Dark Saturday

by Nicci French

  “Where is she?”

  “Chelsworth Hospital. Have you heard of it?”

  “Of course I’ve heard of it. The whole country’s heard of it. When can I go there?”

  “Now, if you want,” said Levin. “Or tomorrow. There’ll be a pass waiting for you.”

  “What do I ask?”

  “Anything you like,” said Keegan. “You won’t understand the answer.”

  “And who do I ask for?”

  “Hannah Docherty.” He smiled. “Yes. The Hannah Docherty. Now you’ll understand why we’re worried.”

  INTERLUDE TWO

  Shay is the first to find out. She brings Dory’s breakfast and Dory whispers a few words to her. “My own knife,” she says. “Hannah took my knife.”

  “We’ll get even.”

  FIVE

  Frieda, who had no patients until later in the day, said she would go at once and this time Levin insisted on a car. It wasn’t a sleek black one, but a slightly shabby red Honda driven by Jude, who didn’t respect speed limits and blithely shot through amber lights. Directed by a satnav with a stern woman’s voice, they made their way out of London and were soon on the A3, going against the clogged traffic in the other direction. Jude gestured toward a flask of coffee, then chatted about her dog, a mongrel called Serena who, she was afraid, had shedded all over the car, and about her love of interior-design programs on TV.

  Frieda looked out of the window as the little car hurtled through the Surrey countryside. The heavy rain of the last few days had stopped and in its place was a fine drizzle that obscured everything in its soft gray film. Fields lay under water; fences ran across newly created lakes and little bridges stood useless.

  They turned off the A3 and made their way past large houses with porches and well-tended lawns, through pretty villages where houses were thatched and there were teashops. It seemed another world from London, thought Frieda, as the car jolted over a speed bump and swerved to avoid a man walking a spaniel.

  “Turn left in one mile,” instructed the satnav.

  “Not far now,” said Jude.

  The turning led to a smaller road with high wire fences, topped with razor wire, on either side. They came to a double gate with a hut beside it and Jude wound down the window and leaned out, waving a card. The gate swung open to let them through. As they rounded the corner a shape loomed out of the dank mist, dark and huge, more like a small, grim town than a single institution. It was flanked by Portakabins and trees bare of leaves, and had a low, modern building running off to the left. Behind was a dominating, solid mass of dark, stained brick, lined with rows of small, symmetrically spaced windows. Each window was barred. Some were lit and others were dark. Birds perched on the roof or rose circling above it, buffeted by gusts of wind.

  Jude swung the car round on the gravel and parked beside a white van. Frieda took her phone and her keys from her coat pocket and put them on the seat. She left her bag as well. Empty-handed, she walked up to the main entrance.

  Chelsworth Hospital was not a prison. Its inmates were patients and the doctors’ job was to treat them and make them better. But as Frieda stepped through a series of reinforced doors, which clanged behind her, into a security capsule, where she was patted down and had to turn out her pockets, then walked along a blank narrow corridor in the wake of two bulky men, who had keys jangling on their belts, past gridded windows that looked out onto a tangle of barbed-wire fencing, it felt like all the other high-security prisons she’d been to over the course of her career. Its name marked it out, sending a special shiver of recognition through people when they heard it. A house of unquiet spirits.

  They reached the back of the hospital, and another set of double doors was unlocked to take them out into a large area surrounded by a high, spiked wall. In the far corner, Frieda saw there was a greenhouse and she could make out shadowy figures inside, stooping as they worked. A man ambled past them, huge, smiling. His head was shaved and Frieda saw he had a livid scar running across his skull.

  “The women’s unit,” one of the nurses said, nodding toward a wing of the building that formed part of the courtyard.

  “How many women are there here?”

  “Oh, not so many. Maybe twenty-five, thirty.” He sidestepped another patient coming toward him, a nurse a few steps behind him. “Half of them have murdered their kids. Sometimes at night you can’t sleep for their screaming.”

