Thursday's Children (23 page)

She leaned against an old tree outside Vanessa’s house, feeling shivery, took her mobile from her pocket, scrolled down to find Chas’s number, pressed it and waited for him to reply.

‘Hello?’

‘It’s Frieda. Are you busy at the moment?’

‘Yes. I’m at work. You’re not, I take it?

‘I’d like to meet you.’

‘How nice.’

‘What time do you finish?’

‘I said I was busy, but that doesn’t mean I can’t fit you in.’ Frieda grimaced at the phrase. ‘Can you come to my office?’

‘Where is it?’

‘About two hundred metres from my house, on the esplanade. Number thirty-seven. You can’t miss it – it’s the old customs house, all spruced up. Why don’t you come at –’ There was a pause and an ostentatious rustle of paper and Frieda knew she was meant to be imagining Chas looking through his crowded appointments diary. ‘Three o’clock any good?’

‘Fine. What’s the name of your company?’ For it occurred to Frieda that she had no idea what Chas actually did, just that he made lots of money from doing it. Had Eva said something about head-hunting?

‘Just Latimer’s,’ he said airily. ‘Ask for me at Reception
and my assistant will come and collect you. Do you want to tell me what this is about – apart from the pleasure of my company, of course?’

‘Not really. Not over the phone.’

They ended the conversation but for a few minutes Frieda stayed where she was, feeling the cold wind against her face, carrying spots of rain. She welcomed the anger that was hardening inside her; her heart was a clenched fist.

Josef said, of course, that he would take Frieda to Chas’s house. They arranged to meet in an hour outside the little café where she had met Lewis. She didn’t really feel like going back to Eva’s house. She didn’t know what to make of the affair that had sprung up between Eva and Josef, but she certainly didn’t want to spend her time watching it.

So she sat at a small table near the window and ordered a bowl of butternut squash soup and a roll. Today she felt cold to her bones, in spite of her thick coat. She drank the soup and gazed out at the street, where people were now running for cover as the rain thickened then turned to a spiteful hail. The sky looked purple and swollen.

She thought about Greg Hollesley, who had known that Becky was going to the police. Then she thought about Chas Latimer: his blue eyes with their small pupils; his habitual air of ironic humour; his love of power. When he was a teenager, he had tried to control everyone around him, even the teachers, and now he did the same. He manipulated people, then watched to see how they would react. Vanessa had said Chas was stoned when he kissed her, but Frieda felt sure it had been a deliberate act of sabotage: as soon as Vanessa had got involved with Ewan, Chas would
have wanted to take her away; it would have amused him. And he had told Vanessa that Frieda was a virgin. The desperate lie Frieda had told her rapist when she was sixteen had found its way to Eva’s kitchen table twenty-three years later and been traced back to him.

She finished her soup and pushed the bowl away. Chas Latimer. If he was her rapist, he was also Becky’s and Sarah May’s rapist, and their killer. She tried to connect him in her mind with the man who climbed into the rooms of vulnerable girls, called them ‘sweetheart’, violated them and ended their lives. She analysed her thoughts and she analysed her feelings. It was a sort of syllogism. The rapist was an awful man. Chas was an awful man. That didn’t mean they were the same awful man. And it didn’t mean that they weren’t.

Josef’s van pulled up and she went out into the gleaming street.

Josef’s normally stubbly face was newly shaven and his hair was clean. He was wearing a shirt that Frieda didn’t recognize. She wasn’t going to say anything to him about Eva, it was no business of hers, but Josef had no such inhibitions.

‘Eva was your good friend, yes?’

Frieda remembered Eva as she had been all those years ago, a red-headed tomboy, clumsy and straight-speaking and loyal to a fault. ‘We were friends.’

‘And now?’

‘I don’t know. It’s been such a long time. It’s hard to return to a lost friendship.’

‘She likes you,’ he said. ‘Very, very much. She tells me she never had a friend like you, when you were gone from here.’

‘That’s sad,’ said Frieda.

‘If it’s not OK, I stop.’

‘You mean, with Eva?’

‘I stop. Like that.’ He lifted his hand from the steering wheel and snapped his thumb and middle finger. ‘Say the word.’

‘I don’t want to say the word. It’s nothing to do with me. But I would hate it if anyone got hurt.’

