by Nicci French
‘No. I should be.’
‘This is a boyfriend,’ said Josef.
‘No,’ said Frieda. ‘When therapists ask if you’re seeing someone, they mean a therapist. Boyfriends and girlfriends, husbands and wives come and go. Your therapist is the really important relationship.’
‘You sound angry, Frieda,’ said Reuben.
She shook her head. ‘I want to ask you a question,’ she said. ‘I want to ask you one question and then I’ll go away.’
‘Then ask it,’ he said. ‘Do you want to go somewhere private?’
‘I’m fine here,’ said Frieda. She looked down at her plate. It was almost empty. ‘More than anyone else, you’re the person who taught me that my job is to sort out what’s going on in my patient’s head.’
‘That is undeniably your job.’
‘You can’t change your patient’s life. You just have to change the patient’s attitude to that life.’
‘I hope my teaching was a bit more nuanced than that,’ said Reuben.
‘But what about using a patient as a means of helping someone else?’ said Frieda.
‘Which sounds like a strange thing to do.’
‘But is it wrong?’
There was a delay while Reuben stubbed his cigarette out in a saucer and lit another. ‘I know this isn’t a session,’ he said, ‘but, as you know, when a patient asks you a question, what you normally do is try to suggest that the patient already knows the answer and is afraid of it and is trying to pass the responsibility on to the therapist. So, was it worth walking all the way over to Primrose Hill to hear what you knew I was going to say?’
‘I still needed to hear it said out loud,’ said Frieda. ‘And I got a good breakfast.’
Frieda heard the door open and she looked around. A young woman, a very young woman, came in. She was barefoot and wearing only a man’s dressing-gown many sizes too big for her. She had messy blonde hair and looked as if she had just woken up. She sat down at the table. Reuben caught Frieda’s eye and gave the tiniest of nods towards Josef. The woman held out her hand towards Frieda. ‘I am Sofia,’ she said, in an accent Frieda couldn’t quite place.
Chapter Thirty-nine
‘So, just the usual thing?’ said Alan. ‘You want me to talk.’
‘No,’ said Frieda. ‘I want to talk about something particular today. I want to talk about secrets.’
‘There are plenty of those. It turns out that most of the secrets in my life were secrets I didn’t even know about.’
‘I don’t mean those sorts of secrets. I mean the secrets you do know about.’
‘What kind of secrets?’
‘Well, for example, what about the secrets you keep from Carrie?’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Everyone needs secrets,’ said Frieda. ‘Even in the closest relationship. You need your own space. A locked room, a desk, maybe just a drawer.’
‘You mean a bottom drawer where I keep my porn?’
‘It could be,’ said Frieda. ‘Do you have a bottom drawer where you keep your porn?’
‘No,’ said Alan. ‘I was saying that because it’s a cliché.’
‘Clichés exist because there’s something true about them. If you had a few porn magazines in a drawer somewhere, that wouldn’t be a crime.’
‘I don’t have porn magazines in a drawer or in a box or buried in the garden. I don’t know what you’re trying to get me to say. I’m sorry to disappoint you but I don’t have secrets from Carrie. In fact, I’ve told Carrie that she’s completely free to look in any of my drawers, open my mail, go through my wallet. I’ve got nothing to hide from her.’
‘Let’s not call it a secret, then,’ said Frieda. ‘I’m thinking of another world you can go into. Let’s call it a hobby. Lots of men have hobbies and they have a space where they go and do this hobby. It’s an escape, a refuge. They go to their sheds and build model aeroplanes or Tower Bridge out of matchsticks.’
‘You make it sound stupid.’
‘I’m trying to make it sound harmless. I’m trying to find out where your private space is. Do you have a shed?’
‘I don’t know what you’re trying to get at but Carrie and me together do happen to own a shed. I built it myself and I’ve only just finished it. It’s where we keep a few tools and some stuff in boxes. It’s locked with a key that hangs by the door out to the yard and we both have access to it.’
