Dark Saturday

by Nicci French

  “She was an alcoholic?”

  “Even when she wasn’t on one of her binges, she often couldn’t get out of bed. She would lie there, curtains closed, all day long. I’d leave for school in the morning and she would be this huddled shape under the covers. I’d come back and she would still be there. Everything was a mess. Everything smelled bad.” Shelley wrinkled her nose.

  “She was depressed?”

  “She was something.”

  “When you were little as well?”

  “I forgot the garlic. I’ve got out of order with everything. It’ll be spoiled.”

  “Shelley?”

  “She was different when I was at primary school. She’d wait for me at the school gates and she held my hand on the way home and sometimes we’d have bread and jam and she’d read me stories. I remember that.” For a moment her immaculately made-up face softened.

  “But then she changed.”

  “Yes, well, that’s all in the past.”

  She picked up a flat garlic clove and a smaller sharp knife and tried clumsily to peel it, but her tissue-bandage kept getting in the way.

  “Can I help you?” asked Frieda.

  “No.”

  “What about your father?”

  “What about him?”

  “Was he around?”

  “I know his name and that’s about it. They weren’t together long—just long enough to have me and then he left. There were other men, on and off. None who stayed. None I wanted to stay. You can peel the garlic, if you want. I don’t crush it, I chop it very finely.”

  Frieda took the knife and the clove. “So it was just you and your mother?”

  “Just the two of us.” Shelley gave a sudden high trill of laughter. “Happy families.”

  “It sounds painful.”

  “So why ask me about it?” Shelley jabbed at the onions. “Why poke round and stir up memories?”

  “I don’t mean to distress you unnecessarily.”

  “Then don’t do it. Put the garlic in with the onions. Please.”

  “You moved out when you were fifteen.”

  “I suddenly thought, I don’t have to put up with this any more. It wasn’t as if she was going to miss me, was it?”

  “Did she miss you?”

  Shelley swept a plate of diced courgettes and peppers into the pan. Her back was very straight. Her ponytail swung when she turned to look at Frieda. “It was too late.”

  “Did she try to get you back?”

  “She tried to make me feel guilty.”

  “Did you?”

  “Why should I? She was a bad mother. She cried and said she would be different, but she’d said that before, and she said she couldn’t help herself, but I don’t believe that. Look at me. I went through terrible times but then I pulled myself together. I got a job. I married a good man and I try to make him happy. I work hard.” She gestured at the sparkling kitchen, everything in its proper place.

  “But she was concerned about you?”

  “You should ask her about that. If you can find her.”

  “When did you last see her?”

  “I wasn’t living with her. I don’t know.”

  “Was she ever reported missing?”

  “She wasn’t missing. She just wasn’t around. Anyway, I don’t know because I wasn’t around either, was I?”

  “But someone must have been worried about her.”

  “Why? She didn’t have many friends left.”

  “Did you ever try to find her?”

  “It’s not supposed to work like that. She never tried to find me, her daughter. Why should I think of her? Anyway, that was another life. I was another person. I want nothing to do with it all. Nothing. If she came knocking at the door, I wouldn’t open it.”

  “All right.”

  “And if I did open it, I would be very cold and polite and pretend I didn’t even recognize her.”

  “How would you feel if I tried to find her, or at least to—”

  “If she apologized, I wouldn’t accept her apology. I’d say, “It’s too late to pretend to care. Too little, too late.”’

  “Do you think she’ll ever come knocking at your door?”

  “Of course not.” Again she gave a trill of unnatural laughter, as if someone were tapping a knife on the rim of a glass. “I’m only her daughter.”

  She peeled the tissue away from her finger. “It’s still bleeding,” she said, as if it were an accusation.

  “I’m sorry,” said Frieda.

  Shelley walked with her to the door, not like a hostess, but more as if she were making sure Frieda was really going. As Frieda stepped out of the front door, Shelley touched her on the shoulder. “You saw Jason,” she said. “He was my boyfriend. When I was with him we took drugs and we stole and we lived in a squalid squat. I escaped from all of that. Is that something to feel bad about?”

