Blue Monday

Chapter Seventeen

‘The boss is going to be spitting mad,’ said DC Foreman, gloomily.

There were several of them in the operations room, although Karlsson was out and not expected until later. They were thumbing through the morning’s papers, where the Matthew fever showed no sign of abating. In one tabloid, there were nine pages given over to him – several photographs of him, interviews with people who knew him or claimed to know him, pieces about psychological profiling, a long feature about Matthew’s home life. There were speculations about the state of the Faradays’ marriage. Sources ‘close to the heart of the operation’ had said as much.

‘Who the fuck was that, then?’

‘They’re flying kites. They know it’s usually the dad or the step-dad.’

‘He was miles away. There’s no way he could be a suspect. Why would they print such a thing?’

‘Why do you think? Matthew’s money. I read somewhere that papers put on tens of thousands in circulation if they have front-page news about him. This could run and run.’

‘Blood money.’

‘Easy to say. Who here’s been offered money yet?’

‘What – for leaking information?’

‘You will be. Just wait.’

‘The boss is not going to be happy.’

‘Nor his boss. I know for a fact that the commissioner is taking a very personal interest in the case.’

‘Crawford’s just a fucker.’

‘A fucker who can make life pretty uncomfortable.’

‘Karlsson’s the real copper. If anyone can solve this case, he can.’

‘Then it looks like no one can, doesn’t it?’

Twenty-two years: but when Karlsson told Deborah Teale who he was he saw the hope in her eyes, and the fear as well. She put two fingers on her lower lip and leaned against the door jamb as if the earth was shifting under her.

‘There really is no news about your daughter,’ he said quickly.

‘No, of course not,’ she said. She gave a small, shaky laugh, pressing a hand against her chest. ‘You said that when you called. It’s just …’ And she trailed to a halt because what was there to say, after all? It’s just that … how do you stop waiting, how do you stop hoping and dreading? Karlsson couldn’t stop himself thinking of what it must be like for her, even after all these years. The discovery of a little body in a ditch would be a relief to her. At least she would know, and there would be a grave where she could lay flowers.

‘Could I come in?’ he asked her, and she nodded and stood back to let him enter.

Everyone’s house has a different smell. Tanner’s had been musty, faintly rank, as if the windows hadn’t been opened for months, an odour that caught in the back of your throat, like old flower water. Deborah Teale’s house smelt of Flash and Ajax and polish and, under that, fried food. She led him into the front room, apologizing for mess that wasn’t there. All round the room he saw photographs, but none of Joanna.

‘I just wanted to ask you some questions.’ He eased himself into a chair that was too low for him, trapping him in its softness.

‘Questions? What’s left to ask?’

Karlsson didn’t know the answer to that. He found himself wondering why he was here, revisiting a tragedy that had almost certainly nothing to do with Matthew Faraday. He looked at the woman opposite him, her narrow face and thin shoulders. He had checked her in the file. She must be fifty-three now. Some people – for instance, his former wife’s new boyfriend – spread and solidified into a comfortable version of themselves as they got older, but Deborah Teale looked as though the years had pressed down on her, rubbing away her youth and softness.

‘I’ve been looking at the case again.’

‘Why?’

‘Because we never solved it,’ he replied. It wasn’t a lie but it wasn’t the whole truth either.

‘Joanna’s dead,’ Deborah Teale said. ‘Oh, I keep on imagining that she might be out there somewhere, but really I know she’s dead, and I’m sure you do too. She probably died the day we lost her. Why do you need to rake over old ground? If you find her body, then come and tell me. You won’t find her killer now, will you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You probably have to go through unsolved crimes every so often to satisfy some bureaucratic rule or other. But I’ve said everything there is to say. I’ve said it over and over again. Until I thought I’d go mad. Do you have any idea of what it feels like to lose a child?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘That’s something,’ she said. ‘At least you’re not telling me you know how I feel.’

‘You described Joanna as an anxious little girl.’

‘Yes.’ Deborah Teale frowned at him.

‘And she knew not to trust strangers?’

‘Of course.’

‘Yet she disappeared without a sound in the middle of the afternoon, on a busy street.’

‘Yes. As if she’d been a dream.’

