Friday on My Mind (19 page)

Frieda was woken by her phone. For a moment, she was disconcerted because so very few people had her phone number. She lifted it up and saw it was Bridget.

‘Sorry to ring so early.’

‘That’s all right.’

‘I wanted to catch you. We’ve got the morning off, so we thought we’d take the children to the zoo. So you needn’t come in until about one, or half past. Sorry about the late notice.’

‘That’s fine.’

‘We’ll pay you anyway.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Well, we can argue about that when we meet.’

Frieda looked at her watch. Ethan was with Sasha today and she had four clear hours. It was a chance she might never get again. Within five minutes, she was washed and dressed. As she was opening the front door, she heard a hiss behind her. She turned round. It was Mira.

‘You take the potato?’ she said. ‘The salad.’

‘What?’ said Frieda. ‘No, I wasn’t here.’

‘Ileana,’ said Mira, darkly.

‘I’ll buy some food while I’m out,’ said Frieda. ‘I’ll make a meal.’

‘Thieves,’ said Mira.

‘What?’

‘Thieves and gypsies. All of them.’

‘All of what?’

‘The Romanians.’

‘Where are you from?’

‘Ruse.’

‘I don’t know where that is.’

‘It is Bulgaria.’

Frieda felt in her pocket and took out a twenty-pound note. She handed it to Mira. ‘That can go towards food and whatever. And you don’t mean that about gypsies and thieves.’

‘Lock your door,’ said Mira.

‘There isn’t a lock on it.’

‘That is your problem.’

‘Later,’ said Frieda, opening the door.

In another five minutes she was on the bus with a black coffee. She sat upstairs looking at people heading to work or to the shops. More and more she felt different from all that, all the people in the real world of jobs and houses and attachments, people with places to go, appointments to keep. She felt the same estrangement when she opened the door of the house. It felt as if the family had been snatched away in an instant, leaving toys scattered where they had fallen, mugs and plates on the kitchen table. The house still smelt of the people who had left, the coffee, the perfume, soap, skin cream, talcum powder.

She thought for a moment, and then began to walk from room to room, the kitchen and the living room and upstairs to Bridget’s den and the bedroom. The house felt familiar to her now and she had already searched these
rooms. She had opened the drawers and the cupboards. She paused in the bedroom and looked out of one of the large windows that faced the street. An idea had occurred to her: it was somewhere in her mind but she couldn’t quite grasp it. What was it? Let it go. Her rummaging and searching had produced nothing so far. Nothing except the keys. They had the keys to Sandy’s flat and they had the keys to her house. Suddenly the idea came to her. She ran down the stairs two at a time. The device at her house, inside the door. How could she be so careless a second time? She looked at the alarm inside the front door. It was switched off. Frieda felt a sudden jolt of alarm. Was it possible that someone was still in the house? Could Al be on the top floor? No, she told herself. They’d just forgotten to turn on the alarm.

But the idea of Al stayed with her. Frieda had mainly been thinking about Bridget, that she might have had an affair with Sandy. Somehow she seemed like Sandy’s type, maybe more his type than Frieda had been. But Al was his colleague and his friend. Had he suspected something, known something? The rooms she had looked at so far had felt like Bridget’s territory, even the shared bedroom. But she had never been to the top of the house. She walked back up the stairs, past the bedroom, up to the next floor. She knew better, but even so she walked as quietly as she could. The stairs ended in an attic room that had been converted into an office. On the side away from the street there were two large skylights. Frieda walked across and looked out. She could see the Shard and the Gherkin and the Cheese Grater, those big buildings with silly names, as if London were slightly ashamed of them.

She turned to the room. In the centre was a large pine desk, with a computer surrounded by piles of papers and cards and CDs. There was a mug full of pens and a cup containing paperclips. There was a wooden pencil box, two toothbrushes, a Flash drive, a compass, a watch, an energy bill, two pairs of headphones and a small framed photograph of the children. There were books everywhere, on makeshift wooden shelves on two of the walls, stacked on the floor. There were also piles of different scientific journals. On another table there was a CD player and more piles of CDs, a shredder, an empty magnum-sized bottle of wine and a tangle of cables and chargers. On one space of bare wall there was a messy watercolour, presumably painted by Tam, and a photograph of Al crossing the line in the London Marathon. Frieda leaned in close and looked at the time: 04.12.45. Was that good?

