Nicci French: Blue Monday

A firework exploded on the horizon and fell through the sky in a flower of colour. A police car passed her, a lorry with its driver high up in his cab, a drunk man veering and tacking up the road, his eyes fixed blindly on some distant point. Matthew was alive. Joanna was alive. Kathy Ripon was missing still and must be dead. Dean Reeve was dead. It was half past four on Christmas morning and Frieda hadn’t bought her Christmas tree. Chloë was going to be cross.

‘I bought this for you weeks ago,’ said Matthew’s mother. She laid a large red fire engine, in its box, by Matthew’s bed. ‘It’s the one you saw in the shop, ages ago. Do you remember? You cried when I said you couldn’t have it, but I went back later and got it.’

‘I don’t think he can really see it,’ said Matthew’s father, mildly.

‘I knew you’d come home. I wanted to be ready for you.’

The little boy opened his eyes and stared. She couldn’t tell if he could see her, or was looking through her, at something else.

‘It’s Christmas. Father Christmas came. We’ll see what he brought you in a bit. I told you he wouldn’t forget. He always knows where the children are. He knew you were here in hospital. He came specially.’

The voice came, reedy and thin: ‘But have I been a good boy?’

‘Have you? Oh. None better.’

Matthew closed his eyes. They sat on either side of him and held his bandaged hands.

Richard Vine and Rose sat together in his small room that smelt stale and was too warm. They were eating brunch and opening their presents to each other – a dressing-gown for him, and for her a bottle of perfume, the same perfume he gave her every Christmas, and she had never had the heart to tell him she didn’t like it and never used it. Later, she would go to her mother and step-father for Christmas dinner – turkey and all the trimmings, though she had been a vegetarian from the age of thirteen, and so would make do with the trimmings. This had been the arrangement ever since her father had left them and Joanna had disappeared.

She kissed her father on his unshaven cheek, smelling the tobacco, the sweet stench of alcohol, the sweat, trying not to draw back. She knew that after she left him today he would sit in front of his TV and drink himself into a stupor. And as for her mother, who’d so resolutely got on with her life without Joanna, refusing to wait in miserable suspension for the daughter she knew was dead, what would she say, what would she do? Rose was very aware that on the other side of this drab family ritual lay the roar of press attention, frantic curiosity and a world wrenched out of its normal order.

‘Thanks,’ she said. She dabbed some of the perfume on her wrists. ‘That’s lovely, Dad.’

All around her were the photos of Joanna. He had never put them away or culled them. Some were faded now, and others slipping in their clip-frames. Rose looked at them, although they were so familiar to her – the wide, anxious smile and dark fringe, the bony knees. The nervous, needy little girl who’d so lodged and grown in her father’s memory, preventing him from ever leading a normal life again. She opened her mouth to speak, though she didn’t know the words.

‘Dad,’ she said. ‘There’s something I need to tell you, before you hear it from someone else. You need to prepare yourself.’ She took a deep breath, put her hand on his.

Tanner poured whisky into two tumblers. Karlsson saw that his hands shook, and were liver-spotted, the hands of an old man. ‘I wanted to tell you myself,’ he said. ‘Before it gets in the papers.’

Tanner handed him one of the glasses.

‘Merry Christmas,’ said Karlsson.

Tanner shook his head. ‘We’re not having much of a Christmas this year,’ he said. ‘My wife used to do all that. We’ll sit up in the bedroom and watch the TV.’ He lifted the glass. ‘To a result.’

They clinked glasses and both took a gulp.

‘Half a result,’ said Karlsson. ‘One woman is still missing. She’ll never come home.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘The press won’t care, though. She’s only an adult. I already know what the headlines are going to be. “The Best Christmas Present of All”. There’s going to be a press conference. I’d like you to be there.’

‘It’s your moment,’ said Tanner. ‘You deserve it. You got two missing children back alive. That’s more than most coppers achieve in a lifetime. How the hell did you manage it?’

‘It’s a bit difficult to explain.’ Karlsson paused for a moment as if he still had to get it ordered in his mind. ‘I met this psychiatrist who was seeing Reeve’s brother. His twin brother. She learned about the inside of this guy’s head, about his dreams, and somehow this tipped her off. In some way.’

Tanner narrowed his eyes, as if he thought his leg was being pulled. ‘His dreams,’ he said. ‘And you’re going to say all of this at the press conference?’

Karlsson took a sip of his whisky and held it for a moment in his mouth so that it stung his gums and his tongue. Then he swallowed it. ‘My boss wasn’t particularly receptive to that aspect of the inquiry,’ he said. ‘I believe that at the press conference we’ll be stressing the effectiveness of my team, the co-operation of other services, the response from the public and from the media, and the lessons it gives us all about staying vigilant. You know. The usual.’

‘And the psychiatrist. What does she have to say about that?’

Karlsson gave a slow smile. ‘She’s a bit of a handful,’ he said. ‘She’s not someone who takes no for an answer. But she doesn’t want the attention.’

‘You mean the credit.’

‘If you like.’

Tanner gestured towards the whisky bottle.

‘I’d better go,’ Karlsson said.

‘One thing,’ said Tanner. ‘Why didn’t she run away?’

‘From what?’ said Karlsson. ‘She didn’t know anything else. It was her home. I’ve got a feeling it still is, in a way. We’re all meant to be happy about it, but I’m not sure we’ve really got her back.’

In the doorway, Tanner started to say something that sounded like ‘thank you’ when he was stopped by a thumping from upstairs. ‘She has a stick,’ he said. ‘Like those bells you call a butler with.’

Karlsson pulled the door closed behind him.

‘This we call holubsti in my country,’ said Josef. ‘The country of Ukraine. And this is pickled fish, which you should catch in the ice but I got from my shop in absence of time.’ He cast a reproachful look at Frieda. ‘I have here some pyrogies , some with potato, some with sauerkraut and some with prune.’

‘This is amazing.’ Olivia was looking hung-over and dazed. She was wearing a purple silk dress that shone in the candlelight, giving her a voluptuous look, like a film star of the fifties. Beside her sat Paz, who was wearing a very short pink dress and bows in her hair that on anyone else would have looked absurd but only made her seem more luscious than ever.

‘My friend and landlord Reuben make you this pampushky .’

Reuben lifted up his glass of vodka and took an unsteady bow.

‘And above all we have the kutya , which is wheat and honey and poppy seeds and nuts. This is essential. With it we may say, “Joy, Earth, Joy.” ’ He paused. ‘Joy, Earth, Joy,’ he repeated.

‘Joy, Earth, Joy,’ said Chloë, loud and clear. Her face was shining. She moved a bit closer to Josef, who beamed at her approvingly. She giggled and smirked, and Frieda glanced at Olivia, but Olivia was paying no attention to her daughter’s smitten behaviour. She was prodding her fork into the dumplings and pastries that were heaped on plates all around the table.