Or as if she trusted the person who took her, thought Karlsson.

‘At some point, you have to tell yourself it’s over. Do you see? You have to. I saw you looking at the photos when you came in. I know what you were thinking, of course: that there were none of Joanna. You probably thought that was a bit unhealthy.’

‘Not at all,’ said Karlsson, truthfully. He was a great believer in denial. In his experience, that was how people stayed sane.

‘That’s Rosie, and that’s my husband, George. And my two younger children, Abbie and Lauren. I wept and I prayed and I mourned, and then at last I said goodbye and I moved on and I don’t want to go back again. I owe it to my new family. Does that sound callous to you?’

‘No.’

‘It does to some people.’ Her mouth twisted bitterly.

‘You mean your ex-husband?’

‘Richard thinks I’m a monster.’

‘Do you still see him?’

‘Is that what this is really about? You still think he did it?’

Karlsson looked at the woman opposite him, her gaunt face and her bright eyes. He liked her. ‘I don’t think anything, really. Except it hasn’t been solved.’

‘I gather his place is like a shrine. Saint Joanna amid the whisky bottles. I don’t suppose that means anything, though.’

It didn’t. In Karlsson’s experience, murderers were often sentimental or narcissistic people. He could easily imagine a father murdering his daughter and then weeping over her with tears of drunken, maudlin self-pity.

‘Do you ever see him now?’

‘Not for years. Unlike poor Rosie. I try to persuade her to keep away from him but she somehow feels responsible for him. She’s too kind-hearted for her own good. I wish –’ She stopped.

‘Yes?’

But she shook her head violently. ‘I don’t know what I was going to say. I just wish. You know.’

Richard Vine insisted on coming to the police station rather than seeing Karlsson at his flat. He had put on a suit, shiny with age and tight around his waist and chest, and a white shirt done up to the collar, constricting his Adam’s apple. Above it his face looked pouchy and his eyes were faintly bloodshot. His hands trembled when he took the mug of coffee. He gulped at it.

‘If there are no new clues, what’s this about?’

‘I’m reviewing the case,’ Karlsson replied carefully. He wished that he was interviewing Richard Vine in his own home: you can tell a great deal from someone’s surroundings, even when they try to prepare them in advance for visitors. He was probably ashamed to let strangers see it.

‘You lot spent the whole investigation trying to get me to confess. Meanwhile the real bastard got away.’ He paused, dragged the back of his hand across his mouth. ‘Have you been to see her as well, or is it just me?’

Karlsson didn’t answer. He felt oppressed by the grief and mess of the lives he was visiting. Why was he talking to this man? On a whim, baseless intuition; out of hopelessness and because he had no real clues. Matthew Faraday and Joanna Vine, two cases separated by twenty-two years and joined together by nothing more than the fact that they were the same age and had vanished without trace in the middle of the day, near a sweet shop.

‘She’s the one who lost her. She was supposed to be looking after her and she let a nine-year-old kid do it for her. And then she just gave up on her. Packed up her pictures and put them all in a box, moved house, married Mr Respectable, forgot about me and Joanna. Life has to go on. That’s what she came to me and said. Life has to go on. Well, I’m not giving up on our daughter.’

Karlsson listened, his head propped on one hand and his pencil describing useless doodles over his opened notepad. It sounded like he’d said this too often, to whoever at the bar would listen to him.

‘Would you describe Joanna as a trusting child?’ he asked, just as he’d asked Deborah Teale.

‘She was a little princess.’

‘But did she trust people?’

‘You can’t trust anyone in this world. I should have told her that.’

‘Would she have trusted a stranger?’

A strange expression came into Richard Vine’s face, cautious and speculative. ‘I don’t know,’ he said at last. ‘Perhaps. Perhaps not. She was only five, for God’s sake. It ruined my life, you know. One day things were going OK and then – well, it was like pulling on one of those bits of knitting that Rosie’s always doing when she comes to see me. Everything simply comes undone and in just a few moments nothing’s left to show anything was ever there.’ He looked at Karlsson and for a second the detective saw in his face the man he had once been. ‘That’s why I can’t forgive her. Things didn’t unravel for her like they did for me. She should have suffered more. She didn’t pay the right price.’

