Waiting for Wednesday

still didn’t come. ‘Are you all right for things at the moment?
Anything I can get you?’
    Conley shrugged. Fearby said goodbye and
that he’d be in touch. In the old days he would have driven home however late it
was, but since his wife had left him and the children had gone, he usually made a day of
it. People joked about the hotels at motorway service stations, but they suited him.
He’d got a cheap deal at this one. Thirty-two pounds fifty.Free
parking. Coffee and tea in the room. A colour TV. Clean. Except for the paper flap
across the toilet bowl, there was no sign that anyone else had ever been in there.
    He had the usual luggage. His little
suitcase. His laptop. And the bag with the files. The real files were back at home. They
filled most of his office. These were the ones he needed for reference: the basic names
and numbers and facts, a few photos and statements. As always, his first action was to
take the purple pending file from the bag and open it on the little desk next to the
colour TV. While the miniature white plastic kettle was starting to heat up, he took a
new sheet of lined paper, wrote the date and time of the meeting at the top and noted
everything that had been said.
    When he had finished, he made himself a cup
of instant coffee and removed a biscuit from its plastic wrapping. It was then that he
remembered his first visit to Conley at Mortlemere. ‘This is the beginning,’
he’d said, ‘not the end.’ He looked at the file. He thought of the
room full of files at home. He thought of his marriage, the squabbles, the silences and
then the ending. It had seemed sudden, but it turned out that Sandra had been planning
it for months, finding a new flat, talking to a solicitor. ‘What will you do when
it ends?’ she had said – referring not to their marriage but to this case, in the
days when they still talked of such things. It was more like an accusation than a
question. Because there never really were endings. He’d been thinking he could
produce a new edition of his book if Conley was released. But it felt wrong now. The
book was just negatives: why this hadn’t happened, why that wasn’t true, why
this was misleading.
    The question now was different and new: if
George Conley hadn’t killed Hazel Barton, who had?



ELEVEN
    ‘Northern countries,’ said Josef.
‘They all drink the same.’
    ‘What do you mean, drink the
same?’
    Josef was driving Frieda in his old van.
They were on the way to Islington because Olivia had rung in a near-hysterical state to
say that the washbasin in the upstairs bathroom had been ripped off the wall during the
party and she needed it repaired. Urgently. And she was never, ever going to have
teenagers in her house again. Josef had agreed to abandon the bathroom briefly to help
Olivia. Frieda felt strangely torn in her emotional reaction. There was Josef taking a
break from doing up her bathroom for nothing in order to help her sister-in-law. Not for
nothing: Frieda would insist on that, if she had to pay for it herself. At the same time
he was constantly in her house, which had stopped being her own. And each time she
looked at what once had been her bathroom, its state seemed to be getting worse rather
than better.
    ‘In the south, they drink wine and
stay upright. In the north they drink clear liquid and fall down.’
    ‘You mean they drink to get
drunk.’
    ‘Forget cares, lose sorrow, escape
darkness.’
    Josef swerved to avoid a man who stepped
blithely out into the road, his ears encased in giant yellow headphones.
    ‘So, at this party, were there lots of
people drinking clear liquid and falling down?’
    ‘They learn too young.’ Josef
gave a huge, sentimental sigh. ‘The recovery position.’
    ‘That sounds ominous.’
    ‘No. no. This is just life. People fight,
people dance, people kiss and hold, people talk about dreams, people break things,
people are sick.’
    ‘All in a few hours.’
    ‘Chloë, she did not have such a good
time.’
    ‘Really?’
    ‘She kept trying to clear the mess. No
one should clear the mess before the party is over. Except for broken glass.’
    Josef drew up outside Olivia’s house
and they got out of the van. Olivia opened the door before Frieda rang. She was wearing
a man’s dressing-gown and her face was tragic.
    ‘I just had to go to bed,’ she
said. ‘Everything’s such a mess.’
    ‘It was quite a mess before,’
said Frieda. ‘You said you wouldn’t notice a bit extra.’
    ‘I