Waiting for Wednesday

together when you found out,
weren’t you?’ asked Frieda. ‘But since then have you talked about it
to each other?’ Neither of them spoke. ‘Have you talked to
anyone?’
    ‘You mean someone like you?’
    ‘A friend or a relative or someone
like me.’
    ‘She’s dead. Words don’t
change that. We’re sad. Words won’t change that.’
    ‘There’s this woman the police
sent,’ said Judith.
    ‘Oh, yes.’ Ted’s voice was
raw with contempt. ‘Her. She nods all the time as if she has some deep
understanding of our pain. It’s crap. It makes me want to throw up.’ There
were hectic blotches on his cheeks. He tipped himself back on his chair so he was
balanced on only one of its legs and spun himself slowly.
    ‘Mum hated it when he did that.’
Judith waved at her brother. ‘It was like a family thing.’
    ‘Now I can do it as much as I want and
no one will bother about it.’
    ‘No,’ said Frieda. ‘I
agree with your mother about that. It is very irritating. And dangerous.’
    ‘Can we go home, please? I don’t
want to leave Dad on his own with Louise being all sad and disapproving.’ She
faltered. There were tears in her eyes and she blinked them away. ‘I think we
should go home,’ she repeated.
    Ted lowered his chair and stood up, a
spindly, scruffy figure. ‘OK, then. Thanks for the toast.’
    ‘That’s all right.’
    ‘Bye,’ said Judith.
    ‘Goodbye.’
    ‘Can we come again?’
Judith’s voice was suddenly tremulous.
    ‘Yes.’ Chloë’s voice was
loud and energetic. ‘Any time, day or night. We’re here for you –
aren’t we, Frieda?’
    ‘Yes,’ said Frieda, a little
wearily.
    She trudged upstairs to the bathroom. The
bath was there in all its glory. She turned on the taps and they worked. But there was
no plug. She looked under the bath and in the cupboard, but it wasn’t there. The
plug in the washbasin was toosmall, and the one in the kitchen was an
irritating metal kind that didn’t have a chain but twisted down. She
couldn’t have a bath, after all.
    Karlsson and Yvette arrived at the Lennox
house shortly after Judith had left. The shouting was over, and in its place there was a
curdled silence, an air of unease. Russell Lennox was in his study, sitting at his desk
and staring blindly out of the window; Dora was in her room, no longer sobbing but lying
curled into a ball, her face still wet and swollen from tears. Louise Weller had been
cleaning up. She had washed the kitchen floor, vacuumed the stairs, and was just about
to make a start on some of her sister’s clothes, when the doorbell rang.
    ‘We need to look through Mrs
Lennox’s things one more time,’ explained Yvette.
    ‘I was making a start on her
clothes.’
    ‘Perhaps not just yet,’ Karlsson
told her. ‘We’ll tell you when you can do that.’
    ‘Another thing. The family want to
know when the funeral can be.’
    ‘It won’t be long. We should be
able to tell you in the next day or so.’
    ‘It’s not right.’
    Karlsson felt an impulse to say something
rude back to her but he replied blandly that it was difficult for everybody.
    They made their way upstairs, into the
bedroom that the Lennoxes had shared for more than twenty years. There were signs of
Louise Weller’s work: there were several plastic bags full of shoes, and she
seemed to have emptied most of the small amount of makeup Ruth had owned into the
waste-paper bin.
    ‘What are we looking for?’ asked
Yvette. ‘They’ve been through all this.’
    ‘I don’t know. There’s
probably nothing. But this is a family full of secrets. What else don’t we know
about?’
    ‘The trouble is, there’s so
much,’ said Yvette. ‘She kept everything. Should we look through all those
boxes in the loft with her children’s reports in? And what about the various
computers? We’ve been through theirs, of course, but each child has a laptop and
there are a few old ones that obviously don’t work any more but haven’t been
thrown away.’
    ‘Here’s a woman who for ten
years met her lover in their flat. Did she have a key? Or any documents at all that
would shed light on this? Did she really never send or receive emails or texts?
I’ve taken it for granted that this affair must have something to do with her
death but perhaps there’s something else.’
    Yvette gave a sarcastic smile. ‘As in,
if she was capable of adultery, what else might she have done?’
    ‘That’s not exactly what I
meant.’
    Standing in the bedroom,