  “You feel bad about something,” said Frieda. “And, by the way, keep that finger clean. The cut looks nasty.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  Joe Franklin had gone, with his new haircut, his clean white shirt and the precarious sense of recovery that made Frieda more than usually gentle with him. Now it was Maria Dreyfus’s turn. She came into the room as though a wind was blowing her.

  “I wish I believed in God,” she said, before she was fully seated.

  “Why do you wish that?”

  “Because then I could pray.”

  “What would you say in your prayers?”

  “Please. Please please please.”

  “Please help?”

  “I don’t know. Just please.”

  “Please rescue me?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Rescue you from what?”

  “From myself, of course.” She glared at Frieda. “Which no one can do. I know. I’m no fool. My brain hurts. I had such a bad night. I can’t shake it off. You know, sometimes I actually hit myself to get rid of the feelings. Like this.” Abruptly, she lifted her hand and slapped the top of her head, then gave a small snort of what might have been laughter.

  “Don’t do that,” Frieda said.

  “Why?”

  “You’re here to talk, not hurt yourself.”

  “Talking hurts the way hurting doesn’t.”

  “Nevertheless, in here you talk, or choose to remain silent. You do not hit yourself.”

  “Sorry. I don’t know why I did that—it was stupidly theatrical.” There was a silence. She stared at Frieda, unblinking. “I don’t know why I don’t mind meeting your eyes. Recently I’ve hated that. When friends look at me I feel like squirming, screaming at them. I can’t bear their eyes on me. Maybe I’d do better on a couch, where I don’t feel your eyes going into me.”

  “I don’t have a couch.”

  “I’d probably hate it anyway. I’d feel like I was acting a part. And I’d only fall asleep. I’m so tired. I talk to you in my head, you know. I tell you things I’ll probably never tell you in person.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “You’re trying to trick me.” She pushed both hands through her hair. “Why not? OK. For instance, sometimes I feel so angry with my husband that it’s like being on fire. Or feeling sick—I can feel sick with rage.”

  “Go on.”

  “It’s physical, like a kind of huge, burning disgust. I don’t know why. Even when he had his affair, I didn’t feel like this. It’s like he’s done something to me, betrayed me in some deep way. Perhaps it’s connected to the affair, perhaps I buried the anger and now it’s finally expressing itself. But that doesn’t feel quite it. That seems too easy, too glib, an explanation.”

  Maria Dreyfus was talking in a way that she hadn’t done before, freely, not weighing up the consequences of what she was saying or censoring herself before the words were out of her mouth.

  “When I was young,” she continued, “I thought I could do anything I wanted. I was bold. I was full of hope. I took risks. Men fell in love with me—I don’t mean
great crowds of them, but enough to make me understand that I was desirable. I felt powerful then. It’s as if I’ve gradually lost that power, without even realizing it. Now here I am, middle-aged, my hair turning gray, my children gone, my husband a bit bewildered by me, and I don’t understand how that young woman has turned into this one. Compromised. I think that’s the word.” She rubbed a hand over her clever face. “It’s like my fineness has gone. All chipped and whittled away. I’m just a blunt instrument now. I didn’t think this was how it was going to be—my life.”

  For a few moments, Frieda let the words settle in the room. Then she said, “And you blame your husband for this?”

  “Maybe. It’s not fair, of course. It’s just a marriage. Quite a good marriage, if my friends’ marriages are anything to go by. I love him, I guess. I think he loves me—he would certainly say he does. But I don’t think he sees me any more. I don’t see myself.”

  “You feel invisible.”

  “Unrecognized. Perhaps everyone feels this. Perhaps this is what growing older means. Perhaps my panic is just me getting used to something that, in a few months’ time, will feel quite natural, quite OK. That’s what people say: this, too, will pass. I say it to other people. But maybe—” She stopped.

