Frieda Klein 2 - Tuesday's Gone (16 page)

‘What else would I write a bleeding
book about?’ She stubbed her cigarette out and lit another. ‘What do you
think of that?’

‘It depends on what you’ve said
and why you’ve done it.’

‘It’s my story,’ said
Joanna. ‘Everything I’ve gone through in my life. Snatched away, hidden,
abused, beaten, raped, brainwashed.’ Her voice rose. ‘No one rescued me. And
I don’t hold back. I don’t duck it. I looked after Matthew, you know. I
saved him. There was a hidden core of strength in me. How else could I have survived
everything? A core of strength,’ she repeated. Then: ‘You want to know
why
I’ve written it. To give hope to others. That’s
why.’

‘I see.’

‘I need the money as well. I
didn’t get compensation. Not a penny, after everything I endured. I lived in
Hell,’ she said, ‘with a monster, for twenty-two years. You can never get
back those years.’

‘Have you seen your family, Joanna?
Have they read this book?’

‘They don’t
understand. Rose comes round, but she just sits and stares at me with those big eyes of
hers. She wants me to talk to someone about what happened. Someone like you, I
mean.’ She took another drag on her cigarette, inhaling deeply. ‘It’s
much better talking to someone like Janine or Rick. Anyway, she didn’t take care
of me. She was supposed to be looking after me that day I was got.’

Frieda thought of Rose Teale’s
stricken face, her enduring guilt: a good woman who’d been almost as much a victim
of Dean Reeve as her younger sister. ‘She was nine, Joanna.’

‘My big sister. They all let me down.
That’s what they can’t cope with.’ Joanna dropped the cigarette end on
to the pile of dead stubs. ‘But I forgive them.’

‘You forgive them?’

‘Yeah.’

Frieda forced herself to think of why she
had come here. ‘When Dean died,’ she said, ‘were you surprised that he
took his own life?’

Joanna’s eyes flicked to Janine, then
back to Frieda. ‘It showed he loved me, that he knew he’d abused me. It was
his last spark of human decency, that’s what it was.’

Gobbets of the book flew past Frieda,
phrases about strength, evil, goodness, survival, victims. She steadied herself.
‘So you never thought it was out of character?’

Joanna gazed at her, off-script at last. She
gave a shrug. ‘He’d reached the end of the line.’

‘Have you seen Alan?’ asked
Frieda.

‘Who’s he?’

‘Dean’s brother, his
twin.’

‘Why would I see him?’

‘So you haven’t, not even
once?’

‘No.’

‘What about June, Dean’s
mother?’

Joanna pulled a face.
‘She’s gone demented. She wouldn’t know me if I did go and see her,
which I wouldn’t anyway.’ She paused, then found her lines again. ‘The
curse that’s passed down generations,’ she said. ‘I’m going to
be on TV, you know. Rick says. He’s setting it up. And I’m in the paper next
week.’

‘A major serialization,’ said
Janine. ‘Over four days. You should read it yourself.
An Innocent in
Hell.
You wouldn’t believe some of the things that are in it.’

‘I probably would.’

‘I don’t want to see you again,
though,’ said Joanna. ‘I don’t like the way you look at me.’

For Yvette, it was mainly a matter of
bureaucracy and logistics, like most of her job. Early in the day she obtained
confirmation in writing that, since Flat 2, 14 Waverley Street, was associated with an
indictable offence, no search warrant was required. She contacted the police station in
Balham where the disappearance had been reported. From there she got a number for the
woman who had reported Poole missing. She phoned Janet Ferris, and when she told her
that a body had been found, the woman started to cry. From her, Yvette got the number of
the landlord, a Mr Michnik. She arranged to meet Janet Ferris at the address, then
phoned Mr Michnik and asked to meet him there as well. She had just booked the
scene-of-crime team when her phone rang and she picked it up. A female voice told her
that she had Commissioner Crawford for her. Yvette took a deep breath.

‘Is that DC Long?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Where’s Karlsson?’

‘He’s in Gloucester. At a
funeral.’

‘Family?’

‘No,’ said Yvette.
‘It’s Katherine Ripon.’ There was a pause. ‘The woman Dean Reeve
snatched.’

‘Oh, her.’

‘The one we didn’t find,’
said Yvette.

‘There was a pause. She stared out of
the window and waited.

‘All right,’
he said at last. ‘What’s happened with that murder charge? The Deptford
lunatic case.’

‘We’ve got the file back, sir.
From the CPS.’

‘I thought that one was
finished,’ he said, his voice deepening ominously. ‘I made it quite
clear.’

‘There was new evidence. It’s
turned out to be a bit more complicated.’

‘Really?’

‘We know who he is.’

Crawford sighed.

She could hear a pen tap-tapping and knew
the grim expression on his face. ‘Do you want me to tell you the details?’
Yvette asked.

‘Anything I need to know? Anything
operational?’

‘No.’

‘Just get on with it, then.’

Before she had a chance to say yes, the line
had gone dead. She was left with the feeling she had done something wrong but she
wasn’t sure what it was.

Her car was late picking her up and they
got stuck in traffic on Balham High Street. By the time she arrived at the house, she
saw that the scene-of-crime van was already there. It was an ordinary pebbledash house
on a residential street. A man wearing an anorak was standing outside.

‘Mr Michnik?’ she said.

‘I am the owner of the house.’
He had an accent she couldn’t place exactly. Something Eastern European. ‘I
let the people in already.’ Yvette looked up. The window on the first floor was
illuminated by the lights they’d set up inside. ‘Is he dead?’

