Текст книги "Friday on My Mind"

Автор книги: Nicci French

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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

‘Oh, God,’ she said softly. ‘Where were you, Miles? Where?’

‘Far away.’ It was barely more than a whisper; a creak of sound. ‘Far, far away. Trussed up like a carcass for the journey. Bumping, bumping along, everything dark. Just a long road and then more dark. Nobody to hear me. Nobody came. So many days. Days and nights and nights and days. I couldn’t count any more.’

‘You mean you went on a long journey?’

‘He took me to the sea.’

‘Who, Miles? Who took you and did these terrible things to you? You have to tell me.’

‘I could hear the sea all the time. Even when I was crying I heard the waves. They wouldn’t stop, on and on. He wouldn’t stop. Never left me, never went away, never let me sleep. There was a clock on the wall and I watched it. Never away for more than twenty minutes. On and on. Then let me go. He said tell her.’

‘Tell who?’

Frieda heard a sound. Two men had come into the ward, one in a suit, one in some sort of uniform. Security. Suddenly it felt like she’d left things too late.

‘You,’ said Thornton. ‘Frieda Klein. He said tell her. It’s for Frieda Klein.’

The two men were talking to a nurse.

‘Tell her it’s for Frieda Klein.’

‘I see,’ she said. And she did see.

She had to go. She stood up and started to walk in the opposite direction from which she’d come. She heard a voice behind her. She mustn’t look round and she mustn’t run. She remembered the map. There was another exit from this ward. She reached the door. It was closed and there was a sign: ‘Fire escape only. This door is alarmed.’ She tried to remember the map. Was there another exit further down the ward? She couldn’t risk it. Someone was shouting her name. She pushed the door open and immediately there was an electronic pulsing alarm. She ran down the stone stairs. The noise was so loud that it hurt. One floor down, she pushed a door open and stepped almost into the arms of a man in a uniform.

‘There’s a woman in the ward above,’ Frieda said. ‘She’s causing a disturbance.’

The man ran past her into the stairwell. Frieda counted to five, then followed him back into the stairwell and went down rather than up. She counted the floors. On the ground floor, she saw the sign to the main entrance and went in the opposite direction towards the day clinic, which had its own exit and its own car park that led onto a different road. Within five minutes she was outside and away from the hospital, but she continued walking, taking a series of turns into different residential streets, until she was absolutely sure she wasn’t being followed.

She saw a bench and sat down. She needed to because her head was spinning and her legs shook. She almost felt as if she might faint. But she forced herself to calm down and to think clearly about what she had just heard.

Torture: to turn someone into an instrument, an object; to take away their humanity; to humiliate and wound them until all they are is pain, and then nothing. She thought of Miles Thornton’s wild, animal face and his creaking voice and his mangled stumps of fingers. She knew who had done that and she knew why he had done that, and for a few minutes she sat there and felt so sick and full of helpless anger and confusion that the world in front of her blurred.

Then she got out her notebook and pen and made a table of dates:

– Tuesday, 10 June: last sighting of Sandy.

– Monday, 16 June: Dr Ellison (who is she?) reported her concerns about his absence to the police.

– Friday, 20 June: Sandy’s body found in the Thames.

She looked at the dates, then added some more.

– April–May: Miles Thornton sectioned; own responsibility for this.

– 27 May: Miles Thornton out of hospital and comes to WH, violent and upset. Loudly angry; felt betrayed by me. Returned several times.

– 3 June: Miles Thornton did not turn up for session.

– 3 June onwards: Miles Thornton not answering calls, emails, etc.

– Monday, 9 June (right date?): reported Miles missing.

– 27 June (approx?): Miles Thornton returns, badly injured.

Frieda stared for a moment at what she had written. There was one more thing to complete the picture:

– Wednesday, 25 June: June Reeve dies. She knew that from the funeral notice.

– Monday, 30 June: June Reeve’s funeral.

She had been wrong all along, terribly wrong. Dean Reeve had abducted Miles, taken him a long distance to somewhere by the sea, and tortured him, of that she was quite certain. And she knew, too, that Miles had been missing since the beginning of June, when Sandy had still been alive. Dean had held him captive until two or three days ago, repeatedly abused him in her name, as a punishment that she was intended to know about: he had sent Miles back with a message. She guessed that Dean had stopped when he had because he had heard that his mother had died and he needed to come back, if not for the funeral, then at least to pay his respects. He had loved his mother, in his own perverse manner.

