Waiting for Wednesday

about what was going to happen.
    Frieda handed him a mug of tea and he took
several sips before putting the mug on the table.
    ‘Christ, I needed that,’ he
said. ‘Just before I told him, I felt as though I was in a dream. It was as if I
was standing in front of a large plate-glass window, holding a stone in my hand, round
and solid like a cricket ball. I was about to throw it at the window and I was looking
at the glass, smooth and straight, knowing that in a few seconds it would be lying on
the ground in jagged pieces.’ He stopped. Frieda was sitting down again with her
own mug of tea, still untouched. ‘You can see that I’m getting better. I
didn’t tell you not to analyse the image, not to read hidden meaning into it.
Except that I have now. But you know what I mean.’
    ‘How did he react?’ said
Frieda.
    ‘You mean what happened when the stone
hit the glass? It shattered, that’s what. He was devastated. He’d lost his
wife and it was as if I was taking her away from him all over again. At least he’d
had the memory of her and there I was contaminating it.’
    ‘You’re sounding too much like a
therapist,’ said Frieda.
    ‘That’s rich coming from you.
How can anyone be too much like a therapist?’ He took another sip of tea.
‘The more like a therapist everyone is, the more they’re in touch with their
feelings, the better.’
    ‘The only people who should be like
therapists are therapists,’ said Frieda. ‘And then only when they’re
at work. Policemen should be like policemen. So, to get back to myquestion, did he react in any way that was relevant to the investigation?’
    Karlsson put his mug down.
    ‘At first he denied it absolutely and
said how much he trusted her and that we’d made a mistake. Then Yvette spelled out
in detail what we’d learned about Paul Kerrigan, about the flat, about the days
when they met, about how long it had been going on. In the end, he saw reason. He
didn’t cry, he didn’t shout. He just looked almost empty.’
    ‘But did you get the impression that
he knew?’
    ‘I don’t know. I just
don’t know. How could it be possible? Ten years, eleven years. She was seeing this
man, having sex with him. How did he not smell him on her? How did he not see it in her
eyes?’
    ‘You think he must have suspected, at
least?’
    ‘Frieda, you sit there day after day
with people telling you their dark secrets. Do you ever just think that the clichés
about relationships turn out to be true? What it’s like to fall in love, what
it’s like to have a child, and then what it’s like to break up. The old
cliché, you can live with someone for years and you realize you don’t know
them.’
    ‘Who are we talking about now?’
Frieda asked.
    ‘Well, that was a bit of me, but
it’s mainly about Russell Lennox. What I hoped for, obviously, was that we’d
tell him about the affair, he’d break down, confess everything, case
closed.’
    ‘But he didn’t.’
    ‘I should have brought you.’
    ‘You make me sound like a
dog.’
    ‘I should have invited you to come. As
a favour. I’d like you to have been there to see his face at the moment I told
him. You notice these things.’
    ‘But Yvette was there.’
    ‘She’s worse than I am and
I’m bloody awful. You should ask my ex-wife. She’d say that I didn’t
know what she was feeling, and I’d say that if she wanted me to know what she was
feeling, she ought to tell me and … Well, you get the idea.’
    ‘If he could sit with you on the day
of the murder,’ Frieda said, ‘and not break down, then today would be no
problem for him. And I wouldn’t have been any help to you.’
    ‘Do you miss it?’ asked
Karlsson. ‘Be honest.’
    Frieda was silent for a long time.
    ‘I don’t know,’ she said.
‘Maybe. Sometimes I catch myself, like when I heard about Ruth Lennox’s
secret life. But I tried to stop myself.’
    ‘Oh, God,’ said Karlsson, with a
stab of alarm. ‘You’re meant to be recovering and here I am, trying to drag
you back into what nearly killed you.’
    ‘No! It’s not like that at all.
It’s good to see you. It feels like a visit from the outside world. Some of the
visits I have from the outside world are bad but this is one of the good
ones.’
    ‘Yes,’ said Karlsson.
‘Listen, Frieda. I’ve only just discovered about that bloody scam. I’d
like to wring Hal Bradshaw’s pompous neck.’
    ‘That probably wouldn’t help my
cause.’
    ‘He’s got it in for