by Nicci French
‘I don’t remember. I really can’t remember. Don’t you see? I don’t know what I know myself and what I’ve been told since and what I made up to comfort myself and what I’ve dreamed about. Everything is muddled up. It’s useless to ask me. I’m no help to you. I’m sorry.’
The woman opposite him was apologetic. Karlsson had seen photographs of Rosie Teale as a young child and now here she was at thirty-one. There is something strange about fast-forwarding to adulthood: her dark hair pulled tightly back from her thin, triangular face, bare of makeup; her dark eyes, which seemed too large for her face; the pale lips, slightly chapped; the bony, ringless hands that lay plaited in her lap. She looked both younger and older than her years and slightly malnourished, Karlsson thought. ‘I know. You were nine years old. But I just wonder if there’s anything, anything at all, that you’ve thought about since you were last interviewed by the police. Anything you saw or heard or – I don’t know – smelt, sensed. Anything. She was there and then she wasn’t, and in those few seconds there must have been something.’
‘I know. And sometimes I think…’ She stopped.
‘Yes?’
‘I think I do know something, but I don’t know I know it – if that doesn’t sound stupid.’
‘No, not at all.’
‘But it’s no good. I don’t know what it is and the more I try to catch it the more it disappears. It’s probably some illusion anyway. I’m trying to find something that was never there in the first place, just because I’m so desperate to find it. Or if it was ever there, it’s long gone. My mind feels a bit like one of your crime scenes: at first I refused to visit it at all, I literally couldn’t bear to, and then I went over it with muddy boots so many times that there’s nothing left.’
‘You’ll tell me if anything does occur to you?’
‘Of course.’ Then she said, ‘Is this anything to do with the little boy who’s gone missing, Matthew Faraday?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘Why else would you be here now, after all this time?’
Karlsson suddenly felt he ought to say something. ‘You were only nine. No one in their right mind would ever blame you.’
She smiled at him. ‘Then I’m not in my right mind.’
Chapter Eighteen
Karlsson was already in a bad mood when Yvette Long came into his office and told him there was a woman to see him. She looked nervously at the expression on her boss’s face.
‘How’s Faraday?’
‘Not well. Smashed jaw, broken ribs. You need to make a statement in about half an hour. The press are already waiting.’
‘They did it,’ Karlsson said. ‘They stirred it up. What did they think would happen? I’m sure they’re shocked. Any leads on who did it?’
‘Nothing.’
‘How’s the wife?’
‘About how you’d expect.’
‘Who’s with her now?’
‘A couple of officers from Victim Support. I’m going back there later.’
‘Good.’
‘And the commissioner wants to see you once you’ve made your statement.’
‘Not good.’
‘Sorry.’ For a moment, Yvette Long thought of putting a hand on his shoulder. He looked so tired.
‘You know who I’ve just been talking to?’
‘No.’
‘Brian Munro.’ Yvette Long looked blank. ‘He’s in charge of the CCTV footage.’
‘Has he found anything?’
‘He’s found cars. Lots and lots of cars. Cars with one person in, cars with more than one person in. Cars with the number of persons undetermined. But, as he says, with nothing to cross-check against it’s not even looking for a needle in a haystack. It’s like looking for hay in a haystack.’
‘You could cross-check it with known offenders. Or people on the sex offenders register.’
‘Yes, that thought has occurred to us and Brian just spent a very long time telling me what a long and complicated process that is going to be. And I could make it a bit less long by putting people on it, people who could be knocking on doors and taking statements.’
‘About this woman,’ said Yvette Long.
‘Who is she?’
‘She says she wants to talk to you about the investigation.’
‘Get someone from the office to have a word with her.’
‘She said she wanted to talk to the officer in charge.’
Karlsson frowned. ‘Why are you wasting my time with this?’
‘She asked for you by name. It sounded as if she knew people.’
‘I don’t care if she…’ Karlsson groaned. ‘It’ll be quicker just to see her. But she hasn’t chosen the right day to waste my time. Who is she?’
‘I don’t know. She’s a doctor.’
‘A doctor? For God’s sake, just bring her in.’
Karlsson kept a large notebook on his desk for writing notes, making lists, doodling. He turned it to a blank page. He picked up a pen and clicked it several times. The door opened and Yvette Long stepped halfway into the office. ‘This is Dr Frieda Klein,’ she said. ‘She… er… she wouldn’t say what it was about.’
The woman stepped past her and DC Long left the room, closing the door. Karlsson was slightly disconcerted. Normal people behaved oddly with the police. They became nervous or too eager to please. They felt as if they’d done something wrong. This woman was different. She looked around the office with apparent curiosity, and then, when she turned to him, he felt as if she was assessing him. She took off her long coat and tossed it on to a chair by the wall. She pulled another chair forward in front of his desk and sat on it. He had a sudden and very irritating feeling that he was the person who had come to see her.
‘I’m Detective Chief Inspector Malcolm Karlsson,’ he said.
‘Yes, I know.’
‘I understand that you have something you want to tell me personally.’
‘That’s right.’
Karlsson wrote the name ‘Frieda Klein’ on his notepad and drew a line under it.
