Thursday's Children by Nicci French Read Free Book Online Page A

the water and she’d swum across the canal and gotaway. She had lived to testify against them. Frieda had been struck by those two details: that last clinching bit of sadism, as if they hadn’t done enough already. And the woman’s ability to think clearly, to plan to fight for her life, even at such a time.
    As she walked along the towpath, she thought about bombs on buses, a young woman thrown into the canal. Wherever Frieda walked in London she was haunted by these ghosts. She heard a sound and looked at the water that was starting to speckle with raindrops. As the canal snaked through Kentish Town and past the edge of Camden Lock market, the rain grew heavier and heavier, a grey curtain that turned the afternoon dark. Frieda was wearing a light suede jacket and within a few minutes her clothes were wet and cold against her skin. She almost welcomed it as a relief. It stopped her thinking. When the huge London Zoo aviary came into view ahead of her, she went up the steps, crossed the road and walked into Primrose Hill.
    Reuben was making himself a sandwich. He assembled the avocado, rocket, sun-dried tomatoes, hummus, then took the focaccia bread from the oven and sliced it open. He arranged his ingredients in careful layers and ground some black pepper over the top. During the morning he’d been at the Warehouse, the clinic he had opened decades ago, and for the last hour, as he sat listening to the woman whose father had never loved her and whose husband was cheating on her, he had been imagining the lunch he was going to have. The question was, should he have a glass of red wine with it? He used to drink too heavily, during those terribledays of disenchantment and chaos. Nowadays his rule was that he never drank before six o’ clock, but he frequently broke it, especially if Josef was with him. Josef was not there now, but there was an opened bottle of red wine on the side. Maybe half a glass.
    Then there was a knock at his front door. He cursed under his breath and considered not answering. The knock was repeated and he sighed and went to the door.
    Standing in the streaming rain, her hair plastered to her head and her clothes drenched, was his old friend, colleague and – long before that – his patient, Frieda.
    ‘Bloody hell,’ he said.
    ‘Hello, Reuben.’
    ‘You’re fucking soaking.’
    ‘I know.’
    ‘Where’s your umbrella?’
    ‘I don’t have one. Are you going to let me in?’
    Five minutes later, Frieda was sitting in an armchair with both hands around a mug of tea and half of the bulging focaccia sandwich on a plate at her side. She was wearing a pair of Reuben’s jeans and a bulky woollen sweater but she was still shivering. Reuben slouched on the sofa opposite, munching his lunch. He had decided against the wine.
    ‘So, you walk through driving rain to get here. You don’t ring ahead to check whether I’m in. You might have to walk all the way back in the rain. What’s it about?’
    ‘There’s something I need to tell you. I’m telling you this because you’re my friend. But also because you were my analyst.’
    ‘Which is it? Analyst or friend?’
    ‘Both. But if you hadn’t been my analyst I couldn’t tell you at all. You know, rules and all that.’
    Reuben examined her as she sat before him, in her familiar upright posture. She looked fine, more than fine, better than she had done in months: calm, clear, alert.
    ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘I’m listening.’
    ‘I’ve just seen a fifteen-year-old girl. She comes from Braxton in Suffolk.’
    Reuben’s eyes narrowed. ‘That sounds familiar.’
    ‘I might have mentioned it in our sessions. It’s where I grew up. Where I went to school.’
    ‘Why are you seeing a patient from there?’
    ‘She’s not exactly a patient. Her mother was in my class at school. She suddenly got in touch and asked me to talk to her daughter. She was being difficult. The daughter, I mean. Acting up.’
    ‘What happened?’
    ‘She told me she