Dark Saturday

by Nicci French

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve had enough.”

  “Enough of what?”

  “Enough of everything. Of working and cleaning and shopping and cooking and talking and attending to the needs of my husband, my father, my children, my friends, my work colleagues, generally making an effort. It takes all my energy to—I don’t know—pick up a dirty sock from the floor, open my mouth and make the right words come out. Smile. Push a trolley round the supermarket. You know. Stuff. I want—” Again she stopped, frowning.

  “You want?”

  “I don’t know. I want this feeling to go away. I want to be someone else.” She leaned forward in her chair. “Can you help me?”

  “To be someone else? No. But to find yourself? That’s what we’re going to do, together.”

  “I’m not sure if finding myself is going to make me very happy.” Maria gave a short, derisive laugh.

  “Oh, happiness,” said Frieda. “That’s not what this is about.”

  Frieda had the rest of the afternoon to herself, and the evening. It lay ahead of her, beautifully empty and quiet. She went up the road to the greengrocer’s and bought herself some aubergines and red peppers: she would light her fire, take a long bath, have roasted vegetables with a glass of red wine.

  As she was putting the food away in the kitchen there was a knocking at the front door.

  “Chloë.”

  Her niece was soaked through, and she was laden with shopping bags. When she stepped over the threshold, her shoes squelched. “Frieda, I would have called but my mobile’s out of battery so I thought I’d come round instead. I’m so glad you’re in.”

  “Come and sit by the fire and get dry. Aren’t you working today?”

  “Half-day off.”

  Frieda looked at the bags. “Where are you on your way to?”

  “Here, if that’s all right with you.”

  “Here?”

  “I thought it would be nice to have dinner together. I’ve already bought the food. You’re not going anywhere, are you?”

  “I hadn’t been planning to.” Frieda tried to feel glad. “That looks like a lot of food for two.”

  “I thought we could ask other people round too.”

  “Other people?”

  “Reuben and Josef.”

  “Oh.”

  “And then there are a couple of people I’ve met recently and I thought I could invite them as well.”

  “Here?”

  “If that’s all right.”

  “This evening?”

  “Yes. Last-minute thing, you know. It’ll be fun.”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Frieda!”

  “Why can’t you do it in your own house?”

  “Mum’s got some new man coming round so I couldn’t do it there. Don’t you want me here?” Chloë’s face assumed a look of comical dismay. Her mascara had run and water still dripped from her hair, running down her cheeks like tears.

  “You and four others? I was planning a quiet evening.”

  “Seven, actually. And us as well. Why do you want a quiet evening?”

  “Seven.”

  “They’ve all said yes.”

  “You’ve already asked them?”

  “I knew you wouldn’t mind. Jack’s coming too.”

  “Chloë, you can’t just ask seven people round to my house without telling me.”

  “I am telling you.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “Will you help me cook?”

  “I was about to have a bath.”

  “I’d love a bath at some point too. I’m wet through and so cold. Don’t worry, I’ve got a change of clothes with me.”

  Frieda sighed. “I wasn’t worrying. Do you want one now?”

  “That would be great. Just a quick one. You could peel the onions while you’re waiting. Someone told me that if you don’t cut off the root end, your eyes won’t water so much.”

  There were nine of them, and not enough chairs—they had to fetch the stool from the garret and the chair from her room. There was too much food: an assortment of salads and dips and breads that barely fitted onto Frieda’s small table, among the candles. Chloë’s face was red from cooking and anxiety. Frieda hadn’t had time for a bath. Josef arrived with a whole spiced chicken, even though Chloë had told him that her friends were all vegetarian and Dee a vegan, who didn’t like to be anywhere near meat. He also brought his honey cake, which reminded him of his homeland, and two bottles of vodka. Reuben came with red wine and runny cheese. He was wearing his favorite waistcoat, as if this were a party. Jack arrived late, empty-handed, and perhaps, thought Frieda, already slightly drunk. He was wearing tight, canary-yellow trousers and two scarves around his thin neck. His hair was cut shorter than usual but as if to compensate he had grown a beard; it was a brighter orange than his hair and he stroked it occasionally. He perched on the stool, between and slightly behind Frieda and Josef, and had to lean forward to spear his food. Frieda had been his supervisor and he had revered her; he had also helped her in previous cases. When he and Chloë had been involved with each other, it had felt strange and complicated.

