Waiting for Wednesday

by Nicci French

  ‘That’s awesome,’ said Ted, in a loud, harsh voice. His eyes glittered dangerously.

  ‘This is just a fantasy you’re talking about,’ said Frieda. ‘Right?’

  ‘Or I could do worse than that,’ said Reuben. ‘I could tamper with the brakes on his car – with Josef’s help, of course. Or torch his office. Or threaten his wife.’

  ‘You’d go to prison. Josef would be sent to prison and then deported.’

  Reuben opened another bottle of wine and started to fill the glasses again.

  ‘I’m going to take Dora to her bed,’ said Frieda. ‘And when I come back, I think you should go. You and Josef are going home.’

  ‘I’m having a second helping,’ said Reuben. ‘More, Ted?

  ‘Reuben, you’ve gone far enough.’

  But a few minutes later, when she came back into the room, Reuben began again. She knew him in this mood – petulant and dangerous, like a sore-headed bull.

  ‘I think you’re being pious about this, Frieda. I’m an advocate for revenge. I think it’s healthy. I want to go round the table and everyone has got to say the person that they would like to take revenge on. And what the revenge would be. I’ve already named Hal Bradshaw. I’d like him to be tied to a mountain top naked for all eternity and then every day a vulture would come and eat his liver.’ He grinned wolfishly. ‘Or something.’

  ‘But what about when it had finished?’ said Chloë.

  ‘It would grow back every day. What about you?’

  Chloë looked at Reuben, suddenly serious. ‘When I was nine, there was a girl called Cath Winstanley. In year four and the first half of year five, she spent the whole of every day trying to stop people talking to me or playing with me. And when a new girl arrived, Cath would become her friend straight away to stop her playing with me.’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ said Frieda.

  ‘Mum knew. She just told me it would pass. It did. In the end.’

  ‘What would you like to do to her?’ said Reuben. ‘You’re allowed to do anything. This is fantasy revenge.’

  ‘I’d just like her to go through what I went through,’ said Chloë. ‘Then at the end I would appear out of a puff of smoke and say: “That’s what it was like.”’

  ‘That’s what revenge should be like,’ said Frieda, softly.

  ‘But you survived,’ said Reuben. ‘What about you, Josef?’

  Josef gave a sad smile. ‘I don’t say his name. The man with my wife. Him I want to punish.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said Reuben. ‘So what punishments would you like to devise for him? Something medieval?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Josef. ‘If my wife is with him like me, how do you say it? Talk, talk, talk to him …’

  ‘Nagging,’ said Reuben.

  ‘Yes, the nagging,’

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Reuben,’ said Frieda. ‘And you, Josef.’

  ‘What’s problem?’ said Josef.

  ‘Forget it,’ said Frieda.

  ‘What about you, Ted? If you could track down your mother’s killer? You must think about it.’

  ‘Out. Go home now,’ said Frieda.

  ‘No.’ Ted said loudly, almost in a yell. ‘Of course I think about it. If I could find my mother’s killer, I’d – I’d –’ He gazed around the table, his fist clenched around his wine glass. ‘I hate him,’ he said softly. ‘What do you do to the people you hate?’

  ‘It’s OK, Ted,’ said Chloë. She was trying to hold the hand that was clasping his glass.

  ‘Attaboy,’ said Reuben. ‘Let it out. That’s the way. Now you, Frieda. Who’s going to be the object of your implacable revenge?’

  Frieda felt a lurch of nausea in her stomach, rising in her chest. She felt as if she was standing on the edge of a chasm, with just her heels on the ground, her toes poking into the darkness and the temptation, always that temptation, to let herself fall forward into the deep darkness towards – well, towards what?

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m not good at these sorts of games.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Frieda, this isn’t Monopoly.’

  But Frieda’s expression hardened with a kind of anger and Reuben let it go.

  ‘The bath,’ said Josef, trying to make everything all right in his clumsy way. ‘Is OK?’

  ‘It’s very good, Josef. It was worth it.’ She didn’t tell him she hadn’t yet used it.

  ‘Finally I help,’ he said. He was swaying on his feet.

  At last they had left. The soft spring dusk was darkening to real night. The clouds had blown away and the ghost of a moon was visible above the rooftops. Inside, an air of anticipation and dread filled the rooms. Even Chloë’s animation had petered out. Judith, who had come downstairs when she heard the front door slam, sat in a chair in the living room, her knees drawn up, her head pressed down on them, her hair wild. If anyone spoke to her and tried to comfort her, she would simply shake her head vehemently. Dora lay on a camp bed in Frieda’s study with a mug of cocoa beside her, which had cooled to form a wrinkled skin on its surface. She was playing a game of Snakes on her phone. Her thin plaits lay across her face. Frieda sat beside her for a few moments, without speaking. She turned her head and said, in a voice that sounded almost querulous: ‘I knew about Judith and that older man.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘A few days ago, when Dad was drunk, I heard him shouting at Aunt Louise about it. Is Judith going to be OK?’

  ‘In time.’

