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

by Nicci French

  ‘Stop,’ Frieda said. Sandy braked.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I’d like to walk the last bit.’

  ‘It’s dark.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter. There’s a moon. Then street lamps.’ She smiled. ‘I know the way.’

  ‘Shall I come with you?’

  She swallowed and made an effort to speak gently. ‘I’d prefer to walk there alone. It will only take twenty minutes or so.’

  ‘Where shall we meet?’

  ‘Outside the church. You can’t miss it.’

  She buttoned her coat and wrapped her red scarf around her neck. Then she opened the door and stepped out into the windy darkness. Something about the smell – wet soil, fallen leaves, the faintest tang of brine – caught her in the throat and took her back again. She closed the door and waited until Sandy had pulled away and his taillights had been swallowed up in the night, and then she started to walk.

  ‘What will you have?’

  Frieda looked at the menu, with its sashimi and crust coatings and drizzles of oil. And she looked around the dining room with its minimalist black furniture, tasteful abstract paintings, zoned lighting. This didn’t feel like the place where she had grown up. In the 1980s it had felt like the 1950s or 1930s.

  By the time she had arrived in the high street, Sandy had arranged everything. He had booked a room in a pub that Frieda had remembered as a smoky, dingy place but now had framed awards by the door and a restaurant. The harassed young woman at the front desk had said that it was almost full but she could get them a table if they could eat immediately. Sandy looked at Frieda, who just shrugged, and they walked straight through without even going up to their room.

  ‘I’ll have the oysters,’ said Sandy. ‘You know, when in Suffolk.’

  ‘You know about the norovirus, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Projectile vomiting,’ said Frieda. ‘Without warning.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And oysters feed on human sewage. And the norovirus isn’t treatable.’

  ‘But it doesn’t kill you,’ said Sandy, putting his menu down. ‘And there’s an r in the month, and we’re just a few miles from the sea, and this is oysters we’re talking about. So I’m having oysters, followed by the fish of the day, whatever it is, whatever it’s eaten. What are you having?’

  Frieda ordered two starters and a green salad. Sandy poured them both white wine. The oysters and Frieda’s scallops with bacon arrived, and after a few minutes, Sandy looked down at his six empty shells. ‘They didn’t taste of norovirus at all,’ he said.

  ‘We’ll see,’ said Frieda.

  ‘So what was it like, walking into Braxton? Did you recognize every tree?’

  Frieda shook her head. ‘It wasn’t like that at all. When you left me and I started walking it felt like I was going into a completely strange town. They’ve built a new industrial estate and a petrol station and what looks like a giant housing estate. It could have been anywhere.’

  ‘It sounds as if they were trampling on your memories.’

  ‘I don’t mind having my memories trampled on,’ said Frieda. ‘I’ve done quite a bit of trampling and stamping on them myself.’

  The fish arrived and Sandy started on it while Frieda ate her risotto. He gestured around the room with his fork. ‘Are these your people?’ he said, in a subdued tone. ‘Can you tell me all about them?’

  Frieda glanced around. ‘They’re too young,’ she said. ‘Most of them were children when I left. Anyway, Braxton isn’t some tiny village. It’s a market town.’

  After the meal they drank coffee and went upstairs. It was a little room at the back, overlooking the car park.

  ‘It’s not brilliant,’ said Sandy, ‘but we were lucky to get anything.’

  Frieda had a shower and then Sandy had a shower. When he came out of the bathroom, she was lying on the bed, still wrapped in a towel, staring up at the ceiling. She raised her head. ‘It looks as if America has been good for you,’ she said.

  ‘There was nothing to do there but work and run.’

  ‘Nothing?’ She smiled. ‘Not in the whole of America?’

  He lay down beside her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Frieda said.

  ‘What about?’

  ‘All of this. We should have been doing this for real – going away for the weekend, me taking you back to where I grew up. That’s what proper couples do. Instead, we’re here on this … well, what is it?’

  ‘Something you need to do,’ said Sandy.

  Frieda ran her fingers over his shoulder, still smooth and damp from the shower. ‘Sex is still allowed, you know.’ She leaned forward to kiss him. ‘I’m not some damaged, traumatized object that needs to be handled carefully in case it breaks.’

  Sandy looked serious, then kissed her and kissed her down her body and took the towel off her. Even when he was inside her, she felt that she was being fierce and longing and he was being careful and kind. Afterwards, they got into bed and lay in the dark and didn’t speak. Frieda was jaggedly awake. She could hear wind and rain outside, in waves against the window. There were voices, laughing, car doors opening, engines starting. She could hear the shallow breathing beside her but she couldn’t tell whether Sandy was awake, like she was, staring into the darkness.

  12

  The next morning was cloudy and cold and the gutters were still full of water from the night’s rain. Frieda and Sandy walked along the high street to the police station but she found it was no longer there. The solid brick building had been converted into a solicitor’s office and a café, and a shop selling flowers and local chocolates. They were all closed. Frieda had to ask three people before she found a man who could tell her where the new police station was. Through the car park next to the bank, turn left, cross the road. A big new building.

  ‘It’s probably closed,’ said the man. ‘It being Sunday.’

