by Nicci French
The voice came, reedy and thin: ‘But have I been a good boy?’
‘Have you? Oh. None better.’
Matthew closed his eyes. They sat on either side of him and held his bandaged hands.
Richard Vine and Rose sat together in his small room that smelt stale and was too warm. They were eating brunch and opening their presents to each other – a dressing-gown for him, and for her a bottle of perfume, the same perfume he gave her every Christmas, and she had never had the heart to tell him she didn’t like it and never used it. Later, she would go to her mother and step-father for Christmas dinner – turkey and all the trimmings, though she had been a vegetarian from the age of thirteen, and so would make do with the trimmings. This had been the arrangement ever since her father had left them and Joanna had disappeared.
She kissed her father on his unshaven cheek, smelling the tobacco, the sweet stench of alcohol, the sweat, trying not to draw back. She knew that after she left him today he would sit in front of his TV and drink himself into a stupor. And as for her mother, who’d so resolutely got on with her life without Joanna, refusing to wait in miserable suspension for the daughter she knew was dead, what would she say, what would she do? Rose was very aware that on the other side of this drab family ritual lay the roar of press attention, frantic curiosity and a world wrenched out of its normal order.
‘Thanks,’ she said. She dabbed some of the perfume on her wrists. ‘That’s lovely, Dad.’
All around her were the photos of Joanna. He had never put them away or culled them. Some were faded now, and others slipping in their clip-frames. Rose looked at them, although they were so familiar to her – the wide, anxious smile and dark fringe, the bony knees. The nervous, needy little girl who’d so lodged and grown in her father’s memory, preventing him from ever leading a normal life again. She opened her mouth to speak, though she didn’t know the words.
‘Dad,’ she said. ‘There’s something I need to tell you, before you hear it from someone else. You need to prepare yourself.’ She took a deep breath, put her hand on his.
Tanner poured whisky into two tumblers. Karlsson saw that his hands shook, and were liver-spotted, the hands of an old man. ‘I wanted to tell you myself,’ he said. ‘Before it gets in the papers.’
Tanner handed him one of the glasses.
‘Merry Christmas,’ said Karlsson.
Tanner shook his head. ‘We’re not having much of a Christmas this year,’ he said. ‘My wife used to do all that. We’ll sit up in the bedroom and watch the TV.’ He lifted the glass. ‘To a result.’
They clinked glasses and both took a gulp.
‘Half a result,’ said Karlsson. ‘One woman is still missing. She’ll never come home.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘The press won’t care, though. She’s only an adult. I already know what the headlines are going to be. “The Best Christmas Present of All”. There’s going to be a press conference. I’d like you to be there.’
‘It’s your moment,’ said Tanner. ‘You deserve it. You got two missing children back alive. That’s more than most coppers achieve in a lifetime. How the hell did you manage it?’
‘It’s a bit difficult to explain.’ Karlsson paused for a moment as if he still had to get it ordered in his mind. ‘I met this psychiatrist who was seeing Reeve’s brother. His twin brother. She learned about the inside of this guy’s head, about his dreams, and somehow this tipped her off. In some way.’
Tanner narrowed his eyes, as if he thought his leg was being pulled. ‘His dreams,’ he said. ‘And you’re going to say all of this at the press conference?’
Karlsson took a sip of his whisky and held it for a moment in his mouth so that it stung his gums and his tongue. Then he swallowed it. ‘My boss wasn’t particularly receptive to that aspect of the inquiry,’ he said. ‘I believe that at the press conference we’ll be stressing the effectiveness of my team, the co-operation of other services, the response from the public and from the media, and the lessons it gives us all about staying vigilant. You know. The usual.’
‘And the psychiatrist. What does she have to say about that?’
Karlsson gave a slow smile. ‘She’s a bit of a handful,’ he said. ‘She’s not someone who takes no for an answer. But she doesn’t want the attention.’
‘You mean the credit.’
‘If you like.’
Tanner gestured towards the whisky bottle.
‘I’d better go,’ Karlsson said.
