8
Frieda sat in her little garret at the top of the house. From the skylight window she could see, across the rooftops of Fitzrovia, the old Post Office tower. Inside it was quiet and peaceful. A standard lamp threw a soft light over the room, and there was a jug of crimson dahlias on her desk. Her drawing pencils, her charcoals, were ranged neatly in front of her. She wrapped her hands around her large mug of tea and took a small sip. She felt calm. Her thoughts were clear. She opened the lid of her laptop and, ignoring new mail, pressed the message icon.
Dear Sandy [she wrote]
I have just returned from seeing Reuben. I told him something that I should have told him a long time ago, when he was my therapist and I was his patient. Now I need to tell you too. You don’t have to say anything or do anything. I don’t want help and this is not a confession, just a story of something that happened to me that you should know because I don’t want it to be a secret. If it is a secret, then it has power over me still, and I don’t want that.
When I was just sixteen, some months after my father killed himself, I was raped. A man broke into my room at night and raped me. I do not know who he was. He was never discovered. There are ways in which my life changed after this; I changed. I never spoke of it because I did not want to be defined by it. Now, however, the past seems to have returned to me. Perhaps it never left, after all.
I wanted you to know.
I really am fine, better than I’ve been for a long time. You don’t need to worry about me. Not an hour goes by that I don’t think of you and send you my love xxxx
Frieda sat for several minutes, sipping her tea, staring out at the blurred lights of London, before she pressed the ‘send’ button. It was gone. Soon he would know. She felt slightly vertiginous: for all these years she had kept the secret sealed away inside her; now in the space of a few hours she had told two people. And she knew that this meant she had other people to tell.
The next morning she phoned Sasha. Yes, it was important. Yes, it was almost an emergency. But nothing Sasha needed to worry about.
They walked together in silence until they reached Bloomsbury Square, Sasha pushing Ethan in his buggy. The winds were almost gale force and the trees were swaying in unison. Frieda was wearing her long black coat and her red scarf. She had to lean in close while she told Sasha what had happened to her; she saw her friend flinch.
When she had finished, Sasha hugged her. Frieda glanced around to see if anyone was watching.
‘I’m thinking of when we first met,’ Sasha said, her hair blown around her face by the wind. She looked as if she were on the deck of a ship. ‘I came to you and told you about what happened with me and Dr Rundell. And all the time you’d gone through that. How did you keep something like that to yourself? Why did you never mention it before?’
‘I’ve never told anyone. One of the reasons is that I didn’t want that to be the way that people thought of me: the victim. I told you ten seconds ago and already you think it influenced the way I responded to you when we first met.’
‘You didn’t just respond,’ said Sasha. ‘You went straight across London and punched him in a restaurant and got arrested. Is that normal?’
‘It seemed appropriate in the circumstances. So now you know.’
‘What next?’
Frieda took her phone from her pocket. ‘There are one or two more people I’ve got to burden with this.’
Josef was working in a large detached house near the canal in Maida Vale. Frieda noticed a smart white van parked outside. A suspicious Spanish cleaner admitted her and led her to an upstairs bedroom. Josef was up a ladder spreading plaster on the ceiling. A burly man with his hair in a ponytail and tattoos on his arms was stripping discoloured paper off the walls. Josef noticed her and slid down the ladder. He stepped forward to hug her, then looked at his smeared arms and stopped.
‘It looks as if things are going well,’ said Frieda.
‘How?’ asked Josef.
‘I saw a new van outside. Hello, Stefan.’
The man with the ponytail stood up and held out his broad hand. He was Russian and from time to time he worked with Josef. Frieda was never quite sure what he did outside that.
‘How is your bath?’ Josef asked.
‘My bath is fine, thank you.’ She peered up at the ceiling. ‘You’re nearly done.’
Josef shook his head. ‘Is shit.’
‘No,’ said Frieda. ‘It looks really nice.’
‘No, no,’ said Josef, pointing upwards. ‘Over there in room is toilet. They put wrong things down. It very, very bad. Three days ago, this room was like hell. And it smelt … Ooof.’ He pulled a face.
‘It looks fine now,’ said Frieda.
‘But you said you must see me,’ said Josef.
Frieda looked at Stefan. ‘Can we find somewhere private?’
Stefan grinned. ‘I make tea. Or something stronger?’
‘Tea’s good.’
‘I have custard creams.’
‘Lovely.’ She hated custard creams.
Stefan left the room.
‘There’s something I have to tell you,’ said Frieda, ‘but I can tell you while you’re working.’
