by Nicci French
“The question is, what we do with that good news?”
“That’s not my problem. I’ll be in touch.”
Frieda put her phone back in her pocket.
“Is everything all right?”
She looked round at Jack. For a moment she had forgotten he was there. “All right? Not really. You just stay there and I’ll find us something to eat. Unless you’ve got somewhere to go.”
“No, no, that’s great, I’d love it.”
There wasn’t much in the fridge, but Frieda assembled a salad and found some cheeses and a packet of water biscuits that didn’t seem too stale. Suddenly she heard Jack calling from the other room. She walked through.
“I want you to look at something,” he said. She sat down beside him. “I was flicking through my file of their credit card receipts. It’s the normal sort of thing, supermarkets, some holiday flights, but I saw the name of a restaurant called La Strada. Sounds Italian. It rang a bell, so I did a search. She went there at least thirteen times in the fourteen months before she died.” He paused.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to think,” said Frieda. “Don’t lots of people have their favorite restaurants?”
“I cross-checked it with the timeline I made for Aidan. On the fourteenth of October Deborah spent sixty-two pounds eighty-five at La Strada. Aidan was at a conference in Newcastle. On the tenth of February Deborah spent seventy-eight pounds at La Strada. Maybe she bought an extra bottle of wine. Meanwhile Aidan had a petrol receipt placing him in Manchester just after six on that evening.”
“I suppose he could just about have driven back in time.”
“I checked on Google Maps. No, he couldn’t. I haven’t had time to check all the others but there are at least three when Aidan definitely wasn’t in London.”
“I’m going to play the role of the boring, awkward person,” said Frieda. “There could be a family tradition. Aidan goes away, Deborah takes the children—or child—out to the local Italian.”
“I checked. La Strada is up in Bermondsey, near the river. It’s five miles away. It’s not exactly her local Italian. Is that where you’re going to take a child on a school night, rather than somewhere nearby?”
Frieda sat back in her chair and thought for a moment. “That’s great, Jack,” she said. “You should be doing this for a living.”
“Who does this for a living?”
“So we know that Aidan was infertile and Deborah got pregnant and had an abortion. And it looks like she was having an affair, rather than just a fling.”
“It may or may not have been an affair. She went to an Italian restaurant occasionally without her husband.”
“But accepting it as a hypothesis: who does that make angry?”
“Hannah Docherty.”
Frieda frowned at Jack. “That wasn’t what I wanted you to say.”
“I know. I’m being your devil’s advocate.”
“Thank you, but I don’t need any more of those.”
There was a sudden hammering at the front door. Jack started as though he’d been bitten. “Who’s that?”
“I don’t know yet,” said Frieda.
“It might be him.”
“Who?”
“Whoever took everything.”
“I don’t think so,” said Frieda. “Wait here.”
She opened the door and Reuben stood there, with an exaggerated smile on his face, a bottle of wine in one hand and whisky in the other, which he held out to her.
“Come in,” she said, taking both bottles from him.
He stepped over the threshold and took off his damp overcoat. She saw that he was wearing his favorite jacket and, under it, the embroidered waistcoat he put on for special occasions. He did not remove the patterned scarf that was wrapped around his neck.
“Come and sit by the fire. Jack’s here.”
“Have you come from some grand occasion?” asked Jack, eyeing the baroque waistcoat, the jacket.
Reuben was still smiling. It was starting to look like a silent, frozen shout.
“Here.” Frieda held up both bottles. “What do you want to drink?”
Reuben pointed at the whisky. She poured him a slug and handed it across. He tipped it into his smiling mouth. His eyes watered.
“Tell me,” said Frieda.
“You know anyway.”
“Yes.” She glanced at Jack, who was staring at Reuben and pushing his hands through his disordered hair. “You’ve had bad news.”
“Shall I go?” asked Jack.
“It doesn’t matter.” Reuben poured himself some more whisky. “I have cancer.”
