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

by Nicci French

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t you think he deserved it?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  Craigie leaned in close again. ‘You said he raped you, that he raped and killed two other young women.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And he told you to your face that he wouldn’t be caught.’

  ‘He would have been caught, though. Somehow.’

  ‘How many people know what you know? Or what you think you know?’

  ‘Know for certain? Just me,’ said Frieda.

  ‘How many people know what you suspected?’

  ‘By now, quite a few. Things spread fast in a town like Braxton. Ewan told me that almost everyone in Braxton knew about him being interviewed by the police. He seemed to think that someone in the police might have gossiped about it.’

  ‘That’s a serious accusation.’

  ‘I don’t care. And Chas Latimer knew.’

  ‘Can you think of anyone who might have wanted to do this?’

  ‘Dr Klein,’ said Pearce, ‘Ewan Shaw’s widow has told us in a statement that the last time she saw him he was going out to meet a man who claimed to have information about you.’

  ‘What kind of information?’

  ‘She didn’t know. Clearly this man is someone we’re anxious to interview. Have you any idea who he might be?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The purpose may have been to lure Ewan Shaw out of his house. And it sounds like someone who knows you.’

  ‘Or knows of me.’

  ‘Any ideas?’ asked Craigie.

  Frieda thought of Lewis, and she thought of Josef and Sandy. ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Something was found with his body. I wonder if you can help cast any light on it.’ She bent down and lifted up a plastic evidence bag, which contained the ripped half of a red woollen scarf. Frieda’s red scarf, which she had owned for so many years, wearing it every cold autumn and winter day.

  ‘No,’ she said slowly. ‘No. I can’t help you, I’m afraid.’

  41

  Frieda walked along the empty street, carrying flowers. Sasha had dropped her off. She and Ethan were waiting in the little café where – it seemed years ago – she had met up with Lewis again. It was a little before seven in the morning and Braxton barely seemed to be stirring. In London, there would be people, cars, the sounds of radios and doors slamming. Here it was a dark, still dawn, only the street lamps lighting her way.

  The churchyard was a dim space of huddled gravestones and ancient trees. The spire of the church rose through the fog. The moisture on the ground seeped through her shoes; she could see her breath curling into the air. She could only just make out the names of the dead as she walked between the graves and the carved angels. It took many minutes, bending down to trace inscriptions, clearing moss away from letters, before she found them both.

  Bethany May, 1947–1983

  Dearly Beloved Mother and Wife

  And under it, in newer stone,

  Sarah May 1973–1991

  She lives in the hearts of all who loved her

  Frieda cleared the weeds away from the small plots and then she put the flowers on the graves, in the little vases that were there. She would ask Eva if she would come once a month just to see that everything was tidy and put new flowers there. That was the kind of thing Eva would like to do. She would pick blooms from her own garden when it was spring and come here, in her long bright skirts and with her red hair blowing, and sit and weep for the friends she had lost.

  The flowers had gone from Maddie’s house. Only a red cyclamen on the table remained. Maddie sat opposite Frieda and they drank tea together. She was wearing an old brown cardigan and faded jeans, no heels on her shoes, no makeup on her face.

  ‘I don’t know whether to hate you.’

  Frieda considered this. ‘Would it make you feel better to hate me?’

  ‘I’m beyond feeling better. My daughter, my only child, is dead. I keep remembering her when she was tiny and happy, and then I remember all our rows, terrible, terrible rows. And I remember not believing her. I wake in the night and I see her face when she told me what had happened to her and I didn’t comfort her and hold her tight and tell her I would help her through. After that, what’s left to me? I have a failed marriage behind me, no job or real purpose, my so-called loved affair is over, my friends – well, look what’s happened to people I used to call my friends. But nothing really mattered, except Becky.’

  ‘I’m very sorry.’

  ‘You’re sure it was Ewan?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The Ewan I’ve known since I was thirteen, who sat in my house, ate my food, rubbed my shoulders, made stupid jokes, mended my computer and fixed up my shower curtain, who comforted me when Becky died, cried at her funeral, whose children I know, whose wife is one of my closest friends?’