Josef climbed back up the ladder and started slapping on the plaster and shaping it flat, in broad sweeps with two trowels. It was oddly satisfying and soothing to watch and Frieda would have been happy just to lie on the floor and look as the ceiling was covered.
‘I can’t watch a ceiling without imagining you falling through it,’ she said.
‘A strange way for our first meeting,’ said Josef. ‘You could have watched me die. But what is it you have to say?’
So Frieda told him. After she had begun, Josef stopped his plastering and turned and sat on the steps, gazing down at her. Frieda felt that there was something incongruous about the whole scene, as if she was talking to someone sitting up in a tree. ‘So,’ she said finally. ‘That’s what I came to tell you.’
He stood up on his ladder, his head almost touching the newly plastered ceiling, and put a hand to his heart. ‘Thank you, my friend,’ he said.
‘What for?’
‘For telling me this.’
‘You’re welcome.’ There was a pause and the two of them looked at each other. ‘You need to finish your ceiling.’
Josef shrugged.
‘I came to say what I had to say,’ said Frieda. ‘So I’ll go.’
‘Whisky with a dash of water,’ said Karlsson.
They clinked tumblers and smiled at each other.
‘You’re tanned,’ said Frieda. ‘You haven’t been using a sunbed, have you?’
Somehow, over the turbulent years that they had known each other, Frieda and DCI Malcolm Karlsson had become comfortable in each other’s company. They had had fierce arguments; they had let each other down and had rescued each other; they had seen each other in danger and great distress. Now they could sit on the long, battered sofa, drink whisky and say what was on their minds.
‘Spain,’ Karlsson said. ‘I was there for a long weekend.’
‘Of course. How are your children?’
Karlsson’s children were spending two years in Madrid with his ex-wife and her new partner. Frieda had seen how much he hated their going and how painfully he missed them.
‘Brown, freckled, talking a language I don’t understand.’
‘Happy, then?’
‘Yes. They seem very happy.’
‘That’s good, isn’t it?’
‘Is it terrible to wish they sometimes missed me a bit?’
‘They’ll be back in a few months, won’t they?’
‘Yes. I hope we can get back to normal.’
‘Rather than what?’
‘I make so much effort with them when I see them for these brief snatches, as if I always have to entertain them. I don’t want to be their holiday, I want to be their home.’
‘Perhaps you should trust them more.’
‘You’re probably right.’ He smiled at her. ‘You usually are.’
‘I’ll remind you that you said that. How’s work?’ They had first met each other through his work, which had come for a time to be hers as well.
‘Nothing to interest you. No murders and missing children. No, I’m – what’s the term Commissioner Crawford uses? – I’m facilitating a reorganization.’
‘That sounds painful.’
He made a grimace of distaste. ‘Resource limitations. Performance indicators. Streamlining. Making operations fit for purpose. This isn’t what I went into the police force to do.’
‘Are you laying people off?’
‘I’m afraid so. Yvette’s helping me. She hates it more than I do, which, of course, makes her like the poor old bull in a china shop. She charges angrily at it.’
Frieda smiled. ‘Poor Yvette.’
‘Don’t feel sorry for us. We’re the lucky ones.’ He poured more whisky into both glasses. ‘How are you, though, Frieda? You look well. This is a very nice surprise visit.’
‘I wanted to see you for a particular reason. As a friend.’
Karlsson became slightly wary.
‘I mean, as a friend who also happens to be a police officer.’ She took a mouthful of whisky. ‘I’ve only given the full version of this story to one other person. I’ve told Reuben. I’m allowed to do that because he was my analyst when I was training. I couldn’t tell the full version even to Sasha or Josef but I can tell you because you’re a policeman and this is about a crime.’ She looked Karlsson full in the face. This had got his attention. ‘I’ll begin with the easier part. Over the past few days I’ve been talking to a girl – she’s fifteen – who comes from the town where I grew up. I was at school with her mother.’
Karlsson nodded. He had never before heard Frieda refer to her childhood.
‘She came to see me because she’s in a bad way – truanting, self-harming, being withdrawn. She has now told me that several weeks ago she was raped,’ continued Frieda. ‘She was in bed, in the dark. She has no idea who it was and hasn’t reported it to the police.’
‘Do you believe her?’
‘Yes.’ Frieda’s tone was sharp.
‘What is it you want my advice about?’
‘She is insistent she won’t report it. Even more insistent now that she’s told her mother, who isn’t being supportive.’
‘I see. And you want to know what you should do about it, as her therapist?’
