42
‘Are you sure you don’t want her diamond earrings?’
‘Quite sure.’
‘Or this gold chain.’
‘I don’t want it.’
‘There’s a moonstone bracelet.’
‘I don’t want anything.’
‘Can I give them to Trudy, then?’
‘Sure. And ask Chlo? what she wants, and Ivan.’
‘I don’t see why Ivan should have anything. He couldn’t even be bothered to come over for the funeral.’
‘There wasn’t a funeral.’
‘Yes, and the idea of leaving her body for medical research was like the final slap in the face.’
‘There are worse slaps in the face.’
‘I’m surprised anyone would want it. What about this picture?’
‘No.’
‘I’m duty-bound to inform you that it’s probably worth quite a lot of money.’
‘I don’t want it.’
‘Just don’t come complaining to me after.’
Frieda and David were in their mother’s bedroom, sorting through her possessions. Outside, the skip that Frieda had arranged was already half full, and in the drive was the van that David had rented. They had already been through her clothes. David had taken a few dresses, a good coat, some jackets that he thought his young wife might like. Frieda had taken nothing.
The doorbell rang and David frowned, his hands full of jewellery.
‘Who can that be?’
‘I’ll go.’
She went downstairs and opened the door. Lewis stood there. He looked as if he’d lost pounds in just a few days, and his hair had been cut very short. His eyes were red-rimmed, sore.
‘How’s Max?’ Frieda asked
But he just tumbled over the threshold and stood in front of her. ‘It was Ewan?’ he asked.
‘Yes. And he killed Becky.’ She didn’t want to talk about everything that had happened to her, all those years ago.
‘You saved him.’ He started to cry, not putting up his hands to wipe away the tears, letting them course down his weathered cheeks.
‘I’m glad he’s going to be all right.’
‘How can I ever repay you?’
Frieda put her hands on his thin, trembling shoulders and looked into his eyes. ‘I owed you,’ she said softly.
After Lewis had left, David and Frieda went into the living room. Soon the van was full of the furniture and paintings that David would take away with him. Frieda had refused even the framed photograph of her father, squinting into the glare of the sun. She had his face stored away in her mind, and that was all she needed. She didn’t want the food mixer, the silver cutlery, the glasses and soup tureens and teacups, the serving dishes, spice racks, rugs, throws, cushions, bottles of wine and spirits, jars of marmalade and pickles and jam; not the novels or books on gardening and politics and medicine; or the towels, umbrellas, digital radio, pot plants … She wanted to walk away empty-handed and free.
The bell rang again.
‘Now who?’ said David, angrily. ‘Another ex-lover? Can’t you leave well alone?’ This was his only reference to the turmoil that had been caused in Braxton over the death of Ewan.
‘It wasn’t well,’ said Frieda, leaving the room and going to the front door.
‘Dr Klein?’
‘My mother, Juliet Klein, doesn’t live here any longer.’ Or anywhere.
The man frowned, looking at the bulky envelope in his hands. ‘I have a delivery here for a Dr Frieda Klein.’
‘That’s me.’
She signed for the package and went with it into the empty, echoey kitchen. Her name and her mother’s address were on the front, written in large capitals. There was a nudge of memory under her ribs. Sliding her finger under the gummed flap, she pulled out a length of material. Red wool. The second half of her red scarf, whose first half had been left with Ewan’s body, at the witch’s memorial. She held it between her fingers very delicately, as if she would be able to feel the trace of the person who had stolen it from her, and then she felt that it was wrapping something. She unfolded the scarf and removed a greetings card. On the front was a photograph of daffodils in full flower. She opened the card and saw the message written in the same capital letters: ‘HE CRIED WHEN I SAID YOUR NAME. REALLY CRIED.’
Frieda had a flashing sensation, like a waking dream. She suddenly imagined what Ewan had been through when he realized it had all gone wrong, when he understood it was his turn to be assaulted and tortured and killed. Where would Dean have done it? Somewhere remote, a shed, a lock-up, in the woods, where screams wouldn’t be heard. That was what happened to enemies of Frieda Klein. Bad things. Frieda examined her own reaction, testing herself, as if she were her own patient. Was it what she’d wanted? Did she take pleasure in the idea of Ewan knowing that there was nothing he could do or say to make it stop? After what he’d done to those girls.
No, she told herself. No. All it did was make a bad world worse. Dean had sent her this message because he wanted to tell her that he was still looking out for her, still in her life, like a lover, like a stalker, like a shadow and a ghost come back to haunt her. She remembered her own words to Ewan: I don’t stop. I don’t give up. I don’t go away. Neither did he. He would never leave her. He’d done this for her: butchered Ewan on the witch’s ground as a tribute and a sacrifice.
She laid the red scarf on the table. She would never touch it again. She slipped the card into her pocket. Then she rang Karlsson’s number.
‘Dean’s here now,’ she said, although, of course, he’d never been away.
Karlsson put the phone down. He thought about Frieda, and tried to picture her, but although he had seen her in Braxton he found he could only imagine her in London. He saw her walking along a street with the wind in her face and he saw her sitting beside a fire, her head turned towards him. Never quite smiling. Listening. Attending. The thought of her filled him with an emotion he struggled to identify: it was neither happiness nor sorrow, but something strong and deep. He wanted her to come home because he could talk to her in a way he couldn’t to anyone else, and even though he was often inarticulate, abrupt, he felt that she understood the meaning behind the clumsy words.
Two years ago, he hadn’t believed Frieda when she had told him that Dean was still alive and was both protecting and terrorizing her. Now he believed her, not because there was evidence but because Frieda had told him it was true. For better or for worse, she was a truth-teller. He sighed and turned back to his work.
