Blue Monday

by Nicci French

  ‘Hello again,’ he said.

  Karlsson was holding a folder and placed it in front of him. He flapped it open, removed a photograph and placed it in front of Reeve, rotating it so that it was the right way up for him. ‘Look at it,’ he said.

  He examined Reeve’s face for a response, a shimmer of recognition in the eyes. He saw nothing at all.

  ‘Is this him?’ asked Reeve. ‘I mean the boy you’re looking for.’

  ‘Don’t you read the papers?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Or watch TV?’

  ‘I watch the football. Terry watches the cooking programmes.’

  ‘And what about this? Do you recognize this girl?’

  Karlsson placed the long-ago photograph of Joanna in front of Reeve, who looked at it for a few seconds, then shrugged.

  ‘Is that a no?’

  ‘Who is she?’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘If I knew, why would I ask you?’

  Reeve didn’t look at Karlsson but he didn’t seem to be avoiding his gaze either. Some people, when you get them into an interview, just crack immediately. Others show signs of stress: they sweat, they stumble over their words, they babble. Karlsson quickly saw that Reeve wasn’t one of them. If anything he looked indifferent, or perhaps slightly amused.

  ‘Haven’t you got anything to say?’ said Karlsson.

  ‘You haven’t asked me a question.’

  ‘Have you seen him?’

  ‘You asked me that when you came to my house before. I told you then. And I still haven’t seen him.’

  ‘Have you any knowledge of his whereabouts?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where were you on the afternoon of Friday, November the thirteenth at around four o’clock?’

  ‘You’ve done this before. You’re just asking me the same question. And I’m going to give you the same answer. I don’t know. It’s a long time ago. I was probably at work, or on my way back from work. Or maybe I was already at home, ready for the weekend.’

  ‘Where were you working then?’

  Reeve shrugged. ‘Dunno. I do a bit here, a bit there. I’m my own boss. That’s how I like it. No one can muck you around then.’

  ‘Perhaps you could try a bit harder to remember.’

  ‘Maybe I was working for myself that day. Terry’s always on at me to do up the house. Women, eh!’

  ‘Were you?’

  ‘Perhaps. Perhaps not.’

  ‘Mr Reeve. We are going to be interviewing all your neighbours, anyone who might have seen you that day. Perhaps you could be a little more exact.’

  He scratched his head with mock solemnity. ‘There aren’t many neighbours,’ he said. ‘And we keep ourselves to ourselves.’

  Karlsson sat back in his chair and folded his arms. ‘There’s a woman called Katherine Ripon. She’s twenty-five years old. She was last seen three days ago when setting out from Cambridge to visit two addresses. One of them was yours.’

  ‘Who is she?’

  ‘She’s a scientist. She wanted to talk to you for some kind of research project and now she’s disappeared.’

  ‘What did she want to talk to me about?’

  ‘Have you seen her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘We’re talking to your wife as well.’

  ‘She can say no as well as I can.’

  ‘And our warrant to search your house is still active.’

  ‘You’ve already searched it.’

  ‘We’re searching it again.’

  Reeve gave a faint smile. ‘I know that feeling. It’s a nasty one, isn’t it? When you’ve lost something and you get so desperate you start looking in the places you’ve already looked.’

  ‘And we will be going through all the CCTV footage. If she was in your area, we will find out.’

  ‘Good for you,’ said Reeve.

  ‘So if there is anything you need to tell us, best to do it now.’

  ‘I’ve got nothing to tell you.’

  ‘If you tell us where he is,’ said Karlsson, ‘we can come to an agreement. We can make it all go away. And if he’s dead, you can at least put an end to this, put the parents out of their misery.’

  Reeve took a tissue from his pocket and loudly blew his nose. ‘Have you got a bin?’ he said.

  ‘Not in here,’ said Karlsson.

  Reeve placed the scrunched-up tissue on the table.

  ‘We know that you impersonated your twin brother,’ said Karlsson. ‘Why did you do that?’