‘Perhaps I’m giving the wrong impression of what I’m talking about, Alan. What I’m interested in is where you go to create your own space. I’m not trying to catch you out. I just want you to answer the question: have you ever, in your life, had somewhere separate from where you lived where you went in order to pursue some hobby or other, or just to be by yourself, a place nobody else knew about or could find you?’
‘Yes,’ said Alan. ‘When I was a teenager, this friend of mine, Craig, had a lock-up where he kept a car and a motorbike and I used to go there and work on his bike with him. Satisfied?’
‘That’s exactly what I meant,’ said Frieda. ‘Did it feel like an escape?’
‘Well, you can’t exactly work on your motorbike in your front room, can you?’
Frieda took a deep breath, trying to ignore Alan’s hostility. ‘Anywhere else?’
Alan thought for a moment. ‘When I was nineteen, twenty, I used to fiddle around with engines. A friend of a friend had a workshop in one of those places under the arches down in Vauxhall. I worked for him one summer.’
‘Excellent,’ said Frieda. ‘Under the arches. A lock-up garage. Anywhere else you used to go away from home?’
‘When I was a kid, I used to go to a youth club. It was in a sort of hut on the edge of a housing estate. We played table tennis. I was never much good at it.’
Frieda thought for a moment. She knew that this was all too straightforward, too superficial, and she was getting nowhere. A few weeks ago, Alan hadn’t known he was a twin. Now he did. The source had been contaminated, as Seth Boundy would have said. He was self-conscious; he was performing for her. Perhaps he needed coaxing.
‘I want you to imagine something,’ she said. ‘We’ve been talking about these refuges away from the home. Somewhere you can get away to. I want you to imagine something. Imagine that you did have a secret. That you had something to hide and you couldn’t hide it in your home. Where would you hide it? Don’t think of it with your mind. Think of it with your heart. What’s your gut feeling?’
There was a long pause. Alan closed his eyes. Then opened them and stared at Frieda with a hunted expression. ‘I know what you’re asking. This isn’t about me, is it?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’re playing a game with me. You’re using me to find out about him.’
Frieda was silent.
‘You’re asking me questions not to help me, not to sort out my problems, but because you think it might give you some hint about where to look for that kid. Something you can go to the police with.’
‘You’re right,’ Frieda said finally. ‘It was probably a wrong thing to do. No, it was definitely a wrong thing to do. But I thought that if what you said could give any help at all, then it was something we had to try.’
‘We?’ said Alan. ‘What do you mean “we”? I thought I was coming here for help with my problems. I thought when you were asking me questions it was to cure me. You know me. I’d do anything to get that kid back. You can do any of your experiments on me, that’s fine. Little kid like that. But you should have told me. You should have fucking told me.’
‘I couldn’t,’ said Frieda. ‘If I’d told you, it wouldn’t have worked – not that it did work, of course. It was an idea born of desperation. I needed to know what you would come up with spontaneously.’
‘You were using me,’ said Alan.
‘Yes, I was using you.’
‘So the police can start looking in lock-up garages and under railway arches.’
‘Yes.’
‘I guess so,’ said Frieda.
There was another pause.
‘I think we’re done,’ said Alan.
‘We’ll arrange another session,’ said Frieda. ‘A proper one.’
‘I’ll need to think about that.’
They stood up, rather awkwardly, like two people who find themselves leaving a party at the same time.
‘I’ve got some last-minute Christmas shopping to get done,’ said Alan, ‘so it won’t be completely wasted. I can walk down to Oxford Street from here, can’t I?’
‘It’s about ten minutes away.’
‘That’s fine.’
They walked to the door and Frieda opened it to let Alan through. He started to leave, then turned round. ‘I’ve found my family,’ he said. ‘But it’s not much of a reunion.’
‘What did you want from it?’
