Waiting for Wednesday

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