‘It’s a bit more complicated than that.’
Frieda stood up and went to stand by the door that led out into the long garden. It was dark outside but she could see leaves swirling in the gusts of wind. There was a cat on the roof opposite. She turned back. ‘There is a reason that I know she’s telling the truth. You see, the same thing happened to me.’
Karlsson rose to his feet and Frieda looked into his face; she wanted to see how he would react. She waited for a slight recoil, an expression of suppressed horror. Instead, she found a strained tenderness that was hard for her to bear.
‘Frieda,’ he said, in a low voice. ‘My dear Frieda …’
She held up a hand. ‘It’s all right,’ she said reassuringly. ‘It was a very long time ago. Twenty-three years ago. The eleventh of February 1989, to be exact. I’ve had plenty of time to get used to it.’
‘You were just a girl. Christ, how awful.’
‘I was a bit older than the young woman I’ve been telling you about. I was sixteen.’
‘I’m so sorry. So very sorry.’
‘That’s not why I’m telling you.’
Karlsson sat down again.
‘My mother didn’t believe me,’ she said. ‘She thought I was an attention-seeker. But I did go to the police eventually. There was one officer who was kind to me, but I’m not sure some of the others took it seriously. The inquiry just petered out. A few years later, a man was arrested in the area for a series of sexual assaults. His name was Dennis Freeman. He was the usual kind of suspect – well known to the police, a bit of a loner, lived in a hostel, drank, already had a suspended sentence. You know how it goes.’
Karlsson nodded.
‘When I read about it, I thought it must have been him.’
‘Did you go to the police?’
‘And be put through it all again? I just assumed it must have been him. He died in prison a few years later. I thought it was all over, in the past, and anyway, I’d left Braxton by then, left everything.’
Frieda stopped, swirled the amber liquid in the bottom of her tumbler and finished it off in a gulp.
‘But?’ prompted Karlsson.
‘It wasn’t him. The girl I was talking to is fifteen. She was in Braxton – the town where I spent my childhood – in her bedroom, in the dark. He wore a mask. When the rapist left, he said something to her.’
‘What?’ asked Karlsson, after a pause.
‘He said, “Don’t think of telling anyone, sweetheart. Nobody will believe you.”’
‘I can see that’s very frightening but –’
‘I was raped in Braxton when I was sixteen. In my bedroom, in the dark, by a person who also wore a mask. When the rapist left, he said, “Don’t think of telling anyone, sweetheart. Nobody will believe you.”’
‘Are you saying what I think you’re saying?’
‘Yes.’
Karlsson moved on to the sofa beside Frieda. ‘How can I help?’
‘A man who raped me has now raped someone else. He isn’t in prison and he isn’t dead. He’s out there. I have to do something. Also, isn’t it very unlikely he hasn’t raped other young women? He wouldn’t have waited twenty-three years, would he?’
‘No,’ said Karlsson, slowly. ‘It’s extremely unlikely – although it’s not uncommon for rapists to wait several years between assaults.’
‘So other women have been raped by him, and presumably other women will be, unless he’s caught.’
Karlsson’s face was grave. ‘I won’t lie to you,’ he said. ‘This isn’t simple. You say the teenager you’ve been seeing is not willing to report the rape to the police?’
‘She says she won’t.’
‘And even if she did, you say that it happened several weeks ago.’
‘Yes.’
‘So there will be no forensic evidence.’
‘I suppose not.’
‘Rape cases are difficult.’
‘I know that,’ said Frieda, wearily. ‘But look at the situation. The girl won’t go to the police because she thinks that they, like her own mother, won’t believe her, and my own experience tells me she may be right. She feels that in some contorted way she deserved to be raped because she was – in her mother’s words – leading a disordered life and this was her punishment. She feels ashamed. Horribly, horribly ashamed and defiled. So the rapist gets away with it, because his victim has been made to feel guilty and utterly powerless.’
‘Does she suspect anyone?’
‘Not that I know of.’
Karlsson looked troubled. ‘We can go back there together,’ he said.
‘You’d do that?’
‘I can talk to the local force. But look at the situation from their point of view: no crime has been reported, there is no evidence and no suspect. There’s another thing.’
‘What?’
‘Have you thought what all this will mean for you?’
‘Yes, I have. But this man is still out there. I don’t have a choice. Also, it’s time.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘There are things I’ve run away from all my life. My father’s death. My rape. Things that happened after. But it seems as though I’ve run in a perfect circle and I’m back with it again. In the thick of it.’ She touched Karlsson on the arm. ‘Don’t look so anxious. In my profession, this is what we call progress. I’m all right – I can do this because I’m all right.’
