by Nicci French
That evening, he stayed late at work. He stared at the photos of the boy, of the place he had disappeared, at the large map in the investigation room, dotted with pins and flags. He read through statements. His brain throbbed and his chest ached.
He stared and the other boy stared back. It was Simon. He put up a hand towards Simon, to see if he was friendly, and Simon put up his hand too, at the same time, but he didn’t smile. He was very thin and very white and his bones stuck out on his shoulders and his hips, and his willy looked like a little pink snail. When he took a step towards Simon, Simon took a step towards him. A jerky little step, like a puppet moves, and then like a puppet Simon folded to the floor and Matthew folded to the floor and they were staring at each other. Matthew put one finger to the boy’s tiny face, goblin face, hollows for cheeks and holes for eyes and a bandaged mouth, and touched the cold, speckled mirror and watched the tears stain the skin where he pressed.
He felt hands behind him, he felt himself being held. Soft words, breath on him.
‘You’re going to be our little boy,’ the voice said. ‘But don’t be our bad little boy. We don’t like bad little boys.’
When Frieda opened the door to Karlsson, he stood at the threshold as though she was expecting him, and in a way she was. She had known that this was not the end of the case of Matthew Faraday.
‘Come in,’ she said.
They went into the front room, where a fire was burning and a stack of academic journals lay on the arm of her chair.
‘Am I disturbing you?’
‘Not really. Have a seat.’ He was carrying a leather bag, slung over his shoulder. He laid it on the floor and took his coat off. He sat down. She hesitated, and then said, ‘Do you want something to drink? Coffee?’
‘Perhaps something a bit stronger.’
‘Wine? Whisky?’
‘Whisky, I think. It’s that kind of night.’
Frieda poured them both a small tumbler of whisky, adding a splash of water, then sat down opposite him. ‘How can I help?’
Her manner was softer than usual. It almost brought tears to his eyes.
‘It’s all I think of. I get up and I think about him and I go to bed and I dream about him. I go to the pub with the guys and we talk about stuff and I hear the words coming out of my mouth. It’s amazing how you can go around pretending everything’s normal when it’s not. I talk to my kids on the phone and ask them about their day and tell them silly, cheerful stuff about mine, and all the time I’m just seeing him. He’s dead, you know. Or, at least, I hope he is because if he isn’t… What’s the best that can happen? That we find his body and catch the bastard who did it. That’s the best.’
‘Is it really as hopeless as that?’
‘In ten years’ time, in twenty, I’ll still be the copper who didn’t rescue Matthew Faraday. When I’m retired – like the old detective I visited who was in charge of the Joanna Vine case – I’ll sit in my house and think about Matthew and wonder what happened, where he’s buried, who did it and where they are now.’
He swirled his whisky round in his tumbler, then took a gulp. ‘You probably spend half your time with people who are burdened by guilt, but in my experience, people don’t feel nearly enough guilt. They feel shame when they’re caught, all right, but no guilt if they’re not. All over the world there are people who have done terrible things and they’re living perfectly contented lives, with their families and friends.’
He swilled back his whisky and Frieda poured more into his tumbler without asking him. She hadn’t touched hers.
‘If I feel like this,’ he said, ‘think of the parents.’ He pulled his tie loose impatiently. ‘Am I going to be haunted all my life?’
‘Have you never had a case like this before?’
‘I’ve had my share of murders and suicides and domestic abuse. It’s hard to keep your faith in human nature; maybe that’s why I’m divorced and pouring my heart out to a woman I’ve met just a few times, rather than to my wife. He’s only five, the age of my youngest.’
‘There’s no answer to what you’re feeling,’ said Frieda. A strange mood enveloped the room where they sat, dreamy and sad.
‘I know. I just needed to say it to someone. Sorry.’
‘Don’t say sorry.’
She didn’t say anything else. She looked into her glass and Karlsson looked at her, seeing a new side to her. After a while, he said, ‘Tell me about your work.’
‘What do you want to know?’
‘I don’t know. Are you a doctor?’
‘Yes. Though you don’t have to be. I specialized in psychiatry before training. It’s a long process and a strict discipline. I’ve got lots of letters after my name.’
‘OK. And are your patients mostly private? How many do you see a day? What are they like? Why are you doing it? Does it work? That kind of thing.’
Frieda gave a small laugh, then started counting off his questions on her fingers. ‘One, I’m a mixture of private and NHS. I get referrals from the Warehouse Clinic, where I trained and worked for years, and from GPs and hospitals, and I also take people who come to me off their own bat, usually because someone they know has recommended me to them. It’s important to me not just to take on people who are rich enough to be able to afford therapy; otherwise it would be like treating the disease of the rich. Privately, therapy is quite expensive.’
‘How much?’
‘I have this rule of thumb. I charge two pounds for every thousand they earn – so if you earn thirty thousand you’d give me sixty pounds for each session. I had one client who told me he’d have to pay me five hundred thousand an hour, in that case. Luckily for him, I have a cut-off point of a hundred pounds. I have been known to take people for almost nothing, though my colleagues frown on that. Anyway, I’d say that about seventy per cent of my patients are NHS referrals, maybe a bit less.