Frieda pulled open the drawers of the desk one by one. There was nothing unexpected: chequebooks, blank postcards, a stapler, Sellotape. Another drawer contained a pile of credit-card statements. Frieda scanned them quickly: petrol, railway tickets, a supermarket, coffee, a couple of cinema visits, names that were probably restaurants. Frieda put them back. She didn’t even know what she was looking for. Another drawer contained cardboard files. Frieda took them out one by one and riffled through them. They looked like lectures, presentations, chapters of a book. Frieda replaced them in the order she’d taken them out and turned her attention to the computer.

She touched the keyboard and the screen lit up, no
password required. There were dozens of files and documents on his desktop, professional-looking, counterparts of what she had seen in the files. She clicked on his browser and looked at his history. It was a mixture of news, buying a book, weather, the London Zoo website, Twitter, a long article on a university website, a blog article and that was just today. She didn’t have time to make any kind of thorough search.

She clicked on his email. The inbox contained 16,732 messages, but this was easier. She typed in Sandy’s name and the screen filled with messages from him. She clicked on one of them and suddenly it was as if a window had been opened, bringing a familiar smell and a memory of long ago. Sandy was in the room with her. The message was nothing special, just a line saying they should get together before some departmental meeting or other and grab a coffee. The sheer casualness of it, the spelling mistakes: Frieda could almost see him sitting there typing it. It was like she was looking over his shoulder. She had to pause a moment, gather herself, stop thinking about the wrong things.

She clicked on message after message and she quickly became frustrated. Sandy had never been one for treating emails like old-fashioned letters. They were for saying ‘Yes’ or ‘Maybe’ or ‘Make it 11.30’ or, on occasion, ‘We need to talk’. He’d never even been very comfortable talking on the phone. He’d told her that if there was anything important to say, you needed to say it to someone’s face, so you could see their eyes, their expression. Otherwise it wasn’t real communication. She clicked on the last message he had sent:

If you really want to talk about this (again), I’m in my office tomorrow.

S

Frieda thought for a moment. That seemed like something. She looked at the previous message from him. It was from a week earlier, a routine message telling Al about a change of room for a seminar. She read the last message again. Talk about what? She clicked on Al’s ‘sent’ messages and scrolled down to the most recent, just an hour earlier than Sandy’s message:

Dear Sandy,

I’ve taken the weekend and you’re wrong, I’m still angry. If you think I’m just going to roll over about this, then you don’t understand me.

Yours, Alan

The previous message to this was from a week earlier and enclosed the CV of a Ph.D. student; the one before and the one before that contained nothing significant.

And then Frieda heard a sound from downstairs. Or thought she did – just a faint scraping. She stood quite still and listened but all she could hear was the thump of her heart and in the far distance a radio playing, a door slamming. A bead of sweat trickled down the side of her face. She should quickly finish what she was doing and leave. She turned back to her task, but then she heard another sound, definite this time, louder. It was the front door opening and then closing. She took a step back from the computer and tried to breathe steadily.

Frieda tried to remember something she might have been told. Did they have a cleaner? Was someone coming to stay? Perhaps that was why the alarm hadn’t been turned on. She thought of staying where she was in the hope that the person would leave – but what if they didn’t leave? Or if they came upstairs? If they came into this room and found her standing there? She waited, scarcely daring to breathe, and could hear nothing from downstairs. Whoever it was who had come in must be standing in the hall, not moving – unless they were moving silently, on their toes, coming up the stairs towards her. She turned her head towards the door, half expecting to see someone standing there, but who?