  It was closed. According to the sign, it was open on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays between one p.m. and three p.m.

  ‘I don’t believe this,’ said Frieda.

  ‘It’s reassuring in a way,’ said Sandy.

  ‘But what happens if there’s a crime?’

  The two of them walked round the side and found a uniformed officer sponging the windows of a police car. He was thickly built, breathing heavily with the effort.

  ‘I need to talk to a policeman,’ said Frieda.

  ‘Is it urgent?’ said the officer.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Has something serious happened?’

  ‘It’s about a crime that happened years ago,’ said Frieda. ‘But it’s important.’

  The officer sniffed. ‘You’ll need to go over to Moreton. They’ll help you there. It’s a bit of a drive, it’s –’

  ‘I know where Moreton is,’ said Frieda. ‘Is it open?’

  ‘It’s open all the time. Twenty-four hours a day.’

  ‘I thought all police stations were open all the time,’ said Frieda. ‘Like churches.’

  ‘We’re lucky to be here at all,’ said the officer. ‘There’s talk of selling this, turning it into a supermarket.’

  Sandy looked at Frieda quizzically.

  ‘I suppose now that we’re here,’ she said. ‘If you can bear it.’

  ‘So tell me about Moreton,’ said Sandy, once they were in the car and driving out of Braxton on to the bypass.

  ‘It’s bigger than Braxton,’ said Frieda. ‘It’s got a market on Saturday. It’s got a church that’s quite famous. It’s got a guildhall. Two women were burned as witches in the market square. That was quite a long time ago.’

  ‘You sound like a guidebook,’ said Sandy. ‘What part did it play in your life?’

  ‘I went to parties there a few times. At one, I sat with a girl I hardly knew called Jane Nichols while she was sick into the toilet. Is that autobiographical enough for you?’

  ‘It’s a start.’

  They drove past
fields and patches of woodland. There were tiny splashes of rain on the windscreen. You could see the spire of the church in Moreton from several miles away, but before they got into the old centre they drove past new housing estates, a hypermarket, stores for pet supplies and furniture, home lighting and frozen food. Sandy pulled up outside the police station. ‘This looks more like the real thing,’ he said. ‘Shall I wait here for you?’

  ‘Go and look at the church,’ said Frieda. ‘It’ll give you an idea of what this area was like before it started to go downhill about four hundred years ago.’

  ‘You sound like an angry teenager.’

  ‘I must be having a flashback,’ said Frieda. ‘I’ll call you when I’m done.’

  As Frieda walked up the steps and the glass doors opened automatically to admit her, she really did feel – if only for a moment – that history was repeating itself. What had she felt like all those years ago? It was oddly difficult to remember.

  She stood near the front desk. There was a sign asking queuers to stand behind the yellow line and give privacy to the person at the front. The woman at the front wasn’t giving herself privacy because she was loudly telling the uniformed WPC behind the desk that her driveway was completely flooded and that the level of the water was a quarter of an inch away from entering her house and destroying it. The WPC tried, rather more quietly, to tell the woman that the flooding wasn’t a police matter and that she should try the fire brigade but even they might not be able to do anything. Really, her property was her responsibility, and if there was no serious threat, even the fire brigade were not legally obliged to attend. The officer had to repeat this several times before the woman went away, muttering to herself.

  ‘It’s a disgrace,’ she said to Frieda, as she passed her.

  It took a patient explanation from Frieda and a whispered consultation with a colleague and then, five minutes later, she was sitting in a windowless interview room with a female sergeant. The room seemed also to serve as a cleaner’s store space. There was a bucket and mop to the side of the chair Frieda sat in, a vacuum cleaner by the door, two brooms leaning against the wall, and a dustpan and brush on the table next to Frieda’s untouched cup of tea; the dustpan had lots of dead flies in it. The officer, a thin woman with short dark hair, picked it up and put it on the floor without comment.

  ‘I want to say that this must have been distressing for you.’

  ‘The question isn’t what I feel,’ said Frieda. ‘The question is what needs to be done.’

  ‘I’ll consult with colleagues,’ the officer said. ‘It’s difficult because, this being a Sunday, we’re not operating at full capacity. But I understand that there was an inquiry back at the time of the original event in February 1989.’

  ‘February the eleventh. It was a crime, not an event.’

  ‘I didn’t mean anything by that. But, from what you say, the inquiry didn’t progress and was discontinued. And from what you also say, with this new possible crime, the victim is unwilling to come forward.’

  ‘She’s worried that what happened to me will happen to her. She’ll mark herself as a victim and then not really be believed. But another important issue is that this man is still out there and still a danger.’

  ‘And this is based on a feeling you have?’

  ‘It’s clearly the same man.’

  The officer picked up the plastic cup of tea, then remembered it was Frieda’s and quickly put it down again. Some of it splashed on to the table.

  ‘Obviously I have no knowledge of the case apart from what you’ve told me. All I can say is that if the young woman in question comes forward, we will take the case seriously.’

  ‘That doesn’t seem possible just at the moment,’ said Frieda.

