She was shocked by a strange sensation on the fingers of her right hand, warm and wet. She opened her eyes. It was a tongue. A dog was licking at her fingers. It was a Staffordshire bull terrier with a studded metal collar, like a dog in a cartoon. She gently stroked its snout and it sniffed at her. She wondered whether this was wise. Weren’t they fighting dogs? Didn’t they bite you and then not let go even if you were dead?

‘You like dogs?’

The owner looked much like the dog. His round fat head was shaved except for a little neat moustache and goatee.

‘I like cats,’ she said.

‘He likes cats too,’ he said, with an ominous laugh. ‘Come on, Bailey.’ He hit the dog half-heartedly with the lead and Bailey slunk away.

Frieda saw a man wheeling a shopping trolley right through the middle of the park. It was piled with stuffed bin bags and rolled blankets. Then Frieda didn’t see anything at all because she was thinking about Dean Reeve. The thought of him nagged away at her and wouldn’t let her go. It was like a sharp stone lodged inside her shoe, hurting with every step.

Dean Reeve: she had met him five years ago and then, as far as the police were concerned, as far as the world was concerned, he had died. He had killed himself. But Frieda knew that he wasn’t dead and ever since he had haunted her. He was like a figure in her dreams, watching her, watching over her. Once upon a time a young woman had tried to kill Frieda. She had stabbed her and stabbed her. But when the police arrived, the woman was dead, her throat cut. The police believed Frieda had done it in self-defence, but she knew it was Dean Reeve. Hal Bradshaw had taunted Frieda, tried to destroy her, and his house had been burned down. People believed that Frieda had instigated it somehow, but she knew it was Dean Reeve. And a man had committed a terrible crime against Frieda when she was just a girl. Frieda had tracked him down, found him. The law could do nothing against him, but he had been found dead, brutally killed. Frieda knew that Dean Reeve had done it. She had broken up with Sandy. There had been cross words, bad feelings, and now Sandy was dead. It had to have been Dean Reeve. It just had to.

Frieda got up and started to walk out of the park. There was only one way to begin. She walked to the station and caught the train going north of the river. She changed at Shadwell onto the Docklands Light Railway and headed east. She was retracing a journey she had taken before but it felt different. Looking out of the window at the back gardens, the allotments, the junk yards, the piles of tyres, it felt like a foreign city, as if she didn’t belong.

Frieda got out at Beckton. She knew the way. Dean Reeve had disappeared. His only brother was dead. But Dean Reeve had a mother, June. She lived in the River View Nursing Home and Frieda had visited her there. As she walked into the front entrance, the smell of floor cleaner and disinfectant vividly brought back a memory of that shrivelled old woman, the woman who had done terrible things with Dean. Frieda walked up to the front desk. There was nobody there. She rang a bell and a gaunt, harassed woman in a nurse’s uniform emerged from an inner office. Frieda forced a smile.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘My aunt’s here. June Reeve. I wonder if you could tell me where she is.’

The woman seemed puzzled. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes. And your name is?’

‘Jane. Jane Reeve.’

‘Her niece, you say?’

Frieda met her gaze; her face, with its new glasses and haircut, felt naked. ‘That’s right.’

‘I’ll just check.’ Frowning, the woman disappeared back into the office.

Frieda looked at the front desk: there was a phone and a computer on it. The sort of computer you would check for patient information, so where had the woman gone? Something was wrong. The woman knew who she was. She turned at a sound behind her: a man was pushing a trolley along.

‘I’ve got something for June Reeve,’ she said.

The man stopped.

‘Didn’t she die?’ he said. ‘I think she died. The manager’s going to the funeral in three days’ time, at the crem down the road. I’m sure that’s what she said. Hang on, I’ll –’

‘That’s all right,’ said Frieda.

It took a great effort. Inside, a voice was screaming at her to run, to get out of there as quickly as possible. She turned and walked at a normal pace outside onto the street. It felt like slow motion, as if she were in a nightmare, walking in wet sand. She cursed herself for her carelessness. Karlsson knew about her and June Reeve. He had even been to this very place with Frieda. She wasn’t just up against Hussein, she was even perhaps up against Karlsson, and he knew her. He knew her as well as anyone. She turned a corner and then another corner. She didn’t dare make for the DLR. They might guess she’d head there. She needed to walk away in a completely different direction.

As she walked, she thought. June Reeve was dead but there was still the funeral: on Monday at the local crematorium, the man had said. Would Dean go to that? Perhaps. And would the police?

She saw a bus pulling up at a stop and jumped on it without even checking the destination. She went upstairs and sat at the front, where she could see the street. It seemed unreal, like a film she was watching. She knew that she would go to June Reeve’s funeral, because she could think of no other way in which she could find Dean. This frail thread was all she had to lead her to the man who had killed Sandy.

Frieda had not realized how tired she was until she sat down with a tumbler of whisky as the summer sky darkened in the window frame. She had eaten a poached egg on toast at a little café down the road, looking out at the flow of people passing on the street outside. Now she thought about what she should do tomorrow, which seemed an appalling blank. She remembered that when she was a student one of her professors had once said: ‘If you can’t solve a problem, then find a problem you can solve.’ A name came into her mind and she held it there.

Miles Thornton.

12

Frieda woke to the sound of pipes banging and a man shouting in a language she didn’t recognize. She lay for a few moments, looking up at the ceiling, which was cracked and stained. In her own little house, the cat would be walking from room to room, where everything was clean, neat, ordered. Her bed was made, waiting for when she would return.

It was still early, but she rose and swiftly washed in cold water, then dressed in her new bright skirt and top, her head feeling oddly light after her haircut. As she went down the flights of stairs, a young woman sitting hunched in a corner of the stairwell, smoking, lifted her head and stared at her, but incuriously. In the courtyard a bristle-haired boy with jug ears was cycling round and round, singing to himself. Otherwise, the place felt deserted; under the white sky, it was like a ghost town.

Frieda had a mug of bitter coffee in the café she had eaten in the previous evening, then set out for the Underground station. On the train, she thumbed through the pages of a Metro that was on the next seat and found a photograph of herself and a brief story. All around her, people were reading the same paper. She put on her fake glasses.

She knew the road that Miles Thornton lived on in Kensal Green, and she remembered that he had once talked about living with three others above a shop that sold office furniture. It wasn’t hard to find. She knew that he had violently fallen out with his flatmates; one of them had moved out rather than live with him as he entered his period of most florid psychosis. The other two had sometimes locked him out of his own home and, on a couple of occasions, reported him to the police. But it had been Frieda who had finally had him sectioned, believing he was a danger both to himself and to others, and it was Frieda who he felt had betrayed him above all others. He had called her a cold-hearted bitch, a monster, a cunt. She remembered his face as he shouted at her, wrenched almost beyond recognition, his mouth wide and wet and his eyes brilliant with hatred. But she remembered him, too, as he was on calmer days, when he was terrified by himself.