Nicci French - Tuesday's Gone

‘Is that it?’ said Frieda. ‘Pretty gross?’

‘I know what you’re saying,’ said Karlsson. ‘You want to go and look at it for yourself. I’m sorry, Frieda. Look, I know it seems messy. We’ll probably never know who Poole really was. We don’t know where he was killed. It looks like the money that the Welleses took from him has been safely stashed somewhere beyond our reach. Clearly that’s one of the things Harry Welles is good at.’ He stopped and looked around. ‘But we got them. And the rest is in hand. We’ve put a protective unit on the Kerseys until we find their daughter, which won’t take long. From what I heard about the state of that barge, she won’t be able to look after herself for long out in the big world –’ He stopped suddenly. ‘And now I’ve got to get to work. Where the hell are we?’

Frieda pointed upwards at the BT Tower. They were standing almost directly beneath it.

‘That looks familiar,’ said Karlsson. ‘Didn’t there used to be a restaurant up there? A rotating restaurant?’

‘Until someone set off a bomb,’ said Frieda. ‘A pity. I’d quite like to go up there. It’s the only place in London where you can’t see the BT Tower.’

Karlsson held out his hand and Frieda shook it. ‘I should probably move to Spain,’ he said.

‘You’re needed here,’ she said.

As they parted, Karlsson said, ‘At least you can return to your real life now, Frieda. You can put all this mess behind you. And Dean Reeve. Let him go, will you?’

Frieda didn’t reply. When he had turned the corner, heading down towards Oxford Street, she stopped and leaned against a lamppost. She felt the metal cold against her forehead as she took deliberate deep breaths. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘It’s all right.’

She took her phone from her pocket and switched it on. There was a message and she called straight back. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Things have been a bit funny, but it’s over now … Yes, that would be good … No. Just come to my house.’

Frieda woke in darkness and felt the unfamiliar presence. A sag in the bed, breathing, a touch against her thigh. She moved as if to sit up, get out of the bed, get dressed, leave.

‘Easy,’ said a voice, and Frieda lay down. She felt the sheet pulled back and a hand touching her body and his face against hers, the touch of lips on her cheek, her neck, her shoulders.

‘A friend of mine was at a dinner,’ said Sandy. ‘He was a feisty guy, always up for a disagreement. He got into a row with a woman there, shouted at her, told her to fuck off, stormed out of the place, slammed the front door, found himself in the street and realized he’d walked out of his own house.’

‘All right,’ said Frieda. ‘I get it.’

‘It feels like you’re always about to leave. Just get up and walk away somewhere.’

‘That’s what I do, when I’m afraid. When I can’t sleep, which is most of the time, when my head is buzzing, when I’m confused, when I feel I just can’t stay still, I go out and walk. And walk.’

‘And lose yourself?’

‘No. I don’t lose myself. I know my way around.’

She felt both his hands on her now, his face on her.

‘You smell nice,’ he said.

Frieda didn’t know what she was feeling. Suddenly she thought of herself as very little, her father throwing her in the air and catching her; she was screaming and not knowing whether she was screaming with pleasure or with fear. She ran her fingers through Sandy’s damp hair. She was damp too. ‘I probably smell of you,’ she said.

They lay for a moment in silence, tangled in each other.

‘Is that what you feel?’ said Sandy. ‘That you’d like to get up and walk somewhere?’

‘That’s what I feel most of the time.’

‘Do you always walk alone?’

‘Not always.’

‘So if you were going to take me for a walk, where would we go?’

‘Rivers,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I walk along the old rivers.’

‘You mean like the Thames?’

‘No,’ said Frieda. ‘Obviously the Thames is a river. But I don’t mean that. I mean the old rivers that flow into the Thames. They’re buried now.’

‘Buried? Why would anyone bury a river?’

‘I wonder that,’ said Frieda. ‘Sometimes I think people invent different kinds of reasons. They’re a health hazard or they get in the way or they’re dangerous. Sometimes I think rivers and streams make people uncomfortable. They’re wet, they move, they bubble up out of the ground, they flood, they dry up. Better just to put them out of sight.’

‘So which vanished river shall we walk down?’

‘The Tyburn,’ said Frieda. ‘Would you like to do that at the weekend?’

‘I want you to tell me about it now,’ he said. ‘Where’s it start?’

‘It should start in Hampstead,’ said Frieda. ‘The source of the river is on Haverstock Hill. There’s a plaque there. Except that the plaque is only in the approximate place. The actual source is lost. It’s the only plaque I’ve ever seen that actually makes me angry. Can you imagine losing the source of a river? You have this spot where a spring bubbles clear water out of the ground and it flows down to the Thames. Then not only does someone decide to build on top of it but they actually forget where the spring was.’

‘It sounds like a bit of a bad start.’

‘I’m not some kind of tourist guide. I don’t want you to get the idea that I just love London. In fact, I hate it a lot of the time. There are bits of it I hate all the time. So, anyway, you’d walk through Belsize Park towards Swiss Cottage. You can feel the slope that the river ran down. Then to Regent’s Park and along the side of the boating lake.’

‘As we walk, you can talk me to me about how you’re feeling,’ said Sandy. ‘I suppose you should be feeling a bit bruised, especially with all the vicious press coverage.’

Frieda found it strangely easy to talk to the voice in the darkness, not seeing the response, just feeling him. ‘From when I was little,’ she said, ‘I used to have a fantasy that I was invisible. I don’t mean sometimes, I mean all the time, and I mean that I believed I really was invisible. But it turns out not to be true, so basically I feel like I’ve been taken out into the town square, flayed and then had salt and sulphuric acid rubbed into my flesh.’

‘But you’ll get over it.’

‘I’m already over it.’

‘So where are we now?’

‘The river probably flows through the boating pond.’

‘Probably?’

‘It’s hard to find out. And then we walk out of the park and down Baker Street.’

‘Past Madame Tussaud’s.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Is it worth going to?’

‘I’ve never been.’

‘Really? Have you been to the Tower of London?’

‘No,’ said Frieda.

‘I went when I was a kid.’

‘Was it good?’

‘I don’t really remember it,’ he said. ‘So where are we now?’

‘This is the nice bit of the walk. You go through Paddington Street Gardens, which is a minute’s walk from Madame Tussaud’s and nobody knows about it, and across Marylebone High Street and down Marylebone Lane. Just for a bit you feel that you’re walking along the bank of a stream as it flows through a little village just outside London. Except there’s no stream. At least, not one you can see. It’s there somewhere.’

‘You caught them,’ said Sandy.

‘ They caught them.’

‘Admittedly you didn’t get full acknowledgement.’

‘Maybe I like doing without acknowledgement.’

‘Your invisible thing again. So those two, that brother and sister, they did all that just for the money? Tortured that guy and killed him?’