Thursday's Children by Nicci French

people’s histories under her feet. She had always loved the sense of a great city’s buried secrets and the mysterious way they could make themselves felt in fragments of old buildings, in street names, in the hidden rivers that ran under pavements. But in this small town she was walking in her own footsteps. Here, at the bend of the road, her father had come to meet her and taken hold of her small hand in his large, soft, white one; here she had stood at the bus stop with her face in a book. Here a figure had lurked in the shadows and she could feel her teenage heart pounding. She caught her reflection in the window of the newsagent and for an instant thoughtshe saw a fierce young girl, her dark hair in pigtails, but the figure resolved into Dr Frieda Klein, composed and expressionless, walking briskly by.
    She turned off the high street, by a tattoo parlour that used to be a second-hand bookshop, into the street where she had first learned to ride a bike. The grass verge was now a pavement; there were street lamps that hadn’t been there before, and the phone box where she used to make secret calls was gone. The bus stop had a new shelter. She paused for an instant beside it, frowning at a memory, then letting it go. Down a smaller, narrower lane leading towards the edge of the town, past a tiny ancient chapel squeezed between two timbered houses. A scrawny expanse of newly planted grass – what had been there before? She blinked and saw a sagging wooden building with a rusted iron railing running in front of it. The lane rose steeply, under trees whose branches sent down damp flurries of leaves when the wind blew. The landscape seemed to darken; the air was full of unshed rain.
    The cottage where old Mrs Leonard used to live with all her cats and no heating – she had worn strange turbans and stained slippers and would bang a metal dish in the garden, calling them home in a high-pitched croon, but she must be long dead. The mock-Tudor that had belonged to the Clarkes: there used to be old bikes in the garden, and a small trampoline, but now there was a decorative pond and a small weeping willow. Tracey Ashton’s little house. It was a different colour now, yellowish, a bit queasy-making. There was a satellite dish on its roof. Frieda looked at the empty windows, then away. There was only room for one reunion.
    Here, then, at last: a long, low house that seemed to havesettled into the earth. Its walls bulged and its roof sagged. Rich red brick, large windows that were all dark except the one at the side, the porch where her father used to leave his boots. Frieda pushed the gate and went into the front garden. The holly tree was gone. There were large iron pots against the path, but the plants in them had withered into futile stumps. There was a single leather glove lying on the grass; Frieda picked it up and straightened it. Perhaps it was her mother’s. Her mother, whom she hadn’t seen for more than two decades. Dr Juliet Klein, the GP in a little Suffolk market town, the wife of a man who had hanged himself in the room whose window she could see from where she stood, the mother to a daughter who had run away from home and never returned until this day. Frieda narrowed her eyes: she would be in her late sixties now, presumably retired. Perhaps she didn’t even live here any more. She stepped forward and knocked hard on the door that was moss-green now, not red.
    How long did she wait? The door swung open. Her mother stood before her; she stood before her mother. There was a silence during which the two women stared at each other.
    ‘Well, well,’ said Juliet Klein at last, in her dry, precise voice. She always sounded slightly mocking, a touch ironic.
    ‘Hello,’ said Frieda. She realized she didn’t know what to call her mother: Juliet? Mum? ‘Are you going to invite me in?’
    Juliet moved aside and Frieda stepped over the threshold and into the hall, which was warm and smelt slightly stale. The tiles had