  ‘Did Dad …?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Frieda went downstairs. Outside on the patio, Ted was smoking and pacing to and fro, his unkempt head enclosed in his giant pair of headphones. None of them could help the others, or be helped by them. They were just waiting, while Chloë barged around the house with cups of tea or firm, encouraging pats on a bowed shoulder.

  Frieda had asked Ted if there was anyone she should call and he had turned his sullen gaze on her. ‘Like who?’

  ‘Like your aunt.’

  ‘You’ve got to be joking.’

  ‘Don’t you have other relatives?’

  ‘You mean like our uncle in the States? He’s not much use, is he? No, it’s us and it’s Dad, and if he’s not there, there’s no one at all.’

  She sat with him for a while, relishing the cool night air. Nothing in her life felt rational or controlled any more: not her house, which used to be her refuge from the violent mess of the world, not her relationship with these young people, who had turned to her as if she knew answers that didn’t exist, not her creeping involvement with the police again, not her unshakeable preoccupation with the shadowy world of the missing girl Lila. Above all, not her sense that she was following a voice that only she could hear, an echo of an echo of an echo. And Dean Reeve, keeping watch. She thought of Sandy, only halfway through his day, and wished that this day was over.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  The following morning Frieda woke everyone early and took them all to Number 9 for breakfast – a raggle-taggle crew of bleary-eyed, anxious teenagers, who seemed closer today to childhood than adulthood. Their mother had been murdered, their father was in a police cell and they were waiting for the sentence to fall.

  She saw them all on to the bus, waiting till it drew away, then returned home. She felt drained and subdued, but she had things to do. Josef was building a garden wall in Primrose Hill; Sasha was at work. So Frieda took the train out from Liverpool Street, through the nearly completed stadiums and sports halls of the Olympic Park. They looked like toys abandoned by a giant child. Coming out of the station at Denham, she climbed into a taxi waiting at the rank.

  A hors
e refuge named after a flower. Frieda had imagined rolling meadows and woodland. The taxi passed a large, semi-demolished set of warehouses, then a housing estate. When the taxi stopped and the driver announced that they had arrived, Frieda thought she must have come to the wrong place, but then she saw the sign: ‘The Sunflower Horse and Donkey Refuge’. The driver asked if she wanted him to wait for her. Frieda said she might be some time so he wrote his number on a card and gave it to her.

  As the car drove away, she looked around. By the entrance, there was a pebbledash house. There were deep cracks in the façade and an upper window was covered with cardboard. It seemed deserted. On the wall, to the side of the entrance, there was another sign, stencilled: ‘Visitors Report to Reception’. She walked into a yard lined with stable buildings made out of breeze blocks and concrete but no Reception that she could see. There were piles of horse manure and straw bales, and off to the side a rusting tractor with no tyres on the front wheels. Frieda stepped delicately across the yard, making her way between brown muddy puddles.

  ‘Is there anyone here?’ she called out.

  She heard a scraping sound and a teenage girl carrying a spade emerged from one of the stable doorways. She was dressed in rubber boots and jeans and a bright red T-shirt. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I’m looking for someone called Shane.’

  The girl just gave a shrug.

  ‘I heard that a man called Shane works here.’

  The girl shook her head. ‘No.’

  ‘Maybe he used to work here.’

  ‘I don’t know nobody called Shane.’

  ‘How long have you been working here?’

  ‘A few years. On and off.’

  ‘And you know everyone who works here?’

  The girl rolled her eyes. ‘Course I do,’ she said, and disappeared back into the stable. Frieda heard the spade scraping on the concrete floor. She walked out of the yard on to the road where she had come in, looked at her watch and wondered what to do. She thought back to the conversation in the pub. Had she misunderstood somehow? Were they just trying to get her to go away? She started to walk along the road. There was no pavement, just a grass verge, and she felt vulnerable to the cars that were passing her with a rush of air and noise. As she got beyond the buildings, she reached a rough wooden fence that separated the field from the road.

  She leaned on the fence and looked across. The field was large, maybe a quarter of a mile across, bordered on the far side by the busy A12, cars and lorries rumbling along it. The field itself was scrubby and abandoned, broken only by occasional clumps of gorse and, in the middle, a large, dead oak tree. And then there were horses, and a few donkeys, scattered around. They were old and mangy but they seemed contented enough, heads down, nibbling at the grass, and Frieda found it relaxing just watching them. It wasn’t much, perhaps, but better here than anywhere else. It was a strange scene, neither town nor country but something messily in between. It looked like land that had been neglected, unloved, half forgotten about. Maybe some buildings had been there, had been demolished and the grass and the gorse had grown back. One day someone would notice it again, next to the motorway, close to London, and they’d build an industrial estate or a service station, but until then it would struggle on. Frieda rather liked it.