  “You wouldn’t believe what some of them have done,” said the other nurse. He spoke with a kind of gloomy relish. “We’re meant to think of them as ill, not bad, but it makes you wonder.”

  Frieda sat in a small room and waited. It was very hot, very quiet. Someone screamed in the rooms above her, but the scream died away. The old radiator in the corner gurgled. The door opened and a burly man in scrubs entered. He nodded at Frieda, then turned.

  “Come on, Hannah,” he said. “This is the doctor lady I was telling you about.”

  Frieda stood up. Hannah Docherty came into the room.

  Hannah Docherty: Frieda tried to put out of her mind everything she knew, or half knew or had overheard or glimpsed in newspaper headlines. She tried not to remember the photos she had seen all those years ago, and which still cropped up whenever a woman behaved in a way that no woman was ever supposed to behave, did something “unnatural.” She tried simply to concentrate on the figure in front of her, as she limped into the room with an awkward, heavy-footed gait.

  The first thing that struck Frieda was her size. Even stooped as she was and draped in thick layers of clothing, Hannah Docherty was obviously tall and solid, with broad shoulders and large, almost mannish hands. At first it was impossible to see her face, because it was obscured by a coarse mane of thick, dark hair, with a single violent streak of white running down from the parting. Then Frieda saw that she was wearing handcuffs.

  She lifted her head and Frieda saw her face: bruised, swollen, her full lip cut into a sneer and thick brows drawn down. Frieda met her eyes: almost black, but very bright, they seemed to glow at her out of the discolored face, as if she were backlit. Frieda tried to make out Hannah’s expression: was she scared, confused, sullen, angry? Perhaps she was all of these. Her dilated pupils and the slight drag of her mouth also indicated that she had been drugged. She raised her cuffed hands to her face and Frieda saw a swirl of tattoos, homemade, amateurish. They were on the backs of her hands, her lower arms, around her neck, like ink drawings on soft paper that had spread and become blurred and fuzzy.

  “Hannah,” she said. “I’m Frieda.”

  Hannah stared at her but didn’t move. Frieda took a few paces toward her and the woman flinched and stiffened; the nurse took hold of her arm.

  “You want to be careful of her,” he said to Frieda. “She can just go for people. She’s even stronger than she looks.”

  “Don’t talk about Hannah as if she wasn’t here. Please, take off her handcuffs.”

  “She’s just stabbed someone. Nearly killed them.”

  “I’m assuming she doesn’t have a knife on her now.”

  “You never know.” He gave a low laugh.

  “Take them off.”

  He shrugged, then, removing the keys from his belt, unlocked the cuffs. Frieda saw red weals round Hannah’s wrists. She drew out a chair and put it close to the woman. “Here, sit down. You look like you’ve hurt your leg. I just want to talk to you.”

  “She’s not much of a talker,” said the nurse.

  Frieda stared at him. “I’d like to be alone with Hannah.”

  The man looked doubtful.

  “You can wait just outside.”

  He looked from Frieda to Hannah. Then, muttering under his breath, he went out. Frieda shut the door and put her chair opposite Hannah’s, but not too close. Hannah had wrapped her arms around herself and lowered her head once more, so that her hair hid her face. She rocked slightly, making tiny guttural noises.

  “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

 
No reply. She went on rocking.

  “I’ve come to talk to you and find out what you think about things that concern you.”

  Nothing.

  “I know you’ve been in here a long time. Perhaps it’s hard to remember what happened before you were here. Do you remember?”

  Hannah went on rocking, moaning.

  “You might have things to say, things you couldn’t say at the time about the way you were treated. You can talk to me, Hannah.”

  Suddenly the woman sat up straighter. “It’s me,” she said, in a deep voice that sounded hoarse from disuse, almost rusty. “It’s me it’s me it’s me.”

  “What is?”

  “It’s me.”

  “Hannah, can you remember when your family died?”

  “Me.” She lifted a hand and smashed it into the top of her head. “Me.” Once more she struck herself.

  “Don’t hurt yourself,” said Frieda, resisting the impulse to take Hannah’s large hand in her own to restrain her. “Don’t do that. Look at me.”

