Waiting for Wednesday

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,
glossybob; 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.



FORTY-TWO
    Karlsson opened the file. Yvette was writing
in her notebook. Riley and Munster looked bored. Hal Bradshaw was sending a text. He
noticed Karlsson’s fierce glance and put the phone down on the table but continued
to steal glances at it. Karlsson took his watch off and laid it next to the file.
    ‘We’re going to talk about this
for five minutes,’ he said, ‘because that’s about all I can stand and
then we should go our separate ways and try to solve this case. Do you know what I wish?
I wish Billy Hunt had killed her and that he was safely in prison and that we
hadn’t lifted the rock and found out about all the adultery and drink and drugs
and underage sex.’
    ‘Maybe Billy Hunt really did it after
all,’ said Riley.
    ‘Billy Hunt didn’t do
it.’
    ‘Maybe his alibi is