Alan gave a half-smile. ‘Always the therapist. I’ve been thinking. What I really wanted is what you sometimes see in films or read in books where people go to the grave of their parents and grandparents and they sit there and talk to them or just think. Of course, my mother’s still alive. It’ll probably be easier to talk to her when she’s dead. Then I can pretend she was something she wasn’t – someone who’d listen to me and who’d understand me; somebody I could pour out my heart to. That’s what I’d like. To lie by the grave and talk to my ancestors. Of course, in films it’s usually some picturesque graveyard on the side of a mountain or somewhere.’
‘We all want some kind of family.’ Frieda knew that she was the last person to say it.
‘Sounds like something you got out of a cracker,’ said Alan. ‘I suppose it’s the right time of year.’
Chapter Forty
‘I’m making the pudding,’ said Chloë. She sounded unusually animated. ‘Not Christmas pudding. I hate that, and anyway, it’s got about a gazillion calories a mouthful. And I would have had to make it weeks ago, which was when I thought I was going to my dad’s, before he found himself something better to do. I could buy one, I suppose, but that would be cheating. You have to cook your own Christmas dinner, don’t you, not just put something in the microwave for a few minutes?’
‘Do you?’ Frieda walked with the phone to stand in front of the large map of London that was pinned to the wall. She squinted in the poor light.
‘So I’m making this pudding I found online, with raspberries and strawberries and cranberries and white chocolate.’
Frieda put her finger on the area she was examining and traced a route.
‘What are you cooking?’ Chloë continued. ‘I hope it’s not turkey. Turkey doesn’t taste of anything. Mum said you definitely wouldn’t cook turkey.’
‘It’s not exactly definite.’ Frieda was going up the stairs now, to her bedroom.
‘Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it. Just don’t. Please don’t. Tomorrow is Christmas Eve. I don’t care about presents or stuff; I don’t care what we eat, actually. But I don’t want you not to even think about it at all, as if it doesn’t matter to you one way or the other. I couldn’t bear that. Literally. This is Christmas, Frieda. Remember. All my friends are having great family reunions or going to Mauritius with their dads or something. I’m coming to yours. You have to make an effort so that it’s special.’
‘I know,’ said Frieda, forcing herself to respond. She pulled a thick sweater from her drawer and threw it on the bed, followed by a pair of gloves. ‘I will. I am. I promise.’ The thought of Christmas made her feel a bit sick: a lost boy and a missing young woman, Dean and Terry Reeve free, and she was supposed to eat and drink and laugh, put a paper crown on her head.
‘Is it just us three, or have you invited other people? That’s fine by me. In fact, I’d like it. It’s a pity Jack can’t come.’
‘What?’
‘Jack. You know.’
‘You don’t know Jack.’
‘I do.’
‘You only met him once for about thirty seconds.’
‘Before you hustled him out of my sight. Yeah. But we’re Facebook buddies now.’
‘You are, are you?’
‘Yeah. We’re going to meet when he gets back. Is that a problem?’
Was it a problem? Of course it was a problem. Her trainee and her niece. But it was a problem for later, not now. ‘How old are you?’ she asked.
‘You know how old I am. Sixteen. Old enough.’
Frieda bit her lip. She didn’t want to ask, Old enough for what?
‘We could play charades,’ said Chloë, cheerfully. ‘What time shall we arrive?’
‘What do you think?’
‘How about early afternoon? That’s what other families do. They open their presents and mooch around a bit and then they have a blow-out meal in the afternoon or early evening. We could do that.’
‘Right.’
She pulled off her slippers; holding the phone between chin and hunched shoulder, she pulled off her skirt and tights.
‘We’re bringing the champagne. Mum said. That’s her contribution. What about crackers?’
Frieda thought of Alan’s parting remark and gave herself a mental shake. ‘I’ll bring the crackers,’ she said firmly. ‘And it won’t be turkey.’
‘So what -’
‘It’s a surprise.’
Before she left the house she called Reuben. Josef answered. Loud music was playing in the background. ‘Will you and Reuben come and have Christmas dinner at my house?’ she asked, without preamble.
‘Already we are.’
‘Sorry?’
‘We agreed. You cook me an English Christmas. Turkey and plum pudding.’
