.’
‘Has something happened, Josef?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Frieda, how are you? How are things with you?’
‘Just the same,’ she said. ‘On the whole. But I want to hear about you. I should have called. I’m sorry I didn’t.’
‘That is OK,’ he said. ‘Life is busy for all. Many things happen, things that do not do well on the phone.’
‘I keep looking at the weather,’ Frieda said. ‘Whenever I get the chance, I check the weather in Kiev. That’s you, isn’t it? The last time I saw, it was minus twenty-nine. I hope you’re wrapping up warm.’
There was a long silence, followed by a strange sort of moan.
‘Are you all right?’ asked Frieda. ‘Are you still there?’
‘Frieda, I am not in Kiev at the moment.’
‘Oh. Where are you?’
He said something she couldn’t make out.
‘Sorry? Is that somewhere in the countryside?’
He said the name again.
‘Can you speak more slowly?’
He said the three syllables one by one.
‘Summertown?’ said Frieda. ‘You mean, like Summertown in London?’
‘Yes,’ said Josef. ‘Not like. The Summertown in London. That one.’
It was several seconds before Frieda could speak coherently. ‘You’re … you’re only about five hundred yards away.’
‘It is possible.’
‘What the hell are you doing here?’
‘I have been in complications.’
‘I need to see you.’
‘No good.’
‘I’m your friend, remember?’ Frieda said. ‘Come to my house. Right now.’
Fifteen
Frieda hadn’t seen Josef for nearly two months. The last occasion had been shortly before Christmas when, in memory of the previous Christmas they had spent together, he had made some traditional Ukrainian food and carried it to her house, wrapped in white linen and placed inside a ribboned box, as a parting gift: little cakes made of wheat, honey and poppy seeds. She remembered him as he had been then, beaming with pride, expansive with generosity and full of solemn excitement. After many months of absence, he was returning to his country to visit his wife Vera and his two sons. His usually shaggy hair was cut short and he wore a new quilted jacket for the cold Ukrainian winter. He had bought his sons T-shirts saying ‘I love London’, small Union flags and snow domes with miniature London scenes inside.