Blue Monday

by Nicci French

  I know what’s in store. I don’t want any of that. Tell Terry sorry. Sorry to leave you, doll. She knows she was always the one for me. She wasn’t part of any of this. She won’t stand up for herself. Tell her I did my best. Time to go.

  Dean Reeve

  Karlsson looked over at Melanie Hackett. ‘He’s left her to it,’ he said.

  ‘So what do we do?’ she asked.

  ‘Lean on her as hard as we can. She’s all we’ve got.’

  Karlsson rang Frieda at home. He told her about the body, about the note.

  ‘Somehow I never imagined him sitting in a courtroom.’

  ‘I don’t know what that means,’ said Karlsson. ‘Anyway, I said I’d keep you informed. So, you’re informed.’

  ‘And I’ll keep you informed,’ said Frieda.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Frieda. ‘If anything happens, I’ll get back to you.’

  After Frieda put down the phone, she sat entirely still. On the table in front of her was a white earthenware coffee cup. The light through the window hit it so that one side was in shadow, a shadow that was almost blue. She had a pad of paper and a piece of charcoal and she was trying to capture it before the light moved, the shape of the cup changed and the image was lost. She looked at the cup and looked down at the page. It was wrong. The shadow on her drawing was like a shadow was meant to look; it wasn’t the shadow she was actually looking at. She ripped the page out and tore it in half and then in half again. She was wondering whether she could bear to start again when the phone rang. It was Sasha Wells.

  ‘Merry Christmas,’ she said. ‘I’ve got news for you.’

  They arranged to meet in Number 9, which was just around the corner from where Sasha worked. As Frieda came into the coffee shop she looked at the tinsel and stars and little globes that had been hung around the room. Kerry greeted her and pointed at the window display. ‘You like our Santa Claus?’

  ‘I’d like to see him nailed to a cross,’ Frieda said.

  Kerry looked shocked and disapproving. ‘It’s for the children,’ she said. ‘And Katya did it.’

  Frieda ordered the strongest black coffee they could manufacture. When Sasha came in, Frieda thought how different she looked from the shaking, tremulous young woman she’d met a few weeks earlier. Of course, that didn’t necessarily mean she was better, but she was wearing a suit, her hair was tied back, and she was dressed to face the world. When she caught sight of Frieda, her face broke into a wide smile. Frieda got up, introduced her to Kerry and ordered a herbal tea and a muffin for her. They sat down at the table together. Sasha’s smile turned to a look of concern.

  ‘When did you last sleep?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ve been working,’ Frieda said. ‘Well?’

  Sasha took a bite of the muffin and a gulp of tea almost simultaneously. ‘I’m starving,’ she mumbled, with her mouth full, and then swallowed. ‘Well, I want to say first how grateful you should be to me. I’m in genetics but I don’t do testing. However, I know someone who knows someone and furthermore I dragged them out of a Christmas party and got them to do it in about thirty seconds. So basically we’ve done the test.’

  ‘What was the result?’

  ‘You’ve got to say, “Thank you.” ’

  ‘I’m very grateful, Sasha.’

  ‘Admittedly, I do owe you massively for punching that creep and risking going to prison but even so. You’re welcome. And at the risk of being extremely tiresome, I need to preface everything by saying that this is completely unofficial, between ourselves.’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘And I’m also going to say that I’m torn between wondering why you want to know about this piece of tissue paper and suspecting that it’s better if I know as little as possible.’

  ‘I promise you that it’s essential,’ said Frieda. ‘And it’s secret.’

  ‘And of course you’re a doctor, blah blah blah, and you know that there are legal issues here, issues of privacy, and that if part of any legal proceedings, this is entirely off the record.’

  ‘Don’t worry. That’s not a problem.’

  ‘What I mean is that it’s great to hear from you, and I’d been hoping we’d meet for a drink and a chat, but I really hope I’m not suddenly going to be asked to testify somewhere.’

  ‘No. I promise.’

  ‘So why did you want the mitochondrial DNA test?’

  ‘Isn’t that obvious?’

  ‘I suppose so, in a way, but it’s very unusual.’