  ‘Did I? I just sent some flowers.’ That faint smile crossed his face again. ‘She probably doesn’t get enough flowers. Women like them.’

  ‘I can keep you here,’ said Karlsson.

  Reeve looked thoughtful. ‘I suppose I could get angry now. I could say that I wanted a lawyer.’

  ‘If you want a lawyer, we can arrange one for you.’

  ‘You know what I really want?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’d like a cup of tea. With milk and two sugars. And maybe a biscuit. I’m not fussy. I like all of them: custard creams, ginger nuts, garibaldis.’

  ‘This isn’t a café.’

  ‘But if you keep me here, you need to feed me. The fact is, you’ve searched my house and found nothing. You’ve brought me in here and asked me if I’ve seen this child and that woman and I’ve said no and that’s all there is to it. But if you want me to sit here then I’ll sit here. And if you want me to sit here all tonight and all tomorrow, I’ll do that as well and I’ll still be saying no. It doesn’t bother me. I’m a patient man. I go fishing. Do you go fishing?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I go up the reservoirs. I put a mealworm on the hook, throw it in and just sit there. Sometimes I’ll sit there for the whole day and the float won’t have moved and it’s still a good day. So I’m happy to sit here and drink your tea and eat your biscuits, if that’s what you want, but it’s not going to help you find that boy.’

  Karlsson looked over Reeve’s head at the clock on the wall. He watched the second hand moving around the face. Suddenly he felt nauseous and had to swallow hard.

  ‘I’ll get you your coffee,’ he said.

  ‘Tea,’ said Reeve.

  Karlsson left the room and a uniformed officer stepped past him to take his place in the interview room. He walked quickly, almost at a trot, out into the yard at the back. It had been a car park but they were doing building work, adding an extension. He sucked in the cold dark air in gulps as if he was drinking it. He looked at his watch: it was six o’clock. He felt as if the time was scratching at him. A face was watching him from a lighted window and for a moment he thought it was the face of the man he had just been interviewing, then realized it was that of his twin brother, Alan. His head spun uselessly. He went back inside and told an officer to fetch the tea for Reeve, then went down to the basement interview room where Terry had been taken. When he entered, she was in the middle of an altercation with the female police officer. The officer turned round. ‘She wants to smoke.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Karlsson. ‘It’s health and safety.’

  ‘Can I go out and have one?’ she said.

  ‘In a minute. When we’ve had a chat.’

  He sat down and looked across at her. She was dressed in jeans and a shiny electric green bomber jacket. Between the bottom of her jacket and the top of her jeans there was a roll of white skin. Karlsson glimpsed the edge of a tattoo. Something Oriental. He forced himself to give an affable smile. ‘How long have you two been together?’ he asked.

  ‘What’s this about?’ she said.

  ‘Background information.’

  She was squeezing her hands together, massaging her fingers. She really was desperate for a cigarette. ‘Always, if you’re so interested. Just ask what you’ve got to ask.’

  Karlsson showed her the photograph and she looked at it as though it was some meaningless squiggle. He showed her the photograph of Joanna Vine and she barely bothered to glan
ce at it. He told her about the disappearance of Katherine Ripon, but she just shook her head.

  ‘I haven’t seen any of them,’ she said.

  He asked her about her movements on 13 November and she shook her head.

  ‘I dunno.’ There was something sluggish and impenetrable about her. Karlsson felt his chest tighten with an angry impatience. He wanted to shake her into a reaction.

  ‘Why were you painting your upstairs room when we came to your house?’

  ‘It needed painting.’

  ‘Every minute that passes,’ he said, ‘this gets more serious. But it’s not too late. If you start co-operating, I’ll do everything I can for you. I can help you and I can help Dean, but you’ve got to give me something.’

  ‘I haven’t seen them.’

  ‘If it was your husband and you want to protect him, the best way of doing that is to come clean.’

  ‘I haven’t seen them.’

  He couldn’t get her to say anything else.

