by Nicci French
‘Did they know Becky Capel?’
‘Oh, God, that was tragic. Poor Becky. She was a sweetheart. I knew her quite well. She was a friend of Charlotte’s. They were in the same year at school. It’s been devastating for her. So young.’ There were suddenly tears in her eyes. She dragged a sleeve across them. ‘Such a waste.’
‘Yes.’
‘Maddie’s in tatters.’ A little gleam came into her eyes. ‘Hang on, didn’t I hear something about …?’
‘I met Becky a couple of times,’ said Frieda, calmly. ‘On a professional basis. Because Maddie was worried about her.’
‘Yes,’ said Vanessa, musingly. ‘That’s right. I knew I’d heard something.’ Her manner had shifted slightly. ‘Listen, I’ve got to rush off in a minute. I’m due at work. I’m a dental hygienist, not quite as glamorous as being a famous therapist, but sometimes I think healthy teeth are as important as a clear conscience.’ She picked up her coat. ‘One minute, though – Ewan will never forgive me if I don’t make a date. When are you here until?’
‘I’m going to be staying three days or so a week. For my mother. I’ll text you my email and you can suggest days. How’s that?’
‘Great.’
Vanessa picked up a used envelope and wrote her number on it. She handed it to Frieda.
‘Do you have contacts for other people?’ Frieda asked.
‘Like?’
‘Oh. Chas, Jeremy. Lewis,’ she added, and saw a little smile appear and then disappear on Vanessa’s face.
‘As a matter of fact, I do! I’m helping to arrange a reunion.’
‘Eva mentioned something about that.’
‘You must come. It will be my coup. The famous Frieda Klein.’ Again, that undertone of resentment. ‘Anyway, I’ll mail you their details once you’ve sent me that text.’
‘Thanks.’
‘And now I’ve got to run.’
‘Of course.’
She stood up, putting her mug in the sink, pulling on her coat. ‘Can I offer you a lift?’ Vanessa asked at the door.
‘No, it’s fine. I’d like to walk.’
‘You haven’t changed one bit, you know.’
‘Oh, I probably have.’
When Frieda reached the lane at the end of the drive, she switched on her phone. There was a message from Karlsson. She rang him straight back.
‘I’ve found him,’ he said.
‘Is he still in the police force?’
‘He’s done quite nicely. He’s a detective chief inspector.’
‘Do you think he’ll talk to me?’
‘I rang him. He’s expecting your call.’
‘Where does he live?’
‘He still in the area, somewhere up near Norwich.’
‘That’s forty miles away.’
‘It’s still East Anglia. Doesn’t that count as the same area?’
‘I don’t know. Around here there are people who think the next village is a foreign country.’
‘Are you going to see him?’
‘If I can.’
‘And you’ll just talk to him?’
‘What else would I do?’
‘You’ve been known to do other things. Remember it was me who put you in touch with him. I’m vouching for you.’
‘Thanks, Karlsson. I’m really grateful. I wish there was something I could do back.’
‘That’s not how it’s meant to work. Just don’t do anything reckless. At least, not without telling me first.’
‘I’d better go,’ said Frieda. ‘I need to make some calls.’
Three hours later, Eva knocked on Frieda’s door. ‘A van’s arrived,’ she said. ‘A man says he’s here to see you. He sounds Polish.’
Frieda pulled her jacket on and stepped outside. ‘He’s a friend of mine,’ she said. ‘From Ukraine.’
‘Oh, no, before I forget, someone left you a letter.’
‘Here?’
‘Yes. It was on the doormat when I came in. Probably someone who’d heard on the grapevine that you were back.’
Eva held out an envelope and Frieda pushed it into her bag. She would read it later.
When she stepped out into the road, Josef’s head was hidden inside the open bonnet at the front of the van.
‘Is everything all right?’
Josef’s head appeared. He took a rag from his pocket and wiped oil from his hands. ‘Is hot. But is OK, will get us to your man.’
