‘Maybe you can get Reuben to help. Another thing: what are you doing right now?’
‘I must shop for my meal.’
‘I’ll pay for the ingredients. It’s the least I can do. But before that, Josef, do you want to go on a walk with me?’
‘Outside is wet and cold.’
‘Not as cold as in the Ukraine, surely. I could do with another pair of eyes.’
‘Where are we walking together?’
‘I’ll see you outside the tube station. Reuben can tell you how to get there.’
Frieda pulled the collar of her coat up to protect her face from the wind.
‘Your shoes are wet,’ she said to Josef.
‘And the feet,’ he said. He was wearing a thin jacket that she thought belonged to Reuben, no gloves, and a bright red scarf that he’d wrapped several times round his neck and lower face so his voice was muffled. His hair, damp from the sleet, was flat against his skull.
‘Thank you for coming,’ she said, and he made his curious little bow, side-stepping a puddle.
‘And why is it?’ he said.
‘A walk around London. It’s what I do. It’s a way of thinking. Normally I do it on my own but this time I wanted someone with me. Not just anyone. I thought you could help me. The police have been knocking on doors, looking for Matthew and Kathy, or the bodies of Matthew and Kathy. I needed to come here, just for the smell of it, really.’
She thought of Alan’s words. Boarded-up buildings, abandoned workshops under arches, lock-ups, tunnels. That kind of thing. Put yourself in this man’s shoes. Think how he’d feel, panicking, casting around for a hiding place. A place where no one will look; a place where if someone cries out for help, they won’t be heard. She looked helplessly around at the flats and houses, a few of which were lit up and festooned with Christmas decorations, at the shops with their doors wide open, belting heat into the winter streets, the clogged roads, the shoppers milling past clutching bags full of presents and food. ‘Behind thick walls, under our feet. I don’t know. We’ll start together, then separate. I’ve got a kind of route planned.’
Josef nodded.
‘A couple of hours and then you can go and buy your food.’
Frieda opened up her A–Z and found the right page. She pointed at a spot. ‘We’re here,’ she said. She moved her finger half an inch across. ‘I think he was kept here. Dean had to move the boy quickly. So I’m going to say that he would take him somewhere not more than half a mile. Maybe a mile.’
‘Why?’ said Josef.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Why one mile? Why not five mile? Why not ten mile?’
‘Reeve had to think quickly. He had to think of a hiding place nearby. Somewhere he knew.’
‘He take him to a friend?’
Frieda shook her head. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘I think you could take an object to a friend, but not a child. I don’t believe he’d have that kind of friend. I think he’d put Matthew somewhere. Somewhere he knew he could get back to. But then he was being watched and he couldn’t go there.’
Josef crossed his arms as if protecting himself against the cold. ‘Many guesses,’ he said. ‘Maybe he took the boy. Maybe the boy is alive. Maybe he hide him near the house.’
‘They aren’t guesses,’ said Frieda.
‘A mile,’ said Josef. He put his finger on the map on the spot where Dean Reeve lived. He moved it out. ‘A mile?’ he said, again, then traced a circle around the spot. ‘Six miles square. More, I think.’
‘I brought you here to help me,’ said Frieda. ‘Not to tell me what I already know. If it were you, what would you do?’
‘If I steal, I steal equipment. A drill, a sander, sell it for a few pounds. I don’t steal a little child.’
‘But if you did.’
Josef made a helpless gesture. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘A cupboard or a box or a locked room. A place with no people.’
‘There are lots of places with no people around here,’ said Frieda. ‘So? Shall we go for a walk?’
‘Which way?’
‘We don’t know where he is and we don’t know where to look, so it doesn’t matter. I thought of going in a spiral outwards from his house.’
‘Spiral?’ said Josef.
Frieda gestured a spiral with her finger. ‘Like water running into a hole,’ she said. She pointed along the street. ‘This way.’ They started to walk along the edge of a housing estate named after John Ruskin. She looked up at the terraces. More than half of the flats had metal grilles across the doors and windows to seal them. Any of those would be a possible hiding place. At the end of the housing estate there was a gasworks, with rusted chains across the front gate. An old sign on the railings announced that the site was patrolled by dogs. It seemed unlikely. They were now heading north, and at the end of the road they turned right and east alongside a lorry depot and then a scrap-metal yard.
‘It’s like Kiev,’ Josef said. ‘Kiev was like this so I come to London.’ He stopped outside yet another row of closed-down shops. The two of them looked up at the old painted signs on the brick façades: Evans & Johnsons Stationers, J. Jones Stores, the Black Bull. ‘Everybody gone,’ he said.
‘A hundred years ago this was a whole city,’ said Frieda. ‘Down there were the biggest docks in the world. Boats were queuing all the way down to the sea to unload. There were tens of thousands of men working there, and their wives and children. In the war it was bombed and burned. Now it’s like Pompeii, except that people are still trying to live here. It would probably have been better if they’d turned it back into fields and forests and marshes.’
A police car drove past and both Frieda and Josef watched it until it turned the corner.
‘They looking too?’ said Josef.
‘I guess so,’ said Frieda. ‘I don’t really know how they do things.’
As they walked on, Frieda glanced at her map to make sure of the way. One of the things she liked about Josef was that he didn’t talk when it wasn’t necessary. He didn’t feel a need to be clever or to pretend to understand things he didn’t. And when he did say something, he really meant it. They were just passing an empty warehouse when Frieda realized that Josef had stopped and she had walked on without noticing. She walked back to him.
‘Have you seen something?’
‘Why are we doing this?’
‘I told you.’
He took the map from her and looked at it. ‘Where are we?’ he asked.
She prodded at the page. He moved his finger on the map, retracing their progress.
‘This is nothing,’ he said. ‘We pass empty houses, empty buildings, empty church. We don’t go in. Course we don’t go in. We can’t look in every hole, in every room, on the roof, in the rooms under the houses. We’re not looking. Not looking really. We are walking and you tell me about the bombs in the war. Why are you doing this? To feel better?’
‘No,’ said Frieda. ‘To feel worse, probably. I just hoped that if we came here, walked around the streets, we would find something.’
‘The police are looking. They can go into houses, ask questions. That is the job for the police. We being here, we are just …’ Josef searched for the word and waved his hands helplessly.
‘Making a gesture,’ said Frieda. ‘Doing something rather than nothing.’
‘A gesture for what?’
‘But we have to do something. We can’t just sit at home.’
‘Something for what?’ said Josef. ‘If the boy Matthew is lying in the street we fall over him maybe. But if he is dead or he’s locked in a room? Nothing.’
‘You were the one who said it to me, you remember?’ said Frieda. ‘I believed in sitting in a room and talking. You said I should go out and fix people’s problems. It didn’t really work out, did it?’
‘I did not …’ He paused, searching for the words once more. ‘Just going out is not fixing the problem. I don’t just stand in a house to fix the house. I build the wall and put in the pipes and the wires. Just walking in the street is not finding the boy.’
‘The police aren’t finding the boy either,’ said Frieda. ‘Or the woman.’