Nicci French: Blue Monday

‘How long did this all take, for goodness’ sake?’

‘Many hours without stoppage. Because Frieda is my friend.’

‘Your friend Frieda didn’t buy a tree. Or crackers,’ said Chloë.

‘Frieda is here, you know, and Frieda was busy,’ said Frieda. She felt heavy with tiredness, and was regarding the scene as if from a distance. She wondered what Kathy Ripon’s parents were doing right now. This Christmas marked their new life, without their daughter. The first of many barren days.

‘I can tell you a joke, never mind crackers,’ said Reuben, leering at Paz, who ignored him. ‘Real Madrid, one. Surreal Madrid, fish. No? Oh, well.’

‘We make toasts,’ said Josef, who seemed to have taken on the role of host in Frieda’s house.

‘Fuck all errant husbands,’ said Olivia, tossing her vodka into her mouth and over her face.

‘Don’t be too hard on errant husbands,’ said Reuben. ‘They’re just men, weak and foolish men.’

‘To wander far from home,’ said Josef.

‘Is that a toast?’ asked Paz. ‘I shall drink to that.’ Which she did, with energy.

‘Poor Josef,’ said Chloë, kindly.

‘This is delicious, Josef. Should I be eating the sweet and savoury together like this?’ asked Olivia.

‘You’re quiet,’ said Reuben to Frieda.

‘Yes. Talking feels too hard.’

‘Has it occurred to you that everyone here is missing someone?’

‘I suppose you’re right.’

‘What a collection of left-behinds and misfits we are.’

Frieda looked round the table at the candlelit scene. Paz, sweet and sultry in her ridiculous ribbons; Josef, with his wild hair and sad dark eyes; Chloë, with her flushed cheeks and scarred arms; Olivia, a drunk and sultry mess, spilling her words; and Reuben, of course, ironic about his own downfall, a dandy tonight in his beautiful embroidered waistcoat. Everyone was talking over each other; no one was listening.

‘We could do worse,’ she said, lifting her glass.

It was the nearest she could get to making a toast or welcoming them into her home.

He rolled off her and Carrie lay back in the dark, panting. She felt the dampness between her legs oozing out on to the sheet. She shifted away from it slightly. She felt his weight beside her. She waited for a moment. She had to say something but she had to wait a minute or two. Just so long as he didn’t fall asleep. She counted to fifty before she spoke.

‘That was wonderful,’ she said.

‘It was, wasn’t it?’

‘The best Christmas ever. It’s been so long, Alan, since we’ve made love like this. There were times I thought we never would again. But now!’ She gave a blurred giggle, like a pigeon cooing. ‘It’s been wonderful.’

‘I’m making up for lost time.’

He laid his hand on her naked thigh. She turned and smiled dreamily at him, running her hands down his spine. ‘There’s something I have to say.’

‘Go on.’

‘Don’t take this the wrong way. I know what you’ve been through. I know how horrible it’s been, how unsettling in so many different ways. I’ve tried to support you as much as I possibly could, and I’ve never, not for one minute, stopped loving you – though sometimes I wanted to shake you and scream at you. But it’s over now, and we’re going to get our life back, Alan, do you hear me? We both deserve that. We’ve earned our happiness. We’re going to think about adopting, because I know I want a child, and you’d be a wonderful father. I know what you said before about needing to have your own child, but maybe that’s changed, after everything you’ve been through. What matters is that we’ll love the child and they’ll love us.’

She paused, stroked his thick grey hair. ‘And also, at some point you’re going to have to start seeing people again. We haven’t seen friends for ages. I can’t remember when anyone last came here. I understand you want to be alone for a few days, now the nightmare’s over, but it can’t go on for ever. You’ll have to go back to work properly. You have to go back out into the world. I mean, if it’s necessary I suppose you could see Dr Klein again.’ She paused. ‘Alan. Alan? Are you asleep?’

Dean Reeve mumbled something he hoped would sound as if he had been half asleep and hadn’t heard her. And if she suspected he was pretending to be asleep as a way of avoiding an awkward conversation, well, that was just as good. He couldn’t have expected to keep this up for more than a few days anyway. Even as it was, it had worked out far better than he had ever hoped: not for a second had she doubted him. And she’d been so eager. Quite a passionate creature, to his surprise. But it was just a little holiday for him. He would leave and no one would ever know why. Call it what you will – a mid-life crisis, the trauma of events, a parting of the ways, a wake-up call – what mattered was that he was free and he could start again. He turned, as if in sleep, or as if in half-sleep or in faked sleep, and put his arm over her, feeling her breast, damp with sweat. He thought about poor Terry. Oh, well, he’d had the best of her. And she’d be all right, probably, if she said the things people wanted to hear. And then there was that other girl, the one they hadn’t found, the one they would never find now, under the London streets, nothing to say, and even if she could speak from the grave, it couldn’t touch him. Nothing could touch him. Even that Frieda Klein, whose slender fingers he had once felt against his and whose cool dark eyes had looked right inside him, had no power over him now. He was remade and could go where he wanted, be whom he liked. Few on this earth are given such permission and granted such liberty. He smiled into Carrie’s soft shoulder, smiled into the velvet night, and felt himself slowly sink into a dream about darkness and warmth and safety.

On the day before New Year’s Eve, an icy, windless day with frost on the car windows and the rooftops, Frieda woke even earlier than usual. She lay in the darkness for a long time before rising, dressing, going downstairs to make herself a pot of tea, which she drank standing by the back door, looking out onto her small patio where everything stood in frosted stillness. In four days’ time, she would return to work. A new year: she did not want to make any resolutions. She did not want to give up anything else.

For many days now, as the newspapers and television channels had celebrated Matthew Faraday’s return, she had been consumed by the thought of Kathy Ripon, the one they had not been able to save, the one for whom she was responsible. Night after night, she had dreamed of her, and waking she held the picture of the young woman in her head. She had had a nice face, shrewd and self-mocking. She had been sent unwittingly to her fate, over the threshold of Dean Reeve’s house, sucked in by that black hole. What had it been like for her? What had it been like when she realized that it was all over and that nobody would come to save her? The thought of it made Frieda nauseous but she made herself think of it, over and over again, as if by doing so she could take some of Kathy Ripon’s pain and fear away. Two lost children had been found, but you can’t trade lives. They are too dear for that. Frieda knew she would never forgive herself, and she knew too that the story wouldn’t be over until Kathy’s body was found and her parents were allowed to lay her to rest and start on the process of their great mourning. And that if it hadn’t been found yet, it probably never would be found.

At last, turning from her station by the window, she made up her mind and then she acted swiftly, pulling on her long warm coat and her gloves, leaving the house briskly, taking the Underground to Paddington and then boarding the train. It was almost empty, just a few people with suitcases. She didn’t want to think too hard about what she was about to do. In truth, she didn’t really know what she was about to do.