However hard she tried to make a different story from the dates in front of her, she could not. Dean Reeve had tortured Miles Thornton. But he couldn’t have killed Sandy.

14

Frieda sat in her depressing room with a tumbler of whisky, watching the sky turn from blue to pale grey, pale grey to darker grey, then to a bright darkness, scattered with stars. She had bought flowers from the market stall down the road, but their fresh colours only emphasized the dingy aspects of her surroundings, the stained, damp walls and threadbare carpets.

She thought about what she had: nothing.

She had left her home, left her friends, left her job, left her safety and her known world; she had run from the police, ruined her reputation, destroyed her future, lost everything she had built up over the years. For what? For nothing.

She had done all of this because she had believed that Dean had killed Sandy, the man she had once loved more than she had ever loved anyone, and who had been murdered. She had been so sure that she had never even considered the possibility she might be wrong.

She had been wrong, and now she did not know what she should do. Perhaps the only thing left was to give herself up. She let herself imagine it: Hussein’s calm and steely face, Commissioner Crawford’s triumph, Karlsson’s distress. At the thought of her friend, she pressed her glass to her forehead and held it there, closing her eyes. She would be charged, she would be found guilty – especially after going on the run. She would go to jail. For a moment, the thought of being in prison was almost restful.

Then she thought of Sandy. She remembered him as she had first known him, buoyant with love and happiness, and she remembered him as he had been in the last eighteen months, soured and jangled by his wretchedness and anger. Someone had killed him and that person was still out there. If she gave herself up, that person would always be out there. She was not going to let that happen. She set down her whisky and, going over to the window, she stared out at the night sky. She waited there, feeling her resolution harden.

She retrieved her notebook from her bag. She had to start with Sandy. What did she know about him? Who were his friends, his colleagues, his drinking buddies, his affairs and his one-night stands? Who had loved him, hated him, been treated badly by him, felt jealous of or rivalrous with him? She wrote his name at the top of the paper and drew little leaves and flowers curling out of the block letters, as if she were bringing him back to life once more. Then she jotted down every solid fact she could remember, every friend she knew or he had mentioned.

She started with his work. She wrote down the names of people she knew or knew of: Calvin Lock, the professor of neuroscience, who had worked closely with Sandy before he’d gone to America; Lucy Hall, his assistant at that time; Aidan Dunston and his wife Siri, whom they had had dinner with a few times. Who else? She searched through her memories. There was that geneticist in New York, Clara someone-or-other. Surely she wasn’t relevant here. And what was the name of his assistant at King George’s, whom she hadn’t met but had spoken to on the phone? Terry Keaton.

She turned to his family, but Sandy had almost no one. His parents were dead and she couldn’t remember him mentioning aunts or uncles or cousins. There was his sister, Lizzie, and his brother-in-law, Tom; their son, Oliver. What was the name of their nanny? She couldn’t remember and, anyway, perhaps she’d left by now. After all, she and Sandy had separated eighteen months ago – a lot could happen in eighteen months.

There was Sandy’s ex-wife, Maria, who lived in New Zealand. Sandy had spoken of her occasionally. As far as she knew, they had had no contact with each other for years. Since Maria, and before Frieda, there had been a violinist called Gina, whose last name she didn’t know, and an Italian economist, Luisa. Sandy had not talked about either of them much.

Friends: there was Dan Lieberman from primary school, with whom he played squash regularly. There was Josh Tebbit. Janie Frank and her partner, Angela. The Foremans. Who else?

She stared at the list, her brow wrinkling. It didn’t seem much for someone she had known intimately for many years, and inevitably there had been nothing after they had parted: she had no idea of the shape of his life since then. Sandy had often resented the way that Frieda guarded her independence so fiercely. It had taken months before she had allowed him to stay the night at her house. She had been wary about introducing him to her friends, and had kept aspects of her life secret from him. She had told him of her father’s suicide years after they first met, and only confided that she had been raped as a teenager when that episode in her past came back to haunt her present: it was the revelation that had brought Sandy home from America, giving up his job there. But now she saw that she knew very little about him. She knew his tastes; knew what he loved to cook, to eat, what wines he liked. She knew what books he’d read, what his politics were, what his views were on the NHS or organized religion or the placebo effect and anti-depressants. She recognized his expressions, understood what made him angry, jealous, glad or wretched. She could read him, yet at the same time she knew almost nothing of the ordinary daily details of his life.

Another fact came into her mind, so obvious she had almost let it become invisible: whoever had killed Sandy had known about her. They had let themselves into her house – how? – and planted his wallet there. They had set out to frame her.

