Blue Monday

by Nicci French

They made lines and walked across the wasteland near the house, very slowly, stooping occasionally to pick things up from the ground and put them into plastic bags. They went from door to door, holding a photograph of Joanna, the one the mother had passed over on that Monday afternoon, with a block fringe and an obedient smile on her thin face. It was a famous photo now. The papers had got hold of it. There were journalists outside the house, photographers, a television crew. Joanna became ‘Jo’ or, even worse, ‘Little Jo’, like a saintly child heroine from a Victorian novel. There were rumours. It was impossible to know where they started but they spread quickly round the neighbourhood. It was the tramp. It was a man in a blue estate car. It was her father. Her clothes had been found in a skip. She’d been seen in Scotland, in France. She was definitely dead and she was definitely alive.

  Rosie’s granny came to stay with them and Rosie went back to school. She didn’t want to go. She dreaded the way people would look at her and whisper about it behind her back and suck up to her, trying to be her friend because this big thing had happened to her. She sat at her desk and tried to concentrate on what the teacher was saying, but she could feel them behind her. She let her little sister get snatched.

  She didn’t want to go to school but she didn’t want to stay at home either. Her mother wasn’t like her mother any more. She was like someone pretending to be a mother, but all the time she was somewhere else. Her eyes flickered about. She kept putting her hands over her mouth as if she was keeping something in, some truth that would otherwise burst free. Her face became thin and pinched and old. At night, when Rosie lay in bed and watched the car lights from the road outside move across her ceiling, she could hear her mother moving around downstairs. Even when it was dark and everyone else in the world was asleep, her mother was awake. And her father was different too. He lived alone again now. He hugged her too tightly. He smelt funny – sweet and sour at the same time.

  Deborah and Richard Vine sat in front of the TV cameras together. They still shared a surname, but they didn’t look at each other. Tanner had told them to keep it simple: tell the world how they missed Joanna and appeal to whoever it was who had taken her to let her come home. Don’t worry about showing emotion. The media would like that. Just so long as it didn’t stop them speaking.

  ‘Let my daughter come home,’ said Deborah Vine. Her voice broke; she covered her newly haggard face with one hand. ‘Just let her come back home.’

  Richard Vine added, more violently, ‘Please give us our daughter back. Whoever knows anything, please help.’ His face was pale and blotched with red.

  ‘What do you think?’ Langan asked Tanner.

  Tanner shrugged. ‘You mean, are they sincere? I’ve got no idea. How can a kid disappear like that, into thin air?’

  There wasn’t a summer holiday that year. They had been going to go to Cornwall, to stay on a farm. Rosie remembered them planning it, how there would be cows in the fields and hens in the yard and even an old fat pony the owners might let them ride. And they would go to the nearby beaches. Joanna was scared of the sea – she shrieked when waves went over her ankles – but she loved building sandcastles and looking for shells, eating ice cream cones with chocolate Flakes stuck into the top.

  Instead, Rosie went to her grandmother’s house for a few weeks. She didn’t want to go. She needed to be at home, for when Joanna was found. She thought Joanna might be upset if she wasn’t there; it would be as if she didn’t care enough to wait.

  There were meetings in which detectives leafed through statements by fantasists, previous offenders, eyewitnesses who had seen nothing.

  ‘I still think it’s the father.’

  ‘He has an alibi.’

  ‘We’ve been through this. He could have driven back to the area. Just.’

  ‘No one saw him. His own daughter didn’t see him.’

  ‘Maybe she did. Maybe that’s why she won’t say anything.’

  ‘Anyway, anything she saw she won’t remember now. It will just be memories of memories of suggestions. Everything’s covered over.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘I’m saying she’s gone.’

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘Dead.’

  ‘You’re giving up on her?’

  ‘No.’ He paused. ‘But I am taking some of the men off the case.’

  ‘That’s what I said. You’re giving up.’

