‘We’ll find out,’ he said. ‘It’s something to follow up.’
Frieda suddenly remembered. ‘Are your children OK?’
‘They’re back with their mother, if that’s what you mean.’
‘Were things all right with Josef?’
‘He made them pancakes and drew patterns on their legs with indelible ink.’
‘Good. In the meantime, are you keeping a watch on Dean?’
‘For what it’s worth,’ Karlsson’s tone was grim. ‘Even if you’re right, he knows we’re on to him. So.’
‘You mean he won’t lead you to Matthew because he’ll assume you’re watching him?’
‘That’s right.’
‘But if they’ve stowed Matthew somewhere, they need to feed him, give him water.’
He gave a shrug. His face was sombre. ‘It’s probably not him,’ he said. ‘If it was him, he probably killed him straight away. If he didn’t kill him straight away, he probably killed him after you knocked at the door. And if he didn’t … well, all he has to do is sit and wait.’
Karlsson bent over Rose where she sat, examining the photograph. Her kitchen was small and cold and there was a brown stain on the ceiling. The wall heater was rumbling and a tap was dripping.
‘Well?’ he asked at last.
Rose looked up at him. He was struck by how very pale and delicate her skin was, with small blue veins visible under the surface.
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
‘But you think it may be her?’ He wanted to take her by her thin shoulders and shake her.
‘I don’t know,’ she repeated. ‘I don’t remember.’
‘It rings no bells.’
She shook her head hopelessly. ‘I was just a little girl,’ she said. ‘It’s all gone.’
Karlsson straightened up. His back was aching and his neck felt stiff and sore. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘What was I expecting anyway?’
‘I’m sorry. But you don’t want me to say something that misleads you, do you?’
‘Why not?’ They were both startled by his sudden harsh laugh. ‘Everybody else is.’
Frieda sat at her chess table and played through one of the games from her book of classic matches, Beliavsky versus Nunn in 1985. The felted pieces moved up the board. The fire flickered in the grate. The clock ticked away the minutes. The pawns fell and the queens advanced. She thought about Dean and Alan, with their dark brown eyes. She thought about Matthew and held his freckled, merry face in her mind. She thought about Joanna, with her gap-toothed, anxious smile. She tried not to hear their thin high voices screaming out in anguish for their mothers to come and rescue them. Her brain felt as though it was falling between the cracks on the board. Something: there must be something she had missed, some tiny, hidden key that could slide into the unyielding mystery and lever it open. No matter what horrors it revealed, anything would be better than this state of unknowing. She let herself remember how Matthew’s parents had looked at the press conference – their terror-struck faces. What would it be like to be them, lying in bed night after night and imagining their son crying for them? What had it been like for Joanna’s parents, month by month, year by year, never knowing and never having a grave on which they could lay their flowers?
At midnight, her phone rang.
‘Were you asleep?’ asked Karlsson.
‘Yes,’ said Frieda, lifting a bishop off the board and holding it in a clenched fist, waiting.
‘I’m going to visit Mrs Reeve. She’s in an old people’s home in Beckton. Will you come with me?’
‘She’s alive, then. Yes, of course I’ll come.’
‘Good. I’ll send a car for you first thing tomorrow.’
Once, when she was a student, Frieda had gone to Beckton to see the gasworks that looked like a colossal ruin standing in the desert. She still had the photographs she had taken. All of that was gone now; only a grassed-over slag heap showed where it had once been. Everything old and strange seemed to have been demolished, and in its place were lines of eighties houses, apartment blocks, shopping malls and light industrial units.
River View Nursing Home – its name was misleading – was a large modern building in raw orange brick, all on one floor and built around a courtyard with a small balding lawn in the middle, no trees or shrubs. There were metal grids over metal-framed windows. Frieda thought it looked like an army barracks. There were wheelchairs, zimmer frames, walking-sticks, a big jug of plastic flowers in the overheated entrance hall, and a smell of pine air freshener with something like porridge being cooked. She could hear a radio playing but otherwise it was very quiet. Their footsteps echoed. Perhaps most of the residents were still in bed. In the living room, there were only two people – one, a tiny sliver of a man whose bald head shone and whose round glasses caught the light; the other, a large woman dressed in what looked like a voluminous orange cape, with her neck in a brace and her feet in oversized fluffy slippers. Jigsaws were laid out on tables, waiting.
‘Mrs Reeve’s this way.’ The woman led them down a corridor. She had metal-grey hair, twisted into tight, even curls. Her buttocks rolled as she walked and she had strongly muscled calves and forearms, lips that turned down even when she smiled. Her name was Daisy, but she didn’t look like a Daisy.
‘I warn you,’ she said, before she pushed open the door that had a small spy-hole on the outside, ‘she’s not going to tell you much.’ She gave her turned-down smile.
They stepped into a small square room. The air was muggy and smelt of disinfectant. There were bars over the window. Frieda was struck by the bareness. Was that what a life boiled down to? A narrow bed, a picture of the Bridge of Sighs on the wall, a single bookshelf holding a leather-bound Bible, a china dog, a vase with no flowers in it, and a large silver-framed photograph of the son she had chosen to keep. In an armchair by the wardrobe there was a stocky figure in a flannel dressing-gown and thick brown support tights.
June Reeve was short, her feet barely reaching the floor, and she had the same faded grey hair that Alan and Dean had. When she turned her head towards them, Frieda couldn’t at first see the likeness to her picture. Her face had spread. Its shape seemed to have disappeared and all that was left were features in flesh – a sharp chin, a small dry mouth, brown eyes that were her sons’ eyes but looked cloudy. It was impossible to tell how old she was. Seventy? A hundred? Her hands and her hair seemed young; her aimless gaze and her voice much older.
‘Visitors for you,’ Daisy said loudly.
‘What’s she done to her hands?’ asked Karlsson.
‘She chews at her fingers until they bleed, so we put mitten bandages on her.’
‘Hello, Mrs Reeve,’ said Frieda.
June Reeve didn’t reply, although she gave a curious jerk with her shoulders. They advanced further into the room, which was barely large enough to contain the four of them.
‘I’ll leave you, then,’ said Daisy.
‘Mrs Reeve?’ said Karlsson. He was grimacing and stretching his mouth, as if clear enunciation would carry the sense to her. ‘My name is Malcolm Karlsson. This is Frieda.’
June Reeve’s head swivelled. She fixed her milky gaze on Frieda.
‘You’re Dean’s mother,’ said Frieda, kneeling on the floor beside her. ‘Dean? Do you remember Dean?’
‘Who’s asking?’ Her voice was slurred and hoarse, as if her vocal cords were damaged. ‘I don’t like busybodies.’
Frieda looked into her face and tried to read a story from the wrinkles and folds. Had that face been there twenty-two years earlier?
June Reeve rubbed her mittened hands against each other. ‘I like my tea strong, with lots of sugar.’
‘This is hopeless,’ said Karlsson.
Frieda leaned in close to the old woman’s sour smell. ‘Tell me about Joanna,’ said Frieda.
‘Never you mind that.’
‘Joanna. The little child.’
June Reeve didn’t reply.
‘Did you take her?’ Karlsson’s tone was harsh. ‘You and your son. Tell us about it.’