‘We’ve found a body,’ she
said. ‘We think it may be Mr Poole’s. Did you know him?’

‘He is my tenant. I meet
him.’

She took a notebook.
‘At some point we’ll need a proper statement from you,’ she said,
‘but, first, can I ask when you last saw him?’

‘Two months,’ Michnik said.
‘Maybe three. I don’t know. I meet him just a few time. He pays the rent
regular. He’s not trouble, so I don’t see him.’

‘When did he move in?’

‘I check that when you ring. He come
here in May last year. The beginning.’

‘Do you know what his job
was?’

Michnik thought for a moment. ‘A
businessman, maybe. He wears a suit.’

‘What kind of person was
he?’

‘He pays the deposit, he pays the
rent. He’s not trouble. He’s polite. He’s good.’

‘How many people live in this
house?’

‘There are three flats.’

‘I talked to Janet Ferris.’

‘Yes, she is on the ground floor, and
there is a German on the top floor. He is a student but he is a good student. He is an
older student.’

‘Are the flats furnished?’

‘Not the ground, not Miss Ferris. But
the others. All the chairs and tables and pictures, they are all mine.’ He seemed
to remember something. ‘What is happening to the flat?’

‘We’ll be sealing it,’
said Yvette. ‘We’re treating it as a crime scene for the moment. You
shouldn’t go in there and I should warn you that it is an offence to take anything
away or move things around.’

‘How long is this for?’

‘It shouldn’t be too long. Is
Janet Ferris here?’

Michnik frowned. ‘I will take you
inside.’

Janet Ferris answered the knock at the door
so quickly that
Yvette suspected she’d been standing inside,
waiting. She was a middle-aged woman, red hair streaked with grey, a thin, anxious face.
‘Is it really true?’ she said. ‘He’s dead?’

‘We need to confirm it,’ said
Yvette. ‘But we think so.’

‘Oh, God.’ She pressed her
ringless left hand to her chest. ‘That’s terrible.’

‘When did you last see him?’

‘It must have been about the
twentieth, twenty-first of January. I remember because I met him when we were both going
out and I said something about posting a card to my niece for her birthday, which is on
the twenty-fourth.’

‘Did he seem worried about
something?’

‘No, he was completely normal. His
usual friendly self, always so helpful.’ Her voice wavered slightly. ‘I was
on holiday. I went to see my sister and her family in the south of France. I always go
at this time of year. He was supposed to look after my flat while I was away, water the
plants, pick up the mail, things like that. It was our arrangement: he would look after
mine and I would look after his. I always fed his cat for him. When I came back, I saw
at once he hadn’t been in. All my mail was piled up, and when I went into the
flat, my plants were shrivelled. It wasn’t like him to forget. He was very
thoughtful. Then I noticed his mail was piled up too.’ She pointed to a bundle of
letters in the corner. Yvette knelt down and picked through them. It was all junk
mail.

‘I went and knocked at his
door,’ Janet Ferris continued, ‘but, of course, he didn’t reply. I let
myself in, and I knew at once something was wrong. That’s why I went straight to
the police.’

‘Did people come to visit him
here?’ she asked.

‘I never saw anyone,’ said Janet
Ferris. ‘But he was out at work a lot, and I work in the day. He was away
sometimes.’

‘Were
you
friendly with
him?’

‘He came in for
coffee several times. We used to talk.’

‘Did he say anything about
himself?’

‘He wasn’t like that,’
Janet Ferris said. ‘He seemed interested in my life, my work, where I came from,
why I moved to London. He didn’t talk about himself at all.’

Yvette arranged for Janet Ferris to give a
full statement, then walked up the stairs. She was met at the door by Martin Carlisle
from the scene-of-crime team. Gawky, with untidy dark curly hair, he looked as if he
belonged in a sixth-form chemistry lab. ‘There’s nothing to see here,’
he said. ‘No stains, no signs of a struggle. And it looks like a place where he
perched, rather than lived, if you see what I mean. Too neat. We’ve got a
toothbrush and a hairbrush for DNA.’

Yvette pulled the little cloth bags over her
shoes, put on a pair of plastic gloves.

‘I’m not finished,’ said
Carlisle. He handed her a notebook. ‘I had a peek inside. There’s some
names. And, even better,’ he brandished some printed papers, ‘we found some
bank statements. How much do you think he had in the bank?’

‘I’m not going to guess,’
said Yvette.

‘Whatever you guess, it’ll be
less than he had,’ said Carlisle. ‘He was rich, your Mr Poole.’

Yvette stepped inside. She moved
cautiously: her feet felt too big in the cloth bags and her hands sweated inside the
gloves. She remembered her mother – a petite, flirtatious creature – telling her she was
clumsy. ‘Look at you,’ she’d say, but Yvette never wanted to look at
herself. She didn’t like what she saw in the mirror: someone big-boned,
brown-haired, noticeable only when she dropped things or spoke abruptly and out of turn,
which she often did. She would hear herself saying
words she
hadn’t known she was going to utter, especially when she was with Karlsson.

Carlisle was right: Robert Poole’s
flat was too neat, nothing like the mess she lived in. There was nothing homely about
it. She stood in the doorway and looked around, trying to imitate Karlsson when he
entered a crime scene. He would stand very still and alert, his eyes moving from object
to object as if he had become a camera. ‘Don’t make up your mind,’
he’d say. ‘Just look.’ She saw a sofa, a chair, a table, some
pictures, a shelf with a few books ranged in order of size, a rug. It was like a hotel
room.

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.