Blue Monday

‘How’s the wife?’

‘About how you’d expect.’

‘Who’s with her now?’

‘A couple of officers from Victim Support. I’m going back there later.’

‘Good.’

‘And the commissioner wants to see you once you’ve made your statement.’

‘Not good.’

‘Sorry.’ For a moment, Yvette Long thought of putting a hand on his shoulder. He looked so tired.

‘You know who I’ve just been talking to?’

‘No.’

‘Brian Munro.’ Yvette Long looked blank. ‘He’s in charge of the CCTV footage.’

‘Has he found anything?’

‘He’s found cars. Lots and lots of cars. Cars with one person in, cars with more than one person in. Cars with the number of persons undetermined. But, as he says, with nothing to cross-check against it’s not even looking for a needle in a haystack. It’s like looking for hay in a haystack.’

‘You could cross-check it with known offenders. Or people on the sex offenders register.’

‘Yes, that thought has occurred to us and Brian just spent a very long time telling me what a long and complicated process that is going to be. And I could make it a bit less long by putting people on it, people who could be knocking on doors and taking statements.’

‘About this woman,’ said Yvette Long.

‘Who is she?’

‘She says she wants to talk to you about the investigation.’

‘Get someone from the office to have a word with her.’

‘She said she wanted to talk to the officer in charge.’

Karlsson frowned. ‘Why are you wasting my time with this?’

‘She asked for you by name. It sounded as if she knew people.’

‘I don’t care if she…’ Karlsson groaned. ‘It’ll be quicker just to see her. But she hasn’t chosen the right day to waste my time. Who is she?’

‘I don’t know. She’s a doctor.’

‘A doctor? For God’s sake, just bring her in.’

Karlsson kept a large notebook on his desk for writing notes, making lists, doodling. He turned it to a blank page. He picked up a pen and clicked it several times. The door opened and Yvette Long stepped halfway into the office. ‘This is Dr Frieda Klein,’ she said. ‘She… er… she wouldn’t say what it was about.’

The woman stepped past her and DC Long left the room, closing the door. Karlsson was slightly disconcerted. Normal people behaved oddly with the police. They became nervous or too eager to please. They felt as if they’d done something wrong. This woman was different. She looked around the office with apparent curiosity, and then, when she turned to him, he felt as if she was assessing him. She took off her long coat and tossed it on to a chair by the wall. She pulled another chair forward in front of his desk and sat on it. He had a sudden and very irritating feeling that he was the person who had come to see her.

‘I’m Detective Chief Inspector Malcolm Karlsson,’ he said.

‘Yes, I know.’

‘I understand that you have something you want to tell me personally.’

‘That’s right.’

Karlsson wrote the name ‘Frieda Klein’ on his notepad and drew a line under it.

‘And it’s relevant to the disappearance of Matthew Faraday?’

‘It might be.’

‘Then you’d better tell me, because we don’t have much time.’

For a moment she looked awkward. ‘I feel hesitant about saying this,’ she said. ‘Because I’m pretty sure you’ll feel that I’m wasting your time.’

‘If you’re sure, then you should go away and not waste any more of it.’

For the first time, Frieda Klein looked directly at him with her large, dark eyes. ‘I’ve got to,’ she said. ‘I’ve been thinking about it all week. I’ll tell you and then I’ll leave.’

‘So tell me.’

‘All right.’ She took a deep breath. Karlsson thought for a moment of a little girl on a stage who was about to recite something. A deep breath before taking the big leap.

‘I’m a consultant psychoanalyst,’ she began. ‘Do you know what that is?’

Karlsson smiled. ‘I’ve picked up a bit of education here and there,’ he said. ‘Despite being a copper.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘You read law at Oxford. I checked.’

‘I hope that makes me worthy of your respect.’

‘I’ve started seeing a new patient. His name is Alan Dekker. He’s forty-two years old. He came to see me because he has been suffering from severe and recurrent anxiety attacks.’ She paused. ‘I think you should talk to him.’

Karlsson wrote the name down. Alan Dekker. ‘This is to do with the disappearance?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Has he confessed?’

‘If he’d confessed, I would have dialled 999.’

‘So?’

‘Alan Dekker’s anxiety is based on a fantasy about having a son – or about not having a son. This fantasy shows itself in a dream that seems to involve seizing a child in a way that struck me as similar to this boy’s disappearance. And before you say that the dream may have been caused by hearing about it, he first had the dream before Matthew Faraday disappeared.’

‘Anything else?’ said Karlsson.

‘I felt that Dekker’s desire for a son was a narcissistic fantasy. That is, it was really about himself.’

‘I know what “narcissistic” means.’

‘But then I happened to see a photograph of my patient as a boy and it was very similar in certain ways – certain striking ways – to Matthew Faraday.’

Karlsson had stopped taking notes. He was just waggling the pen between two of his fingers. Now he pushed his chair back from the desk. ‘The problem is that on the one hand we don’t have the evidence we would like. Nobody saw Matthew being taken. Maybe he wasn’t taken. Maybe he ran away and joined a circus. Maybe he fell down a manhole. On the other hand, we’ve got more help than we know what to do with. As of this morning, five people have confessed to taking him, none of whom could have done so. Since the TV show about him last week, we’ve had thirty thousand-odd calls to deal with. He’s been spotted in different parts of the UK and in Spain and Greece. People have suspected their husbands, boyfriends, neighbours. His poor bloody father was beaten up last night because the tabloids don’t like the look of him. I’ve been contacted by profilers who’ve told me that the perpetrator is a loner, who has difficulty in relating to others, or that it’s a couple, or that it’s a gang trading children on the Internet. I’ve heard from a medium, who tells me that Matthew is in an enclosed space somewhere underground, which is useful, because it saves us looking in Piccadilly Circus. Meanwhile there are journalists writing that it all happened because we didn’t have enough bobbies on the beat or cars on the road or functioning CCTV cameras. Or else that it’s all the fault of the 1960s.’

‘The sixties?’ said Frieda.

‘That’s the explanation I like best, because it’s about the only one that doesn’t seem to be basically my fault. So you’ll excuse me if I’m not automatically grateful for someone you think might be, in some unspecified way, linked to the crime. I’m extremely sorry, Dr Klein, but what you’ve told me doesn’t sound much different from someone saying that their next-door neighbour’s been spending a lot of time in his shed lately.’

‘You’re right,’ said Frieda. ‘That’s what I would have said myself.’

‘So why did you come and see me about it?’

‘Because once the thought had entered my mind, I had to say something about it.’

Karlsson’s expression hardened. ‘You mean, to get it on the record?’ he said. ‘So that if something went wrong it would be my fault instead of yours?’