  “Maybe?”

  “Maybe I don’t want it to pass because that would mean an acceptance that life is like this: just a gradual process of loss.”

  She started to weep, making no sound or any attempt to stop or to wipe away the tears. They flowed down her face, like a stream down a steep hill, and she sat there, looking at Frieda, while Frieda looked steadily back at her. At last, she leaned forward and took a tissue from the box on the low table between them and wiped her face carefully.

  “Well.” She smiled. “That was unexpected.”

  When Frieda had phoned Flora Goffin, the neighbor of the Dochertys whose husband she had met a few days previously, she had said she would prefer them to meet on neutral territory. “I’d feel more comfortable.”

  “All right.”

  “The Corner Bar. It’s a stone’s throw from our house. We’ll both be there. I’ll make sure to leave the office early for once. And I’ve asked the boys to come half an hour later. Four birds with one stone.”

  Frieda arrived early and secured a large table near the window. She asked for a glass of tap water and drank it looking out of the window. A familiar white van passed and she blinked. Surely that was Josef’s van. What was he doing here? She remembered that he’d said he was going to do some work for Emma Travis but it was rather late for that. She frowned.

  She saw Sebastian Tait drift past the window, tall and gangly; his wife was tiny beside him, walking with brisk steps to keep up. They passed out of her field of vision. In a few seconds they reappeared beside her. Flora Goffin had a freckled triangular face and a head of curls. When she took off her mac she was wearing a linen suit that looked expensive and dangling earrings that swung as she talked. Sebastian hovered behind her. Frieda thought he must be at least a foot taller than his wife.

  “Nasty weather,” Flora Goffin said. She had a husky voice and a Scottish accent.

  “Now then,” said Sebastian, putting a large leather bag on the floor, taking off his coat and shaking the raindrops from it. “What can we get you?”

  “It’s on me,” said Frieda. “I’ll get a bottle of wine. Red or white?”

  It took a minute or so to persuade Sebastian Tait she was buying, and then he insisted on choosing the wine. Flora Goffin watched him with a humorous expression as he leaned over the bar, talking earnestly to the waiter, then turned to Frieda. “You’ll understand how strange it is for us to be revisiting the past like this.”

  “Of course.”

  “I don’t know what kind of help it is you need, or what you’re doing at all. Perhaps you can start off by explaining that.”

  Flora Goffin leaned forward slightly, as if she were an interviewer, and looked at Frieda shrewdly as Frieda began to give her brief account of what she was doing. When she started to identify herself, Flora interrupted her.

  “I know who you are. I’ve been looking through everything online about you. There’s quite a lot. My PA knows all about you.”

  “It’s not very accurate.”

  “I thought of going to see Hannah,” Flora said, so suddenly that Frieda was taken aback.

  “But you never did.”

  “I didn’t know why I’d be going. I didn’t know what I’d say. Anyway, I’m still a bit in the dark here. What could we have to say that would be any help?” There was a faint edge to her voice.

  Sebastian returned and pulled out a chair, arranging his long limbs in sharp angles. “It’s on its way,” he said. “A nice Soave.”

  “I was asking Dr. Klein what use we can be.”

  Frieda hesitated, looking between the two of them. “It’s not just that the case was badly conducted. I don’t believe Hannah Docherty is guilty.”

  Sebastian recrossed his legs. Frieda saw that he was wearing one of his ties. Above it, his bony face was pale, cadaverous. “What?”

  There was an awkward interruption as the waiter put a bottle of white wine and three glasses on the table, with a bowl of large green olives. They watched in silence as he wound a corkscrew down, then pulled out the cork. He held it an inch above a glass.

  “I’ll pour it myself.” Sebastian Tait’s voice was hoarse. He looked shocked. “Just leave it on the table.”

  “Why?” asked Flora, as soon as the waiter had turned away; her gaze was fierce. “What makes you believe that?”

