Tuesday's Gone

Seventeen

Frieda walked from Gloucester station. Tiny flakes of snow were catching in her hair and melting on the streets. She had thought all the snow was over, that the bitter cold of the winter was lifting at last. Perhaps this was the end of it, like a reminder of what they were leaving.

She arrived at the church early, walking quickly past the photographers and journalists already gathered at the entrance, and took a seat at the back, next to the wall. Gradually, other people started to slide into the pews, pulling off hats and gloves, removing their thick coats, glancing around and nodding at people they knew in a blend of conviviality and self-conscious seriousness. A group of young people arrived together, and Frieda guessed they were Kathy’s fellow students, with cheeks flushed from the cold. She picked up the order of service and looked through the hymns they were to sing. The church filled and people had to squeeze into pews or stand at the back. An elderly couple walked slowly up the aisle, the woman leaning on the man’s arm as they made their way to the front. Kathy’s grandparents, she guessed. A man in a long camel coat passed her pew and she recognized Seth Boundy. Kathy Ripon had been his student and researcher and he had sent her to her death. He and Frieda.

His hasty shuffle was very different from the stately stride she associated with him; his head was down and his collar pulled up, as if he didn’t want to be noticed. But perhaps he felt Frieda’s gaze upon him, for he turned, briefly glanced at her, then dropped his eyes and moved on. At last Kathy’s family arrived: her parents, hand in hand, and behind them two young men, awkward in unaccustomed black suits, hair brushed, faces shaved raw.

The coffin was carried by the undertakers’ assistants, young men with professionally sad expressions. Frieda pictured the swollen remains that lay inside, then the young woman’s shrewd, pleasant face. As the congregation sang ‘The Lord Is My Shepherd’, she thought, as she had thought every day for the last fourteen months, that if it hadn’t been for her, Kathy would still be alive, and her parents wouldn’t be sitting with hunched shoulders in their pew, pale and old. A child would be dead but Kathy would be alive. A young woman with a long, sad face went to the front and played the flute. One of Kathy’s brothers read a poem, but couldn’t reach the end. He stood in front of them, his face working furiously, and everyone leaned forward, willing him on, tears rolling down cheeks. The vicar stood and said a few words about a life cruelly cut short, about how at last her parents could bury their daughter. He mentioned a merciful God and the triumph of good over evil, of love over hate. Frieda closed her eyes but she didn’t pray.

At last it was over. The coffin was carried slowly out into the feathery snowfall and Kathy’s family followed. Frieda waited until most of the mourners had left. Then she slipped out of her pew and stood in front of Seth Boundy. ‘It was good of you to be here,’ she said.

‘She was my student.’ His eyes flickered from her face to the stone floor.

Snow was now starting to settle on the gravestones and the roofs of cars that were parked outside. People milled about, hugging each other. Frieda had no intention of staying for the wake. As she reached the gate, she brushed against a tall man.

‘Hello, Frieda,’ said Karlsson.

‘You didn’t say you were coming.’

‘Neither did you.’

‘I had to. She died because of me.’

‘She died because of Dean.’

‘Are you getting the train back?’

‘There’s a car waiting. Would you like a lift?’

Frieda considered for a moment. ‘I’d rather go home alone.’

‘Of course. You might like to know that a Robert Poole has been reported missing.’

Frieda looked startled and Karlsson smiled, his stiff face softening for a moment. ‘Who by?’ she asked.

‘A neighbour. A woman in the flat below. It’s in a house down in Tooting.’

‘Then what the hell are you doing here?’ she asked. ‘Why aren’t you in Tooting, tearing the place apart?’

‘Yvette’s down there today. She can handle it.’

‘Of course.’

‘But are you available?’

Frieda hesitated. ‘Perhaps.’

‘Is that a yes?’

‘It’s a perhaps. This …’ She gestured behind her at the church and the mourners. ‘This doesn’t make me want to be involved again. Ever.’

‘It doesn’t get better,’ Karlsson said. ‘Unless you stop caring. I’ll call you.’

