Dark Saturday

by Nicci French

  She went into the garden at the back again. A man approached her and asked her if she was there alone but Frieda gave him a look and he backed away. She glanced at her watch. Half past. Very carefully she made her way back through the pub, making sure that she checked every single person. Then she stood outside on the pavement and peered in both directions. There was no sign of Stringer but, then, the road was so crowded that it was difficult to see more than a few yards. She looked up at the sign. He had said the King’s Arms, hadn’t he? Not the King’s Head or the Queen’s Arms? And it was definitely the King’s Arms in Camden? There were King’s Arms pubs all over London. But this was all ridiculous. She was sure. And she didn’t have a number for him: he’d been careful not to give her one.

  She counted off the minutes, and at three o’clock, she decided there was no point in waiting any longer. She couldn’t bear to go back through the market. Instead she walked south and cut across until she reached the Outer Circle and made her way home.

  As soon as she let herself in, she stopped. She didn’t know what it was. She just felt something was different. It was like a change in the weather, the feeling that a storm may be coming or that the storm has gone and everything looks a little sharper or a little blurrier. There was a smell, a sawdusty sort of smell she couldn’t identify, something that was either very faint or very distant. She looked at the little card on her table that Sedge had left for her. It was facing away from her, so that the numbers were upside down. She thought that maybe she remembered the card being the other way round when she had left, but she wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure at all. The locks had all been changed but the locksmith had said that no lock, however strong or complicated, could ever be totally secure. And why would someone pick those locks, come into her house and turn that card around?

  There had been a few moments in Frieda’s life when she had glimpsed what it would be like to lose her mind. This was one of them.

  INTERLUDE TWELVE

  The full moon shines through the bars of Mary Hoyle’s cell so brightly that it feels almost like day. She is often awake at this time of the night. Chelsworth is quiet. The screams have subsided. There is the hooting of an owl, or is it the hooting of two owls, searching out one another? There in the dark she lives in her memories, children’s faces, children’s voices. Each one has its own soft charge, like when she was herself a child, touching the terminal of a battery with her tongue. She thinks of the future and freedom and what she can do with that freedom. And she thinks of the present. She thinks of Hannah Docherty and what is going to be done to her. She doesn’t need to see it. She doesn’t need to do it herself. It is enough to anticipate it and to know it is being done and then, once it has been done, to imagine it, over and over and over.

  Freedom would be good: there would be so much she could do with it. But the real freedom is in Mary Hoyle’s head.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Walter Levin wasn’t at the house but Keegan was.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  “It’s Stringer.”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s disappeared on me.”

  Keegan smiled. “That’s what he does.”

  “He arranged to meet me yesterday at a pub and he never turned up.”

  “That’s not like him.” But Keegan didn’t sound unduly worried. “He probably had a lead.”

  “He said he had something to tell me, and that’s the last I heard from him. Can you contact him for me?”

  Keegan looked at her. “You’re worried about him?”

  “Concerned.”

  “He’s never the one you need to worry about. I told you, he’s good at what he does. The best.” He rose from the desk. “Wait here,” he said, and left the room.

  Jude popped her head round the door. “Long time no see. Coffee?”

  “No, thank you.”

  The head disappeared. Frieda waited. She heard doors upstairs opening and closing. After about ten minutes Keegan came back.

  “No luck,” he said. “I’ll keep on trying. I’ll let you know when I find him.”

  “Is it odd?”

  “He doesn’t follow normal rules.” His expression was neutral, but then he said, “You got all those locks changed, didn’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Good, good.”

  It was always easier to talk while walking. Frieda and Karlsson made their way round Highbury Fields in the blustery wind, Karlsson swinging along rapidly on his crutches, his face creased in thought.

  “You’re saying that you and Jack have found nothing,” he said.

  “Not nothing. We know that Aidan had an affair with his neighbor. That shortly after this ended, he had an operation and chemo for testicular cancer and was therefore bound to be infertile. We know that Deborah got briefly entangled with her first husband after their divorce—he says it was brief, anyway. And that she had an abortion shortly before she was killed. He says he wasn’t the father. We infer that this was an affair, rather than a simple sexual encounter. But we haven’t found anything that would remotely explain why Erin Brack’s house was burned down with her inside. There was nothing we found in the collection of stuff that incriminates anyone. Maybe all we’ve found is evidence of a marriage going wrong. Or maybe it wasn’t even going wrong, just had its own rules.” Frieda paused. “And yet someone killed Erin Brack to stop me seeing the stuff she’d collected.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The fact that someone was willing to kill the poor woman to stop you looking through what she’d collected doesn’t have to mean there was anything there.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “That they thought there was something. That would be enough. I’ve looked at her blogs. They’re full of grandiose statements about her own importance, hints about things she might know.”

  “But only in the most general terms. Is that enough to kill someone? It’s quite a risk.”

