Cold Courage (20 page)

Number 204 Ferndale Road, Brixton, was a two-storey terraced house. The area was full of council flats and the children they
contained
. Parts of the district may have been on the rise, but this street was still the London of open drug trafficking and gang attacks that the travel bureaus did not show visitors.

It was Saturday morning, and Lia was looking from the street at Arthur Fried’s ex-wife’s house. The paint was peeling from the walls, and the front garden fence was leaning. Two scratched and battered plastic chairs fulfilled the role of garden furniture. Sarah Hawkins’ life looked meagre.

One window was open, and Lia could hear the sounds of a TV programme or perhaps a video game coming from within.

Children?

If Fried had a child with his ex-wife, he or she would be a teenager at most. Lia waited, thinking about how to make her approach.

Someone came to close the open window. A woman, past forty, with dark hair pulled back in a ponytail. Face devoid of make-up and slightly puffy.

She noticed Lia standing on the street. For a moment their eyes locked. Collecting her courage, Lia waved and entered the garden.

The woman met her at the door. There was no curiosity in her eyes, as though she were too tired to be interested in anyone
standing
in front of her house.

‘What do you want?’ Sarah Hawkins asked.

Lia had an explanation ready, but the bluntness of Hawkins’ question made her abandon the window dressing.

‘Ms Hawkins, my name is Lia Pajala. I came to talk to you about your ex-husband.’

Sarah Hawkins’ eyebrows went up.

‘You know Arthur?’

‘Not really. I’ve just met him. I have some questions for you about him.’

The woman looked at Lia appraisingly.

‘Are you a reporter? You don’t look like a political reporter. Or a gossip columnist.’

Lia smiled. Sarah Hawkins might look like a tired housing estate mother, but, as Arthur Fried’s sometime wife, she clearly knew how the media operated.

‘Actually, I’m a graphic designer for a magazine,’ Lia said. ‘But I’m interested in Arthur, and I’d like to talk to you about him, Ms Hawkins.’

Hawkins hesitated. She was still looking at Lia narrowly. In the end she nodded.

‘If I let you in, you have to leave off that Ms Hawkins rubbish. I’m Sarah. And I’ll decide what we talk about and what we don’t. I say when we’re done and whether I want to talk about a subject or not.’

Lia nodded.

‘Absolutely.’

‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ Sarah said and opened the door the rest of the way.

Lia followed her into the small kitchen, sitting down on a chair and looking around. The house was relatively tidy, and piles of
washing
showed that Sarah had been in the middle of doing the laundry. She could hear the sound that had been audible from outside better now as well: it was a video game, with booms and rapid-fire bangs filling the back room.

Lia looked at Sarah questioningly.

‘My nephew. He’s eleven,’ Sarah explained. ‘He spends a lot of time with me. My sister does shift work at the hospital and I’m… I’m not currently working.’

She prepared a plate of biscuits, laid out cups and a pot of tea and encouraged Lia to help herself.

Lia thanked her. Into her mind popped the little bottle of vodka she had bought from the Eastern Buffet, which she had been
carrying
in her bag for days.

She pulled the bottle out and set it on the table next to the tea service. Sarah smiled sourly.

‘You aren’t going to get much out of me with that little thing. And getting people drunk isn’t very posh.’

‘Oh, it’s not about that,’ Lia said. ‘I’m from Finland, and we have a tradition of having a nip with our coffee or tea when we’re talking business.’

Sarah laughed. It was a small, satisfied giggle, but Lia guessed that the ice-breaker had been timed just right.

‘From Finland?’

Sarah didn’t really know anything about the country. Only that the capital was Helsinki.

‘But you didn’t come here to talk about that. What do you want to know?’ Sarah asked.

‘All sorts of things. For starters, why did you divorce Arthur?’

Sarah sipped her tea.

‘Before I do that, you tell me what your impression was of Arthur when you first met him.’

‘I thought that under his polite shell he was a very cold,
calculating
person,’ Lia said.

Sarah nodded.

They had not seen each other since the divorce.