  There was a pause. Frieda felt her voice tremble. ‘So what was the result?’

  Sasha’s expression was suddenly serious.

  ‘It was positive.’

  ‘Ah.’ Frieda let her breath out in a long sigh.

  ‘So. That’s that,’ said Sasha, watching her closely.

  ‘What does that mean? What does it really mean? DNA tests are a balance of probability, aren’t they?’

  Sasha’s expression relaxed. ‘Not in this case. You’re a medical doctor, aren’t you? You’ve studied biology. The mitochondrial DNA is passed unchanged through females. It matches or it doesn’t. In this case, it does.’

  ‘So I can be certain.’

  ‘I’m not sure I want to know, but where do these samples come from?’

  ‘You’re right, you don’t want to know. Thank you – thank you so much for your help.’

  ‘I didn’t help you.’

  ‘But you did.’

  ‘That was me being like a spy,’ said Sasha. ‘I mean, I’ve not kept the samples or the documentation. I’ve told you the result. That’s all.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Frieda. ‘I promised that from the beginning. I just needed to know.’

  Sasha drank the last of her tea. ‘So what are you doing for Christmas?’

  ‘It just got a bit more complicated.’

  ‘That’s what I thought.’

  Chapter Forty-six

  ‘Don’t you have anything better to do on Christmas Eve?’ Karlsson was standing at the door of the interview room. He was tired, his eyes felt gritty and his throat sore, as if he was coming down with something. It was eight o’clock. At last, the police station was almost deserted, half its rooms in darkness.

  ‘Not just at the moment,’ said Frieda.

  ‘This had better be good. I was on the point of going home.’

  In truth, he didn’t really want to go home to his empty flat on the night before Christmas. He let himself think of his kids, hectic with excitement, putting a mince pie out for Santa without him.

  ‘Has she said anything?’

  ‘Not really. Nothing about Kathy.’

  Frieda went into the interview room. A young police officer was sitting on a chair in the corner, rubbing her eyes surreptitiously. Terry was slumped in her chair, her face blotchy and tired under her harsh blonde hair. She looked at Frieda with indifference.

  ‘I’ve nothing to say to you. He’s dead. You lot did that. And you’ve got the boy. What more do you want? I’ve identified the body. Isn’t that enough for you? Just leave me in peace.’

  ‘I’m not here to talk about Dean.’

  ‘I told him.’ Jerking her head towards Karlsson, who stood by the door with his arms folded. ‘I’m not saying nothing. Like his letter said, I’ve done nothing wrong.’

  ‘You must be glad Matthew is alive,’ said Frieda, looking at Terry’s ragged nails, her tired white flesh.

  Terry shrugged.

  ‘It must have felt distressing to you, knowing that he was trapped underground and not being able to help.’

  Terry yawned widely. Her teeth were nicotine-stained. Behind her, Frieda heard Karlsson stir with impatience.

  ‘Does it help you to know that, in a way, you saved him by going back there?’

  ‘Come on, Frieda,’ said Karlsson, stepping forward and speaking in a stifled whisper. ‘We’ve been over this. If she can’t help us with Kathy, what’s the point?’

/>   Frieda ignored him. She leaned over the table and stared into Terry’s brown, dulled eyes. ‘A tiny child, snatched from his home and hidden away. Matthew would have become Simon and forgotten his first mother, his first father, all the days before the day he was snatched out of one life and put into another. Poor thing. Poor child. What does someone become, after such a terrifying wrench? How does one deal with one’s self, when one’s self has been so lost and so changed? Perhaps it’s a bit like being buried alive for the rest of one’s time here. Is there really nothing you want to say to me, Terry? Dean is dead. There’s nothing left for him to do. You have only yourself now, the self you have had to bury. No? You have nothing to say? All right.’

  Frieda stood up. She gazed down at Terry for a few seconds. ‘I wanted to prepare you. Your sister is outside to see you.’

  For a moment, there was a tingling silence in the little room. She could feel everyone’s eyes on her.

  ‘What the fuck?’ Karlsson said.

