Thursday's Children (14 page)

‘That’s right. It was my first posting.’ He spoke slowly, as if he was worried about committing himself.

‘You interviewed me.’

‘I did?’ His expression was wary. What was coming?

‘I was fifteen years old and I reported that I had been
raped by a stranger in my own house. I was interviewed and some other people were interviewed as well. I don’t expect you to remember it.’

Helmsley was frowning with concentration but then his expression changed. He became paler. ‘Yes, I do remember it.’

‘What do you remember?’

He sat back in his chair and folded his arms tightly across his chest so that his suit ruffled up and suddenly seemed too small for him. Frieda recognized it as a gesture she often saw in her patients. It was sometimes interpreted as a way of fending off the outside world, of refusing intimacy. But Frieda also saw it as a sign of vulnerability, as if the person was trying to construct a feeble, useless hiding place, with their own arms.

‘First,’ Helmsley said, ‘where are you going with this?’

‘If you’ve any worries about me, you can phone Karlsson back and check with him. You can do it right now, if you want. This isn’t about you or the investigation. I just want some information. But when I mentioned the interview and you remembered it, it didn’t look like it was a happy memory.’

‘It must be worse for you,’ said Helmsley.

‘I’m not here as a traumatized victim. Just tell me what you remember.’

‘I’ve done courses. That’s what you do as you work your way up the ladder. You go on courses, away days, lectures. Some of them are a waste of time and some of them aren’t. A few years ago we had one about the handling of sexual-assault cases. We heard from some specialist officers, a psychologist and a victim.
Two
victims. A lot of things were said, some of it not what you’d expect.’

‘About what?’

‘About post-traumatic stress disorder, about the interviewing of complainants. In the middle of one of the PowerPoints, I suddenly remembered that case. I mean, your case. It was the first of its kind I ever dealt with. And what I felt, what I mainly felt, is that I can’t believe they let us loose on it. We were just a couple of kids, me and Jeff. That’s the other officer who interviewed you.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

Helmsley looked at Frieda more carefully, as if he were sizing her up. ‘If you’re planning some sort of legal action, then this conversation is probably a bad idea. From my point of view, I mean.’

‘I promise you, I’m not after anything like that. So …’

‘I have a feeling, and I might be wrong about this, that we didn’t handle the interview the way we should have.’ He seemed to be waiting for Frieda to say something but she stayed silent so, after a pause, he continued. ‘I thought you were this confident – what’s the word? feisty? – teenage girl. That’s probably the way teenage girls looked to me when I was that age. It was only all those years later that I thought what it must have been like from your side of the table, what it must have been like for a child to go into a police station and say what you said. And then when you’d said it, you were hauled into an interview room and treated as if you were the criminal. I can’t remember all the details.’

‘I just read the file,’ said Frieda.

Helmsley’s pale face grew even paler. ‘So we probably asked you about things … well, you know …’

‘Like my sex life?’ said Frieda. ‘Whether I was a virgin? Whether I had a boyfriend? Was I on the Pill?’

‘Sorry.’

‘And then the investigation went nowhere.’

‘Most of them do.’

‘You mean rape investigations or any investigations at all?’

‘Both, I guess. But …’ He seemed to struggle as if the word was difficult to get out. ‘Rape is always going to be a special case.’

‘Because it’s one person’s word against another.’

‘That’s one reason.’

‘This particular case got stopped especially quickly.’

‘Is that right?’

‘Well, I’m not an expert, but it didn’t seem to proceed beyond some very preliminary interviews.’

‘I only remember my interview with you.’

‘What I noticed,’ said Frieda, ‘as I read through the report was that someone else had gone through it, commenting and underlining. He didn’t seem very positive about the investigation. He signed with the initials SF. I was curious about who that might be.’

Helmsley picked up his fruit juice and took a slow sip. He put the glass back on the table. ‘When I first joined the force, my life wouldn’t have been worth living if I’d been spotted with a Britvic. It was whisky and beer. Whisky with beer. Christ, I don’t know how we all survived it.’

‘The good old days,’ said Frieda.

‘There was something to be said for them.’ He looked down at his drink as if he was considering whether to pick it up. ‘Stuart Faulkner.’

‘What?’

‘That’s your SF. He was the DCI, doing the job I do now.’

‘Do you remember his role in the case?’

‘You saw the file. As far as I remember he wasn’t really involved. He was probably on another case. We did the early interviews, then he turned up, read through the file, had a word with us and told us to drop it.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t want to keep saying this but rape isn’t like other crimes. With burglaries, assault, it’s about catching people, building a case. With rape, before anything else, you have to decide whether a crime has actually taken place. Once you’ve decided that, you can set about finding the perpetrator, assembling the evidence.’