‘OK. Number two, I usually see my patients three times a week, and I usually have seven patients – in other words, about twenty sessions a week in all. I know therapists who have eight sessions each day – that’s forty in a week. As one patient leaves, the next arrives. It makes them wealthy, but I couldn’t do that. Nor would I want to.’
‘Why not?’
‘I need to absorb things, think about each person I see, make proper process notes. I don’t need more money than what I get now. I need time. What was next?’
‘What are they like?’
‘I don’t know how to answer that. They don’t have much in common with each other.’
‘Except they’re in a mess.’
‘Most of us are in a mess at some time in our lives, wretched beyond bearing or dysfunctional beyond tolerating or simply stuck.’ She fixed him with her piercing glance. ‘Don’t you think?’
‘I don’t know.’ Karlsson frowned, uncomfortable. ‘Do you ever turn people away?’
‘If I think they don’t need therapy, or if I think they’d be better off with someone else. I only take on people I think I can help.’
‘And what made you become a therapist?’ This was what he really wanted to know but had little expectation of her answering. They had sat companionably together and talked, and yet he did not understand her much better or have more sense of her vulnerabilities or doubts. She kept herself to herself, he thought. The self-possession that had struck him so forcefully at their first meeting rarely wavered.
‘That’s enough questions for one night. What about you?’
‘What about me?’
‘Why did you join the police force?’
Karlsson shrugged, then stared into his whisky. ‘Fuck knows. Recently, I’ve been asking myself why I didn’t become a lawyer, the way I was meant to, earning serious money and sleeping properly at night.’
‘What’s the answer?’
‘There isn’t an answer. I work too hard, get paid too little, am drowning in paperwork, only get noticed when things go wrong, get pissed on by the press and by my own boss, and the publi
c distrust me. And now that I’m heading up the Murder Investigation Team, I get to meet lots of killers and wife-beaters and perverts and drug dealers. What can I say? It just seemed like a good idea at the time.’
‘You like it, then.’
‘Like it? It’s what I do, and I think I do it pretty well, most of the time. Though you wouldn’t guess it from this case.’
He seemed to remember something and reached into his bag. He took out two cardboard files. ‘These are statements made by Rosalind Teale. She’s the sister of Joanna Vine. The first statements were made just after the disappearance and then we interviewed her again the other day.’
‘Is there something significant about them?’
‘I know you’re resistant, but I’d like you to have a look at them.’
‘What for?’
‘I’d be interested in anything you had to say.’
‘Now?’
‘That would be good.’
Karlsson refilled his glass and didn’t add water. He stood up and walked around the room as if he was at a gallery. Frieda didn’t like being watched while she was reading. And she didn’t like the idea of him looking at her possessions and using them to try and learn something about her. But the quickest way to get him to stop was to read the statements. She opened the older one and began, making herself read slowly, word by word.
‘Have you read all these books?’ Karlsson asked.
‘Shut up,’ said Frieda, in a mumble, without even looking up from the file. As she moved on to the second, more recent, file, she was aware of Karlsson, out of her eyeline. Finally she closed it. She didn’t speak, although she knew that Karlsson was waiting.
‘So?’ he said. ‘If she was your patient, what would you ask her?’
‘If she was my patient, I wouldn’t ask her anything. I would try to stop her feeling guilty about her sister. Apart from that, I think she should be left alone.’
‘She’s the only possible witness,’ said Karlsson.
‘And she didn’t see anything. And it’s more than twenty years ago. And every time you talk to her you damage her all over again.’
Karlsson came over and sat back down so that he was facing Frieda. He contemplated his whisky glass. ‘This is good stuff,’ he said. ‘Where did you get it?’
‘Someone gave it to me.’
‘Tell me something else about the statements,’ said Karlsson. ‘You’re clever. Don’t you see this as a challenge?’
‘Don’t think you can taunt me,’ said Frieda.
‘I’m not taunting you. I’m at a stage where I’d be grateful for any input. I’m interested in anyone who knows about things I don’t know about.’
Frieda paused for a moment. ‘Have you thought about the possibility that Joanna might have been taken by a woman rather than a man?’
Karlsson put his glass down very gently on the low table by his chair. ‘Why do you say that?’
‘The disappearance was quick,’ said Frieda. ‘Rosie Vine only lost sight of her sister for a minute or so. It doesn’t seem as if there was any fuss, any noise. This wasn’t someone being snatched on a quiet lane and thrown into the back of a van. This was a street that people walked along, with shops on it. I could imagine a little girl walking off with a woman. Taking her hand.’ Frieda imagined the scene, the little girl walking away, trustingly. Then she tried not to imagine it.
‘That’s very interesting,’ said Karlsson.
‘Don’t patronize me,’ said Frieda. ‘It’s not very interesting. It’s obvious and you must have considered it from the beginning.’
‘The idea had occurred to us,’ he said. ‘It’s a possibility. You’ve got to admit, though, you’re interested.’
‘Why are you asking me this?’ said Frieda. ‘What are you trying to get me to say?’