  One year later, a photograph enhanced by a new computer program, which even its inventor warned was speculative and unreliable, showed how Joanna might have changed. Her face was slightly filled out, her dark hair a little bit darker. Her tooth was still chipped and her smile was still anxious. Some newspapers carried it, but only on an inside page. There had been a murder of a particularly photogenic thirteen-year-old girl and this had dominated the headlines for weeks. Joanna was an old story now, a tingle in the public memory. Rosie stared at the picture until it blurred. She was scared she wouldn’t recognize her sister when she saw her, that she would be a stranger. And she was scared that Joanna wouldn’t recognize her either – or would know her but turn away from her. Sometimes she went and sat in Joanna’s room, a room that hadn’t been altered since the day she disappeared. Her teddy was on her pillow, her toys stacked in the under-bed boxes, her clothes – which would be too small for her – neatly folded in drawers or hanging in the wardrobe.

  Rosie was ten now. Next year, she would go to secondary school. She had begged to go to the one a mile and a half away in the next borough, two bus journeys, because there she would no longer be the girl who had lost her little sister. She would just be Rosie Vine, year seven, shy and quite small for her age, who did all right in every subject but wasn’t the best at anything except, perhaps, biology. She was old enough to know that her father drank more than he should. Sometimes her mother had to come and fetch her home because he couldn’t look after her properly. She was old enough to feel that she was an older sister without a younger sister, and sometimes she felt Joanna’s presence like a ghost – a ghost with a chipped tooth and a plaintive voice, asking her to wait. Sometimes she would see her on the street and her heart would miss a beat and then the face would resolve into the face of a stranger.

  Three years after Joanna disappeared, they moved to a smaller house a mile or so away, nearer to Rosie’s school. It had three bedrooms, but the third one was tiny, like a box room. Deborah Vine waited until Rosie had left in the morning before she packed away Joanna’s things. She did it methodically, lifting soft piles of vests and shirts into boxes, folding up dresses and skirts and tying them into bin bags, trying not to look at the pink plastic dolls with their long manes of nylon hair and their fixed, staring eyes. In the new computer-enhanced image, Joanna looked quite composed, as if her childish anxiety had slipped away from her. Her chipped tooth had been replaced with an undamaged one.

  Rosie started her periods. She shaved her legs. She fell in love for the first time, with a boy who barely knew she existed. She wrote her diary under her bedcovers and locked it with a silver key. She watched her mother dating a stranger with a bristly brown beard and pretended she didn’t mind. She poured her father’s drink down the sink, though she knew it would do no good. She went to her grandmother’s funeral and read a poem by Tennyson in a quiet voice no one could really hear. She cut her hair short and started going out with the boy she had been so smitten with when she was younger, but he couldn’t live up to her idea of him. She kept a small pile of printouts in her underwear drawer: Joanna at six, seven, eight, nine. Joanna at thirteen. She thought her sister looked exactly like she did, and for some reason this made her feel worse.

  ‘She’s dead.’ Deborah’s voice was flat, quite calm.

  ‘Have you come all this way to tell me that?’

  ‘I thought we owed each other at least that much, Richard. Let her go.’

  ‘You don’t know she’s dead. You’re just abandoning her.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Because you’ve found
a new husband and now…’ His glance at her pregnant belly was full of disgust. ‘Now you’re going to have another happy family.’

  ‘Richard.’

  ‘And forget all about her.’

  ‘That’s not fair. It’s been eight years. Life has to go on, for all of us.’

  ‘Life has to go on. Are you going to tell me that this is what Joanna would have wanted?’

  ‘Joanna was five when we lost her.’

  ‘When you lost her.’

  Deborah stood up, thin legs on high heels and a round stomach pushing at her shirt. He could see her belly button. Her mouth was a thin, trembling line. ‘You bastard,’ she said.

  ‘And now you’re deserting her.’

  ‘You want me to destroy myself as well?’

  ‘Why not? Anything rather than life has to go on. But don’t worry. I’m still waiting.’

