Blue Monday

by Nicci French

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘You’re a naughty boy. What’s to be done with you, eh?’

  ‘I’m Alan. I’m not Dean. I’m your other son. Your lost son.’

  ‘Have you got a doughnut for me?’

  ‘You have to tell me why you did it. I have to know. Then I’ll leave you in peace.’

  ‘I like my doughnuts.’

  ‘You wrapped me in a thin towel and left me out in the street. I could have died. Didn’t you care?’

  ‘I want to go home now.’

  ‘What was wrong with me?’

  Mrs Reeve patted his head gently. ‘Naughty naughty, Dean. Never mind.’

  ‘What kind of mother are you?’

  ‘I’m your mother, dearie.’

  ‘He’s in trouble, you know, your precious Dean. He’s done something very bad. Wicked.’

  ‘I don’t know anything.’

  ‘He’s with the police.’

  ‘I don’t know anything.’

  ‘Look at me – at me. I’m not him.’

  ‘I don’t know anything.’ She started to rock back and forward on her chair, her eyes fixed on Frieda, crooning the words as if they were a lullaby. ‘I don’t know anything. I don’t know anything. I don’t know anything.’

  ‘Mum,’ said Alan. He took her hand cautiously, screwing up his face, and tried out the word: ‘Mummy?’

  ‘Naughty. Very naughty.’

  ‘You never even cared, did you? You never gave me a thought. What kind of person are you?’

  Frieda stood and took Alan’s arm. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘This is enough. You need to go home, where you belong.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. She saw his face was streaked with tears. ‘You’re right. She’s just a nasty old woman. She’s not my mother. I don’t even hate her. She’s nothing to me, nothing at all.’

  They sat in the cab in silence. Alan gazed at his hands and Frieda gazed out at the night. Snow was falling once again, this time settling on the pavements and the roofs and the branches of the plane trees. It would be a white Christmas, she thought, the first in many years. She remembered as a child tobogganing down the hill near her grandmother’s house with her brother. Stinging cheeks and snowflakes in her eyelashes and her open, shouting mouth, the world a white and rushing blur. How long since she had been tobogganing, or built a snowman or hurled a snowball? How long, for that matter, since she had seen her brother or sister? Her parents? Her whole childhood world had disappeared, and in its place she had constructed a world of adult responsibilities, of other people’s pain and need, of order and compartments, well-guarded boundaries.

  ‘It’s here, on the left,’ Alan was saying to the driver, who brought his cab to a stop. He got out. He didn’t close the door but Frieda didn’t follow.

  ‘Won’t you come in?’ he said. ‘I don’t know how to say this to her.’

  ‘To Carrie?’

  ‘I want you to help her understand.’

  ‘But, Alan…’

  ‘You don’t understand what it feels like, what I’ve found out today, what’s been happening to me. It won’t come out right. She’s going to be shocked.’

  ‘Why do you think that me being there will help?’

  ‘You’ll make it – I don’t know – professional or something. You can tell her what you told me and it’ll feel more, you know, safe or something.’

  ‘Are you coming or going?’ the driver asked.

  Frieda hesitated. She looked at Alan’s anxious face, the flakes falling through the lamplight on the street and settling in his grey hair; she thought of Karlsson waiting at the station, snarling with frustration. ‘You don’t need me. You need her. Tell her what you know and tell her what you feel. Give her the chance to understand. Then come and see me tomorrow, at eleven o’clock. We’ll talk about it then.’ She turned to the cab driver. ‘Could you take me back to the station, please?’

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Frieda had expected the noise to be gone and the station to be dark and deserted, but it wasn’t like that. As she entered, she was assaulted by the clatter, the din of metal chairs being pulled back, doors opening and closing, phones ringing, people shouting in the distance in anger or fear, feet clipping along the corridor. Frieda thought that perhaps a police station was at its busiest round Christmas, when drunk people were drunker, lonely people lonelier, the sad and the mad pushed beyond their endurance, and all the pain and nastiness of life rose to the surface. Someone might always fall through the door with a knife in their chest or a needle hanging off their arm, or a woman with a bruised face might lurch towards the desk saying he hadn’t meant to hurt her.

