Nicci French - Blue Monday

‘You’re not going to tell me you’re married?’

He smiled. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not that. I’ve been offered a new job.’

‘Oh.’ Relief flooded though her. ‘I thought you were about to say something terrible. But that’s good, isn’t it? What job?’

‘A full professorship.’

‘Sandy, that’s fantastic.’

‘At Cornell.’

Frieda put her knife and fork neatly together and pushed her plate away from her. She put her elbows on the table. ‘Which is in New York.’

‘Yes,’ said Sandy. ‘That one.’

‘So you’re moving to the States.’

‘That’s the plan.’

‘Oh.’ She suddenly felt cold, and very sober. ‘When did you say yes?’

‘A few weeks ago.’

‘So you’ve known all along.’

He turned his face away from her. He looked both embarrassed and irritated at being embarrassed. ‘When I got the job, I hadn’t even met you.’

Frieda picked up her glass and took a sip of wine. It tasted sour. It was as if the light had changed and everything looked different.

‘Come with me,’ he said.

‘Like a good woman should.’

‘You’ve got contacts. You can work there just as well as here. We could both begin again, together.’

‘I don’t want to begin again.’

‘I know I should have told you.’

‘I let my guard down,’ said Frieda. ‘I let you into my house, into my life. I told you things I haven’t told anyone else. You were planning this all the time.’

‘With you .’

‘You can’t make plans for me. You knew something about us that I didn’t know.’

‘I didn’t want to lose you.’

‘When are you going?’

‘New Year. In a few weeks. I’ve sold the flat. I’ve found somewhere in Ithaca.’

‘You have been busy.’ She heard her voice, cool, bitter and controlled. She wasn’t sure she liked the sound of it. Really she was feeling hot and weak with distress.

‘I didn’t know what to do,’ he said. ‘Please, my beloved Frieda, come with me. Join me.’

‘You’re asking me to give everything up here and start again in America?’

‘Yes.’

‘How about if I ask you to give up your professorship there and stay with me here?’

He got up and walked to the window, his back to her. He looked out for a few seconds, then turned round. ‘I wouldn’t,’ he said. ‘I can’t.’

‘So?’ said Frieda.

‘Marry me.’

‘Fuck off.’

‘I’m proposing to you, not insulting you.’

‘I should just go.’

‘You haven’t given me an answer.’

‘Are you serious?’ said Frieda. She felt as if the alcohol had hit her hard.

‘Yes.’

‘I have to think about it on my own.’

‘You mean, you might say yes?’

‘I’ll tell you tomorrow.’

When Tanner opened his front door he looked surprised. Detective Chief Inspector Malcolm Karlsson introduced himself.

‘My assistant talked to you,’ said Karlsson.

Tanner nodded and led him through into a dingy front room. It was cold. Tanner got on his knees and fiddled with an electric bar heater that had been placed in the hearth. As he fussed around making tea and serving it, Karlsson looked around the room and remembered going out with his grandparents when he was a child to see their friends, or vaguely distant relations. Even thirty years later the memory gave off a smell of dullness and duty.

‘I’m doing your old job,’ said Karlsson, thinking as he said it that it seemed like a rebuke. Tanner didn’t look like a detective. He didn’t even look like a retired detective. He was wearing an old cardigan and shiny grey trousers and he had shaved himself clumsily, leaving patches of stubble.

Tanner poured tea into two different-sized mugs and handed the large one across. ‘I never planned to stay in Kensal Rise,’ he said. ‘When I took early retirement, we were going to move to the coast. Somewhere away to the east, like Clacton or Frinton. We started to get brochures. Then my wife got ill. It all became a bit too complicated. She’s upstairs. You’ll probably hear her shout for me.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Karlsson.

‘It’s meant to be the men who get ill straight after retiring. But I’m fine. Just knackered.’

‘I spent a few days looking after my mum when she had an operation,’ said Karlsson. ‘It was harder than being a copper.’

‘You don’t sound like a copper,’ said Tanner.

‘What do I sound like?’

‘Different. I guess you went to university.’

‘I did, yes. Does that stop me being one of the lads?’

‘Probably. What did you study?’

‘Law.’

‘Well, that’s a bloody waste of time.’

Karlsson took a sip of his tea. He could see little spots of milk floating around on the surface and there was a slight sour taste.

‘I know why you’re here,’ said Tanner.

‘We’re looking for a missing kid. We drew up some parameters. Age of child, time of day, type of location, means, opportunity, and a name popped up on our computer. Just one. Joanna Vine. Or is it Jo?’

‘Joanna.’

‘My one’s called Matthew Faraday. The papers call him Mattie. I suppose it fits better into a headline. Little Mattie. But his name is Matthew.’

‘She disappeared twenty years ago.’

‘Twenty-two.’

‘And Joanna was taken in Camberwell. This little boy was in Hackney, right?’

‘You’ve been following the story.’

‘You can’t avoid it.’

‘True. Go on, then.’

‘Joanna was in summer. This was winter.’

‘So you’re not convinced?’

Tanner thought for a moment before he replied, and he started to look a little more like the senior detective he had been. When he spoke, he counted points off on his fingers. ‘Convinced?’ he said. ‘Girl, boy. North London, south London. Summer, winter. And then there’s a gap of twenty-two years. What’s that all about? He snatches a child, waits half a lifetime, then takes another. But you think they’re connected. Is there some clue you haven’t told the press?’

‘No,’ said Karlsson. ‘You’re right. There’s no obvious reason at all. I approached it from the other direction. Thousands of children go missing every year. But once you eliminate the teenage runaways, the ones taken by other family members, the accidents, then already we’re down to a very small number. How many children are killed by a stranger every year? Four or five?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Suddenly these two disappearances look like each other. You know how difficult it is to take a child. You need to get the child without a fuss, avoid being seen and then… what? Dispose of the body so that it’s never found or send them abroad or I don’t know what.’

‘Have the press got on to this theory of yours?’

‘No. And I’m not going to help them.’

‘It’s not a fact,’ said Tanner. ‘You can’t base the whole inquiry on it. That was our problem. We were sure it was the family. Because that’s what the numbers tell you. It’s always the family. If the parents are separated it’s the father, or an uncle. The way I remember it, he didn’t have a proper alibi at first, so we spent too much time on him.’

‘Did he have a proper alibi?’

‘Proper enough,’ he said glumly. ‘We thought it was just a matter of making him crack and hoping he hadn’t killed his daughter already. Because that’s what always happens. Except when it doesn’t. But you don’t need me to tell you all this. You’ve read the file.’

‘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.’