Dark Saturday

by Nicci French

  He stopped as though out of breath. Levin picked up his mug once more and peered into it with an air of interest. “Yes,” he said. “What do you want?”

  “I just had this thought,” said Frieda. “If the case is unsafe, and if Hannah Docherty was not of unsound mind, just deeply troubled, at the time, as so many teenagers are troubled, then we should start with a basic principle and see where that leads us.”

  “What basic principle would that be?” Levin sounded genuinely interested.

  “The presumption of innocence.”

  Silence filled the room. Levin had taken off his glasses once more. Keegan stared at him. “Tell her,” he said. “Tell her it’s out of the question.”

  “Why is it?” asked Frieda.

  “Because Hannah Docherty murdered her entire family and some arsehole copper screwing up the investigation doesn’t alter that. You saw the files. She killed them and now she’s in a hospital and she’ll be there for the rest of her life because she’s mad and she’s a danger to herself and others. And anyway . . .” His voice rose in volume. “It’s not the point. The point is that we’re looking into a senior police officer, Detective Chief Inspector Ben Sedge. It’s a pile of shit and we’re wading through it. That’s our job. That’s what we’re being paid for. Hannah Docherty is just the small print.”

  “A means to an end.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Everything is wrong with that.”

  “Walter.” Keegan turned to Levin. “Tell her.”

  “What shall I tell her?”

  “Don’t do this. Please don’t do this.”

  “It’s OK, Jock.”

  “It’s not. Maybe you don’t want to deal with the small, shitty, boring stuff. That’s what I do. Hannah Docherty is a distraction.”

  “It wouldn’t be you. It wouldn’t be us. It would be her.”

  “Her.”

  “Me,” said Frieda. “Just me. And there’s something else.”

  “What?”

  “If I’m going to talk to people, go to places, it may be a bit of a problem being just a psychotherapist.”

  “That sounds right,” said Keegan.

  “So what can we do about it?” asked Levin.

  “It would be useful if someone could come with me. A policeman.”

  “Did you have anyone in mind?” He gave a faint smile. “Like Jock here?”

  “There’s somebody I’d like to try. But would they be allowed to do it?”

  “Check them out and I’ll get them seconded,” said Levin.

  “You can do that?”

  “This is just for a limited time. It can’t be open-ended.”

  “A few days,” said Frieda. “A week or two at the most. If I haven’t found anything by then, I’ll walk away.”

  “You talked about places you wanted to see,” said Keegan. “What places?”

  “The Oakley Road house, for a start,” said Frieda. “Where the murders happened.”

  “There are people living there. They probably won’t be happy about you blundering around.”

  “That’s why I need someone with a badge.”

  INTERLUDE THREE

  At group therapy, they sit in a semicircle and Tisha talks and talks about her little daughter and how she was taken away from her and how she still dreams about her, eight years later and five years into her sentence. But how can you dream about someone if you don’t know what they look like? Shay leans across to her neighbor. “Dory went for Hannah,” she whispers. “Hannah got her with her own knife. Thirty stitches.”

  “Shay?”

  Shay doesn’t notice Dr. Styles is talking to her.

  “Shay? Could I ask you to pay us some attention?”

  Shay looks round at the doctor, who is sitting opposite the group.

  “Is there something you’d like to share with us?” says Dr. Styles.

  “Not really.”

  “Come on, Shay. We can say anything here, as long as it’s nothing wilfully cruel or hurtful. Was it cruel or hurtful?”

  “No.”

  “Then share it with us.”

  “It was about Dory. How she’s been stabbed by Hannah Docherty.”

  “It’s not clear who was responsible.”

  “No, Dr. Styles.”

  “But it’s important to talk about it. We must talk about our feelings and what we can learn from this. Has anyone got anything to offer?”

  There is a silence. The members of the group look down at the floor or up at the ceiling, anything so that they don’t meet Dr. Styles’s gaze.

  “You, Kelly,” says Dr. Styles. “Why don’t you start us off?”

  “How?”

  “For example,” says Dr. Styles, slowly and patiently, “what can we learn from something like this?”

  “That we shouldn’t fight,” says Kelly. She speaks the words as if they are part of a lesson she has learned with difficulty. “And that it’s better to talk about things than . . . you know, than to fight.”

  “That’s right. That’s a good start. But you look doubtful, Kelly. Is there some part of this that you don’t understand?”

  “But what if someone comes at you?” says Kelly.

  “You tell me,” says Dr. Styles. “We’re here to talk about things like that.”

  “I just mean, if they come at you, you can’t just talk.”

  Shay leans across to her neighbor again, and speaks in a whisper. “We’ll see what Mary says about that.”

  “Mary’s in solitary. She won’t know yet.”

  “Mary’ll know. Mary always knows. Mary’ll see to Hannah. She’ll show her who’s boss in here.”

  NINE

  “I’m worried about identifying with her.” Frieda was once more sitting opposite Thelma Scott. “She’s an intelligent, energetic, self-sufficient woman. I get the impression her husband’s always been dependent on her, as have her children, her friends as well. The word she uses for herself is ‘competent.’ She’s having panic attacks. She feels unsafe in her world, which has come to seem like a hostile and even vindictive place.”

