‘I’ve had the sweats.’ Stevie held up a hand, remembering that Geoffrey Frei’s obituary had mentioned he was the father of twins, and wondering where the other child was. ‘I’m not contagious.’
‘I can’t afford to take that chance.’
‘I understand, but I’ve travelled quite a long way to see you. My name is Stephanie Flint. My boyfriend knew your husband and I think their deaths might be connected. If I promise not to move from here, can I ask you a few questions?’
Sarah Frei was wearing a pair of cropped jeans and a floral blouse over a dark blue vest. She was broad-hipped and large-shouldered, the kind of woman that men with a bit of land and a yen for descendants must once have prized.
‘Geoff was mugged. It was a random attack.’ The box was threatening to slip from the woman’s grasp and she bent and put it on the ground. A tin of tomatoes tumbled free, rolled across the garden path and into an overgrown border. She stared at the escaped tin, as if it was a problem beyond her capabilities, and then raised her eyes to look at Stevie. ‘I can’t tell you anything. I wasn’t there when Geoff was killed.’ She looked tired beyond tears, but there was a crack in her voice. ‘He was on his own.’
‘I think your husband was researching a story that somehow involved my boyfriend. They were due to meet the week Mr Frei died. Two days after your husband died Simon was dead too. I think their deaths might be connected.’
Sarah Frei had pinned her hair up in a careless knot. She pushed a strand away from her face.
‘Almost everyone has lost someone. I’m sorry you’ve had a wasted journey, but I have responsibilities.’ She lifted the box and took a step forward. ‘Get out of my way, please.’
The front garden was tiny, the only exit through the gate. They were all lepers now. It was a weapon of sorts, the force field of infection. Stevie held her ground.
‘My boyfriend didn’t die of the sweats. Someone killed him and tried to make it look like he died of natural causes. I only realised he’d been murdered when I discovered that he’d left me a laptop full of data. I couldn’t access it at first, and when I did it was too technical for me to understand. The problem is, the person who killed him doesn’t know that. They’re after me now. If they think you know something, you could be in danger too.’
The child whimpered. Sarah Frei jogged him up and down in her arms, in a dislocated, jerky fashion.
‘Don’t you get it? We’re all in danger.’
‘Your husband might have been murdered. Don’t you want to find out the truth about why he died?’
‘What the fuck does it matter any more?’ The child heard the emotion in his mother’s voice and started to cry. A man carrying supplies to his car down the path of an adjoining garden looked across at them, but he made no effort to intervene. ‘Shhhh, it’s all right.’ Sarah Frei resumed the jerky rocking. The child’s cries grew louder and more fractious. His arms and legs still stretched tightly around her, like a spider trying to subdue a much larger prey. ‘Shhhh.’ Sarah Frei put the box back down on the path and sank on to her doorstep. ‘See what you’ve done?’ She threw Stevie a defeated look, opened her shirt and put the child to her breast. ‘Shhhh.’
Stevie couldn’t stand the not-knowing any more. She said, ‘I read you had twins. Is the other one okay?’
Sarah Frei rested the child on her knees, cradling his head in the crook of her arm. She gave a small smile as he settled and Stevie caught a glimpse of the person she had been before the crisis: an untidy, capable woman, sexy despite her ample rear, rough heels and unshaven legs.
‘He’s with my mother.’ The child had quietened and the process of comforting him seemed to have soothed Sarah Frei too. ‘She was going to take both of them but Felix had a cold. We decided it was better to leave him with me and let Alex go with her. It was a mistake. I hadn’t realised how bad things were going to get.’ She looked at Stevie. ‘Can you believe what’s happening?’
It was a pause in hostilities, a Christmas football match before the fighting resumed. Stevie squatted on the ground. She saw Simon’s face, his eyes rolled back in his head, Joanie in her nest of tubes, Hope’s shattered skull.
‘No, it feels unreal.’
‘That’s where we’re going now, to my mother’s place in the New Forest, as soon as you let us.’ Sarah Frei reached into her jeans pocket and took out a pack of cigarettes. ‘Geoff would go crazy if he could see me smoking and breastfeeding at the same time, but right now I think it’s the least of our worries.’ She lit up and took a long drag. ‘You’ve got until I finish this and then we’re leaving.’
The sun caught her strawberry-blonde hair, highlighting flecks of silver-grey amongst the gold. They looked like a mark of her widowhood and the sight of them made Stevie feel ashamed.
‘I’m sorry.’ She ran her hand over her own rough crop, surprised at the jaggedness of it against her palm. ‘I wouldn’t normally behave like this. It’s like I’m trying to outrun a landslide.’
‘We all are.’ Sarah Frei took a pull at her cigarette. ‘So you’d better get on with it. You only have until I finish my fag.’
‘Can you tell me anything about the story your husband was working on when he died?’
Sarah Frei took another deep drag. Stevie watched the tip of ash glow and grow, the cigarette shrink.
‘Normally Geoff doesn’t . . .’ Sarah Frei gave a dry smile. ‘Didn’t talk much about his work. He liked to leave it behind when he came home, but that last case blurred the boundaries between Geoff the family man and Geoff the journalist.’ Sarah Frei tapped the cigarette with the unconscious ease of a practised smoker and the ash crumbled to the ground. ‘He’d known one of the people involved. He didn’t tell me his name, but Geoff said they had gone to the same school; they even trained together for a while, back when Geoff still thought he wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps.’ The child had fallen asleep. She fastened her blouse and then ran a hand softly over his curls. ‘He was too squeamish to be a doctor, not that he’d ever admit it to anyone except me. Geoff was a gentle man. I was the tough one in the relationship. He couldn’t stand pain.’ She looked up and her eyes met Stevie’s. ‘But he could kill with his pen, if he thought the cause justified it.’
Stevie opened her bag and flicked through the bundle of school photographs. She found the one that showed the trio of doctors together in the same row. The curly-haired boy in the glasses was sandwiched between Simon and Dr Ahumibe. She held it up so that the other woman could see it.
‘Is this your husband?’
‘I don’t know. It might be.’
Stevie took a step closer and held out the photograph.
‘Here, the boy wearing glasses?’
She pointed at the serious face beneath the Harpo Marx curls.
‘I think so. He looked so like Felix and Alex when he was little. It’s like fast-forwarding to how they’ll be when they’re ten or eleven.’ Sarah Frei grimaced as if she had just realised that she had spoken as if the future was assured. ‘Geoff was big on nurture over nature, all that Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man stuff. He reckoned the person you became was determined by how you were brought up.’
‘So, bad luck if your parents let you down.’
‘Very bad luck indeed, according to Geoff.’
Stevie looked at the turrets and dreamy spires of the school in the photograph’s background.
‘I guess your husband’s family didn’t let him down.’
A speck of steel entered Sarah Frei’s voice.
‘They worked very hard to help Geoff be what he eventually became, a good man.’
It was how the newspaper column had styled Geoffrey Frei: a good man, a campaigner against corruption.