Friday on My Mind (30 page)

‘It doesn’t hurt anywhere.’

The doctor looked down at Frieda with an expression of dismay. Frieda followed her gaze.

‘This blood isn’t mine,’ she said. ‘I just need to get home and wash it off.’

‘I don’t …’ The doctor started to speak, then stopped. ‘I need to see someone.’

There was a blue curtain at the end of the cubicle. The doctor pulled it aside and disappeared. Within a couple of minutes she was back.

‘Apparently you need someone to look at your head,’ said the doctor.

‘I’m fine.’

‘Someone’s on their way down from Neurology to assess you.’

Frieda looked at her watch. ‘I’m leaving in five minutes,’ she said.

The doctor’s eyes widened in dismay. ‘You can’t,’ she said.

‘You’ll find that I can.’

‘I’ll need to check.’ The young doctor rushed back out through the curtain. Frieda sat up on the bed. She held up her hands and looked at them. She wiggled the fingers. It all seemed fine. Time to go. The curtain was pushed aside and a man stepped inside. He was dressed in jeans and white tennis shoes and a short-sleeved checked shirt. He had curly dark hair and he was unshaven.

‘This cubicle’s taken,’ said Frieda.

With a frown, the man picked up the clipboard that was on a hook at the end of the bed. ‘I’m meant to have a look at you.’ He put the clipboard down and saw Frieda properly for the first time.

‘Goodness,’ he said.

‘It’s not mine,’ Frieda said.

‘Yes, but still. What happened?’

‘I was attacked.’

‘Looks like you fought back.’

‘I had to.’

‘And you hit something big.’

‘The subclavian artery.’

‘Are they dead?’

‘I managed to stem the bleeding.’

‘Not all of it. From what –’ And then he stopped and looked at Frieda with a new interest. ‘I know you,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘Don’t tell me.’

‘All right.’

A slow smile spread across his face. ‘You need to take your shoes off and your socks.’

Frieda slipped them off.

‘Can you flex your toes?’ he said. She did so. ‘That’s fine. Do you know what day it is?’

‘Friday.’

‘Splendid.’

‘It began on a Friday and it ended on one.’

‘You’ve lost me there.’

‘Never mind.’

‘You came to my flat and took me to see a woman with a really interesting psychological condition.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Weren’t you working with the police?’

‘I was.’

‘How did that work out for you?’

‘It was mixed.’

‘Did you find out who did it?’

‘Yes. But I ended up in hospital that time as well. And it wasn’t just someone else’s blood.’

He took a penlight from his pocket. ‘Look up at the corner.’ He aimed the light at one eye and then the other. ‘I’m Andrew Berryman.’

‘I remember,’ said Frieda. ‘You were playing the piano. As an experiment into the ten-thousand-hours theory, where many hours each day of hard work trump innate ability.’

‘The experiment didn’t work,’ he said. ‘I gave up.’

‘Neurological abnormalities. That was your field, wasn’t it?’

‘It still is.’

‘I thought of getting in touch with you once or twice. For your professional opinion.’

He put his penlight back in his pocket. ‘You should
have done,’ he said. ‘And you’re fine. Except …’ He rubbed the side of his face. ‘You say that the last time we met, it ended up with you in hospital. And now you’re here again. I don’t like blood. That’s why I went into neurology.’

‘I didn’t want this to happen.’

‘You’re a therapist, aren’t you?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Don’t therapists believe that everything happens for a reason?’

‘No, they don’t.’

My mistake.’

‘So, have you finished?’

‘You’re probably in shock, after what you’ve gone through. So you should be kept under observation.’

Frieda stood up. ‘No. I’m done here.’

‘Are you planning on just leaving?’

‘That’s right. I only live a few minutes from here.’

‘You can’t walk the streets looking like that.’

‘I’ll be fine.’

Berryman shook his head disapprovingly. ‘I’ll get you a lab coat. And I’ll walk you back.’

‘I don’t need that.’

‘I’ll walk you back, which will allow me to assess your psychological state. You can agree to that or I’ll have you forcibly restrained.’

‘You can’t do that.’

‘You’re covered in blood. You’ve been brought by ambulance from a crime scene. You wanna bet?’

‘All right,’ said Frieda. ‘Anything. So long as I can leave.’

Josef had kept the plants watered and fed the cat, but a fine layer of dust lay over everything and there was a slightly musty smell in the rooms, whose windows had remained closed through the hot summer weeks of Frieda’s absence.