‘One thing,’ said Tanner. ‘Why didn’t she run away?’
‘From what?’ said Karlsson. ‘She didn’t know anything else. It was her home. I’ve got a feeling it still is, in a way. We’re all meant to be happy about it, but I’m not sure we’ve really got her back.’
In the doorway, Tanner started to say something that sounded like ‘thank you’ when he was stopped by a thumping from upstairs. ‘She has a stick,’ he said. ‘Like those bells you call a butler with.’
Karlsson pulled the door closed behind him.
‘This we call holubsti in my country,’ said Josef. ‘The country of Ukraine. And this is pickled fish, which you should catch in the ice but I got from my shop in absence of time.’ He cast a reproachful look at Frieda. ‘I have here some pyrogies, some with potato, some with sauerkraut and some with prune.’
‘This is amazing.’ Olivia was looking hung-over and dazed. She was wearing a purple silk dress that shone in the candlelight, giving her a voluptuous look, like a film star of the fifties. Beside her sat Paz, who was wearing a very short pink dress and bows in her hair that on anyone else would have looked absurd but only made her seem more luscious than ever.
‘My friend and landlord Reuben make you this pampushky.’
Reuben lifted up his glass of vodka and took an unsteady bow.
‘And above all we have the kutya, which is wheat and honey and poppy seeds and nuts. This is essential. With it we may say, “Joy, Earth, Joy.” ’ He paused. ‘Joy, Earth, Joy,’ he repeated.
‘Joy, Earth, Joy,’ said Chloë, loud and clear. Her face was shining. She moved a bit closer to Josef, who beamed at her approvingly. She giggled and smirked, and Frieda glanced at Olivia, but Olivia was paying no attention to her daughter’s smitten behaviour. She was prodding her fork into the dumplings and pastries that were heaped on plates all around the table.
‘How long did this all take, for goodness’ sake?’
‘Many hours without stoppage. Because Frieda is my friend.’
‘Your friend Frieda didn’t buy a tree. Or crackers,’ said Chloë.
‘Frieda is here, you know, and Frieda was busy,’ said Frieda. She felt heavy with tiredness, and was regarding the scene as if from a distance. She wondered what Kathy Ripon’s parents were doing right now. This Christmas marked their new life, without their daughter. The first of many barren days.
‘I can tell you a joke, never mind crackers,’ said Reuben, leering at Paz, who ignored him. ‘Real Madrid, one. Surreal Madrid, fish. No? Oh, well.’
‘We make toasts,’ said Josef, who seemed to have taken on the role of host in Frieda’s house.
‘Fuck all errant husbands,’ said Olivia, tossing her vodka into her mouth and over her face.
‘Don’t be too hard on errant husbands,’ said Reuben. ‘They’re just men, weak and foolish men.’
‘To wander far from home,’ said Josef.
‘Is that a toast?’ asked Paz. ‘I shall drink to that.’ Which she did, with energy.
‘Poor Josef,’ said Chloë, kindly.
‘This is delicious, Josef. Should I be eating the sweet and savoury together like this?’ asked Olivia.
‘You’re quiet,’ said Reuben to Frieda.
‘Yes. Talking feels too hard.’
‘Has it occurred to you that everyone here is missing someone?’
‘I suppose you’re right.’
‘What a collection of left-behinds and misfits we are.’
Frieda looked ro
und the table at the candlelit scene. Paz, sweet and sultry in her ridiculous ribbons; Josef, with his wild hair and sad dark eyes; Chloë, with her flushed cheeks and scarred arms; Olivia, a drunk and sultry mess, spilling her words; and Reuben, of course, ironic about his own downfall, a dandy tonight in his beautiful embroidered waistcoat. Everyone was talking over each other; no one was listening.
‘We could do worse,’ she said, lifting her glass.
It was the nearest she could get to making a toast or welcoming them into her home.
He rolled off her and Carrie lay back in the dark, panting. She felt the dampness between her legs oozing out on to the sheet. She shifted away from it slightly. She felt his weight beside her. She waited for a moment. She had to say something but she had to wait a minute or two. Just so long as he didn’t fall asleep. She counted to fifty before she spoke.