  Karlsson found Frieda sitting in the cafeteria. At first he thought she was writing something, but when he got closer he saw she was drawing. She had made a sketch on the paper napkin of the half-full tumbler of water on the table in front of her.

  ‘That’s good.’

  She glanced up and he saw how tired she was, and how pale, almost translucent, her flesh was. He looked away, feeling full of a sense of defeat.

  ‘Do you see your children at Christmas?’ she asked.

  ‘Christmas Eve for an hour or so and then Boxing Day.’

  ‘That must be hard.’

  He shrugged, not trusting himself to speak.

  ‘I don’t have children,’ Frieda continued, as if she were talking to herself. ‘Perhaps that’s because I don’t want to be vulnerable to all that pain. I can bear it in patients, but in one’s own children, I don’t know.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have been angry. It wasn’t really your fault.’

  ‘No, you were right. I should never have given him those addresses.’ She waited a beat. ‘No progress with the Reeves, then?’

  ‘DC Long is in with Dean Reeve now, going over the same ground. She’s usually good at getting people to talk. But I’m not hopeful.’

  He picked up the tumbler that Frieda had been drawing and drank from it, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. ‘There are some people,’ he continued, ‘who can stand the pressure. As soon as I walked into the interview room and sat down opposite him, I felt it. He’s just not bothered.’

  ‘Do you mean he feels safe?’

  ‘It seems like that. He knows we can’t touch him. The question is: why?’

  Frieda waited. Karlsson picked up the tumbler and examined it, then set it down again. ‘The boy’s dead,’ he said. ‘Or if he’s not, he will be soon. We’re not going to find him. Oh, don’t misunderstand me. We’re not giving up. We’re doing everything we can. It’s Christmas, they should be with their kids, but everyone’s working all out. We’re going through the Reeve house again with a finetooth comb. We’re knocking on the doors we’ve already knocked on. We’ll find out every job Dean Reeve has worked on in the last year and go there to see if that leads us anywhere. We’ll use all the manpower we’ve got to search the area, with sniffer dogs. But you’ve seen the area yourself, all those boarded-up houses, old warehouses, those condemned flats. There are thousands and he could be in any one of them – or somewhere completely different. Except we should probably just be looking for a patch of ground that’s been recently disturbed, or a body floating in the river.’

  ‘But you think it’s him.’

  ‘I can smell it,’ Karlsson said savagely. ‘I know it’s him, and he knows I know. That’s why he’s enjoying it.’

  ‘He knows he’s safe from you. How? Why?’

  ‘Because he’s got rid of the evidence.’

  ‘What about his wife? Is she saying anything?’

  ‘Her?’ He shook his head in frustration. ‘She’s worse, if that’s possible. She just sits there and looks at you as if what you’ve said makes no sense at all and repeats the same phrase over and over again. He’s the dominant one, that’s for sure, but there’s no way she doesn’t know something. My guess is that she did to Matthew what Dean Reeve’s mother did to Joanna: lured him into a car. But it’s just that, a guess. I’ve got not a scrap of evidence.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Well.’ He looked grim. ‘We’ve got our big new clue, of course. Kathy Ripon. She was going to see him and she disappeared. We’re talking to the parents, her friends, anyone who might have seen her, mounting a full-scale search, pulling all the CCTV footage – then we’ll see if we can place her in the area. The way the media goes on about CCTV, you’d think it’s on every street corner and nothing goes unseen, but don’t you believe it. Anyway, I sometimes think that days’ and weeks’ worth of footage to go through can hold up an investigation, rather than help it.’ He looked at his watch, grimaced. ‘Still, if she went to London that day, as Professor Boundy says, she’s bound to be on camera at either King’s Cross or Liverpool Street and maybe we can track her from there. There’s a window between her leaving Cambridge after he rang her, and the time when we put the Reeve house under investigation later that day.’

  ‘What about Alan?’

  ‘DC Wells is in with him now, taking his statement. His was the other address Kathy Ripon was going to visit, of course.’