‘And your boss thought a crime hadn’t been committed?’

‘It sounds bad, saying it to you.’

‘But he thought I’d made it up.’

‘I can’t speak for the actual details.’

‘When I read his comments, I thought they seemed to come from someone who had made his mind up from the beginning that the case didn’t amount to anything.’

‘That’s the job. Sometimes you get it right, sometimes you get it wrong.’

‘Stuart Faulkner,’ said Frieda.

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know where I can find him?’

He started to speak, then hesitated. ‘Probably. It’s just …’

‘I’m not angry about this. Do I strike you as someone who’s out for revenge?’

‘I don’t know what that would look like. I’ll see what I can do and then I’ll call you.’

‘Thank you.’ Frieda was going to get up, and then a thought occurred to her. ‘Do you know how old he would be now?’

‘I don’t, really. Early sixties, maybe.’

‘Are you in touch with him?’

‘I haven’t seen him for twenty years. He wasn’t a bad guy. Old school.’

Now Frieda stood up and held out her hand.

‘I’m sorry. If we let you down.’

‘I’m sure you did what you had to do. But what I really need is that number.’

When Frieda came out of the pub, Josef wasn’t there and she had to phone him. Unfortunately, there was a problem with the van.

When they finally started on their way, the van still wasn’t right. It kept hiccuping, lurching Frieda and Josef forward in their seats.

‘Is block in petrol supply,’ Josef explained cheerfully.

‘Will we get back all right?’

‘Oh, yes.’ He patted the steering wheel as if it were a horse that was spooking. ‘All good.’

They jerked their way back towards Braxton under dark, rolling clouds. The sky looked heavy, and soon large drops were landing on the windscreen. Josef turned on the wipers, whose frayed rubber edges made squeaky, unsatisfactory attempts to sweep the water away. He leaned forward to squint through the clear patches, seeming unperturbed.

As they entered Braxton, Frieda touched his shoulder. ‘Would it be possible for us to call in on my mother?’

‘Mother?’ The van hiccuped.

‘Yes. She’s ill.’

‘You have an ill mother in this place?’

‘Yes.’

‘We must see your mother,’ said Josef, excitedly. ‘At once. Is she bad?’

‘She’s dying.’

‘Dying? Your mother is dying here?’

‘Yes.’

‘Frieda,’ he said, his face shining with solemn fervour, ‘I do anything.’

‘Just take the next left,’ said Frieda. ‘We won’t be long.’

‘However much time is OK.’

They stood together in the driving rain, Josef at Frieda’s shoulder peering expectantly at the entrance where Frieda’s dying mother would appear. But there was no reply. Frieda rang the bell once more, then took out the key she’d had cut for herself and opened the door. They stepped into the hall. Junk mail lay on the floor, along with a postcard and a bill. She stooped and picked them up. There was a strange smell, sweet and slightly rancid. Going into the kitchen she saw that the flowers she had left the last time she was here had been put into a glass vase, but without water, and now they had withered and died. An opened tin of tuna stood on the side, letting out a greasy, fishy smell. She picked up flowers and fish and dropped them into the bin. It was no longer gleamingly neat and tidy in there. There were dirty plates on the table, half a carton of milk. Frieda sniffed it. It was sour. The sink was filled with cold brown water. There was a scrap of paper on the side that was headed ‘Things to Do’ in her mother’s handwriting. Underneath, there was nothing.

‘Wait here,’ said Frieda to Josef.

She went into the living room. The television was on with the volume turned down. She went up the stairs and into Juliet’s bedroom. There was a smell of abandonment and neglect. Juliet was lying in bed, her hands gathered beneath her throat, her hair awry, her usually immaculate face smudged with old makeup. She was awake, staring glassily at the ceiling.

‘Hello,’ said Frieda.

Juliet didn’t answer. She gave a single dry blink. Frieda could almost hear the brush of her lashes on her cheek.

‘Are you all right?’

She gave a laugh that was almost a gasp, but she still didn’t take her gaze from the ceiling. ‘That’s funny. I’m dying, or had you forgotten?’

‘How are you feeling?’

‘I have a growth in my brain.’

‘I know.’

Juliet turned her face and fixed Frieda with a harsh, bright gaze. ‘Why did you come back?’

‘We can talk about that later. Tell me what’s wrong.’

‘I was all right before you came. Now I’m dying.’

‘You were dying before I came,’ Frieda began, but then stopped. What was the point? ‘Are you in pain?’ she asked instead.

‘Sometimes,’ Juliet said, in a fierce, low voice. ‘Sometimes, Frieda, it’s better not to
know
. Not to know about your brain tumour, or your husband, or what your friends think, or what happened to your daughter when she was sixteen. I
don’t want to know
.’