‘We had problems,’ Sarah said.

She looked out the window.

‘Or, Arthur had problems,’ she added. ‘And his problems became my problems.’

Sarah continued nursing her tea. Only the racket of the game in the other room broke the silence.

Lia tried to put her thoughts into words, but she knew how strange they would sound.

Your ex-husband is some sort of villain. But what kind?

‘I don’t know how to ask what I want to know,’ Lia said.

Sarah snorted.

‘Just spit it out.’

Lia swallowed.

‘I believe that Arthur is not what he seems. There’s something nasty hiding under the surface. But I don’t know what.’

Sarah stared at her teacup as she weighed Lia’s words. She offered her more tea. Lia shook her head.

‘It may be that he’s changed. But during our marriage there was a lot wrong with him,’ Sarah said.

Lia saw that Sarah was collecting herself.

‘No one knows about this. Not my sister, not anyone.’

Sarah squeezed her cup, which was shaking. She had to set it back
on the table.

‘I hope that Arthur has changed, because when I lived with him, he was a cruel rat bastard. He beat me so much that in the final years I had to escape to a women’s shelter three times.’

Lia inhaled deeply. Everything was falling into place. Her
observations
about Sarah Hawkins and her home. Everything about Arthur Fried.

‘Do you want to know more?’ Sarah asked.

Lia nodded.

‘Where’s your recorder? You must have a recorder if you’re doing a newspaper story.’

‘I don’t have a recorder. I want to hear your experience so I can decide what to do about it. Whether it deserves a newspaper story or something else.’

‘Fine. It’s all the same to me.’

Sarah said she had waited, expecting that someone would come and ask her about her marriage to Arthur Fried. But no one ever came.

‘Maybe it’s because Arthur wasn’t famous when we were married.’

At that point, Fair Rule’s supporter numbers had been so humble that they did not even register in the national polls, and instead of few invitations to televised debates, Fried received none. Sarah had been pleased to see Fried forced to understand that he was not the leader he imagined himself to be. But Fried’s frustration had sent him out of his mind at home and he started beating her.

‘No one came to ask about your marriage because almost no one knows about it. No record of it exists even in the national database,’ Lia said.

Sarah was amazed. They had been married and filed for divorce in the usual ways, signing all the forms at the proper offices.

‘I think Arthur had the records erased somehow,’ Lia said.

‘That must be it. I’m sure he’s never regretted what he did to me.’

Lia listened on the edge of her seat as Sarah spoke, the careful consideration and confidence of her words telling of years of thought directed at this moment.

‘My sister says someone would probably want to write a kiss-and-tell book about our story. But I don’t want to blow it up into
something
larger than it was.’

They had been married seven years, the first three of which had been reasonably good and the last four of which were pure hell. Thousands of women went through the same thing. That was why Sarah had always intended to talk about it publicly someday. These men shouldn’t be able to get away with their violence without
suffering
the consequences.

At first, Fried had only hit Sarah once or twice a month. It usually happened when he had drunk a couple of pints too many and wanted sex, but Sarah never wanted to when her husband was being
aggressive
.

‘But after the first few times, he didn’t need the excuse of being drunk any more. He would just hit me for anything.’

Sarah talked for more than two hours. Lia listened in anguish. The situation was absurd: all the while, as this tragic story was flowing out of Sarah, the sounds of simulated car chases and random death echoed incessantly from the living room.

Fried had usually begun by slamming Sarah into the floor. Sometimes she did not even see the blow coming and ended up with bruises just from the fall. Then she had to huddle on all fours as Fried circled her, lashing out at her at will.

‘Usually with his fists. Sometimes he used his belt. On my back or my breasts so no one would see the marks.’

Sarah had not let anyone see her body, even in a swimsuit. At times even now in her dreams she would feel her body covered in bruises. For years she had simply become accustomed to the reality that another attack could come at any moment.

Once it was so bad that she lost consciousness and fled to a shelter when she came to. Fried was both drunk and angry. The party was doing badly. Another time the parish failed to appoint Fried to its governing board.

