‘Why?’
Frieda stopped and turned to him. She looked at him with her dark eyes. ‘Because you are going to.’
‘No,’ he whispered. ‘I can’t … I never meant to … I can’t.’
‘What’s it been like?’ said Frieda. ‘These last weeks.’
‘Like being in hell,’ he said, the words barely audible.
‘That’s where you’ll be for ever, unless you speak the truth.’
‘How can I? My mother. I killed my mother.’ He jerked to a pause, and then dragged the words back again. ‘I killed my mother. I can see her face.’ He repeated the words wildly: ‘I can see her face, her smashed-in face. All the time.’
‘This is the only way. It won’t make things better. You will always be the person who killed his mother. You will always carry that with you, until the day you die. But you have to admit what you did.’
‘Will I go to prison?’
‘Does that matter?’
‘I wish I could tell her –’
‘What would you tell her?’
‘That I love her. That I’m sorry.’
‘You can tell her.’
The street had swung round in a crescent and now they were back on the road where Louise Weller lived. Ted stopped and drew a deep, unsteady breath.
‘We don’t need to go back in there,’ said Frieda. ‘We can just go to the station.’
He stared at her, his young face stricken with dread. ‘Will you come with me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Because I don’t think I can do it alone.’
Frieda had walked through London many times, but she couldn’t remember a walk so ghostly and so strange. It felt that crowds separated as they passed, and their footsteps rang out in the fugitive grey light. After a while, she put her arm through Ted’s and he drew closer to her, like a child with his mother. She thought of Judith and Dora in that dark, tidy, airless house, their father locked away, their brother too – this young, horror-struck man. Everyone alone in their own terror and grief.
At last they were there. Ted drew apart from her. Beads of sweat had sprung up on his forehead and there was a dazed expression on his face. Frieda put a hand on the small of his back.
‘This is it,’ she said. And they went inside together.
Karlsson had just gone back in to Russell Lennox when Yvette put her head round the door and beckoned him out again.
‘What is it?’
‘I thought you should know at once. Frieda’s here, with the Lennox boy.’
‘With Ted?’
‘Yes. She says that he has something important to say to you.’
‘OK. Tell them I’ll come now.’
‘And Elaine Kerrigan is still insisting she did it.’
Karlsson went back into the room. ‘I’ll be back shortly,’ he said to Russell Lennox. ‘But apparently your son’s here to see me.’
‘My son? Ted? No. No, he can’t be. No –’
‘Mr Lennox, what is it?’
‘I did it. I’ll tell you everything. I killed my wife. I killed Ruth. Sit down. Turn on the tape recorder. I want to confess. Don’t go. I did it. No one else. It was me. You have to believe me. I murdered my wife. I swear to God it was me.’
Ted lifted his burning eyes and stared at Karlsson full in the face. For the first time, Karlsson felt a stillness about him, a sense of concentrated purpose. The boy took a breath and then said in a clear and ringing voice: ‘I am here to confess to the murder of my mother. Who I loved very much …’
FIFTY-EIGHT
Josef was sitting in the kitchen with Chloë, playing some card game that involved lots of shouting and slapping of cards one on top of another when Frieda returned. Even as she was considering how to break the news to her niece, she had time to wonder why Chloë was in her house when she should have been at school, and think of how, from being her secure retreat from the world, it had become a casual meeting place for everyone, a place of disorder and grief. Perhaps, she thought, she would replace all the locks when this was over. She looked at Josef. ‘Could Chloë and I have a moment?’ she asked.
Josef seemed puzzled. ‘Moment?’
‘Yes,’ said Frieda. ‘Could you go out of the room?’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Josef. ‘I go to Reuben now anyway. Poker for the guys.’
He picked the cat off his lap and, holding it against his broad chest, backed out.
As Frieda told Chloë, she watched the succession of emotions on the young girl’s pale face: confusion, shock, distress, disbelief, anger. When Frieda had finished, there was a silence. Chloë’s eyes flickered from side to side.
‘Is there anything you want to ask me?’ she said.
‘Where is he?’
‘At the police station.’
‘In a cell?’
‘I don’t know. They were going to take a statement, but they’ll keep him in.’
‘He’s only a child.’
‘He’s eighteen. He’s an adult.’
There was another pause. Frieda saw that Chloë’s eyes were glistening. ‘Tell me,’ she said.
‘You were supposed to look after him.’
‘I think I was looking after him.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He had to own up to what he did.’
‘Even if it meant ruining his life.’
‘It’s his only hope of not ruining his life.’
‘In your opinion,’ said Chloë, bitterly. ‘In your fucking professional opinion. I brought him to you. I brought him to you so that you could help him.’
‘Helping people isn’t simple. It’s –’
‘Shut up. Shut up shut up shut up. I don’t want to hear you talk about taking responsibility and fucking autonomy. You’ve betrayed him and you’ve betrayed me. That’s what you’ve done.’
‘He killed his mother.’
‘He didn’t mean to!’
‘And that will be taken into account.’
‘I’m going.’
‘Where?’
‘Back home. Mum might be a head case and the house might be a slum, but at least she doesn’t send my friends to prison.’
‘Chloë –’
‘I’ll never forgive you.’
It was finished, she told herself. She had finished. The feverishness of the last few weeks could abate; the strangeness could fade, like a violent bruise fades until at last it is just a faint ache, invisible to anyone else. The Lennox murder was solved. The Lennox children had gone to their different kinds of prison. Chloë had gone. Frieda had betrayed her friendship with Karlsson. The wild quest for a girl she had never known was over and already it had the quality of a dream. She wondered if she would ever see Fearby again, with his staring eyes and his silver hair.
She started clearing up, putting objects back where they belonged, wiping stains off surfaces, rubbing beeswax polish on to the little chess table by the window. That afternoon she would go and see Thelma Scott and dip the bucket down into the dark well of thoughts, but perhaps later on she could play through an old chess game, let the wooden pieces click their way across the board while silence settled around her again. She would have to call Sandy too. In her tumult, she had let him go. The two days in New York seemed distant, unreal. Now at last she let herself dwell upon the way he’d held her that night and the words he had said. Remember.
Remember. Halfway up the stairs, Frieda stopped dead. Something had come into her mind, setting her heart racing. What was it? Fearby. Something about Fearby, and his last message to her, before he’d disappeared out of her life. Frieda sat down on the step and tried to recall exactly what he’d said in his message. Most of it wasn’t important but he’d obviously had an idea that seemed worth following up. He’d said he’d looked over the files of the girls. She remembered that bit clearly enough. Then he’d said something else. That we’d been thinking about them in the wrong way. Yes, and that he was going out to take another look.