Blue Monday

Chapter Thirty-one

There was a ring at the door. Dean Reeve didn’t even turn his head. He was expecting it. He stood, and ran up the stairs to Terry, who was painting the little room in clumsy white strokes. She had almost done: just a few square feet were left unpainted. He stroked her hair. ‘All right?’ he said.

‘Course.’

‘You’d better be.’

‘I said I am.’ The bell rang again. ‘Aren’t you going to answer it?’

‘They’re not going away. You get that finished. Quickly now.’

He walked down the stairs and opened the door. It wasn’t who he was expecting. Standing on his doorstep was a young woman. She wore rimless spectacles and her brown hair was tied up with just a few strands spilling over her forehead. She was dressed in a black suede jacket with blue jeans and leather boots that almost reached her knees. She was carrying a leather briefcase. She smiled. ‘Are you Dean Reeve?’ she said.

‘Who are you?’

‘I’m sorry just to barge in on you. My name is Kathy Ripon and I’m here to make you an offer. I work for a university and we’re doing research into people we choose virtually at random. All I want to do is to give you a questionnaire and go through it with you. It’s a simple personality test. It would just take half an hour of your time, a bit more maybe. I’d do it with you. And then we would, of course, recompense you for your time. My employers will pay you a hundred pounds.’ She smiled. ‘All for filling out a simple form. Which I’ll help you with.’

‘I haven’t got the time for this.’ And he started to shut the door.

‘Please! It won’t take long. We’ll make it worth your while.’

He stared at her, his eyes narrowing. ‘I said no.’

‘How about a hundred and fifty?’

‘What’s this about?’ he said. ‘Really. Why me?’

‘It’s quite random.’

‘Then why so eager? Go and knock next door.’

‘There’s no catch,’ she said, although she was becoming slightly flustered. ‘Your name won’t be used in any of the research. We’re just doing an investigation into personality types.’ She reached into the pocket of her coat and pulled out a wallet. She took out a card and held it out to him. It had a photograph of her on it. ‘You see?’ she said. ‘That’s the institute where I work. You can phone my boss, if you want. Or look at our website.’

‘I’ll ask you again, why me?’

She smiled again, a little falteringly this time. The money was usually enough, and she didn’t understand what the problem was. ‘Your name came up on our database. We look for all sorts of people to use in our study and yours was one of the names. It’s a hundred pounds for half an hour of your time. It’ll be no trouble.’

Dean thought for a moment. He looked at the woman’s nervous face, then over her shoulder, up and down the empty street. ‘Come in, then.’

‘Thank you.’

For one moment, she felt a tremor of disquiet running through her, but then shrugged it off and stepped inside.

‘I don’t think you’re telling me the whole truth,’ he said, and the door shut behind them with a small, firm click.

Dark, so dark. Very quiet. The drip of water. Dry swollen tongue tasted the iron wetness. Then the rustle of tiny feet. Are there long yellow teeth waiting to chop me up into little bits for the birds? He mustn’t speak, mustn’t say a word. Body burning with cold but mustn’t speak.

Scraping sound. Grunting sound. Lighter darkness to scrape his soft eyes. Soft voice of Master. Mustn’t speak. Not a sound shall escape. Mustn’t even breathe.

Scraping sound and darker darkness.

Oh, no. Oh, no. It wasn’t him making this sound. Like a wild animal panting. Like a wild animal screaming next to him. Over and over and over. Something scrabbling at him, shaking him, shouting, screaming and screaming, cracked high madness of screaming, his ears were going to burst. He mustn’t speak. It was a test and he couldn’t fail because if he failed it was over.

Still it went on. It was outside him and it was inside him, a shriek swelling and echoing, and he couldn’t escape. Fingers over ears, body in a ball, head on stone, sharp knees on sharp stones, grit in eyes, burning skin, don’t make a sound. Once upon a time there was a little boy.

It didn’t go the way Frieda thought it was going to. They didn’t jump in the car and head straight to the house. Instead, an hour later, Frieda found herself sitting in Karlsson’s office giving a statement to a uniformed officer while Karlsson stood to one side, frowning. At first, Frieda could scarcely control herself.

‘Why are we sitting here?’ she said. ‘Don’t you think the situation is just a bit urgent?’

‘The quicker we get your statement, the quicker we can get a warrant and the quicker we can act.’

