The kitchen was the same – matching mugs on a hook, a saucepan and a small milk pan on the side, an electric kettle. She opened the fridge and saw half a packet of butter; a piece of cheddar cheese, shrink-wrapped; two chicken drumsticks with a green tinge; a plastic bottle of tomato ketchup and a jar of low-fat mayonnaise. That was all.
After she had walked round his bedroom, opened every drawer and every cupboard, looked under the bed, then stood for a while in the clean, empty bathroom (razor, shaving foam, spray deodorant, liquid aloe-vera soap, paracetamol, blister plasters, nail clippers), she returned to the sitting room and sat down.
First of all she thought about what there was not: there was no passport, there was no wallet, there were no keys, no phone, no driving licence, no birth certificate, no certificates of qualifications, no National Insurance number, no photographs, no letters, no computer, no address book, no condoms, no drawer stuffed full of the odd bits and pieces of a person’s life.
She opened the notebook Carlisle had given her. Robert Poole’s writing was neat and pleasing, easy to read. She turned the pages. There were lists, perhaps shopping lists, but more specific than the usual shopping lists she drew up. One, for instance, was made up of names of plants – though she recognized only a few. Another looked like book titles, or maybe they were films.
Then there were names, spaced apart with doodles and exclamations and asterisks next to some. A few had addresses or partial addresses beside them – that was useful. She flicked through the notebook to the end. There were a few sums and, on one page, what looked like a sketched plan of a house. There were numbers that might have been phone numbers without the area code.
Then she looked into the A4 brown envelope Carlisle had handed her and drew out the wad of bank statements. She looked at the top one, which was the most recent, dated 15th January. She squinted at the number, blinked, then slid it carefully back into the envelope and stood up. It was going to be a long day.
Nineteen
The last thing Frieda wanted that evening, after the funeral and her unsettling visit to Joanna, was to go out. She needed time alone, in the cocoon of her house, where she could draw down the blinds, light a fire and shut out the world. Yet after her chemistry lesson with a bad-tempered Chloë, she stayed on. She had been invited – or, rather, ordered – to come for dinner. And not just any dinner: this was a dinner to introduce her to Olivia’s new boyfriend, Kieran. Chloë described him as her mum’s eBay find. A few days before, Olivia had asked Frieda to bring someone else along too, so Frieda had asked Sasha if she was free.
‘Not a woman! God, Frieda, what planet are you living on? I meant, bring another man along or it might seem odd.’
‘Odd in what way?’
‘I don’t know. Too intense – kind of meet the family.’
‘The ex-sister-in-law.’
‘Whatever. You know what I mean. But if you bring someone, it’ll seem more casual. Two couples.’
‘I’m not a couple.’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘And isn’t Chloë going to be there?’
‘Oh, God – probably. She’ll sit there glaring at him all evening. You know the way she can glare. I’ve never seen such a brow. It’s a Klein brow – she gets it from her father. I hope she goes out.’
In the end, Frieda had reluctantly invited Reuben to accompany her. He asked if he could bring Paz as well, because she had just broken up with her boyfriend and needed cheering up. And then they had to ask Josef too, didn’t they? Josef couldn’t be left alone at the moment, not in his present state. Reuben was worried about him: he sang sad songs in the shower and had grown a straggly moustache but still wouldn’t talk about what had happened. And with three new guests, Olivia announced it didn’t make sense to disinvite Sasha after alclass="underline" she just had to be kept away from Kieran. So the simple supper turned into an elaborate meal of overcooked salmon fillets rolled in pastry and a pudding made from meringues that stuck to the teeth. Reuben arrived in his favourite waistcoat that glistened like a jewelled breastplate. He drank water all evening (except when he was taking sips from other people’s glasses) and glowed with his new virtue. Josef came with him, wearing a strange jacket that looked as if it had been made from a potato sack. He carried a large bunch of wilting flowers that Frieda was willing to bet he had lifted from the house whose boiler he was mending. Sasha arrived straight from work, dressed severely, no makeup on her beautiful face, and was placed at the far end of the room, safely in the shadows. Olivia had put on a red gown and dangling gold earrings. Her eyes were kohl-lined and her lips scarlet. She walked like a crane in her high-heeled shoes and laughed in the wrong places. And then Chloë decided she wouldn’t go out after all, but her Goth friend Sammy would be joining them and no one was to stare at the way she had shaved one side of her head.
Chloë had told Frieda that Olivia’s new friend Kieran was a creep. She rolled her eyes whenever she talked about him. But Kieran turned out to be a shy, crumpled man, who stooped to hide his height, blushed easily and seemed baffled but delighted by the lavish attentions of Olivia. She popped olives into his mouth with her long, painted fingernails, ruffled his hair and called him ‘honey’, while he gazed at her with a heartfelt gratitude that everyone found touching, except Chloë, who found it gross. Frieda saw that Kieran was terrified of Chloë and she felt a lurch of pity for him. Her niece was a formidable enemy: she had no sense of restraint and she wouldn’t mind making a scene in public.
‘What do you do, Kieran?’ she asked him, and Chloë gave a snort of derision.
‘Guess,’ she said. ‘Just try and guess.’
‘I’d prefer to be told.’
‘Twenty questions.’
‘I work for a firm of funeral directors.’
‘See?’
‘That’s a good job,’ said Frieda. ‘An important one.’
Kieran smiled warily at her to check she wasn’t being ironic. ‘I work in the office,’ he added. ‘Doing the accounts.’
‘He doesn’t carry a coffin,’ said Olivia, ‘and pretend to be sad.’
The evening lurched by. Olivia got tipsy, took off her shoes and let down her hair, leaning her flushed face on Kieran’s bony shoulder. Reuben, absent-mindedly taking hold of Sasha’s wine glass, told Chloë and Sasha a long story involving snow geese. It sounded like a parable but without a final moraclass="underline" the snow geese simply disappeared at the end of the winter. Josef taught Sammy and Paz a drinking song about wood alcohol and dubious country pleasures. Frieda stacked plates, filled glasses and passed cups of coffee round the table. She heard about Kieran’s two sons, now grown-up, one in the army and the other living in Australia, and about Sammy’s elder brother, who had joined a gang and had a knife that he hid in his shoe. She thought about Kathy Ripon, once more buried but this time with love, and about Joanna telling her story to the world, with all the uncomfortable bits rendered anodyne and harmless. She looked at Olivia’s smeared and happy face and thought that there were many worse ways to find men than on the Internet.
That evening, Karlsson bought a packet of ten Silk Cut and a small box of matches on his way home. He used to smoke Marlboro, twenty a day and more on bad days, but when his wife had got pregnant he had given up and never smoked since. Even when she’d left him and taken the kids to Brighton, he’d resisted. He didn’t want Mikey and Bella coming to a flat that smelt of tobacco.