Nicci French: Blue Monday

Three years after Joanna disappeared, they moved to a smaller house a mile or so away, nearer to Rosie’s school. It had three bedrooms, but the third one was tiny, like a box room. Deborah Vine waited until Rosie had left in the morning before she packed away Joanna’s things. She did it methodically, lifting soft piles of vests and shirts into boxes, folding up dresses and skirts and tying them into bin bags, trying not to look at the pink plastic dolls with their long manes of nylon hair and their fixed, staring eyes. In the new computer-enhanced image, Joanna looked quite composed, as if her childish anxiety had slipped away from her. Her chipped tooth had been replaced with an undamaged one.

Rosie started her periods. She shaved her legs. She fell in love for the first time, with a boy who barely knew she existed. She wrote her diary under her bedcovers and locked it with a silver key. She watched her mother dating a stranger with a bristly brown beard and pretended she didn’t mind. She poured her father’s drink down the sink, though she knew it would do no good. She went to her grandmother’s funeral and read a poem by Tennyson in a quiet voice no one could really hear. She cut her hair short and started going out with the boy she had been so smitten with when she was younger, but he couldn’t live up to her idea of him. She kept a small pile of printouts in her underwear drawer: Joanna at six, seven, eight, nine. Joanna at thirteen. She thought her sister looked exactly like she did, and for some reason this made her feel worse.

‘She’s dead.’ Deborah’s voice was flat, quite calm.

‘Have you come all this way to tell me that?’

‘I thought we owed each other at least that much, Richard. Let her go.’

‘You don’t know she’s dead. You’re just abandoning her.’

‘No.’

‘Because you’ve found a new husband and now…’ His glance at her pregnant belly was full of disgust. ‘Now you’re going to have another happy family.’

‘Richard.’

‘And forget all about her.’

‘That’s not fair. It’s been eight years. Life has to go on, for all of us.’

‘ Life has to go on . Are you going to tell me that this is what Joanna would have wanted?’

‘Joanna was five when we lost her.’

‘When you lost her.’

Deborah stood up, thin legs on high heels and a round stomach pushing at her shirt. He could see her belly button. Her mouth was a thin, trembling line. ‘You bastard,’ she said.

‘And now you’re deserting her.’

‘You want me to destroy myself as well?’

‘Why not? Anything rather than life has to go on. But don’t worry. I’m still waiting.’

When Rosie went to university she called herself Rosalind Teale, taking her step-father’s name. She didn’t tell her father. She still loved him, though she was scared by his chaotic, unchanging grief. She didn’t want anyone to say: ‘Rosie Vine? Why does that ring a bell?’ Even though there was less and less chance of that. Joanna had melted into the past, was a wisp of memory now, a forgotten celebrity, a one-hit wonder. Sometimes, Rosie wondered if her sister was just a dream.

Deborah Teale – Vine, as was – prayed secretly, fiercely, for a son, not a daughter. But first Abbie and then Lauren arrived. She crouched over their baskets at nights to hear them breathe; she clutched at their hands. She wouldn’t let them out of her sight. They reached Joanna, they overtook her and they left her behind. In the attic, the boxes of Joanna’s clothes stood unopened.

The case was never actually closed. Nobody made a decision. But there was less and less to report. Officers were reassigned. Meetings became more sporadic, then merged into other meetings, and then the case wasn’t mentioned at all.

Rosie, Rosie. Wait for me!

It was ten to three in the morning. There were four people walking across Fitzroy Square. A young couple, huddled together in the wind, had made their way up from Soho where they had been at a club. For them, Sunday night was coming gradually to an end. Though they hadn’t said it to each other, they were delaying the moment when they had to decide whether they were getting into separate cabs, or into the same cab. A dark-skinned woman in a brown raincoat and a transparent polythene hat tied under her chin was shuffling north along the east side of the square. For her it was Monday morning. She was going to an office on Euston Road, to empty bins and vacuum floors in the dark early morning for people she never saw.

The fourth person was Frieda Klein and for her it was neither Sunday night nor Monday morning but something in between. As she stepped into the square, the wind hit her full on. She had to push her hair away from her face so that she could see. Over the previous week the leaves on the plane trees had turned from red to gold but now the wind and rain had shaken them free and they were rippling around her like a sea. What she really wanted was to have London to herself. This was the closest she could get to that.

She stopped for a moment, undecided. Which way should she go? North, across Euston Road to Regent’s Park? That would be deserted all right, too early even for the runners. Sometimes in summer Frieda would go there in the middle of the night, climb over the fence and head into the darkness, look at the glitter on the water of the lake, listen to the sounds from the zoo. Not tonight, though. She didn’t want to pretend that she wasn’t in London. Not south either. That would take her across Oxford Street into Soho. Some nights she would lose herself in the oddity of the creatures who came out or stuck around in the middle of the night, the dodgy little cab firms who’d take you home for whatever they could get you to pay, the clusters of police, delivery vans dodging the crowds and the congestion charge, and, more and more, people who were still eating, still drinking, whatever time it was.

Not tonight. Not today. Not now with a new week just about to wake itself up reluctantly and blearily get going. A week that would have to face up to November, to darkness and rain, with only more darkness and more rain to come. It was a time when you ought to sleep and wake again in March or April or May. Sleep. Frieda had the sudden suffocating sense that she was surrounded by people lying asleep, alone or in pairs, in flats and houses and hostels and hotels, dreaming, watching films inside their heads. She didn’t want to be one of them. She turned east, past the closed shops and restaurants. There was a flash of activity as she crossed Tottenham Court Road, with its night buses and taxis, but then it was quiet once more, and she could hear the clatter of her footsteps as she walked along past anonymous mansion blocks, shabby hotels, university buildings, even some houses that had improbably survived. It was a place where many people lived but it didn’t feel like it. Did it even have a name?

Two police officers sitting in a parked patrol car saw her as she approached Gray’s Inn Road. They looked at her with a bored kind of concern. This wasn’t necessarily a safe area for a woman to walk alone at night. They couldn’t quite make her out. Not a prostitute. She wasn’t particularly young, mid-thirties maybe. Long dark hair. Medium height. Her long coat hid her figure. She didn’t look like someone on her way back from a party.

‘Didn’t fancy spending the whole night with him,’ said one.

The other grinned. ‘I wouldn’t kick her out of bed on a night like this,’ he said. He wound down the window as she approached. ‘Everything all right, miss?’ he asked, as she passed.

She just pushed her hands tightly into the pockets of her coat and walked on without giving any sign that she had heard.