  “You’re describing a kind of paranoia.”

  “For years she’s controlled her feelings of vulnerability and fear. Now they’re controlling her.”

  “Why would you identify with that?”

  “I lie in bed at night, awake, full of dread. You’re going to ask, dread of what?”

  Thelma smiled. “Let me ask the questions before you answer them.”

  “Even if you aren’t going to ask, I’ll tell you. Dread that something is coming, that things are gathering to a head. Dread that there are enemies waiting in the shadows.” She remembered a word that Maria Dreyfus had used on her first visit. “Dread of a reckoning,” she said.

  Thelma nodded. She had the crabbed hands of an old woman but the voice of a young one. Her eyes were bright in the creases of her face. “As I often do,” she said, “I need to ask you how much of this is abstract and how much a more tangible fear. What kind of reckoning do you mean?”

  “You mean, do I have real enemies in the shadows?”

  “Or, at least, any that could really hurt you.”

  “I’m not awake worrying that someone’s going to break in.”

  “But you have been attacked.”

  “I have. And then, of course, there’s Sandy. I can’t get his face out of my mind. Or the knowledge that I was in part responsible for his death.”

  “The person who killed him was responsible. Nobody else.”

  “If it hadn’t been for me, he wouldn’t have died.”

  “You haven’t answered my question.”

  Frieda nodded. “I do have real enemies. Some I don’t care about. Commissioner Crawford. Hal Bradshaw.”

  “Remind me.”

  “He’s the profiler Crawford uses. He thinks I burned down his house.”

  “That one.” Thelma’s voice was dry.

  “But, as you know, as you’re waiting for me to
say, my real enemy is Dean Reeve.”

  Dean Reeve: the killer and child-abductor, the man the world believed to be dead but who had, Frieda was certain, killed his twin and was still out there somewhere. Out there and watching over her, protecting her, stalking her, loving her and hating her. Dean Reeve had come into her life five years ago, when his identical twin had been Frieda’s client. He had killed a disturbed young woman who would otherwise have killed Frieda; he had murdered the man who had raped Frieda when she was a teenager; he had burned down Hal Bradshaw’s house in revenge for Bradshaw’s treatment of Frieda; he had tortured a psychotic patient who had threatened Frieda. He was the grotesque distortion of her protector. For many months now he had been absent from her life, but Frieda had no doubt that he was still there, somewhere, that he was watching her and that he would never go away.

  “You still believe he’s a danger?” asked Thelma.

  “I know he is. I just don’t know what form that danger will take.”

  “So is this what you dread, when you like awake at night?”

  “A part of what I dread. But I can’t disentangle him from other feelings. Which is why I feel some kind of identification with my new patient.”

  “So these other feelings . . .”

  “There’s something I think I should tell you.”

  “Yes?”

  “I seem to have got involved with the case I was telling you about.”

  “You “seem to have got involved”—you talk as if you have no agency.”

  “I have decided to become involved.”

  “Last time we met you said you had decided against it. You were very clear why it was a bad idea.”

  “I know.”

  “This is why you’re sitting here, not because you worry about identifying with Maria Dreyfus. She’s your excuse. Even Dean Reeve is your excuse. You’re here because of the new case, the one you know you should be wary of. That’s where your feeling of dread is located.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “And the case?”

  “It’s about chaos,” said Frieda. “Abandonment.”

  Thelma looked at the clock.

  “Chaos and abandonment,” she said. “Something for us to talk about next time.”

  Frieda walked from the Underground station to her house. Passing an electrical shop, she saw through its windows a succession of images on the row of flat-screen televisions: a footbridge stranded in an expanse of water; a line of half-submerged cars on a road that had turned into a river; a man in a yellow raincoat rowing along a street; waves surging along a sea-front. It wasn’t raining any more, but the air was saturated and there were large puddles underfoot.

  She reached her front door and unlocked it, stepping gratefully into the hallway where she hung her coat on the hook and unwound her scarf from her neck. For a moment she stood quite still. Something felt different. There was a faint smell in the air that didn’t belong with the smell of wood and books and furniture polish that she was used to. She had noticed it before. She moved slowly through the house and into the kitchen. Everything seemed in place, her breakfast things washed up and on the draining-board, the herbs on the windowsill, the bunch of orange tulips in its vase on the wooden table. The cat-flap rattled and the tortoiseshell cat she had reluctantly inherited slid through it and stood before her, softly purring. She scratched its chin. There was a single spoon on the surface that looked as though it had stirred yogurt or cream. She opened the fridge but everything was as she had left it.

  In the living room, she lit the fire, setting a match to a tightly rolled ball of paper and watching until the kindling caught and a small flame was licking at the logs. She looked round the room. There had been a game of chess she had been playing through on the chess table by the window but the pieces had been put back in the box. Had she done that?

