Waiting for Wednesday

been with Judith that afternoon.’
    ‘He killed Zach to save me,’
said Ted, in a low voice.
    ‘If he wasn’t caught, your alibi
was safe. If he was, he could say he did it in an argument.’
    ‘What will happen to him
now?’
    ‘I don’t know, Ted.’
    ‘Is he going to say he killed Mum as
well, to save me?’
    ‘I think he will if he has to.
It’s all a bit of a muddle at the moment, because of Elaine Kerrigan’s
intervention.’
    ‘Will you tell the police?’
    ‘No,’ said Frieda, thoughtfully.
‘I don’t think I will.’
    ‘Why?’
    Frieda stopped and turned to him. She looked
at him with her dark eyes. ‘Because you are going to.’
    ‘No,’ he whispered. ‘I
can’t … I never meant to … I can’t.’
    ‘What’s it been like?’
said Frieda. ‘These last weeks.’
    ‘Like being in hell,’ he said,
the words barely audible.
    ‘That’s where you’ll be
for ever, unless you speak the truth.’
    ‘How can I? My mother. I killed my
mother.’ He jerked to a pause, and then dragged the words back again. ‘I
killed my mother. I can see her face.’ He repeated the words wildly: ‘I can
see her face, her smashed-in face. All the time.’
    ‘This is the only way. It won’t
make things better. You will always be the person who killed his mother. You will always
carry that with you, until the day you die. But you have to admit what you
did.’
    ‘Will I go to prison?’
    ‘Does that matter?’
    ‘I wish I could tell her –’
    ‘What would you tell her?’
    ‘That I love her. That I’m
sorry.’
    ‘You can tell her.’
    The street had swung round in a crescent and
now they were back on the road where Louise Weller lived. Ted stopped and drew a deep,
unsteady breath.
    ‘We don’t need to go back in
there,’ said Frieda. ‘We can just go to the station.’
    He stared at her, his young face stricken
with dread. ‘Will you come with me?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Because I don’t think I can do
it alone.’
    Frieda had walked through London many times,
but she couldn’t remember a walk so ghostly and so strange. It felt that crowds
separated as they passed, and their footsteps rang out in the fugitive grey light. After
a while, she put herarm through Ted’s and he drew closer to
her, like a child with his mother. She thought of Judith and Dora in that dark, tidy,
airless house, their father locked away, their brother too – this young, horror-struck
man. Everyone alone in their own terror and grief.
    At last they were there. Ted drew apart from
her. Beads of sweat had sprung up on his forehead and there was a dazed expression on
his face. Frieda put a hand on the small of his back.
    ‘This is it,’ she said. And they
went inside together.
    Karlsson had just gone back in to Russell
Lennox when Yvette put her head round the door and beckoned him out again.
    ‘What is it?’
    ‘I thought you should know at once.
Frieda’s here, with the Lennox boy.’
    ‘With Ted?’
    ‘Yes. She says that he has something
important to say to you.’
    ‘OK. Tell them I’ll come
now.’
    ‘And Elaine Kerrigan is still
insisting she did it.’
    Karlsson went back into the room.
‘I’ll be back shortly,’ he said to Russell Lennox. ‘But
apparently your son’s here to see me.’
    ‘My son? Ted? No. No, he can’t
be. No –’
    ‘Mr Lennox, what is it?’
    ‘I did it. I’ll tell you
everything. I killed my wife. I killed Ruth. Sit down. Turn on the tape recorder. I want
to confess. Don’t go. I did it. No one else. It was me. You have to believe me. I
murdered my wife. I swear to God it was me.’
    Ted lifted his burning eyes and stared at
Karlsson full in the face. For the first time, Karlsson felt a stillness about him, asense of concentrated purpose. The boy took a breath and then said in
a clear and ringing voice: ‘I am here to confess to the murder of my mother. Who I
loved very much …’



FIFTY-EIGHT
    Josef was sitting in the kitchen with Chloë,
playing some card game that involved lots of shouting and slapping of cards one on top
of another when Frieda returned. Even as she was considering how to break the news to
her niece, she had time to wonder why Chloë was in her house when she should have been
at school, and think of how, from being her secure retreat from the world, it had become
a casual meeting place for everyone, a place of disorder and grief. Perhaps, she
thought, she would replace all the locks when this was over. She looked at Josef.
‘Could Chloë