‘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.
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
‘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.’
Chapter Eighteen
Karlsson was already in a bad mood when Yvette Long came into his office and told him there was a woman to see him. She looked nervously at the expression on her boss’s face.
‘How’s Faraday?’
‘Not well. Smashed jaw, broken ribs. You need to make a statement in about half an hour. The press are already waiting.’
‘They did it,’ Karlsson said. ‘They stirred it up. What did they think would happen? I’m sure they’re shocked. Any leads on who did it?’
‘Nothing.’