‘I was thinking about something a bit different. Like me not cooking it. What do you do in Ukraine for Christmas?’
‘It is my honour to prepare for my friends. Twelve foods.’
‘Twelve? No, Josef. One is fine.’
‘Twelve foods is mandatory in my home.’
‘But that’s too much.’
‘Never too much.’
‘If you’re sure,’ said Frieda, doubtfully. ‘I just thought something simple. Meatballs. Isn’t that Ukrainian?’
‘No meat. Never meat on the day. Fish is good.’
‘Maybe you can get Reuben to help. Another thing: what are you doing right now?’
‘I must shop for my meal.’
‘I’ll pay for the ingredients. It’s the least I can do. But before that, Josef, do you want to go on a walk with me?’
‘Outside is wet and cold.’
‘Not as cold as in the Ukraine, surely. I could do with another pair of eyes.’
‘Where are we walking together?’
‘I’ll see you outside the tube station. Reuben can tell you how to get there.’
Frieda pulled the collar of her coat up to protect her face from the wind.
‘Your shoes are wet,’ she said to Josef.
‘And the feet,’ he said. He was wearing a thin jacket that she thought belonged to Reuben, no gloves, and a bright red scarf that he’d wrapped several times round his neck and lower face so his voice was muffled. His hair, damp from the sleet, was flat against his skull.
‘Thank you for coming,’ she said, and he made his curious little bow, side-stepping a puddle.
‘And why is it?’ he said.
‘A walk around London. It’s what I do. It’s a way of thinking. Normally I do it on my own but this time I wanted someone with me. Not just anyone. I thought you could help me. The police have been knocking on doors, looking for Matthew and Kathy, or the bodies of Matthew and Kathy. I needed to come here, just for the smell of it, really.’
She thought of Alan’s words. Boarded-up buildings, abandoned workshops under arches, lock-ups, tunnels. That kind of thing. Put yourself in this man’s shoes. Think how he’d feel, panicking, casting around for a hiding place. A place where no one will look; a place where if someone cries out for help, they wo
n’t be heard. She looked helplessly around at the flats and houses, a few of which were lit up and festooned with Christmas decorations, at the shops with their doors wide open, belting heat into the winter streets, the clogged roads, the shoppers milling past clutching bags full of presents and food. ‘Behind thick walls, under our feet. I don’t know. We’ll start together, then separate. I’ve got a kind of route planned.’
Josef nodded.
‘A couple of hours and then you can go and buy your food.’
Frieda opened up her A-Z and found the right page. She pointed at a spot. ‘We’re here,’ she said. She moved her finger half an inch across. ‘I think he was kept here. Dean had to move the boy quickly. So I’m going to say that he would take him somewhere not more than half a mile. Maybe a mile.’
‘Why?’ said Josef.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Why one mile? Why not five mile? Why not ten mile?’
‘Reeve had to think quickly. He had to think of a hiding place nearby. Somewhere he knew.’
‘He take him to a friend?’
Frieda shook her head. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘I think you could take an object to a friend, but not a child. I don’t believe he’d have that kind of friend. I think he’d put Matthew somewhere. Somewhere he knew he could get back to. But then he was being watched and he couldn’t go there.’
Josef crossed his arms as if protecting himself against the cold. ‘Many guesses,’ he said. ‘Maybe he took the boy. Maybe the boy is alive. Maybe he hide him near the house.’
‘They aren’t guesses,’ said Frieda.
‘A mile,’ said Josef. He put his finger on the map on the spot where Dean Reeve lived. He moved it out. ‘A mile?’ he said, again, then traced a circle around the spot. ‘Six miles square. More, I think.’
‘I brought you here to help me,’ said Frieda. ‘Not to tell me what I already know. If it were you, what would you do?’
‘If I steal, I steal equipment. A drill, a sander, sell it for a few pounds. I don’t steal a little child.’
‘But if you did.’
Josef made a helpless gesture. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘A cupboard or a box or a locked room. A place with no people.’