She stood up once more and stared into the patch of night sky the little smeared window gave her. Another name came into her mind and settled there. Dr Ellison. The woman who, Hussein had said, had reported Sandy missing. Who was she? It was at least something to go on, a way to begin, and she pulled on her new unfavourite jacket and went out.

There were several other people at the internet café, all bowed over their computer screens. The room was silent, save for the occasional bleep and hum of the machines, and the light was a sour dim yellow, which made Frieda’s head ache slightly.

First of all she Googled ‘Dr Ellison’. Even when she was only looking for women, there were lots of them, all over the world. She added ‘UK’ and the names dwindled, but there were still too many to be helpful. She pondered, then went to the King George’s website; there was no way to do a search on a Dr Ellison so she started scrolling through the names of staff in each separate department, beginning with the sciences. Nothing in Neuroscience or Neurobiology, Biomedicine, Genetics, Physics or Molecular Biophysics, Chemistry, Environmental Science, Engineering … But suddenly, amid the blur of names, she saw a Dr Veronica Ellison who was a fellow in the Psychology department. She clicked on her name and a face came onto the screen, a woman who was probably about Frieda’s age, blonde, smiling, eyebrows slightly raised as if in surprised enquiry. There was an email address but Frieda didn’t want to email her, so she wrote down the number of the department in her notebook. She would call tomorrow. Although it was the summer vacation, someone would be there to answer calls and would at least pass a message on to Veronica Ellison.

On her way back to her rooms, she met the woman she had seen before smoking on the stairs. She raised her head. She had a bruise under her left eye and a split lip. She nodded at Frieda.

Frieda stopped. ‘I saw you before.’

The woman smiled – a smile that was knowing and rueful and oddly jaunty. ‘Who are you anyway?’ she asked.

Frieda sat beside her on the steps. ‘I’m Carla.’

‘What are you doing in a shithole like this?’

‘Passing through.’

‘That’s what we like to think.’

‘Your face looks sore.’

The woman touched it lightly with the tips of her fingers. ‘That’s nothing. But I could do with a drink.’

‘I have some whisky in my room.’

‘That’ll do.’

Frieda stood up and the woman held out her hand, like a child, to be helped up, then didn’t let go of Frieda’s at once.

‘Carla, you say?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m Hana.’ She smiled crookedly again. ‘Just passing through.’

The next morning, just before nine, Frieda walked into the deserted courtyard and called the number for the Psychology department at King George’s and when a woman finally answered, sounding harassed, explained that she needed to contact Dr Veronica Ellison.

‘She’s just come in to pick up some books.’

Frieda was momentarily taken aback. ‘Could I speak to her, then?’

‘One moment.’

Frieda waited several minutes, then a husky, slightly breathless voice said: ‘Hello? This is Dr Ellison. How can I help you?’

‘My name is Carla,’ said Frieda, trying to think of a convincing second name. She looked around and saw the name of the building over the gate. ‘Carla Morris. I am – I was – a friend of Sandy’s. I was hoping I could talk to you.’

‘About Sandy?’

‘I lost touch with him and then I heard about his death. I wanted to talk to someone who knew him.’

‘Why me?’

‘A friend mentioned you,’ said Frieda. ‘He said you’d been worried about him.’

‘Well, yes. I was.’ The woman sounded uncertain.

‘I thought perhaps you could tell me what happened.’

‘Were you and Sandy …?’ Her voice trailed off.

‘He was just a friend, many years ago. But for a while we were close. Now I need to understand what happened.’

‘I don’t know. I’m going on holiday tomorrow morning.’

‘Just fifteen minutes of your time, and I could come to wherever was convenient for you.’

‘All right.’ Now that she had made up her mind, her voice was brisker. ‘Come at midday to the garden centre just off Balls Pond Road. It’s called Three Corners. I’ve no idea why. I have to pick up some plants before I go.’

‘I’ll be there.’

‘Carla, you say?’

‘Carla Morris.’

‘I’ll be with the climbing roses.’

Frieda had nearly three hours. And the garden centre was about ten minutes’ walk from Sasha’s house. She was anxious about Sasha, and about Ethan. The last sight she had had of him, being pulled along by his implacable nanny, his mouth open in a howl and his dark eyes wet with tears, kept returning to her.

Thirty-five minutes later she was standing in the same position near Sasha’s house as she had been two days before. She knew that Sasha often left for work late, and she thought perhaps she would see her. But there was no sign of her leaving and there was no sign of Christine or of Ethan either. Probably she had arrived too late and no one was there.

