Thursday's Children: A Frieda Klein Novel (Frieda Klein 4)

by Nicci French

  As she walked along the towpath, she thought about bombs on buses, a young woman thrown into the canal. Wherever Frieda walked in London she was haunted by these ghosts. She heard a sound and looked at the water that was starting to speckle with raindrops. As the canal snaked through Kentish Town and past the edge of Camden Lock market, the rain grew heavier and heavier, a grey curtain that turned the afternoon dark. Frieda was wearing a light suede jacket and within a few minutes her clothes were wet and cold against her skin. She almost welcomed it as a relief. It stopped her thinking. When the huge London Zoo aviary came into view ahead of her, she went up the steps, crossed the road and walked into Primrose Hill.

  Reuben was making himself a sandwich. He assembled the avocado, rocket, sun-dried tomatoes, hummus, then took the focaccia bread from the oven and sliced it open. He arranged his ingredients in careful layers and ground some black pepper over the top. During the morning he’d been at the Warehouse, the clinic he had opened decades ago, and for the last hour, as he sat listening to the woman whose father had never loved her and whose husband was cheating on her, he had been imagining the lunch he was going to have. The question was, should he have a glass of red wine with it? He used to drink too heavily, during those terrible days of disenchantment and chaos. Nowadays his rule was that he never drank before six o’ clock, but he frequently broke it, especially if Josef was with him. Josef was not there now, but there was an opened bottle of red wine on the side. Maybe half a glass.

  Then there was a knock at his front door. He cursed under his breath and considered not answering. The knock was repeated and he sighed and went to the door.

  Standing in the streaming rain, her hair plastered to her head and her clothes drenched, was his old friend, colleague and – long before that – his patient, Frieda.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ he said.

  ‘Hello, Reuben.’

  ‘You’re fucking soaking.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Where’s your umbrella?’

  ‘I don’t have one. Are you going to let me in?’

  Five minutes later, Frieda was sitting in an armchair with both hands around a mug of tea and half of the bulging focaccia sandwich on a plate at her side. She was wearing a pair of Reuben’s jeans and a bulky woollen sweater but she was still shivering. Reuben slouched on the sofa opposite, munching his lunch. He had decided against the wine.

  ‘So, you walk through driving rain to get here. You don’t ring ahead to check whether I’m in. You might have to walk all the way back in the rain. What’s it about?’

  ‘There’s something I need to tell you. I’m telling you this because you’re my friend. But also because you were my analyst.’

  ‘Which is it? Analyst or friend?’

  ‘Both. But if you hadn’t been my analyst I couldn’t tell you at all. You know, rules and all that.’

  Reuben examined her as she sat before him, in her familiar upright posture. She looked fine, more than fine, better than she had done in months: calm, clear, alert.

  ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘I’ve just seen a fifteen-year-old girl. She comes from Braxton in Suffolk.’

  Reuben’s eyes narrowed. ‘That sounds familiar.’

  ‘I might have mentioned it in our sessions. It’s where I grew up. Where I went to school.’

  ‘Why are you seeing a patient from there?’

  ‘She’s not exactly a patient. Her mother was in my class at school. She suddenly got in touch and asked me to talk to her daughter. She was being difficult. The daughter, I mean. Acting up.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘She told me she had been raped.’

  ‘How?’ said Reuben, and then he corrected himself. ‘I mean, in what circumstances?’

  ‘A stranger broke into her bedroom at night. She didn’t see his face. It was dark and he was wearing something over it. So she didn’t recognize him.’

  ‘Has she gone to the police?’

  ‘She doesn’t want to, her mother doesn’t want to.’

  Reuben lay back on the large sofa and ran his fingers through his long, greying hair. He was wearing a shirt with an intricate pattern in black and white. It almost shimmered. ‘It sounds terrible,’ he said. ‘But why are you telling me this?’

  ‘She told me that after it had all happened, the man had leaned close to her and told her that nobody would believe her.’

  ‘Do people believe her?’

  ‘I do. Her mother isn’t sure. Or is scared to be sure.’

  There was a long silence. When Reuben spoke he sounded tentative, as if he knew he was entering dangerous territory. ‘That’s a terrible thing to happen,’ he said. He sat up and put the last of his lunch into his mouth, chewed vigorously. ‘But, again, why are you telling me?’

  ‘Because twenty-three years ago I went through exactly the same thing.’

  Reuben’s features froze. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The same thing, the same words.’

  ‘You mean you were raped?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When you were a girl?’

  ‘I was just sixteen.’

  Reuben felt as if he had received a blow. It took an effort for him to speak calmly. ‘I’m going to say two things. The first is that I am so, so sorry about this. And the second, I was your therapist for three years. Why didn’t you tell me?’

  Frieda thought for a moment. ‘One of those things explains the other. I survived it. I got out. I didn’t want your sympathy or anybody’s sympathy. If I had told you, that would have given him power over me. It would have shown he was still in my head.’

  ‘If that’s what you feel, then I must have failed you deeply as a therapist.’

  ‘I probably wasn’t a good patient.’

