Frieda Klein 2 - Tuesday's Gone Read Free Page B

psychological evaluation that had come to no real conclusions about her mental health,
     and that she had been living in Howard Street for a month, with no complaints from
     neighbours. This was the first time Maggie Brennan had visited her: she was standing in
     for someone else, who wouldn’t have paid a visit because she had been on sick
     leave since last October.
    ‘Michelle Doyce?’
    She looked at him with eyes that were very
     pale, almost like the eyes of a blind person, but didn’t reply.
    ‘I’m Detective Chief Inspector
     Malcolm Karlsson.’ He waited. She blinked. ‘A police officer,’ he
     added.
    ‘Have you come a long
     way?’
    ‘No, I haven’t. But I need to
     ask you some questions.’
    ‘I have come a very long way. You may
     well ask.’
    ‘This is important.’
    ‘Yes. I know it.’
    ‘The man in your flat.’
    ‘I’ve been entertaining
     him.’
    ‘He’s dead, Michelle.’
    ‘I cleaned his teeth for him. Not many
     friends can say that about their guests. And he sang for me. Like the sounds of the
     river at night, when the dog has stopped barking and the shouting and crying dies
     down.’
    ‘Michelle, he’s dead. The man in
     your flat is dead. We need to find out how he died. Can you tell me his name?’
    ‘Name?’
    ‘Yes. Who is he? Was he?’
    She looked puzzled. ‘Why do you need a
     name? You can ask him.’
    ‘This is a serious matter. Who is
     he?’
    She stared at him: a strong, pale woman with
     uncanny eyes and large reddened hands that floated in vague gestures when she spoke.
    ‘Did he die in your flat, Michelle?
     Was it an accident?’
    ‘One of your teeth is chipped. I am
     quite fond of teeth, you know. I have all my old teeth under my pillow, just in case
     they come, and a few of other people’s, but that’s rare. You don’t
     find them so often.’
    ‘Can you understand what I’m
     asking you?’
    ‘Does he want to leave me?’
    ‘He’s dead.’ Karlsson
     wanted to shout it, to use the word like a stone that would shatter her incomprehension,
     but he kept his voice calm.
    ‘Everyone goes in the end. Though I
     work so hard.’
    ‘How did he
     die?’
    She started to mumble words he
     couldn’t make out.
    Chris Munster was making a preliminary
     assessment of the rest of the house. It repulsed him. It didn’t feel like a
     criminal investigation at all: it was about people who were hopeless, who had slipped
     through the cracks. This upstairs room was full of needles: hundreds, no, thousands of
     used needles covering the floor so at first he’d thought it was some kind of
     pattern. Dog shit here too, most of it old and hardened. Bloodstained rags. One thin
     mattress with nasty stains near the middle. Right now, he didn’t care who’d
     killed the man downstairs. He just wanted to empty everyone out of this house, torch it
     and get out, breathe some clean air, the colder the better. He felt dirty all over,
     outside and in. How could people live like this? That fat man with the red-veined eyes
     and the livid skin of the drunk, hardly able to speak, hardly able to balance his bulk
     on his small feet. Or the skinny dog-owning one, with his punctured arms and scabby
     face, who grinned and scratched himself and bobbed around: was this his room and were
     these his needles? Or maybe it was the dead man’s room. That was probably it. The
     dead man would turn out to be part of this household from Hell. Fucking landlord.
     They’d been pushed in here, the hopeless misfits, the ones society didn’t
     know how to deal with, had no money to treat and abandoned so that now the police had to
     clear up the mess. If the public knew, he thought, his feet in their heavy boots sliding
     among the syringes, if they knew how some people lived and how they died.

Four
    Karlsson was on his way into the case
     meeting when he met Commissioner Crawford in the corridor. He was in conversation with a
     tall young man who was wearing a shiny blue suit and