Waiting for Wednesday

be her refuge from the violent mess of the world, not her relationship
with these young people, who had turned to her as if she knew answers that didn’t
exist, not her creeping involvement with the police again, not her unshakeable
preoccupation with the shadowy world of the missing girl Lila. Above all, not her sense
that she was following a voice that only she could hear, an echo of an echo of an echo.
And Dean Reeve, keeping watch. She thought of Sandy, only halfway through his day, and
wished that this day was over.



FORTY-EIGHT
    The following morning Frieda woke everyone
early and took them all to Number 9 for breakfast – a raggle-taggle crew of bleary-eyed,
anxious teenagers, who seemed closer today to childhood than adulthood. Their mother had
been murdered, their father was in a police cell and they were waiting for the sentence
to fall.
    She saw them all on to the bus, waiting till
it drew away, then returned home. She felt drained and subdued, but she had things to
do. Josef was building a garden wall in Primrose Hill; Sasha was at work. So Frieda took
the train out from Liverpool Street, through the nearly completed stadiums and sports
halls of the Olympic Park. They looked like toys abandoned by a giant child. Coming out
of the station at Denham, she climbed into a taxi waiting at the rank.
    A horse refuge named after a flower. Frieda
had imagined rolling meadows and woodland. The taxi passed a large, semi-demolished set
of warehouses, then a housing estate. When the taxi stopped and the driver announced
that they had arrived, Frieda thought she must have come to the wrong place, but then
she saw the sign: ‘The Sunflower Horse and Donkey Refuge’. The driver asked
if she wanted him to wait for her. Frieda said she might be some time so he wrote his
number on a card and gave it to her.
    As the car drove away, she looked around. By
the entrance, there was a pebbledash house. There were deep cracks in the façade and an
upper window was covered with cardboard. It seemed deserted. On the wall, to the side of
the entrance,there was another sign, stencilled: ‘Visitors
Report to Reception’. She walked into a yard lined with stable buildings made out
of breeze blocks and concrete but no Reception that she could see. There were piles of
horse manure and straw bales, and off to the side a rusting tractor with no tyres on the
front wheels. Frieda stepped delicately across the yard, making her way between brown
muddy puddles.
    ‘Is there anyone here?’ she
called out.
    She heard a scraping sound and a teenage
girl carrying a spade emerged from one of the stable doorways. She was dressed in rubber
boots and jeans and a bright red T-shirt. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand.
‘Yeah?’
    ‘I’m looking for someone called
Shane.’
    The girl just gave a shrug.
    ‘I heard that a man called Shane works
here.’
    The girl shook her head.
‘No.’
    ‘Maybe he used to work
here.’
    ‘I don’t know nobody called
Shane.’
    ‘How long have you been working
here?’
    ‘A few years. On and off.’
    ‘And you know everyone who works
here?’
    The girl rolled her eyes. ‘Course I
do,’ she said, and disappeared back into the stable. Frieda heard the spade
scraping on the concrete floor. She walked out of the yard on to the road where she had
come in, looked at her watch and wondered what to do. She thought back to the
conversation in the pub. Had she misunderstood somehow? Were they just trying to get her
to go away? She started to walk along the road. There was no pavement, just a grass
verge, and she felt vulnerable to the cars that were passing her with a rush of air and
noise. As she got beyond the buildings, she reached a rough wooden fence that separated
the field from the road.
    She leaned on the fence and looked across.
The field waslarge, maybe a quarter of a mile across, bordered on the
far side by the busy A12, cars and lorries rumbling along it. The field itself was
scrubby and abandoned, broken only by occasional clumps of gorse and, in the middle, a
large, dead oak tree. And then there were horses, and a few donkeys, scattered around.
They were old and mangy but they seemed contented enough, heads down, nibbling at the
grass, and Frieda found it relaxing just watching them. It wasn’t much, perhaps,
but better here than anywhere else. It was a strange scene, neither town nor country but
something messily in between. It looked like land that had been neglected, unloved,