‘No,’ said the woman. ‘I’ve got a key. I feed the cat when he’s away and water his plants. I went to check. The mail was just piled up on the doormat. The food in the fridge had gone off. There was no food in the cat’s bowl. The cat wasn’t there, thank God. He comes in and out on the sill and there’s a sort of shelf he walks along to get down on the roof of the bike shelter in next door’s front garden. Something’s happened.’
The desk sergeant sighed. ‘This is an adult male?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ said the woman. ‘It’s completely out of character. What can you do?’
The desk sergeant walked across to a filing cabinet and, after trying one drawer and then another, returned with the form.
‘We fill out this form,’ she said. ‘Then we’ll put the details on the computer, and if his name comes up anywhere, it’ll pop up on the screen.’
‘Aren’t you going to look for him?’
‘This is the normal procedure,’ said the sergeant. ‘Unless it’s an emergency.’
‘I think this is an emergency.’
‘They usually turn up,’ the sergeant said. ‘But let’s start with the form. What’s his name?’
‘Bob,’ said the woman. ‘I mean Robert. Robert Poole.’
Seventeen
Frieda walked from Gloucester station. Tiny flakes of snow were catching in her hair and melting on the streets. She had thought all the snow was over, that the bitter cold of the winter was lifting at last. Perhaps this was the end of it, like a reminder of what they were leaving.
She arrived at the church early, walking quickly past the photographers and journalists already gathered at the entrance, and took a seat at the back, next to the wall. Gradually, other people started to slide into the pews, pulling off hats and gloves, removing their thick coats, glancing around and nodding at people they knew in a blend of conviviality and self-conscious seriousness. A group of young people arrived together, and Frieda guessed they were Kathy’s fellow students, with cheeks flushed from the cold. She picked up the order of service and looked through the hymns they were to sing. The church filled and people had to squeeze into pews or stand at the back. An elderly couple walked slowly up the aisle, the woman leaning on the man’s arm as they made their way to the front. Kathy’s grandparents, she guessed. A man in a long camel coat passed her pew and she recognized Seth Boundy. Kathy Ripon had been his student and researcher and he had sent her to her death. He and Frieda.
His hasty shuffle was very different from the stately stride she associated with him; his head was down and his collar pulled up, as if he didn’t want to be noticed. But perhaps he felt Frieda’s gaze upon him, for he turned, briefly glanced at her, then dropped his eyes and moved on. At last Kathy’s family arrived: her parents, hand in hand, and behind them two young men, awkward in unaccustomed black suits, hair brushed, faces shaved raw.
The coffin was carried by the undertakers’ assistants, young men with professionally sad expressions. Frieda pictured the swollen remains that lay inside, then the young woman’s shrewd, pleasant face. As the congregation sang ‘The Lord Is My Shepherd’, she thought, as she had thought every day for the last fourteen months, that if it hadn’t been for her, Kathy would still be alive, and her parents wouldn’t be sitting with hunched shoulders in their pew, pale and old. A child would be dead but Kathy would be alive. A young woman with a long, sad face went to the front and played the flute. One of Kathy’s brothers read a poem, but couldn’t reach the end. He stood in front of them, his face working furiously, and everyone leaned forward, willing him on, tears rolling down cheeks. The vicar stood and said a few words about a life cruelly cut short, about how at last her parents could bury their daughter. He mentioned a merciful God and the triumph of good over evil, of love over hate. Frieda closed her eyes but she didn’t pray.
At last it was over. The coffin was carried slowly out into the feathery snowfall and Kathy’s family followed. Frieda waited until most of the mourners had left. Then she slipped out of her pew and stood in front of Seth Boundy. ‘It was good of you to be here,’ she said.
‘She was my student.’ His eyes flickered from her face to the stone floor.
Snow was now starting to settle on the gravestones and the roofs of cars that were parked outside. People milled about, hugging each other. Frieda had no intention of staying for the wake. As she reached the gate, she brushed against a tall man.
‘Hello, Frieda,’ said Karlsson.
‘You didn’t say you were coming.’
‘Neither did you.’
‘I had to. She died because of me.’
‘She died because of Dean.’
‘Are you getting the train back?’
‘There’s a car waiting. Would you like a lift?’
Frieda considered for a moment. ‘I’d rather go home alone.’
‘Of course. You might like to know that a Robert Poole has been reported missing.’
Frieda looked startled and Karlsson smiled, his stiff face softening for a moment. ‘Who by?’ she asked.
‘A neighbour. A woman in the flat below. It’s in a house down in Tooting.’
‘Then what the hell are you doing here?’ she asked. ‘Why aren’t you in Tooting, tearing the place apart?’
‘Yvette’s down there today. She can handle it.’
‘Of course.’
‘But are you available?’
Frieda hesitated. ‘Perhaps.’
‘Is that a yes?’
‘It’s a perhaps. This …’ She gestured behind her at the church and the mourners. ‘This doesn’t make me want to be involved again. Ever.’
‘It doesn’t get better,’ Karlsson said. ‘Unless you stop caring. I’ll call you.’
The journey to London took two hours, and Frieda would have been able to get back in time for her afternoon session, with Gerald Mayhew, an elderly and wealthy American banker who had woken up one morning to find himself inexplicably stricken with grief for his long-dead parents. But she had cancelled all her patients that day, and when she arrived at Paddington, she took the Bakerloo Line to Elephant and Castle, and walked through the slush and sleet towards a block of council flats on the New Kent Road. They were grey and unprepossessing, with metal grilles over the ground-floor windows, and a treeless courtyard where a single toddler rode round and round on his tricycle, his body bulked out by quilted layers and his nose dribbling in the icy wind.
Frieda took the stairs and went up to the fourth floor, then along the concrete corridor to a brown door with a knocker and a spy-hole. She knocked and waited. A chain pulled back, an eye peered out.
‘Yes? Who is this?’ It wasn’t the voice she had been expecting.
‘I’ve come to see –’ She nearly said ‘Terry’, but caught herself in time. ‘Joanna Teale. She’s not expecting me. My name is Frieda Klein.’
‘The doctor?’
Frieda had been the one who realized that Dean Reeve’s wife Terry was actually the little schoolgirl, Joanna Teale, who had been snatched more than twenty years previously. She had also insisted to Karlsson that Joanna be treated like a victim, abducted and brainwashed for decades, rather than a perpetrator – although sometimes Joanna had made it hard for others to take her side. She was self-righteous, aggrieved and unapologetic. She treated her parents – who were almost as derailed by her reappearance as they had been wrecked by her going – with a kind of angry indifference and her elder sister, Rose, with contempt. It had been a shocking reunion for them all. Frieda, after the first few weeks, had kept out of everyone’s way, until now.
The chain pulled back and the door opened. On the doormat stood a young woman with a tight bright ponytail and over-shaped eyebrows. She was wearing a short skirt, long socks over her thick tights and had a striped cotton scarf wrapped round her neck, though it felt warm inside to Frieda. She held out a hand. ‘I’m Janine,’ she said. ‘Come in.’