Blue Monday

by Nicci French

  ‘I have. It took me a whole day and there was basically nothing there. I wanted to ask you if there was anything you hadn’t put in the file. Suspicions, maybe. Instincts. Guesses.’

  Tanner leaned back on the sofa. He was breathing deeply. ‘Do you want me to say I’m haunted by the case? That it’s why I took early retirement?’

  ‘Is it true?’

  ‘I could deal with the dead bodies. I could even deal with the people walking free that I knew had done it. I could deal with their solicitor standing next to them on the pavement talking about his client being vindicated and grateful to the jury for seeing sense. In the end it was just the paperwork and the targets. In the end I just couldn’t be doing with it.’

  ‘Joanna Vine,’ said Karlsson, gently. ‘What happened with the inquiry?’

  ‘Nothing. Nothing at all. I’ll tell you what it was like. I’ve got this cupboard door in the kitchen and it doesn’t have a handle. To open it you have to push your fingernails into the crack and just get a bit of purchase on it and ease it open. The Joanna Vine inquiry was like going through the motions. We set up an office and we took hundreds of statements and we wrote reports and we gave press conferences and we had meetings about our progress. But there wasn’t a single actual piece of evidence. There was nothing you could push your fingernails into and ease away at.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘We needed smaller rooms for the press conferences. We ran out of things to do. Suddenly it was a year later. Nothing else had happened. Nobody had cracked.’

  ‘What did you think?’

  ‘Think? I just told you what I thought.’

  ‘I mean, how did it smell to you? What was your guess?’

  Tanner gave a sour laugh. ‘I couldn’t work it out. After a couple of days, I thought we’d find her in a ditch or a canal or a shallow grave. With these sick bastards it’s usually an impulse thing. Then they just try and get rid of the evidence of what they’ve done. This didn’t feel like that, but I didn’t know what it did feel like. There was just nothing. How do you analyse nothing? Maybe he – or she – just buried her in the right place. So how’s your inquiry going?’

  ‘It reminds me of yours. For a few hours we hoped he’d turn up, that he’d got lost or hidden in a cupboard or stayed with a friend. We interviewed the parents. They’re not separated. We talked to an aunt. The wife’s brother lives nearby. He’s unemployed, drinks. We really leaned on him. And now we’re waiting.’

  ‘What about CCTV?’

  ‘He’s either clever or lucky. The camera at the school turned out on inspection not to be working. It’s a closely guarded secret that about a quarter of cameras are either faulty or not switched on. But we know he walked away from school. There are a few cameras on shop fronts and next to a pub just before his home. He didn’t show up on these, but I’m told they were poorly angled, so this was inconclusive. But the walk home passes along the side of a park that has no cameras at all.’

  ‘Can’t you check number-plates driving in and out of the area?’

  ‘What? In and out of Hackney? This isn’t a red-light district at two in the morning. We wouldn’t know where to start.’

  ‘Maybe you’ll need to wait another twenty-odd years.’

  Karlsson stood up. He took a card from his wallet and handed it to Tanner, who looked wryly amused. ‘You know what I’m going to say,’ said Karlsson. ‘But if there’s anything, anything at all, just give me a ring.’

  ‘It’s not a good feeling, is it?’ said Tanner. ‘When you need to come and talk to people like me?’

  ‘It was helpful,’ said Karlsson. ‘I’m almost glad that it was as bad for you as it’s been for me.’

  They walked together to the door.

  ‘I’m sorry about your wife,’ said Karlsson. ‘Is she getting better?’

  ‘Worse,’ said Tanner. ‘It’ll take a long time, the doctor says. You need a cab?’

  ‘My driver’s outside.’

  Karlsson stepped out and then thought of something, something he hadn’t meant to say. ‘I dream about him,’ he said. ‘I can’t remember the dreams when I wake up but I know they’re about him.’

  ‘I did as well,’ said Tanner. ‘I used to try a couple of drinks before I went to sleep. That helped sometimes.’

  ‘I missed you last night,’ Sandy said.