‘Is this all a problem for you?’ said Chlo?. ‘Where’s your corkscrew? Answer the second question first.’
‘It’s in the drawer on the left-hand side of the cooker,’ said Frieda.
Chlo? disappeared into the kitchen and there was a clattering sound. Frieda gently touched her temples. She could feel the beginning of a headache but at the moment it was even worse, like a little buzzing fly inside her skull. What she had told Karlsson was almost true. She had left his house with the determination to go home, get into bed and sleep, and if she couldn’t sleep then at least she would get into bed. But almost immediately her phone had rung and Chlo? was saying she needed to see her now, absolutely this minute: could she come straight over? This, Frieda thought, was the reason why getting a mobile phone had been a mistake, as was leaving it switched on. But she had always felt a duty of care to her niece, since she was a podgy nervous toddler, through her angry, chaotic teenage years. She was someone Frieda said yes to, and she did so again, with a sigh.
Barely five minutes after Frieda had arrived home, Chlo? was at the door clutching a bottle of white wine. Now she re-emerged from the kitchen precariously clutching the opened bottle, two glasses and a small bowl. She placed them delicately on the table.
‘I found some peanuts in the cupboard,’ she said. ‘Is that all right?’
‘Fine,’ said Frieda.
‘You know, I’ve always pictured this,’ said Chlo?.
‘What?’
‘That one day it wouldn’t be just Auntie Frieda giving me a science lesson and looking disapproving. We’d be two friends meeting for a drink.’
Frieda couldn’t suppress a smile, even when Chlo? poured much too much wine into the two glasses. She handed one to Frieda and raised her own. ‘Cheers,’ she said. ‘I just saw a news story that made me think of you.’
‘Does that mean it was some kind of murder?’
‘No, not at all. But it was about the brain. There are these people who’ve been in comas for years, but worse than comas – what’s that called?’
‘A deep vegetative state,’ said Frieda.
‘They’ve discovered they’re not complete vegetables, after all. They’ve managed to communicate. They ask them a question, and if the answer is yes, they should imagine they’re playing tennis, and it shows up on a brain scan. Isn’t that amazing?’
‘Yes,’ said Frieda. ‘I’ve been following the research.’
‘Isn’t that the most nightmarish thing in the world? Being trapped in your own brain and unable to move or talk or do anything, but still being conscious.’
Frieda took a sip of the cold white wine that Chlo? had brought and thought for a moment. ‘A persistent vegetative state sounds quite restful. Maybe I could find a doctor who could put me into one.’
‘Frieda! You don’t mean that. Are you saying that for a joke?’
‘Of course,’ she said.
‘So what is the answer to my question?’
‘Which one?’
‘The one about whether me being with Jack was a problem for you.’
‘Why should it be a problem?’
‘It might be like two of your little babies suddenly growing up and having a relationship. I don’t know, it might seem like something incestuous.’
Frieda looked at her bright, restless niece, half girl and half young woman. She had watched her through her early years, through the turbulent adolescent ones. She had stepped in when her mother, Olivia, had seemed incapable of doing so. She had seen her in love with a tragic boy who couldn’t love her back. She smiled at her reassuringly. ‘I don’t feel that at all.’
‘Obviously, we met through you and it’s really interesting meeting someone who sees you in a different way. It’s quite funny, but Jack is so completely in awe of you. He’s like some schoolboy with a crush on his teacher.’
‘Chlo?, you probably shouldn’t tell me that.’
‘He wouldn’t mind. And there’s nothing he’s told me about you that should embarrass you at all.’
‘I don’t think I was worried about that.’
‘That’s great. It was really important to me that it was no problem for you.’
Frieda felt she couldn’t let this go completely. ‘As I said,’ she began slowly, ‘if I have any concern, it’s that there’s quite a big age difference.’
‘Of course I’ve thought about that. You think about lots of things. That doesn’t mean they’re problems.’
‘I trust you,’ said Frieda. ‘But I don’t want you to get hurt.’
‘Oh, that,’ said Chlo?. ‘You’re making too big a deal of it. That’s why I wanted to come and talk to you about it. Obviously I can’t talk to my mum.’
‘Maybe you should.’
‘It would be a complete and utter disaster. And most of my friends are too immature. I feel that you’re the only person I can really talk to about something like this. The point is, you don’t need to worry about us because so far we’re really just having a good time. And it really is a good time. In fact, the sex with Jack has been just wonderful. I’ve never experienced anything like it.’