‘I’d like you to talk to Rose Teale. Maybe you can get to her in a way we can’t.’
‘But what’s there to get at?’ She picked up the file and flicked through it.
‘Isn’t it frustrating?’ said Karlsson. ‘When I read the statement, I have this fantasy that I could get in a time machine and be there just for a minute, just for five seconds, and then I could find out what really happened.’ He gave a sour smile. ‘That’s not the way grown-up policemen are supposed to talk.’
Frieda looked at the statement again: the little girl talking about her younger sister. She felt she was being asked to go on a journey and after she had said yes it would be too late to turn back. Was there any point to this? Was there anything she could contribute? Well, maybe. And if she could, she must.
‘All right,’ she said.
‘Really?’ said Karlsson. ‘That’s great.’
‘What I’d need,’ said Frieda, ‘are those police artists who are used for creating likenesses. Have you got that?’
Karlsson smiled and shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘We’ve got something much better.’
Chapter Twenty-four
Tom Garret was visibly excited to meet someone who knew what he was talking about when he described the neurological aspects of facial recognition.
‘The old idea of the photofit was based on this primitive notion that we see faces as a collection of bits – blue eyes, a large nose, bushy eyebrows, a sharp chin – and when we put them together we have a face we recognize. But that’s not how we really see faces and that’s why photofit reconstructions look ridiculous.’
‘Not exactly ridiculous,’ said Karlsson.
‘Comical. And almost useless. As you know’ – and now he turned firmly towards Frieda – ‘the fusiform gyrus area of the brain is specifically associated with facial recognition and if it’s damaged the patient is unable to recognize any faces at all, even of close relatives. We’ve harnessed that idea in creating this program based on holistic facial recognition.’
‘Excellent.’
Frieda leaned more closely towards Garret’s monitor.
Garret continued talking about evolutionary facial composite systems and genetic algorithms until Karlsson coughed and reminded them that Rosalind Teale was sitting outside. ‘Is it all right if we stay here?’ he said.
‘That’s fine,’ said Frieda. ‘But please leave everything to me.’
Frieda had read the file and seen photographs but she was still shocked by Rose Teale’s appearance. She looked like someone who had suffered a traumatic episode the previous day, not more than twenty years in the past. Had this woman not received any help? Had she not been attended to? Rose glanced around her, at Garret, who was tapping at a keyboard and didn’t look at her; at Karlsson, who was leaning on the wall with his arms folded. When Frieda stepped forward and introduced herself, she didn’t ask questions, just let herself be led across the room and placed in a chair. Frieda sat opposite her. Karlsson had said that it might make Rose feel better to be useful. Looking at the passive, defeated woman in front of her, Frieda doubted that.
‘I’ve done everything,’ she said. ‘I’ve tried to remember. I’ve gone over and over it. There’s nothing left.’
‘I know,’ said Frieda. ‘You’ve done everything you possibly could.’
‘So why am I here?’
‘There are ways of accessing things in your mind that you don’t know are there. It’s nothing magical. More like opening an old filing cabinet that you’d forgotten about. I’m not going to ask you any questions,’ said Frieda, ‘and none of us expects anything of you. I just want you to bear with me for a moment. Can you do that?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’d like us to try something. I don’t want you to think about it. Just do as I say.’ Frieda now let her voice become softer. ‘I know that you’re probably feeling tense, coming into a police station and talking to people you don’t know, but I’d like you to sit comfortably and relax as if someone was going to read you a story. I want you to close your eyes.’
Rose looked distrustful. Her eyes flickered towards Karlsson. He remained impassive. ‘All right.’ She clo
sed her eyes.
‘I want you to think back to that day,’ said Frieda. ‘I want you to go back there and imagine yourself leaving school, walking along the pavements, crossing the road, looking at shops, people, cars. Don’t say anything. Just imagine yourself doing it.’
Frieda looked at the young woman’s face, the fine lines at the corners of her eyes, the flickering eyelids. She waited for a minute. Two minutes. She leaned forward and spoke even more quietly, almost in a whisper. ‘Don’t say anything, Rose. Don’t try and remember anything. I want you to do something for me. Just imagine a woman. Young or middle-aged. You decide.’ Frieda saw Rose’s features flicker in puzzlement. ‘Just do it,’ she continued. ‘Don’t worry about it. Don’t even think about it. Just think of a woman. Any woman, whoever comes into your head. Maybe she’s standing on the edge of the pavement, by the kerb. She’s just got out of a car and she’s looking around. Put her in the scene with you. Look at her. Can you do that?’
‘All right.’
‘Have you done it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Wait,’ said Frieda. ‘Wait and look at her. Look at the woman who came into your head. Remember what she looks like.’
A minute passed. Frieda saw that Karlsson was frowning at her. She ignored him. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘You can open your eyes now.’
Rose blinked, like someone who had just woken and was dazzled by the light.
‘I want you to go over and sit with Tom and he’s going to show you something.’
Tom Garret stood up and gestured Rose into the chair he’d been sitting in. As she sat down, he made a questioning face at Frieda as if to ask, Is this for real?
‘Go on,’ said Frieda.