  Frieda looked around the kitchen. It already seemed like foreign territory.

  ‘I was just having breakfast. Do you want…’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘At least it’s not raining any longer. You look lovely. Is that a new jacket?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m gabbling like an idiot. I’m sorry about last night. I’m sorry. You were right to be angry.’

  ‘I’m not angry any more.’

  ‘No,’ said Sandy. ‘Because you’ve decided not to come with me. Is that right?’

  ‘I can’t leave everything,’ she said. ‘Even to be with you.’

  ‘But aren’t you scared of losing what we have?’

  She hadn’t meant it to happen, but somehow they were kissing each other, and then he was peeling off her jacket, her shirt, and they were stumbling on to the sofa together, his mouth against hers, her hands on his naked back, pulling him closer for the last time. He called out her name, over and over again, and she knew that she would wake in the night and hear that cry.

  Afterwards, she said, ‘That was a mistake.’

  ‘Not for me. I don’t leave until after Christmas. Let’s spend that time together. Try to work things out.’

  ‘No. I don’t do long goodbyes.’

  ‘How can you bear to leave, after that?’

  ‘ ’Bye, Sandy.’

  After she had gone, he stood by his window and looked down at the square she would come out on to. And after a few minutes there she was, a slim and upright figure making her way swiftly towards the road. She didn’t look up.

  Chapter Seventeen

  ‘The boss is going to be spitting mad,’ said DC Foreman, gloomily.

  There were several of them in the operations room, although Karlsson was out and not expected until later. They were thumbing through the morning’s papers, where the Matthew fever showed no sign of abating. In one tabloid, there were nine pages given over to him – several photographs of him, interviews with people who knew him or claimed to know him, pieces about psychological profiling, a long feature about Matthew’s home life. There were speculations about the state of the Faradays’ marriage. Sources ‘close to the heart of the operation’ had said as much.

  ‘Who the fuck was that, then?’

  ‘They’re flying kites. They know it’s usually the dad or the step-dad.’

  ‘He was miles away. There’s no way he could be a suspect. Why would they print such a thing?’

  ‘Why do you think? Matthew’s money. I read somewhere that papers put on tens of thousands in circulation if they have front-page news about him. This could run and run.’

  ‘Blood money.’

  ‘Easy to say. Who here’s been offered money yet?’

  ‘What – for leaking information?’

  ‘You will be. Just wait.’

  ‘The boss is not going to be happy.’

  ‘Nor his boss. I know for a fact that the commissioner is taking a very personal interest in the case.’

  ‘Crawford’s just a fucker.’

  ‘A fucker who can make life pretty uncomfortable.’

  ‘Karlsson’s the real copper. If anyone can solve this case, he can.’

  ‘Then it looks like no one can, doesn’t it?’

  Twenty-two years: but when Karlsson told Deborah Teale who he was he saw the hope in her eyes, and the fear as well. She put two fingers on her lower lip and leaned against the door jamb as if the earth was shifting under her.

  ‘There really is no news about your daughter,’ he said quickly.

  ‘No, of course not,’ she said. She gave a small, shaky laugh, press
ing a hand against her chest. ‘You said that when you called. It’s just…’ And she trailed to a halt because what was there to say, after all? It’s just that… how do you stop waiting, how do you stop hoping and dreading? Karlsson couldn’t stop himself thinking of what it must be like for her, even after all these years. The discovery of a little body in a ditch would be a relief to her. At least she would know, and there would be a grave where she could lay flowers.

  ‘Could I come in?’ he asked her, and she nodded and stood back to let him enter.

  Everyone’s house has a different smell. Tanner’s had been musty, faintly rank, as if the windows hadn’t been opened for months, an odour that caught in the back of your throat, like old flower water. Deborah Teale’s house smelt of Flash and Ajax and polish and, under that, fried food. She led him into the front room, apologizing for mess that wasn’t there. All round the room he saw photographs, but none of Joanna.

  ‘I just wanted to ask you some questions.’ He eased himself into a chair that was too low for him, trapping him in its softness.

