Dark Saturday

by Nicci French

  “That’s what it’s like to do something difficult,” said Frieda.

  “And I’m sleeping with one of the boys in the workshop.”

  “Is that a good thing?”

  “It’s all right. So now you know everything about my life and I’m going to ask you about yours. For example, I thought you and me were going to end up sharing a cell together. And then you almost got killed. So when you said you were working for the police again, I half assumed—or hoped—you were making a really bad joke.”

  “I’m not working for the police.”

  “Oh, good.”

  “I’m working with someone who used to be a detective and it’s connected with the police. In a way. But it’s just a one-off.”

  “A one-off,” said Chloë.

  “Yes.”

  Chloë’s expression had changed. Suddenly she looked like the troubled, chaotic teenager Frieda had known, years before, and had tried to help. “I just thought of something,” she said.

  “What?”

  “ ‘A burned child loves the fire.’ That’s Oscar Wilde, isn’t it?”

  “I think so.”

  “When I read it, I thought it was stupid. Saying the opposite of the truth as a way of being clever. But that’s what you’re like. You’ve been burned, and burned some more, and yet you always return to the fire. I don’t understand it. Are you going to keep doing this until you run into something you can’t walk away from?”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “I can see that it’s like an addiction. Sitting in a room listening to people moan on about their silly little problems—that must get a bit boring after what you’ve been through.”

  “I know what you’re saying to me.”

  “But . . . I can hear a “but” coming.”

  Frieda couldn’t stop herself smiling. She wasn’t used to being questioned like this by someone she still thought of as a child. Wrongly. “You may be right. When you do something enough, maybe you should admit that it’s what you do, that it’s who you are. Even so, this is happening for a particular reason. This man, the man I’m now helping, did me a favor when I was in trouble. More important, he did Karlsson a favor. I owe him one. And this is it.”

  “Are you going to tell me about it?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t.”

  “I’ll probably read about it in the paper.”

  “I hope not.”

  “All right. Interrogation over. Now we can talk like normal people. Which we haven’t done for ages.”

  “I was thinking about you this morning. I was going to get in touch.”

  “What about?”

  “You’ve got a tattoo, haven’t you?”

  Chloë looked incredulous. “You were thinking about my tattoos? Are you considering getting one?”

  “No,” said Frieda, then realized what Chloë had said. “Tattoos? Have you got more than one?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Show me.”

  Chloë unzipped her hoodie and took it off. Underneath she had a black sweatshirt. She grappled with the collar and pulled it off her shoulder, exposing a flower, red with a black-thorned stalk.

  “Is that a rose?” said Frieda.

  “That’s what I asked for.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I liked the look of it. And there’s this one.” Chloë twisted round and pulled her shirt up. Up the side of her ribs a scaly snake was in a circle, about to swallow its own tail.

  “Does that symbolize something?”

  “Eternity,” said Chloë. “That’s what this guy in Thailand told me. Or endless desire. And I’ve got one more, but if I showed you that one in here, they’d throw us out. Or have us arrested.”

  “Because of what it shows?”

  “Because of where it is.”

  “Oh. Why did you get them, Chloë?”

  “If you pretend you didn’t say that, I won’t have to say that you sound like my mother.”

  “What does Olivia think?”

  “She had a fit. But she doesn’t know about my secret one.”

  “I wish I didn’t know about it. So tell me why you get them.”

  “I don’t know. It was something to do.”

  “I met a woman with tattoos this morning.”

  “Were you in a prison?”

  Frieda gave a start. “What makes you say that?”

  Chloe laughed. “You’re on a case.”

  “It’s not exactly a case.”

  “If you’re on a case and you meet someone tattooed, that means prison.”

  “In fact, it wasn’t a prison.”

  “Was it Broadmoor?”

  “It wasn’t Broadmoor and stop trying to guess. I was talking—or trying to talk—to a woman who is a patient there. I didn’t get any sense out of her. I was looking at her tattoos and wondering what they meant.”

  “This boy I’m going out with has tattoos on his back and his chest and sleeves on both arms. He says they tell the story of his life. I told him he’d better not think of putting me on there.”

