Waiting for Wednesday

by Nicci French

  ‘Do you live alone?’

  ‘On and off. I like living by myself. I don’t get lonely and I have lots of friends.’ He paused, looked up, flashed her a smile and then looked down at his hands again. ‘And girlfriends. Women seem to like me. I know how to make them happy.’

  ‘And do you?’

  ‘What?’ He was momentarily startled.

  ‘Make them happy.’

  ‘Yes. I was saying. For a while, but I don’t want to be tied down, you see. I’m not a faithful sort of man. I want variety, excitement. I like feeling my heart pound. I used to steal when I was a kid for the thrill of it. Are you shocked by that?’

  ‘Should I be shocked?’

  ‘I don’t know. Anyway, it’s the same with women. I like the beginning of things, the chase. That’s why I’m good at my job too. I get a kick out of persuading people to buy things they don’t need. I get a kick out of making women want me. It’s only with my mum that I’m calm and ordinary.’

  Frieda scrutinized him. There were beads of sweat on his forehead although the room was quite cool. ‘If you like your life so much, why are you here, with me?’

  Seamus sat up straighter and took a breath. ‘I like having power over people.’ She could see him swallow and when he spoke it was more slowly, as if he was considering every word. ‘I remember, when I was a boy, I used to cut my father’s hair. My father was a big man, much bigger than I am, and solid. He had a thick neck and broad shoulders and beside him I felt very small. But every so often I would be holding these sharp scissors and he would shut his eyes and let me snip his hair off.’ He paused for a moment, as if recollecting something. ‘I can remember the dampness of the hair and the smell of it. Pushing my fingers into it, feeling the skin underneath. It smelt of him. When he let me touch his hair, I knew he was giving me power over him. I can still hear the sound of the blades. I could have killed him with those scissors. I had power over him, and that made me feel strong and tender at the same time. Looking after him with something that could wound him.’

  He forced his eyes up and met Frieda’s gaze. He faltered slightly. ‘I’m sorry, is something wrong?’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘You look, I don’t know, puzzled?’

  ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘What were you going to say?’

  ‘I used to hurt animals,’ he said. ‘That gave me the same feeling. Mostly little things, birds and insects. But sometimes cats, a dog once. And now women.’

  ‘You like hurting women?’

  ‘They like it too. Mostly.’

  ‘You mean, hurting them sexually?’

  ‘Of course. It’s all part of sex, isn’t it – hurting, pleasing, causing pain and pleasure, showing who’s master? But now – well, now there’s this woman I’ve met. Danielle. She says I’ve gone too far. I frightened her with what I did. She says she won’t see me any more unless I get help.’

  ‘You mean you’re here because Danielle told you to come?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Don’t you believe me?’

  ‘I’m interested by the way you describe yourself as someone who likes to have power over people. But you’ve listened to Danielle, you’ve responded to her concern and you’ve acted on it.’

  ‘She thinks I could do something – well, something that could get me into trouble. Not just killing a cat. And she’s right. I think so too.’

  ‘You’re telling me that you’re worried you could seriously hurt someone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And is that all you have to tell me?’

  ‘All? Isn’t that enough?’

  ‘Apart from Danielle’s worries, which you share, are there other things that are troubling you?’

  ‘Well.’ He shifted in his chair, glanced away and then back again. ‘I’m not great at sleeping.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I go to sleep all right but then I wake and sometimes that’s fine and sometimes I just know I won’t go back to sleep. I lie there and think about stuff.’

  ‘Stuff?’

  ‘You know. Little things seem big at three in the morning. But everyone goes through patches of not sleeping. And I’ve lost my appetite a bit.’

  ‘You don’t eat properly?’

  ‘That’s not why I’m here.’ He seemed suddenly angry. ‘I’m here because of my violent feelings. I want you to help me.’

  Frieda sat quite straight in her red armchair. The sun poured through the window, ran like a river through the room where she told patients who made their way to her that they could tell her anything, anything at all. Her ribs hurt and her leg ached.

  ‘No,’ she said at last.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘I can’t help you.’

  ‘I don’t understand. I come here telling you I might seriously harm someone and you tell me you can’t help me.’

  ‘That’s right. I’m not the proper person.’

  ‘Why? You specialize in things like this – I’ve heard about you. You know about people like me.’

  Frieda thought about Dean Reeve, the man who had stolen a little girl and turned her into his submissive wife, who had stolen a little boy and tried to make him into his son, who through Frieda’s carelessness had snatched a young woman and murdered her just because she got in his way, who was still alive somewhere with his soft smile and his watching eyes. She thought of the knife slashing at her.

  ‘What are people like you like?’ she said.

  ‘You know – people who do bad things.’

  ‘Have you done bad things?’

  ‘Not yet. But I can feel them inside me. I don’t want to let them out.’

  ‘There is a paradox here,’ said Frieda.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The fact of asking me for help might suggest that you don’t really need it.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘You’re worried about being violent, about a lack of empathy. But you listened to Danielle. And you’re asking for help. That shows insight.’

