Blue Monday

Chapter Forty-two

Frieda stood near the bed, watching. The little figure was still curled in the position they had found him. Then he had been in a state of semi-undress – for in his delirium of death, the boy had ripped off the clothes he had been wearing, the checked shirt a replica of the shirts both twins favoured – and had lain in near-nakedness on the cold earth of the mausoleum. Now he was on a warm-water mattress. He was covered with layers of light cloth and there were monitors attached to his heart. His face, which in the photographs she had seen of him was round and ruddy and full of merriment, was so white it was almost green. His freckles stood out like rusted pennies. The lips were bloodless. One cheek was bruised and puffy. His hands were bandaged for he had ripped his fingers tearing at the stone walls. His hair had been crudely dyed black, with a stripe of red showing at the parting. Only the monitors showed he wasn’t dead.

Detective Constable Munster sat in the corner of the room. He was a young man with dark hair and dark eyes and he’d been on the team looking for Matthew since the first day. He was nearly as pale as the boy, and still, as though he were carved in stone. He was waiting for the boy to return to consciousness. Matthew’s eyes fluttered and closed again. His lashes were long and red; his eyelids were translucent. Karlsson had asked Frieda to stay as well, until the child psychiatrist arrived. Even so, she felt in the way, excluded from the process, the rapid footsteps, the rattle of trolleys, doctors and nurses murmuring to each other. Worse, she understood the jargon that was being used, the intravenous warm saline, the danger of hypovolaemic shock. They were trying to raise his core temperature and she was just a bystander.

The door opened once again and the parents were ushered in. They had the pale, drawn, gaunt faces of people who have spent days waiting for bad news. Now they had hope, which was a new kind of agony. The woman knelt beside his bed, pushing the tubes aside and taking hold of her son’s bandaged hand, pressing her face into his body. Two nurses had to pull her back. The man looked flushed and angrily confused; his eyes darted around the room, taking in all the equipment, the flurry of activity.

‘What’s wrong with him?’

The doctor was looking at the chart. He took his glasses off to rub his eyes. ‘We’re doing all we can but he’s extremely dehydrated and has severe hypothermia. He’s dangerously cold.’

Mrs Faraday gave a sob. ‘My little boy. My beautiful son.’ She raised his hand to her lip and kissed it, and then fell to stroking his arm and neck, saying over and over again that everything would be all right now, that he was safe.

‘But he’ll be all right?’ said Mr Faraday. ‘He will be all right.’ As if by insisting, it would become true.

‘We’re rehydrating him,’ said the doctor. ‘And we’re going to do a cardiopulmonary bypass. It means we attach him to a machine, pump his blood out, warm it up, pump it back in.’

‘And then when you do that, he’ll be all right?’

‘You should wait outside,’ said the doctor. ‘We’ll let you know if there’s any change.’

Frieda stepped forward and took Mrs Faraday’s hand. She seemed in a daze and allowed herself to be led out. Her husband followed. They were shown into a small, windowless waiting room, just four chairs and a table on which stood a vase of plastic flowers. Mrs Faraday looked at Frieda as if she had just noticed her.

‘Are you a doctor?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ said Frieda. ‘I’ve been working with the police. I was waiting for you to arrive.’ She sat beside them as Mrs Faraday talked and talked. Her husband didn’t speak. Frieda saw how his nails were dirty, his eyes red-rimmed. Frieda hardly spoke but once Mrs Faraday turned and looked her in the eyes and asked if she had children. Frieda said she didn’t.

‘Then you can’t understand.’

‘No.’

And then Mr Faraday spoke. His voice was gravelly, as if his throat was sore. ‘How long was he in that place?’

‘Not long.’

Too long: Kathy Ripon had called at Dean’s house on Saturday afternoon. Now it was Christmas Eve. Frieda thought of the last few days. Rain, sleet, snow. There would have been water running down the walls. He would have been able to lick it like an animal. She thought of him again, that first sight, his emaciated, bruised body, the eyes open but unseeing, his mouth drawn back in fear. That was the worst. At first he hadn’t realized he was being rescued. He thought they were coming back for him. And there was something else to think about. Where was Kathy? Did she have a damp wall somewhere?

‘What he must have gone through,’ said Mr Faraday. He leaned towards Frieda. ‘Had he been – was he – you know?’