‘That was wonderful,’ she said.
‘It was, wasn’t it?’
‘The best Christmas ever. It’s been so long, Alan, since we’ve made love like this. There were times I thought we never would again. But now!’ She gave a blurred giggle, like a pigeon cooing. ‘It’s been wonderful.’
‘I’m making up for lost time.’
He laid his hand on her naked thigh. She turned and smiled dreamily at him, running her hands down his spine. ‘There’s something I have to say.’
‘Go on.’
‘Don’t take this the wrong way. I know what you’ve been through. I know how horrible it’s been, how unsettling in so many different ways. I’ve tried to support you as much as I possibly could, and I’ve never, not for one minute, stopped loving you – though sometimes I wanted to shake you and scream at you. But it’s over now, and we’re going to get our life back, Alan, do you hear me? We both deserve that. We’ve earned our happiness. We’re going to think about adopting, because I know I want a child, and you’d be a wonderful father. I know what you said before about needing to have your own child, but maybe that’s changed, after everything you’ve been through. What matters is that we’ll love the child and they’ll love us.’
She paused, stroked his thick grey hair. ‘And also, at some point you’re going to have to start seeing people again. We haven’t seen friends for ages. I can’t remember when anyone last came here. I understand you want to be alone for a few days, now the nightmare’s over, but it can’t go on for ever. You’ll have to go back to work properly. You have to go back out into the world. I mean, if it’s necessary I suppose you could see Dr Klein again.’ She paused. ‘Alan. Alan? Are you asleep?’
Dean Reeve mumbled something he hoped would sound as if he had been half asleep and hadn’t heard her. And if she suspected he was pretending to be asleep as a way of avoiding an awkward conversation, well, that was just as good. He couldn’t have expected to keep this up for more than a few days anyway. Even as it was, it had worked out far better than he had ever hoped: not for a second had she doubted him. And she’d been so eager. Quite a passionate creature, to his surprise. But it was just a little holiday for him. He would leave and no one would ever know why. Call it what you will – a mid-life crisis, the trauma of events, a parting of the ways, a wake-up call – what mattered was that he was free and he could start again. He turned, as if in sleep, or as if in half-sleep or in faked sleep, and put his arm over her, feeling her breast, damp with sweat. He thought about poor Terry. Oh, well, he’d had the best of her. And she’d be all right, probably, if she said the things people wanted to hear. And then there was that other girl, the one they hadn’t found, the one they would never find now, under the London streets, nothing to say, and even if she could speak from the grave, it couldn’t touch him. Nothing could touch him. Even that Frieda Klein, whose slender fingers he had once felt against his and whose cool dark eyes had looked right inside him, had no power over him now. He was remade and could go where he wanted, be whom he liked. Few on this earth are given such permission and granted such liberty. He smiled into Carrie’s soft shoulder, smiled into the velvet night, and felt himself slowly sink into a dream about darkness and warmth and safety.
Chapter Forty-eight
On the day before New Year’s Eve, an icy, windless day with frost on the car windows and the rooftops, Frieda woke even earlier than usual. She lay in the darkness for a long time before rising, dressing, going downstairs to make herself a pot of tea, which she drank standing by the back door, looking out onto her small patio where everything stood in frosted stillness. In four days’ time, she would return to work. A new year: she did not want to make any resolutions. She did not want to give up anything else.
For many days now, as the newspapers and television channels had celebrated Matthew Faraday’s return, she had been consumed by the thought of Kathy Ripon, the one they had not been able to save, the one for whom she was responsible. Night after night, she had dreamed of her, and waking she held the picture of the young woman in her head. She had had a nice face, shrewd and self-mocking. She had been sent unwittingly to her fate, over the threshold of Dean Reeve’s house, sucked in by that black hole. What had it been like for her? What had it been like when she realized that it was all over and that nobody would come to save her? The thought of it made Frieda nauseous but she made herself think of it, over and over again, as if by doing so she could take some of Kathy Ripon’s pain and fear away. Two lost children had been found, but you can’t trade lives. They are too dear for that. Frieda knew she would never forgive herself, and she knew too that the story wouldn’t be over until Kathy’s body was found and her parents were allowed to lay her to rest and start on the process of their great mourning. And that if it hadn’t been found yet, it probably never would be found.