  “No. No. Don’t.” Then she said suddenly, in a voice that was quite calm and clear, “I’m too hot.”

  It was true: it was almost unbearably stuffy in the room and beads of sweat were running down Hannah’s face. She pulled off her gray cardigan. Under it was another long-sleeved top that she grappled with, tugging its sleeves up her arms and trapping herself in its folds, fighting. Frieda could hear her heavy breathing.

  “Shall I help?” asked Frieda. She rose, took the hem of the jumper, pulled it swiftly over Hannah’s head, then sat down again. Hannah blinked at her. She was only wearing a dark blue undershirt now, stained under the armpits. Her bare flesh was covered with tattoos, hardly any skin left unmarked by circles and geometric patterns, words and images, so that it was hard to know which to look at: the serpent, the rose, the crucifix, the swirling lines, the bird, the numbers and roman numerals, the web . . . She was like a violent manuscript in many colors.

  “Your tattoos are amazing,” said Frieda. “Have they all been done here?”

  Hannah didn’t reply, but she let her hands rest on her lap and was no longer rocking.

  “What does that one mean?” asked Frieda, stretching out a hand but not quite touching what looked like an hourglass, or perhaps it was a crude drawing of a naked woman, surrounded by small oval shapes, perhaps raindrops or tears.

  Hannah didn’t speak; her black eyes burned.

  “Do you have a favorite?”

  There was no answer, but after a few moments, Hannah put a finger on the inside of her forearm where there were three tiny inked shapes that looked like wonky crosses with circles on top. She touched the middle one and made a noise.

  “What is it?” asked Frieda. “What does it mean?”

  Hannah made another stifled sound. Frieda leaned forward, intent. Hannah touched the shapes softly again. Her breath came in little rasps.

  “What is it?” asked Frieda. “Hannah?”

  “Me me me me,” she said. “Me.”

  She wrapped her arms around herself once more and her hair came down, like a curtain, between them. She rocked to and fro.

  When Frieda left the room, she asked the nurse waiting outside how often Hannah was visited.

  He looked at her as though she had cracked a joke. “Her?”

  “Yes. When did someone last come to see her?”

  “I don’t know. Before my time.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “About seven years.”

  “You’re saying no one has visited her in seven years.”

  “That’s right. Or more.”

  “Does she have no relatives?”

  “Why would any relative want to see her?”

  “So there’s no one at all.”

  “Why would there be?”

  SIX

  Back in the car, Frieda didn’t speak for several minutes.

  “You’ll need to report back,” said Jude.

  “There’s nothing really to report.”

  “Then they’ll want to hear that.”

  Frieda sighed. She didn’t like talking on the phone, but Jude told her the number and Frieda dialed. Keegan answered. “So?”

  “I’ve seen her.”

  “Did she confess?”

  “We didn’t get around to that.”

  “Did you get any sense out of her?”

  “I’ll come and see you about it.”

  There was no reply and Frieda realized that the line was dead. “Wasn’t he pleased?” said Jude.

  “I don’t know,” said Frieda. “I can’t tell whether we lost the signal or whether he just hung up.”

  “He just hung up.”

  “I suppose he’s easier to work with when you get to know him.”

  “I can’t answer that,” said Jude. “I’ve only known him for a year.”

  Frieda’s phone rang again. “You were wrong,” said Frieda to Jude, as she answered it. “So I’ll see you tomorrow?”

  “Who will?” said a woman’s voice.

  “Who is this?” said Frieda. “Is Keegan there?”

  “Who’s Keegan? I wanted to talk to Frieda Klein.”

  “Chloë?”

  Chloë was Frieda’s niece and they were even closer than that sounded. At times, Frieda had taught her, fed her, lived with her and, most recently, enlisted her in a break-in—committing a crime in order to solve one. She had once wanted to be a doctor—like her aunt—but was now living up in Walthamstow and training to be a carpenter.

  “Who’s Keegan?”

  “Somebody I’m working with.”