  ‘I’ll wait for him, I think. See him home.’

  ‘Thank you. Come back after.’

  ‘I don’t work for you, you know.’

  ‘Would you please come back after?’ But he spoilt it by adding, ‘Is that better for you?’

  ‘Not much. But I’ll come back because I would like to help.’

  ‘I know the feeling,’ Karlsson said bitterly. ‘Well, if nothing else works, you can hear about their dreams.’

  Chapter Thirty-six

  When Frieda offered to take Alan home, he didn’t reply. He just stared at her.

  ‘Alan? Have you called Carrie?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You can call her on the way.’

  ‘I’m not going until I’ve seen him.’

  ‘You mean Dean.’

  ‘My brother. My twin. My other self. I have to see him.’

  ‘That’s impossible.’

  ‘I won’t go until I’ve seen him.’

  ‘The police are interviewing him at the moment.’

  ‘I spent the first forty years of my life not knowing anything about my family, not even having a name, and now I find out that I’ve got a mother who’s still alive, and a twin brother and he’s a few feet from me. How do you think that feels? You’re supposed to be good at knowing things like that. Tell me!’

  Frieda sat down and leaned towards him. ‘What do you want from it?’

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t just go away, knowing I’ve been so close.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Frieda said. ‘It’s not possible. Not now.’

  ‘All right.’ Alan stood up and started pushing his arms into his duffel coat. ‘Then we’ll go to her.’

  ‘Her?’

  ‘My mother. The one who kept my brother but dumped me.’

  ‘Is that why you want to see him? To find out why she chose him over you?’

  ‘There must have been something, mustn’t there?’

  ‘You were just two babies. And she won’t remember you.’

  ‘I’ve got to see her.’

  ‘It’s late.’

  ‘I don’t care if it’s the middle of the night. Do you want to tell me where she is or do I have to find out for myself? Somehow. Maybe your detective friend would tell me.’

  Frieda smiled and stood up too. ‘I’ll tell you,’ she said. ‘If this is how you want it. But ring Carrie and tell her when you’ll be home, tell her you’re OK. The taxi’s on me.’

  ‘Are you coming?’

  ‘If you want me to.’

  Karlsson sat in front of Dean Reeve. Every questi
on he asked came back short and fast – a ball thrown at a dead bat, over and over again, with the same sickening little smile on his face. He was watching Karlsson. He knew that Karlsson was angry and he knew that he was feeling increasingly helpless.

  He was the same with Yvette Long – except with her his eyes would slide from her face to her body, and to her rage she found herself blushing.

  ‘He’s playing with us!’ she fumed to her boss.

  ‘Don’t let him get to you. If you do that, you’re letting him win.’

  ‘He’s already won.’

  ‘Are you sure you’re ready for this?’ Frieda asked.

  Alan stood beside her. He looked frightened and there were already tears in his eyes. ‘Will you come in with me?’

  ‘If that’s what you want.’

  ‘Yes. Please. I can’t -’ He gulped.

  ‘OK, then.’

  Frieda took him by the hand, as if he were a small child. She led him down the corridor towards the little room where his mother sat. His feet dragged and his fingers were cold in hers. She smiled reassuringly at him, then knocked at the door and opened it. Alan walked in. She could hear his laboured breathing. For a moment he stood quite still, staring at the old woman sitting stooped in her chair. Then he stumbled across to her and sank to his knees beside her.

  ‘Mother? Mum?’

  Frieda had to turn away from the expression of horror and abject supplication on his face.

  ‘Have you been a naughty boy again?’

  ‘It’s not him. It’s me. The other one.’

  ‘You were always naughty.’

  ‘You gave me away.’

  ‘I never. I never gave you away. Cut my tongue out before I give you away. Who’s been saying that to you?’

  ‘You left me. Why did you leave me?’

  ‘Our little secret, eh?’

  Frieda, sitting on the bed, watched Mrs Reeve intently. Surely she was talking about what she and her son had done, all those years ago.