‘We don’t have time for this.’

‘You’re the one who’s holding us up.’

Frieda had to take a deep breath, just so she could speak calmly.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘So what do you want me to say?’

‘Keep it simple,’ said Karlsson. ‘All we want is for the judge to grant the warrant. So don’t go into detail about your patient’s dreams or fantasies or whatever they were. In fact, don’t even mention them.’

‘You mean, don’t tell the truth?’

‘Just tell the part of the truth that’s helpful to the process.’ He looked at Yvette Long. ‘Ready?’ She smiled at him and clicked her pen. Frieda thought: She’s in love with her boss. Karlsson paused for a moment. ‘You want to say, “During therapy with my patient Alan Dekker, he made certain statements that implicated his brother Dean Reeve in the abduction of blah blah blah.” ’

‘Why don’t you just dictate it yourself?’

‘If we go into too much detail, the judge may start asking difficult questions. If we find the boy, it doesn’t matter if it was the man in the moon who told you about it. We just need the warrant.’

Frieda gave a brief statement while Karlsson nodded and made occasional comments.

‘That’ll do,’ he said finally.

‘I’ll sign anything,’ said Frieda. ‘Just as long as you do something.’

Yvette handed her the form. She signed it, and the copy underneath.

‘What do I do now?’ said Frieda.

‘Go home, whatever you want.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Our job. We’ll wait for the warrant, which should be delivered in an hour or two.’

‘Can’t I help?’

‘This isn’t a spectator sport.’

‘That’s not fair,’ said Frieda. ‘I told you about it.’

‘If you want to come on police operations, you’ll need to join the force.’ He paused. ‘Sorry. I don’t meant to be … Look, I’ll let you know what happens as soon as I can. That’s all I can do.’

Back in her house, Frieda felt like a child who had been dragged out of the cinema five minutes before the film ended. At first she walked up and down her living room. All the action was happening somewhere else. What could she possibly do? She rang Josef’s mobile and got no reply. She called Reuben and he told her that Josef wasn’t back. She ran herself a hot bath and lay in it with her head mostly under the water, trying not to think and failing. She got out and put on some jeans and an old shirt. Clearly there were things she needed to do. She needed to make some sort of plans for Christmas. She’d been resisting it for weeks but she had to do something. She had appointments with patients to rearrange. It seemed impossible even to consider any of this now.

She made herself coffee, a whole pot, and steadily drank her way through it. She felt suddenly as if she were the subject of a psychological experiment designed to demonstrate how lack of control and autonomy resulted in intense, almost paralytic, symptoms of anxiety. It was almost six o’clock, and thoroughly dark, when there was a ring at the door. It was Karlsson.

‘Is it good news?’

Karlsson brushed past her. ‘You mean was he there? No, he wasn’t.’ He picked up Frieda’s half-finished cup of coffee and took a sip. ‘It’s cold,’ he said.

‘I can make you some.’

‘Don’t bother.’

‘I should have been there,’ said Frieda.

‘Why?’ asked Karlsson, sarcastically. ‘So you could have looked in a cupboard we missed?’

‘I’d like to have seen Dean Reeve’s demeanour.’

‘His demeanour was confident, if that’s what you mean. The demeanour of someone with nothing to hide.’

‘And I’ve seen the house before. I could see if they’d done anything to it since I was there.’

‘Unfortunately the warrant doesn’t allow us to bring tourists.’

‘Wait,’ said Frieda.

She poured the last from the cafetière into a new mug and heated it in the microwave. She handed it to Karlsson. ‘You want anything with it?’ she said. ‘Or in it?’

He shook his head and took a sip of coffee.

‘So that’s that,’ said Frieda.

‘That photofit you did the other day. That reconstruction of the woman’s face.’

‘What about it?’

‘Have you got it?’

‘Yes.’

There was a pause.

‘I don’t just mean, “Have you got it?” I mean, can you get it and show it to me?’

Frieda went out of the room and came back carrying the printout. She smoothed it out on the table. ‘It got a bit scrunched up,’ she said.

Karlsson leaned over and looked at it.

‘While the officers were turning the house upside down and then turning it the right side up again, I wandered into their bedroom. I saw this on the wall.’ From his side pocket he took a small framed photograph. He laid it down on the table next to the printout. ‘Remind you of anything?’