  ‘Terry?’ Frieda said softly.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I’ll call her, shall I?’

  Frieda’s eyes were still fixed on Terry, but Terry’s face hadn’t changed. She just stared at Frieda, impassive. Frieda opened the door and walked swiftly down the deserted corridor to the waiting room. ‘You can come in now, Rose.’

  ‘This is not a bloody West End show. You are not in charge here.’

  Karlsson was shouting, walking up and down the room and bellowing. His face was white with rage.

  ‘What do you mean, suddenly announcing it, like a conjuror pulling a rabbit out of a hat?’

  ‘I didn’t want a police officer to tell her. I wanted to break it gently.’

  ‘You did, did you?’

  ‘Why are you so angry?’

  ‘Jesus, where do I begin?’ Karlsson suddenly stopped his tramping up and down the room and folded into a chair. He rubbed his face violently. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I didn’t really know,’ said Frieda. ‘I just kept thinking about her going home, about what home meant for her. And that they didn’t kill Matthew. Even Dean. He didn’t kill him. And then I saw her when she was sleeping.’

  ‘Sleeping?’

  ‘I came into the interview room when she had fallen asleep. She had laid her face on her folded hands. Rose once told me how Joanna went to sleep just like that, her hands as if in prayer and her face on top of them. There are some things you can’t erase – a certain smile, perhaps; a little gesture; the way you fall asleep. So I had to know, I had to test it. I got her DNA in the tissue and I got Rose’s.’

  ‘She looked so much older. The few records we have of her say she’s older, nearer Dean’s age. She can’t be in her twenties still.’

  ‘She’s been poor. Poor and abused all her life.’

  ‘You’re going to tell me she’s a victim.’

  ‘She is a victim.’

  ‘She’s also a perpetrator. She helped Dean snatch Matthew, remember.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘He would have died. She would have helped murder him. And where’s Kathy Ripon? She’s not saying.’

  ‘I don’t think she knows.’

  ‘Oh, don’t you? On what evidence? You feel it, is that it?’

  ‘I suppose so. And it would make a kind of sense. It was a way of becoming a mother.’

  ‘She was under my nose all that time,’ Karlsson said.

  ‘It’s a triumph,’ said Frieda. ‘You’re already a hero for finding one lost child. Now you’ve found two. Matthew and Joanna.’

  ‘She’s not a lost child.’

  ‘Oh yes she is. And she’s the one I really feel sorry for.’

  Karlsson flinched as if he was suffering from a blinding headache. ‘It was you,’ he said. ‘You were the one who found them both.’

  Frieda stepped forward and put her hand on Karlsson’s cheek. He closed his eyes for a moment. ‘You know what I want?’

  ‘What?’ said Karlsson, softly. ‘Recognition, love, like the rest of us.’

  ‘No,’ said Frieda. ‘I’d like to sleep. I’d like to go home and sleep for about a thousand years and then get back to my patients. I don’t want to go into a press conference and explain how I used a patient to find a murderer. I’ve got things I need to think about and I need to do it in private. I want to crawl back into my burrow. You’ve found Matthew. You can do a DNA test – a legal one – and show that Terry is Joanna. And Dean Reeve is dead.’ There was a silence. Then she added, ‘But if you’re thinking of charging Joanna with murder, making her the scapegoat now that Dean has killed himself, I’ll think again.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘Or even of complicity.’

  ‘She’s guilty and you know it.’

  ‘I know that the crowd out there is howling for her blood – and that, being a woman, she’ll be treated even worse than if she were a man. And I also know that she was abducted when she could barely talk; that she was psychologically abused and brainwashed, that she cannot therefore be held responsible for her actions, and that if you think of putting her on trial for what she did as the victim of a crime against her that continued for more than two decades, you’ll see me in court as an expert witness for the defence.’

  ‘Don’t you think she’s responsible for what she did?’

  ‘Just try me,’ Frieda said.

  Karlsson looked at his watch. ‘Well, it’s Christmas Day.’

  ‘So it is.’ Frieda stood up.

  ‘I’ll get someone to drive you home.’

  ‘I’d rather walk.’

