Nicci French - Blue Monday

‘They aren’t guesses,’ said Frieda.

‘A mile,’ said Josef. He put his finger on the map on the spot where Dean Reeve lived. He moved it out. ‘A mile?’ he said, again, then traced a circle around the spot. ‘Six miles square. More, I think.’

‘I brought you here to help me,’ said Frieda. ‘Not to tell me what I already know. If it were you, what would you do?’

‘If I steal, I steal equipment. A drill, a sander, sell it for a few pounds. I don’t steal a little child.’

‘But if you did.’

Josef made a helpless gesture. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘A cupboard or a box or a locked room. A place with no people.’

‘There are lots of places with no people around here,’ said Frieda. ‘So? Shall we go for a walk?’

‘Which way?’

‘We don’t know where he is and we don’t know where to look, so it doesn’t matter. I thought of going in a spiral outwards from his house.’

‘Spiral?’ said Josef.

Frieda gestured a spiral with her finger. ‘Like water running into a hole,’ she said. She pointed along the street. ‘This way.’ They started to walk along the edge of a housing estate named after John Ruskin. She looked up at the terraces. More than half of the flats had metal grilles across the doors and windows to seal them. Any of those would be a possible hiding place. At the end of the housing estate there was a gasworks, with rusted chains across the front gate. An old sign on the railings announced that the site was patrolled by dogs. It seemed unlikely. They were now heading north, and at the end of the road they turned right and east alongside a lorry depot and then a scrap-metal yard.

‘It’s like Kiev,’ Josef said. ‘Kiev was like this so I come to London.’ He stopped outside yet another row of closed-down shops. The two of them looked up at the old painted signs on the brick façades: Evans & Johnsons Stationers, J. Jones Stores, the Black Bull. ‘Everybody gone,’ he said.

‘A hundred years ago this was a whole city,’ said Frieda. ‘Down there were the biggest docks in the world. Boats were queuing all the way down to the sea to unload. There were tens of thousands of men working there, and their wives and children. In the war it was bombed and burned. Now it’s like Pompeii, except that people are still trying to live here. It would probably have been better if they’d turned it back into fields and forests and marshes.’

A police car drove past and both Frieda and Josef watched it until it turned the corner.

‘They looking too?’ said Josef.

‘I guess so,’ said Frieda. ‘I don’t really know how they do things.’

As they walked on, Frieda glanced at her map to make sure of the way. One of the things she liked about Josef was that he didn’t talk when it wasn’t necessary. He didn’t feel a need to be clever or to pretend to understand things he didn’t. And when he did say something, he really meant it. They were just passing an empty warehouse when Frieda realized that Josef had stopped and she had walked on without noticing. She walked back to him.

‘Have you seen something?’

‘Why are we doing this?’

‘I told you.’

He took the map from her and looked at it. ‘Where are we?’ he asked.

She prodded at the page. He moved his finger on the map, retracing their progress.

‘This is nothing,’ he said. ‘We pass empty houses, empty buildings, empty church. We don’t go in. Course we don’t go in. We can’t look in every hole, in every room, on the roof, in the rooms under the houses. We’re not looking. Not looking really. We are walking and you tell me about the bombs in the war. Why are you doing this? To feel better?’

‘No,’ said Frieda. ‘To feel worse, probably. I just hoped that if we came here, walked around the streets, we would find something.’

‘The police are looking. They can go into houses, ask questions. That is the job for the police. We being here, we are just…’ Josef searched for the word and waved his hands helplessly.

‘Making a gesture,’ said Frieda. ‘Doing something rather than nothing.’

‘A gesture for what?’

‘But we have to do something. We can’t just sit at home.’

‘Something for what?’ said Josef. ‘If the boy Matthew is lying in the street we fall over him maybe. But if he is dead or he’s locked in a room? Nothing.’

‘You were the one who said it to me, you remember?’ said Frieda. ‘I believed in sitting in a room and talking. You said I should go out and fix people’s problems. It didn’t really work out, did it?’

‘I did not…’ He paused, searching for the words once more. ‘Just going out is not fixing the problem. I don’t just stand in a house to fix the house. I build the wall and put in the pipes and the wires. Just walking in the street is not finding the boy.’

‘The police aren’t finding the boy either,’ said Frieda. ‘Or the woman.’

‘If you’re looking for a fish,’ said Josef, ‘you look where the fish are. You don’t just walk in the fields.’

‘Is that some Ukrainian proverb?’

‘No, it is my idea. But you cannot just walk in the streets. Why do you bring me here to do this? We are like a tourist here.’

Frieda squinted down at the map. She closed it. It had already got damp in the bitter sleet and the pages were ruffled. ‘All right,’ she said.

Breath. Heart. Tongue on stone. Little wheezy sound in chest. Lights in his eyes. Head of fireworks, red and blue and orange. Rockets. Sparks. Flames. They had lit the fire at last. So cold and then so hot. Ice to furnace. Must pull his clothes off, must escape this wild heat. Body melting. Nothing would be left. Just ash. Ash and a bit of bone and nobody would know this had once been Matthew with brown eyes and red hair, a teddy with velvet paws.

On the Underground back, jostled by the evening rush-hour, they didn’t speak at all. As Frieda opened the front door of her house, she heard the phone ringing. She picked it up. It was Karlsson.

‘I don’t have your mobile number,’ he said.

‘I don’t have a mobile,’ Frieda said.

‘I guess you’re not the kind of doctor people need in an emergency.’

‘What’s happening?’

‘That’s what I’m ringing about. I just wanted to let you know that, as of an hour and a half ago, Reeve and partner are back on the street.’

‘You ran out of time?’

‘We could have kept them a bit more, if we really wanted. But isn’t it better if they’re out there? He might make a mistake. He might lead us somewhere.’

Frieda thought for a moment. ‘I wish I believed that,’ she said. ‘It didn’t feel like that when I met him. He seemed like a man who had made up his mind.’

‘If he slips up, we’ll get him.’

‘He’s sure that you’re following him,’ said Frieda. ‘I think he’s probably enjoying it now. We’ve given him power. He knows what we’re going through. I don’t think there’s anything we could do to him, anything we could give him that would be as much fun for him as that.’

‘It’s all right for you,’ said Karlsson. ‘You’ve got your work. You can get on with it.’

‘That’s right,’ said Frieda. ‘It’s fine for me.’

After she had put the phone down Frieda sat for a time, staring at nothing. Then she went upstairs and stared out of her bedroom window at the snow-specked roofs. It was a clear cold night. She ran a bath and lay in it for nearly an hour. Then she got dressed and went to her garret study, where she sat at her drawing board. How long had it been since she had sat here like this, with time for herself? She couldn’t remember. She picked up her soft pencil and held it between her thumb and forefinger, but didn’t draw anything. All she could think of was Matthew, out there somewhere in the fierce cold, perhaps alive and terrified, but probably long dead; of Kathy Ripon, who’d knocked at the wrong door; of Dean and Terry walking away from the police station, free.