Josef stopped in the small deserted car park overlooking the deserted beach – just one young man and his barrel-chested dog on the wet sands – and Frieda climbed out of the van. ‘I don’t suppose I’ll be long.’

‘Long, short. All good.’

She walked along the road in the rain, feeling the salt stinging her skin. Chas’s office was easy to find – it was an old wooden building, beautifully modernized. There were only two small windows in its front façade, but when Frieda was buzzed through the double doors she saw that the back, looking on to the sea, was almost all glass. It was as though the rooms were full of liquid light. She could see the man with his dog from here, and now she could also see Josef, who was smoking a cigarette at the water’s edge, stepping back occasionally to avoid the small waves that curled at his feet.

A tiny woman with a helmet of platinum blonde hair showed her up to Chas’s office on the first floor. It was a large room that was empty, except for a huge curved desk with three chairs ranged round it and, in the corner, an equally huge terracotta pot containing very tall dried flowers. It was more like a stage set than a workplace.

Chas stood up and spread his hands, as if he owned not only the room but the sea outside as well. ‘Welcome.’

‘I won’t be long.’

He took off his thick-framed glasses, then arched his eyebrows. ‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘You’d better tell me.’

‘Many years ago, you told Vanessa that I was a virgin.’

His smile froze. ‘I’m sorry?’

Frieda repeated her statement.

‘I’m beginning to think you have a problem.’ He put his glasses back on, tapping them into position. ‘I know what happened with your father. That would be enough to send anyone off the rails. I couldn’t be more sympathetic.’

‘Why did you say I was a virgin?’

‘I don’t have a clue what you’re going on about. But you do realize that you sound insane?’

‘You told Vanessa, when you and she kissed.’

‘When we kissed? I’m sorry, am I trapped in some kind of teenage girl story? Are you going to start talking about prom dresses?’

‘Don’t you remember?’

‘Remember kissing Vanessa? For fuck’s sake, Frieda, I’m nearly forty. I might have kissed Vanessa – I kissed lots of girls. I don’t know what I said to her. And, anyway, this isn’t a Jane Austen novel. Nobody cares if you were or weren’t a virgin when you were sixteen. Not me. I didn’t care then and I certainly don’t now.’ He came round from behind his desk and stood in front of her. His glasses gleamed. ‘What I do think is that you’re in danger of becoming irritating.’

‘Something happened here twenty-three years ago.’

‘So I gather.’

‘And it happened on the night of the concert. Thursday’s Children.’

‘This is clearly some kind of personal psychodrama.’

‘I don’t care what you think. But I don’t give up and I won’t go away. Something terrible just happened in Braxton and you went to the funeral. I believe it started back in 1989 and you need to tell me about that evening. I know you were there at the start of the concert, but you weren’t at the end. Where were you?’ Frieda stepped forward. ‘And do not fuck me around the way you fuck everyone else around.’

For a moment he looked uncertain. Then he took a step backwards. ‘I went to hospital,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘You heard.’

‘I don’t believe you. You didn’t say that to the police when they interviewed you. I’ve read the transcripts.’

‘You can believe me or not.’

‘Why did you go to hospital?’

‘Why? Why do you think?’

‘I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking.’

‘I was drunk. Not just drunk. Paralytic. Vomiting. Yes. That’s why I didn’t tell the police. I was embarrassed. If they’d pressed me, I’d have told them but they never got back to me.’ He bounced slightly on the balls of his feet, as if testing the springiness of the pale carpet. ‘I had my image to protect, after all. Very important for a sixteen-year-old boy.’

‘How did you get to the hospital?’

‘In an ambulance. Though I don’t remember that bit. I was told when I woke up. What I remember is the headache and the IV drip.’

‘Do you have proof?’

‘No, I do not have proof. If I’d been expecting you, I’d have got my mum to write me a note.’

‘I’m going to have to check this.’

‘Do what the hell you want as long as it means you get out of Braxton and never come back. We don’t want you here any more.’

Frieda left the building and walked out on to the beach. She gazed over the grey, wrinkling water for a while, her hair whipping against her face, then pulled out her phone and called Jack. It went to voicemail so she made her way back over the sand to where Josef was waiting. Just as she reached the van, her mobile rang.

‘Jack? Thanks for calling back.’

