Waiting for Wednesday by Nicci French

it on the little desk next to the colour TV. While the miniature white plastic kettle was starting to heat up, he took a new sheet of lined paper, wrote the date and time of the meeting at the top and noted everything that had been said.
    When he had finished, he made himself a cup of instant coffee and removed a biscuit from its plastic wrapping. It was then that he remembered his first visit to Conley at Mortlemere. ‘This is the beginning,’ he’d said, ‘not the end.’ He looked at the file. He thought of the room full of files at home. He thought of his marriage, the squabbles, the silences and then the ending. It had seemed sudden, but it turned out that Sandra had been planning it for months, finding a new flat, talking to a solicitor. ‘What will you do when it ends?’ she had said – referring not to their marriage but to this case, in the days when they still talked of such things. It was more like an accusation than a question. Because there never really were endings. He’d been thinking he could produce a new edition of his book if Conley was released. But it felt wrong now. The book was just negatives: why this hadn’t happened, why that wasn’t true, why this was misleading.
    The question now was different and new: if George Conley hadn’t killed Hazel Barton, who had?



ELEVEN
    ‘Northern countries,’ said Josef. ‘They all drink the same.’
    ‘What do you mean, drink the same?’
    Josef was driving Frieda in his old van. They were on the way to Islington because Olivia had rung in a near-hysterical state to say that the washbasin in the upstairs bathroom had been ripped off the wall during the party and she needed it repaired. Urgently. And she was never, ever going to have teenagers in her house again. Josef had agreed to abandon the bathroom briefly to help Olivia. Frieda felt strangely torn in her emotional reaction. There was Josef taking a break from doing up her bathroom for nothing in order to help her sister-in-law. Not for nothing: Frieda would insist on that, if she had to pay for it herself. At the same time he was constantly in her house, which had stopped being her own. And each time she looked at what once had been her bathroom, its state seemed to be getting worse rather than better.
    ‘In the south, they drink wine and stay upright. In the north they drink clear liquid and fall down.’
    ‘You mean they drink to get drunk.’
    ‘Forget cares, lose sorrow, escape darkness.’
    Josef swerved to avoid a man who stepped blithely out into the road, his ears encased in giant yellow headphones.
    ‘So, at this party, were there lots of people drinking clear liquid and falling down?’
    ‘They learn too young.’ Josef gave a huge, sentimental sigh. ‘The recovery position.’
    ‘That sounds ominous.’
    ‘No. no. This is just life. People fight, people dance, people kiss and hold, people talk about dreams, people break things, people are sick.’
    ‘All in a few hours.’
    ‘Chloë, she did not have such a good time.’
    ‘Really?’
    ‘She kept trying to clear the mess. No one should clear the mess before the party is over. Except for broken glass.’
    Josef drew up outside Olivia’s house and they got out of the van. Olivia opened the door before Frieda rang. She was wearing a man’s dressing-gown and her face was tragic.
    ‘I just had to go to bed,’ she said. ‘Everything’s such a mess.’
    ‘It was quite a mess before,’ said Frieda. ‘You said you wouldn’t notice a bit extra.’
    ‘I was wrong. It’s not only the washbasin. My blue lamp is broken. My wheelbarrow is broken because they tried to see how many people could fit in it and still be moved – that, apparently, was your friend Jack’s idea. How old is he? I thought he was an adult, not a toddler. And my nice coat has disappeared, Kieran’s favourite hat he left before he went away has a cigarette burn in the crown.’ Kieran was her mild and patient boyfriend – or perhaps her ex. ‘The