  ‘But what about torturing animals?’

  ‘You shouldn’t do that. But you said it was a long time ago. So: don’t do it again.’

  There was a pause. He looked confused. ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘What about “goodbye”?’ said Frieda.

  Seamus left and Frieda went and stood by her window, her eyes resting on the site across the street. Once there had been houses there, before a wrecking ball had swung through their walls, smashing them into dust, and diggers and cranes had moved in among the rubble. For a while, it had been a construction site, with Portakabins and men in hard hats drinking tea. Boards had gone up round the perimeter, announcing the imminent arrival of a brand new office block. But then work had stopped: this was a recession after all. The men had left with their diggers, though one stumpy crane still stood in the middle of the space. Weeds and shrubs had grown up where the rubble had been. Now it was a wild place. Children played there; homeless people sometimes slept there. Frieda occasionally saw foxes roaming through the brambles. Perhaps it would stay like that, she thought, reminding people that even in a great city like London some things have to remain uncontrolled, unpredictable, sending up nettles and wild flowers and even a few stray vegetables, the stubborn survivors of gardens that had been demolished.

  No. She couldn’t help Seamus Dunne, although the image of him cutting his father’s hair remained with her, the bright blades opening and closing in her mind.

  Dearest Frieda, I do understand that you can’t make any plans just now. Just don’t make plans without me,
OK? I went to see some very purple paintings today. And I bought some pots of herbs for the balcony – though I don’t know if they will survive the cold wind that cuts through this city like a knife. I think you could grow to love it here. You could certainly lose yourself in the crowds and the strangeness. There are days when I fancy I glimpse your face among the crowds. A certain lift of your chin. A red scarf. My heart turns over. Surrounded by people I like, I am lonely here without you. My love, Sandy xxxxx

  TEN

  Jim Fearby never gave up: his doggedness was his gift and his curse. He couldn’t help it, he was made that way.

  When he was ten and on a school trip, he had seen a demonstration of how to light a fire without a match. It looked simple the way the man in the combat jacket did it – a board with a notch cut into it, a long stick, a handful of dry grass and bark, a minute or so of rolling the spindle between his two palms, and there was an ember catching at the tinder nest, which he gently blew into a flame. One by one the class tried to do the same, and one by one they failed. When Fearby got back home, he spent hours rolling a stick between his palms until they were sore and blistered. Day after day he squatted in their small garden, his neck aching and his hands throbbing, and one day an ember glowed beneath the tip of his stick.

  Fearby’s mother, who was now long dead, had always declared rather proudly that her son was more stubborn than anyone she had ever met. His wife called it bloody-mindedness. ‘You’re like a dog with a bone,’ she would say. ‘You can never let go.’ Fellow journalists said the same, sometimes admiringly, sometimes with incredulity or even contempt, and recently with that shake of the head: old Jim Fearby and his notions. Fearby didn’t care what they thought. He just rolled his spindle, waited for the ember to catch and grow into a flame.

  It had been like that with George Conley. No one else had cared about Conley, barely thought of him as a fellow human being, but he had struck a spark in Fearby, who had sat through every single day of his trial. It was his passivity that touched him: Conley was like a beaten dog just waiting for the next blow. He didn’t understand what was happening to him but neither was he surprised by it. He’d probably been bullied and jeered at all his life; he no longer had the hope in him to fight back. Fearby never used words like ‘justice’ – they were too grandiose for an old hack like him – but it didn’t seem fair that this sad lump of a man should have no one to fight his corner.

  The first time Jim Fearby had visited George Conley in prison, way back in 2005, the experience had given him nightmares. HMP Mortlemere, down in Kent on the Thames Estuary, wasn’t such a bad place and Fearby wasn’t sure what it was that had particularly got to him. There were the resigned, tired faces of the women and children in the waiting room. He had listened to their accents. Some of them had come from across the country. There was the smell of damp and disinfectant, and he had kept wondering about the smells the disinfectant was covering up. But, almost embarrassingly, it was mainly the locks and the bars and the high walls and the barbed wire. He had felt like a child who had never properly understood what a prison was. The real punishment is that the doors are locked and you can’t go out when you want to.

  During the trial, pathetic little Conley had been bemused, almost numb, in the face of so much attention. When Fearby had met him for the first time in prison, he was pale and utterly defeated. ‘This is just the beginning,’ Fearby had told him but he seemed barely to be paying attention.

  Fearby had seen on his road map that Mortlemere was next to a bird sanctuary. Afterwards he had parked his car and walked along a path by the water, mainly so that the cold northerly wind could blow the rank prison smell off him. But even so he couldn’t seem to shake away the stench, and that night and for many nights afterwards, he had dreamed of doors and steel bars and locks and lost keys, of being shut in, of trying to look out at the world through glass so thick that nothing was visible except blurry shapes.

