by Nicci French
‘You’re sure about this?’ Frieda asked. ‘It’s not too late to pull out.’
‘I want to.’ Chloë’s expression was fierce. ‘I need to. You would if you were me.’
‘You don’t need to tell him anything you don’t want to.’
‘I know that. You’ve told me a hundred times.’
‘And you mustn’t say anything about the sound of planes.’
‘I know.’
‘And I’m going to be here throughout.’
‘You’ve told me that as well. It’s OK. He’ll ask me things. I’ll answer them. I’ve not got anything to hide. Nothing to be ashamed of.’ Her voice wavered. She looked momentarily lost. ‘And then I’ll talk about what’s happening to Will.’
‘Good.’
‘What’s he like?’
‘Who?’
‘Daniel Blackstock. He sounded OK on the phone.’
Frieda hesitated. She thought of him handing over that photo of Chloë; that was a good, unexpected thing to do. And then she thought of his hot brown eyes as he’d asked if he could interview her niece. But of course he was a journalist on a newspaper that was fighting for survival. His life must feel precarious, and this interview must be like his trump card. ‘I don’t know him,’ she said. ‘But he’s behaved well over all of this and he seems reliable.’
‘Do I look all right?’
Frieda smiled. ‘You look fine.’
‘No, I don’t. I hate these clothes.’
‘Why did you put them on, then?’
‘To appear frail and vulnerable, I suppose. Or at least respectable. I shouldn’t have done. Hang on a minute.’
She disappeared. Frieda heard her feet going up the stairs. When she reappeared she was wearing an old black T-shirt of Frieda’s over the skirt and had put on Frieda’s heavy walking boots; her legs were white above them, a bruise along one shin. She’d heavily lined her eyes.
‘There,’ she said. ‘That’s better. This is more like me.’
‘He’s not going to take photos.’
‘I know. It’s about wanting to be myself. Not pretending.’
Frieda nodded. ‘That’s good, then. Have you thought any more about talking to someone?’
‘I’ll think about it,’ said Chloë, ‘when all this is over.’
‘It never is over. You’ll never get to a time that’s magically right. If you need to talk to someone, you should do it now.’
‘Shouldn’t he be here?’
‘In about five minutes. I’ve said he can have half an hour with you.’
Chloë’s face took on a sarcastic expression that reassured Frieda. ‘You’re like my press agent. You’ll make sure I don’t get asked awkward questions about my private life.’
‘I’ll only be present if you want me to be.’
‘God, no. You’ve bloody got to stay, but –’ Chloë didn’t get to finish her sentence because at that moment the doorbell rang.
Daniel Blackstock took Frieda’s chair directly opposite Chloë. Frieda sat to one side, like an onlooker. There had been a delay in beginning the interview. Frieda had offered him tea, assuming he would be eager to get on with the interview. But Blackstock said, yes, he would love some. So Frieda went to the kitchen and made a mug of tea with a teabag. He wanted sugar as well and she had to search through a cupboard to find it.
He seemed nervous, she thought. He had obviously dressed smartly for the occasion, in a grey shirt done up to the top button so it appeared to be throttling him and a jacket that was too warm for the day. His face, newly shaved, was smoothly pink. He kept licking his dry lips.
‘I want to say, right from the beginning, that I appreciate you letting me come here. I also want to say that when I have written the article I’ll show it to you both before I file it.’
‘That would be great,’ said Chloë. She smiled encouragingly at him and sat up straighter in her chair. Her hands were clasped together in her lap.
‘That’s unusual, isn’t it?’ said Frieda.
‘I don’t see this as normal journalism,’ said Blackstock. ‘The real point of doing this, as far as I’m concerned, is if it can be of some help. But don’t tell my editor.’ He took his phone from his pocket and laid it on the table. ‘You don’t mind if I record this, do you?’
Chloë didn’t. Her face, though pale, was composed.