They got inside and the van started with what sounded like a long, spluttering chesty cough.
‘So where?’ said Josef.
‘I’ll guide you.’
‘You will not guide. You tell me address, I put in machine, we don’t think any more.’
‘It’s a town called Rushton. It should take about an hour.’
Frieda spelled the name and Josef tapped it into his satnav. ‘It is an hour and a quarter.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Is the little roads.’
‘Yes.’
‘But pretty.’
‘Some of them.’
Frieda looked out of the window. They were leaving Braxton and turning on to the bypass. The sea glinted in the distance.
‘This where you grow up?’ said Josef.
‘That’s right.’
‘Every tree is a memory?’
Frieda turned to Josef to see if he was joking but there was no sign of it on his face. ‘In a way,’ she said. ‘Josef, I know that when I say thank you, you’ll say that I don’t need to say it. But I do need to say it. Thank you.’
Now Josef did break into a smile. ‘Is too complicated for me.’
‘No, it isn’t. Your heart must have sunk when you heard me on the phone.’
Josef shook his head. ‘I was nearly ringing you.’
‘What …?’ Frieda began. ‘You’ve been talking to Karlsson.’
‘He says to check on you.’
‘Mad woman on the loose?’
‘No,’ Josef protested, in an aggrieved tone. ‘A friendly look-after.’
‘You know, Josef, when I think of you and me, I think of you helping me when I’m in trouble and me almost getting you killed.’
‘And building you the new bath.’
‘Without me asking for it. But it’s a lovely bath,’ Frieda added hastily. ‘I’m just saying that friendship with me comes at a price.’
‘No, no,’ said Josef. ‘There are many of the people I work with. The builders and the plumbers. They are from Ukraine and Russia and Poland. They sleep in the hostels and in the van and in the sheds. Is different for me. Because of you, I have a home, friends.’
‘It’s different for me as well, Josef.’
The rest of the journey passed mostly in silence. That was good as well. With Josef there was no compulsion to talk where talk was necessary, none of that asking how you are, without really wanting to know, or really needing to know. She just stared out of the window. Josef had been right. The landscape almost spoke to her. That woodland where they used to be taken for walks on Sunday mornings. The rectory you could just see from the road where she had been for Virginia Clarke’s fourteenth birthday party. As they drove, the memories thinned out and the landscape grew less familiar, then not familiar at all.
They stopped once for petrol and Josef checked the engine again. ‘When you have your meeting, I will sort it,’ he said.
When Frieda had rung ahead to confirm the meeting, Helmsley had told her to come to the Duchess of York. It was in the main street of Rushton and, because it was lunchtime, the saloon bar was crowded. The room was decorated with aged photographs of solemn, moustached men standing in front of horses and traction engines. In the far corner a man was sitting at a table alone, reading a newspaper. He was dressed in the grey suit and discreet tie that were the uniform of insurance salesmen and police detectives. When he saw Frieda standing in front of him, he folded his paper and stood up to greet her.
She tried to see something of the young officer she had met almos
t twenty-three years earlier. He was heavily built, jowly, with hair cut so short that it was really little more than a fuzz around the edges of his large head.
‘Dr Frieda Klein?’ She nodded and they shook hands. ‘Have you eaten?’
Frieda said she wasn’t hungry. She bought drinks for the two of them, a fruit juice for the detective and water for herself. ‘It’s good of you to see me,’ she said.
‘When a colleague gets in touch, we like to help. This DCI Karlsson, he’s a friend of yours?’
‘That’s right. Did he tell you what this is about?’
‘He left that up to you. He said you wanted some information.’
‘We’ve met before,’ said Frieda.
Until then Helmsley’s manner had been affable but now he looked apprehensive.
‘I’m sorry. I don’t recall …’
‘It was a long time ago. In February 1989, you were working in Braxton down in Suffolk.’
‘That’s right. It was my first posting.’ He spoke slowly, as if he was worried about committing himself.
‘You interviewed me.’
‘I did?’ His expression was wary. What was coming?