  ‘Any luck?’ she asked Karlsson, as he came to the front desk to meet her, although she didn’t really need to ask.

  ‘Time’s running out,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll have to release them. They’ll have won. No Matthew Faraday, no Kathy Ripon.’

  ‘What do you want from me?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. You could talk to them. Isn’t that what you do?’

  ‘I’m not a witch. I don’t have any magic.’

  ‘Pity.’

  ‘I’ll talk to them. Is it official?’

  ‘Official?’

  ‘Will you be there? Will it be taped?’

  ‘How do you want to play it?’

  ‘I want to see them alone.’

  Dean Reeve didn’t look tired. He looked fresher than Frieda had ever seen him, as if he was feeding off the situation, unassailable. Frieda, pulling her chair up at the table, thought he was enjoying himself. He smiled at her.

  ‘So, they’ve sent you to talk to me. That’s nice. A pretty woman.’

  ‘Not talk,’ said Frieda. ‘To listen.’

  ‘What are you going to listen to? This?’

  He started to tap his forefinger on the table top, the amiable half-smile still on his face.

  ‘So you’re a twin,’ said Frieda.

  Tap tap-tap tap.

  ‘An identical twin at that. How do you feel about that?’

  Tap tap-tap tap.

  ‘You didn’t know, did you?’

  Tap tap-tap tap.

  ‘Your mother never told you. How does it feel to know that you’re not unique? To know that there’s someone out there who looks like you, talks like you, thinks like you? All this time you thought there was only one of you.’ He smiled at her and she persisted: ‘You’re like a clone. And you never knew anything about it. She kept you in ignorance all this time. Doesn’t that make you feel betrayed? Or stupid, perhaps.’

  He tapped his stubby finger on the table, eyes fixed on her. The smile on his face didn’t change but Frieda could feel his anger on her skin and the room was ugly with it.

  ‘Your plans have all gone wrong. Everyone knows what you’ve done. How does that feel, to have something you planned in secret suddenly out in the open? Wasn’t he going to be your son? Wasn’t that the plan?’

  The tapping grew louder. Frieda felt it inside her brain, an insidious beat.

  ‘If you’re like Matthew’s father, how can you place him in danger? Your job is to protect him. If you tell me where he is, you’re saving him and you’re saving yourself. And you’re staying in control.’

  Frieda knew he wasn’t going to say anything. He was only going to smile softly at her and tap his finger on the table. He wouldn’t break down; he would outlast any of them who came and sat opposite him like this, outstare them, hold on to his silence, and every time he did, it was another small victory that strengthened him. She stood up and left, feeling his jeering smile on her back as she went.

  Terry was different. She was asleep when Frieda came into the room, her head against her folded hands and a snore whistling from her. Her mouth was open and she was dribbling slightly. Even when she woke up, staring blearily at Frieda for a moment as if she didn’t know who she was, she remained slumped in her chair. At times she put her head back on the table, as if she would go to sleep again. Her makeup was smeared. There was
lipstick on her teeth. Her hair was greasy. Frieda felt neither fear nor strong anger from her, simply a baleful resentment that she was being made to sit in this bare, uncomfortable room, hour after hour. She wanted to go back to her overheated house and her cats. She wanted a cigarette. She was cold. She was hungry, and the food they’d given her was crap. She was tired – and she looked tired: her face was puffy and her eyes seemed sore. Every so often she wrapped her arms around her big sad body for comfort, hugging herself.

  ‘How long have you and Dean known each other?’ asked Frieda.

  Terry shrugged.

  ‘When did you marry?’

  ‘Ages ago.’

  ‘How did you meet?’

  ‘Years ago. When we were kids. Can I have my fag now?’

  ‘Do you work, Terry?’

  ‘What are you? You’re not a copper, are you? You don’t look like one.’

  ‘I told you before, I’m a kind of doctor.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with me. Except I’m here.’