‘First of all,’ said Daniel Blackstock, with a nervous cough, ‘and tell me if you find the question too disturbing, can I just talk you through the terrible thing that happened to you?’
‘The trouble is,’ said Chloë, ‘that I barely remember anything. That’s what’s horrible. There are these lost days and I don’t know what happened to me.’
‘It must feel like a nightmare,’ said Blackstock.
‘It does. What kind of creep would do that?’
‘So, you remember being in the bar with your friends, and then – what? Waking up somewhere?’
‘In a churchyard. Yes. Inside railings that surrounded a tree. But even that’s a blurred, distant memory, like a smudge in my brain.’
‘Smudge in your brain,’ said Blackstock. He wrote something on his pad. ‘So you were out of it for …’ he seemed to be calculating ‘… nearly sixty hours!’
‘He injected me,’ said Chloë, matter-of-factly. She held out her bare forearm. ‘Several times. You can still see the faint marks.’
He leaned forward. ‘You must feel violated.’
‘Must I?’
Frieda smiled to herself at Chloë’s answer. She was doing well.
‘Well, when you think of how you were kept, how you were displayed.’
Blackstock looked at Chloë, at her eyes flashing in surprise, her lips parting slightly, breathing more quickly.
‘What do you mean? Nobody knows how I was displayed. I don’t know myself.’
He assumed an expression of puzzlement. ‘Didn’t they show you the photograph?’
‘Hang on,’ said Frieda, sharply.
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said Daniel Blackstock. ‘I just thought – but I see I was wrong.’
‘What photograph?’ said Chloë. There was a silence. He waited. ‘What photograph, Frieda?’
‘A picture was sent to Mr Blackstock. He gave it to me and I gave it to the police.’
‘Why didn’t you show it to me?’
‘I thought it would upset you.’
‘I can’t believe you didn’t tell me about it.’
‘It was a decision I had to make.’
‘I want to see it.’
‘I have a copy,’ said Blackstock. ‘But Dr Klein may not think it’s right for you to see it.’
Blackstock looked at Chloë as Chloë stared in dismay at Frieda. He could hardly breathe. He felt shivers running down his back, his arms and his legs. His heart was racing. How could it not be visible to them?
‘Show it to me,’ said Chloë.
‘If that’s what you want,’ said Frieda, slowly.
‘It’s what I want.’
Frieda nodded at Blackstock and he reached into his shoulder bag, took out a copy of the photograph and handed it to Chloë. His hand was perfectly still, as if he felt nothing, but Chloë’s trembled so fiercely she had to put the picture on the table before she could see it properly.
‘Tell me how you feel.’ Daniel Blackstock spoke gently.
When Chloë looked up, her eyes were full of tears. She was panting, as if after an intense effort. ‘He was there,’ she said. ‘Taking that picture, staring at me, putting it on record.’
And now he felt he was back in that room with her, standing over her. He remembered the feel of her, the smell of her, the texture of her hair, her body.
‘And?’ he prompted.
‘I feel … I don’t know. He could have killed me. He could have … done things to me. But he just took those pictures and let me go.’
‘What do you want now, Chloë?’
‘I want to know what happened. I want the person who did thi
s caught so he can’t do it to anyone else.’
Daniel Blackstock nodded.
‘I don’t feel damaged,’ said Chloë. Her voice was suddenly loud. ‘I don’t feel ashamed or humiliated or traumatized. I feel angry. Very angry.’
He wrote on his pad. ‘So, at the moment the media seems to have focused on your colleague from work. William McCollough.’
‘The bastards,’ said Chloë. ‘Almost the whole point of me doing this interview is so that I can say, completely clearly, that Will McCollough had absolutely nothing to do with this.’
‘I’m really glad to hear you say that and say it so passionately. And I’m sure you’re right. So what can I put in this article that will convince sceptical readers that your friend is innocent?’
Chloë banged her fist on the table. ‘Because he just bloody could not have done it.’
