‘Actually, I sometimes think I might learn more about my patients by looking at where they live than listening to what they say.’ She shook her head and said, almost to herself, ‘I should have come here before. This is like looking inside Michelle Doyce’s head.’
‘Which is not a pretty sight?’ said Karlsson.
‘Poor woman.’
‘Have you seen things like this before?’
‘I don’t really deal with acute psychiatric disorders,’ said Frieda, ‘but obsessive hoarding is quite a common symptom. You must have heard about people who can’t throw anything away, newspapers, their own shit.’
‘All right, all right,’ said Karlsson. ‘That’s too much information. Being here is bad enough without hearing about things that are even worse.’
Frieda felt herself flush, as if she were going to faint. But the feeling seemed to be in her brain. When she spoke, it was in a whisper: ‘I don’t like this case.’
Karlsson looked at her curiously. ‘You’re not supposed to like it. It’s not a night at the theatre.’
‘No,’ Frieda said slowly. ‘I don’t mean that. It’s just that nothing seems to fit. We’re standing in a crime scene that isn’t really a crime scene. The victim seems to be the main perpetrator. And the motives are obvious, but they don’t seem enough. And then there’s Janet Ferris. She must have been killed because she saw something. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that it was Frank Wyatt. Why would he have gone there? We’d already connected him to Poole.’
She shook her head.
‘I don’t feel we’re seeing the whole story. I keep thinking about Beth Kersey. Poole used people. He tried to change Mary Orton’s will but failed. He took some money from the Wyatts. Probably he was going to steal from Jasmine Shreeve. What was he going to do with Beth Kersey? Have you had any luck getting her medical details?’
‘That’s a dead end,’ said Karlsson.
‘It’s not. It’s crucial.’
‘We can access her medical records if she’s a suspect or a victim of a crime. At the moment she is an adult who hasn’t even been reported missing. But for the moment we’re here because you said you wanted to be here.’
‘All right, all right,’ said Frieda, trying to clear her mind. ‘So, the idea is that Michelle Doyce found Robert Poole’s body outside in the alley by the house. She brought him in and stripped him and washed his clothes and folded them up, in the process probably removing any hair or fibres.’
‘That’s right.’
‘She tried to help,’ said Frieda. ‘She saw Robert Poole as someone in trouble and she tried to be a Good Samaritan but in the process she ruined things.’
‘Exactly. She couldn’t have done a better job of getting rid of the evidence if she’d done it deliberately.’
Frieda looked around, trying to take it all in. The sheer mass of it made her head ache. ‘This really is like her mind,’ she said. ‘When most of us go out we bring back things in our memory or maybe we take a photo. But she just brought the things back.’
‘She was a real magpie,’ said Karlsson.
‘Yes.’ Frieda frowned. ‘Yes, she was.’
‘You make that sound interesting. It’s just what you say about people who collect things.’
Frieda looked at the window. The day had gone grey. ‘Are there lights?’
Karlsson went to the doorway to switch on the ceiling light, and then, with his foot, an old standard lamp in the corner. Frieda stepped forward and looked at it more closely. Suspended from short pieces of thread around the frame that held the lampshade were what looked like beads and pieces of glass. Frieda peered at them one by one. ‘Magpies don’t collect just anything,’ she said. ‘They collect sparkly things.’
‘I don’t know much about them,’ said Karlsson. ‘When I see them, they’re mainly pecking at dead pigeons.’
Frieda took a new pair of surgical gloves from her pocket and put them on.
‘Are you still buying those yourself?’ said Karlsson. ‘We can get them for you.’
‘Remember what Yvette said about Michelle Doyce? That she was the saddest woman she’d ever met? This room is like that. Those dead bits of bird, the newspaper, the old cigarette butts smoked by other people. They contain a sadness that I don’t even want to think about. But the sparkly things are different. They’re pretty.’
‘If you like that kind of thing.’
‘Come and look at these.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
Karlsson stepped forward.
‘What do you see?’ she asked.
‘Bits of glass.’
She cradled one of the other little dangling objects in her gloved hand. ‘What about this one?’
‘It’s a bead.’
‘Describe it to me.’
‘Well, it’s not exactly a bead. It’s a sort of shiny metal cube, with a bit of blue at the centre.’
‘I think the blue might be lapis lazuli,’ said Frieda. ‘And the shiny metal could be silver.’
‘Nice.’
‘What else?’
‘Are you serious?’ asked Karlsson.
‘Yes.’
He strained his eyes. ‘There’s a little metal thing on two of the sides.’
‘Which is?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Do you think it may be for attaching it to something?’
‘Maybe. Or maybe not.’
‘And look,’ said Frieda. ‘There are two more here and one on the other side. Just the same.’
She stood back. Her eyes had been dazzled by the proximity of the bulb. ‘There should be others.’
‘You mean beads like that?’
‘Yes. Beads like that.’
She began pacing around the room.
‘Frieda …’
‘Shut up,’ said Frieda. ‘Find the others.’
She found three, ranged along the windowsill. Karlsson found four in a glass, arranged around the stub of a candle, standing in its own dried wax. Another four were placed along the frame of the door.
‘This is like a children’s party,’ said Karlsson.
Frieda had stopped. She was standing in the middle of the room with her eyes closed. Suddenly they opened. ‘What?’ she said.
‘I said, it’s like a children’s party. You know, like an Easter-egg hunt, or something like that.’
Frieda ignored him. She took the three beads from the windowsill, placed them in the palm of her hand and stared at them closely. She turned to Karlsson. ‘Have you got a torch?’
‘No.’
‘I thought policemen carried torches.’
‘In films made in the 1950s. I’m afraid I don’t have a truncheon either.’
She walked over to the standard lamp, lifted the shade off and held her hand close to the bulb. She looked at the beads so intently that her eyes hurt.
‘Yes?’ said Karlsson.
‘Look at this one.’ Frieda pointed at one of the beads.
‘It’s a bit grubby,’ said Karlsson.
‘Do you have something we can put these in?’
Karlsson took a transparent evidence bag from his pocket and Frieda dropped them in, one by one.
‘What do you think they are?’ asked Frieda.
‘Beads.’
‘And what do you get if you join beads together?’
‘A bangle of some kind?’
‘Or if you have more beads?’
‘A necklace, maybe. But aren’t these just something that Michelle Doyce found somewhere?’
‘That’s exactly what they are,’ said Frieda. ‘She found them joined together and took them apart and used them to decorate her room. These are nice. And they look handmade to me. And valuable. She didn’t just find them on the pavement.’
‘So …’
‘So you’ve got to stop your guys packing this stuff away. Instead, they’ve got to find as many as they can. There’ll probably be fifteen or twenty more, at least. Then show a photograph of them to Aisling Wyatt. And you said that one of them was dirty. Find out what the dirt is.’