  When Rosie went to university she called herself Rosalind Teale, taking her step-father’s name. She didn’t tell her father. She still loved him, though she was scared by his chaotic, unchanging grief. She didn’t want anyone to say: ‘Rosie Vine? Why does that ring a bell?’ Even though there was less and less chance of that. Joanna had melted into the past, was a wisp of memory now, a forgotten celebrity, a one-hit wonder. Sometimes, Rosie wondered if her sister was just a dream.

  Deborah Teale – Vine, as was – prayed secretly, fiercely, for a son, not a daughter. But first Abbie and then Lauren arrived. She crouched over their baskets at nights to hear them breathe; she clutched at their hands. She wouldn’t let them out of her sight. They reached Joanna, they overtook her and they left her behind. In the attic, the boxes of Joanna’s clothes stood unopened.

  The case was never actually closed. Nobody made a decision. But there was less and less to report. Officers were reassigned. Meetings became more sporadic, then merged into other meetings, and then the case wasn’t mentioned at all.

  Rosie, Rosie. Wait for me!

  Chapter One

  It was ten to three in the morning. There were four people walking across Fitzroy Square. A young couple, huddled together in the wind, had made their way up from Soho where they had been at a club. For them, Sunday night was coming gradually to an end. Though they hadn’t said it to each other, they were delaying the moment when they had to decide whether they were getting into separate cabs, or into the same cab. A dark-skinned woman in a brown raincoat and a transparent polythene hat tied under her chin was shuffling north along the east side of the square. For her it was Monday morning. She was going to an office on Euston Road, to empty bins and vacuum floors in the dark early morning for people she never saw.

  The fourth person was Frieda Klein and for her it was neither Sunday night nor Monday morning but something in between. As she stepped into the square, the wind hit her full on. She had to push her hair away from her face so that she could see. Over the previous week the leaves on the plane trees had turned from red to gold but now the wind and rain had shaken them free and they were rippling around her like a sea. What she really wanted was to have London to herself. This was the closest she could get to that.

  She stopped for a moment, undecided. Which way should she go? North, across Euston Road to Regent’s Park? That would be deserted all right, too early even for the runners. Sometimes in summer Frieda would go there in the middle of the night, climb over the fence and head into the darkness, look at the glitter on the water of the lake, listen to the sounds from the zoo. Not tonight, though. She didn’t want to pretend that she wasn’t in London. Not south either. That would take her across Oxford Street into Soho. Some nights she would lose herself in the oddity of the creatures who came out or stuck around in the middle of the night, the dodgy little cab firms who’d take you home for whatever they could get you to pay, the clusters of police, delivery vans dodging the crowds and the congestion charge, and, more and more, people who were still eating, still drinking, whatever time it was.

  Not tonight. Not today. Not now with a new week just about to wake itself up reluctantly and blearily get going. A week that would have to face up to November, to darkness and rain, with only more darkness and more rain to come. It was a time when you ought to sleep and wake again in March or April or May. Sleep. Frieda had the sudden suffocating sense that she was surrounded by people lying asleep, alone or in pairs, in flats and houses and hostels and hotels, dreaming, watching films inside their heads. She didn’t want to be one of them. She turned east, past the closed shops and restaurants. There was a flash of activity as she crossed Tottenham Court Road, with its night buses and taxis, but then it was quiet once more, and she could hear the clatter of her footsteps as she walked along past anonymous mansion blocks, shabby hotels, university buildings, even some houses that had improbably survived. It was a place where many people lived but it didn’t feel like it. Did it even have a name?

  Two police officers sitting in a parked patrol car saw her as she approached Gray’s Inn Road. They looked at her with a bored kind of concern. This wasn’t necessarily a safe area for a woman to walk alone at night. They couldn’t quite make her out. Not a prostitute. She wasn’t particularly young, mid-thirties maybe. Long dark hair. Medium height. Her long coat hid her figure. She didn’t look like someone on her way back from a party.

  ‘Didn’t fancy spending the whole night with him,’ said one.