She worked slowly and methodically through the morning, vacuuming, wiping surfaces, pulling weeds from the pots on her patio. She took all of the clothes that she had worn as Carla to the charity shop a few streets away and put out clean towels. The fridge was empty, apart from a jar of olive paste and eggs long past their sell-by date that she dropped into the bin. She went to the shops and bought herself enough for the next few days: milk, bread and butter, some bags of salad and Sicilian tomatoes, salty blue cheese, smoked salmon that she thought she would eat that evening, raspberries and a little carton of cream. She let herself imagine the evening ahead of her, alone in her clean and orderly house, with the cat at her feet.

Then she went up into her study at the top of the house and wrote emails to her patients, saying that she was ready to start work again next week, and if they wanted to return they should let her know. Before she had sent them all an answer came back from Joe Franklin, simply saying: ‘Yes!’ She wrote his name in her diary on the days she had always seen him.

At three o’clock that afternoon she went out and took the Underground from Warren Street to Highbury and Islington, then walked the remainder of the way. She walked more slowly than usual, aware that she was putting off the moment when she would knock at Sasha’s door.

The door swung open and Reuben was standing in front of her, holding out his arms in welcome. She stepped into his embrace and he hugged her and ruffled her short hair, told her what she knew already – that she was back at last. Then there were quick light footsteps and Ethan flew into view. He was wearing red shorts and a blue T-shirt and holding an ice cream that was melting over his hand as he ran.

‘Frieda!’ he yelled. ‘I’m going to make a frog box with Josef and Marty.’

‘A frog box?’

‘For frogs to be in.’ Some ice cream plopped to the floor. He took a violent lick at the cone.

‘Who’s Marty?’

‘He works with Josef,’ said Reuben. ‘Ethan’s taken a shine to him.’

‘I see. Where is Josef?’

‘Here.’ And there he was, coming down the stairs. He stopped in front of her and, for a moment, couldn’t seem to find the words. His brown eyes gazed at her. ‘And glad,’ he said. ‘Very glad for this sight.’

‘Thank you, Josef.’ Frieda took one of his large calloused hands between hers and pressed it. ‘How’s Sasha?’

Josef glanced at Ethan, whose face was now covered with ice cream, then back at Frieda. He shook his head from side to side. ‘In bed,’ he said.

‘Mummy’s ill,’ said Ethan, brightly. ‘But only a little ill.’

Who was going to tell him about Frank? wondered Frieda, and when and how? It was going to be hard. ‘I’ll go and see her.’

She mounted the stairs. At the door to Sasha’s room she paused, listening. She could hear faint rasping sounds, like a muffled saw. Sasha was weeping. Reuben had told her on the phone that Sasha had been crying steadily since she had found out the truth. ‘Almost like a machine made for crying,’ he’d said. ‘With no variation, no diminution or increase.’

Frieda pushed the door and entered. The curtains were closed against the bright day; Sasha lay under her covers, a humped shape from which came the sound of sobbing that was like a distressed, strangulated breathing. In and out, in and out.

Frieda sat on the side of the bed and put out a hand to comfort the shape that rose and fell with the weeping. ‘Sasha,’ she said. ‘It’s me. Frieda.’ She waited but there was no response. ‘I’m here, Josef and Reuben are here. Ethan is here, and we’re all going to look after him. We’re going to look after you. You will come through this. Can you hear me? Nothing will be the same again, of course, and you won’t be the same, but you will come through.’

She sat on the bed for a while longer, then rose and opened the window so that the warm air came into the room. ‘I’m going to make a pot of tea,’ she said. ‘I’ll be back in a few minutes. OK?’

There was a sudden sound and she stopped. ‘What are you saying?’ Frieda asked.

‘It was me.’ The words were barely discernible but, once said, they seemed to replace the sobbing in their repetitive lament. ‘It was me it was me it was me it was me.’

Frieda sat down on the bed again. ‘No. It wasn’t you. We don’t get to say that. Frank was a jealous and controlling man. He couldn’t bear to feel humiliated. Would something else have set him off? Maybe.’ She stroked Sasha’s hair. ‘We do things, some of them foolish or wrong, but we don’t know what the consequences will be. You slept with Sandy when you were feeling abandoned. I didn’t listen to what he was trying to tell me. We just have to live with that. A terrible thing has been done, but not by you. And you’re not going to be destroyed by it.’

Sasha was still murmuring the words but they had merged into a wretched trickle of sound. Frieda stood up once more and left the room. Josef and Reuben were in the small garden with Ethan, who was hammering a nail into a plank of wood, blissfully absorbed and supervised by Josef. Reuben was smoking a cigarette and talking on his mobile.