  ‘It’s the middle of the night and it’s miles.’

  ‘That’s OK.’

  ‘And it’s freezing out there.’

  ‘That’s OK too.’

  It was more than OK: it was good. Frieda wanted to be alone in the dark and the ice of the city she loved; she wanted to walk until her body and mind were exhausted. Her snug house felt like a distant goal, a place she had to achieve through enormous physical effort.

  When she had led Rose in to see her sister, she had held on to the young woman’s arm and felt the violent trembling that seized her entire body. Rose had stood just inside the doorway and stared with frightening, frightened intensity at the figure who sat before her.

  Twenty-two years previously her skinny, dark-haired, gap-toothed little sister had dawdled behind her on the way home and suddenly disappeared, swallowed up by cracks in the pavement. She had haunted Rose. Her thin pale face, her pleading, lisping child’s voice, calling her name, had entered her dreams. She had tried to imagine her as she would be at each stage of her life thereafter – at ten, as an adolescent, as a young adult. Computer-generated images of her face had told her what Joanna would have become. She had looked for her on streets, glimpsed her in crowds, known she was dead and never let her go.

  How many times had Rose imagined this reunion? How they would gasp, take faltering steps towards each other, stare into each other’s eyes, clasp each other close; the words that would spill out, the love and comfort. And now here was an overweight, middle-aged woman with bottle blonde hair and a look of apathetic indifference, even contempt, on her face, as if she was a stranger.

  Frieda could see Rose’s disbelief, then a sudden terrified recognition that this actually was Joanna. What was it? Perhaps the eyes, the shape of the chin, a turn of the head.

  ‘Jo-Jo?’ she said, in a trembling voice.

  But Terry – Joanna – didn’t react.

  ‘Joanna, is it you? It’s me.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re on about.’

  ‘I’m Rose. Rosie,’ she said, on a sob. ‘Do you know me?’ She sounded as though she didn’t know herself.

  ‘My name’s Terry.’

  Rose was quivering with distress. She turned to Frieda briefly, then back again. ‘You’re my sister. Your name’s Joanna. You were taken away when you were little. Don’t you remember? We looked and looked. You must remem
ber. But now you’re back.’

  Joanna looked at Frieda. ‘Have I got to listen to this?’

  ‘There’s time,’ Frieda said, to both Rose and Joanna. Neither seemed to hear her.

  Frieda walked past the small park, still and white in the moonlight. Past the church squeezed into the fork of two roads, with its huddled gravestones. Under the plane trees, knobbled and bare. Under the strings of Christmas lights, shining on the empty roads. Smashed phone boxes. A rubbish bin that had been turned on its side, leaking its viscous mess onto the pristine scattering of snow. Rusty railings. Boarded doors. Parked cars all in a row. Empty office blocks, all the computers and phones at rest for the holidays. The shops with their graffitied metal shutters. The houses with their blind windows behind which people slept, snored, muttered, dreamed.

  A firework exploded on the horizon and fell through the sky in a flower of colour. A police car passed her, a lorry with its driver high up in his cab, a drunk man veering and tacking up the road, his eyes fixed blindly on some distant point. Matthew was alive. Joanna was alive. Kathy Ripon was missing still and must be dead. Dean Reeve was dead. It was half past four on Christmas morning and Frieda hadn’t bought her Christmas tree. Chloë was going to be cross.

  Chapter Forty-seven

  ‘I bought this for you weeks ago,’ said Matthew’s mother. She laid a large red fire engine, in its box, by Matthew’s bed. ‘It’s the one you saw in the shop, ages ago. Do you remember? You cried when I said you couldn’t have it, but I went back later and got it.’

  ‘I don’t think he can really see it,’ said Matthew’s father, mildly.

  ‘I knew you’d come home. I wanted to be ready for you.’

  The little boy opened his eyes and stared. She couldn’t tell if he could see her, or was looking through her, at something else.

  ‘It’s Christmas. Father Christmas came. We’ll see what he brought you in a bit. I told you he wouldn’t forget. He always knows where the children are. He knew you were here in hospital. He came specially.’