Once they were on holiday in Italy, on a road trip around Tuscany. Just before arriving in Volterra, Fried had suddenly flown into a rage.

‘He stopped the car on the side of the road and started beating me. Not in the face, just everywhere else. I tried to get out, but he held me with one hand and hit me with the other.’

Sarah had been numb with shock and anger that he had dared to do it even when they were travelling. But she had no way to defend
herself. Then her head jerked back so hard from the force of a blow that something cracked in her neck. For a moment she thought the torment would end there, on the side of that Italian motorway. She would never get to see Volterra or anywhere else ever again.

Suddenly Fried had stopped, urged Sarah to control her crying and started the car. After driving the rest of the way to Volterra, they walked around seeing the sights, but Sarah had no memory of it.

‘At night in the restaurant, Arthur ate larded veal with truffle sauce and I ate painkillers.’

Sarah noticed Lia shudder.

‘Have you ever seen domestic violence up close? No? I could give you a definitive lecture on the subject. It’s a strange drama of
repetition
and promises that things will change. But they never do.’

Sarah had waited for years for Arthur to stop. If only she loved him enough or he got help from a therapist. The violence clouded the victim’s judgement: when someone close to you does something that terrible, you go into lockdown. Thinking that your situation was different from everyone else’s was typical.

‘In the beginning I made the same mistake as most women by thinking that I was to blame. It took two or three years for me to realise that it had nothing to do with me.’

They were a textbook case.

‘Arthur was sick. Not deranged, but he did have some sort of personality disorder.’

It had dawned on Sarah that although Arthur Fried had
exceptional
social skills, he was utterly cold. Not only did he see himself as the centre of everything, he also derived extreme pleasure from subjugating others.

Sarah discovered that she was not the only woman Fried was doing this to. He had been visiting prostitutes the whole time they were married. This only came out after the violence had become
commonplace
and Fried no longer felt like pretending and concealing his whoring any longer. Not only had he been acting out sadomasochistic games with the prostitutes, he had really been hitting them too.

‘He had to pay them to keep quiet. Once some girl got hurt so badly the payoff had to be in real money. I heard him arranging it with his party secretary.’

‘Tom Gallagher?’

‘No, then it was a man named Bob Hewitt. Slimy toad. But he only had the job for a couple of years. Working under Arthur is hard, so turnover has always been high.’

Some forms of violence were a strong sexual fetish for Fried. He had wanted Sarah to praise how well-endowed he was.

There were things she was supposed to say, things she could never say aloud again.

Sarah could not even think of reporting her husband to the police. She was too afraid. There were days when she was unable to leave the house, and working was impossible. When she first met Fried, she was working as a secretary for a labour union, but after the first few years of the marriage that fell by the wayside.

‘I was so messed up. I kept having crying fits.’

After the divorce, as she gradually began to recover from Fried, no jobs were open to her. She had been out of the workforce for more than ten years.

Arthur Fried paid his ex-wife a small amount of maintenance each month, just enough for her to scrape by.

‘I know that Arthur pays me because he’s afraid. Now that I’m telling you everything, he’s sure to stop giving me money. But I’m thirty-eight years old. If life has anything left for me, it has to start sometime.’

Lia was shocked. Sarah looked nearly fifty.

It was strange that no rumours had got out about Fried’s violent tendencies, Lia observed.

‘He’s very good at what he does,’ Sarah said. ‘In the beginning his self-sufficiency was charming. Sounds stupid, doesn’t it? But I had never met anyone before who shines the way he does.’

Fried could talk for an hour without expecting anything from his conversation partner other than the occasional nod of her head. And after one session like that, anyone would be prepared to vote for him. In fact, he had all the elements required of a good politician: he knew how to inspire, his energy was boundless and he knew how to play the game.

‘But he has no heart – he knows how to fake warmth, but he doesn’t feel any. Ever.’

All politicians were narcissists to some degree, Sarah suggested. It went with the profession. They had to believe in themselves, in their own omnipotence, in their ability to act as representatives in others’ stead.