Waiting for Wednesday

TWENTY-FOUR

When Rajit Singh opened the door, he was wearing a heavy black jacket. ‘It’s the heating,’ he said. ‘Someone was meant to come today to fix it.’

‘I’ll only be a minute,’ said Frieda. ‘I won’t even need to take my coat off.’

He led her through to a sitting room in which every piece of furniture, the chairs, a sofa, a table, seemed to jar with everything else. On the wall was a picture of the Eiffel Tower in brightly coloured velvet. He noticed her expression.

‘When I was an undergraduate, I stayed in the residence that was right in the West End. Everything’s sorted for you, where you sleep, where you eat, who you become friends with. But once you’re doing your postgraduate work, you’re left to fend for yourself. I was lucky to get this, believe it or not. I’m sharing it with a couple of Chinese engineering students who I never see.’

‘You live all over the place,’ said Frieda.

‘Me?’ said Singh. ‘I just live here.’

‘No, I mean you and the rest of you. Seamus Dunne, the one who came to see me, he lives in Stockwell. I saw Duncan Bailey at his flat in Romford. Later I’m going to Waterloo to see Ian Yardley.’

Singh sat in the armchair and gestured at the sofa. Frieda preferred to stand up so she could move around. Even though it was sunny in the street outside, it was icy in the house.

‘We’re not a gang,’ he said. ‘We don’t exactly hang out together.’

‘You’re just Professor Bradshaw’s students.’

‘That’s right. We’re the ones who volunteered for his clever experiment. The one that seems to have got under your skin.’

‘Which therapist did you see?’

Singh’s face tightened. ‘Are you trying to trap me?’ he said. ‘Are you going to sue us?’

‘No,’ said Frieda. ‘This is all for my benefit. Let’s just say I’m curious.’

‘Look,’ said Singh, ‘we didn’t have anything to do with that stuff in the newspaper. I thought it would appear in a psychology journal that no one would read and that would be the end of it. I don’t know how that happened.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Frieda. ‘I’m not bothered with that. Just tell me about your part in it.’

‘I ended up with the therapist who passed the test. She’s a woman called Geraldine Fliess. Apparently she wrote some book about how we’re all really psychopaths, or something like that. Anyway, I went and saw her, gave the spiel about having been cruel to animals and that I had fantasies of hurting women. Later she got back in touch with me, asking me who my doctor was and other things like that.’

‘What did you tell her?’

‘Professor Bradshaw told us that if anyone took us up on what we had said, if they really picked up on the danger, we should just refer them to him and he would tell them about the experiment. You know, to avoid us getting arrested.’

‘What would you have been arrested for?’ Frieda asked.

‘All right, all right,’ said Singh, irritably. ‘She got it right and you didn’t. It’s not the end of the world. Just let it go.’

‘But I’m interested in the story you all told. How was that done?’

‘There was nothing clever about it. Bradshaw gave us the things on the psychopath checklist and we just had to agree on a story, rehearse it and perform it.’

‘I don’t care about the checklist,’ said Frieda. ‘I’m more interested in the other details. Where did all the bits that had nothing to do with the checklist come from? Things like that story about cutting hair. What was that about?’

‘What does it matter?’

Frieda thought for a moment and looked around her. The room wasn’t just cold. There was a smell of damp. There didn’t seem to be a single object that hadn’t been left there by the landlord and that was the sort of stuff – abandoned, unloved – you’d pick up in car-boot sales, house clearances.

‘I think it’s difficult to pretend to be a patient,’ Frieda said. ‘For most people, the difficult bit is to ask for help in the first place. Once they’re sitting in a room with me, they’ve already made a painful decision. I think it’s just as difficult to pretend to ask for help.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘When I came in, you apologized about the house.’

‘I didn’t apologize about it. I said I was lucky to get it.’

‘You said that when you were an undergraduate everything was arranged for you, but now you were left to fend for yourself. You told me that you never see your housemates.’

‘I meant that as a good thing.’

‘You probably don’t want to hear this from me …’

‘You know, I’ve got a feeling you’re about to say something about me that isn’t complimentary.’

‘Not at all. But I wonder if when you volunteered for this experiment, the chance to go to a therapist but not really go to a therapist, it gave you an opportunity to express something. A kind of sadness, a feeling of not being cared for.’

‘That is absolute crap. That’s exactly what therapists like you do. You read things into what people say in order to give you power over them. And then if they deny it, it makes them look weak. What you’re objecting to is the fact that you got involved in an experiment that showed you up. From what I’ve heard, you and Dr Bradshaw have some kind of history, and if I’ve played some part in that, then I’m sorry. But don’t suck me into your mind games.’

‘It doesn’t look as if you live here,’ said Frieda. ‘You haven’t hung up a picture, or put a rug down, or even left a book lying around. You’re even dressed like you’re outside.’

‘As you can feel for yourself, it’s cold in here. When the man fixes the boiler, I promise you I’ll take my jacket off.’