‘That’s fine. If this is because Chloë’s told you that –’

‘It isn’t. I want you to do me a favour.’

‘All right,’ he said warily.

‘I want you to find some A&E discharge forms that would have been sent to Chas Latimer’s GP in Braxton, or nearby at least, twenty-three years ago, on February the eleventh.’

‘How am I going to go about that?’

‘I don’t know.’

Then she made another call. She gave her name and asked to be put through to Mr Hollesley.

His tone was polite but cool, the charm gone.

‘You knew about Becky’s rape.’

There was a pause before he spoke. ‘Maddie told me that Becky had claimed to have been raped, yes.’

‘She was raped. And you knew she intended to go to the police.’

‘I believe Maddie told me that, yes.’

‘You and Maddie were having an affair.’

‘I don’t have to answer to you.’

‘How well did you know Becky?’

‘Hardly at all. My thing with Maddie wasn’t really public.’

‘Were you in Braxton when Becky died?’

‘I was in London. With my family. I was very shocked and distressed to hear of Becky’s death and I don’t know why you’re intruding into Maddie’s grief. I’m surprised at you.’

Josef dropped Frieda outside Eva’s, then drove away to get some building materials. Frieda made her way round the back to her shed, hoping that Eva wasn’t in the kitchen to see her as she walked through the little garden. She needed to be alone. Tomorrow she would go home, and the thought of her little house, the open fire, the quiet rooms, even the tortoiseshell cat that she was the reluctant owner of, gave her relief.

She opened her computer. There were two emails from Sandy, one sent the previous evening and the other that morning, which she didn’t open. She knew that, very soon, she was going to have to face up to what she had done, let the pain flood in, but not today. There was also an email from Ewan, which she did open. Under a message that simply read, ‘See what you think’, there was an attachment. She clicked on it to find a display of lines and colours that at first made no sense to her. Then she saw that he’d done it: he’d assembled a timeline of the evening of the concert. And it wasn’t just one but a series of parallels: a line for each person whose movements he had tried to record, girls as well as boys – and there was a complicated colour code for time and for place. Frieda stared at it, trying to see the gaps
and overlaps, trying to make a coherent picture out of fragments. It made her head hurt. She was almost pleased when there was a brisk knock at the door.

‘Come in,’ she called, but Eva already had. She was carrying a tray on which there were two mugs of tea and a plate of buttered crumpets.

‘I thought you might need something warm,’ she said. She looked warm herself, with her red hair, her flushed cheeks, her layers of bright clothing.

She’s happy, thought Frieda, with a stab of anxiety. ‘Thank you.’

‘What’s that?’ Eva was looking at Ewan’s timeline.

‘Just research.’ She hesitated for a moment. ‘I’m trying to establish where everyone was on the night of that concert. Thursday’s Children.’

Eva took a mug of tea and a crumpet and sat on Frieda’s bed. ‘Don’t you think you should tell me why?’

‘I said before, something happened that night and –’

‘I’m not a fool, Frieda. I know your mother’s dying, but that’s not really why you’re here, is it?’ Eva’s flushed cheeks had become even pinker. Her freckles stood out. Frieda couldn’t work out if she was angry or simply agitated. ‘You have to tell me. I’m your friend. I was.’

Frieda closed her laptop lid. She looked out on to the soggy garden, full of brown leaves and withered shrubs. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘The night of the concert, I argued with Lewis. Remember?’ Eva nodded. ‘I couldn’t face it all and I went back home. I went to bed. Someone broke into our house that night and I want to find out who.’

Eva didn’t say anything, just went on staring at her and waiting. Frieda heard the phrase in her head, ‘I was raped.’
Why was it still so hard to say it out loud? This was what people who’d been raped confronted: not only the disgust and disbelief of others, but their own self-disgust, their own shame, so that they couldn’t even say the words.

‘I was raped,’ she said. ‘I was raped by someone who knew I was lying in my bed while everyone else was at the concert.’

‘Oh, my God, Frieda, I’m so sorry.’

She stood up and put her mug on the floor, then came over to Frieda and hugged her, bending down awkwardly and folding her in her arms. She smelt of baking and herbs and clay. Good, clean, strong. Her breasts squashed against Frieda’s body and her hair tickled her face. Frieda sat quite still, neither resisting nor responding.