  “That’s interesting,” said Frieda, thoughtfully. “I could see she was right-handed.”

  “How could you see that?”

  “It’s to do with muscle development. And on her left forearm she had a tattoo that she might have done herself. It showed a woman’s body in darkness and around her were six little almond shapes.”

  “Almond shapes? What’s that?”

  “I don’t think they’re almonds. I think they’re pomegranate seeds.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t you know the old Greek myth of Persephone?”

  “Not exactly. Shall we get another carafe?”

  Without waiting for an answer, Chloë waved the empty carafe at a waitress.

  “Persephone was the daughter of the earth goddess, Demeter. One day she was seized by Hades and taken to the underworld. She was rescued, but not before she had eaten six seeds of a pomegranate. So for six months of every year she had to return to Hades. Which is why we have winter.”

  “So what does that mean?”

  “It could mean that this young woman is a prisoner.”

  “I thought you knew that already.”

  “And that she feels herself to be in Hell.”

  “Who’s she trying to tell?”

  “Herself, perhaps. What do you think?”

  Chloë had looked dubious but not as dubious as Keegan, when Frieda met him, Levin and Jude the next morning.

  “Is that it?” he said.

  “What do you mean “it”?”

  “That’s your report?”

  “It’s my account of what I saw yesterday.”

  “You didn’t get a statement but you looked at her tattoos.”

  “It looked like a message. A message to herself.”

  “You know that getting tattoos is what prisoners do?”

  “I do, and I think it’s possible that this tattoo is a message.”

  “A message about being in some kind of Hell?”

  “Yes.”

  “And this is relevant—why?”

  “I don’t know if it is relevant.”

  “Then I’ll tell you. It isn’t.”

  “I didn’t ask for this,” said Frieda. “Levin asked me. Now I’m here.”

  Levin hadn’t spoken. He was leaning back on his chair, looking up at the ceiling. When he turned toward Frieda, he wore an expression of mild amusement. Frieda didn’t know who it was directed at.

  “You know the saying, “Don’t get a dog and bark yourself”?” Levin asked. Nobody replied. “My own version of that would be: don’t get a dog, muzzle it and tie it up as soon as you’ve got it.”

  “Who’s the dog in this version?” asked Frieda.

  “Well, you, I suppose,” said Levin. “But I meant it in a respectful way. So what do you want?”

  “You must have a file of some kind.”

  “Yes,” said Keegan. “We have a file of some kind.”r />
  “I’d be interested in taking a look at it.”

  “Do you know the full story of what this woman did?” asked Keegan.

  “I know she was found guilty of murdering her entire family. I don’t think there’s anyone who doesn’t know that. For a while she must have been the most reviled person in the country.”

  “Yes, and with good reason. It was an abattoir. And let me tell you,” he leaned toward her, “it’s the most open-and-shut case I’ve ever seen.”

  “Then there’s no harm in me looking at the files.”

  “We’re looking at how the police handled the case, not the case itself.”

  “I know that.”

  Keegan turned to Levin. “She’s a therapist.”

  “I’m in the room,” said Frieda.

  He turned to her. “You’re a therapist.”

  “That’s why I brought her,” said Levin, the smile fading from his face. “Give her the file.”

  SEVEN

  The files weren’t files but boxes. Jude led her upstairs, past a closed door, and into a small room made even smaller by the bed at the end, covered with a brightly patterned quilt and with a hot-water bottle on the pillow. The only other furniture was the table and chair. There was an Anglepoise lamp on the table and under it were four boxes full of papers.

  Jude switched on the lamp and pulled the boxes out. “There you are,” she said. “Plenty to keep you busy.”

  “Yes.”

  “Coffee?”

  “I’d like that.”

  “There’s this Scandinavian place down the road that does amazing cardamom and cinnamon buns. I’m addicted. Do you want one?”

  “Just coffee.”

  “Your loss. Next time, perhaps.”