  ‘Do you feel that you have to do what Dean tells you?’

  ‘I need that fag.’

  ‘You don’t need to do what Dean tells you.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’ She gave an exaggerated yawn. ‘Have you done?’

  ‘You can tell us about Matthew. You can tell us about Joanna and Kathy. That would be a brave thing to do.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re on about. You think you know things about my life, but you don’t. People like you know nothing about people like us.’

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  There was an email from Sandy on her computer. He had written it at one o’clock in the morning and in it he said he had tried not to get in touch with her but in the end had found it impossible. He was missing her so much that it hurt. He could not believe that he would never see her again, or hold her in his arms. Could they meet? He was leaving for America in a few days’ time, but he would like to see her before that. He had to. Please, he wrote: please, Frieda, please.

  Frieda sat for several minutes, staring at the message. Then she pressed the delete button. She stood up and poured herself a glass of wine, which she drank, standing by the fireplace, which was full of cold grey ash. It was half past two in the morning, the worst time to be awake and full of urgent desires. She returned to the computer and retrieved the message from Trash. For the past few days, Sandy had seemed long ago and far away. While he had been consumed by thoughts of her, she had been thinking of a stolen boy. Yet now, with this email, the sense of longing rushed back, a flood of sadness. If he was here now, she could talk to him about what she was feeling. He would understand as no one else could. He would listen carefully, without speaking, and to him she could confess failure, doubt, guilt. She could be silent and still he would know.

  She wrote: ‘Sandy, come round as soon as you get this. It doesn’t matter what time.’ She imagined how it would feel to open the door and see his face. Then she blinked and shook her head. Once again, she pressed the delete button, saw her message wiped away, turned off her computer and went downstairs to her bedroom.

  Three in the morning was a dangerous time to think things over. As Frieda lay in her bed and stared at the ceiling there was clarity to her thoughts, a lack of distraction, but there was also a chill to them, as if she were at the bottom of the sea. She thought of Dean Reeve. And Terry. How could she get inside their heads? Wasn’t that supposed to be what she was good at? Frieda had spent most of her adult life sitting in rooms when people talked and talked and talked. Sometimes they told truths they had never spoken aloud before, never even admitted to themselves. People lied or were self-justifying or self-pitying. They were angry or sad or defeated. But just so long as they had talked, Frieda had been able to use their own words and make of them a story that could create some kind of sense of their lives or maybe just a refuge in which they could survive. These were all people who sought her out or were sent to her. What did you do with people who wouldn’t talk, who didn’t know how to? How did you get at them?

  In recent years, she had been to seminars where they had discussed torture. Why was it now? Why was it that people were suddenly so eager to discuss it? So tempted by it? Was it something in the air? Dean Reeve. She had seen his face, seen his slow smile. He wouldn’t say anything, whatever you did to him. He would see being tortured as a kind of triumph. You were destroying your own humanity, everything you valued, all for nothing. But Terry. If you – no, Frieda thought, not you, me, Frieda Klein. If I were alone in a room with Terry Reeve. For one hour. Frieda pictured to herself the medical instruments, the scalpels, the clamps. A couple of wires, an electric terminal. A hook in the ceiling. A chain or a rope. A tub of water. A towel. Frieda had medical training. She knew what would cause real, deep pain. She knew how to create the feeling of imminent death. An hour alone with Terry Reeve and no questions asked. Think of it as a mathematical formula. The piece of information, X, is in Terry Reeve’s head. If you could conduct the procedure to transfer X out of her head, then Kathy Ripon would be found and brought back to her family, and would have the life she deserved. To do it would be wrong, as wrong as wrong could be. But if she, Frieda, were in the dark somewhere, bound with wire, masking tape over her mouth, what would she think if someone else was sitting in an interview room with Terry Reeve, having qualms, saying to themselves that there are some things we don’t do, having the luxury of being good while she, Frieda, or Kathy was still out there in the dark somewhere? Except that maybe Terry Reeve really knew nothing, or almost nothing. So you would be torturing to find an X that wasn’t really there, and you’d think, Maybe we haven’t tortured enough.

