‘So that they don’t pay tax on it?’ said Frieda.
Harry gave a humorous frown. ‘You’re not from the Inland Revenue, are you?’ he said. ‘It’s just about seeing possibilities. For me, it’s not really about the money at all. It’s like counters in a children’s game.’ He looked around the room. ‘It’s like this. You asked if it was legal. Strictly speaking, it probably isn’t. They’ve found a grey legal area somewhere between a restaurant and a private dinner party. And in that area they can develop their Moroccan-Danish creativity. What do you think?’
‘It’s London,’ said Frieda.
Harry looked puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Grey areas,’ she said. ‘The things that happen in secret, good things, bad things, strange things.’
‘Which is this?’ Harry asked.
‘Good, I think,’ she said. ‘Until one day there’ll be a fire here or somewhere similar and it won’t seem such fun.’
Harry’s face fell. ‘There speaks the policewoman.’
‘I’m not a policewoman.’
‘Sorry, of course you’re not. Next question.’
‘Why are you still single?’
‘I don’t know.’
Frieda raised her eyebrows and waited.
‘I didn’t think I’d be single at thirty-eight. I’ll be forty soon – I always thought at forty I’d be settled down: wife, kids, house, you know. The life you’re supposed to have. Of course I’ve had relationships, some short and some long, and once upon a time I was engaged to a woman I thought I loved and who, I thought, loved me and then, well, it didn’t work out. It petered away and sometimes I can hardly remember what she looked like or felt like, as if it was a dream that happened to someone else. I think I’ve always felt …’ he frowned and took a gulp of wine ‘… always felt that I was waiting.’
‘What for?’
‘I don’t know. For my real life to begin: the life I was supposed to have.’
‘Real life?’ Frieda’s words hung in the air between them.
‘Real life, real love. I don’t know.’
Once, he had said to her, ‘I know you.’ He had looked into her eyes and he hadn’t smiled and she could feel his gaze finding its way through the tunnels and secret doorways of her mind.
What had he seen? What had he found as he gazed into her? Had he found the real her, the one nobody else could reach?
The body doesn’t matter. Not any more. The splitting skin and the scabby mouth, the cropped and greasy hair, the protruding ribs and the strange bruises that have begun to flower on the pale, grubby flesh, unused to sun. What matters is the soul. ‘Don’t listen to anything,’ the voices say to you. He said, ‘I know you.’ Put that in the scales. ‘I know you.’ That counted for everything.
Thirty-four
Their meeting was at seven, when it was still not fully light outside. There was yellow-brown tea that nobody drank and Garibaldi biscuits that none of them ate – Yvette took a large dusty bite of one, then looked surprised by her own action and embarrassed by the crunching sound she made, just when she was supposed to be talking, while Jake Newton looked at her pityingly.
She laid a chart on the table, and Karlsson, Frieda and Chris Munster leaned forward to look at it. Jake tipped himself back in his chair, keeping himself balanced with his forefingers in a way that alarmed Yvette and irritated Karlsson.
‘We thought we should try and account for what he did in his days,’ said Yvette, still swallowing biscuit, ‘where he was, who he saw, try and establish a pattern and any gaps.’
‘Go on.’
‘It’s not exact, of course. We don’t know enough, and a lot of it relies on memory. But look. These are the days he saw Mary Orton. She’s in green. Jasmine Shreeve is red. The Wyatts are blue. The days he met up with Janet Ferris are dotted around, not surprisingly, and there are various days that are free. But it seems quite regular, doesn’t it? I mean, more regular than you’d expect – as if he had a system and set aside times for each of the people he wanted something from.’
‘Mm,’ said Karlsson, musingly. ‘It does. Good work.’
‘But the odd thing is there are sets of days when he just disappears from the radar. Like, every ten days or two weeks, there are three or four days when there’s no trace of him and, as far as we can tell, he wasn’t in his flat either.’
‘So you think he was with someone else?’
‘Possibly. Someone we haven’t traced yet.’
‘Maybe another victim.’
‘It’s a thought, anyway.’
‘Has there been any response to the poster?’
‘You know – dozens of people have come forward claiming knowledge but they’re all dead ends.’
‘He’s like a gardener, isn’t he?’ said Frieda.
They all looked at her.
‘What do you mean “he’s like a gardener”?’ said Yvette. ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
‘What you’ve done makes me think of gardening,’ said Frieda. ‘Gardening’s all about different stages. You’re planting seeds, watering plants, picking fruit, pruning dead wood. It looks to me as if he was in various stages of cultivating the people we know about. There are the ones he had only contacted by phone or presumably was going to contact at some point. Then there’s our couple in Brixton, our first leads to him, whom he had visited once. There’s Janet Ferris, to whom he seems to have been the perfect neighbour, kind and attentive. There’s Jasmine Shreeve – he had something on her but hadn’t used it yet, as far as we know. Then the Wyatts. He’d managed to extract money from Aisling and it seems unlikely he wouldn’t have put more pressure on her. Mary Orton, of course, he had deceived out of a large amount of money and also tried to persuade her to change her will.’
‘You’re right,’ said Karlsson.
‘If there’s someone else we don’t know about, someone he was seeing in those gaps, I wonder where he or she fits into this. Was he done with them? Was he just getting started? Or was this person further along the line than any of them? Con men, they don’t just cheat people of money. They like to have power. There are studies of people who have conned their victims for no financial gain at all – it can be a grandiose project, to make themselves feel all important.’
Chris Munster spoke for the first time. ‘What I want to know,’ he said, ‘is who is bloody Sally Lea?’
The booming in her head had gone. The sharp hunger had gone, and the fug of dizziness. Everything had a sharp outline. She could see clearly now, and her thoughts were like knives.
She was his inheritor. She would not let him down.
She stood up from the narrow bed, the ruckle of sheets and itchy blanket. Her clothes hung off her and, with her fingers, she could feel how sharp her bones were: pelvis, collarbone, ribs, wrists, shoulder blades, her wings. To fly. At school she had been plump, with soft round hips. Curvacious, her mother had said. Podgy, her enemies had jeered. Now she was lean and hard. An instrument. His instrument.
She made her way to the long cupboard under the bows of the boat, which stretched into darkness at its point. He had said that she mustn’t, on any account. She had sworn: cross my heart and hope to die. But everything had changed. The rules were gone and the waiting was over.
She reached into the cupboard and pulled out the first packet, which was wrapped in several plastic bags against the wet, and put it on the table. Three more followed. Then she began.
Frieda only just got to the hospital in time. She was supposed to meet Jack in the lobby, by the rack of get-well cards, but he was late and she saw him as he came hurtling through the revolving doors, his face flushed. He was wearing an odd jumble of garments – weekend clothes, she thought, or got-out-of-bed-in-a-hurry clothes: balding velvet jeans that used to be dark red, a shirt with brown and green geometric patterns under a cardigan with reindeers on it, probably a Christmas present from his parents, she decided. Only one of his trainers had laces in it so that he ran with an asymmetric hobble, sliding one foot along the ground to stop the shoe falling off.