Frieda Klein 2 - Tuesday's Gone Read Online Free PDF Page A

she’s
     the one complaining for Alan.’
    ‘But that wasn’t the only time
     you crossed a boundary, was it?’ said Krull.
    Frieda met his eyes. ‘The case turned
     out to be complicated. Alan was adopted. He discovered – no, I discovered and told him –
     that he was an identical twin. He had a brother, whom he knew nothing about, and yet
     they had an extraordinary psychological similarity and also a kind of connection, an
     affinity if you will. They saw things in the same way, to some extent. Not surprisingly,
     this discovery was disturbing to Alan. It was this brother who had takenMatthew: Dean Reeve – a household name now, the nation’s favourite
     bogeyman.’
    ‘Who killed himself.’
    ‘He hanged himself under a bridge by a
     canal over in Hackney when he knew he couldn’t escape us. However much Alan hated
     the thought of his brother, he loved him as well. At least, he felt he had lost part of
     himself when he died. He must have suffered a great deal. But that’s not what
     Carrie means when she talks about me using him.’ Frieda looked at the three of
     them with her large, dark eyes. ‘On one occasion,’ she continued, ‘I
     talked to him as a way of entering his brother’s mind, of trying to find out what
     his brother was thinking. Without telling him. If I’d told him, it wouldn’t
     have worked.’
    ‘So you did use him?’
    ‘Yes,’ said Frieda. They were
     all struck by her voice, which sounded angry rather than conciliatory.
    ‘Do you think that was
     wrong?’
    Frieda was silent for several moment,
     frowning. She let herself slide back into the darkness of the case, among its shadows
     and its inky dread. Her patient Alan had turned out to be the identical twin of Dean, a
     psychopath who had abducted not only Matthew but, twenty years previously, a little
     girl. And that little girl Joanna, once skinny and gap-toothed and shy, mourned without
     cease by her family, had turned out to be the fat, lethargic wife of Dean, hiding in
     plain sight, a victim turned perpetrator. It was Sasha’s DNA test that had proved
     the obese, chain-smoking Terry was knock-kneed Joanna, that Dean’s willing
     collaborator was also his victim. What was more – and this was what Frieda still thought
     about when she stalked the London streets at night until she was so tired she could
     sleep, and what she still dreamed about – Frieda’s discovery of the freakish
     similaritybetween the twins had led to the abduction of a young
     research student, whose body had never been found. She thought of Kathy Ripon’s
     clever, likeable face and the future she would not have. Perhaps her parents were still
     waiting for her to return, their hearts turning at every knock on the door. These
     people, her judges, asked her if what she had done was wrong, as if there was a simple
     answer; a truth that was not slippery and treacherous. She lifted her eyes and faced
     them again.
    ‘Yes,’ she said, very clearly.
     ‘I wronged Alan Dekker, as my patient. But I don’t know if I was wrong. Or,
     at least, I think I was both wrong and right in what I did. What Alan said to me on that
     day led directly to Matthew. He saved a little boy’s life, there’s no doubt
     about that. I thought he was glad he had helped. I know that time alters the way one
     thinks about things, and I have no idea what he’s been through since then, but I
     don’t understand why now, a year and a bit later, he would want to complain about
     something that at the time he accepted. Can I say one more thing?’
    ‘Please.’ Professor Krull made a
     courtly gesture with his thin, blue-veined hands.
    ‘Carrie talks about me putting my
     career before her husband’s peace of mind and happiness. I did not further my
     career. I do not work for the police and have no interest in being a detective. A young
     woman disappeared because of my actions, and I live with that. But that is a separate
     issue, not what we’re talking