  At the far end of the table, they were talking about travel. Chloë was anxiously over-animated. Every so often she darted a gaze in Jack’s direction—ever since they had broken up there had been an uneasy relationship between them, sometimes charged with possibility, at others with hostility.

  “Did you read that finding,” said Jack, suddenly, to Frieda, “about how women are more likely to have a faith than men?”

  “No. That’s interesting.”

  “I have faith,” said Josef. He tapped his chest. “We all must have meaning in our life.” He raised his voice. “You agree, Chloë?”

  “What?”

  “You have faith?”

  “I have chicken,” said Reuben. “Who wants some down that end? Chicken is a vegetable, really.”

  “Sorry, Josef,” said Chloë. She beamed at him: she’d always had a soft spot for Josef. “I’m an infidel.”

  “Do you know how they keep chickens?” asked the young man next to Chloë; he had a shaved head and close-set beautiful brown eyes.

  “Faith is such an odd thing,” said Jack. “People say they just know things, but you can’t know what can’t be proved. You can only believe.”

  “I’d eat road kill, though.”

  “You’re quiet, Frieda,” said Reuben. “How’s it going with that mad girl?”

  “She’s not a girl any more—and I’m not entirely sure she’s mad. Or not mad in the way you mean.”

  “Chloë told me about what you do,” said the young man with the shaved head. “It sounds really interesting. You’re looking into the Hannah Docherty case, is that right?”

  “I’m not sure that’s for general publication,” said Frieda.

  “There are lots of Anglican vicars who lose their faith after decades,” said Jack. He drank some of Josef’s vodka, then poured wine into his empty glass. “Wouldn’t that be painful, all of your life built on something you don’t believe in any more?”

  “Frieda,” said Chloë. “Surely you can tell us a bit. We’re not going to talk about it.”

  Frieda looked at her niece. She seemed hectic and slightly tense. “I’m going to see one of her fans tomorrow,” she said. “To get a better sense of Hannah as she used to be. Erin Brack. Yvette came across her on the internet.”

  “Erin Brack.” One of Chloë’s friends, a woman called Myla, who hadn’t talked for most of the evening, had pulled out her laptop from the duffel bag slung on her chair and was already typing into it. “There can’t be many of them around. Let’s see.”

  “I pray,” said Josef to Jack, pouring more vodka into their glasses. “If I doubt, I pray more. Now is time for honey cake. Please, everyone.”

  “And what is prayer,” asked Reuben, “but talking to yourself?” He smiled round the table and stood up. “I’m going to have a cigarette out back.
Anyone coming?”

  Josef and Dee, the vegan, joined him. Jack picked up a slice of cake and looked at it. “Talking to yourself,” he muttered, and bit into it, spraying crumbs. “That’s not enough.”

  “Here we are. Erin Brack. Look. She’s got a blog.”

  Chloë and the young man leaned toward the screen.

  “She’s crazy,” said Chloë, after a few seconds. “You want to be careful, Frieda.”

  “She certainly writes a lot,” said the young man, scrolling down. “She seems to write her blog almost every day.”

  “What about?” asked Frieda.

  “Conspiracies, I think,” he answered. “Here’s one: chemicals in the water deliberately causing infertility.”

  “It says here she has a collection,” said Chloë.

  “What kind of collection?”

  “No idea. She just keeps referring to ‘my collection.’ ”

  “She calls it “archive” sometimes,” said Chloë, and turned away to answer her buzzing mobile.

  “And “murderabilia,’ ” said Myla.

  Reuben, Josef and Dee reappeared, their hair damp from the rain. “Time to go,” said Reuben.

  “We’ve only just been given cake.”

  “That was Mum,” said Chloë, sliding her phone back into her pocket. “She was very upset. She wants to know why you didn’t invite her as well.”

