Nicci French: Waiting for Wednesday

The graveyard was crowded. Most of the stones were old, green with moss, and it was no longer possible to make out the inscriptions carved there; but some were new and shiny and had flowers on them, dates of the dearly beloved and the sorely missed.

‘Crowds of the dead,’ said Frieda, more to herself than to Sasha.

‘Why are we here?’

‘I’ll show you.’

She stopped in front of a carved stone and pointed. Sasha, leaning forward, made out the name: Jacob Klein 1943–1988, much missed husband and father.

‘Is this your father?’ she asked, thinking about Frieda as a teenager, finding him dead, trying to imagine the history of pain that lay behind the simple stone.

Frieda nodded, not taking her eyes off it. ‘Yes. That’s my father.’ She took a small step backwards and said: ‘Look at the engraving there, above his name.’

‘It’s very nice,’ said Sasha, lamely, after examining the symmetrical pattern. ‘Did you choose it?’

‘No.’ She reached into her bag and pulled out a piece of thick paper, holding it in front of her, gazing from drawing to engraving and back again. ‘What do you see?’

‘It’s the same,’ said Sasha.

‘It is, isn’t it? Exactly the same.’

‘Did you do it?’

‘No.’

‘Then?’

‘Someone sent it to me. This morning.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘They pushed it through my door in the early hours.’

‘Why?’

‘That’s the question.’ Frieda was talking to herself now, rather than Sasha.

‘Are you going to tell me what’s going on?’

‘Dean did it.’

‘Dean? Dean Reeve?’

Sasha knew about Dean Reeve, the man who had abducted a little boy and dragged Frieda unwillingly into the outside world, away from the safety of her consulting room and the strange secrets of the mind. She had even helped Frieda by doing a DNA test that established Dean’s wife Terry was in fact the little girl Joanna, who had disappeared into thin air more than two decades previously. Frieda had become convinced that Dean Reeve, whom the police accepted as dead, was still alive. He had become Frieda’s invisible stalker. The dead man who watched over her and would never let her go.

‘Yes, Dean Reeve. I recognize his handwriting – I saw it once on a statement he made at the police station. But even if I didn’t, I’d know it was him. He wants me to understand that he has found out about my family. He knows about the death of my father. He was here, where we are now, where my father is.’

‘Your father is buried in a churchyard, but I thought you were Jewish,’ Sasha said.

They were in a small café overlooking the sea. The tide was low and long-legged sea-birds picked their delicate way over the shining mudflats. Far out, a container ship, as big as a town, was moving across the horizon. There was no one else in the café and no one out on the shingle. Sasha felt as though she’d been taken to the edge of the world.

‘Did you?’

‘Yes. Aren’t you?’

‘No.’ Frieda hesitated, then, making an obvious effort, said: ‘My grandfather was Jewish, but not my grandmother, so his children were no longer Jewish and neither, of course, am I. My mother,’ she added drily, ‘is most definitely not Jewish.’

‘Is she still alive?’

‘Unless my brothers forgot to tell me, yes.’

Sasha blinked and leaned forward.

‘Brothers?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ve got more than one?’

‘I’ve got two.’

‘You’ve only ever mentioned David. I never knew there was another.’

‘It wasn’t relevant,’ Frieda said.

‘Relevant? A brother?’

‘You know about David because he’s Olivia’s ex and Chloë’s father.’

‘I see,’ murmured Sasha, knowing better than to press her and thinking that in the last few hours she had learned more about Frieda than in the whole course of their friendship.

She pierced her poached egg and watched the yolk well up, then ooze on to the plate. ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.

‘I haven’t decided. Anyway, haven’t you heard? He’s dead.’

Frieda hardly spoke on the way back. When Sasha asked her what she was thinking about, she couldn’t answer. ‘I don’t know,’ Frieda said. ‘Nothing really.’

‘You wouldn’t take that as an answer from one of your patients.’

‘I’ve never been a very good patient.’

After Sasha had driven away, Frieda let herself into her house. Inside, she fastened the chain and slid the bolt across the front door. She walked upstairs to her bedroom. She took off her jacket and tossed it on to the bed. She would have a long, hot bath and then she would go up to her little study in the garret room and do a drawing: concentrate, yet think of nothing. She thought of the graveyard, the desolate coastline. She pulled her sweater over her head. She started to undo the buttons of her shirt but then she stopped. She had heard something. She wasn’t sure whether the noise was inside or a much louder noise outside and far away. She stayed completely still. She didn’t even breathe. She heard the noise again, a small scraping sound. It was inside the house and close by, on the same floor. She could feel its vibration. She thought of the front door downstairs, with its bolt and chain. She tried to time it in her head, the scrambling downstairs, the fumbling with the chain. No, she couldn’t make it work. She thought of the mobile phone in her pocket. Even if she could whisper a message into it, what good would that do? It would take ten minutes, fifteen minutes, to get here, and then there was the locked, bolted door.

Frieda felt her pulse race. She made herself breathe slowly, one breath after another. She counted slowly to ten. She looked around the room for a hiding place but it was no good. She had made too much noise as she came in. She picked up a hairbrush from her dressing-table. It was hopelessly flimsy. She felt in the pocket of her jacket and found a pen. She held it tightly in her fist. At least it was sharp. It seemed like the worst thing in the world, but she edged out of her bedroom on to the landing. It would take just a few seconds. If she could get down the stairs without them creaking, then …

There was another scraping sound, louder now, and something else, a sort of whistle. It came from across the landing, in the bathroom. The whistling continued. Frieda listened for a few seconds, then stepped closer and pushed at the door of the bathroom so that it swung open. At first she had a sudden sensation of being in the wrong room or the wrong house. Nothing was where it was supposed to be. There was exposed plaster and pipes and a huge space. The room seemed larger than she’d remembered. And in the corner a figure was bent over, pulling at something to get it loose.

‘Josef,’ she said weakly. ‘What’s going on?’

Josef was her friend – a builder from the Ukraine who had entered her life in an unlikely way, falling through her ceiling when she was with a patient. But he had not taken no for an answer, and had a fanatical devotion to her. Now he started, then smiled a bit warily. ‘Frieda,’ he said. ‘I did not hear.’

‘What are you doing here? How did you get in?’

‘I have the key you give me.’

‘But that key was for feeding the cat when I was away, not for this.’ She gestured. ‘And what is this?’

Josef stood up. He was holding a huge wrench.

‘Frieda. You have been not well. I look at you and see you being sad and in pain and it is difficult.’ Frieda started to speak but Josef interrupted her. ‘No, no, wait. It is difficult to help but I know about you. I know that when you are sad you lie in your very hot bath for hours.’

‘Well, not for hours ,’ said Frieda. ‘But where is my bath? I was just about to get into it.’