  ‘Yes. That Ewan.’

  She closed her eyes and opened them again. ‘What happens now?’

  ‘You’ll be interviewed by the police. They’ve got busy now that it’s all too late. There’ll be journalists as well. Careful what you say to them.’

  ‘I don’t want to speak to any journalists. He tried to kill Max?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And he raped you when you were sixteen?’

  ‘That was when it all began.’

  ‘And he has daughters of his own.’

  ‘That means nothing,’ said Frieda. ‘It may be that his own daughters becoming young women triggered him again. We can’t know. But don’t worry, there’ll be plenty of instant experts in the media explaining it to us.’

  ‘What will Vanessa do?’ said Maddie. Her face changed. ‘Do you think she knew? How could she not have known? But she was my friend, I trusted her – did she know, Frieda?’

  Frieda hesitated. Should she say what she knew about Vanessa? ‘I’m not sure,’ she said at last.

  ‘Braxton,’ said Maddie. ‘This nice, safe town. Who would ever have believed it?’

  Frieda thought of the witch who had been put to death a few hundred yards from here, all those centuries ago, in the place where Ewan had also been slaughtered. All those women over all the years, the vulnerable, the ones who didn’t belong, the outsiders. Punished for being different.

  ‘I never found it so nice,’ said Frieda.

  Frieda had one more call she had to make, repelled and attracted at the same time. There was no answer at the front door, so she walked around the side and there she was, in a sturdy grey jacket and gardening gloves, cutting with secateurs at the ivy that covered the wall of the shed. Vanessa looked round. She gave no sign of surprise or shock. ‘I should call the police,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve just been with them.’

  ‘The girls are out with their aunt. They’re in a bad way. You’d better not be here when they get back.’

  ‘I won’t be.’

  ‘Did you come to gloat?’

  Frieda looked at Vanessa and felt, This is what it was all about. This is why I came back. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘what really scares me is not what people like Ewan do. It’s what people like you do. He had these wires crossed, where sexual desire got fused with violence, but you let it happen. You enabled it and cleared up afterwards. There’ll always be people like Ewan. What makes it worse is that there’ll always be people like you and Chas and Jeremy, too, who stand back and let it happen.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ Vanessa said.

  ‘Can I ask you one thing?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Take your jacket off.’

  ‘My jacket?’

  ‘I was thinking about you, about sitting at your kitchen table, at the reunion party, and I realized that I’ve never seen your arms.’

  Vanessa looked at Frieda steadily. Then she put the secateurs into her pocket and took the jacket off. Underneath was a rough green cardigan, which she unbuttoned and removed. She was wearing a long-sleeved grey shirt. She unfastened the buttons at the cuffs and rolled
the sleeves up above the elbow. She held her arms towards Frieda, as if making an offering. Frieda stepped closer and took hold of Vanessa’s wrists. Both arms were streaked with scars. Some were red, some raised off the surface in welts. Frieda could see from the wrinkles in the skin that some were years and years old. The faded scars were crossed and tangled in the more recent ones.

  ‘It won’t work,’ said Frieda. ‘It won’t make the pain go away. Or the guilt. In the end, they will overwhelm you.’

  When Frieda left, Vanessa had rolled her sleeves back, put on the cardigan and the jacket and was hacking once more at the ivy, as if her life depended on it.

  She went back to London and to her house for a couple of days. She saw five patients, including Joe Franklin, and no friends. She sat for a long while in her quiet study, drawing, thinking, pondering. She tried to draw Becky’s face but it became her own face when she was younger. She tried to remember Sandy’s face but it warped into Dean’s. She talked on the phone to Reuben, Sasha and Karlsson about what had happened but nobody could really understand how she had gone back to her past and found herself still alive in its rubble.

  42

  ‘Are you sure you don’t want her diamond earrings?’

  ‘Quite sure.’

  ‘Or this gold chain.’

  ‘I don’t want it.’

  ‘There’s a moonstone bracelet.’

  ‘I don’t want anything.’

