Nicci French - Blue Monday

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 so 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.

‘No. I should be.’

‘This is a boyfriend,’ said Josef.

‘No,’ said Frieda. ‘When therapists ask if you’re seeing someone, they mean a therapist. Boyfriends and girlfriends, husbands and wives come and go. Your therapist is the really important relationship.’

‘You sound angry, Frieda,’ said Reuben.

She shook her head. ‘I want to ask you a question,’ she said. ‘I want to ask you one question and then I’ll go away.’

‘Then ask it,’ he said. ‘Do you want to go somewhere private?’

‘I’m fine here,’ said Frieda. She looked down at her plate. It was almost empty. ‘More than anyone else, you’re the person who taught me that my job is to sort out what’s going on in my patient’s head.’

‘That is undeniably your job.’

‘You can’t change your patient’s life. You just have to change the patient’s attitude to that life.’

‘I hope my teaching was a bit more nuanced than that,’ said Reuben.

‘But what about using a patient as a means of helping someone else?’ said Frieda.

‘Which sounds like a strange thing to do.’

‘But is it wrong?’

There was a delay while Reuben stubbed his cigarette out in a saucer and lit another. ‘I know this isn’t a session,’ he said, ‘but, as you know, when a patient asks you a question, what you normally do is try to suggest that the patient already knows the answer and is afraid of it and is trying to pass the responsibility on to the therapist. So, was it worth walking all the way over to Primrose Hill to hear what you knew I was going to say?’

‘I still needed to hear it said out loud,’ said Frieda. ‘And I got a good breakfast.’