  ‘I don’t know what a good patient is,’ said Reuben, with a rueful expression. ‘I probably learned more from you than you learned from me. But I wasn’t able to help you. Or you weren’t able to turn to me for help.’

  ‘You did help me in so many ways, but I didn’t need that sort of help,’ said Frieda. ‘If by that you mean coming to terms with it. That’s the old cliché for it, isn’t it? I don’t believe in coming to terms with things.’

  ‘You felt a need to come here, walking through the rain. You didn’t have a proper coat or an umbrella. I could say that you were punishing yourself, or scouring yourself.’

  ‘I could say that it wasn’t raining when I set off,’ said Frieda. ‘But that would be evasive. This girl was like a visitor from my past. Calling me back. I felt I had to tell someone.’

  ‘I’m glad it was me.’ Reuben turned his palm upwards in a summoning gesture that was familiar to Frieda, taking her back to the time when he had been her therapist. ‘Can you tell me now?’

  ‘I can try,’ said Frieda.

  Two hours later, Frieda was walking alone down Primrose Hill, with what felt like the whole of London laid out in front of her. She had told the story to Reuben, such as it was; she had said it out loud for the first time in twenty-three years. He had listened in a way that had taken her back to the old Reuben, shrewd, perceptive, entirely focused on the words she was finally uttering. Yet as she thought over it now, it wasn’t something that could meaningfully be told as a story, narrated in words. It existed for her as a series of images, flashes lit by a strobe light.

  The feel of her bed in the pitch darkness, the weight of her body, the smell of bath soap.

  A movement. A creak of a floorboard. The heaving of the bed.

  Light in her eyes. A shape behind the light. A blade against her neck. Something whispered. A mask. Woollen.

  Duvet thrown back. The feeling of air on bare skin. Legs pushed apart. The weight on her. Gloved hands. Terror invading every part of her body.

  Voices from downstairs. The television. Canned laughter. Life going on as it always did, careless of atrocity.

  Trying to hold on to her thoughts, to her rational self. Saying, ‘Please don�
�t do this. I’m a virgin. Please please please.’ And a snorting little chuckle coming from him.

  A sensation of pain and the feeling – which Frieda had never forgotten – that it was happening to her yet she was separate from her body. The sudden warm wetness.

  The flashing certainty that this might be the last moment of her life, the final thing she would ever experience. Waiting for the hands around the neck.

  Warm, panting breath. Horrible intimacy. The last murmured, muffled words lisped into her ear: ‘Don’t think of telling anyone, sweetheart. Nobody will believe you.’

  Lying in the dark, trying to believe he was gone and not coming back. The thought that it would never be safe to sleep ever, ever again.

  8

  Frieda sat in her little garret at the top of the house. From the skylight window she could see, across the rooftops of Fitzrovia, the old Post Office tower. Inside it was quiet and peaceful. A standard lamp threw a soft light over the room, and there was a jug of crimson dahlias on her desk. Her drawing pencils, her charcoals, were ranged neatly in front of her. She wrapped her hands around her large mug of tea and took a small sip. She felt calm. Her thoughts were clear. She opened the lid of her laptop and, ignoring new mail, pressed the message icon.

  Dear Sandy [she wrote]

  I have just returned from seeing Reuben. I told him something that I should have told him a long time ago, when he was my therapist and I was his patient. Now I need to tell you too. You don’t have to say anything or do anything. I don’t want help and this is not a confession, just a story of something that happened to me that you should know because I don’t want it to be a secret. If it is a secret, then it has power over me still, and I don’t want that.

  When I was just sixteen, some months after my father killed himself, I was raped. A man broke into my room at night and raped me. I do not know who he was. He was never discovered. There are ways in which my life changed after this; I changed. I never spoke of it because I did not want to be defined by it. Now, however, the past seems to have returned to me. Perhaps it never left, after all.

  I wanted you to know.

  I really am fine, better than I’ve been for a long time. You don’t need to worry about me. Not an hour goes by that I don’t think of you and send you my love xxxx

  Frieda sat for several minutes, sipping her tea, staring out at the blurred lights of London, before she pressed the ‘send’ button. It was gone. Soon he would know. She felt slightly vertiginous: for all these years she had kept the secret sealed away inside her; now in the space of a few hours she had told two people. And she knew that this meant she had other people to tell.

  The next morning she phoned Sasha. Yes, it was important. Yes, it was almost an emergency. But nothing Sasha needed to worry about.

  They walked together in silence until they reached Bloomsbury Square, Sasha pushing Ethan in his buggy. The winds were almost gale force and the trees were swaying in unison. Frieda was wearing her long black coat and her red scarf. She had to lean in close while she told Sasha what had happened to her; she saw her friend flinch.

  When she had finished, Sasha hugged her. Frieda glanced around to see if anyone was watching.

  ‘I’m thinking of when we first met,’ Sasha said, her hair blown around her face by the wind. She looked as if she were on the deck of a ship. ‘I came to you and told you about what happened with me and Dr Rundell. And all the time you’d gone through that. How did you keep something like that to yourself? Why did you never mention it before?’

  ‘I’ve never told anyone. One of the reasons is that I didn’t want that to be the way that people thought of me: the victim. I told you ten seconds ago and already you think it influenced the way I responded to you when we first met.’