Frieda shook her head. ‘It’s been a terrible, terrible thing,’ she said. ‘But I think he thought of him as his child.’

‘Bastard,’ said Mr Faraday. ‘Have they caught the one who did it?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Frieda.

‘He deserves to be buried alive, like my son was.’

A junior doctor came into the waiting room. She was young and very beautiful, with skin like a peach and blonde hair tied back in a tight ponytail; her face glowed. And Frieda knew it was going to be good news.

They knelt on either side of the bed, under the brutal lights and among the hanging tubes. They held his bandaged hands and said his name and crooned nonsense words, as if he was a newborn baby. Poppet and sweetheart and muffin and Mattie-boy and pigeon. His eyes were still shut but his face had lost that deathly tinge, its clayey whiteness. The rigidity of his limbs had softened. Mrs Faraday was sobbing and talking at the same time. Her words of love came out in gulps. He was bleary and barely responsive, as if he had been woken in the middle of the night out of a deep sleep.

‘Matthew, Matthew,’ murmured Mrs Faraday, almost nuzzling him. He said something and she leaned in even closer. ‘What’s that?’ He said it again. She looked round, puzzled.

‘He said “Simon”. What does that mean?’

‘It’s their name for him,’ said Frieda. ‘I think they gave him a new name.’

‘What?’ Mrs Faraday started to cry.

DC Munster drew Mr Faraday aside, then leaned over the bed and started to talk to Matthew. He held a photograph of Kathy Ripon in front of the boy’s face. His eyes weren’t able to focus properly.

‘It’s not fair,’ said Mrs Faraday. ‘He’s terribly ill. He can’t do this. It’s bad for him.’

A nurse said that the child psychiatrist was on her way but she’d phoned to say she was stuck in traffic. Frieda heard DC Munster trying to explain that they’d got their son back but other parents were still missing their daughter and Mr Faraday said something angry in response and Mrs Faraday was crying harder than ever.

Frieda pressed her fingers to her temples. She tried to shut out the noise so she could think. Matthew had been snatched from his parents, hidden away, punished, starved, told that his mother was no longer his mother and his father no longer his father, told that he wasn’t himself but someone else – a boy called Simon – and then shut away, left to die, naked and alone. Now he lay blinking in an over-lit room, with strange faces looming at him out of his waking nightmare, shouting words he didn’t understand. He was a little boy, hardly more than a toddler still. But he had survived. When nobody could save him he had saved himself. What stories had he told himself as he lay in the dark?

She moved to the other side of the bed, across from Mrs Faraday.

‘May I?’ Frieda said.

Mrs Faraday looked at her numbly but she didn’t resist. Frieda moved her face close to Matthew’s, so she could talk in a whisper. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘You’re home. You’ve been rescued.’ She saw a slight flicker of his eyes. ‘You’re safe. You’ve escaped from the witch’s house.’

He made a sound but she couldn’t decipher it.

‘Who was there with you?’ she said. ‘Who was with you in the witch’s house?’

Matthew’s eyes suddenly clicked open, like a doll’s.

‘Busybody,’ he said. ‘Poky-nose.’

Frieda felt as if Dean was in the room, as if Matthew was a ventriloquist’s dummy and he was speaking.

‘Where is she?’ she asked. ‘Where did they put her? The busybody?’

‘Took away,’ he said, in his husk of a voice. ‘In the dark.’

Then he started sobbing, twisting his body back and forward. Mrs Faraday gathered up her son and held him, twitching and retching, against her breast.

‘That’s all right,’ said Frieda.

‘What’s that mean?’ asked Munster.

‘It doesn’t sound good. Not at all.’

Frieda walked out through the waiting room into a corridor. She looked around. An orderly was pushing an old woman in a wheelchair. ‘Is there anywhere I can get some water?’ Frieda asked.

‘There’s a McDonald’s down by the main entrance,’ the orderly said.

She had only just started walking down the long corridor when there was a shout from behind her. It was Munster. He ran towards her. ‘I just got a call,’ he said. ‘The boss wants to see you.’

‘What for?’

‘They found the woman.’

‘Kathy?’ Relief tore through her, making her feel dizzy.

‘No. The wife,’ said Munster. ‘Terry Reeve. There’s a car for you downstairs.’