Freda tried to cry out, tried to wriggle out of his arms, but his grip on her tightened. Her face was pressed against the rough serge of his jacket and she mewled with distress, a small, helpless noise, until, very close to her ear, he snarled, “Shut up, you little fucking whore.”
She had heard his voice before, but she couldn’t think where, and before she could rake through her memory she was jabbed by something painfully sharp and a wave of darkness passed over her and washed her away. The last thing she heard was the sound of his laughter.
* * *
—
When Freda came to, she had the worst headache in the world history of headaches. It took her a moment to recall what had happened. It took her another moment to realize that she was trapped in the dark somewhere—was it a box? A coffin? Had she been buried alive? In a dreadful panic, she screamed for help until she was hoarse, all the while pummelling and kicking the sides of the coffin, until there was the abrupt sound of an engine starting up and her nostrils were suddenly filled with the heady smell of petrol. A car. She was in the boot of a car. Not the best place to be, but at least it wasn’t a coffin.
The journey was mercifully short. When the boot was wrenched open she thought about jumping out and running, but she couldn’t move her limbs. Before she could catch a glimpse of the face of her kidnapper, he punched her again and she fell back into the dark.
* * *
—
When Freda came to again, it was to find herself in the river. Her baptism in the freezing, dirty water of the Thames brought her back from the dead, only to find herself drowning. She had gone down so far that she thought she must have touched the riverbed. She thought of Duncan’s pearl fishers. There was probably treasure to be found on the muddy bottom of the Thames—Roman coins and medieval rings lost carelessly over the years—but they were not Freda’s concern. She came back up, choking on the river, and like Duncan’s pearl fishers filled her lungs with air and then more air until she thought they might burst like balloons.
She tried to swim, but her legs still weren’t working properly and the current was an unforgiving predator, holding her fast in its watery embrace until it suddenly lost interest in her and she went down to the bottom a second time. She was a good swimmer, she reminded herself. She thought of the little trophies she had won in competitions in the Yearsley pool. She thought about Mr. Birdwhistle, about the horrid milliner’s in Coney Street. She remembered standing on the windy platform in York station waiting for the arrival of the train that would take them to London. The bluebird brooch. Owen Varley’s leering face. The Corpus Christi church. And Florence. Dear good, stupid Florence.
It was what people said, wasn’t it? That your life flashed before you when you died. It wasn’t much of a life when it spooled out in front of you like this. Freda felt a surge of anger. She wasn’t ready to go yet, she wanted more, much more, and better. She kicked and kicked and found air again.
* * *
—
Frobisher had been walking across Southwark Bridge, lost in contemplation about how he could bring Maddox and Oakes to justice and make sure they didn’t wriggle out of its embrace.
The matador from this morning （how long ago that seemed） had been identified. He was a man called Vivian Quinn and he wrote one of those society columns that Frobisher avoided like the plague. Embarrassingly, he had not been identified by the police, but—annoyingly—by John Bull magazine. There had been a phone call when Frobisher returned to his desk after the visit to Southwark mortuary, from the editor of John Bull, asking him to write something for them about the murder. Was there any truth, the editor asked, in the rumour that one of the last people seen with Quinn was Ramsay Coker, son of “the infamous Old Ma Coker”？ “I’m thinking something on the lines of ‘Vice Queen’s son embroiled in shocking—’？”
Frobisher had hung up on the man. Sufficient unto the day, he thought wearily.
On the bridge, his thoughts turned back to Gwendolen Kelling. She had called him by his first name. Should he read meaning into that? She was no longer the merry soul of a couple of weeks ago. He felt a stab of remorse. When he had first met her, he had been struck—captivated, even—by her sunny nature. Now he had somehow managed to obfuscate it, to eclipse her radiance with his shadows. He was pursuing the weather metaphors in his mind—dark clouds, befuddling fog and so on—when his attention was diverted by something in the water that was being swept along like more rubbish amidst the grubby flotsam of the Thames.