  ‘That’s a pity,’ said the officer. ‘As I said, I will talk to my colleagues, but I can anticipate what they’ll say.’

  ‘Which is to do nothing.’

  ‘I don’t want to be unsympathetic,’ said the officer, ‘but I’m not clear what there is to investigate.’

  ‘It would mean going back to the original file,’ said Frieda. ‘That would be a start.’

  ‘As I said, I’ll discuss this issue, this difficult issue, with my superior. But he’s not in until tomorrow morning. I’ll contact you and let you know what he says.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be better if I talked to him?’

  ‘I don’t think that will be necessary. For the present. If you just leave your details at the front desk so we know how we can keep you informed. Also, we can supply you with contact details so that you can obtain help. It can sometimes be very useful in cases like these to have someone you can talk to about it.’

  ‘Can it?’ said Frieda.

  ‘Yes. It’s sometimes very helpful to get these things out in the open and get advice on how to deal with it.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Frieda nodded. ‘I’ll consider it.’

  Sandy was in the car outside. Frieda got in beside him.

  ‘Well?’ he said.

  ‘Look at me. Look at me and tell me what you see.’

  ‘I’m tempted to say the face of the woman I love. But I have a sense that might be the wrong thing, just at the moment.’

  ‘I’m an idiot,’ said Frieda. ‘An idiot. And I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘Well.’ Sandy spoke after a pause. ‘How about going to see your mother?’

  13

  As if in a dream from which she kept expecting to jerk awake, Frieda walked along the high street. It was a cool, dim day, the low sun a blur. People passed her – a jostling group of teenagers, a woman pushing her small and yapping dog in a buggy, an old man weaving from side to side. She didn’t look into their faces: she didn’t want to recognize anyone or be recognized, although, of course, that was unlikely. It had been more than two decades. The bakery where she used to buy baguettes was still there, and the shop selling cheap booze and a strange assortment of DVDs. The only change was that it had once been a different strange assortment of videos.

  When Frieda was in London, she often had the feeling of walking over the past: layer upon layer of other people’s histories under her feet. She had always loved the sense of a great city’s buried secrets and the mysterious way they could make themselves felt in fragments of old buildings, in street names, in the hidden rivers that ran under pavements. But in this small town she was walking in her own footsteps. Here, at the bend of the road, her father had come to meet her and taken hold of her small hand in his large, soft, white one; here she had stood at the bus stop with her face in a book. Here a figure had lurked in the shadows and she could feel her teenage heart pounding. She caught her reflection in the window of the newsagent and for an instant thought she saw a fierce young girl, her dark hair in pigtails, but the figure resolved into Dr Frieda Klein, composed and expressionless, walking briskly by.

  She turned off the high street, by a tattoo parlour that used to be a second-hand bookshop, into the street where she had first learned to ride a bike. The grass verge was now a pavement; there were street lamps that hadn’t been there before, and the phone box where she used to make secret calls was gone. The bus stop had a new shelter. She paused for an instant beside it, frowning at a memory, then letting it go. Down a smaller, narrower lane leading towards the edge of the town, past a tiny ancient chapel squeezed between two timbered houses. A scrawny expanse of newly planted grass – what had been there before? She blinked and saw a sagging wooden building with a rusted iron railing running in front of it. The lane rose steeply, under trees whose branches sent down damp flurries of leaves when the wind blew. The landscape seemed to darken; the air was full of unshed rain.

  The cottage where old Mrs Leonard used to live with all her cats and no heating – she had worn strange turbans and stained slippers and would bang a metal dish in the garden, calling them home in a high-pitched croon, but she must be long dead. The mock-Tudor that had belonged to the Clarkes: there used to be old bikes in the garden, and a small trampo
line, but now there was a decorative pond and a small weeping willow. Tracey Ashton’s little house. It was a different colour now, yellowish, a bit queasy-making. There was a satellite dish on its roof. Frieda looked at the empty windows, then away. There was only room for one reunion.

  Here, then, at last: a long, low house that seemed to have settled into the earth. Its walls bulged and its roof sagged. Rich red brick, large windows that were all dark except the one at the side, the porch where her father used to leave his boots. Frieda pushed the gate and went into the front garden. The holly tree was gone. There were large iron pots against the path, but the plants in them had withered into futile stumps. There was a single leather glove lying on the grass; Frieda picked it up and straightened it. Perhaps it was her mother’s. Her mother, whom she hadn’t seen for more than two decades. Dr Juliet Klein, the GP in a little Suffolk market town, the wife of a man who had hanged himself in the room whose window she could see from where she stood, the mother to a daughter who had run away from home and never returned until this day. Frieda narrowed her eyes: she would be in her late sixties now, presumably retired. Perhaps she didn’t even live here any more. She stepped forward and knocked hard on the door that was moss-green now, not red.

  How long did she wait? The door swung open. Her mother stood before her; she stood before her mother. There was a silence during which the two women stared at each other.

  ‘Well, well,’ said Juliet Klein at last, in her dry, precise voice. She always sounded slightly mocking, a touch ironic.

  ‘Hello,’ said Frieda. She realized she didn’t know what to call her mother: Juliet? Mum? ‘Are you going to invite me in?’