Then she did hear footsteps. Not fast but purposeful. Perhaps they would go towards the kitchen and she could dash into the hall and through the front door. But the footsteps paused at the foot of the stairs and then there was no doubt: they were coming towards her. She took a deep breath. There was no choice, really. She restored Al’s computer to the way it had been and walked down the stairs, which curled round themselves, so that as she approached the main flight she had a clear view: Bridget was standing a few steps up the stairs, hand on the banisters and face gazing at her with an expression of fierce contempt. For a moment the two women stared at each other, neither of them moving, and it seemed to Frieda that everything she said now would be a charade. Nevertheless she adopted a light tone as she walked down towards Bridget.

‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I came over because I thought I’d left my watch here. I took it off when I was playing with the children.’

The words sounded so lame as she spoke them that Frieda could anticipate Bridget’s questions: why couldn’t you just collect the watch later? Why were you looking for it upstairs? Frieda was composing plausible answers in her head but Bridget simply said: ‘And did you?’

In answer Frieda held up her left hand, showing her watch on her wrist.

Bridget barely glanced at it, but kept her gaze fixed on Frieda’s face. Her eyes glowed. She had a very faint smile on her face now, not a happy one.

‘I thought you were at the zoo,’ Frieda said. She could feel the pulse in her neck and she put out a hand to touch the wall’s reassuring solidity.

‘Yes. I know you did.’

‘Is something wrong?’

Bridget looked at Frieda as if she were assessing her and then seemed to make up her mind.

‘Follow me,’ she said. ‘Carla.’

The two women walked through to the kitchen. Bridget pulled open a drawer in the kitchen table.

‘I’ve got my watch,’ said Frieda, her voice sounding tinny in her ears. ‘I can leave now and come back for the children later.’

‘Oh, stop it, for goodness’ sake. Just stop.’ Bridget’s voice rang out clear and sharp, and Frieda felt a tingle of shame spreading through her.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll stop.’

Bridget took out a newspaper and threw it down on the table. Frieda barely needed to look. She saw the headline: ‘Police Psych Goes on Run’. And there was a picture of her, one that had been used before. It had been taken of her without her knowledge.

‘It looks like you’ve made some attempt to disguise yourself. It wasn’t enough.’

‘Obviously not.’

‘Well?
Well?
’ Bridget slammed her fist on the table so hard that the mugs on it jumped. ‘Is that all you have to say? Sitting there so cool and proper. My
nanny
. Fuck. The woman who screwed up Sandy’s life, finding your way into
my
house, looking after
my
children, snooping through
my possessions.
’

‘Have you called the police?’

As Frieda asked the question, she was making calculations in her head, asking herself questions. What was Bridget planning? Was Al really with the children or was he in the house as well? Or perhaps he would be waiting outside. She pictured the network of roads and tried to think of which way she would run.

‘Ha! Not yet.’ She slid her hand into her jacket pocket and pulled out a mobile, held it up. ‘But my fingers are itching.’

‘Where’s Al?’

‘Out. With the children. Where you can’t get at them. How could you?’ Bridget’s voice was suddenly loud. ‘This isn’t some kind of game. Those are our fucking children. Clearly you don’t mind what happens to yourself, but what about them? You’re a fugitive, you’re wanted for murder, you probably are a murderer. A murderer of my dear friend.’

‘I looked after them well,’ said Frieda. She glanced at the back door. The key was in the lock. She could feel her muscles tensing in readiness.

Bridget raised her hands and Frieda stepped back. She let her hands fall.

‘I’ve never hit anybody in my life. But I could punch you and grab you and kick you.’

‘I understand.’

‘No, you don’t. You’ve been in this house, this house where you would never have been welcome, and you’ve lied and you’ve lied. How can you do that? How are you so good at that?’

‘I’m sorry I lied. But I was looking after your children like anyone would look after them.’

Bridget gave a bitter shout of laughter. ‘Are you insane? Is that your line of defence? I’ve never met anyone like you. You’re off my scale.’ She took a few deep breaths, as if she were trying to calm herself down. ‘Let’s go out into the garden. I feel trapped in here, as if I’m going to explode with something.’