‘That’s not going to help,’ said Frieda. She said gently, ‘It was outside the sweetshop, wasn’t it?’
‘Why am I here?’ asked the old woman. ‘I want to go home.’
‘Did you give her sweets?’
‘Lemon sherbet,’ she said. ‘Jelly babies.’
‘Is that what you gave her?’
‘Who’s asking?’
‘Then you put her in a car,’ said Frieda. ‘With Dean.’
‘Have you been a naughty girl?’ Something like a lewd grin appeared on her face. ‘Have you? Wetting yourself like that. Biting. Naughty.’
‘Was Joanna naughty?’ asked Frieda. ‘June, tell us about Joanna.’
‘I want my tea.’
‘Did she bite Dean?’ Pause. ‘Did he kill her?’
‘My tea. Three sugars.’ Her face puckered as if she would cry.
‘Where did you take Joanna? Where is she buried?’
‘Why am I here?’
‘Did he kill her at once, or did he hide her somewhere?’
‘I wrapped him in a towel,’ she said belligerently. ‘Somebody would have found him and taken him. Who are you to judge?’
‘She’s talking about Alan,’ Frieda said quietly to Karlsson. ‘He was found bundled up in a little park on a housing estate.’
‘Who are you, anyway? I didn’t ask you in here. People should mind their own business. Butter wouldn’t melt.’
‘Where’s the body?’
‘I want my tea, I want my tea.’ She raised her voice until it cracked. ‘Tea!’
‘Your son, Dean.’
‘No.’
‘Dean hid Joanna somewhere.’
‘I’m not telling you anything. He’ll look after me. Muckrakers. Nosy-parkers. Bloody stuck-up ponces.’
‘She’s upset.’ Daisy had appeared in the door. ‘You won’t get any more out of her now.’
‘No.’ Frieda got to her feet. ‘We’ll leave her in peace.’
They left the room and walked back up the corridor.
‘Has she ever said anything about a girl called Joanna?’ Karlsson asked.
‘She keeps herself to herself,’ Daisy said. ‘Spends most of her time in her room. She doesn’t really talk much at all, except to complain.’ She grimaced. ‘She’s pretty good at that.’
‘Have you ever thought she seemed guilty about anything?’
‘Her? She just feels angry. Put-upon.’
‘What about?’
‘You heard a bit of it. People interfering.’
As they made their way out, Karlsson didn’t speak.
‘Well?’ said Frieda.
‘Well what?’ said Karlsson bitterly. ‘I’ve got a woman trying to reconstruct a face after twenty-two years of not remembering it. I’ve got an identical twin with disturbing dreams and fantasies, and now I’ve got a woman with Alzheimer’s talking about lemon sherbet.’
‘There were things in what she said. Fragments.’
Karlsson pushed the front door open with too much force so that it gave a bang.
‘Fragments. Oh, yes. Bits of nonsense, shadows of memories, strange coincidences, odd feelings, half-baked intuitions. That’s what this whole fucking case boils down to. I could ruin my career over this, like Joanna’s detective twenty-two years ago.’
They stepped into the cold and stopped.
‘Morning,’ said Dean Reeve. He was freshly shaved and his hair had been combed away from his face. He was smiling amiably at them. It felt like a challenge.
Frieda couldn’t speak. Karlsson nodded curtly.
‘How’s my ma today?’ He held up a grease-spotted brown-paper bag. ‘I’m bringing her a doughnut. She likes her doughnut on Sunday. Her appetite is the one thing she hasn’t lost.’
‘Goodbye,’ said Karlsson, in a hoarse voice.
‘I’m sure we’ll see each other again,’ said Dean, politely. ‘One way or another.’
And as he passed them, he gave Frieda a wink.
Chapter Thirty-three
Just after ten, Frieda was sitting alone in her consulting room. She looked at her watch. Alan was late. Was that a surprise? After what he had learned about himself and about her own deceptive behaviour, did she really expect him to come back at all? He had been neglected by one therapist and deceived by a second. What would he do now? Perhaps he would just give up on therapy. It would be a logical conclusion. Or he could make a complaint. Again. This time the results might be bad. Frieda thought about this but found it hard to take seriously; that could all unfold later. Meanwhile, she felt she was in the wrong place. She had been awake for what felt like the whole night, hour after hour. Normally, she would have got up and got dressed and left the house and walked through the empty streets, but she just lay there and went over in her mind what Karlsson had said. He was right. She had exposed dreams and fragments of memories, or images that felt like memories, likenesses. Because that was what she did, that was her currency: the things that happened inside people’s heads, the things that made people happy or unhappy or afraid, the connections that they made for themselves between separate events that could lead them through chaos and fear.
Now there was something else. Somewhere out there was Matthew. Or Matthew’s body. Perhaps, probably, he had been killed within an hour of being taken. That was what the statistics told you. What if he was alive, though? Frieda made herself think of it as if she was forcing herself to stare at the sun, however much it hurt. What must it have been like for that other detective, Tanner? Did he reach a point of hoping he would find a dead body? Just so that he would know. There was a ring at the door and Frieda buzzed Alan up.
When she opened the door, he walked in quite casually and sat down in his usual chair. Frieda sat opposite him.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘The tube just stopped in a tunnel for twenty minutes. There was nothing I could do.’
Alan fidgeted in his chair. He rubbed his eyes and pushed his fingers through his hair. He didn’t speak. Frieda was used to this. More than that, she felt it was important not to break silences, not to fill them with her own chatter, however frustrating it might feel. The silence itself could be a form of communication. At times she had sat with a patient for ten or twenty minutes before they spoke for the first time. She even remembered a problem from when she was training: if a patient fell asleep, should she wake them up? No, insisted her supervisor. Being asleep was itself a statement. She had never quite managed to accept that. If it was a form of communication, it was expensive and unproductive. She had felt that a gentle nudge wasn’t really a violation of the therapeutic relationship. As the silence continued, she started to think that some kind of a nudge might be necessary this time.
‘When someone doesn’t want to talk,’ she said, ‘sometimes it’s because there’s too much to talk about. It’s hard to know where to begin.’
‘I just felt tired,’ said Alan. ‘I’ve been having trouble sleeping, and I’ve been working again, on and off, which I have found hard.’
There was another pause. Frieda felt baffled. Was he playing games with her? Was his silence a sort of punishment? She also felt frustrated: this was a time to be exploring his new sense of who he was, not shying away from it.
‘Is that really the reason?’ she said. ‘Are we going to pretend it never happened?’
‘What?’
‘I know you’re going to be affected by what you’ve learned,’ she said. ‘It must be like turning your world upside down.’
‘It’s not as bad as that,’ he said, looking puzzled. ‘But how did you know? Has Carrie rung you? Has she been going behind my back?’
‘Carrie?’ she said. ‘I think we’re at cross-purposes here. What’s going on?’
‘I’m having these memory losses. I thought that was what you were on about.’
‘What do you mean, memory losses?’
‘I sent Carrie some flowers, arranged for them to be delivered, and then I didn’t remember doing it. What does that mean? I should do stuff like that more often. But why don’t I remember? This is what going mad is like, isn’t it?’
Frieda paused. She couldn’t make any sense of this. It was as if Alan were talking in a language she didn’t quite understand. Worse, she had a feeling that something, somewhere, was wrong. Then a thought occurred to her and it was like a blow. She had to compose herself so that she could speak without her voice trembling.