‘But –’

‘I don’t want to. Rubbing my nose.’ She looked a bit startled by the phrase. ‘I’ll start dribbling soon,’ she said, ‘and talking gibberish.’

‘I’d like to talk to you about your health regime and what the doctors have told you –’

‘I don’t want to.’ She cut Frieda off. ‘I don’t want to talk about it and I don’t want to talk to you. You just trail disaster in your wake.’

That was so close to what Frieda thought about herself that she didn’t respond, just pressed the base of her nose between her finger and thumb and waited for her feeling of helpless anger to subside.

‘Go away,’ said Juliet. She gave a half-sob, like a retch. And then she said, in a voice that sounded unlike her usual one, ‘Fuck off and leave me in peace.’

Frieda stared at her in astonishment: she had never heard her mother swear. Juliet herself seemed surprised.

At that point, Frieda’s phone vibrated in her pocket. She took it out and saw it was an unknown caller.

‘Answer it,’ said Juliet.

She heard a hoarse voice she didn’t recognize.

‘Frieda?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s Lewis. Lewis Temple.’

Frieda spun on her heel away from her mother’s eyes, and looked out of the window now where the rain was splashing against the panes.

‘Someone told me you were back,’ he said. Back, as if it had always been her destiny to return one day. ‘And that you’d asked after me. So I got your number from them and thought I’d ring.’

Eva, thought Frieda, wryly. Or maybe Vanessa; even Ewan. Although Lewis hadn’t been strictly a part of their group (he was older than all of them, druggier, poorer), this was Braxton, where everyone knew everyone else and where news was blown around the town by the hot wind of gossip.

‘Can I call you back in a couple of minutes?’ Frieda asked.

‘Why not? It’s been twenty-three years, what’s a few minutes more matter?’

Frieda switched the phone off and turned back to her mother. ‘Can I get you something?’ she asked. Juliet shrugged. ‘Some tea, perhaps. And when did you last eat?’ Again, the shrug and the hostile stare. ‘I’ll get you some tea and toast then.’

‘Go away, Frieda.’

‘Is that what you want?’

‘Yes.’

‘All right.’

She went into Juliet’s small study and called Lewis back.

‘So,’ he said. ‘What happens now?’

‘Do you want to meet?’

There was a silence. She heard a match rasp against its box, his deep intake of breath, and could see him drawing smoke deep into his scorched lungs, his cheeks hollowing, flakes of tobacco on his lower lip.

‘Why not?’ he said. ‘When?’

‘What are you doing now?’

‘I’m on my way to a call-out. But I can always make a diversion. For old times’ sake.’

Downstairs, she found Josef standing at the sink, washing dishes. He looked contented and at home.

‘We’re going,’ said Frieda.

‘We only just come now.’

‘I know. But she doesn’t want me here. And there’s something I need to do. Someone I’ve arranged to meet. You can drive back to London. I’m really grateful, Josef.’

He shook his head. ‘I stay.’

‘There’s no room in my shed. It’s tiny, for one person.’

‘I stay here.’ He gestured at the kitchen. ‘Make things nicer for your sick mother.’

‘She’s not in a good mood, Josef.’

‘I stay and cheer her. Make soup with barley. You come back later.’

‘But you’ve never even met her!’

‘I stay,’ he repeated.

Frieda gave up.

She had arranged to meet Lewis in the coffee shop that she had gone to after her visit to the police station. It wasn’t really Lewis’s kind of place. He would hate the chocolate-box landscapes on the walls, and he had never been one for tea and scones. She arrived before him. The woman who had served her before was there again and recognized her at once. Frieda ordered a pot of tea and cake to go with it.

Three women bustled through the doorway, carrying shopping bags, their hair damp from the rain. Then a gaunt man with peppery hair and a pale face meshed with lines entered, letting the door slam behind him. He was wearing a long overcoat and had a scarf wrapped several times round his neck. Frieda thought he looked like a cross between an artist and a homeless person. He glanced around him, his eyes flicking from table to table until they came to rest on Frieda. Then he smiled.

Later, Frieda tried to separate out the emotions that had run through her when she understood that this stooped, meagre man was Lewis. She felt a kind of sorrow at what the years had done to him. She remembered him as he had been the last time she’d seen him, strong and gorgeous with his shock of hair and his white teeth, his dandyish second-hand clothes. She saw herself through his eyes, middle-class, well-off, entitled Frieda Klein, sitting in this comfy little
establishment with a cup of tea in her hand. She tried to keep her expression neutral. ‘Thanks for coming out like this. You must be wet through.’