  ‘Can I give them to Trudy, then?’

  ‘Sure. And ask Chloë what she wants, and Ivan.’

  ‘I don’t see why Ivan should have anything. He couldn’t even be bothered to come over for the funeral.’

  ‘There wasn’t a funeral.’

  ‘Yes, and the idea of leaving her body for medical research was like the final slap in the face.’

  ‘There are worse slaps in the face.’

  ‘I’m surprised anyone would want it. What about this picture?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m duty-bound to inform you that it’s probably worth quite a lot of money.’

  ‘I don’t want it.’

  ‘Just don’t come complaining to me after.’

  Frieda and David were in their mother’s bedroom, sorting through her possessions. Outside, the skip that Frieda had arranged was already half full, and in the drive was the van that David had rented. They had already been through her clothes. David had taken a few dresses, a good coat, some jackets that he thought his young wife might like. Frieda had taken nothing.

  The doorbell rang and David frowned, his hands full of jewellery.

  ‘Who can that be?’

  ‘I’ll go.’

  She went downstairs and opened the door. Lewis stood there. He looked as if he’d lost pounds in just a few days, and his hair had been cut very short. His eyes were red-rimmed, sore.

  ‘How’s Max?’ Frieda asked

  But he just tumbled over the threshold and stood in front of her. ‘It was Ewan?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. And he killed Becky.’ She didn’t want to talk about everything that had happened to her, all those years ago.

  ‘You saved him.’ He started to cry, not putting up his hands to wipe away the tears, letting them course down his weathered cheeks.

  ‘I’m glad he’s going to be all right.’

  ‘How can I ever repay you?’

  Frieda put her hands on his thin, trembling shoulders and looked into his eyes. ‘I owed you,’ she said softly.

  After Lewis had left, David and Frieda went into the living room. Soon the van was full of the furniture and paintings that David would take away with him. Frieda had refused even the framed photograph of her father, squinting into the glare of the sun. She had his face stored away in her mind, and that was all she needed. She didn’t want the food mixer, the silver cutlery, the glasses and soup tureens and teacups, the serving dishes, spice racks, rugs, throws, cushions, bottles of wine and spirits, jars of marmalade and pickles and jam; not the novels or books on gardening and politics and medicine; or the towels, umbrellas, digital radio, pot plants … She wanted to walk away empty-handed and free.

  The bell rang again.

  ‘Now who?’ said David, angrily. ‘Another ex-lover? Can’t you leave well alone?’ This was his only reference to the turmoil that had been caused in Braxton over the death of Ewan.

  ‘It wasn’t well,’ said Frieda, leaving the room and going to the front door.

  ‘Dr Klein?’

  ‘My mother, Juliet Klein, doesn’t live here any longer.’ Or anywhere.

  The man frowned, looking at the bulky envelope in his hands. ‘I have a delivery here for a Dr Frieda Klein.’

  ‘That’s me.’

  She signed for the package and went with it into the empty, echoey kitchen. Her name and her mother’s address were on the front, written in large capitals. There was a nudge of memory under her ribs. Sliding her finger under the gummed flap, she pulled out a length of material. Red wool. The second half of her red scarf, whose first half had been left with Ewan’s body, at the witch’s memorial. She held it between her fingers very delicately, as if she would be able to feel the trace of the person who had stolen it from her, and then she felt that it was wrapping something. She unfolded the scarf and removed a greetings card. On the front was a photograph of daffodils in full flower. She opened the card and saw the message written in the same capital letters: ‘HE CRIED WHEN I SAID YOUR NAME. REALLY CRIED.’

  Frieda had a flashing sensation, like a waking dream. She suddenly imagined what Ewan had been through when he realized it had all gone wrong, when he understood it was his turn to be assaulted and tortured and killed. Where would Dean have done it? Somewhere remote, a shed, a lock-up, in the woods, where screams wouldn’t be heard. That was what happened to enemies of Frieda Klein. Bad things. Frieda examined her own reaction, testing herself, as if she were her own patient. Was it what she’d wanted? Did she take pleasure in the idea of Ewan knowing that there was nothing he could do or say to make it stop? After what he’d done to those girls.