‘And it’s relevant to the disappearance of Matthew Faraday?’
‘It might be.’
‘Then you’d better tell me, because we don’t have much time.’
For a moment she looked awkward. ‘I feel hesitant about saying this,’ she said. ‘Because I’m pretty sure you’ll feel that I’m wasting your time.’
‘If you’re sure, then you should go away and not waste any more of it.’
For the first time, Frieda Klein looked directly at him with her large, dark eyes. ‘I’ve got to,’ she said. ‘I’ve been thinking about it all week. I’ll tell you and then I’ll leave.’
‘So tell me.’
‘All right.’ She took a deep breath. Karlsson thought for a moment of a little girl on a stage who was about to recite something. A deep breath before taking the big leap.
‘I’m a consultant psychoanalyst,’ she began. ‘Do you know what that is?’
Karlsson smiled. ‘I’ve picked up a bit of education here and there,’ he said. ‘Despite being a copper.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘You read law at Oxford. I checked.’
‘I hope that makes me worthy of your respect.’
‘I’ve started seeing a new patient. His name is Alan Dekker. He’s forty-two years old. He came to see me because he has been suffering from severe and recurrent anxiety attacks.’ She paused. ‘I think you should talk to him.’
Karlsson wrote the name down. Alan Dekker. ‘This is to do with the disappearance?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Has he confessed?’
‘If he’d confessed, I would have dialled 999.’
‘So?’
‘Alan Dekker’s anxiety is based on a fantasy about having a son – or about not having a son. This fantasy shows itself in a dream that seems to involve seizing a child in a way that struck me as similar to this boy’s disappearance. And before you say that the dream may have
been caused by hearing about it, he first had the dream before Matthew Faraday disappeared.’
‘Anything else?’ said Karlsson.
‘I felt that Dekker’s desire for a son was a narcissistic fantasy. That is, it was really about himself.’
‘I know what “narcissistic” means.’
‘But then I happened to see a photograph of my patient as a boy and it was very similar in certain ways – certain striking ways – to Matthew Faraday.’
Karlsson had stopped taking notes. He was just waggling the pen between two of his fingers. Now he pushed his chair back from the desk. ‘The problem is that on the one hand we don’t have the evidence we would like. Nobody saw Matthew being taken. Maybe he wasn’t taken. Maybe he ran away and joined a circus. Maybe he fell down a manhole. On the other hand, we’ve got more help than we know what to do with. As of this morning, five people have confessed to taking him, none of whom could have done so. Since the TV show about him last week, we’ve had thirty thousand-odd calls to deal with. He’s been spotted in different parts of the UK and in Spain and Greece. People have suspected their husbands, boyfriends, neighbours. His poor bloody father was beaten up last night because the tabloids don’t like the look of him. I’ve been contacted by profilers who’ve told me that the perpetrator is a loner, who has difficulty in relating to others, or that it’s a couple, or that it’s a gang trading children on the Internet. I’ve heard from a medium, who tells me that Matthew is in an enclosed space somewhere underground, which is useful, because it saves us looking in Piccadilly Circus. Meanwhile there are journalists writing that it all happened because we didn’t have enough bobbies on the beat or cars on the road or functioning CCTV cameras. Or else that it’s all the fault of the 1960s.’
‘The sixties?’ said Frieda.
‘That’s the explanation I like best, because it’s about the only one that doesn’t seem to be basically my fault. So you’ll excuse me if I’m not automatically grateful for someone you think might be, in some unspecified way, linked to the crime. I’m extremely sorry, Dr Klein, but what you’ve told me doesn’t sound much different from someone saying that their next-door neighbour’s been spending a lot of time in his shed lately.’
‘You’re right,’ said Frieda. ‘That’s what I would have said myself.’
‘So why did you come and see me about it?’
‘Because once the thought had entered my mind, I had to say something about it.’
Karlsson’s expression hardened. ‘You mean, to get it on the record?’ he said. ‘So that if something went wrong it would be my fault instead of yours?’
‘Because it was the right thing to do.’ Frieda stood up and reached over for her coat. ‘I knew it was nothing. I just needed to be sure.’
Karlsson stood up and walked around his desk to lead her out. He felt he’d been too harsh with her. He’d taken the frustrations of a bad morning out on a woman who was just trying to be helpful. Even if uselessly. ‘You can see it from my point of view,’ he said. ‘I can’t go around interviewing people based on someone’s dream. I know you’re the analyst and I’m not, but people have these sorts of dreams all the time and they don’t mean anything.’
At this it was her turn to speak sharply. ‘I’m not going to take lessons from a detective about what dreams mean. If that’s all right.’
‘I was just saying -’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Frieda. ‘I’m not going to waste your time any more.’ She started to pull her coat on. ‘This wasn’t just some little dream he’d been having for years, the way most anxiety dreams are. He’d had the dream a long time ago when he was a young man and now he’d suddenly had it again.’
Karlsson had been about to say goodbye, about to steer her out of the door, when he stopped. ‘What do you mean “again”?’ he said.