‘I was fifteen years old and I reported that I had been raped by a stranger in my own house. I was interviewed and some other people were interviewed as well. I don’t expect you to remember it.’
Helmsley was frowning with concentration but then his expression changed. He became paler. ‘Yes, I do remember it.’
‘What do you remember?’
He sat back in his chair and folded his arms tightly across his chest so that his suit ruffled up and suddenly seemed too small for him. Frieda recognized it as a gesture she often saw in her patients. It was sometimes interpreted as a way of fending off the outside world, of refusing intimacy. But Frieda also saw it as a sign of vulnerability, as if the person was trying to construct a feeble, useless hiding place, with their own arms.
‘First,’ Helmsley said, ‘where are you going with this?’
‘If you’ve any worries about me, you can phone Karlsson back and check with him. You can do it right now, if you want. This isn’t about you or the investigation. I just want some information. But when I mentioned the interview and you remembered it, it didn’t look like it was a happy memory.’
‘It must be worse for you,’ said Helmsley.
‘I’m not here as a traumatized victim. Just tell me what you remember.’
‘I’ve done courses. That’s what you do as you work your way up the ladder. You go on courses, away days, lectures. Some of them are a waste of time and some of them aren’t. A few years ago we had one about the handling of sexual-assault cases. We heard from some specialist officers, a psychologist and a victim. Two victims. A lot of things were said, some of it not what you’d expect.’
‘About what?’
‘About post-traumatic stress disorder, about the interviewing of complainants. In the middle of one of the PowerPoints, I suddenly remembered that case. I mean, your case. It was the first of its kind I ever dealt with. And what I felt, what I mainly felt, is that I can’t believe they let us loose on it. We were just a couple of kids, me and Jeff. That’s the other officer who interviewed you.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
Helmsley looked at Frieda more carefully, as if he were sizing her up. ‘If you’re planning some sort of legal action, then this conversation is probably a bad idea. From my point of view, I mean.’
‘I promise you, I’m not after anything like that. So …’
‘I have a feeling, and I might be wrong about this, that we didn’t handle the interview the way we should have.’ He seemed to be waiting for Frieda to say something but she stayed silent so, after a pause, he continued. ‘I thought you were this confident – what’s the word? feisty? – teenage girl. That’s probably the way teenage girls looked to me when I was that age. It was only all those years later that I thought what it must have been like from your side of the table, what it must have been like for a child to go into a police station and say what you said. And then when you’d said it, you were hauled into an interview room and treated as if you were the criminal. I can’t remember all the details.’
‘I just read the file,’ said Frieda.
Helmsley’s pale face grew even paler. ‘So we probably asked you about things … well, you know …’
‘Like my sex life?’ said Frieda. ‘Whether I was a virgin? Whether I had a boyfriend? Was I on the Pill?’
‘Sorry.’
‘And then the investigation went nowhere.’
‘Most of them do.’
‘You mean rape investigations or any investigations at all?’
‘Both, I guess. But …’ He seemed to struggle as if the word was difficult to get out. ‘Rape is always going to be a special case.’
‘Because it’s one person’s word against another.’
‘That’s one reason.’
‘This particular case got stopped especially quickly.’
‘Is that right?’
‘Well, I’m not an expert, but it didn’t seem to proceed beyond some very preliminary interviews.’
‘I only remember my interview with you.’
‘What I noticed,’ said Frieda, ‘as I read through the report was that someone else had gone through it, commenting and underlining. He didn’t seem very positive about the investigation. He signed with the initials SF. I was curious about who that might be.’
Helmsley picked up his fruit juice and took a slow sip. He put the glass back on the table. ‘When I first joined the force, my life wouldn’t have been worth living if I’d been spotted with a Britvic. It was whisky and beer. Whisky with beer. Christ, I don’t know how we all survived it.’
‘The good old days,’ said Frieda.
‘There was something to be said for them.’ He looked down at his drink as if he was considering whether to pick it up. ‘Stuart Faulkner.’
