Nicci French - Tuesday's Gone

There was an exaggerated sigh, and then he buzzed her up. She followed the stairs to the top flat, where he was waiting by the open door. ‘I was playing the piano,’ he said.

‘How’s it going?’

‘Not much progress.’

‘I’ve come about Michelle Doyce.’

‘Is she still alive?’

‘Yes.’

‘Any developments?’

‘Yes. You and I are going to make sure she is put in a more appropriate institution, where she is properly cared for and can be surrounded by the things she loves.’

‘We are?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Not because she is a medical curiosity but because she’s in distress and she is our responsibility.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, really.’ Frieda nodded at him. ‘It was you who gave her the teddy, wasn’t it?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Pink, with a heart stitched on to its chest.’

‘The shop had a lousy selection.’

‘Don’t worry – I won’t tell anyone. You don’t know how much trouble it caused,’ said Frieda. ‘But it was a nice thing to do. And it helped, in a way.’

As she walked down the stairs, she heard the sound of badly played Chopin behind her.

‘Did you see the news today?’ Yvette asked Munster. ‘Money for the police is being cut by twenty-five per cent. How the hell are we going to manage that? I’ll probably be working at McDonald’s in six months. If I’m lucky.’

‘It’s about efficiency,’ said Munster. ‘Cutting bureaucracy. Frontline services won’t be affected.’

‘Crap,’ said Yvette. ‘The bureaucracy is me, sitting here trying to prepare a file for the CPS. How’s that going to be cut? That’s what that idiot Jake Newton was here for, wasn’t it? Looking for who to cut. Where is he, by the way?’

‘I suppose he’s writing his report, just as we’re writing ours. Speaking of which, we’ve got to explain these pictures for our report.’

‘Oh, shit,’ said Yvette. ‘I was hoping someone else would deal with them. It’s like, I don’t know, like an old sweater. A bit of wool comes loose and you think you’ve sorted it but then something’s gone wrong with the sleeve. What I can’t understand is that you’ve killed someone, you’ve got the body dangling in front of you and you start rearranging the pictures. And moving furniture around. Is this just some crazy theory of Frieda Klein’s? Couldn’t they have just moved two of the pictures? Take the big one to cover the patch, move the furniture. Replace the smallest picture with the one they’d brought. Wouldn’t that be simpler?’

‘There’s a reason why not. I just can’t think of it.’

Karlsson came into the room, followed by Frieda.

‘Everything all right?’ asked Karlsson.

‘We were talking about the pictures,’ said Yvette. ‘For the report. We can’t get it straight in our heads.’

‘Frieda?’ Karlsson turned to her and waited.

Frieda considered for a moment. Yvette thought she seemed tired, dark around her eyes.

‘OK,’ she began. ‘Six pictures of different sizes. Poole took the third smallest, stowed it under his bed and replaced it with the picture he’d taken from Tessa Welles, the one he gave to Janet Ferris and that she then put back.’ She gave a small sigh. ‘Poor thing. Sometimes I think it’s people’s attempt to do the right thing that destroys them. Anyway, imagine the scene. Tessa and Harry Welles have killed her. The picture they have brought is too small for the space, but it will fit where the second smallest picture hung. The second smallest picture will fit where the smallest picture hung. There is still a gap, which they cover with the next biggest picture, so they move each picture to cover the smaller patch. This leaves them with one large blank patch, which they cover by moving the dresser, and one little painting, which they take away with Tessa’s.’

‘Wasn’t there an easier way?’

‘It depends how you look at it,’ said Frieda. ‘You’ve got to remember that they were in a state of extreme stress. There was a body hanging in front of them. They were having to improvise. They solved one problem at a time, and I think they managed it pretty well. There was another reason as well. By moving all the pictures, they disguised which was the important one.’

‘I think I’ll have to see it written down,’ said Munster.

‘There is the alternative theory,’ said Yvette. ‘Which is that Poole just wanted to rearrange his pictures.’

‘That was what I thought,’ said Karlsson. ‘So this morning we went to Tessa Welles’s flat. We found the painting, the real one with the bloody pine tree and the moon, and they’ve got it downstairs where they’re going over it. Unofficially there are several sets of prints on the frame.’

‘So they would have got away with it if they hadn’t made a mistake with the bloody pictures?’ asked Munster.

‘No. Lots of small things didn’t add up. But it was all vague at first,’ said Frieda. ‘With everyone else Poole met, he found their weakness, got under their skin. But Tessa got under Poole’s skin. That was interesting. Their eagerness to get involved with me seemed a bit strange. It may sound crazy, but it was as if they wanted to become part of the inquiry.’

‘It doesn’t sound crazy at all,’ said Karlsson. ‘It’s part of our training. It’s not at all uncommon for perpetrators to hang around the fringes of the investigation, even to try and get involved. It’s to do with control. At least, that’s what the textbooks say.’

‘The Welleses were big on control,’ Frieda said. ‘It all smelt funny to me but finding Aisling Wyatt’s necklace was the key thing.’

‘Which implicated the Wyatts,’ said Munster.

‘The people it definitely didn’t implicate were the Wyatts. I know that people leave things at murder scenes, but not an expensive necklace. It’s just the sort of thing that Poole would have helped himself to, though, and shown off to Tessa. Even given to her.’

‘So why did it end up in Michelle’s flat?’ said Munster.

‘I walked the route from the Wyatts’ flat along the river to where Michelle Doyce lived. Tessa and Harry Welles must have checked the same route in their car. They wanted to dump the body as close to the Wyatts’ place as possible, and Howard Street is closest to where you could pull a car up to an alley and leave a body without being seen. And they put Aisling’s necklace in his pocket. It was as if they thought the police were really thick and needed to be led by the nose.’

‘How did you know that Tessa had had an affair with Poole?’

Frieda shrugged. ‘It was more or less a guess,’ she said. ‘Poole stopped sleeping with Aisling Wyatt at about the time he met Tessa. It seemed likely. When Tessa described the idea as pornographic, I knew I’d been right. But even when I’d started to feel queasy about Tessa and Harry Welles, I knew that probably none of it counted as real evidence. Even Harry calling him ‘Bob’ to me, that one time. And whatever you think of me, I do understand you can’t simply follow your intuition. That’s what lynch mobs do. I felt certain the Wyatts were innocent but that someone else could be guilty aside from Harry and Tessa. What about Beth Kersey, for instance?’ She rubbed her face. ‘So I used Michelle Doyce as bait. For my sins.’

‘You were sure they’d kill her to protect themselves?’ said Munster.

‘I felt they had a taste for it,’ said Frieda. ‘And that this was something they could do. I’d imagine that murder gets easier after the first one or two.’

‘So,’ said Karlsson, ‘it’s the end of the case. We’ve found Robert Poole’s killers, and Janet Ferris’s. The one person we haven’t found and never will is Robert Poole himself. That’s not even his name. He’s not Edward Green either. He’s a mystery, a blank.’