Waiting for Wednesday

wildflowers. But there was
nothing personal, nothing that told you about Thelma Scott’s life or personality,
except that she liked little objects. Frieda hated little objects. They felt like
clutter. She would have liked to sweep them all into a bin bag and put them out on the
pavement for the binmen to take away.
    Still Thelma looked at her with her kind,
accepting expression. Frieda knew what it was to sit there, to wait for the first step
that would mark the beginning of the journey.Sometimes Frieda had sat
for the entire fifty minutes with a patient failing to say a single word. Sometimes they
would just cry.
    Why was she here? What, really, was there to
talk about? She’d already gone through it all, all the choices, all the
permutations, the roads she had taken and the roads she hadn’t taken, while lying
awake at two, three, four in the morning. Because of her intervention, Russell
Lennox’s attempt to protect his son had failed and Ted was now in custody. The
thought of him in prison and all he might be going through was terrible, but he had
committed a terrible act of violence, and against his own mother. His only hope was to
acknowledge what he had done and take the consequences. The legal system might be
merciful. With the right defence, he might escape a murder conviction.
    Some people might think that Ted would have
stood a better chance if he had remained free. Human beings have an ability to survive
by burying the past, making themselves forget. Ted might have found his own way of
atoning. But Frieda couldn’t make herself believe that. You had to face the truth,
however painful, and move on from there. Burying it didn’t make it die, and in the
end it would claw its way out of the earth and come for you. But was that just an
opinion and was Ted paying the price for it?
    And were Dora and Judith paying the price as
well? As she thought of them, the image came into her mind of the funeral that she had
attended just two days ago. There had been music and poems and hundreds of people, but
what she had seen from her position at the back had been the two girls, one on either
side of their grimly virtuous aunt. Both had had their hair cut for the occasion: Dora
now had a severe fringe and Judith’s wild curls had been shorn. They seemed limp
and defeated, utterly wretched. Judith had seenFrieda; her remarkable
eyes had blazed briefly and then she had turned away.
    The truth: Jim Fearby had lived for it and
sacrificed everything for it, his family, his career and his life. In those last
moments, when Lawrence Dawes and Gerry Collier had killed him, did he briefly realize he
had found the truth? Did he feel justified? And was it her fault? She had tried to help
Fearby and he had died. She had travelled with him, talked with him, planned with him.
She had abused her friendship with Karlsson to get him involved but she had failed
Fearby. Fearby had made the connection with Dawes but should Frieda herself have
realized that he couldn’t have acted alone? He had gone ahead of her into that
underworld and she hadn’t been able to save him.
    Sharon Gibbs had been rescued and restored
to her family and that was something. If she and Josef hadn’t burst in, Sharon
Gibbs would have joined the others. They had found them buried in the cellar. Frieda was
haunted by their names, and by their faces in the photographs Fearby had shown her.
Happy family snapshots of young girls, who didn’t know what was ahead of them.
Hazel Barton and Roxanne Ingatestone and Daisy Crewe and Philippa Lewis and Maria
Horsley and Lila Dawes. And there was a seventh. The police had found another body in
the cellar, the skeletal remains of a young female. Unidentified. Fearby had missed her
somehow and the police had the names of too many missing girls. Karlsson said they had a
DNA sample and might strike lucky. All those lost girls, but Frieda couldn’t stop
thinking about the unknown one. It was like staring into an abyss and being lost
there.
    Frieda wanted to feel guilty about what
she’d done to Josef as well, but that was harder. She suspected at first that his
cheerful stoicism might be concealing post-traumatic stress.It could
emerge much later, that was what the literature said. But really there was no sign of it
at all. He was enjoying the attention, and when Karlsson had said there was some
possibility of an award for bravery, he seemed to enjoy it even more. His account of the
event seemed to become more embroidered