  “It’s hard to explain.”

  “Nobody else has ever expressed any doubt. No doubt at all.”

  “I’m expressing it now.”

  “Just yours?” asked Flora. “Or other people’s?”

  “I’m the one pursuing it.”

  “On your own?” She gave Frieda a sharp nod. “I’ve read about you, remember.”

  “Largely alone,” said Frieda. “But there are significant question marks over the whole case, and the point is this: your neighbors, your close friends, people you went on holiday with, were killed and perhaps their daughter Hannah—whom you also knew well—has been in a hospital for the criminally insane for thirteen years for a crime she may not have committed.”

  “Really? I mean, really?” This was Sebastian, cradling his wine glass in his long, thin hands and speaking in a half-whisper.

  “I’m trying to find out,” said Frieda. She looked from one to the other. “Is there anything you can tell me, anything at all, about Aidan and Deborah, or Hannah, or even Rory that you think I should know—that the police never discovered all those years ago? Anything at all.”

  She looked at them in turn and they looked back. She saw Sebastian’s eyes slide to his wife, then away again. The rain dripped down the window and the wine bar filled with people taking shelter.

  “They were our friends,” said Flora at last. “But, you know, people are mysterious. They were mysterious, and after they died they became even more so. Deborah in particular.”

  “In what way?”

  “She withheld herself.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, Frieda saw Sebastian smile.

  “What would she withhold?”

  “If I discovered she’d been a spy, that wouldn’t surprise me.”

  “You were always rather hostile to her,” observed Sebastian, mildly, looking out of the window as he spoke.

  “Rubbish. She was my friend.”

  “Friends can be rivalrous.” Sebastian looked at Frieda. “Don’t you agree?”

  “Men like to think that about women,” said Flora.

  “You had reason,” said Sebastian. “Let’s not be forgetting.”

  The air was suddenly thick with unspoken thoughts. Frieda sat still and quiet, waiting.

  “Shall we get back to the point?” said Flora.

  “What is the point?” Sebastian drank some of his wine, then leaned forward to t
ake an olive that he pushed into his mouth.

  “Hannah is the point,” said Frieda.

  “Whenever we speak of her, which isn’t often,” said Flora, “it’s as if she’s dead. We use the past tense about her. Have you noticed?” She looked at Sebastian.

  “Perhaps that’s the easiest way to deal with it,” said Frieda. “Now, can we return to my original question? Can you tell me anything that you think the police might have overlooked?”

  “Flora?” Sebastian raised his eyebrows at his wife.

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake.” She clipped her glass down on the small table. “Stop it.”

  “What?”

  “Just stop it.” She turned to Frieda. “What my dear husband is hinting at, jabbing at, prodding at, is that I had a thing—” She stopped suddenly and Frieda saw a tide of red spread over her face and neck. “With Aidan.”

  “When?”

  “I can’t remember the exact dates.”

  “July 1999 to January 2000,” said Sebastian. “Which is rather a long time. For a thing.”

  “Don’t try to take the moral high ground,” said Flora. “It doesn’t suit you.” She glared at him angrily. The flush had dwindled to a small red patch on either cheek.

  “You’re right,” said Sebastian, holding up his hands in mock surrender. “You’re quite right, of course.”

  Frieda had the strange sense that he was enjoying this public disclosure. “Why did it end?” she asked Flora.

  “It just did. It was always going to.” She shook her head. “No, that’s not quite right. Aidan was always so cheerful, so energetic, but all of a sudden he became lethargic, even depressed.”

  “Who knew?”

  “About him being depressed?”

  “No. About your . . .” Frieda hesitated. The word felt so wrong. “. . . thing.”

  “I did.” Sebastian gave that strange smile again.

  “Did Deborah?”

  “Probably,” said Flora. “I’m almost sure she did. She never said and was always very friendly. I just always thought somehow she would know.”

  “Hannah?”

  “No. Definitely not. She couldn’t have.”