‘Yeah. Yeah. I think so. I’m sure, actually. This is beginning to spook me out, if you don’t mind me saying so.’
‘Sorry. There’s a drawing I’ve got here. Can you tell me if it reminds you of anyone?’
She took her drawing out of the A4 envelope she’d put it in and handed it to him. He stared at it. ‘Maybe.’
‘Maybe?’
‘It bears a resemblance. There was a guy – he was going to do our decorating. Really keen, as a matter of fact. Nice guy. Very helpful. This looks a bit like him. And he wrote down the paints, now I come to think of it. But we never used him, if that’s what you’re going to ask. He just disappeared. Didn’t answer his phone or anything. Left us in the lurch. That’s why we got this lot to come.’
Frieda tried to keep her expression steady. ‘When did he disappear?’
‘Well – maybe two weeks ago, something like that. I don’t know exactly. Cas could probably be more accurate. Is there a problem? Has he done something?’
‘What was his name?’ She heard her own use of the past tense, but the young man didn’t notice.
‘Rob. Rob Poole.’
‘Do you have his address?’
‘No. Nothing. Just his mobile number.’ He scrolled down on his phone and found it, jotted it on the back of Andy’s worse-for-wear flyer. ‘He’s not answering it, though – I must have left him half a dozen messages.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Do you know him?’
‘Not exactly. Could I have your name as well, please, and your phone number?’
‘Why on earth?’
‘I think the police might want to talk to you about him.’
Reuben hadn’t put potatoes in the oven: he’d made a greasy, rich lasagne, garlic bread and a green salad. The smell greeted them when he opened the door, wearing an apron and his half-moon spectacles balanced on the end of his nose. With one swift glance, he took in the state of Josef, then stepped forward and clapped him on the shoulders.
‘Thank goodness you’re back,’ he said. ‘I was beginning to think I was actually going to have to pay someone to mend my roof and assemble my bloody easy self-assembly chest.’
‘I not stay,’ Josef mumbled. ‘I just give hello and take my things.’
‘Can we come in?’ said Frieda. ‘It’s too cold to be standing out here.’
So, they bundled him inside, peeled off his jacket and shoes, and Reuben pushed a bottle of beer into his hands and took him to see where the leak came from, and somehow, ten minutes later, Josef was immersed in a scalding hot bath. From where they sat in the warm, fugged-up kitchen, Frieda and Reuben could hear him splashing and moaning.
‘What the fuck’s happened?’ Reuben asked.
Both of them instinctively looked across at the dog-eared photo stuck to Reuben’s fridge that Josef had put there more than a year ago, when he’d first moved into Reuben’s house: his dark-haired wife and his two dark-haired sons.
‘He was in Summertown, living on a building site.’
‘Why didn’t he say?’
‘He’s ashamed.’
‘Of what?’
‘I don’t know yet.’
‘It’s lucky I really do have a leaking roof.’
‘Yes.’
‘Well done for rescuing him.’
‘I didn’t. I called him up for advice on something.’
‘He’s here now, anyway.’
Frieda nodded, then said, ‘By the way, I’m going to Kathy Ripon’s funeral at the end of the week. I’ve been thinking a lot about her death, and about Dean Reeve. I have these disturbing dreams about him and they don’t go away when I wake.’
‘So he’s haunting you from beyond the grave?’
‘I wish.’
That night she was sick. It started with beads of sweat on her forehead and a horrible breathlessness, a taste in her mouth that wouldn’t go away, and even when she lay down, she felt dizzy, her stomach churning.
She managed to get to the toilet in time and knelt beside it, her eyes stinging, her body cold and sweating, vomiting, half sobbing and choking as she did so. She felt poisoned, every bit of her. But she had barely eaten anything, not for days and days, and soon there was nothing left to vomit, so she just retched and gasped, occasionally laying her forehead against the rim of the toilet, her knees sore on the hard floor and her hair sticky, her mouth foul, every bit of her unclean. She thought of hot baths, fresh sheets, lemon barley water, a cool hand against her hot cheek, and retched again. Wanting to die. She mustn’t die. He would come. That was all she knew or needed to know.
Sixteen
Frieda sat in the corner of the pub and waited for Karlsson. He came across, balancing two whiskies and two packets of crisps. He took a seat at the table and ripped open both packets.
‘I got salt and vinegar,’ he said, ‘and cheese and onion. I didn’t know which you liked.’
‘Neither, really.’
‘You probably don’t like pubs either,’ said Karlsson.
‘It’s better than the police station.’
‘At least it’s an escape from that guy Newton, following me around like a ghost.’
‘What’s he there for?’
‘Time and motion,’ said Karlsson. ‘Blue-sky thinking. A fresh eye, that’s what the boss calls it. He’s looking at our procedures, our management style. But I think I know what he’s going to find.’
‘What’s that?’
‘The word is that there are going to be budget cuts. Ten per cent, maybe even twenty or twenty-five. If young Jake draws some diagrams to show we can catch more criminals with fewer officers, I think he’ll find a receptive audience.’
They sipped their drinks and looked at each other.
‘I’m sorry if I’ve made your work more difficult.’
‘We got the file back,’ said Karlsson. ‘Charges have been put on hold while investigations continue. That’s roughly what I’ve said in the memo.’ He took a sip of his drink and rubbed his face. Frieda thought he looked more tired than ever. ‘I know why the commissioner did what he did,’ Karlsson continued. ‘Nobody cares much about a case like this. And I know why I did what I did. But what I don’t understand is why you did what you did. Michelle Doyce was never going to prison. She was going to get the medical help she needed. It was all going to be sorted out. Don’t you have enough to do with your own work?’
Frieda looked at him speculatively. ‘What does it matter why I did it? Maybe I don’t like untidy stories with bits left over. There was a patient I had once, a young woman. You know that feeling when you’ve left the house and you wonder if you’ve left the stove on? For her it wasn’t just the stove. Perhaps she’d left a window open or the tap running or shut her cat in her bedroom. She’d try and check them all before she left but there was no way she could check everything, and then there was the thought that while she was checking she might have opened another door or switched something on by mistake. In the end she couldn’t leave home.’
‘How did you cure her?’
‘I wasn’t right for her. I sent her to a behavioural therapist. But that’s not my point. What I’m saying is that I’m a bit like that with stories. I couldn’t have left it like that, knowing the body had been found outside in the alley but not knowing why, or who he was, or whom he had left behind. It was like going out knowing the gas was on.’
Karlsson shook his head. ‘You wouldn’t enjoy my job. I spend most of my life knowing that the gas is on and the bath is overflowing and the window’s open.’
‘What makes you think I enjoy life as a therapist?’ Frieda said. ‘So, what happens next?’
‘I’ve sent a couple of officers down to talk to your couple in Brixton. Robert Poole is a pretty common name and, at the moment, there’s nothing else. He’s as much a mystery as he ever was.’