  Frieda took a layer of papers from the first box and put it on the table. She took out her notebook and pen and put them beside the papers. Then she sat down and started to read. She read for six hours. She read through the three coffees that Jude brought her, and through the smoked salmon on rye bread. The stormy day outside darkened toward evening, rumbling with far-off thunder.

  The papers were almost all photocopies and some were hard to decipher. They were in no particular order. Frieda spent the first half-hour sorting them into categories: forensic reports, phone bills, police interviews, witness statements, court transcripts, psychological assessments and photographs.

  She wanted to be as chronological as possible so she started with the police statements. Late on Saturday, May 19, just before midnight, the police station had received an anonymous call, later traced to a nearby phone box, reporting the sound of a disturbance at 54 Oakley Road. Frieda checked the address on a map she carried in her bag. It was down in Dulwich, foreign territory to her, deep in south London. The police had arrived at twelve twenty on Sunday morning: DCI Sedge, who was at the station finishing up a report on a hit-and-run, and at the same time, in a patrol car, constables Malik Gordon and Jane Farthing. The photographer and the forensic team had arrived a few minutes later. Signs of the disturbance were immediately visible through the front window: furniture was scattered, chairs lying on their sides. Sedge had knocked on the front door, and when there was no reply, they’d forced an entry. There they had discovered three bodies: Hannah’s stepfather, Aidan Locke, fifty-three; her mother, Deborah Docherty, forty-seven; and her younger brother, Rory, aged thirteen. Deborah and Aidan were in their bedroom, but he was fully dressed and she was in her nightclothes. All three had been beaten to death with a claw hammer. Aidan was lying on his stomach, the other two on their backs. The hammer, wiped clean, was on the living-room floor. Hannah Docherty, aged eighteen, had identified the three bodies before they were taken to the morgue.

  At first the assumption had been that it was a burglary gone terribly wrong. But later in the day Hannah had come into the picture as a suspect and then the case against her had seemed clear-cut and irrefutable. Frieda found a handwritten page of notes about Hannah: dysfunctional, reports of drug-taking from family and friends, anti-social behavior, contact with police, warnings but no actual charges brought. She had quarreled violently and publicly with her parents just weeks previously and moved out of the house to live in a squat. A few days before their death they had cut off her allowance. Her attempt at an alibi—that she had gone to meet her stepfather but he had never arrived and, in fact, it was her mother, Deborah, who had turned up—seemed nonsensical and was quickly proved to be impossible. The coroner’s report showed that Deborah Docherty was already dead by the time Hannah claimed to have met her. Clothes belonging to her were found stuffed into a bag in a bin further along the street, covered with the blood of her murdered family. When interviewed by the police, she didn’t confess, but became first hysterical and then catatonic.

  Frieda turned to the forensic reports. Occasionally she made notes in her pad: that there was blood everywhere, not just in the bedrooms, but downstairs as well. That there was no sign of forced entry. That Deborah Docherty had been more savagely attacked than either her husband or child. That the hammer was so effectively wiped clean that it provided no evidence. That there was an apparent difference in the time between Aidan Locke’s murder and that of Deborah and Rory. What had happened in that gap?

  One piece of paper was a printed itemization of what was found on the bodies. Rory Docherty: pajamas, Lord of the Rings motif. Aidan Locke: Karrimor suede walking boots, hooped blue and white socks, blue denim trousers, blue-and-white-checked shirt, watch (brown leather strap), frameless spectacles. Deborah Docherty: green-patterned nightgown, gold-colored necklace with locket. The sparseness had its own somber poetry.

  She made notes, too, on the obvious inadequacies in the way the case had been handled, though she assumed Jock Keegan had already done this, and more thoroughly than she ever could. They had never established—or even tried to establish—where the hammer had come from and there was no evidence that Hannah owned such a tool. The crime scene seemed to have been carelessly handled. There was a memo from an officer noting that Deborah’s first husband, Seamus Docherty, who had inherited their house and everything in it, had come to take away several bags of possessions. The memo called for this matter to be pursued but Frieda found no further mention of it.