The journey to London took two hours, and Frieda would have been able to get back in time for her afternoon session, with Gerald Mayhew, an elderly and wealthy American banker who had woken up one morning to find himself inexplicably stricken with grief for his long-dead parents. But she had cancelled all her patients that day, and when she arrived at Paddington, she took the Bakerloo Line to Elephant and Castle, and walked through the slush and sleet towards a block of council flats on the New Kent Road. They were grey and unprepossessing, with metal grilles over the ground-floor windows, and a treeless courtyard where a single toddler rode round and round on his tricycle, his body bulked out by quilted layers and his nose dribbling in the icy wind.

Frieda took the stairs and went up to the fourth floor, then along the concrete corridor to a brown door with a knocker and a spy-hole. She knocked and waited. A chain pulled back, an eye peered out.

‘Yes? Who is this?’ It wasn’t the voice she had been expecting.

‘I’ve come to see –’ She nearly said ‘Terry’, but caught herself in time. ‘Joanna Teale. She’s not expecting me. My name is Frieda Klein.’

‘The doctor?’

Frieda had been the one who realized that Dean Reeve’s wife Terry was actually the little schoolgirl, Joanna Teale, who had been snatched more than twenty years previously. She had also insisted to Karlsson that Joanna be treated like a victim, abducted and brainwashed for decades, rather than a perpetrator – although sometimes Joanna had made it hard for others to take her side. She was self-righteous, aggrieved and unapologetic. She treated her parents – who were almost as derailed by her reappearance as they had been wrecked by her going – with a kind of angry indifference and her elder sister, Rose, with contempt. It had been a shocking reunion for them all. Frieda, after the first few weeks, had kept out of everyone’s way, until now.

The chain pulled back and the door opened. On the doormat stood a young woman with a tight bright ponytail and over-shaped eyebrows. She was wearing a short skirt, long socks over her thick tights and had a striped cotton scarf wrapped round her neck, though it felt warm inside to Frieda. She held out a hand. ‘I’m Janine,’ she said. ‘Come in.’

‘Is Joanna here?’

‘She’s in there with Rick.’

‘Rick?’

‘Rick Costello. Joanna, you’ve a visitor.’

‘Who is it?’ Hoarse and slightly slurred – that was the voice Frieda had been expecting.

‘You’ll never guess. Talk of the devil. Shall I take your coat?’

‘Can you tell me who you are first?’ asked Frieda. ‘You seem to know me but I certainly don’t know you.’

‘I’m working with Joanna.’

‘In what way?’

‘I’m helping her tell her story.’

‘Her story?’ said Frieda, cautiously. ‘Are you a writer?’

‘Me? No. I’m just the PR her publisher has hired to make sure she reaches the largest possible audience. It’s such a terrible story – and the strength it’s taken her to survive. Tragedy and redemption. With a real-life monster, as well. But you don’t need me to tell you.’ Janine looked at Frieda with a knowing smile. ‘I’ve heard about your role.’

Frieda took off her coat. All of a sudden she had a headache, like a band wrapped around her skull. ‘So she’s writing a book?’

‘It’s all done. We’ve been working on it for days. I’m just privileged that I’ve been chosen to help her. But you’re a counsellor so you know all about enabling people, don’t you? She’s through here.’

Janine led Frieda into a small room, hardly big enough for the large leather sofa and the deep, bulky armchair. The room was thick with smoke – and sitting in the thickest part of the cloud was Joanna, curled up at one end of the sofa with her bare feet tucked under her. Last time Frieda had seen her, her dark hair had been dyed blonde; now it was a metallic chestnut. But she had the same slumped posture and the same heavy-set face. It was pale, overlaid with tan makeup. A cigarette hung from her lower lip and an overflowing ashtray stood on the small table at her elbow. Her large body was squeezed into a pair of skinny jeans and a leopard-print top. The folds of her white stomach showed, and Frieda glimpsed the Oriental tattoo there. A young man with a pink baby face, spots on his forehead, was in the armchair. He was looking at Frieda suspiciously. His trousers had ridden up his legs, exposing yellow socks and shiny white shins.

‘Hello, Joanna,’ said Frieda.

‘You didn’t say you were coming.’

‘No.’

‘Why are you here, after all this time?’