  Her house—this narrow little house in a cobbled mews, squeezed between ugly lock-ups on one side and council flats on the other—had always been her refuge and her place of safety. She could shut the door on the world and be alone, in its dim light, its cleanliness and silence. Over the past few years some of its boundaries had been ruptured—she’d let the cat in, she’d let her chaotic niece Chloë in, and then Chloë’s friends. Josef had taken it upon himself to install a whole new bathroom. Last year, suspected of murdering a man she’d once loved, she had had to flee from the house entirely and it had stood empty and neglected for weeks, gathering dust. But now she had a vague sense that someone had been here. She climbed the stairs to her bedroom and the bathroom, where Josef’s beautiful tub stood, then the next flight of stairs to her garret study. The book she was reading was where she had left it, the marker in place; the charcoal and soft-leaded pencils were in the mug. She looked through the sketches in the pad. She vaguely remembered—or thought that she remembered—doing a quick drawing of the Hardy Tree, from memory, in preparation for a proper visit to St. Pancras churchyard once the rains had stopped, but it wasn’t there.

  She called Josef, who was the only one with keys to her house.

  “Yes? Frieda? Is me.”

  “Have you been here recently, Josef?”

  “Here?”

  “In my house.”

  “For the cat-flap.”

  “I mean in the last few days.”

  “No. You want that I come?”

  “No. It’s fine.”

  “I can come this minute.”

  “I was just wondering.” She ended the call and went downstairs to the fire, which was now burning steadily in the grate. She was imagining things, the atmosphere of Chelsworth Hospital seeping into her consciousness; the memory of Hannah there, drugged and bruised; the images she had seen in all those photographs of the murders of her family. That boy, Hannah’s little brother, his smooth skull cracked open and blood everywhere. Her boundaries were crumbling.

  TEN

  “No,” said Karlsson.

  “I haven’t properly explained it yet,” said Frieda.

  “You’ve explained enough. You want me to go around with you annoying people about an old case. Tempting as it may be—and it’s not very tempting—there’s no way I could do it. I can hardly get to the toilet.”

  They were sitting in Karlsson’s flat. There were windows looking out on the small garden. It was raining heavily again and there were pools of water on the muddy little lawn. Karlsson was sitting in an armchair. His plastered leg was resting on a wooden stool.

  “I used to like the idea of a bit of sick leave,” he said. “I could do some repainting. Get the garden sorted out.”

  “The garden?”

  “Look at that lawn. I’ve put seed on it, I’ve put fertilizer on it, I’ve stabbed it, I’ve rolled it, and it still looks like the day after a rock festival.”

  “So you’ve given it your best shot.”

  “Turf. Just roll it out like a carpet. Or I could have it paved.”

  “You could hire Josef to do it.”

  “This is my garden. I need to do it myself.”

  “What you need is to get out there and do your job,” said Frieda. “I could really use your help.”

  “No.”

  “We’re not going to be running after villains. You could get round with a stick. Or in a wheelchair.”

  “Look at me,” said Karlsson. “Or, better still, read my doctor’s letter, which explains why I’m not available for work.”

  “I wasn’t going to say this . . .” Frieda began.

  “Then don’t.”

  “But the entire reason I’m doing this is because Levin arranged for your reinstatement.”

  “All right,” said Karlsson. “So the two of you got me out of the grave I’d dug for myself. Sometimes I wish you’d left me there. The fact is, I would be useful if your investigation was confined to bungalows and premises with wheelchair access.” He thought for a moment. “If only there was someone who was available during my absence.”

  “What?”

  “If only there
was a detective who was stuck in the office, while her boss was on sick leave.”

  “No,” said Frieda. “Absolutely not.”

  “Was this your idea?” asked Detective Constable Yvette Long. She was sitting in the back seat. Frieda was in the front passenger seat. Josef Morozov was driving. Frieda wasn’t sure who the car belonged to—Josef usually drove his battered van.

  “Karlsson suggested it,” said Frieda. “And I agreed.”

  “Was it his idea of a joke?”

  “What joke?” asked Josef.

  “He thought you’d be the best for the job,” said Frieda. “Anyway, if you didn’t want to do it, all you had to do was refuse.”

  “It was made clear to me that a refusal would be taken very seriously indeed.”

  “I’m sorry about that.”

  “You’ve got powerful friends, apparently.”

  “They’re not exactly friends. But it shouldn’t be that bad.”

  Frieda looked round at Yvette Long. Her cheeks were flushed and she was staring out of the window, avoiding eye contact.

  “I made the call,” Yvette said. “I spoke to the owner. Or the owner’s wife. She’s called Emma Travis. She didn’t sound pleased.”

  “But you persuaded her.”

  “She probably doesn’t want the whole murder business brought up. But I’m sure you’ve got a good reason for it.”

  “I want to see where it all happened.”

  “Why is Josef here?”

  “Don’t you want him?”

  “This is a criminal investigation.”

  “According to the file, the house was sold soon after the murder and there was substantial rebuilding. I thought Josef might help us get a sense of the previous layout.”

  “How?”

  “By being a builder.”

  Yvette took a deep breath. Frieda couldn’t quite tell whether it was a sigh of disapproval or just a breath. She turned round again and faced forward. Josef glanced at her. She thought she saw the faintest sign of a smile. She hoped and prayed that Yvette wouldn’t notice.

  “Before we begin,” said Yvette, abruptly, “I want to clear the air about a few things.”