At the end of the interview, standing to leave, he said, ‘If you see Rosie, tell her to come and see me. At least she hasn’t deserted her old dad.’

The first punch missed his jaw and landed on his neck. The second was in his stomach. Even as he staggered back, putting his hands in front of his face, Alec Faraday was struck by how silent it all was. He could hear a plane in the sky above him and the traffic on the main road to his right – he thought he could even hear a radio playing in the distance – but the men didn’t make a sound, except their breathing was heavy, almost like a grunt every time they landed a punch.

There were five of them. They had hoods up; one was wearing a balaclava. He fell to his knees and then to the ground, trying to ball himself up against their blows, trying to protect his face. He felt a boot hard against his ribs and another on his thigh. Someone hacked him viciously in the groin. Somewhere he heard something crack. His mouth was full of liquid, stuff he was spitting out. Pain was like a river gushing through him. He saw the frosty Tarmac glinting beneath him and then closed his eyes. There was no point in struggling. Didn’t they understand that it would be a relief to be dead?

At last someone spoke. ‘Fucking nonce.’

‘Paedo bastard.’

There was a hawking sound and something wet landed on his neck. There was another blow but now it seemed to be happening to someone else. He heard steps receding.

He had eaten a bit of potato mush with gravy because he couldn’t hold it in his mouth any longer, though he had spat out most of it and it was still on the floor, like sick. There was a chicken leg on the floor as well and it was smelling funny now. He had eaten some spaghetti hoops because he was crying and it just went down him and he couldn’t help it. The room was full of the smell of rotting food and of his own body. He put his head down and sniffed his skin and it was sour. He licked at it and he didn’t like the taste of himself.

But he had found out that if he stood on tiptoe on the mattress and wiggled his head under the stiff blind, he could manage to get under it and then he could see out of the window. Just the bottom corner. All smeary and then clouded with his breath too. If he put his forehead against the glass, it was so cold it made him ache. He could see sky. Today it was blue and hard and made his eyeballs jump. There was a roof opposite that was white and glittering and it had a pigeon on it that was looking at him. If he strained, he could just see the road. It wasn’t like the road where he lived when he was Matthew. Everything was broken. Everything was empty. Everyone had run away because they knew bad things were coming.

‘I don’t remember. I really can’t remember. Don’t you see? I don’t know what I know myself and what I’ve been told since and what I made up to comfort myself and what I’ve dreamed about. Everything is muddled up. It’s useless to ask me. I’m no help to you. I’m sorry.’

The woman opposite him was apologetic. Karlsson had seen photographs of Rosie Teale as a young child and now here she was at thirty-one. There is something strange about fast-forwarding to adulthood: her dark hair pulled tightly back from her thin, triangular face, bare of makeup; her dark eyes, which seemed too large for her face; the pale lips, slightly chapped; the bony, ringless hands that lay plaited in her lap. She looked both younger and older than her years and slightly malnourished, Karlsson thought. ‘I know. You were nine years old. But I just wonder if there’s anything, anything at all, that you’ve thought about since you were last interviewed by the police. Anything you saw or heard or – I don’t know – smelt, sensed. Anything. She was there and then she wasn’t, and in those few seconds there must have been something.’

‘I know. And sometimes I think …’ She stopped.

‘Yes?’

‘I think I do know something, but I don’t know I know it – if that doesn’t sound stupid.’

‘No, not at all.’

‘But it’s no good. I don’t know what it is and the more I try to catch it the more it disappears. It’s probably some illusion anyway. I’m trying to find something that was never there in the first place, just because I’m so desperate to find it. Or if it was ever there, it’s long gone. My mind feels a bit like one of your crime scenes: at first I refused to visit it at all, I literally couldn’t bear to, and then I went over it with muddy boots so many times that there’s nothing left.’

‘You’ll tell me if anything does occur to you?’

‘Of course.’ Then she said, ‘Is this anything to do with the little boy who’s gone missing, Matthew Faraday?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘Why else would you be here now, after all this time?’

Karlsson suddenly felt he ought to say something. ‘You were only nine. No one in their right mind would ever blame you.’

She smiled at him. ‘Then I’m not in my right mind.’