“Oh, God, Reuben. I’m sorry.”
“Cancer,” repeated Reuben. “Me. Me!”
“Do you want to tell us what the doctor said?”
“Not really. I’d prefer just to drink whisky.”
“OK.”
So that was what they did, sitting by the fire as the night darkened, not speaking, watching the flames.
THIRTY-FIVE
“Is this a good time to talk?” said Yvette.
“We seem to be talking anyway.”
“I was worried you might be busy with something. Or asleep.”
“It’s ten o’clock.”
“It is Sunday.”
“Yvette, what is it you want to say?”
“I’ve got someone who wants to see you.”
“Who?”
“Detective Chief Inspector Ben Sedge.”
“Why has he gone through you?”
“Why shouldn’t he? Don’t you want me involved?”
“I don’t mean that. Just tell him that if he wants to see me, he can see me. There’s no trick to it.”
“I’ll tell him. Is it all right if he comes straight over?”
“Of course it’s all right.”
“He won’t be long.”
Frieda barely had time to gather her thoughts when there was a ring at the door and Sedge was there, alone. He looked different, wearing trainers, jeans and a tracksuit top.
“I know it’s Sunday. You probably have things to do.”
She gestured him inside. “What I don’t understand is why you have to approach me through Yvette. You’ve got my number. You only need to call me.”
“Do you want to go out for a coffee?”
“I can make coffee.”
As Frieda filled the kettle and ground the coffee beans, she was conscious of Sedge walking around, looking at pictures on the wall, picking up objects. She felt she was being scrutinized and she didn’t much like it.
“Nice place,” said Sedge. “It’s good to live centrally. Do you have trouble parking?”
“I don’t have a car.”
“Sensible.”
Frieda poured them both mugs of coffee and they went out and sat in the little yard behind the house. It had been raining during the night but now the sun was out.
“Lovely spot.”
Frieda sipped her coffee. “So why didn’t you just call me direct?”
“Do you want the short answer or the long answer?”
“I don’t particularly want any answer,” said Frieda. “I want to find out the truth about Hannah Docherty. That’s all I really care about.”
“I’m back at work but I’m still being investigated,” said Sedge, as if he hadn’t heard what Frieda had said. “You probably already know that.” He waited, but Frieda didn’t reply. “I’m not going to make excuses. When I joined the force, everything was different. The police used to mix with the people they investigated. Sometimes it was difficult even to tell them apart. They went to the same pubs, the same clubs. My first boss used to say that if anyone stepped out of line, he’d be dealt with. Sometimes it worked, but you ended up with some coppers crossing a boundary. You probably don’t understand that.”
“I think I do,” said Frieda. “I’m a psychotherapist. We have the same problem.”
Sedge laughed. “I doubt that very much.”
“It�
��s true. Therapists start to identify with their patients—they want to be liked by them, they almost want to become their friends. They can delude themselves that getting emotionally close to their patients is a way of helping them.”
“That’s exactly what I’m talking about,” said Sedge. “But part of our job involves gray areas. You talk to criminals. Money changes hands. You let someone get away with small crimes as a way of sorting out bigger crimes. You make trade-offs and sometimes they’re hard to justify.” He laughed again. “It looks like I’m giving you the long version. I don’t mean to sound like I’m justifying myself to you.”
“You don’t need to. That’s not what I’m here for.”
Sedge narrowed his eyes and looked at Frieda more closely. “You’re good at this.”
“Good at what?”
“Getting people to talk,” he said. “I suppose that’s your job. You sit there silently and you don’t seem to be doing much and people just talk to you about themselves. I’ve done that myself sometimes in interview rooms. You go in there, you sit down opposite them and you don’t speak and you wait. People don’t like silence. It makes them uncomfortable, so they start to speak to fill the silence and they give themselves away.”
“There hasn’t been much of a silence here,” said Frieda. “But you still haven’t told me why you’ve come.”
