Waiting for Wednesday

stay awake. Even as she let herself go at last, her eyes closing and
her body softening, she was thinking how odd it was that she should trust someone she
didn’t know at all.
    Fearby turned off the M25 and on to the M1.
This was a road he knew; it seemed fitting they should be driving it together. He slid
some Irish folk music into the CD player, turned the volume down so it was only just
audible, and glanced at her. He couldn’t make her out. She must be in her mid- to
late-thirties – from a distance, she looked younger, with her slim upright body and her
supple movement, but up close her face was gaunt; there were hollows under her eyes and
a strained, almost haunted expression on her pale face. He hadn’t asked her what
she did. Frieda Klein: it sounded German, Jewish. He looked at her hands, lying half
folded in her lap, and saw they were ringless, with unvarnished nails cut short. She
wasn’t wearing any jewellery or makeup. Even in sleep, her face was stern and
troubled.
    Nevertheless – and his heart lifted – he had
a companion, a fellow-traveller, at least for a while. He was so used to workingalone that it had become hard to tell where the outside world blurred
with his private obsessions. She would be able to tell him: she had a good, clear gaze,
and whatever motives she had for her own particular quest, he had felt her cool
shrewdness. He smiled to himself: she didn’t like being ordered around.
    She murmured something and threw up one
hand. Her eyes clicked open and, in a moment, she was sitting up straight, pushing her
hair off her hot face.
    ‘I fell asleep.’
    ‘That’s OK.’
    ‘I never fall asleep.’
    ‘You must have needed it.’
    Then she sat back once more and gazed out of
the windscreen at the cars streaming past in the opposite direction.
    ‘Is this Birmingham?’
    ‘I don’t actually live in the
city. I live in a village, or small town, really, a few miles away.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Sorry?’
    ‘Why don’t you live in the
city?’
    ‘It’s where I lived with my wife
and kids. When my wife left, I never got around to moving.’
    ‘Not from choice, then?’
    ‘Probably not. Don’t you like
the countryside?’
    ‘People should think about where they
live, make a deliberate choice.’
    ‘I see,’ said Fearby.
‘I’m passive. And you’ve made a choice, I take it.’
    ‘I live in the middle of
London.’
    ‘Because you want to?’
    ‘It’s somewhere I can be quiet
and hidden. Life can carry on outside.’
    ‘Maybe that’s what I feel about my
little house. It’s invisible to me. I don’t notice it any more. It’s
just a place to go. I’m an ex-journalist. What do you do?’
    ‘I’m a
psychotherapist.’
    Fearby looked bemused. ‘Now that I
wouldn’t have guessed.’
    He didn’t seem to understand just how
wretched he had let his house become. There was a gravelled drive almost entirely grown
over with ground elder, dandelions and tufts of grass. The windowsills were rotting and
the panes were filthy. He might have cleared away the dirt, but a general air of neglect
lay over everything. In the kitchen, piles of yellowing newspapers were stacked on the
table, which clearly wasn’t used for eating at. When Fearby opened the fridge door
to look for milk that wasn’t there, Frieda saw that, apart from beer cans, it was
quite empty. It was a house for a man who lived alone and wasn’t expecting
company.
    ‘No tea, then,’ he said.
‘How about whisky?’
    ‘I don’t drink in the
day.’
    ‘Today is different.’
    He poured them both a couple of fingers into
cloudy tumblers and handed one to Frieda.
    ‘To our missing girls,’ he said,
chinking his glass against hers.
    Frieda took the smallest stinging sip, to
keep him company. ‘You were going to show me what you’ve found.’
    ‘It’s all in my
study.’
    When he opened the door, she was speechless
for a few seconds, her eyes trying to become accustomed to the combination of frenzy and
order. Briefly, she was reminded of Michelle Doyce, the woman to whom Karlsson had
introduced her, who had filled her rooms in Deptford with thedebris
of other people’s lives, carefully categorizing litter.
    Fearby’s study was dimly lit, because
the window was half blocked with teetering piles of paper on its sill: newspapers and
magazines and printouts. There were piles of papers on the floor as well: it was almost
impossible to make a path through them to the long table that acted as his desk,