Waiting for Wednesday

portfolio. ‘I’ve brought you this.’
    ‘You thought I might be worrying about
where it was? I’ve had other things on my mind.’
    ‘I know. DCI Karlsson told me that
your father has confessed to the manslaughter of Zach Greene and he’s under
suspicion of murdering your mother.’
    His face twisted violently and he turned
away from her. His thin, dirty figure reeked of misery and wretchedness.
    ‘I’ve also been told that Elaine
Kerrigan has confessed, though I think she might be trying to protect her
sons.’
    ‘Jesus,’ he muttered.
    ‘I’d like to say something, but
maybe we can get out of here for a bit,’ suggested Frieda.
    ‘There’s nothing to
say.’
    ‘Please.’
    They went outside together. Frieda thought
she saw a face staring at them out of a high window, but perhaps she was imagining
things. She waited until they turned off the road on to a narrower street, which ran
along a deserted playground and then beside a small grey church, before speaking.
    ‘I was looking at your art,’ she
said. ‘You’re good.’
    ‘That’s what my mum used to say.
“Ted, you’ve got a gift.” Is that what you’ve come to tell
me?’
    ‘I saw the still-life you did for your
mock exam. On the morning your mother died.’
    Ted said nothing. They continued walking in
silence down the street. It felt like everybody had gone away and only they were
left.
    ‘There was a strange object I
didn’t recognize at first,’ said Frieda. Her voice sounded dry and scratchy.
She cleared herthroat. ‘You’d drawn it from an
interesting angle, so it took me some time to see what it was. I went to the evidence
room to check.’
    Ted had slowed. He dragged his feet as
though they were too heavy for him.
    ‘You can only see the cog as it
appears in your drawing if you tip it sideways and back. Then it flattens out, into what
looks more like a ruler.’
    ‘Yes,’ said Ted, in what sounded
more like a shudder than a word. ‘We had riddle books like that when I was a boy.
I used to love them. I Spy …’
    Frieda put her hand on Ted’s shoulder
and he looked at her. ‘Your father knew you’d taken the cog to school that
morning. When it turned up as the murder weapon, he knew it couldn’t have been
there until you brought it back.’
    ‘He never said.’ Ted spoke in a
dull voice. ‘I thought it could be all right, that nobody would ever
know.’
    ‘You discovered about your
mother’s affair?’
    ‘I’d suspected for ages,’
Ted said drearily. ‘I followed her that day, on my bike. I saw her go to the flat
and a man open the door. I left her there and I wandered around for ages, in a kind of
fog. I couldn’t really think and I felt sick. I thought I would be sick. I went
home and I was putting the fucking cog back on the mantelpiece when she came in.’
He put one hand up to his face for a moment, touching his skin. ‘When I was
little, I thought she was the best person in the whole wide world. Safe and kind.
She’d tuck me into bed every night and she always had the same smell. She looked
at me and I looked at her, and I knew she knew that I’d found out. She
didn’t say anything at once, and then she gave me this odd little smile. So I
swung the thing in my hand and it hit her, smack, on the side of her head. I can still
hear the sound it made. Loud and dull. For one moment, it seemed likenothing had happened and she was still looking at me and I was looking at her and
there was this funny smile on her face and then – she seemed to explode in front of my
eyes. Blood everywhere and she didn’t look like my mother any more. She was lying
on the floor and her face was mashed up and I was still holding the cog and it was
all …’
    ‘So you ran away.’
    ‘I went to the park and I was sick. I
was so sick and I’ve felt sick ever since. Every moment. Nothing takes the taste
away.’
    ‘And then Judith gave you an
alibi?’
    ‘I was going to confess. What else
could I do? But then the murder weapon had gone and everyone was saying it was a
burglary gone wrong and Judith was begging me to say I’d been with her that
afternoon. So I went along with it. I didn’t work anything out in
advance.’
    ‘You do understand that your father
planned Zach’s murder, don’t you, Ted? It wasn’t manslaughter. It was
murder. Once Judith came to him and told him about her affair and that she’d been
with Zach on the day your mother died, he knew your alibi would be broken. Zach would
say he’d