‘Thank you.’ Yvette smiled at the baby, who stared at her in terror, then started to bawl. She’d never been good with babies.
‘Tell him to keep the noise down, will you? He was making a hell of a racket last night, just after I’d got this one off to sleep at last.’
Yvette found her way in through the rickety back gate. Wooden stairs led from the house she’d just been in, down to the small garden, where a child’s plastic tricycle lay tipped on its side. Tucked under the stairs was the door to the flat. Yvette rang the bell and waited. Then she knocked on the door and it creaked open a few inches.
For a moment, Yvette stood quite still, listening intently. Outside, she could hear the clamour of traffic. From within, there was nothing.
‘Hello,’ she called. ‘Zach? Mr Greene? It’s Detective Long here.’
Nothing. The wind blew a flurry of white blossom down on her where she stood. For a moment she thought it was snow. Snow in Apriclass="underline" but stranger things happen. She pushed the door wider and stepped inside, onto a balding doormat. Zach Greene was not a tidy man. There were shoes on the floor, piles of junk mail, a couple of empty pizza boxes, a tangle of phone chargers and computer cords, a cotton scarf with tassels.
She took a few more cautious steps.
‘Zach? Are you here?’ Her voice rang out in the small space. To her right, a tiny kitchen, a hob encrusted with ancient food, an army of mugs, granules of instant coffee. Two shirts hanging to dry on the radiator. A smell of something going off somewhere.
It’s odd, she thought. How you know when there’s something wrong. You get a feel for it. Not just the open door, the smell. Something about the silence, as if it hummed with the aftermath of violence. Her skin prickled.
Another shoe, a brown canvas one with yellow laces, on the floor, in the barely opened door that presumably led to Zach’s bedroom. She pushed the door with the tips of her fingers. The shoe was on a foot. The beginnings of the leg could be seen, encased in dark trousers and riding up to expose a striped sock, but everything else was covered with a patterned quilt. She took in the pattern: birds and swirling flowers; it looked Oriental, brightening up the grey and brown pokiness of the dingy flat.
She looked at her watch and noted the time, then squatted down and very carefully drew off the quilt, feeling how damply sticky it was, seeing now that she was close up to it how its vivid pattern had obscured the stains.
It must be Zach lying in front of her at the foot of his bed, but the narrow face, the golden eyes, the rosebud lips that had given her the creeps were all gone – smashed into a pulp. Yvette made herself look properly, not squint in a reflex of horror. She could still make out the delicate ear lobes in his wrecked face. There was blood everywhere. People didn’t know how much blood they had flowing through them, warm and fast – only when you saw it pooled around a body did you realize. Puddles of dark, sweet-smelling blood, thickening now. She laid one finger against his back, under his purple shirt; the skin was white and hard and cold.
She stood up, hearing her knees creak, and thought of Karlsson when he arrived at a crime scene: she tried to make herself into a camera. The muddy streaks in the passageway, the tipped picture above the bed, the thickening blood, the rigid flesh, the way his arms were flung out as if he was falling through the air. She remembered the noise the woman upstairs had said she’d heard last night.
And then she took out her phone. From upstairs, she could make out the sounds of the baby, still howling. They arrived so quickly, the ambulances and the police cars. It seemed only minutes before the flat had been transformed into a makeshift laboratory, bright lights shining, with Zach’s body at the centre. Paper shoes, plastic gloves, brushes to dust for the fingerprints, bottles of chemicals, tweezers and evidence bags, tape measures, thermometers. Riley was talking to the woman upstairs. Munster, standing by the door and taking gulps of air, was talking into his phone. Zach was just an object now, a specimen.
Above the hubbub, Karlsson said to her: ‘Chris is speaking to Greene’s parents. Do you think you could be the one to tell Judith Lennox?’
She felt beads of sweat on her forehead as she thought of the fierce, desolate daughter. ‘Sure.’
‘Thanks. As soon as possible, I think.’
Yvette knew it would be bad and it was. She stood and listened to herself say the words and watched Judith Lennox’s very young, very vulnerable face crumple. She spun round the small room, her slender figure twitching, all the separate parts of her apparently disconnected – hands fluttering, face tweaked in strange grimaces, head bobbing on thin neck, feet slipping in her frantic urge to move. They were in a room that the head teacher had put aside for them. There was a desk by the plate-glass window and shelves full of folders in different colours. Outside, two teenagers – a boy and a girl – walked past and glanced without obvious interest into the large window.
Yvette felt helpless. Should she go and wrap her arms round the girl’s fragile bones, hold her still for an instant? This time it was a shriek that must surely fill the whole school, empty classrooms and bring teachers running. She banged against the desk and was sent in another direction. Yvette was reminded of a moth bruising its soft powdery wings against harsh surfaces.
She put out a hand and caught Judith by the hem of her shirt, heard it rip slightly. The girl stopped and stared wildly at her. She was still wearing dark orange lipstick, but the rest of her face was like a small child’s. Suddenly, she sat, not on the chair, but in a heap on the uncarpeted floor.
‘What happened?’ she whispered.
‘We’re trying to find out exactly. All I can tell you at present is that he has been killed.’ She thought of the mashed face and swallowed hard. ‘In his flat.’
‘When? When?’
‘We haven’t established the time of his death.’ Stiff, pompous, she was embarrassed by her own awkwardness.
‘Recently, though?’
‘Yes. I’m sorry to have to ask but I’m sure you’ll understand. Can you tell me when you last saw him?’
‘Go away.’ Judith covered her ears with her hands and rocked back and forwards on the floor. ‘Just go away now.’
‘I know it’s very painful.’
‘Go away. Go away. Go away. Leave me alone. Leave all of us alone. Get out. Why is this happening? Why? Please please please please.’
Yvette had only once been to Frieda’s house and never to her consulting rooms until now. She tried not to seem curious; she didn’t want to look too intently at Frieda herself, partly because Frieda’s steady gaze had always made her uncomfortable and partly because she was shocked by Frieda’s appearance. Perhaps she was thinner, Yvette couldn’t tell, but she was certainly tauter. She seemed stretched tight. There were dark smudges under her eyes, almost violet. Her skin was pale and her eyes very dark, with a smokiness to them that was different from their usual glitter. She didn’t look well, Yvette decided.
She watched Frieda walk towards her red armchair with a limp that she tried to disguise but couldn’t, and thought: This is my fault. For a moment, she let herself remember Frieda lying in Mary Orton’s house, unmoving, the sight of the blood. Then she saw young Judith Lennox flying around the schoolroom, like a broken moth, shouting at her to get out, to leave. Perhaps the simple truth is that I’m a hopeless detective, she thought. She hadn’t even been able to get an alibi from Zach Greene.
Frieda gestured to the chair opposite and Yvette sat down. So this was where Frieda’s patients sat. She imagined closing her eyes and saying: Please help me. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Please tell me what’s wrong with me …