‘Chlo? …’ Frieda began feebly. She felt a desperate need to shut Chlo? up but she was finding it difficult even to speak.
Chlo? took another gulp of wine. ‘You clearly know that I’m not exactly a blushing virgin …’
‘Chlo? …’
‘… but in the past, by comparison, it’s really just been fumbling and groping and all a bit desperate, you know what I mean? With Jack it’s something completely different. It’s funny, because when you first meet him, he seems sweet and shy, but in fact he’s amazingly uninhibited. He’s really up for it, you know what I mean? It’s not like some angsty, anguished relationship, if that’s what you’re worried about. Really, we don’t talk that much at all at the moment. We spend most of our time in bed.’
‘Stop,’ Frieda finally managed to say, in a sort of gasp. ‘Stop. Enough.’
‘What?’ said Chlo?, with concern.
‘I don’t think I should be hearing all of this.’
‘But isn’t that what you do all day?’
‘I’m not a sex therapist, Chlo?. And especially not a sex therapist to my niece.’
‘Well, I can tell you, if there’s one thing we don’t need it’s sex therapy.’ She suddenly looked puzzled. ‘I thought you’d be the one person who would understand what I was feeling.’
‘I would love you to tell me what you’re feeling,’ Frieda said delicately. ‘It’s just that I’m not sure I need to know what you’re doing. Chlo?, when I see patients in my consulting room, the deal is that they have the freedom to say anything at all, the things they’ve never been able to speak aloud. But the deal is also that what they say stays in that room. The same is true, maybe, about sexual intimacy. You can be free with someone because it stays as a secret between you and the other person. Not to be communicated to your aunt.’
‘That’s a bit boring,’ said Chlo?. ‘With Jack I’ve just felt how sex with one person can be a completely different experience. I thought it was something we could talk about.’
Frieda leaned across the table and touched Chlo?’s hand with her own. ‘Jack might not want you to talk about this with me.’
‘You think you know Jack. But you don’t know him the way I know him. He’s not like you think.’ She sat up straight and put her glass down on the table with such firmness that some of the wine spilled. ‘Oh, well. If that’s what you want. But don’t you remember what it was like when you were my age? I bet the eighteen-year-old Frieda would have been a bit more unbuttoned about all this.’
Frieda put her own glass down. ‘It’s time for you to go. It’s late.’
Chlo? got up and pulled on her jacket. ‘Well, that wasn’t a great success,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry you think so.’
‘If you reckon it’s all a great mistake, you should just say so.’
‘It’s clearly not a mistake,’ said Frieda. ‘I don’t see why it matters what I say.’
Chlo? gave Frieda a last puzzled look. ‘Of course it does. It matters more than anything.’
When Chloe had gone, Frieda washed the glasses and put them away. She looked in the fridge and found some blue cheese, past its best, that she sliced on to crackers. Then she made herself camomile tea and had a long soak in the wonderful large bath that her friend Josef had installed for her with Stefan’s help. Afterwards she got into bed and turned the light out. Instantly she knew that there was no chance of sleep, not for hours. In normal times she might have considered getting up and putting her clothes on, going out and walking somewhere through late-night London to wear her body out and still the voices in her head. But just now she didn’t want to leave her house. She lay and stared at the ceiling and tried not to think of the events of the day, of what she had said to Karlsson, of what she hadn’t said to Chlo?. She thought of the eager, happy, ridiculous face as she arrived. However, she had no intention of having an intimate discussion about sex with her niece.
So she lay there for hour after hour of a raw night, somehow having dreams without sleeping. From time to time she would look at the clock on the bedside table and see that another half-hour or hour had passed. Some people said that what you felt at four in the morning was the bleak, spare truth that you couldn’t face up to in the daytime. Others said it was just a symptom of low blood sugar and the feelings were sham and a delusion. For much of the night, though she was in a dark that seemed like it would never end, Frieda felt she was staring at the sun, a cold and joyless sun.
Somehow she must finally have slept because she was woken from uneasy dreams by a sound that seemed a horrible part of the dream, then turned into her front doorbell. She looked at the clock. A visit at this time of the morning could only be more bad news. She pulled a dressing gown around her and padded downstairs in her bare feet. She stood for a moment by the door, taking a deep breath, delaying whatever was there for a few more seconds. Then she opened it.
‘Oh, my God,’ she said.
A man was standing outside, wearing a leather jacket, with a large shoulder bag. He looked tired and slightly sheepish and very concerned. It was Sandy.