Waiting for Wednesday

FORTY-ONE

‘I don’t get it.’

Agnes, dressed in baggy jogging trousers and a grey hoodie with fraying sleeves, was sitting beside Frieda in a cab. She looked tired. It was raining, and through the dark, wet windows they could see only the glimmering lights of cars and the massed shapes of buildings. Frieda thought of how she could have been in her house now, empty after so many weeks of disruption. She could have been lying in her new bath, or playing chess, or sitting in her study, drawing and thinking and looking out into the wet night.

‘Get what?’ she asked mildly.

‘I was in bed with a novel and a cup of tea, all cosy. And then you ring up out of the blue and all of a sudden I’m on my way to some dingy little pub full of girls off their heads on who-knows-what and men with tattoos and dead eyes, just because Lila used to hang out there. Why?’

‘Why are you going?’

‘No. I know why I’m going. Lila was my mate. If there’s some chance I can find her, I have to. But why are you going? Why do you even care?’

Frieda was tired of asking herself the same question. She closed her eyes and pressed her cool fingertips against her hot, aching eyeballs. She could see Ted Lennox’s white face, like a petal on dark water, and Chloë’s fierce, accusing gaze.

‘Anyway, here we are,’ said Agnes, with a sigh. ‘I certainly never thought I’d set foot in this place again.’

Frieda told the cab driver to wait for them, and they both stepped out into the rain. They could hear the beat of music coming from the Anchor, and there was a huddle of smokers around the door. The tips of their cigarettes glowed and a miasma of smoke hung around them.

‘Let’s get this over with. You want me to look for anyone I think I might have seen hanging out with Lila.’

‘Yes.’

‘Two years ago.’

‘Right.’

‘Because we need to find someone called Shane.’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you think you’re quite right in the head?’

They shouldered their way through the smokers and into the pub, if that was what it was. Frieda rarely went to pubs: she hated the smell of beer and the jangling music, the lights of the jukebox. Now she felt dozens of eyes on them as they entered: it didn’t feel like a place where outsiders came casually for a pint. It was a dark room that stretched back out of view, where crowds of people, mostly men, were sitting at tables or standing at the bar and in corners. A few women straggled on the outskirts of the groups; Frieda saw their short skirts and cold white thighs, their shoes with dagger heels and their makeup; she heard their high, frantic laughter. The long dim room was hot and smelt stale. A man stumbled and almost fell in front of them, short and squat with spittle shining on his cheek, the drink he was holding splashing on to the floor.

‘Should we buy drinks?’ asked Agnes.

‘No.’

Together they inched their way through the crowd, Agnes peering from face to face, her eyes flickering, a frown of concentration on her face.

‘Well?’ asked Frieda.

‘I don’t know. Maybe him.’

She hunched her shoulder towards a small table at the end of a room. A woman was sitting on the man’s lap and they were kissing and unabashedly feeling each other, and beside them another man was watching them impassively, as if they were animals in a zoo. He was rail-thin, with peroxide blond hair, pale skin and a line of tiny red spots running like stitches along his forehead.

‘Right.’

Frieda stepped forward and tapped him on the shoulder. He looked at her. His pupils were enormous, giving him an otherworldly appearance.

‘Can I have a word?’ she asked.

‘Who are you?’

‘I’m looking for Shane.’

‘Shane.’ It wasn’t a question, just an echo. ‘Shane who?’

The pair beside him stopped kissing and disentangled themselves. The woman leaned forward and took a swig from the glass on the table. Her face was empty of expression.

‘Shane who knew Lila Dawes.’

‘I dunno about any Lila.’

‘But you know Shane?’

‘I knew a Shane once, but I haven’t seen him. He doesn’t come here any more.’

‘He went to prison,’ the woman beside him said, in a flat voice. She was buttoning her blouse – wrongly, Frieda saw. The man whose lap she was sitting on tried to pull her back into him but she pushed him away.

‘You know him?’

‘Do you know Lila?’ added Agnes, eagerly, almost imploringly.

‘Was she one of the girls who hung around with Shane?’

‘Why did Shane go to prison?’

‘I think he hit someone,’ the blonde said. ‘With a bottle.’

‘Is he still there?’

‘I don’t know. You could ask Stevie. He knows Shane.’

‘Where can I find Stevie?’

‘Right behind you,’ said a voice. Frieda and Agnes turned to find a thick-set man with a shaved head and an oddly soft, girlish face behind them. ‘What do you want with Shane?’

‘Just to find him.’

‘Why?’

‘He knew my friend,’ said Agnes, whose voice trembled slightly. Frieda put a hand on her arm in reassurance.

‘Which friend was that?’

‘Lila. Lila Dawes.’

‘Lila? Shane had so many friends.’