‘Are we going to talk about the weather?’ He raised his eyebrows mockingly at her and sat down, not taking off his coat or scarf and stretching out his legs in their balding corduroy trousers. She felt he was making a self-conscious display of his shabby clothes, his creased face, his poverty, and daring her to react.

‘How have you been?’

‘You mean, since we last met?’ He gave his laugh again. She could practically hear his lungs crackling. She wondered what drugs he took now. When she had known him he’d experimented with anything that came his way; an oblivion-seeker. His recklessness had, she supposed, been part of his glamour. Now he just looked worn out, bashed about by life.

‘I suppose so.’

‘You first. Though you look as though you’ve done just fine.’

‘I’m a psychotherapist now.’

‘I’m an electrician.’

‘You were always good at science. I live in London.’

‘I live here, nearby.’

‘So you never did get to leave?’

‘Not yet.’

Frieda beckoned the waitress over. ‘Tea?’ she asked Lewis.

He grimaced. ‘OK.’

‘Cake?’

‘No cake, Frieda.’

The way he said her name brought his young self back to her. For a moment she sat in the dazzle of memory.

‘My mother is dying,’ she said.

‘Is she? I’m sorry. How she hated me, though.’

‘She thought you were leading me astray.’

‘Ah, well, maybe I was. Though I always thought you were the leader. I just followed you, anywhere.’

They smiled at each other suddenly. It was odd, thought Frieda, how she felt more comfortable with this damaged man than with the other characters from her past.

‘I’m going to be here on and off,’ continued Frieda. ‘I wanted to make contact with people I used to know.’ She didn’t like misleading Lewis, but thought of Becky and pressed on. ‘There are things in the past that trouble me.’

‘Unfinished business.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Why did you run away?’

‘It’s complicated.’

‘Who did you run away from? Your old ma? Your dead dad? Me? Was it me?’ He lifted his eyebrows. She saw he had a miniature puckering scar running down from the corner of one eye. A fight, perhaps; a fall.

‘Maybe from all of those.’ And more, she thought.

‘You never explained.’

‘I don’t think I had the words.’

‘So you went your way and I went mine.’

The tea arrived and they waited until the woman serving them had gone away again.

‘Things had unravelled a bit,’ said Frieda, carefully.

‘Whatever that means.’

‘I’ve been wondering.’ She could think of no way to approach this subtly. ‘Shortly before I went away, someone broke into our house.’ She couldn’t recall exactly what the
pretext had been for the police investigation. ‘Do you remember?’

‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. Or, at least, I have a dim memory. But, then, I’ve had a few run-ins with the police over the years.’ He smiled; his teeth were crooked. ‘Maybe it’s all merged. What kind of break-in?’

‘Someone got into the house,’ Frieda said. Footsteps in her room, the breath on her face, the television downstairs.

‘What’s that got to do with you leaving?’

‘I wanted to know if you remembered. I’ve been thinking about everything, trying to get things clear. That concert everyone went to: Thursday’s Children.’

Lewis looked at her vaguely. ‘It’s no use asking me to remember little things like that,’ he said, self-mocking. ‘How do I know what I was doing twenty-something years ago? I’ve destroyed most of the brain cells I used to have.’

‘You used to love that band.’

He broke into a little hum that Frieda supposed was from one of their songs, then stopped and frowned at her.

‘I was going to go with you,’ she continued. ‘It was the biggest thing to happen in Braxton since, well, since the witch was burned probably. But we had a violent row just before.’

‘We had lots of those.’

‘This was the worst.’

‘What was it about?’

‘I can’t remember. I know that we said terrible things to each other.’ She had a sudden flashback: Lewis standing opposite her, his fist clenched and his boy’s face contorted with fury and distress. ‘So I stormed off and went home to bed.’

‘And I went to the concert without you.’ He was suddenly
subdued, almost wretched. ‘I remember that like it just happened.’

‘Do you remember the concert itself?’

‘A few bits, but it’s all tangled up. I remember you, though. Little things. That bike ride we went on. You made jam sandwiches with stale white bread and we climbed up a rock and looked out over the sea and ate them, and I rolled a joint and there were seagulls diving down at us. It was nice. One of those nice days that stay with you.’ He gave a little shake of his head, like someone getting rid of an unwelcome thought. ‘And I remember you saying to me once that nobody’s meddling could come between us. We were stronger than that.’

‘Did I?’

‘Then you buggered off.’ He snapped his fingers in the air. The three women looked up from their table curiously. ‘I remember that too. One day you were kissing me in the cemetery, and then you were refusing to have anything to do with me, for no reason I could understand, and then you were gone. You could have been a dream, except I kept one of your shirts. I used to smell it and think, Where the fuck are you, Frieda bloody Klein?’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Frieda. She was gazing at him steadily.