  She rummaged in her pocket and found the card that the taxi driver had given her. It was probably time to give up, return to London and to her normal life and her work. The impulse brought an immediate feeling of relief. She was just reaching for her phone when a car pulled up at the entrance to the refuge. A man got out. He was tall, slightly stooped, with unkempt hair that was nearly white and a beaked nose. He wore dark trousers and a rumpled jacket, a thin dark tie pulled loose over his shirt. He had a watchful, unsmiling air, and she saw the blare of his pale, hooded eyes. They stared at each other. They were thirty or more yards apart, too far to talk comfortably. Frieda stood back from the fence. She walked a few steps towards him and he walked towards her. The expression on his face didn’t alter: it was as though he was looking not at but through her.

  ‘Do you work here?’ the man asked.

  ‘No. I was trying to find someone, but he’s not here.’ A thought occurred to her. ‘You aren’t called Shane, are you?’

  ‘No,’ said the man. ‘I’m not.’ And he walked past Frieda into the yard. Suddenly he stopped and turned. ‘Why do you want him?’

  ‘It’s difficult to explain.’

  The man came back towards her. ‘Tell me anyway.’

  ‘I’m searching for a girl,’ said Frieda, ‘and I thought that someone called Shane might help me. I was told he was here but they haven’t heard of him.’

  ‘Shane,’ said the man, reflectively. ‘I haven’t heard of him. Still, you may as well come along.’

  Frieda raised her eyebrows in surprise. ‘Why should I do that?’

  ‘I’m trying to find someone as well.’ He spoke slowly and sombrely.

  ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t know you. You’re a stranger to me, and I don’t know who you’re meeting or why you’re here. I’ve finished and I’m going home.’

  ‘It’ll just take a minute.’ He scrutinized her. ‘My name’s Fearby, by the way. Jim Fearby. I’m a journalist.’

  The sun passed behind a cloud and the landscape in front of them darkened. Frieda had the feeling of being in a dream, where everything made sense but was senseless. ‘I’m Frieda Klein.’

  ‘And who are you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She stopped, hearing the words. ‘I’m just someone trying to help someone.’

  ‘Yes. What’s the name of your missing girl?’

  ‘Lila Dawes.’

  ‘Lila Dawes?’ He frowned. ‘No, I haven’t heard of her. But come with me.’

  They walked into the yard where the girl was now sweeping. She was obviously puzzled to see Frieda again.

  ‘I’m looking for a man called Mick Doherty,’ said Fearby.

  ‘He’s over the other side,’ said the girl. ‘Doing the fence.’

  ‘Where?’

  The girl sighed. She led them through the yard to the field and pointed across. They could see signs of someone moving on the far side, right by the main road.

  ‘Is it safe to walk across?’ asked Fearby.

  ‘They don’t bite.’

  A small gate opened into the field. Fearby and Frieda walked across it in silence. Two horses came to them and Fearby glanced at Frieda.

  ‘They think we’ve got food,’ said Frieda.

  ‘What will they do when they find we haven’t?’

  A small ragged horse nuzzled against Frieda. She stroked it between the eyes. How long was it since she had been that close to a horse? Twenty years? Longer? She felt the warmth of its breath on her. Comforting. It smelt sweet, musty, earthy. As they got closer to the far side, they saw a man fastening the fence to a new post, twisting wire with pliers. He looked at them. He was tall, with very long reddish-brown hair, tied back in a ponytail. He wore jeans and a black T-shirt. At first the T-shirt appeared to have long sleeves, but then Frieda saw his arms were covered with a network of tattoos. He had earrings in both ears.

  ‘Are you Mick Doherty?’ asked Fearby.

  The man frowned at them. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘We’re not police. I’m looking for a young girl called Sharon Gibbs. She’s missing. Your name came up as someone who knew her.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of her.’

  ‘I think you have. You are Mick Doherty?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘We just want to find her.’ Frieda hear
d the ‘we’, but didn’t protest. This odd man spoke wearily but with a tone of authority. ‘However, if we don’t find anything, we’ll have to turn over what we know to the police. I’m sure that’s not a problem, but …’ Fearby paused and waited.

  ‘I’m clean. You’ve got nothing on me.’

  Still Fearby waited.

  ‘I don’t know what you want.’ His eyes slid to Frieda. ‘You’re wasting your time here.’

  ‘Sharon Gibbs.’

  ‘OK. I know her a bit. So what?’

  ‘When did you last see her?’

  ‘You say she’s missing?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘When did she go missing?’

  ‘Just over three weeks ago.’

  Doherty finished twisting a wire fastening on the fence. ‘I haven’t seen her for months. Maybe more. I’ve been away.’

  ‘You’ve been away.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In prison. Just for a bit. Bloody set up, I was. I went in in January. I got out last week. They let me out and they got me a job. Shovelling fucking dung for fucking donkeys.’

  ‘And have you seen Sharon since getting out?’

  ‘Why would I have? She’s not my girlfriend or anything, if that’s what you’re getting at. Just a squirmy little kid.’

  ‘A squirmy little kid who got into the wrong company, Mr Doherty.’ Fearby fastened his unnerving eyes on the man. ‘And whose parents are very anxious about her.’

  ‘That’s not my problem. You’re talking to the wrong person.’

  A thought struck Frieda. ‘Do people call you Shane?’