Waiting for Wednesday

delicate ear lobes in his
wrecked face. There was blood everywhere. People didn’t know how much blood they
had flowing through them, warm and fast – only when you saw it pooled around a body did
you realize. Puddles of dark, sweet-smelling blood, thickening now. She laid one finger
against his back, under his purple shirt; the skin was white and hard and cold.
    She stood up, hearing her knees creak, and
thought of Karlsson when he arrived at a crime scene: she tried to make herself into a
camera. The muddy streaks inthe passageway, the
tipped picture above the bed, the thickening blood, the rigid flesh, the way his arms
were flung out as if he was falling through the air. She remembered the noise the woman
upstairs had said she’d heard last night.
    And then she took out her phone. From
upstairs, she could make out the sounds of the baby, still howling. They arrived so
quickly, the ambulances and the police cars. It seemed only minutes before the flat had
been transformed into a makeshift laboratory, bright lights shining, with Zach’s
body at the centre. Paper shoes, plastic gloves, brushes to dust for the fingerprints,
bottles of chemicals, tweezers and evidence bags, tape measures, thermometers. Riley was
talking to the woman upstairs. Munster, standing by the door and taking gulps of air,
was talking into his phone. Zach was just an object now, a specimen.
    Above the hubbub, Karlsson said to her:
‘Chris is speaking to Greene’s parents. Do you think you could be the one to
tell Judith Lennox?’
    She felt beads of sweat on her forehead as
she thought of the fierce, desolate daughter. ‘Sure.’
    ‘Thanks. As soon as possible, I
think.’
    Yvette knew it would be bad and it was. She
stood and listened to herself say the words and watched Judith Lennox’s very
young, very vulnerable face crumple. She spun round the small room, her slender figure
twitching, all the separate parts of her apparently disconnected – hands fluttering,
face tweaked in strange grimaces, head bobbing on thin neck, feet slipping in her
frantic urge to move. They were in a room that the head teacher had put aside for them.
There was a desk by the plate-glass window and shelves full of folders in different
colours. Outside, two teenagers – a boyand a girl – walked past and
glanced without obvious interest into the large window.
    Yvette felt helpless. Should she go and wrap
her arms round the girl’s fragile bones, hold her still for an instant? This time
it was a shriek that must surely fill the whole school, empty classrooms and bring
teachers running. She banged against the desk and was sent in another direction. Yvette
was reminded of a moth bruising its soft powdery wings against harsh surfaces.
    She put out a hand and caught Judith by the
hem of her shirt, heard it rip slightly. The girl stopped and stared wildly at her. She
was still wearing dark orange lipstick, but the rest of her face was like a small
child’s. Suddenly, she sat, not on the chair, but in a heap on the uncarpeted
floor.
    ‘What happened?’ she
whispered.
    ‘We’re trying to find out
exactly. All I can tell you at present is that he has been killed.’ She thought of
the mashed face and swallowed hard. ‘In his flat.’
    ‘When?
When?
’
    ‘We haven’t established the time
of his death.’ Stiff, pompous, she was embarrassed by her own awkwardness.
    ‘Recently, though?’
    ‘Yes. I’m sorry to have to ask
but I’m sure you’ll understand. Can you tell me when you last saw
him?’
    ‘Go away.’ Judith covered her
ears with her hands and rocked back and forwards on the floor. ‘Just go away
now.’
    ‘I know it’s very
painful.’
    ‘Go away. Go away. Go away. Leave me
alone. Leave all of us alone. Get out. Why is this happening? Why? Please please please
please.’
    Yvette had only once been to Frieda’s
house and never to her consulting rooms until now. She tried not to seem curious;she didn’t want to look too intently at Frieda herself, partly
because Frieda’s steady gaze had always made her uncomfortable and partly because
she was shocked by Frieda’s appearance. Perhaps she was thinner, Yvette
couldn’t tell, but she was certainly tauter. She seemed stretched tight. There
were dark smudges under her eyes, almost violet. Her skin was pale and her eyes very
dark, with a smokiness to them that was different from their usual glitter. She
didn’t look well, Yvette decided.
    She watched Frieda walk towards her red
armchair