Nicci French: Waiting for Wednesday

‘What is it?’

‘I thought you should know at once. Frieda’s here, with the Lennox boy.’

‘With Ted?’

‘Yes. She says that he has something important to say to you.’

‘OK. Tell them I’ll come now.’

‘And Elaine Kerrigan is still insisting she did it.’

Karlsson went back into the room. ‘I’ll be back shortly,’ he said to Russell Lennox. ‘But apparently your son’s here to see me.’

‘My son? Ted? No. No, he can’t be. No –’

‘Mr Lennox, what is it?’

‘I did it. I’ll tell you everything. I killed my wife. I killed Ruth. Sit down. Turn on the tape recorder. I want to confess. Don’t go. I did it. No one else. It was me. You have to believe me. I murdered my wife. I swear to God it was me.’

Ted lifted his burning eyes and stared at Karlsson full in the face. For the first time, Karlsson felt a stillness about him, a sense of concentrated purpose. The boy took a breath and then said in a clear and ringing voice: ‘I am here to confess to the murder of my mother. Who I loved very much …’

Josef was sitting in the kitchen with Chloë, playing some card game that involved lots of shouting and slapping of cards one on top of another when Frieda returned. Even as she was considering how to break the news to her niece, she had time to wonder why Chloë was in her house when she should have been at school, and think of how, from being her secure retreat from the world, it had become a casual meeting place for everyone, a place of disorder and grief. Perhaps, she thought, she would replace all the locks when this was over. She looked at Josef. ‘Could Chloë and I have a moment?’ she asked.

Josef seemed puzzled. ‘Moment?’

‘Yes,’ said Frieda. ‘Could you go out of the room?’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Josef. ‘I go to Reuben now anyway. Poker for the guys.’

He picked the cat off his lap and, holding it against his broad chest, backed out.

As Frieda told Chloë, she watched the succession of emotions on the young girl’s pale face: confusion, shock, distress, disbelief, anger. When Frieda had finished, there was a silence. Chloë’s eyes flickered from side to side.

‘Is there anything you want to ask me?’ she said.

‘Where is he?’

‘At the police station.’

‘In a cell?’

‘I don’t know. They were going to take a statement, but they’ll keep him in.’

‘He’s only a child.’

‘He’s eighteen. He’s an adult.’

There was another pause. Frieda saw that Chloë’s eyes were glistening. ‘Tell me,’ she said.

‘You were supposed to look after him.’

‘I think I was looking after him.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He had to own up to what he did.’

‘Even if it meant ruining his life.’

‘It’s his only hope of not ruining his life.’

‘In your opinion,’ said Chloë, bitterly. ‘In your fucking professional opinion. I brought him to you. I brought him to you so that you could help him.’

‘Helping people isn’t simple. It’s –’

‘Shut up. Shut up shut up shut up. I don’t want to hear you talk about taking responsibility and fucking autonomy. You’ve betrayed him and you’ve betrayed me. That’s what you’ve done.’

‘He killed his mother.’

‘He didn’t mean to!’

‘And that will be taken into account.’

‘I’m going.’

‘Where?’

‘Back home. Mum might be a head case and the house might be a slum, but at least she doesn’t send my friends to prison.’

‘Chloë –’

‘I’ll never forgive you.’

It was finished, she told herself. She had finished. The feverishness of the last few weeks could abate; the strangeness could fade, like a violent bruise fades until at last it is just a faint ache, invisible to anyone else. The Lennox murder was solved. The Lennox children had gone to their different kinds of prison. Chloë had gone. Frieda had betrayed her friendship with Karlsson. The wild quest for a girl she had never known was over and already it had the quality of a dream. She wondered if she would ever see Fearby again, with his staring eyes and his silver hair.

She started clearing up, putting objects back where they belonged, wiping stains off surfaces, rubbing beeswax polish on to the little chess table by the window. That afternoon she would go and see Thelma Scott and dip the bucket down into the dark well of thoughts, but perhaps later on she could play through an old chess game, let the wooden pieces click their way across the board while silence settled around her again. She would have to call Sandy too. In her tumult, she had let him go. The two days in New York seemed distant, unreal. Now at last she let herself dwell upon the way he’d held her that night and the words he had said. Remember.

Remember. Halfway up the stairs, Frieda stopped dead. Something had come into her mind, setting her heart racing. What was it? Fearby. Something about Fearby, and his last message to her, before he’d disappeared out of her life. Frieda sat down on the step and tried to recall exactly what he’d said in his message. Most of it wasn’t important but he’d obviously had an idea that seemed worth following up. He’d said he’d looked over the files of the girls. She remembered that bit clearly enough. Then he’d said something else. That we’d been thinking about them in the wrong way. Yes, and that he was going out to take another look.

Was there anything else? Yes: they hadn’t heard the engine – what did that mean, for God’s sake? It sounded like a slightly mad metaphor for the way the mind works. Frieda thought so hard that it almost hurt. No, that was all, except that he’d said he’d come round and tell her what he found. So that was all. It didn’t seem much. The files of the girls. We’d been thinking about them in the wrong way. What had he meant by that? How could it be the wrong way? Was there some sort of connection they’d missed? He’d said ‘we’. In what way had Fearby and she been thinking together about the girls? She thought about the rest of the message. He was going to take another look. Another. What did that mean? Was he going to go back to one of the girls’ families? It was possible.

But then Frieda thought: No. There had been three parts to what he’d said. The girls. ‘We’ had thought wrongly about them – and he hadn’t heard the engine. And he was going to take another look. That must mean – mustn’t it? – that he was going to a place the two of them had been together.

Was he going to the horse sanctuary to talk to Doherty? No, that didn’t make sense. Then he would have said he was going to talk to someone. His message was about a place. That must mean he’d been going back to Croydon. To take another look. But what could be the point of that? The police had been to the house. They had searched it. What could there possibly be to take another look at? She thought again about the message, as if it was a machine she was taking apart and laying out on the table. The girls. We had the wrong idea about them. Taking another look. The first bit was clear enough. The girls. The third bit seemed obvious. Another look. That must be Croydon. The problem was the second bit, the middle. We had the wrong idea about them. We. That was clear enough: Fearby and Frieda. What did Fearby and Frieda have the wrong idea about? Them. The engine. They hadn’t heard the engine. What bloody engine?

And then, quite suddenly, it was as if Frieda had walked out of a dark tunnel into light so dazzling that she could hardly see.

Them. What if ‘them’ wasn’t the girls? What if the engine wasn’t a metaphor at all – because, after all, Fearby didn’t talk in metaphors. He made lists; he focused on objects, facts, details, dates. The engine was the one that Vanessa Dale had heard, the day she was attacked, just before Hazel Barton had been killed. Vanessa Dale, through her panic, when her attacker’s hands were round her throat, had heard an engine revving.