  In the years since, in the course of writing articles and finally his book, Blind Justice, he had visited Conley in prisons all over England, up in Sunderland, down in Devon, off the M25. Now, visiting him at HMP Haston, in the Midlands, Fearby hardly noticed his surroundings. The parking, the registration, the entrance through multiple doors, had become routine, irritating rather than traumatic. The prison officers knew him, they knew why he was there and mainly they were sympathetic to him – to Fearby and to Conley.

  Over the years Fearby had heard of inmates who had used prison as a sort of school. They had learned to read; they had studied for A levels and degrees. But Conley had only got fatter, paler, sadder, more defeated. His dark hair was greasy and lank, he had a long ragged scar down from the corner of one eye, the result of an attack while he was queuing for lunch one day. That had been early in his sentence, when he was the subject of constant threats and abuse. He was jostled in the corridor; his food was interfered with. Finally he was confined to solitary for his own protection. But gradually things changed, as questions were raised, as the campaign began, largely inspired and then sustained by Jim Fearby. Fellow prisoners started to leave him alone and then became positively friendly. In recent years, even the prison officers had softened.

  Fearby sat opposite Conley as he had so many times before. Conley had become so fat that his bloodshot eyes almost disappeared in the fleshy slits in his face. He compulsively scratched at the top of his left hand. Fearby made himself smile. Everything was good. They were winning. They should both be happy.

  ‘Did Diana come to see you?’ he asked.

  Diana McKerrow was the solicitor who had taken over Conley’s case for the latest appeal. At first Fearby had worked closely with her. After all, he had known more about the case than anyone else in the world. He knew the weak links, all the people involved. But as the case had proceeded, she had stopped phoning him. She had been harder to reach. Fearby tried not to mind. What mattered was the result, wasn’t it? That was what he told himself.

  ‘She phoned,’ said Conley, never quite looking Fearby in the face.

  ‘Did she tell you about the appeal?’ Fearby spoke slowly, separating each word, as if he was talking to a small child.

  ‘Yeah, I think so.’

  ‘It’s all good news,’ said Fearby. ‘They’ve got the details of the illegal interview.’ Conley’s expression didn’t change. ‘When the police picked you up, they didn’t interview you properly. They didn’t warn you. They didn’t explain things the way they should have done. They didn’t pay attention to your …’ Fearby paused. At the next table a man and a woman were facing each other, not speaking. ‘Your special needs,’ said Fearby. ‘That’s enough on its own to quash the conviction. But added to the details of your alibi that the prosecution suppressed …’

  Fearby stopped. He could see from the blank look in Conley’s eyes that he had lost his attention.

  ‘You don’t need to get bogged down in the details,’ said Fearby. ‘I just wanted to come and say to you that I know what you’ve gone through all these years. All that stuff, all that shit. I don’t know how you did it. But you just need to hang on a bit longer, be strong, and it’ll all come right. You hear what I’m saying?’

  ‘Coming right,’ said Conley.

  ‘There’s something else,’ said Fearby. ‘I wanted to say that it’s good, but it’ll be hard as well. When someone gets paroled, they prepare them for months. They take you out on visits, you know, walks in the park, trips to the seaside. Then, when you’re on the outside, you get to stay in a halfway house and they check up on you. You’ve heard that, haven’t you?’ Conley nodded. Fearby couldn’t make out if he was really following what he was saying. ‘But it won’t be like that for you. I
f the appeal court quashes your conviction, you’ll just walk free that minute, straight out the door. It’ll be difficult. You should be prepared for that.’

  Fearby waited for a reaction, but Conley just seemed puzzled. ‘I just came up here today to tell you that I’m your friend. Like I’ve always been. When you’re out, you might want to tell your story. A lot of people would be interested in what you’ve been through. It’s an old-fashioned tragedy-and-triumph story. I know about these things and you’ll want to put your own side of the story because if you don’t people will do it for you. I can help you with that. I’ve been telling your story right from the beginning, when no one else would believe you. I’m your friend, George. If you want help telling your story, I can do that for you.’ Fearby paused, but the reaction still didn’t come. ‘Are you all right for things at the moment? Anything I can get you?’

  Conley shrugged. Fearby said goodbye and that he’d be in touch. In the old days he would have driven home however late it was, but since his wife had left him and the children had gone, he usually made a day of it. People joked about the hotels at motorway service stations, but they suited him. He’d got a cheap deal at this one. Thirty-two pounds fifty. Free parking. Coffee and tea in the room. A colour TV. Clean. Except for the paper flap across the toilet bowl, there was no sign that anyone else had ever been in there.

  He had the usual luggage. His little suitcase. His laptop. And the bag with the files. The real files were back at home. They filled most of his office. These were the ones he needed for reference: the basic names and numbers and facts, a few photos and statements. As always, his first action was to take the purple pending file from the bag and open it on the little desk next to the colour TV. While the miniature white plastic kettle was starting to heat up, he took a new sheet of lined paper, wrote the date and time of the meeting at the top and noted everything that had been said.