Thursday's Children by Nicci French Read Free Book Online

and you’re intelligent and you can come through this.’ She leaned forward slightly, fixing Becky with her dark eyes. ‘You will feel better one day.’
    ‘Will I?’
    ‘Yes.’
    Just as Becky was leaving, Frieda asked her, ‘Tell me, have you thought any more about going to the police?’
    ‘No. They wouldn’t believe me. Why should they if my own mother doesn’t?’ Her voice became flat and dreary. ‘He was right.’
    ‘Who was right?’
    Becky made a visible effort. ‘He said no one would think I was telling the truth.’
    Frieda gazed at her. ‘Is that what he told you?’
    ‘He said it in my ear, in this muffled kind of voice, thick and lisping through the mask but I could make out the words. I think it was the only time he spoke, the whole time. I can hear him saying it, like he was saying something loving.’ She shivered again. ‘He said, “Don’t think of telling anyone, sweetheart. Nobody will believe you.” And he was right.’



7
     
    After Becky was gone, Frieda stood for a moment, waiting. She walked to the window, looked down and saw the girl emerge on to the pavement. She put her hands into her pockets and started to walk away, looking small and lost. Was this right? What if something happened to her on the way home? Frieda caught her own faint reflection in the window pane. That was what she did. She dealt with people’s problems in that room, then sent them back out into the world to fend for themselves.
    Her thoughts shifted and the reflection in the glass seemed to shift as well. Just for a moment Frieda saw another face. It was her own, but from long ago, and she had the unnerving sense that the face was looking at her and calling to her across the decades. For years this room had been a sanctuary, a quiet place where damaged people could come and say anything, be heard and understood. Suddenly Frieda felt trapped there, as if she couldn’t breathe. She pulled her jacket on and left the office, as if she was escaping something. She descended the stairs two at a time. She started walking east with no sense of any destination. She crossed Tavistock Square. This was where one of the bombs had gone off back in 2005. It was a London sort of terrorist atrocity. The bomber had got on the bus because there were delays on the Underground. Frieda had been half a mile away and hadn’t heard a thing.Dozens of people had been killed but London just absorbed it and went on. London always went on. The driver of the bombed bus had stepped out of the wreckage, covered with blood, and walked home, all the way west across London to Acton. Frieda hadn’t understood what this meant until the same thing had happened to her. When you face real horror, you need to walk home, like an animal crawling back to its lair.
    She walked to the north of Coram’s Fields, past King’s Cross, along York Way until she reached the canal. From the bridge she looked along it to the east and mouth of the Islington tunnel. She was almost tempted by the idea of continuing east along the canal, through Hackney and the Lea Valley and out – somewhere, miles ahead – into the countryside. She could walk out of London and never come back. No. That wasn’t right. She needed to go in the other direction, back into the centre. She walked down the steps on to the towpath on which she had walked many times. The landmarks were familiar to her: the strange garden in the barge; the neat little lock-keeper’s cottage; the bright new plate-glass offices; Camden Lock. But Frieda remembered something else, with a shiver.
    She looked at the rippling grey water. How long ago had it been? Frieda had been a medical student when it had happened. A tourist had been walking here late at night, the way Frieda did. She had been attacked by a gang of young men. Raped. There’d been a detail she’d never been able to get out of her mind. They’d asked her if she could swim. She’d said she couldn’t and – so – they had thrown her into