Frieda sat on the side of the bed and put out a hand to comfort the shape that rose and fell with the weeping. ‘Sasha,’ she said. ‘It’s me. Frieda.’ She waited but there was no response. ‘I’m here, Josef and Reuben are here. Ethan is here, and we’re all going to look after him. We’re going to look after you. You will come through this. Can you hear me? Nothing will be the same again, of course, and you won’t be the same, but you will come through.’

She sat on the bed for a while longer, then rose and opened the window so that the warm air came into the room. ‘I’m going to make a pot of tea,’ she said. ‘I’ll be back in a few minutes. OK?’

There was a sudden sound and she stopped. ‘What are you saying?’ Frieda asked.

‘It was me.’ The words were barely discernible but, once said, they seemed to replace the sobbing in their repetitive lament. ‘It was me it was me it was me it was me.’

Frieda sat down on the bed again. ‘No. It wasn’t you. We don’t get to say that. Frank was a jealous and controlling man. He couldn’t bear to feel humiliated. Would something else have set him off? Maybe.’ She stroked Sasha’s hair. ‘We do things, some of them foolish or wrong, but we don’t know what the consequences will be. You slept with Sandy when you were feeling abandoned. I didn’t listen to what he was trying to tell me. We just have to live with that. A terrible thing has been done, but not by you. And you’re not going to be destroyed by it.’

Sasha was still murmuring the words but they had merged into a wretched trickle of sound. Frieda stood up once more and left the room. Josef and Reuben were in the small garden with Ethan, who was hammering a nail into a plank of wood, blissfully absorbed and supervised by Josef. Reuben was smoking a cigarette and talking on his mobile.

‘OK?’ he asked, when he ended the call.

She nodded. She felt she had no more words left inside her; the thought of talking, explaining, exhausted her. ‘I think I had better stay here for a bit,’ she said at last.

‘No,’ said Reuben.

‘What?’

‘No. You are going to stay in your own home, the home I know you’ve been homesick for.’

‘Someone has to be here.’

‘Indeed. Paz is arriving in about half an hour, with provisions.’

‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘It’s nothing,’ he said.

‘It’s not nothing, Reuben. It’s a lot. Everything you’ve all done.’

‘One day you’ll have to learn that you can’t do everything all by yourself.’

‘Yes.’

‘And one day we will talk about all of this.’

‘One day.’

‘But for now, for God’s sake, go home.’

She went home. She had a long bath, then roamed through each room, making doubly sure everything was in its proper place. She ate smoked salmon on rye bread and drank a single glass of white wine. She played through a game of chess, with the cat on her lap, and she promised herself that tomorrow she would sit in the garret room and draw. She felt peaceful and immeasurably sad. She thought over these last weeks when she had stepped out of her life, living in strange, unlovely places and among marginalized people, free and unanchored and alone. Now she was back here in her beloved house, her possessions about her, schedules being reassembled and order re-established. She thought of Karlsson’s face as he had bent over her in his children’s bedroom, which was now daubed and sprayed with blood. Where was he now? Then she thought of Sasha, lying in her bed weeping, as if the weeping would never stop. Of Frank in his hospital bed, flanked by police officers. Of Ethan, who didn’t understand how his life had changed. Of Sandy, now just ash and memory, and the future he would not have.

33

Tanya Hopkins arrived to pick Frieda up from her house in a taxi. For several minutes after the taxi had set off again, she didn’t speak. Frieda didn’t mind long silences. She was used to them. Sometimes a patient would sit facing her for a whole session without speaking. Usually therapy was about talk but it could also be an escape from the press of words and that could be good too.

But although Tanya Hopkins wasn’t speaking, it didn’t feel like silence. She was staring out of the window, away from Frieda, yet it was clear that she was thinking hard. Frieda could even see her lips moving, as if she were silently talking to herself. Finally she turned to Frieda. ‘I suppose you know where we’re going.’

‘To see the police.’

‘To see the police,’ said Hopkins, like an echo. ‘They haven’t told me what it’s about, but it’s not hard to guess. They will be informing us whether they are planning to proceed with any charges.’ She paused, but Frieda showed no sign of speaking. ‘Perverting the course of justice is an obvious possibility.’

Frieda looked round. ‘Did I pervert it?’

Hopkins shook her head. ‘I don’t know. You perverted something. I’m not exactly sure what.’ She looked at Frieda with a resigned expression. ‘At this point, I would usually tell my client to leave the talking to me, but I don’t suppose it would do any good.’

‘I’m sorry I put you in a bad position,’ said Frieda.

‘No, you’re not,’ said Hopkins.

Frieda thought for a moment. ‘I’m not exactly sorry. If the same thing happened, I’d do it all again.’

‘Which means you’re not sorry at all.’

‘But what I’m really sorry about is that, as a by-product of what I did, you had to go through all that trouble.’

‘That is the most pathetic apology I’ve ever heard in my life.’

‘It’s not an apology. It’s a description of my state of mind.’

‘I don’t even know how to respond to that.’

‘You didn’t have to keep me on as a client.’

Hopkins managed something of a smile at that. ‘I wouldn’t foist you on anyone else,’ she said. ‘But there are consequences, you know.’

‘Consequences? If I’d followed your advice, I would have pleaded guilty to a crime I didn’t do.’

‘It wasn’t advice. It was an option. But I wasn’t just talking about consequences for you. What about your friend DCI Karlsson?’

‘What about him?’

‘He’s been suspended.’

Frieda felt that someone had punched her very hard in the solar plexus. She gave a small moan. ‘Oh, the idiot.’

‘It wasn’t just yourself you were risking. You must have known that.’

Frieda looked out of the window of the taxi, looked without seeing. She felt overcome by rage and nausea and shame. Suddenly, through all of that inner fog, she saw that the taxi was driving up Pentonville Road. ‘This isn’t the way to the police station,’ she said.

‘I got a call this morning changing the location.’

The taxi pulled into the kerb and the driver turned round.

‘The road’s blocked off to traffic,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to walk from here.’

The two of them got out and walked along Chapel Market, past the stalls. There was a smell of cooking meat that made Frieda feel queasy. Hopkins checked the piece of paper in her hand.

‘This can’t be right,’ she said.

They were standing beside a doorway between a bookie’s and an optician’s. She pressed the bell. A scratchy, unintelligible voice came from a little speaker next to the door. Hopkins leaned in close and gave her name and Frieda’s. There was a buzzing sound and she pressed the door but it didn’t open. She pressed the bell again. They heard a sound inside and then the door was opened by a young, spiky-haired woman wearing a blue T-shirt and dark jeans.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Hopkins. ‘I think we must have the wrong address.’