‘Why? I’m not asking for myself.’
Chloë became almost agitated. ‘I can list the reasons. He shares a flat, he doesn’t have a car and can’t drive. How the fuck would he kidnap me and drive me across London, keep me prisoner and then dump me?’
‘How do you mean “drive you across London”? How do you know that?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘Do you have any idea where you were held?’ said Blackstock. ‘That could be very useful for the article. It might jog people’s memory.’
Chloë glanced across at Frieda, who minutely shook her head. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I can’t remember.’
‘Nothing?’
‘It’s just a blur. But where was I?’
‘You were saying why William McCollough couldn’t have committed these crimes.’
‘The police haven’t charged him. They let him go. They say that he isn’t under suspicion.’
Daniel Blackstock looked doubtful. ‘I’ve been a crime reporter for ten years now, and you can’t always take what the police say at face value, you know. William McCollough has a history of mental disturbance.’
Chloë put her head in her hands for a moment, then lifted it. ‘That’s what I can’t bear. He’s been through so much and he’s survived it. I didn’t know about his past before, no one did. He’s very private. Now, because of me, everyone knows about him and he’s going through all of this.’
Daniel Blackstock turned to Frieda. ‘What’s your opinion?’
‘This isn’t about me,’ said Frieda. ‘I’m here to support Chloë.’
‘I’m just asking about William McCollough. Do you agree with what Chloë has just said?’
‘Yes.’
‘If that’s right, then why did the police pick on him?’
‘Because they have a theory.’
‘What theory?’
Frieda thought for a moment. Was she going to do this? Yes, she decided. Yes, she was. ‘It’s a profiling idea that’s become a bit of a cliché. The idea is that the first crime is, in a way, the real one, the impulsive one. So it’s much more likely to be close to home. Later crimes are a form of distraction.’
‘Do you disagree with the rule?’
‘Rules can be useful, but not when people use them as a prop to save them the trouble of thinking.’
‘Can I quote you on that?’
‘If you like. The attack on Chloë was premeditated and highly organized. I don’t mean by that that the attacker is a person of any particular capacity.’
‘Don’t you have to be pretty capable and smart to bring something like that off?’ asked Daniel Blackstock.
Frieda shook her head. ‘Acts like that are a sign of weakness, not strength. Of course, what happened to Chloë and Reuben and, above all, to my patient is terrible. But there’s something basically pathetic about it.’
Daniel Blackstock was writing again but at this point his pen slipped off the notebook and fell to the floor. He bent and picked it up. There was sweat on his back now, a broad dark arrow on his shirt. ‘That’s interesting,’ he said.
‘It’s not interesting, it’s obvious. Dean Reeve is someone who defines himself emotionally through violence. It’s like a crossed wire. That’s bad enough. But these crimes are something different. It’s someone who’s trying to copy Dean Reeve, as if that will fill some sort of gap, compensate for some sort of inadequacy.’
‘An inadequacy that involves killing people,’ said Daniel Blackstock.
‘Yes. As if causing pain was a sign of being important.’
‘Hey,’ said Chloë. ‘I thought this interview was with me.’
Just over an hour later Chloë and Frieda were in William McCollough’s kitchen. On the way, Frieda had bought a bottle of whisky. McCollough opened it and poured them all some. They clinked glasses and she saw his hands were trembling slightly. He was wearing canvas trousers, ripped on one leg, and a baggy T-shirt that couldn’t disguise how thin he was – even thinner than he looked in those awful photographs of him all the papers had carried, almost cadaverous. His long, greying hair was drawn back from his face. She saw his teeth were nicotine-stained and slightly crooked.
‘I don’t know which journalists are worse,’ he said, in the throaty voice of a smoker. ‘The ones who threaten me or the ones who say they want me to tell my side of the story.’
‘I’m extremely sorry you got dragged into this,’ said Frieda.