At last, turning from her station by the window, she made up her mind and then she acted swiftly, pulling on her long warm coat and her gloves, leaving the house briskly, taking the Underground to Paddington and then boarding the train. It was almost empty, just a few people with suitcases. She didn’t want to think too hard about what she was about to do. In truth, she didn’t really know what she was about to do.
Heathrow Terminal Three was crowded. It always is. In the middle of the night, on Christmas Day, in February when days are greyest and in June when they are fresh and green, in times of plenty and of recession, in times of grief and celebration, people are always travelling somewhere. Queues wound back from check-in desks: families with too many bags, little children with feverish cheeks sitting disconsolately on giant suitcases, single people looking cool and unencumbered. A tiny black woman pushed a cleaning machine slowly across the floor, her eyes fixed on her task as if she did not notice the heaving crowds, the cross men with big stomachs straining their shirts.
Frieda examined the Departures board. The flight left in two and a half hours. Check-in hadn’t yet opened, although already a queue was forming. She went to the kiosk selling coffee and pastries and bought herself a carton of porridge, thick and creamy, then sat herself on a soft bench from where she had a good view.
Sandy was late. She had never travelled with him, but she guessed he was the kind of person who always turned up at the last minute, unflustered. For someone who was leaving the country for an indeterminate length of time, he didn’t have much luggage – or maybe he had arranged for all of his things to be shipped over; all of his beautiful clothes and his medical tomes, his heavy-based pans and his tennis and squash rackets, the pictures that used to hang on his walls. He walked up to the check-in desk with two modest bags, and his laptop slung over his shoulder. He was wearing black jeans and a jacket she couldn’t remember having seen before. Perhaps he had bought it especially for this trip. His face was unshaven, thinner than when they had last met. He looked tired and preoccupied and, seeing this, her heart stirred. She half stood, but then sat down again, watching him as he handed over his passport. She saw him speak, nod courteously, place his bags on the belt that carried them away.
She had imagined this moment and played it over in her mind. How she w
ould put a hand on his shoulder and he would turn. How, seeing her there, his face would light up with gladness and relief. They wouldn’t smile; some feelings are too great for smiling. Yet when he left the desk, she still didn’t move. He stood for a moment, as if he didn’t know where he was going, then straightened his shoulders, settled his face into an expression of purpose and moved swiftly towards Departures – long strides as if he was suddenly in a hurry to be gone from there. Now she could only see his back. Now he was disappearing into the throng of passengers who were pressing themselves through the departure doors into the cavernous overlit hall beyond. Frieda knew that if she didn’t move, he would be gone from her – gone into his new world without her. It would be over.
She stood up. A curious feeling was gathering in her chest, one of a grave sadness and fixed resolution. She understood that she belonged here – in this cold, windy, crowded, moderate country; in this teeming, dirty, noisy, throbbing city; in the little mews house on a hidden cobbled street that she had made into her refuge; in this only place where she almost belonged. She turned and made her way, going home.
Acknowledgements
This is the first book of a series, and the start of a new journey for us. We would like to thank Michael Morris, Dr Julian Stern and Dr Cleo Van Velsen for their generous help and advice. They shouldn’t necessarily be held responsible for our interpretation of that help and advice.
Tom Weldon and Mari Evans have been a source of support and loyalty for more years than any of us probably likes to remember; to them and the dynamic team at Penguin, we owe a huge debt of gratitude.
We’re constantly grateful for the unstinting care and support of our agents, Sarah Ballard and Simon Trewin, also of St John Donald and everyone at United Agents. Sam Edenborough and Nicki Kennedy of ILA have protected and looked after us throughout our years of writing together.