‘Was he a pimp?’ asked Frieda, her voice cool and clear in the over-heated room.

‘You should be careful what you call people,’ said Stevie.

‘Is he still in prison?’

‘No, he only did a couple of months. Good behaviour.’

‘Do you know where I can find him now?’

Stevie smiled, not at Frieda but at the blond man sitting at the table. ‘You know what our Shane’s doing now? He’s working at a horse sanctuary in Essex. He’s feeding ponies whose owners haven’t treated them right. Lucky ponies.’

‘Where in Essex?’

‘Why do you want to know? Got a horse you don’t want?’

‘I want to talk to him.’

‘Somewhere by a big road.’

‘Which big road?’

‘The A12. It’s got a stupid name. Daisy. Or Sunflower.’

‘Which?’

‘Sunflower.’

‘Thank you,’ said Frieda.

‘And fuck you, too.’

Jim Fearby was nearly at the end of his list: Sharon Gibbs was from the south of London, nineteen years old, and last seen approximately one month ago. Her parents hadn’t reported her missing immediately – according to the police report he had in front of him, she was something of a drifter; perhaps one of those who go intentionally missing. Even in the bureaucratic language, Fearby sensed indifference, hopelessness. She looked like another dead end.

But when he stood in front of his large map and peered again at the small flags he’d pinned to it, he felt the surge of excitement that had kept him going through this strange one-man investigation. For it seemed clear to him that there was a pattern before his eyes. But then – at the end of a day, when he sat in this room with his whisky, his fags, fugging up the window, surrounded by crumpled balls of paper, overflowing ashtrays, cartons of takeaways, half-finished mugs of coffee, piles of books thumbed through and then discarded – it faded away.

He looked around him, for a moment seeing things as a stranger would see them. It was a mess, no doubt about it, but an obsessive mess. The walls were covered with maps, photographs of girls and young women, Post-it stickers with numbers scribbled on to them. It made him seem like a stalker, a psychopath. If his wife walked in now, or his children … He could picture their expressions of dismay and disgust. He was wearing shabby clothes, his face needed shaving, his hair needed cutting, he reeked of tobacco and drink. But if he was right, if these faces that stared at him from his walls had all been killed by the same person, then all of that would be justified and he would be a hero. Of course, if he was wrong, he would be a lonely fool and a pathetic failure.

It was no good thinking like that: he’d come too far and done too much. He just had to hold on to his original instinct and keep going, holding his doubts at bay. He sighed and picked up his overnight bag, his car keys, his cigarettes, and shut the door on his stale, untidy house with relief.

Brian and Tracey Gibbs lived in a first-floor flat in south London, at the point where the density of the city was petering out into suburbia. They were poor, Fearby could tell that at once. Their flat was small and the living room they showed him into needed a fresh coat of paint. He knew from the cutting that they were in their forties, but they looked older – and he felt a surge of anger. The comfortable middle classes can cheat time, while people like the Gibbses are worn down by it, rubbed away. Brian Gibbs was thin and apologetic. Tracey Gibbs was larger and at first more aggressive. She wanted to tell Fearby that they’d done their best, been good parents, never done anything to deserve this. Their only child. It wasn’t their fault. All the while, her husband sat mute and thin beside her.

‘When did you last see her?’ asked Fearby.

‘Six weeks ago. Give or take a few days.’

‘And when did you report her missing?’

‘Three and a half weeks ago. We didn’t know,’ she added quickly, defensively. ‘She’s an adult. She lives with us but she comes and goes as she pleases. Days could go by …’ She faltered. ‘You know how it is.’

Fearby nodded. He did.

‘Could I see a picture of her?’

‘There.’ Tracey Gibbs pointed and he saw a framed photograph of Sharon: a round, pale face; dark hair in a neat, glossy bob; small mouth smiling for the camera. Fearby had seen too many young women smiling for the camera recently.

‘Is she going to be all right?’ Brian Gibbs asked, as if Fearby was God.

‘I hope so,’ he replied. ‘Do you think she went of her own accord?’

‘The police think so.’ This, bitterly, from the mother.

‘You don’t?’

‘She got into bad company.’

‘What company was that?’

‘The worst was this Mick Doherty. I told her what I thought of him but she wouldn’t listen.’

She plaited her hands tightly together; Fearby saw that the wedding ring was biting into her finger and that the varnish on her nails was chipped. She looked uncared-for. There were moth holes in Brian Gibbs’s ancient pullover. There was a hairline crack running up the mug of tea they had given him and a chip on its rim.

‘I see,’ he said, trying to sound neutrally cheerful.

‘I know where he works. The police weren’t bothered but I can tell you where to find him.’

‘All right.’

He took the address. It wouldn’t do any harm, he thought, and there was nothing else left for him to do, nowhere else to go.