Nicci French - Waiting for Wednesday

‘Hello? Yes? I’m sorry to call at this time. You probably won’t remember me. My name is Frieda Klein.’

‘Of course I remember you.’ Her voice sounded firm, reassuring.

‘This is really stupid, and you’ve probably forgotten this as well, but you once came to see me and you said I could come and talk to you if I needed it. I was just wondering if at some point I could do that. But if that’s not convenient, then it’s completely all right. I can find someone else to talk to.’

‘Can you come tomorrow?’

‘Yes, yes, that would be possible. But there’s no hurry. I don’t want to force myself on you.’

‘What about four o’clock, the day after tomorrow?’

‘Four o’clock. Yes, that would be fine. Good. I’ll see you then.’

Frieda got into bed. She spent most of the night not sleeping, besieged by faces and images, by fears and dark, pounding dread. But she must have slept a bit, because she was woken by a sound that at first she didn’t recognize, then gradually realized was her mobile phone. She fumbled for it and saw the name Jim Fearby on it. She let it ring. She couldn’t bear to talk to him. She lay back in the bed and thought of Fearby and had a sudden vivid, sickening, flashing sense of what it would be like to be mad, really mad, finding your own hidden meanings in a chaotic world. She thought of the troubled, sad people who came to her for help, and then the even more troubled, sadder people who were beyond anything she could do, the people who had voices in their heads telling them about conspiracies, how everything made horrible, terrifying sense.

Frieda looked at her clock. It was a couple of minutes after seven. Fearby must have waited for a permissible time to ring her. She got up and had a cold shower, so cold it made her ache. She pulled on some jeans and a shirt and made herself coffee. She couldn’t face anything else. What if Fearby had left a message? She didn’t even want to hear his voice, but now she’d thought of it, she couldn’t stop herself. She retrieved the phone from upstairs and called her voicemail. He probably wouldn’t have said anything. But he had.

The message began with a nervous cough, like someone starting a speech without knowing quite what to say.

‘Erm. Frieda. It’s me. Jim. Sorry about everything yesterday. I should have thanked you for all you’ve done. I know I come over as a bit of a nutter. And an obsessive. Anyway, I said I’d keep you in touch. Which is probably not what you want to hear. I’m in London. I’ve been going over things, the files on the girls. I’ve had a thought. We weren’t thinking about them properly. We didn’t hear the engine. I’m going out to have another look. Then I’ll call round to you and fill you in. I’ll be there at two. Let me know if that’s no good. Sorry to go on so long. Cheers.’

Frieda almost wished she hadn’t heard the message. She felt she was being sucked back in. It was clear that Fearby would never let go. Like those people obsessed with the Freemasons or the Kennedy assassination, he would never give up and nothing would change his mind. She was tempted to ring him back and tell him not to come but then she thought: No. He could come one last time and she would hear what he had to say and respond rationally and that would be that.

The day was almost as much of a blur as the night had been. Frieda thought she might read a book but she knew she couldn’t concentrate. Normally at a time like this she would have done a drawing, of something simple, like a glass of water or a candle. She didn’t even want to go out, not in the daytime, with the people and the traffic noise. She decided to clean her house. That would do. Something that required no thought. She filled bucket after bucket with hot water and cleaning fluid and took objects off shelves and wiped them down. She sprayed the windows. She mopped floors. She polished surfaces. The more she cleaned, the more she had a comforting sense that nobody lived in the house or had lived there or had ever been there.

The phone rang periodically, but she didn’t answer. She didn’t know whether it had been a surprisingly long time or a surprisingly short time, but she looked up at the clock and saw it was five to two. She sat in a chair and waited. There was going to be no coffee. Certainly no whisky. He could say what he had to say, she would respond, and he could go. Then it would be over, and she could go to talk to Thelma Scott and start to deal with all of this because it just couldn’t go on.

One minute past two. Nothing. She actually went to the door and opened it and stepped out. As if that would help. She sat back down. Ten past, nothing. Quarter past, nothing. At twenty past, she called Fearby and went straight to his voicemail.

‘I was wondering where you were. I need to go out soon. Well, not that soon. I’ll be here until half past four.’

She thought he might be one of the people who had called during the day. There were fourteen messages on her answering machine. They were the usual suspects: Reuben, Josef, Sasha, someone about a possible patient, Paz, Karlsson, Yvette. She tried her voicemail. Nothing. For the next half-hour she answered the phone three times. One was a fake survey, one was Reuben, one was Karlsson. Each time she said she couldn’t talk. By three o’clock she was genuinely puzzled. Had she got the time wrong? She’d deleted Fearby’s message as soon as she’d heard it. Was it possible she had misheard? God knew, she hadn’t been thinking all that clearly. Was it really two o’clock? Yes, she was sure about that. He’d even said that if she couldn’t make that time, she should ring back. Could he just be late? Caught in traffic? Or maybe he had decided not to come. He might have drawn a blank and headed home. Or he might have picked up on her scepticism. She phoned his number again. Nothing. He wasn’t coming.

At last she gave up on Fearby. She put food in the cat’s bowl and then she walked to Number 9 for coffee. As she was returning, she saw a figure walking towards her. Something about the heavy-footed purposeful stride was familiar.

‘Yvette?’ she said, as they drew close to each other. ‘What is it? Why are you here?’

‘I’ve got to talk to you.’

‘What’s happened?’

‘Can we go inside?’

She led Yvette into the house. Yvette took off her jacket and sat down. She was wearing black jeans with a hole in the knee and a button-down man’s shirt that had seen better days. Clearly, she wasn’t on duty.

‘So what is it? Is it something about the Lennoxes?’

‘No, I’m taking a well-earned break from that bloody circus. You wouldn’t believe – but anyway. That’s not why I’m here.’

‘So why are you?’

‘I had to tell you: I’m on your side.’

‘What?’

‘I’m on your side,’ Yvette repeated. She seemed close to tears.

‘Thank you. But on my side against who?’

‘All of them. The commissioner. That wanker Hal Bradshaw.’

‘Oh, that.’

‘I needed you to know. I know you had nothing to do with it, but if you had – well, I’d still be on your side.’ She gave a crooked, emotional smile. ‘Off the record, of course.’

Frieda stared at her. ‘You think I might have done it,’ she said at last.

Yvete flushed. ‘No! That’s not what I was saying at all. But it’s not a secret that you and Dr McGill were angry with him. You had every reason. He shafted you. He was just jealous.’

‘I promise you,’ Frieda said softly, ‘that I haven’t been near Hal Bradshaw’s house.’

‘Of course you haven’t.’

‘It was a monstrous thing to do. And I know that Reuben wouldn’t do that, however angry he was.’

‘Bradshaw said something else as well.’