  “It’s a thought. It’s possible you and Jack have been searching for something that simply isn’t there, and what’s important is that the very act of searching confirms its significance. That’s why it was taken.”

  “Yes,” said Frieda. The wind was carrying rain. Old sodden leaves swirled at her feet. “You’re right.”

  Jack called her. He said he’d been trawling online and found that Erin Brack had done an interview with her local paper shortly before she died.

  “It’s sort of both short and rambling at the same time.”

  “Send it to me.”

  “There doesn’t seem to be much in it.”

  “Thanks, Jack,” said Frieda. “But now I think you should return to your real life. You’ve done more than enough for me.”

  “What’s my real life?” asked Jack, but didn’t wait for her answer.

  She looked at the interview. It was written by a journalist called Derek Blythe and accompanied by a small photograph in which Erin Brack appeared to have her eyes half shut. She was described as a ‘colorful local character’ and a ‘collector,’ her house as ‘cluttered.’ There was almost no mention of the Docherty case: Blythe had focused more on the things she had found on the riverbed when the tide was low.

  Frieda rang Blythe at the paper and he agreed to see her the following morning. Then she put on her coat and walked to Number Nine.

  Tom Morell was already there, sitting at a table for two in the corner in his slightly shabby tweed jacket and his double-knotted, stout brown shoes. She ordered coffee for them both and sat down. “I’m probably wasting your time. I didn’t really want to talk about it over the phone.”

  “That’s OK. I might be wasting yours. You said Hannah told you something.”

  “Not told me exactly. Said something. When she was crying after, you know . . . It was the most intimate bit of the night, not the sex but when she cried in the dark and I tried to comfort her.”

  “So what did she say?”

&n
bsp; “She was sobbing and saying something about everything falling apart.”

  “In her life?”

  “I thought so. I mean it was, after all. But now I think she may have meant back at home. Her old home, I mean. She might have run away but she was still so tangled up with her family.”

  “So she said things had fallen apart there?”

  “Yes. I don’t know in what way. Maybe with her brother, or her mother.”

  Frieda thought about Deborah’s late abortion. She thought about Guy Fiske. When she had met him in prison, he had talked about “little Rory.” She looked at Tom Morell’s round, somber face and tried to imagine Hannah lying in the darkness next to him, sobbing her heart out.

  “Have you heard from Stringer?” said Keegan on the phone.

  “No. I’d have told you.”

  “You say he told you that he’d found something.”

  “He said he’d found something interesting. And then you told me not to worry.”

  “Did he say what?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a pity you didn’t ask.”

  “It’s a pity he didn’t tell me he was going to disappear.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Keegan. “We’re on the same side here. Do you know who he had seen?”

  “I know the names I gave him. I don’t know if he followed them all up. But he talked to my friend, Josef, and my sister-in-law, Olivia Klein. And he said he’d talked to a builder called Micky, who’d worked with Dean Reeve. I directed him toward Joanna Vine, the woman Reeve had kidnapped as a little girl and later married. And also Caroline Dekker, the wife of his twin brother, Alan, whom he killed and then impersonated. Should I contact them and see if he was in touch?”

  “All right. Let me know if you hear anything.”

  “Of course. Are you going to tell me not to worry?”

  “No.”

  Joanna Vine was rather drunk and was not happy to see Frieda. She said that every time Frieda turned up in her life, she did damage. She blamed Frieda for ruining her life because it was Frieda who had understood that Dean had not only abducted a little boy, he had abducted Joanna so many years earlier. Joanna hadn’t wanted to be rescued, and neither had she thanked Frieda for insisting that she was Dean’s victim rather than his collaborator, although that had meant she hadn’t been charged with a crime. Now she gestured wildly at Frieda, ash dropping from her cigarette onto the carpet. Her makeup was smeared and she’d put on weight. Frieda thought she seemed wretched and chaotic, and for a moment she imagined she could glimpse the terrified child this woman had once been, who had been snatched out of her ordinary life and plunged into another world. In a way she still hadn’t escaped it.

  “Have you been visited by a man called Bruce Stringer?” she asked Joanna Vine.

  “That was your doing, was it?”

  “When was he here?”

  “I don’t know.” She stubbed out her cigarette and immediately lit another. Her eyes looked slightly yellow and her face swollen beneath the makeup. “I told him to get lost.”

  “Is that all you told him?”

  “I should be the one who can’t get Dean out of my system, but it’s you. I know you’re meant to help mad people, but you’re the one who’s touched in the head.”

  “Did you give him any names or places where Dean used to go?”

  “Nope. I told him where he could go, and then I shut the door in his face.”

  The next visit was less quarrelsome and more distressing. Frieda hadn’t seen Carrie Dekker for more than three years and she hadn’t heard anything about her since Jack had stopped being her therapist. It was she who had recommended Jack, after Carrie had discovered that her beloved and helpless husband had been killed by Dean, and that she had let Alan’s murderer into her bed. Carrie had liked Jack and they had done well together, but a year ago she had said it was time to move on.