Even as she was thinking this, the front door flew open and Sasha emerged, in a sleeveless blue work dress. But she was holding Ethan by the hand and talking into her mobile phone. Frieda could see she was dishevelled and, even from this distance, there was an air of agitation about her. She watched as Ethan skipped and twisted at his mother’s side. Sasha put her phone into her pocket and stopped walking. She put a hand to her throat in a gesture of distress that was familiar to Frieda, then took out the phone once more and made another call. Ethan tugged at her hand.

Frieda put her dark glasses on, buttoned up her bright jacket and walked down the street after them. Now she could hear Sasha talking. ‘No,’ she was saying, and, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know who else to ask.’

‘Sasha,’ said Frieda.

Sasha swung round. She stared, her eyes huge in her pale thin face. Frieda took off her dark glasses.

‘Your hair’s all gone,’ said Ethan.

‘Frieda! Oh, God. What are you doing here? I thought – the police came, you know.’

‘I wanted to make sure you were all right.’

‘I’m trying.’

‘Where’s Christine?’

‘She sent me a text this morning saying she doesn’t want to be a nanny for a single mother. She says it’s more trouble than it’s worth.’

‘Good.’

‘Good? I’m going to lose my job, Frieda, and then what will I do?’

‘Go to work right now. I’ll take care of Ethan. If that’s OK with you, Ethan.’

Ethan nodded and slid his hand into hers.

‘I don’t understand anything,’ said Sasha. ‘And your clothes are weird. Why have you cut off all your lovely hair?’

‘Give me your key and go to work before they miss you. We can talk later. Tell no one.’

‘But, Frieda …’

‘No one. Now go.’

‘Can we play animals?’ said Ethan, once they were alone together.

‘Later. First we’re going to a garden centre, to see the roses.’

He didn’t seem impressed.

15

Almost immediately Frieda asked herself, with a kind of horror, what she had done. Absconding, fleeing from the police, leaving all her friends, living among strangers, cut off from her own life: that was one thing. But this felt much worse. She was walking along the pavement with a two-year-old boy who didn’t belong to her. His father had left him and his mother was almost in a state of collapse. Yet there he was, his warm little hand in hers, entirely trusting. She could be taking him away from his home never to return and there would be nothing he could do about it. And he was so fragile. He could fall over. He could run into something. He could run out into the road. She tightened her grip as a bus passed and she felt the wind blowing against them in waves.

‘Ow,’ Ethan said, and she loosened her grip, just a little.

He was small and helpless and there were about another twelve or thirteen years before he would be able to look after himself. She thought of her niece, Chloë. Make that fifteen or sixteen years. How did any child manage to get through to adulthood?

‘What’s that?’ said Frieda, pointing.

‘Bus,’ said Ethan.

‘What colour is it?’

‘Red,’ he said, in an assertive, contemptuous tone, as if the question were insultingly easy.

‘We’re going to play a game,’ said Frieda. She wasn’t exactly sure if two-and-a-bit-year-olds knew how to play games, but she had to try something. ‘You’re going to call me “Carla”.’ There was no answer. She wasn’t even sure if he had heard her. ‘Ethan, can you call me Carla?’ His attention was entirely fixed on a man who was walking towards them leading – or being led by – four dogs, each of a different breed and a different size. Frieda waited until they had passed.

‘Carla,’ she said. ‘Can you say that? Go on.’

‘Carla,’ said Ethan.

‘That’s really clever. My name is Carla.’

But Ethan seemed already bored by the idea, so Frieda pointed out a bicycle to him and a bird and a car, and quite soon she was running out of objects so she was relieved when she saw the green archway ahead at the entrance of the Three Corners Garden Centre. She had never noticed it before. It was set slightly back from the road, next to a large shop selling bathroom fittings. The entrance was a narrow driveway but, behind, it opened up on both sides into a mews area that, a hundred and fifty years earlier, must have been stables.

‘What we’re going to do,’ said Frieda, ‘is find the best flower that we can and we’re going to bring it back as a present for your mummy. Is that a good idea?’ Ethan nodded. Frieda looked around and saw, with some alarm, a section of ornamental trees and climbing flowers. ‘A little flower,’ she added. ‘A really little one.’ Then she knelt down, so that her face was at the same height as Ethan and whispered to him, in what she hoped was a playfully conspiratorial tone, ‘What’s my special name? My name in our special game?’

Ethan frowned in intense concentration but said nothing.