‘I came to see how you were getting on.’

Joanna sucked on her cigarette. ‘It’s not just coincidence?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Now that I’m setting the record straight.’

‘I didn’t know about this.’

‘This,’ said Joanna, complacently, nodding towards the young man and jerking more ash from her cigarette, ‘is Rick.’

Frieda nodded to Rick, who held out a limp pink hand.

‘He’s my editor.’

‘Of your book?’ He didn’t look like Frieda’s idea of a publisher.

‘From the Sketch.’

‘I thought you were writing a book.’

‘It’s being serialized,’ said Rick.

‘I see.’

Janine bobbed her head so that her ponytail swung. ‘Can I get you coffee?’

‘No, thanks.’

‘So you didn’t know?’ Joanna asked again. ‘You haven’t been sent to spy?’

‘To spy on what?’

‘On me, on all of this.’

‘It’s too late for that,’ said Rick. ‘We’re pretty much done and dusted. It’s being lawyered as we speak.’

Frieda perched herself on the sofa and looked at Joanna, trying to ignore the two others. ‘You’ve written a book?’

‘That’s right.’

‘About what happened?’

‘What else would I write a bleeding book about?’ She stubbed her cigarette out and lit another. ‘What do you think of that?’

‘It depends on what you’ve said and why you’ve done it.’

‘It’s my story,’ said Joanna. ‘Everything I’ve gone through in my life. Snatched away, hidden, abused, beaten, raped, brainwashed.’ Her voice rose. ‘No one rescued me. And I don’t hold back. I don’t duck it. I looked after Matthew, you know. I saved him. There was a hidden core of strength in me. How else could I have survived everything? A core of strength,’ she repeated. Then: ‘You want to know why I’ve written it. To give hope to others. That’s why.’

‘I see.’

‘I need the money as well. I didn’t get compensation. Not a penny, after everything I endured. I lived in Hell,’ she said, ‘with a monster, for twenty-two years. You can never get back those years.’

‘Have you seen your family, Joanna? Have they read this book?’

‘They don’t understand. Rose comes round, but she just sits and stares at me with those big eyes of hers. She wants me to talk to someone about what happened. Someone like you, I mean.’ She took another drag on her cigarette, inhaling deeply. ‘It’s much better talking to someone like Janine or Rick. Anyway, she didn’t take care of me. She was supposed to be looking after me that day I was got.’

Frieda thought of Rose Teale’s stricken face, her enduring guilt: a good woman who’d been almost as much a victim of Dean Reeve as her younger sister. ‘She was nine, Joanna.’

‘My big sister. They all let me down. That’s what they can’t cope with.’ Joanna dropped the cigarette end on to the pile of dead stubs. ‘But I forgive them.’

‘You forgive them?’

‘Yeah.’

Frieda forced herself to think of why she had come here. ‘When Dean died,’ she said, ‘were you surprised that he took his own life?’

Joanna’s eyes flicked to Janine, then back to Frieda. ‘It showed he loved me, that he knew he’d abused me. It was his last spark of human decency, that’s what it was.’

Gobbets of the book flew past Frieda, phrases about strength, evil, goodness, survival, victims. She steadied herself. ‘So you never thought it was out of character?’

Joanna gazed at her, off-script at last. She gave a shrug. ‘He’d reached the end of the line.’

‘Have you seen Alan?’ asked Frieda.

‘Who’s he?’

‘Dean’s brother, his twin.’

‘Why would I see him?’

‘So you haven’t, not even once?’

‘No.’

‘What about June, Dean’s mother?’

Joanna pulled a face. ‘She’s gone demented. She wouldn’t know me if I did go and see her, which I wouldn’t anyway.’ She paused, then found her lines again. ‘The curse that’s passed down generations,’ she said. ‘I’m going to be on TV, you know. Rick says. He’s setting it up. And I’m in the paper next week.’

‘A major serialization,’ said Janine. ‘Over four days. You should read it yourself. An Innocent in Hell. You wouldn’t believe some of the things that are in it.’

‘I probably would.’

‘I don’t want to see you again, though,’ said Joanna. ‘I don’t like the way you look at me.’