  ‘You didn’t just respond,’ said Sasha. ‘You went straight across London and punched him in a restaurant and got arrested. Is that normal?’

  ‘It seemed appropriate in the circumstances. So now you know.’

  ‘What next?’

  Frieda took her phone from her pocket. ‘There are one or two more people I’ve got to burden with this.’

  Josef was working in a large detached house near the canal in Maida Vale. Frieda noticed a smart white van parked outside. A suspicious Spanish cleaner admitted her and led her to an upstairs bedroom. Josef was up a ladder spreading plaster on the ceiling. A burly man with his hair in a ponytail and tattoos on his arms was stripping discoloured paper off the walls. Josef noticed her and slid down the ladder. He stepped forward to hug her, then looked at his smeared arms and stopped.

  ‘It looks as if things are going well,’ said Frieda.

  ‘How?’ asked Josef.

  ‘I saw a new van outside. Hello, Stefan.’

  The man with the ponytail stood up and held out his broad hand. He was Russian and from time to time he worked with Josef. Frieda was never quite sure what he did outside that.

  ‘How is your bath?’ Josef asked.

  ‘My bath is fine, thank you.’ She peered up at the ceiling. ‘You’re nearly done.’

  Josef shook his head. ‘Is shit.’

  ‘No,’ said Frieda. ‘It looks really nice.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Josef, pointing upwards. ‘Over there in room is toilet. They put wrong things down. It very, very bad. Three days ago, this room was like hell. And it smelt … Ooof.’ He pulled a face.

  ‘It looks fine now,’ said Frieda.

  ‘But you said you must see me,’ said Josef.

  Frieda looked at Stefan. ‘Can we find somewhere private?’

  Stefan grinned. ‘I make tea. Or something stronger?’

  ‘Tea’s good.’

  ‘I have custard creams.’

  ‘Lovely.’ She hated custard creams.

  Stefan left the room.

  ‘There’s something I have to tell you,’ said Frieda, ‘but I can tell you while you’re working.’

  Josef climbed back up the ladder and started slapping on the plaster and shaping it flat, in broad sweeps with two trowels. It was oddly satisfying and soothing to watch and Frieda would have been happy just to lie on the floor and look as the ceiling was covered.

  ‘I can’t watch a ceiling without imagining you falling through it,’ she said.

  ‘A strange way for our first meeting,’ said Josef. ‘You could have watched me die. But what is it you have to say?’

  So Frieda told him. After she had begun, Josef stopped his plastering and turned and sat on the steps, gazing down at her. Frieda felt that there was something incongruous about the whole scene, as if she was talking to someone sitting up in a tree. ‘So,’ she said finally. ‘That’s what I came to tell you.’

  He stood up on his ladder, his head almost touching the newly plastered ceiling, and put a hand to his heart. ‘Thank you, my friend,’ he said.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For telling me this.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’ There was a pause and the two of them looked at each other. ‘You need to finish your ceiling.’

  Josef shrugged.

  ‘I came to say what I had to say,’ said Frieda. ‘So I’ll go.’

  ‘Whisky with a dash of water,’ said Karlsson.

  They clinked tumblers and smiled at each other.

  ‘You’re tanned,’ said Frieda. ‘You haven’t been using a sunbed, have you?’

  Somehow, over the turbulent years that they had known each other, Frieda and DCI Malcolm Karlsson had become comfortable in each other’s company. They had had fierce arguments; they had let each other down and had rescued each other; they had seen each other in danger and great distress. Now they could sit on the long, battered sofa, drink whisky and say what was on their minds.

  ‘Spain,’ Karlsson said. ‘I was there for a long weekend.’

  ‘Of course. How are your children?’

  Karlsson’s children were spending two years in Madrid with his ex-wife and her new partner. Frieda had seen how much he hated their going and how painfully
he missed them.

  ‘Brown, freckled, talking a language I don’t understand.’

  ‘Happy, then?’

  ‘Yes. They seem very happy.’

  ‘That’s good, isn’t it?’

  ‘Is it terrible to wish they sometimes missed me a bit?’

  ‘They’ll be back in a few months, won’t they?’

  ‘Yes. I hope we can get back to normal.’

  ‘Rather than what?’

  ‘I make so much effort with them when I see them for these brief snatches, as if I always have to entertain them. I don’t want to be their holiday, I want to be their home.’

  ‘Perhaps you should trust them more.’

  ‘You’re probably right.’ He smiled at her. ‘You usually are.’

  ‘I’ll remind you that you said that. How’s work?’ They had first met each other through his work, which had come for a time to be hers as well.

  ‘Nothing to interest you. No murders and missing children. No, I’m – what’s the term Commissioner Crawford uses? – I’m facilitating a reorganization.’

  ‘That sounds painful.’

  He made a grimace of distaste. ‘Resource limitations. Performance indicators. Streamlining. Making operations fit for purpose. This isn’t what I went into the police force to do.’

  ‘Are you laying people off?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. Yvette’s helping me. She hates it more than I do, which, of course, makes her like the poor old bull in a china shop. She charges angrily at it.’