  The other grinned. ‘I wouldn’t kick her out of bed on a night like this,’ he said. He wound down the window as she approached. ‘Everything all right, miss?’ he asked, as she passed.

  She just pushed her hands tightly into the pockets of her coat and walked on without giving any sign that she had heard.

  ‘Charming,’ said one of the officers, and returned to filling out the incident report on something that really hadn’t been much of an incident at all.

  As Frieda walked on, she heard the words of her mother in her ear. It wouldn’t have hurt to say hello, would it? Well, what did she know? That was one of the reasons why she did these walks. So that she didn’t have to talk, didn’t have to be on show, be looked at and appraised. It was a time for thinking, or not thinking. Just walking and walking during those nights when sleep wouldn’t come and when she could get the mess out of her head. Sleep was meant to do that, but it didn’t do it for her even when it came in little snatches. She crossed Gray’s Inn Road – more buses and taxis – and walked down an alley, so small that it was like it had been forgotten about.

  As she turned into King’s Cross Road, she saw that she was approaching two teenage boys. They were dressed in hoodies and baggy jeans. One of them said something to her that she couldn’t properly make out. She stared at him and he looked away.

  Stupid, she said to herself. That was stupid. It was one of the main rules about walking in London: you don’t make eye contact. It’s a challenge. This time he had backed down, but you only needed one.

  Almost without thinking, Frieda took a path that wound off the main road, then back and then off it again. For most people who worked there or drove through it, this was just an ugly and unremarkable part of London, office blocks, flats, a railway cutting. But Frieda was walking along the course of an old river. She had always been drawn to it. Once it had flowed through fields and orchards down to the Thames. It had been a place for people to sit by, to fish in. What would they have thought, men and women sitting on a summer evening, dangling their feet in the water, if they had seen its future? It had become a rubbish dump, a sewer, a ditch clogged with shit and dead animals and everything else that people couldn’t be bothered to do anything with. Finally it had been built over and forgotten about. How could a river be forgotten about? When she walked this way, Frieda always stopped by a grating where you could still hear the river flowing deep below, like an echo of something. And when you had left that behind, you could still walk between the banks rising on either side. Even the occasional street name hinted at the wharves where barges had been unloaded and before that the rises, the grass slopes where people
sat and just watched the crystal water flow down into the Thames. That was London. Things built on things built on things built on things, each in their turn forgotten about but each somehow leaving a trace, if only a rush of water heard through a grating.

  Was it a curse that the city covered so much of its past, or was it the only way a city could survive? Once she’d had a dream of a London where buildings and bridges and roads were demolished and excavated so that the ancient rivers flowing to the Thames could be opened up to the sky once more. But what would be the point? They were probably happier the way they were, secret, unnoticed, mysterious.

  When Frieda reached the Thames, she leaned over as she always did. Most times you couldn’t see where the stream flowed out of its pitiful little pipe, and this morning it was far too dark. She couldn’t even hear the sound of its splash. Down here on the river, the southerly wind was fierce but it was strangely warm. It felt wrong on a dark November morning. She looked at her watch. It wasn’t yet four. Which way? East End or West End? She chose West, crossed the river and headed upstream. Now, finally, she was tired, and the remainder of the walk was a blur: a bridge, government buildings, parks, grand squares, across Oxford Street, and by the time she felt the familiar cobblestones under her feet of the mews where she lived it was still so dark that she had to scrape around on her front door with her key to find the lock.

  Chapter Two

  Carrie saw him from a distance, walking across the grass towards her in the fading light, his feet stirring the piles of damp brown leaves, his shoulders slightly hunched and his hands thrust deep into his pockets. He didn’t see her. His eyes were fixed on the ground in front of him and he moved slowly and heavily, like a man just woken from sleep, still sluggish and wrapped up in his dreams. Or nightmares, she thought, as she watched her husband. He looked up and his face cleared; his steps quickened slightly.

  ‘Thanks for coming.’