Nicci French: Waiting for Wednesday

Too many ghosts. Too many dead people in her life. Already a crowd of them behind her. The ghost of herself, young and eager. You start on your journey full of ignorance and hope. Her father. Sometimes she still saw him, not just in her dreams but among the faces she passed on the streets. There was something she wanted to tell him but she could no longer remember what it was. Darkness was gathering round her. Her head was filled with the colours of pain.

Past an old deserted warehouse, painted an ugly blue and covered with graffiti. Shattered windows. You could hide there. Perhaps it, too, was full of dead people, or of lost people. You couldn’t look everywhere. There isn’t an end, there are always others, and she was tired. Not a soft, blurred tiredness but one that was sharp and insistent. Tiredness like a knife, a millstone grinding. Sharon Gibbs was alive, but Lila was dead. The others were dead. Bones in the rich soil that fed a garden full of flowers.

The path broadened out into a wide track. The river was slow and brown. If she lay down here, would she ever get up? If Sandy were here, would she tell him? If Sasha were here, would she cry at last? Or sleep? When would she ever sleep? To sleep was to let go. Let go of the dead, let go of the ghosts, let go of the self.

Cranes. Great thistles. A deserted allotment with crazy little sheds toppling at the edge of the river. A fox, mangy, with a thin, grubby tail. Swift as a shadow into the shadows. She liked foxes. Foxes, crows, owls. A bird flitted by and she realized it must be a bat. It was night at last. How long had it been? Her river was still showing her the way and a moon rose and everyone she knew stood a long way off. Reuben, Sasha, Olivia, Chloë, Josef, Sandy, Karlsson. Her patients were reduced to a crouched figure in a chair, asking her to rescue them from themselves. Dean Reeve stood in a corner; he looked in at a window; she heard his footsteps when no one was there; and he left behind him the sickly smell of lilies and death. He was more real than anyone.

It was hard to know any longer why she put one foot in front of the other, one foot in front of the other, and kept breathing in and out, as if her body had the willpower her spirit no longer possessed. She was spent. Her waters were run dry.

But then the river widened and the path opened out and there was a fence, an iron bell hanging in a metal cage. The Wandle had guided her and now it opened out into its own small estuary and poured itself at last into the great thoroughfare of the Thames. Frieda was standing on a stone walkway, looking out at the lights of the city. She wasn’t lost any more, and somewhere in those pulsing lights lay home.

This was not a night for sleep. Thoughts burned in Frieda’s brain; images pulsed behind her eyes. She sat upright in her armchair and stared into the empty grate, where she saw the well-tended garden in Croydon. Now they would be pushing spades into the loamy soil, pulling the house apart. She remembered the two of them, Dawes and Collier, sitting in the garden. She felt sick and closed her eyes, but the pictures wouldn’t go away. She thought the stench of lilies still hung in the air.

At last she rose and went upstairs. She put the plug into the bath – Josef’s bath – and turned the taps, poured in bath lotion until the water foamed. She peeled off her dirty clothes and cleaned her teeth, avoiding looking at herself in the little mirror over the basin. Her limbs felt heavy and her skin stung; she was all used up. At last she climbed into the fragrant, scorching water and let herself sink beneath the surface. Perhaps she could lie here until day, her hair floating on the surface and her blood pounding in her ears.

At last she got out. It was still dark but there was a faint band of light on the horizon. A new day was starting. She dressed and went downstairs. There were things she needed to do.

First, she made a phone call, one she should have made days ago. He didn’t reply at once and when he did his voice was thick with sleep.

‘Sandy?’

‘Frieda? What? Are you all right?’

‘I don’t think so. I’m sorry.’

‘Hang on.’ There was a pause. She imagined him sitting up, turning on the light. ‘Why are you sorry?’

‘I’m just sorry. I’m so sorry. I should have told you.’

‘Told me what?’

‘Can you come over?’

‘Yes. Of course.’

‘I mean, now.’

‘Yes.’

That was one of the things she loved about him – that he would make a decision like that, without hesitation or a flurry of anxious questions that she wouldn’t be able to answer, knowing she would only ask out of extreme need. He would get up at once, book a flight, make arrangements with his colleagues, be with her before the day was out because she had turned to him at last.

‘Thank you,’ she said simply.

She made herself a bitterly strong cup of coffee and fed the cat, watered the plants in her backyard, breathing in the intense fragrance of hyacinths and herbs. Then she put on her jacket and left the house. It was a fresh, damp dawn; later it would be warm and bright. The sweetness of spring. The shops were all still shut, but she could smell bread baking in the little bakery on the corner. Lights were coming on in flats and houses; metal shutters rattled up in newsagents and corner shops; a bus lurched by with a single passenger staring out of the window. A postman pulling his red cart passed her. The great life of London starting up again.

Frieda reached Muswell Hill and consulted her A-Z , then turned off into a wide residential street full of handsome detached houses. Number twenty-seven. From the outside, the damage wasn’t immediately obvious – just darkened bricks, some charred woodwork, a broken window on the first floor and, as she drew closer, the acrid smell that caught in the back of her throat. She hesitated, then stepped into the front garden with its gravelled pathway and its tub of red tulips that had survived the blaze. From here she could see through the large bay window into the front room, where the devastation was obvious. She pictured the fire raging through the orderly spaces, gobbling tables, chairs, pictures, doors; licking ashy blackness up the walls. Dean had done this – casually pushed a petrol-soaked rag through the letterbox, dropped a match after it. We couldn’t let him get away with it. In a way, Bradshaw was right: this was her fault.

There was a side door to the left of the house, and when she pushed at it, it opened on to the garden at the back. She stepped through into a green space, and now she was looking in at what had once been a conservatory and kitchen but was now a ruin. She was about to turn away when she saw something that stopped her.

Hal Bradshaw was in there, stooped over the scorched remains. He squatted, pulled out what had obviously once been a book, held it up to examine, then dropped it again. He was wearing a crumpled suit and wellington boots and stepped softly through the silt of ashes that stirred as he walked, lifted in dark petals around him. Frieda saw his face, which was tired and defeated.

He seemed to sense her presence because he straightened up. Their eyes met and his expression tightened. He pulled himself back into the Hal Bradshaw she knew: controlled, knowing, defended.

‘Well,’ he said, coming towards her. ‘Quite a sight, isn’t it? Come to assess the damage?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘I needed to see it. What were you looking for?’

‘Oh.’ He smiled mirthlessly, lifted his sooty hands, then let them drop. ‘My life, I suppose. You spend years collecting things and then – poof, they’re gone. I wonder now what they all meant.’

Frieda stepped into the ruin and picked up the remains of a book that crumbled at her touch. She watched words dissolve into ash and dust.