‘You’d go to prison. Josef would be sent to prison and then deported.’
Reuben opened another bottle of wine and started to fill the glasses again.
‘I’m going to take Dora to her bed,’ said Frieda. ‘And when I come back, I think you should go. You and Josef are going home.’
‘I’m having a second helping,’ said Reuben. ‘More, Ted?
‘Reuben, you’ve gone far enough.’
But a few minutes later, when she came back into the room, Reuben began again. She knew him in this mood – petulant and dangerous, like a sore-headed bull.
‘I think you’re being pious about this, Frieda. I’m an advocate for revenge. I think it’s healthy. I want to go round the table and everyone has got to say the person that they would like to take revenge on. And what the revenge would be. I’ve already named Hal Bradshaw. I’d like him to be tied to a mountain top naked for all eternity and then every day a vulture would come and eat his liver.’ He grinned wolfishly. ‘Or something.’
‘But what about when it had finished?’ said Chloë.
‘It would grow back every day. What about you?’
Chloë looked at Reuben, suddenly serious. ‘When I was nine, there was a girl called Cath Winstanley. In year four and the first half of year five, she spent the whole of every day trying to stop people talking to me or playing with me. And when a new girl arrived, Cath would become her friend straight away to stop her playing with me.’
‘I didn’t know that,’ said Frieda.
‘Mum knew. She just told me it would pass. It did. In the end.’
‘What would you like to do to her?’ said Reuben. ‘You’re allowed to do anything. This is fantasy revenge.’
‘I’d just like her to go through what I went through,’ said Chloë. ‘Then at the end I would appear out of a puff of smoke and say: “That’s what it was like.”’
‘That’s what revenge should be like,’ said Frieda, softly.
‘But you survived,’ said Reuben. ‘What about you, Josef?’
Josef gave a sad smile. ‘I don’t say his name. The man with my wife. Him I want to punish.’
‘Excellent,’ said Reuben. ‘So what punishments would you like to devise for him? Something medieval?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Josef. ‘If my wife is with him like me, how do you say it? Talk, talk, talk to him …’
‘Nagging,’ said Reuben.
‘Yes, the nagging,’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Reuben,’ said Frieda. ‘And you, Josef.’
‘What’s problem?’ said Josef.
‘Forget it,’ said Frieda.
‘What about you, Ted? If you could track down your mother’s killer? You must think about it.’
‘Out. Go home now,’ said Frieda.
‘No.’ Ted said loudly, almost in a yell. ‘Of course I think about it. If I could find my mother’s killer, I’d – I’d –’ He gazed around the table, his fist clenched around his wine glass. ‘I hate him,’ he said softly. ‘What do you do to the people you hate?’
‘It’s OK, Ted,’ said Chloë. She was trying to hold the hand that was clasping his glass.
‘Attaboy,’ said Reuben. ‘Let it out. That’s the way. Now you, Frieda. Who’s going to be the object of your implacable revenge?’
Frieda felt a lurch of nausea in her stomach, rising in her chest. She felt as if she was standing on the edge of a chasm, with just her heels on the ground, her toes poking into the darkness and the temptation, always that temptation, to let herself fall forward into the deep darkness towards – well, towards what?
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m not good at these sorts of games.’
‘Oh, come on, Frieda, this isn’t Monopoly.’
But Frieda’s expression hardened with a kind of anger and Reuben let it go.
‘The bath,’ said Josef, trying to make everything all right in his clumsy way. ‘Is OK?’
‘It’s very good, Josef. It was worth it.’ She didn’t tell him she hadn’t yet used it.
‘Finally I help,’ he said. He was swaying on his feet.
At last they had left. The soft spring dusk was darkening to real night. The clouds had blown away and the ghost of a moon was visible above the rooftops. Inside, an air of anticipation and dread filled the rooms. Even Chloë’s animation had petered out. Judith, who had come downstairs when she heard the front door slam, sat in a chair in the living room, her knees drawn up, her head pressed down on them, her hair wild. If anyone spoke to her and tried to comfort her, she would simply shake her head vehemently. Dora lay on a camp bed in Frieda’s study with a mug of cocoa beside her, which had cooled to form a wrinkled skin on its surface. She was playing a game of Snakes on her phone. Her thin plaits lay across her face. Frieda sat beside her for a few moments, without speaking. She turned her head and said, in a voice that sounded almost querulous: ‘I knew about Judith and that older man.’
‘Did you?’
‘A few days ago, when Dad was drunk, I heard him shouting at Aunt Louise about it. Is Judith going to be OK?’
‘In time.’
‘Did Dad …?’
‘I don’t know.’
Frieda went downstairs. Outside on the patio, Ted was smoking and pacing to and fro, his unkempt head enclosed in his giant pair of headphones. None of them could help the others, or be helped by them. They were just waiting, while Chloë barged around the house with cups of tea or firm, encouraging pats on a bowed shoulder.
Frieda had asked Ted if there was anyone she should call and he had turned his sullen gaze on her. ‘Like who?’
‘Like your aunt.’
‘You’ve got to be joking.’
‘Don’t you have other relatives?’
‘You mean like our uncle in the States? He’s not much use, is he? No, it’s us and it’s Dad, and if he’s not there, there’s no one at all.’
She sat with him for a while, relishing the cool night air. Nothing in her life felt rational or controlled any more: not her house, which used to be her refuge from the violent mess of the world, not her relationship with these young people, who had turned to her as if she knew answers that didn’t exist, not her creeping involvement with the police again, not her unshakeable preoccupation with the shadowy world of the missing girl Lila. Above all, not her sense that she was following a voice that only she could hear, an echo of an echo of an echo. And Dean Reeve, keeping watch. She thought of Sandy, only halfway through his day, and wished that this day was over.
FORTY-EIGHT
The following morning Frieda woke everyone early and took them all to Number 9 for breakfast – a raggle-taggle crew of bleary-eyed, anxious teenagers, who seemed closer today to childhood than adulthood. Their mother had been murdered, their father was in a police cell and they were waiting for the sentence to fall.
She saw them all on to the bus, waiting till it drew away, then returned home. She felt drained and subdued, but she had things to do. Josef was building a garden wall in Primrose Hill; Sasha was at work. So Frieda took the train out from Liverpool Street, through the nearly completed stadiums and sports halls of the Olympic Park. They looked like toys abandoned by a giant child. Coming out of the station at Denham, she climbed into a taxi waiting at the rank.
A horse refuge named after a flower. Frieda had imagined rolling meadows and woodland. The taxi passed a large, semi-demolished set of warehouses, then a housing estate. When the taxi stopped and the driver announced that they had arrived, Frieda thought she must have come to the wrong place, but then she saw the sign: ‘The Sunflower Horse and Donkey Refuge’. The driver asked if she wanted him to wait for her. Frieda said she might be some time so he wrote his number on a card and gave it to her.