  Even so, it was easy to do the right thing to save someone, but would she be willing to do the wrong thing? These were the sort of stupid thoughts that buzzed around the brain at three o’clock in the morning when the blood sugar was low. She knew from her training and from her experience that it was a time that produced negative, destructive thinking. That was why she used to get up in the middle of the night. Going for a walk, reading a crappy book, having a bath, a drink – anything was better than lying in bed tormenting yourself with bleak thoughts. But this time she didn’t get up. She made herself stay and worry away at the problem. It was in Dean Reeve’s mind. In all probability. And she couldn’t get it. What could she do? And then Frieda had a thought. She knew about that kind of thought as well, the brilliant idea you have in the middle of the night, and then you wake in the morning and you remember your great idea and somehow it’s congealed, and in the harsh light of morning it’s exposed as stupid and trite and ridiculous.

  It was only just light when she left her house and headed north across Euston Road and along by the park. When she rang the bell on Reuben’s front door it was just after eight. Josef opened the door and Frieda was hit by the smell of coffee and frying bacon.

  ‘Aren’t you at work?’ she said.

  ‘This is my work,’ said Josef. ‘And I am staying on site. Come.’

  Frieda followed him through to the kitchen. Reuben was sitting at the table, a half-finished breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon and fried bread in front of him. He put down the newspaper and looked at Frieda with an expression of concern. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Just tired,’ she said.

  She felt self-conscious under the gaze of the two men. She pushed her fingers through her hair, as if she thought there might be something trapped in it she couldn’t see.

  ‘You look not well,’ said Josef. ‘Sit.’

  She sat down at the table. ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘I haven’t had proper time to sleep.’

  ‘You want breakfast?’ said Reuben.

  ‘No, I’m not hungry,’ said Frieda. ‘I’ll just have a bit of yours.’ She took a piece of fried bread from Reuben’s plate and chewed it. Josef put a plate in front of her and, over the next few minutes, filled it with egg, bacon and toast. Frieda glanced across at Reuben. Perhaps the reason she looked ill was that he looked s
o much better.

  ‘You make a nice couple,’ she said.

  Reuben gulped some coffee. He took a cigarette from the packet lying on the table and lit it. ‘I’ll tell you that living with Josef is a bloody sight better than living with Ingrid,’ he said. ‘And don’t tell me that that’s not a proper way of dealing with my problems.’

  ‘All right, I won’t.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking, I might ask Paz out.’

  ‘Oh no you don’t.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. Anyway, Paz would say no, if you were stupid enough to put her in the position to do so.’

  Josef sat down at the table. He shook a cigarette out from Reuben’s packet. Frieda couldn’t stop herself smiling at the easy intimacy in the way they interacted with each other. Reuben tossed his lighter over and Josef caught it and lit his own cigarette.

  ‘I’m not here to talk about your problems,’ she said.

  ‘What’s up?’ said Reuben.

  Frieda picked up a piece of bacon and bit into it. When had she last eaten? She looked at Josef. ‘Reuben was my therapist for a while,’ she said. ‘When you’re training you have to be analysed yourself and I used to see Reuben three times a week, sometimes four, and talk about my life. Reuben knows all my secrets. Or, at least, the ones I chose to share with him. That’s why it was difficult for him when I tried to step in and help him. It was like a father being told what to do by his delinquent daughter.’

  ‘Delinquent?’ said Josef.

  ‘Naughty,’ said Frieda. ‘Badly behaved. Uppity. Uncontrollable.’

  Reuben didn’t reply, but he didn’t look angry either. The room was almost foggy with the smoke. Reuben and an East European builder: Frieda couldn’t remember when she had last been in a room as smoke-filled as this one.

  ‘When you stop therapy,’ she continued, ‘it’s like leaving home. It takes time to start seeing your parents as ordinary people.’

  ‘Are you seeing anyone now?’ said Reuben.