Frieda ran her finger in a spiral around and outwards from Dean Reeve’s house and then her finger stopped. She grabbed her coat and scarf and ran from the house, out of the mews and across the square. It was still dark and these smaller streets were deserted; she could hear her own footsteps echoing behind her. It was only when she got to Euston Road, among the traffic of London that never ceases, that she was able to flag down a taxi. As it sped away she went over and over it in her mind. Should she have called the police? What would she have had to say? She thought of Karlsson and his team, knocking on doors, taking statements. Divers had been searching the river. What they wanted was something tangible, a piece of cloth, a mere fibre, a fingerprint, and all she’d been able to offer were memories, fantasies, dreams that sometimes seemed to coincide. But was she just seeing patterns the way children saw shapes in clouds? There had been so many dead ends. Was this just another?
‘Where do you want me to drop you?’ said the cabbie. She was a woman. That was unusual.
‘Is there a main entrance?’
‘There’s only one that’s open,’ said the cabbie. ‘There’s a back one but it’s locked up.’
‘The front one, then.’
‘I’m not sure if it’ll be open yet. It’s sunrise to sunset.’
‘The sun’s rising now. Look.’
It was just before eight o’clock, and Christmas Eve.
A few minutes later, the cab pulled up. Frieda paid and got out. She looked at the ornate Victorian sign: ‘Chesney Hall Cemetery.’ Alan had said that he had the fantasy of visiting a family grave where he would like to lie on the grass and talk to his ancestors. Poor Alan. He didn’t have a family grave that he could visit, or not one that he knew of. But did Dean Reeve? The large gates of the cemetery were shut but beside them was a small open entrance for pedestrians. Frieda walked inside and looked around. It was vast, the size of a town. There were rows and rows of tombstones in avenues. There were statues, broken pillars, crosses. Dotted here and there were mausoleums. One area to the left looked grown over, the graves almost disappearing under foliage. Her breath steamed in the cold.
Ahead, down the main avenue, Frieda saw a simple wooden hut. She saw that the door was open and a light was visible through the window. Did cemeteries keep registers? She started to walk down and as she did so, she glanced at the graves on either side. One caught her eye. The family tomb of the Brainbridge family. Emily, Nicholas, Thomas and William Brainbridge had all died in the 1860s before they had reached ten years of age. Their mother, Edith, had died in 1883. How had she managed it, growing old alone with her dead children dwindling into the past? Perhaps she had had other children to look after, children who had grown up and moved away and were now buried somewhere else.
Something, a rustle perhaps, made Frieda turn round. Through the railings, she could see a figure, indistinct at first, as it moved along, and then it appeared in the entrance and she recognized it. Her. Their eyes met: Frieda looked at Terry Reeve and Terry Reeve looked at Frieda. There was something in her gaze, an intensity that Frieda had never seen before. Frieda took a step forward but Terry turned and moved away; she disappeared out of sight. Frieda ran back the way she had come but by the time she had got out of the cemetery there was no sign of Terry. She looked around desperately. She ran back down the avenue and reached the hut. An old woman was sitting behind an improvised desk. There was a Thermos flask in front of her and a notice saying ‘Friends of Chesney Hall Cemetery’. Probably she had a loved-one lying out there somewhere, a husband or child. Perhaps this was where she felt at home, among family. Frieda took out her purse and rummaged through it.
‘Have you got a phone?’ she said.
‘Well, I’m not –’ the woman began.
Frieda found the card she was looking for. ‘I need to make a call,’ she said. ‘It’s to the police.’
After she had gabbled out her message to Karlsson, Frieda turned back to the old woman.
‘I need to find a family grave. Can I do that?’
‘We have plans of the cemetery,’ the woman answered. ‘Almost all of the graves are listed on it. What’s the name?’
‘Reeve. R-E-E-V-E.’
The woman stood up and moved over to a filing cabinet in the corner. She unlocked it and brought out a thick ledger, filled out by hand in black ink that was faded, and started leafing through it with slow deliberation, licking her forefinger from time to time.
‘We have three Reeves listed,’ she said at last. ‘Theobald Reeve, who died in 1927, his wife Ellen Reeve, 1936, and a Sarah Reeve, 1953.’
‘Where are they buried?’
The woman rustled in a drawer and brought out a printed map of the cemetery.
‘Here,’ she said, placing her finger on the point. ‘They’re all buried close to each other. If you go up the central path and take the third path on your –’
But Frieda was gone, snatching the piece of paper from her hand and running. The old woman watched her, and then she took her place once more at her desk, unscrewing the lid of her Thermos flask, waiting for the bereaved to come and pay their respects. Christmas was always a busy time.
Frieda tore up the central path and took the path on the right that was narrow but well-worn. On either side were gravestones, some quite new, made of white marble with clear black words etched into them. Others were older, grown over with lichen and ivy, or had tipped backwards. It was hard to make out the names of some of the dead who lay there and Frieda had to run her fingers over the ridges of the letters to make them out. The Philpotts, the Bells, the Farmers, the Thackerays; those who had died old and those who hadn’t made it out of their teens; those who still had flowers placed there and those long-forgotten.
She moved as quickly as she could among the gravestones, stooping at each one and standing up again, squinting in the dim light. The Lovatts, the Gorans, the Booths. Her eyes burned with tiredness and her chest ached with hope. A blackbird looked at her from a bare thorn bush and in the distance she heard the rumble of cars. Fairley, Fairbrother, Walker, Hayle. And then she stopped and heard the blood pounding in her ears. Reeve. Here was a Reeve – a small, crumbling headstone, tipped slightly to one side. She had found it.
But then, with a crushing sense of failure, she understood that she had found nothing at all. For how could a child be hidden here, among these puny graves that stretched all round her? With a lurch of horror she looked closer at them for freshly turned earth where a body could have been buried, but they were thickly overgrown with weeds. Nobody could be hidden here. She sank to her knees beside Theobald Reeve’s inscription, feeling sick with a sense of defeat. Matthew wasn’t here after all. It had just been a delusion, a last spasm of hope.
She didn’t know how long she knelt like that in the bitter cold, knowing that she had lost. But at last she raised her eyes and started to scramble to her feet, and as she did so she saw it – a high stone mausoleum, almost out of sight behind a tangle of brambles and nettles. She ran towards it, feeling the thorns tear at her. Her feet sank into the slushy mud and the wind whipped her hair round her face so that she could barely see. But she could see enough to know that someone had been there recently. There was a path of sorts where the nettles and brambles had been flattened. She reached the entrance and saw that it was blocked with a heavy stone doorway, but from the ruts in the mud it was obvious that someone had pulled it aside not long ago.
‘Matthew,’ she shouted, at the blank, mouldering stone. ‘Wait! Hold on! We’re here. Wait.’
Then she started tearing at the stone with her bare fingers, trying to get a purchase, trying to hear some sound that would tell her he was there, and that he lived.
The stone door gave slightly. A chink appeared. She strained at it. From over the hill she heard cars and she saw headlights. Then there were voices and there were people and they were running towards her. She saw Karlsson. She saw the expression on his face and she wondered if she looked like that as well.