  ‘Questions? What’s left to ask?’

  Karlsson didn’t know the answer to that. He found himself wondering why he was here, revisiting a tragedy that had almost certainly nothing to do with Matthew Faraday. He looked at the woman opposite him, her narrow face and thin shoulders. He had checked her in the file. She must be fifty-three now. Some people – for instance, his former wife’s new boyfriend – spread and solidified into a comfortable version of themselves as they got older, but Deborah Teale looked as though the years had pressed down on her, rubbing away her youth and softness.

  ‘I’ve been looking at the case again.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because we never solved it,’ he replied. It wasn’t a lie but it wasn’t the whole truth either.

  ‘Joanna’s dead,’ Deborah Teale said. ‘Oh, I keep on imagining that she might be out there somewhere, but really I know she’s dead, and I’m sure you do too. She probably died the day we lost her. Why do you need to rake over old ground? If you find her body, then come and tell me. You won’t find her killer now, will you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You probably have to go through unsolved crimes every so often to satisfy some bureaucratic rule or other. But I’ve said everything there is to say. I’ve said it over and over again. Until I thought I’d go mad. Do you have any idea of what it feels like to lose a child?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘That’s something,’ she said. ‘At least you’re not telling me you know how I feel.’

  ‘You described Joanna as an anxious little girl.’

  ‘Yes.’ Deborah Teale frowned at him.

  ‘And she knew not to trust strangers?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Yet she disappeared without a sound in the middle of the afternoon, on a busy street.’

  ‘Yes. As if she’d been a dream.’

  Or as if she trusted the person who took her, thought Karlsson.

  ‘At some point, you have to tell yourself it’s over. Do you see? You have to. I saw you looking at the photos when you came in. I know what you were thinking, of course: that there were none of Joanna. You probably thought that was a bit unhealthy.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Karlsson, truthfully. He was a great believer in denial. In his experience, that was how people stayed sane.

  ‘That’s Rosie, and that’s my husband, George. And my two younger children, Abbie and Lauren. I wept and I prayed and I mourned, and then at last I said goodbye and I moved on and I don’t want to go back again. I owe it to my new family. Does that sound callous to you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It does to some people.’ Her mouth twisted bitterly.

  ‘You mean your ex-husband?’

  ‘Richard thinks I’m a monster.’

  ‘Do you still see him?’

  ‘Is that what this is really about? You still think he did it?’

  Karlsson looked at the woman opposite him, her gaunt face and her bright eyes. He liked her. ‘I don’t think anything, really. Except it hasn’t been solved.’

  ‘I gather his place is like a shrine. Saint Joanna amid the whisky bottles. I don’t suppose that means anything, though.’

  It didn’t. In Karlsson’s experience, murderers were often sentimental or narcissistic people. He could easily imagine a father murdering his daughter and then weeping over her with tears of drunken, maudlin self-pity.

  ‘Do you ever see him now?’

  ‘Not for years. Unlike poor Rosie. I try to persuade her to keep away from him but she somehow feels responsible for him. She’s too kind-hearted for her own good. I wish -’ She stopped.

  ‘Yes?’

  But she shook her head violently. ‘I don’t know what I was going to say. I just wish. You know.’

  Richard Vine insisted on coming to the police station rather than seeing Karlsson at his flat. He had put on a suit, shiny with age and tight around his waist and chest, and a white shirt done up to the collar, constricting his Adam’s apple. Above it his face looked pouchy and his eyes were faintly bloodshot. His hands trembled when he took the mug of coffee. He gulped at it.

  ‘If there are no new clues, what’s this about?’

  ‘I’m reviewing the case,’ Karlsson replied carefully. He wished that he was interviewing Richard Vine in his own home: you can tell a great deal from someone’s surroundings, even when they try to prepare them in advance for visitors. He was probably ashamed to let strangers see it.

  ‘You lot spent the whole investigation trying to get me to confess. Meanwhile the real bastard got away.’ He paused, dragged the back of his hand across his mouth. ‘Have you been to see her as well, or is it just me?’

