shed?’
‘I don’t know what you’re trying to get at but Carrie and me together do happen to own a shed. I built it myself and I’ve only just finished it. It’s where we keep a few tools and some stuff in boxes. It’s locked with a key that hangs by the door out to the yard and we both have access to it.’
‘Perhaps I’m giving the wrong impression of what I’m talking about, Alan. What I’m interested in is where you go to create your own space. I’m not trying to catch you out. I just want you to answer the question: have you ever, in your life, had somewhere separate from where you lived where you went in order to pursue some hobby or other, or just to be by yourself, a place nobody else knew about or could find you?’
‘Yes,’ said Alan. ‘When I was a teenager, this friend of mine, Craig, had a lock-up where he kept a car and a motorbike and I used to go there and work on his bike with him. Satisfied?’
‘That’s exactly what I meant,’ said Frieda. ‘Did it feel like an escape?’
‘Well, you can’t exactly work on your motorbike in your front room, can you?’
Frieda took a deep breath, trying to ignore Alan’s hostility. ‘Anywhere else?’
Alan thought for a moment. ‘When I was nineteen, twenty, I used to fiddle around with engines. A friend of a friend had a workshop in one of those places under the arches down in Vauxhall. I worked for him one summer.’
‘Excellent,’ said Frieda. ‘Under the arches. A lock-up garage. Anywhere else you used to go away from home?’
‘When I was a kid, I used to go to a youth club. It was in a sort of hut on the edge of a housing estate. We played table tennis. I was never much good at it.’
Frieda thought for a moment. She knew that this was all too straightforward, too superficial, and she was getting nowhere. A few weeks ago, Alan hadn’t known he was a twin. Now he did. The source had been contaminated, as Seth Boundy would have said. He was self-conscious; he was performing for her. Perhaps he needed coaxing.
‘I want you to imagine something,’ she said. ‘We’ve been talking about these refuges away from the home. Somewhere you can get away to. I want you to imagine something. Imagine that you did have a secret. That you had something to hide and you couldn’t hide it in your home. Where would you hide it? Don’t think of it with your mind. Think of it with your heart. What’s your gut feeling?’
There was a long pause. Alan closed his eyes. Then opened them and stared at Frieda with a hunted expression. ‘I know what you’re asking. This isn’t about me, is it?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’re playing a game with me. You’re using me to find out about him.’
Frieda was silent.
‘You’re asking me questions not to help me, not to sort out my problems, but because you think it might give you some hint about where to look for that kid. Something you can go to the police with.’
‘You’re right,’ Frieda said finally. ‘It was probably a wrong thing to do. No, it was definitely a wrong thing to do. But I thought that if what you said could give any help at all, then it was something we had to try.’
‘We?’ said Alan. ‘What do you mean “we”? I thought I was coming here for help with my problems. I thought when you were asking me questions it was to cure me. You know me. I’d do anything to get that kid back. You can do any of your experiments on me, that’s fine. Little kid like that. But you should have told me. You should have fucking told me.’
‘I couldn’t,’ said Frieda. ‘If I’d told you, it wouldn’t have worked – not that it did work, of course. It was an idea born of desperation. I needed to know what you would come up with spontaneously.’
‘You were using me,’ said Alan.
‘Yes, I was using you.’
‘So the police can start looking in lock-up garages and under railway arches.’
‘Yes.’
‘Which is probably where they’re already looking.’
‘I guess so,’ said Frieda.
There was another pause.
‘I think we’re done,’ said Alan.
‘We’ll arrange another session,’ said Frieda. ‘A proper one.’
‘I’ll need to think about that.’
They stood up, rather awkwardly, like two people who find themselves leaving a party at the same time.
‘I’ve got some last-minute Christmas shopping to get done,’ said Alan, ‘so it won’t be completely wasted. I can walk down to Oxford Street from here, can’t I?’
‘It’s about ten minutes away.’
‘That’s fine.’
They walked to the door and Frieda opened it to let Alan through. He started to leave, then turned round. ‘I’ve found my family,’ he said. ‘But it’s not much of a reunion.’
‘What did you want from it?’
Alan gave a half-smile. ‘Always the therapist. I’ve been thinking. What I really wanted is what you sometimes see in films or read in books where people go to the grave of their parents and grandparents and they sit there and talk to them or just think. Of course, my mother’s still alive. It’ll probably be easier to talk to her when she’s dead. Then I can pretend she was something she wasn’t – someone who’d listen to me and who’d understand me; somebody I could pour out my heart to. That’s what I’d like. To lie by the grave and talk to my ancestors. Of course, in films it’s usually some picturesque graveyard on the side of a mountain or somewhere.’
‘We all want some kind of family.’ Frieda knew that she was the last person to say it.
‘Sounds like something you got out of a cracker,’ said Alan. ‘I suppose it’s the right time of year.’
Chapter Forty
‘I’m making the pudding,’ said Chloe. She sounded unusually animated. ‘Not Christmas pudding. I hate that, and anyway, it’s got about a gazillion calories a mouthful. And I would have had to make it weeks ago, which was when I thought I was going to my dad’s, before he found himself something better to do. I could buy one, I suppose, but that would be cheating. You have to cook your own Christmas dinner, don’t you, not just put something in the microwave for a few minutes?’
‘Do you?’ Frieda walked with the phone to stand in front of the large map of London that was pinned to the wall. She squinted in the poor light.
‘So I’m making this pudding I found online, with raspberries and strawberries and cranberries and white chocolate.’
Frieda put her finger on the area she was examining and traced a route.
‘What are you cooking?’ Chloe continued. ‘I hope it’s not turkey. Turkey doesn’t taste of anything. Mum said you definitely wouldn’t cook turkey.’
‘It’s not exactly definite.’ Frieda was going up the stairs now, to her bedroom.
‘Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it. Just don’t. Please don’t. Tomorrow is Christmas Eve. I don’t care about presents or stuff; I don’t care what we eat, actually. But I don’t want you not to even think about it at all, as if it doesn’t matter to you one way or the other. I couldn’t bear that. Literally. This is Christmas, Frieda. Remember. All my friends are having great family reunions or going to Mauritius with their dads or something. I’m coming to yours. You have to make an effort so that it’s special.’
‘I know,’ said Frieda, forcing herself to respond. She pulled a thick sweater from her drawer and threw it on the bed, followed by a pair of gloves. ‘I will. I am. I promise.’ The thought of Christmas made her feel a bit sick: a lost boy and a missing young woman, Dean and Terry Reeve free, and she was supposed to eat and drink and laugh, put a paper crown on her head.
‘Is it just us three, or have you invited other people? That’s fine by me. In fact, I’d like it. It’s a pity Jack can’t come.’
‘What?’