‘Carla,’ said Frieda. ‘Carla.’

‘Carla,’ he said.

She stood up, put on her glasses. Where were the roses? She walked across to a dreadlocked, tattooed, multi-pierced girl, who was wielding a hose along a line of pots. Ethan looked up at her in fascination. She pointed to the far side, where the space was bounded by a high wall. Frieda and Ethan went across; she saw nobody, so they moved slowly along the rows of roses. They were named after characters from English history and TV celebrities and old novels and stately homes and current members of the Royal Family.

‘Carla?’ said a voice.

Veronica Ellison was a striking woman: her blonde hair was pulled back off her face, and she was wearing royal blue leggings, wedge trainers and a loose white T-shirt. She looked summery and fresh. She was regarding Frieda with an appraising expression that Frieda found disconcerting. She suddenly realized that she hadn’t thought through how she was actually going to do this. The woman hadn’t sought her out. There was no reason why she would want to talk to a stranger about Sandy, even if she had anything significant to say.

‘Dr Ellison?’

Veronica Ellison smiled at Ethan. ‘Is this your son?’

‘He’s called Ethan,’ Frieda said. ‘I look after him.’

‘Not much fun for him here,’ said Ellison. ‘Has Carla brought you to this boring gardening centre, Ethan?’

Ethan looked up at her sternly.

‘Frieda,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘He’s at a funny age,’ said Frieda.There was a pause. It was entirely up to her to make this work, she thought. ‘It’s very good of you to see me,’ she said. ‘I needed to talk to someone who knew Sandy. I’ll only be a few minutes.’

Veronica paused, obviously wondering whether she had the time for this. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘There’s a little café here. Shall we grab a coffee?’ She looked at Ethan. ‘And they do very nice ice cream.’

Ethan didn’t answer. He was shifting his weight from one foot to the other, then back again.

‘Does someone need the toilet?’ said Veronica.

‘What?’

‘I mean Ethan,’ said Veronica. ‘I’ve got a three-year-old nephew. I recognize the signs. There’s a toilet in the café.’

‘I was just about to take him,’ said Frieda, feeling like the most incompetent nanny in London. She wondered about the chances of her getting Ethan back to Sasha alive and basically uninjured. She took him into the ladies’ toilet and went through the complicated process of unfastening his dungarees and hoisting him onto the bowl, then redressing him and getting him to wash his hands. Back in the café, Veronica had ordered two coffees and a bowl of ice cream with two scoops: strawberry and chocolate. She had taken over, Frieda saw. That was good. She arranged a cushion on the bench so that Ethan could sit and help himself. Within a few seconds, the ice cream was partly in his mouth and partly around his face. Veronica contemplated him.

‘When I see a child, like Ethan, I partly want one of my own and I partly think it would just be too much of a burden.’

‘It has its compensations.’

‘You must think so, looking after other people’s children for a living. Do you find that satisfying?’

‘It’s what I do,’ said Frieda. She thought about her consulting room, the people who came there with their troubles, and here she was, a fake nanny with a false name, wearing tacky, alien clothes and feeling her way into an appropriate manner. ‘Children keep you seeing the world differently,’ she added. ‘That’s what makes it interesting, constantly surprising.’

‘I can see that. But it must be hard work.’

‘I like hard work. I need purpose – everyone does,’ said Frieda, firmly, knowing at the same instant that she sounded too like her old self.

A gleam of interest appeared in Veronica’s eyes; she sipped at her coffee and looked at Frieda. ‘I don’t quite understand you, Carla.’

Frieda was worried that Ethan might correct her again but although his eyes widened suspiciously, his mouth was too full of ice cream. ‘Why?’

‘You seem to have your hands full but then you somehow track me down. What for? What do you want from me exactly?’

Frieda took a breath. This was it. ‘I knew Sandy. He was kind to me at a difficult time of my life. For a while we were friends of a sort and then we lost touch with each other. Then I read in the paper about what happened to him. I felt … I felt I needed to talk to someone else who knew, who’d known him at the end.’

‘Why?’

‘The Sandy I knew was calm and happy and in control. I couldn’t believe something like that could happen to him.’

‘I was just his colleague,’ said Veronica. ‘I was working on a project with him.’

‘What sort of project?’

‘It’s technical,’ she said dismissively. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

‘But do you recognize the Sandy I described?’

Veronica visibly hesitated. She was clearly deciding whether she could really commit herself to this. ‘What were your words? Calm? Happy?’

‘And in control. Someone who knew his place in the world.’