  Karlsson didn’t answer. He felt oppressed by the grief and mess of the lives he was visiting. Why was he talking to this man? On a whim, baseless intuition; out of hopelessness and because he had no real clues. Matthew Faraday and Joanna Vine, two cases separated by twenty-two years and joined together by nothing more than the fact that they were the same age and had vanished without trace in the middle of the day, near a sweet shop.

  ‘She’s the one who lost her. She was supposed to be looking after her and she let a nine-year-old kid do it for her. And then she just gave up on her. Packed up her pictures and put them all in a box, moved house, married Mr Respectable, forgot about me and Joanna. Life has to go on. That’s what she came to me and said. Life has to go on. Well, I’m not giving up on our daughter.’

  Karlsson listened, his head propped on one hand and his pencil describing useless doodles over his opened notepad. It sounded like he’d said this too often, to whoever at the bar would listen to him.

  ‘Would you describe Joanna as a trusting child?’ he asked, just as he’d asked Deborah Teale.

  ‘She was a little princess.’

  ‘But did she trust people?’

  ‘You can’t trust anyone in this world. I should have told her that.’

  ‘Would she have trusted a stranger?’

  A strange expression came into Richard Vine’s face, cautious and speculative. ‘I don’t know,’ he said at last. ‘Perhaps. Perhaps not. She was only five, for God’s sake. It ruined my life, you know. One day things were going OK and then – well, it was like pulling on one of those bits of knitting that Rosie’s always doing when she comes to see me. Everything simply comes undone and in just a few moments nothing’s left to show anything was ever there.’ He looked at Karlsson and for a second the detective saw in his face the man he had once been. ‘That’s why I can’t forgive her. Things didn’t unravel for her like they did for me. She should have suffered more. She didn’t pay the right price.’

  At the end of the interview, standing to leave, he said, ‘If you see Rosie, tell her to come and see me. At least she hasn’t deserted her old dad.’

  The first punch missed his jaw and landed on his neck. The second was in his stomach. Even as he staggered back, putting his
hands in front of his face, Alec Faraday was struck by how silent it all was. He could hear a plane in the sky above him and the traffic on the main road to his right – he thought he could even hear a radio playing in the distance – but the men didn’t make a sound, except their breathing was heavy, almost like a grunt every time they landed a punch.

  There were five of them. They had hoods up; one was wearing a balaclava. He fell to his knees and then to the ground, trying to ball himself up against their blows, trying to protect his face. He felt a boot hard against his ribs and another on his thigh. Someone hacked him viciously in the groin. Somewhere he heard something crack. His mouth was full of liquid, stuff he was spitting out. Pain was like a river gushing through him. He saw the frosty Tarmac glinting beneath him and then closed his eyes. There was no point in struggling. Didn’t they understand that it would be a relief to be dead?

  At last someone spoke. ‘Fucking nonce.’

  ‘Paedo bastard.’

  There was a hawking sound and something wet landed on his neck. There was another blow but now it seemed to be happening to someone else. He heard steps receding.

  He had eaten a bit of potato mush with gravy because he couldn’t hold it in his mouth any longer, though he had spat out most of it and it was still on the floor, like sick. There was a chicken leg on the floor as well and it was smelling funny now. He had eaten some spaghetti hoops because he was crying and it just went down him and he couldn’t help it. The room was full of the smell of rotting food and of his own body. He put his head down and sniffed his skin and it was sour. He licked at it and he didn’t like the taste of himself.

  But he had found out that if he stood on tiptoe on the mattress and wiggled his head under the stiff blind, he could manage to get under it and then he could see out of the window. Just the bottom corner. All smeary and then clouded with his breath too. If he put his forehead against the glass, it was so cold it made him ache. He could see sky. Today it was blue and hard and made his eyeballs jump. There was a roof opposite that was white and glittering and it had a pigeon on it that was looking at him. If he strained, he could just see the road. It wasn’t like the road where he lived when he was Matthew. Everything was broken. Everything was empty. Everyone had run away because they knew bad things were coming.