Waiting for Wednesday

would
know?’
    ‘I have one idea.’
    After they’d eaten the rice – Fearby
had eaten most of it, Frieda had just picked at hers – Frieda said she should take the
train back. But Fearby said it was too late. After some argument about hotels and
trains, Fearby ended by getting an old sleeping bag out of a cupboard and Frieda made a
sort of bed for herself on a sofa in the living room. She spent a strange, feverish
night in which she didn’t know when she was awake and when she was asleep, when
her thoughts were like dreams and her dreams were like thoughts, all of them bad. She
felt, or she thought, or she dreamed, that she was on a journey that was also a kind of
obstacle race, and only when she had got past the obstacles, solved all the problems,
would she finally be allowed to sleep. She thought of the photographs of the girls on
Fearby’s wall and their faces became mixed up with the faces of Ted, Judith and
Dora Lennox, all staring down at her.
    From about half past three she was starkly,
bleakly awake, staring at the ceiling. At half past four, she got up. She went to the
bathroom and ran herself a bath. She lay there and watched the edges of the window blind
grow light. She dried herself with the towel that looked like the least used and dressed
herself in yesterday’s dirty clothes. When she emerged from the bathroom, Fearby
was there pouring coffee into two mugs.
    ‘I can’t offer you much of a
breakfast,’ he said. ‘I can go out at seven and get some bread and
eggs.’
    ‘Coffee will be fine,’ said
Frieda. ‘And then we should go.’
    Fearby put a notebook, a folder, a little
digital recorder into a shoulder bag and within half an hour they were back on the
motorway, heading south. For a long time, they drove in silence. Frieda looked out of
the window, then at Fearby. ‘Why are you doing this?’ she said.
    ‘I told you,’ he said. ‘At
first, for George Conley.’
    ‘But you got him out,’ said
Frieda. ‘That’s something most journalists wouldn’t achieve in their
whole career.’
    ‘It didn’t feel enough. He only
got out on a technicality. When he got out and everyone was cheering and celebrating and
the media were there, it felt incomplete. I needed to tell the whole story, to show that
Conley was innocent.’
    ‘Is that what Conley himself
wants?’
    ‘I’ve been to see him.
He’s a ruined man. I don’t think he’s capable of putting into words
what he wants.’
    ‘Some people who looked at your house
would say that you were a ruined man.’
    Frieda thought Fearby might flare up at that
or say something defensive but he smiled. ‘Would say? People have said it already.
Starting with my wife and colleagues. My
ex
-colleagues.’
    ‘Is it worth it?’ said
Frieda.
    ‘I’m not asking for thanks. I
just need to know. Don’t you agree? When you saw those photographs of the girls,
didn’t you want to know what happened to them?’
    ‘Did it ever occur to you that there
may not be any link between the pictures on your wall, except that they’re just
poor, sad girls who went missing?’
    Fearby glanced at her. ‘I thought you
were supposed to be on my side.’
    ‘I’m not on anybody’s
side,’ Frieda said, with a frown, and then she relaxed. ‘Sometimes I think
I’m not even on my own side. Our brains are constructed so that we find patterns.
That’s why we see animal shapes in clouds. But really they’re just
clouds.’
    ‘Is that why you came all the way up
to Birmingham? And why we’re driving all the way back to London?’
    ‘My job is listening to the patterns
people make of their lives. Sometimes they’re damaging patterns, or self-serving,
or self-punishing, and sometimes they’re just wrong. Do you ever worry what would
happen if you discovered that you were wrong?’
    ‘Maybe life isn’t that
complicated. George Conley was convicted of murdering Hazel Barton. But he didn’t
do it. Which means someone else did. So, where in London are we going?’
    ‘I’ll put the address into your
satnav.’
    ‘You’ll like it,’ said
Fearby. ‘It’s got the voice of Marilyn Monroe. Well, someone imitating
Marilyn Monroe. Of course, that might not appeal to a woman as much a man. I mean the
idea of driving around with Marilyn Monroe. In fact, some women might find it quite
annoying.’
    Frieda punched in the address, and for the
next hour and a half, the car was guided down the M1, round the M25, by a voice that
didn’t really sound like Marilyn