‘You don’t want to hear the details,’ said Frieda. ‘But before it had been a definite desire for a daughter and now it was a son. One of his worries was that there was something sexual about the change.’
‘Change?’ Frieda looked puzzled by Karlsson’s expression. ‘You’re saying he had the dream before? A long time ago?’
‘Does this matter?’
There was a pause.
‘I’m just curious,’ said Karlsson. ‘For my own reasons. How old was he?’
‘He was just out of his teens, he told me. Twenty or twenty-one. Well before he met his wife. Then, suddenly, the dreams stopped.’
‘Take your coat off,’ said Karlsson. ‘Sit down. I mean, please. Sit down, please.’
With a slightly wary expression, Frieda laid her coat across the chair where it had been before and sat back down. ‘I don’t really see…’ she began.
‘Your patient, he’s what? Forty-three?’
‘Forty-two, I think.’
‘So that previous dream would have been twenty-two years ago?’
‘Something like that.’
Karlsson leaned back on the front of his desk. ‘Let me get this straight. Twenty-two years ago, he has a dream about a little girl. Taking a little girl. Then nothing. And now he has a dream about taking a little boy.’
‘That’s right.’
Suddenly Karlsson’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. ‘You’re being straight with me, right? You haven’t spoken to anyone on the case. You haven’t done your own research.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘No one’s put you up to this?’
‘What?’
‘I’ve had journalists coming in pretending to be witnesses, just to see what we’ve got. If this is some kind of wind-up, you should be aware that you’ll face prosecution.’
‘I was just putting on my coat and now I’m facing prosecution?’
‘You don’t know anything apart from the Matthew Faraday disappearance?’
‘I don’t read the papers that often. I hardly know anything about the Faraday case. Is there some problem?’
Karlsson rubbed his face almost as if he were trying to wake himself up. ‘Yes, there is a problem,’ he said. ‘The problem is that I don’t know what to think.’ He mumbled something that Frieda couldn’t make out. It sounded as if he were arguing with himself, which was exactly what he was doing. ‘I think I’m going to talk to that patient of yours.’
Chapter Nineteen
Frieda stepped into her house with a small sigh of relief, letting the shopping bag drop to the floor while she took off her coat and scarf. It was cold and dark outside, frost in the air and the sense of winter closing in, but inside was snug. There was a light on in the living room and the fire was laid ready; she lit it before going into the kitchen with the bag. Reuben always said that there were two types of cook: the artist and the scientist. He was clearly the artist, flamboyant with improvisations, and she was the scientist, exact and a bit fussy, following every recipe to the letter. A level teaspoon had to be level; if a recipe said red wine vinegar then nothing else would do; pastry dough had to be left in the fridge for the full hour. She very rarely cooked. Sandy had been the cook in their relationship and now… Well, she didn’t want to think about Sandy because that hurt the way a toothache hurt, flaring up suddenly and taking her breath away with its electric sharpness. She just assembled ingredients on her plate and tried not to think of him with his pots and pans and wooden spoons, making meals for one. But today she was following a simple recipe that Chloë had inexplicably emailed her, with urgent instructions to try it, for a curried cauliflower and chickpea salad. She looked doubtfully at it.
She put on her apron, washed her hands, drew down the blinds, and was chopping the onion when her doorbell rang. There was nobody she was expecting and people didn’t often turn up at her house unannounced, except young men with dodgy smiles selling dusters, twenty for a fiver. Perhaps it was Sandy. Did she want it to be? She quickly remembered it couldn’t be. He had gone on the Eurostar to Paris this morning for a conference. She still knew those kinds of things about him and so she was able to imagine him
in the life she had vacated. Soon enough that would change. He would do things she knew nothing about, see people she had never met or heard of, wear clothes she had never seen, read books he wouldn’t discuss with her.
The doorbell rang again and she laid down the knife, rinsed her hands under cold water, and went to answer.
‘Am I disturbing you?’ asked Karlsson.
‘Obviously.’
‘It’s a bit cold out here.’
Frieda stood back and let him walk into her hall. She noticed how he wiped his shoes – rather elegant black ones, with blue laces – on her mat before hanging his black coat, splattered with rain, next to hers.
‘You were cooking.’
‘Brilliant. I can see why you became a detective.’
‘This will only take a minute of your time.’
She led him into her living room, where the fire was still feeble and lacking warmth. She crouched before it and carefully blew its flames before taking a seat opposite Karlsson and folding her hands carefully on her lap. He noticed how straight she sat, and she noticed that one of his front teeth was very slightly chipped. This surprised her: Karlsson seemed otherwise punctilious about his appearance, almost dandyish: his soft charcoal-grey jacket, his white shirt, and a red tie so thin it was like an ironic stripe down his chest.
‘Is it about Alan?’ she said.
‘I thought you would want to know.’
‘Have you talked to him?’
She sat up straighter in her chair. Her expression didn’t waver, and yet Karlsson had the impression that she was holding back a wince of anticipated distress. She was paler than the last time they had met, and tired as well. He thought she looked unhappy.
‘Yes. His wife, too.’
‘And?’
‘He didn’t have anything to do with the disappearance of Matthew Faraday.’