‘Where are you, Frieda?’
‘Near Birmingham.’
‘What’s this?’
‘It’s a place, Josef.’
‘What for?’
‘It would take too long to explain.’
‘You have to come back, Frieda.’
‘Why?’
‘We all worry.’
‘I’m not a child.’
‘We all worry,’ he repeated.
‘Well, don’t.’
‘You are not well. We all agree. I come to collect you.’
‘No.’
‘I come now.’
‘You can’t.’
‘Why can’t?’
‘Because I’m not telling you where I am.’
She ended the call but her mobile rang again almost immediately. Now Reuben was calling; presumably Josef was standing beside him with his tragic eyes. She sighed, turned the phone off and put it into her bag. She’d never wanted to have a mobile in the first place.
‘Sharon Gibbs,’ said Fearby, as if nothing had interrupted them.
At half past ten, they were done. Fearby went outside for a cigarette and Frieda went to look in his cupboards for some food. She wasn’t hungry, but she felt hollow and couldn’t remember when she had last eaten. Not today; not last night.
The cupboards, like the fridge, were almost empty. She found some quick-boil rice and vegetable stock cubes long past their sell-by date: that would have to do. As she was boiling the rice in the stock, Fearby came back in and stood watching her.
‘So, what do you think?’ he asked.
‘I think either we’re two deluded people who happen to have bumped into each other at a donkey sanctuary – or that you’re right.’
He gave a grimace of relief.
‘In which case, it’s not Doherty or Shane or whatever he’s called.’
‘No. But it’s odd, isn’t it, that he knew them both? I don’t like coincidences.’
‘They lived the same kind of lifestyle – two young women who’d fallen off the track.’
‘Perhaps they knew each other?’ Frieda suggested, lifting the rice off the hob, letting the steam rise into her face, which felt grimy with toil and weariness.
‘That’s a thought. Who would know?’
‘I have one idea.’
After they’d eaten the rice – Fearby had eaten most of it, Frieda had just picked at hers – Frieda said she should take the train back. But Fearby said it was too late. After some argument about hotels and trains, Fearby ended by getting an old sleeping bag out of a cupboard and Frieda made a sort of bed for herself on a sofa in the living room. She spent a strange, feverish night in which she didn’t know when she was awake and when she was asleep, when her thoughts were like dreams and her dreams were like thoughts, all of them bad. She felt, or she thought, or she dreamed, that she was on a journey that was also a kind of obstacle race, and only when she had got past the obstacles, solved all the problems, would she finally be allowed to sleep. She thought of the photographs of the girls on Fearby’s wall and their faces became mixed up with the faces of Ted, Judith and Dora Lennox, all staring down at her.
From about half past three she was starkly, bleakly awake, staring at the ceiling. At half past four, she got up. She went to the bathroom and ran herself a bath. She lay there and watched the edges of the window blind grow light. She dried herself with the towel that looked like the least used and dressed herself in yesterday’s dirty clothes. When she emerged from the bathroom, Fearby was there pouring coffee into two mugs.
‘I can’t offer you much of a breakfast,’ he said. ‘I can go out at seven and get some bread and eggs.’
‘Coffee will be fine,’ said Frieda. ‘And then we should go.’
Fearby put a notebook, a folder, a little digital recorder into a shoulder bag and within half an hour they were back on the motorway, heading south. For a long time, they drove in silence. Frieda looked out of the window, then at Fearby. ‘Why are you doing this?’ she said.
‘I told you,’ he said. ‘At first, for George Conley.’
‘But you got him out,’ said Frieda. ‘That’s something most journalists wouldn’t achieve in their whole career.’
‘It didn’t feel enough. He only got out on a technicality. When he got out and everyone was cheering and celebrating and the media were there, it felt incomplete. I needed to tell the whole story, to show that Conley was innocent.’
‘Is that what Conley himself wants?’
‘I’ve been to see him. He’s a ruined man. I don’t think he’s capable of putting into words what he wants.’
‘Some people who looked at your house would say that you were a ruined man.’
Frieda thought Fearby might flare up at that or say something defensive but he smiled. ‘Would say? People have said it already. Starting with my wife and colleagues. My ex-colleagues.’
‘Is it worth it?’ said Frieda.
‘I’m not asking for thanks. I just need to know. Don’t you agree? When you saw those photographs of the girls, didn’t you want to know what happened to them?’
‘Did it ever occur to you that there may not be any link between the pictures on your wall, except that they’re just poor, sad girls who went missing?’
Fearby glanced at her. ‘I thought you were supposed to be on my side.’
‘I’m not on anybody’s side,’ Frieda said, with a frown, and then she relaxed. ‘Sometimes I think I’m not even on my own side. Our brains are constructed so that we find patterns. That’s why we see animal shapes in clouds. But really they’re just clouds.’
‘Is that why you came all the way up to Birmingham? And why we’re driving all the way back to London?’
‘My job is listening to the patterns people make of their lives. Sometimes they’re damaging patterns, or self-serving, or self-punishing, and sometimes they’re just wrong. Do you ever worry what would happen if you discovered that you were wrong?’
‘Maybe life isn’t that complicated. George Conley was convicted of murdering Hazel Barton. But he didn’t do it. Which means someone else did. So, where in London are we going?’
‘I’ll put the address into your satnav.’
‘You’ll like it,’ said Fearby. ‘It’s got the voice of Marilyn Monroe. Well, someone imitating Marilyn Monroe. Of course, that might not appeal to a woman as much a man. I mean the idea of driving around with Marilyn Monroe. In fact, some women might find it quite annoying.’
Frieda punched in the address, and for the next hour and a half, the car was guided down the M1, round the M25, by a voice that didn’t really sound like Marilyn Monroe’s at all. But he was right about the other bit. She did find it annoying.
Lawrence Dawes was at home. Frieda wondered if he ever wasn’t at home. At first he seemed surprised. ‘I thought you’d given up,’ he said.
‘I’ve got news for you,’ said Frieda. ‘We’ve got news for you.’
Dawes invited the two of them through, and once more Frieda found herself sitting at the table in Dawes’s back garden being served tea.
‘We found Shane,’ she said.
‘Who?’
‘He was the man your daughter was associated with.’
‘Associated with? What does that mean?’
‘You knew that your daughter was involved with drugs. He was involved with drugs too. In a more professional way.’ Dawes didn’t react, but didn’t seem like a man expecting good news. ‘Shane was just a nickname. His real name is Mick Doherty.’
‘Mick Doherty. Do you think he’s connected with my daughter’s disappearance?’
‘It’s possible. But I don’t know how. It was when I went to see Doherty, out in Essex, that I met Jim. We were both looking for Doherty, but for different reasons.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I was investigating the case of a young woman called Sharon Gibbs,’ Fearby said. ‘She had gone missing and I learned that she had known this man, Doherty. When I met Frieda, I discovered that we both wanted to talk to him about different missing women. It seemed an interesting coincidence.’