  “I didn’t invite anyone. You did.”

  “She doesn’t see it like that.”

  “What would you do, Frieda?” asked Jack, standing up and pulling on his coat.

  “Sorry?”

  “What would you do if you were a vicar who’d lost their faith?”

  Frieda looked at him. She gave him a small nod. “I’d stop being a vicar.”

  “Even if your congregation believed? You might still be helping them.”

  “I know what you’re driving at, Jack. This isn’t about Anglican vicars.”

  Color flared into his cheeks. “Why do you say that?”

  “If you no longer believe in what you’re doing, you don’t have to do it.”

  “Can I come and talk to you?”

  “You don’t need my permission.”

  “I’ve got myself in a muddle.”

  “We’re all in a muddle,” said Reuben, who was in his jacket and finishing off Frieda’s wine. “It’s part of being human.”

  Frieda closed the door on the last of her visitors and started clearing up. She thought about Erin Brack’s collection. Murderabilia. And she wondered what was in it.

  FIFTEEN

  Frieda looked at the address and the map and decided to go the long way. She took the train east to Erith. From the station she walked across a main road and through a housing estate to the south bank of the Thames. To the right, across scrubby marshland, she could see the Dartford bridge, like a geometry drawing on a gray watercolor. The distant cars and lorries moved across, north to south, silent and slow, as if she were watching them from a great height. Directly across the river, she could see a jumble of warehouses with containers piled, as if in a children’s game, parked cars, and then along the bank, land that had been scraped clean, scoured gray, and brown earth, ready for something: a factory, storage, housing. Beyond that was heathland and fields and on the horizon a church spire. These were London’s edgelands, a half-abandoned industrial landscape, a half-ruined rural space. Frieda liked it.

  She turned left and started to walk along the riverbank away from the sea toward London. Fifty miles to the west, there were parts of the Thames Path that were quietly rural, green, tree-shaded riverbanks, quaint little towns, millionaires’ mansions with trimmed lawns, Henley and Windsor. Here it was different. This was the Thames downstream from London, which veered from being forgotten to being abused, heedlessly built on, demolished and dumped on. It was a place Frieda came to from time to time, usually on bright cold winter days when she needed the wind to clear her head. There were patches of wildness, heathlands, sometimes bird sanctuaries, but even the green havens felt post-industrial, almost postapocalyptic, riven with ditches and dykes, precariously reclaimed from the sea or the river or swamps or somewhere in between.

  Developers and politicians had called the area the Thames Gateway but the name itself was ambiguous and troubling. Was it a gateway in or a gateway out? From time to time Frieda had struck up conversations with bikers or hikers, old couples, young girls pushing buggies, residents of Greenhithe, Dartford, Purfleet, Belvedere. They could be welcoming or wary, suspicious, even hostile. There was a feeling that they had been pushed out from somewhere or that people from somewhere had been pushed onto them: immigrants, London’s rejects. Even the giant industrial buildings—cement works, sewage treatment facilities—served London but weren’t wanted there. This was one of the places Frieda came when she wanted to think about London. This was what London wanted to forget about, to expel, to suppress.

  Frieda walked past a vast supermarket car park and a half-demolished warehouse and a patch of land that was being cleared and flattened by three bulldozers. She reached the sewage works, turned away from the river and walked along the side of it. Gorse bushes and brambles made the path almost impassable. At the other end she emerged on to a newly constructed road. She looked at the rough map she had drawn for herself, turned right, and after a few minutes she had arrived at Oldbourne Drive. It was like a square with one side missing. The houses couldn’t be more than five years old, but already they looked battered without being weathered. There were slates missing on the roofs and the window frames were peeling. The façades looked as if they had been drawn by a small child: a door and a car port on the ground floor, two windows on the first floor, one larger window on the second. The drive framed a small and very basic children’s playground with a see-saw and bright red metal benches. Frieda made her way to number sixty-three and rang the bell.

  The house looked abandoned. It had one of the only driveways without a car on it. But there was a rustling sound and the door opened.

