Nicci French: Blue Monday

Frieda stood up. She gazed down at Terry for a few seconds. ‘I wanted to prepare you. Your sister is outside to see you.’

For a moment, there was a tingling silence in the little room. She could feel everyone’s eyes on her.

‘What the fuck?’ Karlsson said.

‘Terry?’ Frieda said softly.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I’ll call her, shall I?’

Frieda’s eyes were still fixed on Terry, but Terry’s face hadn’t changed. She just stared at Frieda, impassive. Frieda opened the door and walked swiftly down the deserted corridor to the waiting room. ‘You can come in now, Rose.’

‘This is not a bloody West End show. You are not in charge here.’

Karlsson was shouting, walking up and down the room and bellowing. His face was white with rage.

‘What do you mean, suddenly announcing it, like a conjuror pulling a rabbit out of a hat?’

‘I didn’t want a police officer to tell her. I wanted to break it gently.’

‘You did, did you?’

‘Why are you so angry?’

‘Jesus, where do I begin?’ Karlsson suddenly stopped his tramping up and down the room and folded into a chair. He rubbed his face violently. ‘How did you know?’

‘I didn’t really know,’ said Frieda. ‘I just kept thinking about her going home, about what home meant for her. And that they didn’t kill Matthew. Even Dean. He didn’t kill him. And then I saw her when she was sleeping.’

‘Sleeping?’

‘I came into the interview room when she had fallen asleep. She had laid her face on her folded hands. Rose once told me how Joanna went to sleep just like that, her hands as if in prayer and her face on top of them. There are some things you can’t erase – a certain smile, perhaps; a little gesture; the way you fall asleep. So I had to know, I had to test it. I got her DNA in the tissue and I got Rose’s.’

‘She looked so much older. The few records we have of her say she’s older, nearer Dean’s age. She can’t be in her twenties still.’

‘She’s been poor. Poor and abused all her life.’

‘You’re going to tell me she’s a victim.’

‘She is a victim.’

‘She’s also a perpetrator. She helped Dean snatch Matthew, remember.’

‘I know.’

‘He would have died. She would have helped murder him. And where’s Kathy Ripon? She’s not saying.’

‘I don’t think she knows.’

‘Oh, don’t you? On what evidence? You feel it, is that it?’

‘I suppose so. And it would make a kind of sense. It was a way of becoming a mother.’

‘She was under my nose all that time,’ Karlsson said.

‘It’s a triumph,’ said Frieda. ‘You’re already a hero for finding one lost child. Now you’ve found two. Matthew and Joanna.’

‘She’s not a lost child.’

‘Oh yes she is. And she’s the one I really feel sorry for.’

Karlsson flinched as if he was suffering from a blinding headache. ‘It was you,’ he said. ‘You were the one who found them both.’

Frieda stepped forward and put her hand on Karlsson’s cheek. He closed his eyes for a moment. ‘You know what I want?’

‘What?’ said Karlsson, softly. ‘Recognition, love, like the rest of us.’

‘No,’ said Frieda. ‘I’d like to sleep. I’d like to go home and sleep for about a thousand years and then get back to my patients. I don’t want to go into a press conference and explain how I used a patient to find a murderer. I’ve got things I need to think about and I need to do it in private. I want to crawl back into my burrow. You’ve found Matthew. You can do a DNA test – a legal one – and show that Terry is Joanna. And Dean Reeve is dead.’ There was a silence. Then she added, ‘But if you’re thinking of charging Joanna with murder, making her the scapegoat now that Dean has killed himself, I’ll think again.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘Or even of complicity.’

‘She’s guilty and you know it.’

‘I know that the crowd out there is howling for her blood – and that, being a woman, she’ll be treated even worse than if she were a man. And I also know that she was abducted when she could barely talk; that she was psychologically abused and brainwashed, that she cannot therefore be held responsible for her actions, and that if you think of putting her on trial for what she did as the victim of a crime against her that continued for more than two decades, you’ll see me in court as an expert witness for the defence.’

‘Don’t you think she’s responsible for what she did?’

‘Just try me,’ Frieda said.

Karlsson looked at his watch. ‘Well, it’s Christmas Day.’

‘So it is.’ Frieda stood up.

‘I’ll get someone to drive you home.’

‘I’d rather walk.’

‘It’s the middle of the night and it’s miles.’

‘That’s OK.’

‘And it’s freezing out there.’

‘That’s OK too.’

It was more than OK: it was good. Frieda wanted to be alone in the dark and the ice of the city she loved; she wanted to walk until her body and mind were exhausted. Her snug house felt like a distant goal, a place she had to achieve through enormous physical effort.

When she had led Rose in to see her sister, she had held on to the young woman’s arm and felt the violent trembling that seized her entire body. Rose had stood just inside the doorway and stared with frightening, frightened intensity at the figure who sat before her.

Twenty-two years previously her skinny, dark-haired, gap-toothed little sister had dawdled behind her on the way home and suddenly disappeared, swallowed up by cracks in the pavement. She had haunted Rose. Her thin pale face, her pleading, lisping child’s voice, calling her name, had entered her dreams. She had tried to imagine her as she would be at each stage of her life thereafter – at ten, as an adolescent, as a young adult. Computer-generated images of her face had told her what Joanna would have become. She had looked for her on streets, glimpsed her in crowds, known she was dead and never let her go.

How many times had Rose imagined this reunion? How they would gasp, take faltering steps towards each other, stare into each other’s eyes, clasp each other close; the words that would spill out, the love and comfort. And now here was an overweight, middle-aged woman with bottle blonde hair and a look of apathetic indifference, even contempt, on her face, as if she was a stranger.

Frieda could see Rose’s disbelief, then a sudden terrified recognition that this actually was Joanna. What was it? Perhaps the eyes, the shape of the chin, a turn of the head.

‘Jo-Jo?’ she said, in a trembling voice.

But Terry – Joanna – didn’t react.

‘Joanna, is it you? It’s me.’

‘I don’t know what you’re on about.’

‘I’m Rose. Rosie,’ she said, on a sob. ‘Do you know me?’ She sounded as though she didn’t know herself.

‘My name’s Terry.’

Rose was quivering with distress. She turned to Frieda briefly, then back again. ‘You’re my sister. Your name’s Joanna. You were taken away when you were little. Don’t you remember? We looked and looked. You must remember. But now you’re back.’

Joanna looked at Frieda. ‘Have I got to listen to this?’

‘There’s time,’ Frieda said, to both Rose and Joanna. Neither seemed to hear her.

Frieda walked past the small park, still and white in the moonlight. Past the church squeezed into the fork of two roads, with its huddled gravestones. Under the plane trees, knobbled and bare. Under the strings of Christmas lights, shining on the empty roads. Smashed phone boxes. A rubbish bin that had been turned on its side, leaking its viscous mess onto the pristine scattering of snow. Rusty railings. Boarded doors. Parked cars all in a row. Empty office blocks, all the computers and phones at rest for the holidays. The shops with their graffitied metal shutters. The houses with their blind windows behind which people slept, snored, muttered, dreamed.