‘OK?’ he asked, when he ended the call.

She nodded. She felt she had no more words left inside her; the thought of talking, explaining, exhausted her. ‘I think I had better stay here for a bit,’ she said at last.

‘No,’ said Reuben.

‘What?’

‘No. You are going to stay in your own home, the home I know you’ve been homesick for.’

‘Someone has to be here.’

‘Indeed. Paz is arriving in about half an hour, with provisions.’

‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘It’s nothing,’ he said.

‘It’s not nothing, Reuben. It’s a lot. Everything you’ve all done.’

‘One day you’ll have to learn that you can’t do everything all by yourself.’

‘Yes.’

‘And one day we will talk about all of this.’

‘One day.’

‘But for now, for God’s sake, go home.’

She went home. She had a long bath, then roamed through each room, making doubly sure everything was in its proper place. She ate smoked salmon on rye bread and drank a single glass of white wine. She played through a game of chess, with the cat on her lap, and she promised herself that tomorrow she would sit in the garret room and draw. She felt peaceful and immeasurably sad. She thought over these last weeks when she had stepped out of her life, living in strange, unlovely places and among marginalized people, free and unanchored and alone. Now she was back here in her beloved house, her possessions about her, schedules being reassembled and order re-established. She thought of Karlsson’s face as he had bent over her in his children’s bedroom, which was now daubed and sprayed with blood. Where was he now? Then she thought of Sasha, lying in her bed weeping, as if the weeping would never
stop. Of Frank in his hospital bed, flanked by police officers. Of Ethan, who didn’t understand how his life had changed. Of Sandy, now just ash and memory, and the future he would not have.

Tanya Hopkins arrived to pick Frieda up from her house in a taxi. For several minutes after the taxi had set off again, she didn’t speak. Frieda didn’t mind long silences. She was used to them. Sometimes a patient would sit facing her for a whole session without speaking. Usually therapy was about talk but it could also be an escape from the press of words and that could be good too.

But although Tanya Hopkins wasn’t speaking, it didn’t feel like silence. She was staring out of the window, away from Frieda, yet it was clear that she was thinking hard. Frieda could even see her lips moving, as if she were silently talking to herself. Finally she turned to Frieda. ‘I suppose you know where we’re going.’

‘To see the police.’

‘To see the police,’ said Hopkins, like an echo. ‘They haven’t told me what it’s about, but it’s not hard to guess. They will be informing us whether they are planning to proceed with any charges.’ She paused, but Frieda showed no sign of speaking. ‘Perverting the course of justice is an obvious possibility.’

Frieda looked round. ‘Did I pervert it?’

Hopkins shook her head. ‘I don’t know. You perverted something. I’m not exactly sure what.’ She looked at Frieda with a resigned expression. ‘At this point, I would usually tell my client to leave the talking to me, but I don’t suppose it would do any good.’

‘I’m sorry I put you in a bad position,’ said Frieda.

‘No, you’re not,’ said Hopkins.

Frieda thought for a moment. ‘I’m not exactly sorry. If the same thing happened, I’d do it all again.’

‘Which means you’re not sorry at all.’

‘But what I’m really sorry about is that, as a by-product of what I did, you had to go through all that trouble.’

‘That is the most pathetic apology I’ve ever heard in my life.’

‘It’s not an apology. It’s a description of my state of mind.’

‘I don’t even know how to respond to that.’

‘You didn’t have to keep me on as a client.’

Hopkins managed something of a smile at that. ‘I wouldn’t foist you on anyone else,’ she said. ‘But there are consequences, you know.’

‘Consequences? If I’d followed your advice, I would have pleaded guilty to a crime I didn’t do.’

‘It wasn’t advice. It was an option. But I wasn’t just talking about consequences for you. What about your friend DCI Karlsson?’

‘What about him?’

‘He’s been suspended.’

Frieda felt that someone had punched her very hard in the solar plexus. She gave a small moan. ‘Oh, the idiot.’

‘It wasn’t just yourself you were risking. You must have known that.’

Frieda looked out of the window of the taxi, looked without seeing. She felt overcome by rage and nausea and shame. Suddenly, through all of that inner fog, she saw that the taxi was driving up Pentonville Road. ‘This isn’t the way to the police station,’ she said.

‘I got a call this morning changing the location.’

The taxi pulled into the kerb and the driver turned round.

‘The road’s blocked off to traffic,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to walk from here.’

The two of them got out and walked along Chapel Market, past the stalls. There was a smell of cooking meat that made Frieda feel queasy. Hopkins checked the piece of paper in her hand.