Chlo? rang Sasha.
‘I just wanted to tell you that Frieda is going through all of Gran’s stuff with my dad. But I think she’ll be back soon.’
‘Yes. She rang me. But thanks for telling me, Chlo?.’
‘I know you must miss her.’
Several miles away, in Primrose Hill, Reuben and Josef were cooking, or at least Josef was cooking and Reuben was pretending to help him while smoking cigarettes and drinking beer and leafing through a newspaper.
‘Cardamom – you want to remove the seeds?’
‘Sure,’ said Reuben, vaguely.
‘And I peel the potatoes and then while they cook I make golubtsi.’
Josef was very happy. He had already made the wheat soup. Now, wrapped in his apron, he chopped onions, crushed garlic, fried mince, boiled rice and steamed cabbage leaves. He kneaded dough for the pierogis, rolled it out into neat circles that he filled with poppy seeds, raisins and prunes, folding them into small semi-circles. He prepared a raw salad of beetroot and celeriac. He poured himself a shot of vodka, then started on the spiced honey cake that his mother used to bake for him and that reminded him of his homeland, the music and the mountains of his past.
‘She would like this.’
‘Yes,’ said Reuben, holding out his empty glass. ‘And she’d want some more vodka.’
The house was empty; the skip and the van were both full. The day was fading and David was anxious to be gone, pulling on his leather gloves and his tailored coat that made him look, Frieda thought, like an expensive hitman.
‘Can I give you a lift?’ he asked reluctantly.
‘I’m going to walk.’
‘Where to?’ Frieda merely shrugged. ‘Well, that’s your business.’
They didn’t hug or kiss. He climbed into the laden van and drove away.
Frieda put on her coat and then she closed the front door of the house where she had spent the first sixteen years of her life, where she had found her father dead, where she had been raped, where she had not been believed. She double-locked it and slid the keys back through the letter flap, hearing them clatter on to the boards. She walked to the gate and then turned. The house looked dead. All the windows were dark, like blind eyes.
When she had left Braxton as a teenager, she had run from it. Now she walked at her own pace. The afternoon was dull and cold, the sky a pewter grey darkening into winter dusk. She went down the lane, past Tracey Ashton’s old house, past the mock-Tudor one that had once belonged to the Clarkes, then Mrs Leonard’s cottage where, for a moment, Frieda expected to see the old woman in the garden, calling to her cats in her high, crooning tones. She went by the ancient chapel, and the bus stop, and at last was on the high street.
There were three police cars parked near the tattoo parlour. She walked past them without slackening her pace. A cluster of people stood nearby, and when they saw her, they nudged each other and gaped at her openly. She saw them whispering but couldn’t hear the words. A man coming in the other direction stared at her. News spreads fast, a network of facts and rumours and lies. Did you hear? Did you know? Look. Look at her. Can’t you tell? Stand aside. Evil eye. No smoke without fire.
On the other side of the road she saw a woman she recognized as Liz Barron, a journalist from the Daily Sketch who had written about Frieda before. She was talking to someone, notebook in hand, nodding ever so sympathetically. In the distance, there was a television crew. The media had descended on Braxton.
Frieda didn’t alter her pace. She passed the baker’s, whose shelves were almost empty now, the shop selling cheap drink and DVDs, the newsagent’s. A group of teenagers stood at the curve of the road. For a few moments, she saw Chas, Jeremy, Lewis, Ewan, Vanessa, Eva, Sarah, Maddie. She saw herself. All of them so young, just starting out, not yet sure of the roads they would take, trying on different selves. And then their faces faded, and they were just strangers, jostling on the pavement, staring at her avidly.
‘That’s her,’ she heard one say, as she walked by. ‘That’s the woman.’
That’s the witch.
A figure approached from the distance, dressed in a bright long skirt with vivid red hair. Eva. Who had been her mate, her best friend in a different world. But she was on the other side of the road and was talking animatedly into her mobile, at the same time fishing in her capacious bag for something. She didn’t see Frieda. Frieda didn’t stop. Indeed, she couldn’t stop. She was leaving.
Over the brow of the hill ahead lay the witch’s burning ground, now a crime scene and taped off. On the other side of the valley was Lewis’s house, where Max had nearly died. To the left was Eva’s, filled with pottery, herbs, the smell of biscuits, and waiting for a companion. To the right was the house where Maddie had lived and Becky had died, and also the house where Ewan and Vanessa had raised their daughters and never spoken out loud to each other of what they had done together. Behind her lay the house that had been her childhood home; her broken past and her bitter memories; the formation of the woman she had chosen to become. But now her road lay ahead, as shops petered out, then houses thinned, and the clear, shallow river marked the way from the town.
Her steps quickened as the town fell away and the darkness grew thicker. Soon she was on the brow of the hill and only then did she stop and turn to look back. Braxton lay spread out beneath her. The street lamps and the lights of houses glittered in the darkness, under the sprinkling of stars. The church spire pointed upwards, sharp and admonishing. Small coils of smoke diffused in the night sky. She would never return, and as she stood there she almost felt the town’s power weaken, as if a weight was falling from her.
At last she turned away; the town was at her back. Perhaps Dean was walking beside her, out of sight but always there, her shadow. Yet for now she wasn’t thinking of Dean. Or of Sandy, or her dead mother. She wasn’t thinking of the murdered girls, of Ewan, of Vanessa, of any of those who had wrenched her life out of shape. She was thinking of the place she was going to and of the people who waited for her there. She was loved and she was alone and she was free.