“I contacted you through DC Long because I wanted this to be on the record. There’s been enough meetings off the record and unofficial investigations.”
“I don’t really mind whether it’s on the record or off the record.”
“I do, though. As I’ve tried to tell you, there are things I’ve done that can be made to look bad. I think I can defend them but you never know how it’ll turn out. Senior people have given me a wink and a nod and said that, if I choose to take early retirement, I can get my pension and no questions will be asked. I’m not going that easily. But I’ve been thinking about my past, about the Docherty case. I followed the law, I built the case, I got a conviction. It’s easy to hide behind that and I’ve spent a lot of my career doing that. I’ve still got some of my old sources, some contacts. All I’m saying is, if there’s anything I can do . . .”
“Why?”
“You mean, why do I want to help you when you’ve wrecked everything in my life?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know. To feel a bit less shitty about myself. To be able to look at myself in the mirror.”
“I went to see one of your officers,” said Frieda.
“Which one?”
“Jane Farthing.”
Sedge frowned with concentration. “She left the force, didn’t she?”
“As a result of what she saw in the Docherty house.”
“They’re not just numbers,” said Sedge. “You never get used to it. People see murder scenes on TV, but they don’t know what it’s like, the smell of it, bodies that are still warm.”
“Jane Farthing said that.”
“I understand why she left. A lot of people do. Maybe the sane ones.” There was a pause. “So. If you need anything, ask.”
Frieda thought for a moment. “Did you interview the neighbors?”
“Which neighbors?”
“Sebastian Tait and Flora Goffin, at number fifty-six.”
“As far as I remember, we talked to them to find out if they had heard or seen anything.”
“And had they?”
“All I can say is that if they had it would have been a significant part of the investigation. Why? Is there something I should know?”
“They were an interesting family, the Dochertys. They got involved with people in complicated ways . . . they affected them. They left a trail.”
“Of destruction?”
“You could see where they’d been.”
“But the crime itself,” said Sedge. “Where are you with that?”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean that it doesn’t seem to make sense. Or, at least, the only thing that makes sense is that it would be done by someone insane.”
“You mean like Hannah?”
“That’s a possibility. You must see that.”
Frieda shook her head. “Whoever did the murders—she or he or they—wasn’t insane. But, then, I don’t think Hannah was insane.”
“But none of it makes sense now,” said Sedge.
“Yes, it does. It just depends how you tell it.”
“Like how?”
“I’m going to tell you the most plausible story I have come up with so far. It might not be entirely accurate, but as far as I can tell, it works. So, somebody wanted to kill the Docherty family, including, strangely enough, their child. I imagined doing it myself, simply as a practical problem. It’s difficult to kill a whole family except with a gun, and guns are hard to get, difficult to get rid of and they make a lot of noise. So I kill Aidan somewhere else and bring him back in the boot of my car. I go to the Docherty house, but there’s a problem. Deborah Docherty isn’t there but Justine Walsh is, presumably to talk about their problem daughters. What can I do? I can’t postpone the killing. Aidan is already dead. I have to kill Justine Walsh. And Rory Docherty. But what do I do with Justine Walsh’s body? Do I take it away and dispose of it somewhere? Then I have an idea. I drag Justine’s body upstairs, dress her in Deborah Docherty’s nightie.”
“Bloody hell,” said Sedge. “Is that even possible?”
“There are still a couple of challenges. I have to damage Justine Walsh’s face so badly that it isn’t recognizable.”
“Jesus,” said Sedge, almost in a whisper
“And I have to find Deborah Docherty, kill her and hide her body. She really mustn’t be found. That would ruin everything.”
“This makes a sort of horrible sense.”
“It does.”
“But the whole plan depends on Justine Walsh being identified as Deborah Docherty. By her daughter.”
“That’s right.”
“I don’t want to be the guy who’s still trying to defend his fuck-up—pardon the language—but if Hannah did actually do it then all she needs to do is to make the identification herself and she’s home free.”