Frieda took a notebook from her pocket, scribbled on a page, tore it out and handed it to Singh. ‘If you want to tell me anything about what you said – I mean anything apart from the stupid Hare checklist – you can reach me at that number.’

‘I don’t know what you want from me,’ said Singh, angrily, as Frieda left the house.

Ian Yardley’s flat was in a little alley just off a street market. It was down from the Thames but far enough away that the river couldn’t be seen. Frieda pressed a buzzer and heard an unintelligible noise from a speaker, then a rattling sound. She pulled at the door but it was still locked. More noise came from the speaker, then more electronic rattling, a click and the door was unlocked. Frieda walked up some carpeted stairs to a landing with two separate doors, labelled one and two. Door one opened and a dark-haired woman peered out.

‘I’m here to see –’

‘I know,’ said the woman. ‘I don’t know what this is about. You’d better come in. Just for a minute, though.’

Frieda followed her inside. Yardley was sitting at a table, reading the evening paper and drinking beer. He had long curly hair and glasses with square, transparent frames. He was dressed in a college sweatshirt and dark trousers. His feet were bare. He turned and smiled at her.

‘I hear you’ve been hassling people,’ he said.

‘I think you called on my old friend Reuben.’

‘The famous Reuben McGill,’ he said. ‘I must say I was a bit disappointed by him. When I met him, he looked like someone who’d lost his mojo. He didn’t seem to respond to what I was saying at all.’

‘Did you want him to respond?’ said Frieda.

‘What rubbish,’ said the woman, from behind her.

‘Oh, sorry,’ said the Ian. ‘I’m not being a proper host. This is my friend, Polly. She thinks I shouldn’t have let you in. She’s more suspicious than I am. Can I offer you a drink? A beer? There’s some white wine open in the fridge.’

‘No, thanks.’

‘Not while you’re on duty?’

Frieda began to ask some of the same questions she’d asked Rajit Singh, but she didn’t get very far because Polly kept interrupting her, asking what the point of all this was, while Ian just continued to smile, as if he was enjoying the spectacle. Suddenly he stopped smiling.

‘Shall I make things clear?’ he said. ‘If you’re here out of some faintly pathetic attempt at revenge, then you’re wasting your time. This was all cleared by the ethics committee in advance and we were indemnified. I can show you the small print, if you’re interested in reading it. I know it’s embarrassing when it’s demonstrated that the emperor has no clothes. If you’re the emperor. Or the empress.’

‘As I’ve tried to explain,’ said Frieda, ‘I’m not here to argue about the experiment, I’m –’

‘Oh, give us a fucking break,’ said Polly.

‘If you’ll just let me finish a sentence, I’ll ask a couple of questions and then I’ll leave.’

‘What do you mean, and then you’ll leave? As if you had any right to be here in the first place! I’ve got another idea.’ Polly prodded Frieda on the shoulder. It was close to where she was still bandaged and made her flinch slightly. ‘You’ve been made a fool of. So deal with it. And just leave, because Ian has nothing to say and you’re starting to harass him and to get on my nerves.’ She started shoving at Frieda as if she wanted to push her out of the flat.

‘Stop that,’ said Frieda, raising her hands in defence.

‘Time for you to go,’ shouted Polly, and pushed even harder.

Frieda put her hand on the woman’s chest and pressed her back against the wall and held her there. She leaned close so that their faces were only inches apart and she spoke in a quiet, slow tone. ‘I said “stop”.’

Yardley stood up. ‘What the hell’s going on?’ he said.

Frieda turned, and as she turned, she took her hand away, then stepped back. She wasn’t clear what happened next. She felt a flurry to the side of her. She sensed Polly flying at her and then stumbling over a low stool and falling heavily across it.

‘I can’t believe this,’ said Yardley to Frieda. ‘You come here and you start a fight.’

Polly started to struggle to her feet but Frieda stood over her. ‘Don’t you even think about it,’ she said. ‘Just stay where you are.’ Then she turned to Yardley. ‘I think Reuben understood you pretty well.’

‘You’re threatening me,’ he said. ‘You’ve come here to attack me and to threaten me.’

‘That hair story had nothing to do with you, did it?’ said Frieda.

‘What hair story?’

‘You’re too much of a narcissist,’ said Frieda. ‘You wanted to impress Reuben and he didn’t go for it.’

‘What the fuck are you talking about?’

‘It’s all right,’ said Frieda. ‘I’ve got what I came for.’

And she left.

Jim Fearby brought out a large map of Great Britain. There wasn’t room for it on the wall so he laid it out on the floor of the living room, with objects (a mug, a tin of beans, a book and a can of beer) on each corner. He took off his shoes and walked across the map, staring down at it and frowning. Then he stuck a flagged pin-tack to the spot where Hazel Barton’s body had been found; another where Vanessa Dale had been approached by the man in a car that had perhaps been silver.

He skewered her photograph onto the big cork noticeboard, next to Hazel Barton’s picture. Two doesn’t make a pattern – but it’s a start.