  “Is he a therapist?”

  “He’s an ex-policeman.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “It’s just—”

  “Frieda, you said you wouldn’t.”

  “Where are you? What are you doing?”

  “You said to keep in touch,” Chloë said. “I’m keeping in touch. It’s my weekly call. It’s just that I was expecting to leave you a message. It’s almost the first time you’ve ever actually answered your phone.”

  “It’s because I’m doing this job.”

  “I want to talk to you about that.”

  “How about this evening?” said Frieda.

  “This evening where?”

  “My place?”

  When Frieda had finished, Jude looked across at her suspiciously. “You know you’re not supposed to talk about this?”

  “Who would I talk to?”

  “Whoever you were talking to on the phone, for example.”

  “That was my niece.”

  “Like your niece.”

  Frieda glanced back at Jude. Her lipstick was purple and her fingernails were blue, like the sky on a cold winter day. She looked more like someone who would be working in a gallery or a bar in Shoreditch.

  “How did you end up in a job like this?” Frieda asked.

  Jude looked puzzled, as if she wasn’t quite sure herself. “After uni I had no idea what I was going to do. I did some traveling with different hopeless guys. I ended up living in Berlin for a couple of years. Then a friend of a friend asked if I wanted to do some research work.”

  “Who for?”

  “It was a bit vague.”

  “What do you say when your friends ask you what you do?”

  “I say I’m a researcher for a consultancy. That usually makes them change the subject.”

  “Do you enjoy it?”

  “It’s all right for the moment. But at some point I’ll go traveling again.”

  “And now you know German.”

  “Hardly a word,” said Jude. “I told you. I was in Berlin. Everyone speaks English there.”

  Frieda felt strange sitting in a car driven by a woman she barely knew. Jude had a casual, slightly detached way of speaking about her work that Frieda found disarming. But maybe that was the point. Was anything she had told her actually true or was it the sort of thing likely to appeal to Frieda, to get her to let her
guard down? Or was she being too suspicious, if there was such a thing as being too suspicious?

  “I’m a therapist,” said Frieda. “Which means that I have a clear sense of what secrets need keeping.”

  “I went to a therapist once,” said Jude. “I had some issues when I was younger. I was in a bit of a mess. He didn’t keep secrets. He’d tell me about his other patients. He’d say this one had done this and that one had said that.”

  Frieda wondered if Jude was waiting for her to say: Yes, we’ve all done that. “You should have left him,” she said.

  “It didn’t feel that easy.”

  For the rest of the journey Frieda remained silent, through the blur of Wimbledon Common, Putney and Wandsworth, as London gradually came into focus.

  Chloë stepped into Frieda’s house wearing jeans, hoodie, black boots and a gray woolen cap.

  “You look like you’ve come straight from the workshop,” said Frieda.

  Chloë looked down at herself. “This is what I changed into.”

  “Do you want some tea?”

  “Have you got a beer?”

  “We could go out and buy some.”

  “Yes,” said Chloë. “Let’s go out.”

  “When I said we could go out, you were meant to say, that’s all right, tea will be fine.”

  “But tea won’t be fine. And you can’t just sit in your house all day.”

  “I’ve only just got back. Is it still raining?”

  “No excuses,” said Chloë. “You’ve got an umbrella.”

  “I haven’t.”

  “Anyway, you never mind rain. And I’ve just been paid. I want a drink and it’s on me.”

  Chloë led Frieda through the rain to a new tapas bar, on Charlotte Street, that had been decorated to look like an ancient cellar, all brick floors and old barrels. She ordered a carafe of sherry, olives and bread. “It’s like being in Andalucía,” she said, taking a sip of her drink.

  “Except for the weather.”

  “When I went there, it rained the whole time. Every single minute.”

  “So when are you going to make me a bench?” said Frieda.

  “I’ve got through the fun bit, when it was all exciting and new. Now I’m discovering how hard it really is. I’m at the stage when either I give up or I spend the next five years trying to get any good at all. Then I’ll make you a bench.”