“Hannah couldn’t drive. How would she bring her stepfather’s body back? How would she dispose of her mother’s body?”
Sedge thought for a moment. “That crowd she ran around with. Did one of them have a car? They’d already stolen from the house. They could have had a plan to get everything.”
“And kill Rory as well?”
“A hundred percent is a lot better than fifty percent.”
“You see, this story explains things that have bothered me.”
“Such as?”
“Why there was a difference between the time Aidan Locke was murdered, and the murders of Rory and Deborah, or the woman we thought was Deborah but, in fact, was Justine. It explains why Justine Walsh was killed when she seemed to have no connection with the family, except that Shelley and Hannah were both living in the squat. It explains Hannah’s blood-covered clothes.”
“Come again?”
“The clothes that were found in a garbage bag five doors down from the Docherty house were Hannah’s all right, but they weren’t the kind of clothes she had taken to wearing.”
“Oh,” said Ben Sedge. His face wore a bemused expression.
“It explains Hannah’s bizarre alibi, which has always puzzled me. She said she was supposed to meet her stepfather but she met her mother instead. Didn’t that seem odd to you at the time?”
“It did—except that we thought she was mad.”
“Yes. So I’m assuming that whoever killed Aidan got him to call Hannah and arrange to meet her. That way she only had an alibi that didn’t hold up and she could be framed.”
“But what about her mother?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe her mother went to see her after she’d talked to this Justine Walsh,” suggested Sedge.
“Yo
u mean, because she was worried?”
“It’s a thought. She might have known where Aidan and Hannah were meeting and gone to find them.” He gave a sudden smile. “This is all make-believe, though. It’s just one story. There must be dozens of others we can come up with.”
“I can’t,” said Frieda.
Sedge leaned forward, frowning. His blue eyes were intent. “OK. How about this? Have you turned it the other way round and wondered if Deborah Docherty might have killed them all because she was depressed or something, or because she’d discovered Aidan was having an affair and was maddened by fury? And then when she realized what she’d done she killed herself?”
“And someone else buried her?”
“There is that.”
Frieda was starting to reply when her phone rang. She answered it with a wave of apology at Sedge. It was Stringer. As she talked, they both stood up and walked inside.
“I’ve got some news.”
“Good news?”
“Interesting news. I’ll be at the King’s Arms on Camden Road at two o’clock.”
“Can’t you just tell me?”
“I’ll see you at two.”
And the line went dead. Sedge looked at her curiously. “Has something happened?”
“It’s about something else.”
Sedge took a card from his pocket and wrote on the back of it. “This is my private mobile,” he said. “You can call me any time.” He placed it on the table in the living room.
“I’ll be in touch,” said Frieda. “I want to know more about what you know. But I need to think about the right questions to ask.”
“I’ll be waiting,” said Sedge.
“I’m glad you’re doing this. I just wish it had been a few years ago.”
Sedge shook his head. “It may not be much use to Hannah. God help me if I’ve been wrong.”
An hour or so later, Frieda left her house and headed north through Regent’s Park, crowded on that sunny, blustery Sunday. She crossed the bridge over the canal and walked down to the towpath. As she approached Camden Lock, the crowd got denser and denser, tourists and students. Frieda liked markets but not this one. A few years ago, it had burned down and Frieda had rather hoped they wouldn’t rebuild it, but they had, the same as before. She pushed her way through the punks and the Goths on Camden High Street and in a few minutes had arrived at the King’s Arms. She looked at her watch. She was five minutes late. The pub was crowded, with people spilling out onto the pavement in spite of the chill and the sky that promised rain. It took her ten minutes to walk through both bars, past the tables, out into the little garden at the back, then out onto the pavement to see that Stringer wasn’t there. It felt wrong just to stand there, so she went to the bar and bought a glass of sparkling water for two pounds. She sipped at the water, then walked slowly through the pub again, checking all the places she had already checked.