‘He helped you, you say.’

‘Yes.’ Frieda paused, but seeing that Veronica was waiting for her to elaborate, she said: ‘He helped me by allowing me to be myself.’

As was happening so often now, she had a sudden vivid flash of Sandy as he had once been, brimful of confidence and love. She saw the smile he turned on her. It was perhaps more painful to remember him happy than to recall him grim, angry and wretched. It almost took her breath away, the memory of what they had once had.

Veronica shook her head. ‘I liked him a great deal,’ she said. ‘He was kind. I saw that in him. He was the cleverest person I ever worked with. But he …’ She took a deep breath. ‘Things were complicated.’

There was a silence broken only by Ethan’s slurping and the scraping of his spoon in the bowl. Frieda wondered whether to take the risk and decided she had to. ‘Were you …?’ she began.

‘Were you?’ said Veronica, with a smile.

‘No,’ said Frieda. ‘It wasn’t the right time.’

‘It wasn’t the right time for me either,’ said Veronica. ‘But we had a brief … Well, I don’t know what the word for it is. Something. I wish I’d known the Sandy you were describing. The one I met was more complicated. He could be cruel, or perhaps indifferent is a better word for it. He’d been in a relationship and it had ended badly.’

Frieda felt suddenly cold. Had Sandy mentioned her name?

‘He hated talking about it. But sometimes I felt he was like someone who had been in a terrible car crash or suffered a terrible loss. Well, he had suffered a terrible loss and he wasn’t over it. In fact, I’d say he was stuck in it and didn’t even want to move on.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ said Frieda, painfully aware that almost for the first time she was saying something truthful. ‘That must have been hard for you. Being involved with a man who wasn’t emotionally available.’

Veronica said to Ethan: ‘You’re a lucky boy. Carla’s a clever woman, isn’t she?’

‘No!’ Ethan scowled at her.

‘He was such an intelligent man,’ said Veronica to Frieda. ‘He was intelligent about everything except his own life. He was drinking too much, he didn’t look after himself. He needed help and he wouldn’t be helped. It’s awful what we do to each other, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. It is.’ Frieda liked Veronica and felt that they could have been friends in another life.

‘And what we can’t do. Sometimes it felt like I was standing by a lake watching a man drown and I couldn’t do anything about it.’ Suddenly Veronica Ellison’s expression looked vulnerable and touching. ‘I’m not normally that sort of person – I don’t like being helpless. Why am I telling you this?’

‘Because I’m a stranger.’

‘That’s probably it. Anyway, he’d just had an affair with someone else before me and he seemed to feel he’d behaved pretty rottenly, although he didn’t go into any details. He never went into details. I’m sure he was also seeing another woman while we were together. If you can call it together. And then, sure enough, he moved on. But even when he was doing it, I felt sorry for him, rather than angry. But that’s my problem, I suppose.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Frieda. ‘Unless having insight and being compassionate is a problem. Which, of course, it can be.’

Veronica raised her eyes and studied Frieda’s face. ‘Hmm,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘You really didn’t sleep with him?’

‘No.’ Frieda didn’t lower her gaze. ‘As I said, it wasn’t the right time. And I wasn’t the right person for him.’ That, at least, had turned out to be true.

‘I think you would have been good for him. Someone not in his intellectual world. Someone grounded, sensible.’ She met Frieda’s gaze. ‘That sounds rude. It wasn’t meant to be.’

Frieda shook her head. ‘So at the end, when you last saw him, Sandy was sad, distressed.’

‘There was something else.’

‘What?’

‘I think he was scared.’

‘Oh. Why?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Why do you think he was scared?’

‘I just knew. I can’t explain.’

‘He didn’t actually tell you?’

Veronica frowned. ‘This is turning into an interrogation,’ she said.

‘Sorry. But had someone threatened him?’ Frieda persisted.

‘The police have asked me all of this already. I don’t know why I should go through it again with a nanny. Why does it matter so much? Sandy’s dead.’

‘It matters because someone killed him. Perhaps he knew he was in danger.’

‘Perhaps. But I’ve told you everything I know – though I don’t understand what you’re looking for. Now I need to go.’

Frieda lifted Ethan onto the floor. His hand was sticky and hot in hers.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I appreciate it.’ Although in truth, apart from discovering that Sandy had perhaps been scared, she hadn’t got much further. All Veronica could tell her was what she had already known: that Sandy had been unhappy and his life had become in some ways dysfunctional.

‘It’s been such a shock,’ said Veronica. ‘For all of us.’