Waiting for Wednesday

‘Is funny in
Ukrainian.’
    ‘So where are we?’ said
Frieda.
    ‘It is finished today, even if I kill
myself to finish it. This evening you will have a bath in your own beautiful
bath.’
    ‘Good,’ said Frieda.
    ‘And Chloë? She is staying
here?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ said
Frieda. ‘I need to find out what’s going on. We’ll see.’
    Josef looked at Frieda with a concerned
expression. ‘You are not angry,’ he said. ‘You should be
angry.’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    Josef gestured around him. ‘I tried to
make you better with your new bath but it is difficult to help. And I make things worse
for you.’
    ‘It wasn’t your fault
–’
    ‘Stop. The bath didn’t come,
then came and went away again. And the electricity stopped.’
    ‘Now that
was
irritating.’
    ‘You need help and I make it worse for
you and now Chloë is here. I saw upstairs and there is her things everywhere in your
study.’
    ‘Is there? Oh, God, I haven’t
been up there. Is it bad?’
    ‘Is bad. There is girl things and
clothes all over your things. Apple cores too. Wet towels. Mugs growing things inside.
But I am saying, you should be angry. You should be hitting out. Fighting,
no?’
    ‘I’m not angry, Josef. Or maybe
I’m too tired to be angry.’ She relapsed into silence. ‘But that bath
had better be done by this evening or else –’
    A ringtone went off and it took Frieda a
moment to realize it was her own. It came from her jacket, which was draped over a
chair. She fumbled through the pockets until she found it. She heard a woman’s
voice: ‘Is that Frieda Klein?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘This is Agnes Flint. You left a
message.’
    As soon as Jim Fearby saw the photograph,
he sensed he could cross her off his list. Clare Boyle was – had been – a round-faced
girl, with frizzy blonde hair. Her mother had sat him down and brought him tea and cake,
then had produced a handful of photographs from a drawer. Valerie Boyle settled down in
the armchair opposite and talked about how her daughter had always been difficult.
    ‘Did she ever run away?’ Fearby
asked.
    ‘She got in with the wrong
crowd,’ Valerie said. ‘Sometimes she’d stay out all night. Sometimes
even for a few days. When I got upset she just flared up. There was nothing I could
do.’
    Fearby put his notebook down. Really, he
could leave now, but he had to stay long enough to be polite. He looked at Valerie
Boyle. He felt he could classify these mothers by now. Some of them had grief like a
chronic illness; they were grey with it, had fine lines scratched in their faces, a
deadness in the eyes as if there was nothing worth looking at. Then there were women
like this one. Valerie Boyle had a quavering quality, a sense of flinching from a blow
that might come at any moment, as if she were in the middle of an embarrassing scene
that might turn nasty.
    ‘Was there trouble at home?’
Fearby asked.
    ‘No, no,’ she said quickly.
‘She had some problems with her dad. He could turn a bit violent. But, like I
said, she was difficult. Then she just disappeared. The police never did that
much.’
    Fearby wondered if it had just been
violence, or whether it had been sex as well. And the woman in front of him; had she
stood by and watched it happen? In the end there wouldhave been
nothing for the girl to do but escape. She was probably somewhere in London, one of the
thousands of young people who’d had to escape, one way or another. Perhaps she was
with one of the ‘wrong crowd’ her mother had talked about. Fearby silently
wished her luck.
    But when Fearby drove up to the little
estate just outside Stafford, he knew he was on to something. The group of houses was
just a few minutes’ drive out of town but also semi-rural, surrounded by scrubby
open spaces, playing fields, some woods. He saw signs for footpaths. This was more like
it. Daisy Logan’s mother was unwilling to let him in; she talked through the
barely open door with the chain still attached. Fearby explained that he was a
journalist, that he wanted to find out what had happened to her daughter, that he would
only be a minute, but she was immovable. She said she didn’t want to talk about
it. It had been seven years. The police had given up. They’d put it behind
them.
    ‘Just a couple of minutes,’ said
Fearby. ‘One minute.’
    ‘What is it you want?’
    Fearby got a glimpse of haunted dark eyes.
He was used to it by now, but sometimes he felt the odd pang, that he was