‘I just did an interview,’ added Chloë. She reached out and rubbed him on the back with an oddly maternal gesture. The older man looked at her and blinked. ‘We did it to clear your name.’
‘I hope you got well paid.’
‘We didn’t get paid at all. We just did it to help.’
McCollough took a gulp of his drink. ‘You think it’ll do any good?’
‘People have short memories,’ said Frieda.
‘But the internet has a long one. From now on, when someone mentions my name, I’ll be the one who was picked up by the police on suspicion of murder and kidnapping.’ He took another sip. ‘And maybe someone will say, “He didn’t actually do it in the end,” and then someone else will say, “Yeah, but wasn’t there something funny about him? Wasn’t he the one who was involved in some kind of sexual-abuse thing?” And then people won’t be able to remember whether I was the one who was abused or whether I was the abuser, or maybe it was a bit of both. Anyway, the police must have known something, eh?’
‘Surely it will fade,’ said Chloë, urgently. ‘Surely. Once they find who really did it.’
His face softened slightly as he looked at her. ‘Sometimes I reckon if I didn’t have a ponytail this wouldn’t have happened. Maybe I’ll cut it off.’
‘That’s a good idea,’ she said. ‘Really short hair would be good on you.’
‘Do you want to do it?’
‘Me?’ asked Chloë.
‘Why not?’
‘OK.’ Chloë grinned. ‘As you say, why not?’
Now people, housemates and friends, were starting to arrive. The doorbell rang; they drifted into the kitchen, greeted William casually, pulled beer from their backpacks, cigarettes. He looked a bit dazed, almost hunted, as they filled the room, and Frieda realized that it must have been Chloë who had organized this, a gathering of supporters, while outside the journalists still waited. The idea was typically generous but perhaps not entirely wise. Soon it became a blur of tattoos and beards and piercings that made her feel old and far from home. She stood up. ‘If you need any help, just get in touch. Chloë can always tell you where to find me.’
McCollough stood up as well and shook her hand. She smelt tobacco and whisky on him. He had light grey watery eyes and he gazed into her face. ‘I thought I’d escaped,’ he said. ‘But no one escapes in the end.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
He shrugged. ‘You’ve done what you could. You’ve done more than anyone else, you and Chloë.’
‘Scissors,’ said Chloë. ‘Comb.’
42
Frieda received a text from Daniel Blackstock at seven the next morning: ‘I’ve emailed you the article. Ge
t back to me soonest.’ She read the article quickly. She usually hated any publicity but this felt different. It was serving a purpose. And she had to admit that it was a solid piece of work, well structured, accurate. Even so, she flinched at some of his language. Chloë was a ‘vivacious’ young woman who was very brave. Frieda herself was a ‘celebrity psychologist’. Frieda wrote back that she was a psychotherapist, not a psychologist, but otherwise he could go ahead.
But there was something wrong. She sat very still and waited to remember, not straining for the memory but ready for it to come to her. And then she had it.
It was still early, so Frieda drank coffee and went through her notes for the sessions in the afternoon. At half past eight she phoned Petra Burge.
‘You’ve got quite a nerve.’
‘What?’
‘I’ve read Blackstock’s interview with your niece. So our investigative theory is a cliché, is it?’
‘Did he send you the piece?’
‘No, he didn’t. He put it up on the paper’s website for all to see.’
‘That was quick.’
‘The quickness isn’t the issue.’
‘We need to talk,’ said Frieda.
‘Talk? Who do you think you are?’
‘This is important.’
‘We’re talking now.’
‘These things are better face to face.’ Frieda thought for a moment. ‘In front of the Imperial War Museum.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘I can get there in half an hour.’
There was silence on the line.
‘All right,’ said Petra, eventually.
As Frieda approached the museum, she could see Petra was already there, wearing jeans, sneakers and a black bomber jacket. When she noticed Frieda, there was no smile of greeting.
‘So?’ she said.
