‘Just tell Karlsson,’ Frieda said.
But the phone had gone dead. She tried Mary Orton’s number again but, as before, it rang and rang. Who else was there to ring? Was it possible that Josef was still working there? Or nearby? She rang him and went straight to voicemail. She stared out of the window. The traffic wasn’t as bad as it might have been. As they crossed the river, she rang Yvette again.
‘Have you called Karlsson yet?’ she said.
‘I’ve told you. I’ll contact him when I can. Now, please …’
The phone went dead again. Frieda stared at it. At first she felt dazed. There was nothing she could do. And then she thought of one thing she could do. What did it matter now anyway? She dialled 999.
‘Emergency services. Which service, please?’
‘Police.’
There was a click and a whirr, then another female voice. ‘Hello, police. What is the nature of the emergency?’
Frieda gave Mary Orton’s address. ‘I’ve seen an intruder.’
‘When was this?’
‘A couple of minutes ago.’
‘Can you give any description?’
‘No … Yes, I saw a knife. That’s all.’
‘We’ll arrange to send a car. Name, please.’
Frieda imagined what Karlsson or Yvette would think of this. She felt as if she had cut the last fraying bit of thread that attached her to them. But it was the things you didn’t do that mattered more than the things you did.
As the taxi turned into Mary Orton’s road, Frieda expected to see brightly coloured cars, flashing lights, but there was nothing. Jake Newton was right, she thought. Bloody hopeless. She handed a twenty-pound note to the driver.
‘I haven’t got any change,’ he said.
‘Just keep it.’
She walked towards the house. She hadn’t planned for this moment. She moved to press the bell, then saw that the door wasn’t quite shut. She pushed at it and it opened. Had a policeman on the beat arrived? Was Josef working there? She stepped inside.
‘Mary?’ she shouted. ‘Mrs Orton?’
There was no reply. She felt her heart beating too strongly; she felt it in her neck and in her chest. There was a sour taste in her mouth. It was lactic acid, caused by the breakdown of oxygen. You got it when you ran fast or when … She called again. What to do? She couldn’t phone the police. She’d already done that. Where the hell were they? Some false alarm somewhere probably. This was probably a false alarm. She walked through to the kitchen, her footsteps sounding horribly loud, as if they were telling her she was somewhere she wasn’t meant to be.
The kitchen was empty. There was a mug on the table half filled with tea or coffee, an open newspaper. Frieda leaned over and touched the mug. It was warm. Not hot like tea that had just been made, but warmer than the ambient temperature. Mary Orton could have gone out, forgotten to shut the door. She turned and left the kitchen. Was there any point in looking round the house? She opened the door to the front room and stepped inside. She felt an immediate lurching, gulping shock. Mary Orton was lying on the carpet by the bookcase across the room from the door. Frieda knew about these things and she felt her cognitive faculties close and narrow. She was looking at Mary Orton as if through a long tube. Frieda’s first thought was that she’d fallen, like people of Mary Orton’s age so often do. They fall and break a hip and sometimes they can’t get up and nobody finds them and they die. Then, almost dully and slowly, Frieda saw that what she had taken for a shadow of something across Mary Orton and the shadow of Mary Orton on the cream carpet was actually blood. Mary Orton’s blood. She ran across to her, trying to remember the pressure points. Anatomy had been such a long time ago.
Mary Orton was lying sprawled as if she had tried to roll over on to her back and failed.
‘Mary,’ Frieda said, coaxingly. ‘Mary, I’m here.’ Frieda looked into her eyes. She saw the tiniest flicker of something, a glimmer that puzzled her.
‘Mary,’ said Frieda, and saw once again a minuscule movement in her eyes. And then Frieda realized what the movement signified. Barely alive, Mary Orton was not looking at Frieda but past her, over her shoulder, and Frieda thought, Oh, no. Oh, no. She felt a punch, hard and hot in her back, to one side, and from then on everything happened with great foggy slowness. So she had time to think, How slow everything is. And she was punched again, and now it was in her stomach. And she had time to think, Why am I being punched? After that, she was able to remember, quite calmly, that she had read of how being stabbed didn’t feel at all like being stabbed. It didn’t feel sharp. It felt blunt, like being hit by a fist in a boxing glove. Frieda raised her arms in some kind of defence but the next punch came on her leg and quite suddenly it was wet and warm. Frieda knew that she couldn’t stand up any more but she didn’t fall. She stayed where she was, and Mary Orton’s cream carpet came up to meet her. She lay face down on it. She could feel the rough threads on her lips and she was now very, very tired. All she wanted was to sleep. She realized that this was what it was like to die and that she mustn’t die so she made the most terrible, horrible effort to raise herself.
She saw a face, a girl’s face. She had found Beth; Beth had found her. It seemed to be far away, like in a dream. Then, from being slow, everything speeded up. There was a rush of sensations, noises, movement. She felt movement, she was moving herself, and then everything slowed down once more and became dark and first very warm and then very cold, and she felt her head fall back and then her leg started to hurt and then really hurt, so that she cried out and she almost did see something and someone, but it was too much effort and the pain faded, and she fell deeply, gratefully asleep.
Fifty-two
It wasn’t like waking. It was too patchy and painful and messy. She woke in fragments and flashes: a dirty white ceiling, faces leaning over her, faces saying things she didn’t understand, the smell of soap and wetness on her body, being turned over, muttered conversations. Faces she recognized: Sandy, Sasha, Josef, Reuben, Jack, Karlsson, Olivia, Chloë, even Yvette. Some of them cried, some of them smiled. They came close and laid their hands on her shoulder, her face, and she couldn’t tell them that she knew they were there. They talked to her. They talked about her in whispers. Josef sang Ukrainian lullabies between sobs and Sasha read her poetry. Outside in the corridor she heard Chloë shouting at someone, her voice hoarse with fury, and she wished she could tell her angry, clumsy niece that it didn’t matter, nothing mattered so very much, but she was unable to move her lips. Inside, a part of her found something funny. The Frieda Klein reunion party. She couldn’t turn over. Sometimes she felt she was choking. Mostly she slept.
And then one day a voice said to her, ‘Frieda, can you hear me? Blink if you can hear.’ She blinked. ‘I’m going to count to three, then we’ll pull the tube out and you should cough and breathe. All right, one, two, three.’
Frieda felt like her insides were being pulled out through her mouth, as if she were vomiting them, and then she coughed and coughed.
‘That’s a good girl,’ said the voice.
‘I’m not a girl,’ Frieda said huskily, and she started to say that she wasn’t good but it didn’t feel worth the effort. There was more sleep, with occasional vague flashes. Was that Sasha in a chair by the bed reading a book?
There she was again, a hand on hers, looking down at her. This time she spoke to her, in her low and kindly voice: ‘Can you hear me, Frieda?’