‘What?’
‘That’s your SF. He was the DCI, doing the job I do now.’
‘Do you remember his role in the case?’
‘You saw the file. As far as I remember he wasn’t really involved. He was probably on another case. We did the early interviews, then he turned up, read through the file, had a word with us and told us to drop it.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t want to keep saying this but rape isn’t like other crimes. With burglaries, assault, it’s about catching people, building a case. With rape, before anything else, you have to decide whether a crime has actually taken place. Once you’ve decided that, you can set about finding the perpetrator, assembling the evidence.’
‘And your boss thought a crime hadn’t been committed?’
‘It sounds bad, saying it to you.’
‘But he thought I’d made it up.’
‘I can’t speak for the actual details.’
‘When I read his comments, I thought they seemed to come from someone who had made his mind up from the beginning that the case didn’t amount to anything.’
‘That’s the job. Sometimes you get it right, sometimes you get it wrong.’
‘Stuart Faulkner,’ said Frieda.
‘Yes.’
‘Do you know where I can find him?’
He started to speak, then hesitated. ‘Probably. It’s just …’
‘I’m not angry about this. Do I strike you as someone who’s out for revenge?’
‘I don’t know what that would look like. I’ll see what I can do and then I’ll call you.’
‘Thank you.’ Frieda was going to get up, and then a thought occurred to her. ‘Do you know how old he would be now?’
‘I don’t, really. Early sixties, maybe.’
‘Are you in touch with him?’
‘I haven’t seen him for twenty years. He wasn’t a bad guy. Old school.’
Now Frieda stood up and held out her hand.
‘I’m sorry. If we let you down.’
‘I’m
sure you did what you had to do. But what I really need is that number.’
When Frieda came out of the pub, Josef wasn’t there and she had to phone him. Unfortunately, there was a problem with the van.
21
When they finally started on their way, the van still wasn’t right. It kept hiccuping, lurching Frieda and Josef forward in their seats.
‘Is block in petrol supply,’ Josef explained cheerfully.
‘Will we get back all right?’
‘Oh, yes.’ He patted the steering wheel as if it were a horse that was spooking. ‘All good.’
They jerked their way back towards Braxton under dark, rolling clouds. The sky looked heavy, and soon large drops were landing on the windscreen. Josef turned on the wipers, whose frayed rubber edges made squeaky, unsatisfactory attempts to sweep the water away. He leaned forward to squint through the clear patches, seeming unperturbed.
As they entered Braxton, Frieda touched his shoulder. ‘Would it be possible for us to call in on my mother?’
‘Mother?’ The van hiccuped.
‘Yes. She’s ill.’
‘You have an ill mother in this place?’
‘Yes.’
‘We must see your mother,’ said Josef, excitedly. ‘At once. Is she bad?’
‘She’s dying.’
‘Dying? Your mother is dying here?’
‘Yes.’
‘Frieda,’ he said, his face shining with solemn fervour, ‘I do anything.’
‘Just take the next left,’ said Frieda. ‘We won’t be long.’
‘However much time is OK.’
They stood together in the driving rain, Josef at Frieda’s shoulder peering expectantly at the entrance where Frieda’s dying mother would appear. But there was no reply. Frieda rang the bell once more, then took out the key she’d had cut for herself and opened the door. They stepped into the hall. Junk mail lay on the floor, along with a postcard and a bill. She stooped and picked them up. There was a strange smell, sweet and slightly rancid. Going into the kitchen she saw that the flowers she had left the last time she was here had been put into a glass vase, but without water, and now they had withered and died. An opened tin of tuna stood on the side, letting out a greasy, fishy smell. She picked up flowers and fish and dropped them into the bin. It was no longer gleamingly neat and tidy in there. There were dirty plates on the table, half a carton of milk. Frieda sniffed it. It was sour. The sink was filled with cold brown water. There was a scrap of paper on the side that was headed ‘Things to Do’ in her mother’s handwriting. Underneath, there was nothing.