  “Frieda Klein.”

  It was said so loudly and enthusiastically that Frieda felt self-conscious and looked around to see if anyone could have heard. There was no one. There were houses, cars, a playground. But still it felt deserted.

  Erin Brack was taller than Frieda and large, without being fat, just solid and imposing. She had dark curly hair and brown-framed glasses. She was dressed in a white-and-brown-hooped sweater, black jeans and white training shoes.

  “It was good of you to make time,” said Frieda, cautiously.

  “Come in, come in.”

  Erin Brack almost hustled Frieda inside. There was a stale smell in the house of dampness, old cooking, as well as cleaning fluid and air-freshener, which somehow made it worse rather than better. She gestured around her at the piles of newspapers that were on the floor, the stairs and every visible surface wide enough to support them. Frieda followed her into a living room at the back of the house.

  “Sorry for the mess,” said Erin Brack. “Cleaner’s day off. That’s a joke by the way. I don’t have a cleaner. Take a seat.”

  Frieda looked around. She could see that Erin Brack didn’t have a cleaner. There was a chair and a sofa and a wooden kitchen chair but there was nowhere to sit. Every surface was covered with papers, magazines, newspapers. There were plates and mugs and glasses. Even the wall space was covered. The flowery wallpaper was almost completely obscured by pages ripped out from newspapers, maps, photographs. There were portraits of smiling boys and girls. For a moment Frieda hoped they might be family photos, a precarious trace of normality, of social ties, but Erin Brack followed her gaze and identified them one by one. They were the smiling faces of people who hadn’t known what Fate was preparing for them.

  “I thought you might be at work,” said Frieda.

  “I’m on sick leave.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “For four years.”

  “That sounds serious.”

  “The
doctors find it difficult to pin down,” said Erin Brack. “It’s a constellation of symptoms. I’ve had back problems for years. And breathing difficulties. I have a mood disorder as well. It’s hard to put a simple label on. But you know all about that.”

  Frieda didn’t reply.

  “Enough about me. Can I get you some tea? I can go out and buy some biscuits.” Frieda looked around warily. “Don’t worry, I’ll wash some mugs up for us. You’ve got to have tea with me. There’s so much I want to talk about.”

  “Of course,” said Frieda. “Tea would be good. No biscuits. I just want to talk to you about Hannah Docherty.”

  “And I want to talk to you about other things as well. I know about you. I want to talk to you about the Robert Poole case. I’ve got a whole scrapbook on that one upstairs. Follow me while I make the tea.”

  Frieda stepped into Erin Brack’s kitchen, then stepped back out again. She was unsure which was worse: what she had seen or what she had smelled. “I’ll stay in the living room.”

  As she waited, she received a text from Yvette, saying she had managed to track down three of the people who’d lived in the squat where Hannah had been in the weeks leading up to the murders: she would pick Frieda up the following morning and they would see each in turn. Frieda had just sent a reply when Erin Brack came through holding two mugs. Was it long enough to have actually boiled the water? She gave Frieda a mug with a drawing of a skull on it. “I thought that would appeal to your sense of humor.”

  “About Hannah Docherty,” said Frieda.

  “Completely,” said Erin Brack. “I couldn’t be more excited. But first let me find you a space.” She lifted a pile of papers from the sofa and threw them onto another pile. “It may look disorganized . . .” Frieda murmured something polite “. . . but I know where everything is. It’s my own system.”

  Frieda sat on the sofa. There was a low table in front of her. She pushed the piles of paper apart so that she could put the mug down. She tapped the mug and ran a finger around the rim. She did everything except drink from it. “I’ve heard that you’re a collector,” she said.

  “In a small way. When there’s a crime that interests me, I want to know everything about it. As much as the police know. More sometimes.” Erin Brack pushed more papers aside, so that she could sit next to Frieda. She moved close up against her and addressed her in a conspiratorial tone: “The police just wanted to put Hannah Docherty away. They didn’t care what really happened. I’m so excited to hear that you’re involved. You feel the same as I do, don’t you?”