‘This can’t be right,’ she said.

They were standing beside a doorway between a bookie’s and an optician’s. She pressed the bell. A scratchy, unintelligible voice came from a little speaker next to the door. Hopkins leaned in close and gave her name and Frieda’s. There was a buzzing sound and she pressed the door but it didn’t open. She pressed the bell again. They heard a sound inside and then the door was opened by a young, spiky-haired woman wearing a blue T-shirt and dark jeans.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Hopkins. ‘I think we must have the wrong address.’

‘Tanya Hopkins and Frieda Klein?’ said the woman, cheerfully. ‘Come on in.’

They followed her up a set of dingy stairs and through a door into what looked like an abandoned office. It was a large space with only a desk and several unmatching chairs.

‘You’re to wait here,’ the woman said to Hopkins. ‘I’m to take Dr Klein upstairs.’

‘That’s not possible,’ said Hopkins. ‘If there’s any meeting with DCI Hussein, then I have to be there throughout.’

‘DCI Hussein won’t be coming,’ said a voice, and Hopkins and Frieda looked round. A man had come through a door at the far side of the office.

Hopkins started to say something, then stopped. ‘I know you,’ she said.

‘But you can’t remember where from,’ said the man.

‘At the police station,’ said Frieda. ‘The meeting before …’

‘Before you absconded. Yes, that one. My name’s Walter Levin.’

‘What’s this about?’ said Hopkins, suspiciously.

‘I need five minutes with Dr Klein.’

‘That’s not possible. We have an important meeting with the police.’

‘Please,’ said Levin.

Hopkins looked at Frieda. ‘I don’t like this. Not one bit.’

‘All right,’ said Frieda. ‘Five minutes.’

‘This way,’ he said.

She followed him up a set of stairs, then another. There was a metal door in front of him.

‘These premises don’t have much to recommend them. But they do have this.’ With that, he pushed open the door and Frieda stepped through and found herself out on a roof terrace.

‘Come and look,’ he said.

He led her to a set of railings at the front façade of the building. They looked down at the market. He pointed across at the cranes at the back of King’s Cross and St Pancras.

‘You forget that you’re up on a hill here,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Frieda. ‘I’m not really in the mood for small-talk. What’s this about?’

‘What were you expecting it to be about?’

‘About whether I’m going to jail or not.’

‘Yes, well, Commissioner Crawford is rather keen on your going to jail.’

‘What about DCI Hussein?’

‘She’s more agnostic on the matter.’

‘So why am I talking to you?’

‘There’s a big fat file on you. About your brief career as a Metropolitan Police consultant.’

‘That didn’t work out too well.’

Levin smiled. ‘That’s a matter of interpretation.’

‘Well, it almost got me killed and the commissioner wants me in prison, so you’ll excuse me if I have a slightly glass-half-empty view of the situation.’

‘What about working for me?’

Frieda had been looking down at the market stalls but now she turned to Levin. There was a casualness about his demeanour, as if he were never quite serious. But there was a coldness about his grey eyes that made him difficult to read. ‘Who exactly are you?’

‘What did I say when we met before?’

‘You said you’d been seconded from the Home Office.’

‘That sounds about right.’

‘I’ve no idea what it means.’

‘What it means is that I can put a stop to any possibility of your being prosecuted.’

‘In exchange for what?’

‘In exchange for your availability.’

‘Availability for what?’

‘To do the sort of thing you do.’

‘Can you be more specific?’

‘Not as yet.’

In the street a cyclist was wobbling precariously between the stalls, with shopping bags hanging from the handlebars.

‘No,’ said Frieda. ‘I can’t do anything like that. Sorry.’

Levin took off his glasses and polished them on his rather shabby striped tie. ‘There’s one other thing.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Your friend Karlsson.’

‘What about him?’

‘He interfered with a criminal inquiry. He’s facing jail time as well. And his case is more serious than yours. He’s a police detective. It’s the sort of case where judges talk about the foundations on which justice depends.’

Frieda looked round sharply. ‘If you can help Karlsson out of this, then …’ She thought for a moment. Then what? ‘Then I owe you a favour.’

‘A favour,’ said Levin. He put his glasses back on. ‘Jolly good. I like that.’ He beamed at her and his eyes remained sharp. ‘Of course you know that a favour’s a dangerous thing.’

He held out his hand and she took it but then let it go.

‘How do I know you’re a good person?’ she asked.

‘I’m keeping you out of prison. I’m keeping DCI Karlsson out of prison and returning him to the Met. Doesn’t that make me a good person?’

‘Some people wouldn’t think so.’