  She knocked on the door. It was early evening, and dark. Rain came in gusts; the branches of the tall plane trees writhed in the street and every so often a half-moon sped out from behind the heavy clouds, then disappeared once more.

  A dog was yapping, and when Carrie opened the door, she had a small, shaggy mongrel at her feet.

  “You,” she said, not hostile—although once she had been very hostile toward Frieda, blaming her for the death of Alan.

  “I hope it’s all right just to turn up like this.”

  Carrie stepped back and Frieda went inside.

  Frieda saw at once that everything had been decorated. The room that used to be divided by large doors had been opened out; all the shelves that had been full of Alan’s clutter were gone.

  “I thought I should stop living in a museum.”

  “Good.”

  “Jack was very helpful.”

  “I’ll tell him you said so. When did you get your dog?”

  “Just a few weeks ago. He’s a rescue dog. When we were trying for a baby, Alan used to say we should get a dog. He’s a bit like a child, a child who’ll never grow up and leave me.”

  Frieda gave the dog a tentative pat and he immediately rolled over on his back and stuck his legs into the air, his tail banging gently on the floor. “I’m here for a reason.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you meet a man called Bruce Stringer?”

  “A few days ago. He was rather mysterious about what he was doing.”

  “He’s looking for Dean,” said Frieda.

  Carrie bent down and stroked the dog’s stomach. “Any luck?” she said at last.

  “Stringer’s disappeared.”

  Carrie met Frieda’s gaze, and for a moment she didn’t say anything. “Do you think something’s happened?”

  “I don’t know. Did you give him any information?”

  “I just told him what had happened. He was easy to talk to. He wasn’t shocked. He wasn’t pretending to care. It was just a clue, nothing else.”

  Frieda nodded.

  “I gave him a few photos of Alan, because that seemed as good as giving him photos of Dean. And I told him things that Alan liked doing, though I don’t think he was interested in that. But I didn’t give him any actual names because I didn’t have any.”

  “Thank you,” said Frieda.

  “When I imagine him still out there,” said Carrie, “I think I’ll go mad.”

  Frieda’s last stop was at Reuben’s house. He and Josef were both there. Josef was cooking some rich, meaty casserole and Reuben was smoking a cigarette and drinking red wine out of a vast goblet.

  “I can smoke without guilt now,” he said. “It’s already done the damage. And don’t lecture me.”

  “I wasn’t going to.”

  “I’m not going to be a brave patient, you know. Don’t expect me to be because you’ll be disappointed.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “You’d be irritatingly stoical, not me. No one’s going to say, “He lost his brave fight against cancer.”’

  “You haven’t lost it yet, anyway.”

  “They’re not going to say that because I’m not in a fucking battle. I’m the battleground. That’s what. You remember that. Dying isn’t a moral failure. It’s not a sign of weakness.”

  “I agree.”

  “Good. Wine?”

  “Please.”

  Josef brought over the bottle and a glass. As he put them down, his phone rang on the table. She saw his eyes glance at the caller ID; then he reached down and turned the phone over so the screen was hidden.

  “You should tell her,” said Frieda.

  “What?” He spread his palms out; his face wore a look of bemused innocence. “Tell who?”

  “You should tell Emma Travis that you cannot see her any more.”

  “I don’t want to make big upset.”

  “It’s much kinder than not answering her calls.” She poured herself some wine, then said, “There was something I wanted to ask you. The man who came to talk to you about Dean.”

  “We dri
nk vodka together.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I tell him names of other people at house,” said Josef. “Builders and painters and electricians.”

  “That’s all?”

  “All. Why?”

  But Frieda didn’t want to tell Josef that Stringer had disappeared. He felt bad enough already about Dean. She clinked her glass against his tumbler of vodka and took a sip. “To spring coming,” she said.

  “I rather like these storms and floods,” said Reuben. “It feels Biblical.”

  “You like them because you’re safely inside.”

  Derek Blythe was stick-thin with jug ears and looked like an aging schoolboy. His suit was too big for him. He sat behind his desk in a small office that was empty, apart from a large man in a glass cubicle at the far end.

  “What a thing,” he said. “Who’d have thought when I met her that she was about to die?”

  “You met her at her house, is that right?”

  “What a tip. It sounds bad to say, after everything, but she was a bit of a nutter.”

  “Did you spend a long time with her?”

  “Ages. It was just for one of our little items on local characters, so I didn’t need much, but she wouldn’t let me go. I suppose she was lonely.”

  “I think so.”

  “I know why you’re interested in her.”

  “She probably talked about it.”

  “Course she did. She was excited about you.”

  “There’s not much about it in the piece you published.”