  Frieda made a note about the treatment of Hannah in the investigation. She had been made to identify the three bodies, in situ, she had been shown photographs and taken through the scene. “To observe her reaction,” Sedge had written in his report.

  Next she leafed through multiple statements from people who had known Aidan Locke and the Dochertys, trying to get an idea of what this family had been like. Locke: well-known in the neighborhood, entrepreneur, fingers in lots of pies, obviously wealthy, raised money for charity, a Santa in the local primary school, marathon runner, squash player, amateur dramatics. People talked of him in exclamations. Oh, Aidan! What energy! Adored his wife! Never stopped! Frieda felt tired even reading about him, and slightly relieved not to have known him.

  Deborah Docherty was more private. She had been an accountant, part-time once she’d had children. Quiet, self-contained, organized, competent, someone to trust. Her first marriage had broken up when Hannah was twelve and Rory seven, and she had married Aidan the following year. Her second marriage had by all accounts been successful. She was clever, sometimes fierce, and protective of her children—perhaps too protective. Friends spoke of her distress over Hannah’s chaotic state.

  There was less information on the brother, thirteen-year-old Rory: some friends but not that many, ups and downs at school. Hannah had seemed very fond of him, despite the age gap.

  There was a lot of material on Hannah. Frieda read through it all: statements from her teachers, saying she had been an academically bright, diligent student until she was about thirteen (around the time of her mother’s marriage to her stepfather Aidan), and by fifteen she was troubled—bad discipline, bad friends. Her GCSE results had been disappointing and then she had more or less dropped out of school, th
ough she had still been entered for A levels, which she had been due to sit just days after the murders had taken place. In March, she had left home and for the next six weeks had slept in a squat. Friends and ex-friends had been interviewed and a picture emerged of someone who was going off the rails. Of course, by this time she was the main suspect for the murder of her family. Had this affected people’s narratives? Frieda wrote down names in her notebook. There had been a boyfriend; she wrote him down too. A psychiatrist had found Hannah to be dysfunctional, self-destructive, largely unresponsive.

  She laid down her pad and shut her eyes. Hannah reminded her of someone. Yes. She reminded her of herself at that age. She had the irrational feeling that she should have been there, thirteen years ago, to rescue her.

  She opened her eyes again and wrote a question in her notebook: “Why was she ever allowed to stand trial?”

  Then she turned her attention to the court transcripts. These she just leafed through: there was too much for one sitting. She only looked closely at Hannah’s evidence, what there was of it: she had been able to answer few of the defense’s questions and none of the prosecution’s. She had stuck to her inadequate alibi, repeating over and over again that she had gone to meet her stepfather but he had never arrived, although her mother later had (the prosecution had been derisive, asking why there was no corroboration of that phone call from her parents’ phone records, and pointing out that her mother couldn’t have been her alibi since she was in her house miles away being murdered). Apart from that, as far as Frieda could tell, she had stammered out broken phrases and mostly wept. Frieda couldn’t begin to understand why her lawyers had allowed her to give evidence. She imagined Hannah, just eighteen, standing in the dock and crying and crying while men and women in wigs asked her questions that made no sense to her.

  The last batch that Frieda looked at was the photographs. She had been putting them off, but now she lifted them onto the table, facedown, and started to turn them, one by one. There were photographs of the house from the outside, and then of each of the family before the tragedy. Aidan was burly, bearded, smiling, exuding bonhomie even in a picture. Deborah was slim, perhaps even thin, with short dark hair and a guarded expression. Rory looked younger than thirteen—in the photo the police had chosen to represent him, he was small and pale, with a mop of pale red hair and a freckled, slightly anxious face. And Hannah—at first, Frieda could barely tell that the woman she had met in the hospital was the same person as this young creature. Hannah then had been tall and she looked sturdy and strong, but her dark hair was lustrous, her face glowed with health, her teeth were white, her clothes bright and stylish. She was smiling. Then there was one of Hannah just after she was charged, a headshot in which she had already started to become the woman Frieda had seen: her eyes were bloodshot, her hair a tangle, and on her face such an expression of bewilderment and fear that Frieda almost looked away, it felt so intimate.