Waiting for Wednesday Read Free Page A

nearby.’ He saw Riley coming
up the stairs.
    ‘There’s someone to see you,
sir,’ he said. ‘He says you know him.’
    ‘Who is he?’ said Karlsson.
    ‘Dr Bradshaw,’ said Riley.
‘He doesn’t look like a policeman.’
    ‘He’s not,’ said Karlsson.
‘He’s a sort of consultant. Anyway, what does it matter what he looks like?
We’d better let him in, give him a chance to earn his money.’
    As Karlsson walked down the stairs and saw
Hal Bradshaw waiting in the hall, he saw what Riley meant. He didn’t look like a
detective. He wore a grey suit, with just a speckle of yellowish colour to it, and an
open-necked white shirt. Karlsson particularly noticed his fawn suede shoes and his
large, heavy-framed spectacles. He gave Karlsson a nod of recognition.
    ‘How did you even hear about
this?’ Karlsson asked.
    ‘It’s a new arrangement. I like
to get here when the scene is still fresh. The quicker I get here, the more useful I can
be.’
    ‘Nobody told me that,’ said
Karlsson.
    Bradshaw didn’t seem to be paying
attention. He was looking around thoughtfully. ‘Is your friend here?’
    ‘Which friend?’
    ‘Dr Klein,’ he said. ‘Frieda
Klein. I expected to find her here, sniffing around.’
    Hal Bradshaw and Frieda had worked on the
same case, in which Frieda had very nearly been killed. A man had been found lying naked
and decomposing in the flat of a disturbed woman, Michelle Doyce. Bradshaw had been
convinced that she had killed the man; Frieda had heard in the woman’s meandering
words some kind of sense, a distracted straining towards the truth. Gradually she and
Karlsson had pieced together the man’s identity: he was a con man who had left
behind him many victims, each with motives for revenge. Frieda’s methods –
unorthodox and instinctive – and her actions, which could be obsessive and
self-destructive, had led to her dismissal during the last round of cuts. But clearly
this wasn’t enough for Bradshaw. She had made him look stupid and now he wanted to
destroy her. Karlsson thought of all of this. Then he thought of a dead woman lying a
few feet away, and a family grieving, and swallowed his angry words.
    ‘Dr Klein’s not working for us
any more.’
    ‘Oh, yes,’ said Bradshaw,
cheerfully. ‘That’s right. Things didn’t go very well at the end of
that last case.’
    ‘It depends what you mean by
“well”,’ Karlsson said. ‘Three murderers were caught.’
    Bradshaw pulled a face. ‘If the
consultant ends up in a knife fight and then spends a month in intensive care,
that’s not exactly an example of success. In my book, at least.’
    Karlsson was on the point of saying
something but again he remembered where he was.
    ‘This is hardly the place,’ he
said coolly. ‘A mother has been murdered. Her family are upstairs.’
    Bradshaw held up a hand. ‘Shall we
stop talking and go through?’
    ‘I wasn’t the one
talking.’
    Bradshaw stepped inside and took a deep
breath, as if he were appraising the aroma of the room. He moved towards the body of
Ruth Lennox, treading delicately to avoid the pool of blood. He looked towards Karlsson.
‘You know, blundering into a crime scene and being attacked, doesn’t count
as solving a crime.’
    ‘Are we talking about Frieda
again?’ said Karlsson.
    ‘Her mistake is to get emotionally
involved,’ he said. ‘I heard she slept with the man who was
arrested.’
    ‘She didn’t sleep with
him,’ said Karlsson, coldly. ‘She met him socially. Because she was
suspicious of him.’
    Bradshaw looked at Karlsson with a
half-smile. ‘Does that trouble you?’
    ‘I’ll tell you what troubles
me,’ said Karlsson. ‘It troubles me that you seem to feel competitive with
Frieda Klein.’
    ‘Me? No, no, no. Simply concerned for
a colleague who seems to have lost her bearings.’ He gave a sympathetic grimace.
‘I feel very sorry for her. I hear she’s depressed.’
    ‘I thought you’d come to look at
a murder scene. If you