  No, she told herself. No. All it did was make a bad world worse. Dean had sent her this message because he wanted to tell her that he was still looking out for her, still in her life, like a lover, like a stalker, like a shadow and a ghost come back to haunt her. She remembered her own words to Ewan: I don’t stop. I don’t give up. I don’t go away. Neither did he. He would never leave her. He’d done this for her: butchered Ewan on the witch’s ground as a tribute and a sacrifice.

  She laid the red scarf on the table. She would never touch it again. She slipped the card into her pocket. Then she rang Karlsson’s number.

  ‘Dean’s here now,’ she said, although, of course, he’d never been away.

  Karlsson put the phone down. He thought about Frieda, and tried to picture her, but although he had seen her in Braxton he found he could only imagine her in London. He saw her walking along a street with the wind in her face and he saw her sitting beside a fire, her head turned towards him. Never quite smiling. Listening. Attending. The thought of her filled him with an emotion he struggled to identify: it was neither happiness nor sorrow, but something strong and deep. He wanted her to come home because he could talk to her in a way he couldn’t to anyone else, and even though he was often inarticulate, abrupt, he felt that she understood the meaning behind the clumsy words.

  Two years ago, he hadn’t believed Frieda when she had told him that Dean was still alive and was both protecting and terrorizing her. Now he believed her, not because there was evidence but because Frieda had told him it was true. For better or for worse, she was a truth-teller. He sighed and turned back to his work.

  Chloë rang Sasha.

  ‘I just wanted to tell you that Frieda is going through all of Gran’s stuff with my dad. But I think she’ll be back soon.’

  ‘Yes. She rang me. But thanks for telling me, Chloë.’

  ‘I know you must miss her.’

  Several miles away, in Primrose Hill, Re
uben and Josef were cooking, or at least Josef was cooking and Reuben was pretending to help him while smoking cigarettes and drinking beer and leafing through a newspaper.

  ‘Cardamom – you want to remove the seeds?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Reuben, vaguely.

  ‘And I peel the potatoes and then while they cook I make golubtsi.’

  Josef was very happy. He had already made the wheat soup. Now, wrapped in his apron, he chopped onions, crushed garlic, fried mince, boiled rice and steamed cabbage leaves. He kneaded dough for the pierogis, rolled it out into neat circles that he filled with poppy seeds, raisins and prunes, folding them into small semi-circles. He prepared a raw salad of beetroot and celeriac. He poured himself a shot of vodka, then started on the spiced honey cake that his mother used to bake for him and that reminded him of his homeland, the music and the mountains of his past.

  ‘She would like this.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Reuben, holding out his empty glass. ‘And she’d want some more vodka.’

  The house was empty; the skip and the van were both full. The day was fading and David was anxious to be gone, pulling on his leather gloves and his tailored coat that made him look, Frieda thought, like an expensive hitman.

  ‘Can I give you a lift?’ he asked reluctantly.

  ‘I’m going to walk.’

  ‘Where to?’ Frieda merely shrugged. ‘Well, that’s your business.’

  They didn’t hug or kiss. He climbed into the laden van and drove away.

  Frieda put on her coat and then she closed the front door of the house where she had spent the first sixteen years of her life, where she had found her father dead, where she had been raped, where she had not been believed. She double-locked it and slid the keys back through the letter flap, hearing them clatter on to the boards. She walked to the gate and then turned. The house looked dead. All the windows were dark, like blind eyes.

  When she had left Braxton as a teenager, she had run from it. Now she walked at her own pace. The afternoon was dull and cold, the sky a pewter grey darkening into winter dusk. She went down the lane, past Tracey Ashton’s old house, past the mock-Tudor one that had once belonged to the Clarkes, then Mrs Leonard’s cottage where, for a moment, Frieda expected to see the old woman in the garden, calling to her cats in her high, crooning tones. She went by the ancient chapel, and the bus stop, and at last was on the high street.