‘Is it really as hopeless as that?’
‘In ten years’ time, in twenty, I’ll still be the copper who didn’t rescue Matthew Faraday. When I’m retired – like the old detective I visited who was in charge of the Joanna Vine case – I’ll sit in my house and think about Matthew and wonder what happened, where he’s buried, who did it and where they are now.’
He swirled his whisky round in his tumbler, then took a gulp. ‘You probably spend half your time with people who are burdened by guilt, but in my experience, people don’t feel nearly enough guilt. They feel shame when they’re caught, all right, but no guilt if they’re not. All over the world there are people who have done terrible things and they’re living perfectly contented lives, with their families and friends.’
He swilled back his whisky and Frieda poured more into his tumbler without asking him. She hadn’t touched hers.
‘If I feel like this,’ he said, ‘think of the parents.’ He pulled his tie loose impatiently. ‘Am I going to be haunted all my life?’
‘Have you never had a case like this before?’
‘I’ve had my share of murders and suicides and domestic abuse. It’s hard to keep your faith in human nature; maybe that’s why I’m divorced and pouring my heart out to a woman I’ve met just a few times, rather than to my wife. He’s only five, the age of my youngest.’
‘There’s no answer to what you’re feeling,’ said Frieda. A strange mood enveloped the room where they sat, dreamy and sad.
‘I know. I just needed to say it to someone. Sorry.’
‘Don’t say sorry.’
She didn’t say anything else. She looked into her glass and Karlsson looked at her, seeing a new side to her. After a while, he said, ‘Tell me about your work.’
‘What do you want to know?’
‘I don’t know. Are you a doctor?’
‘Yes. Though you don’t have to be. I specialized in psychiatry before training. It’s a long process and a strict discipline. I’ve got lots of letters after my name.’
‘OK. And are your patients mostly private? How many do you see a day? What are they like? Why are you doing it? Does it work? That kind of thing.’
Frieda gave a small laugh, then started counting off his questions on her fingers. ‘One, I’m a mixture of private and NHS. I get referrals from the Warehouse Clinic, where I trained and worked for years, and from GPs and hospitals, and I also take people who come to me off their own bat, usually because someone they know has recommended me to them. It’s important to me not just to take on people who are rich enough to be able to afford therapy; otherwise it would be like treating the disease of the rich. Privately, therapy is quite expensive.’
‘How much?’
‘I have this rule of thumb. I charge two pounds for every thousand they earn – so if you earn thirty thousand you’d give me sixty pounds for each session. I had one client who told me he’d have to pay me five hundred thousand an hour, in that case. Luckily for him, I have a cut-off point of a hundred pounds. I have been known to take people for almost nothing, though my colleagues frown on that. Anyway, I’d say that about seventy per cent of my patients are NHS referrals, maybe a bit less.
‘OK. Number two, I usually see my patients three times a week, and I usually have seven patients – in other words, about twenty sessions a week in all. I know therapists who have eight sessions each day – that’s forty in a week. As one patient leaves, the next arrives. It makes them wealthy, but I couldn’t do that. Nor would I want to.’
‘Why not?’
‘I need to absorb things, think about each person I see, make proper process notes. I don’t need more money than what I get now. I need time. What was next?’
‘What are they like?’
‘I don’t know how to answer that. They don’t have much in common with each other.’
‘Except they’re in a mess.’
‘Most of us are in a mess at some time in our lives, wretched beyond bearing or dysfunctional beyond tolerating or simply stuck.’ She fixed him with her piercing glance. ‘Don’t you think?’
‘I don’t know.’ Karlsson frowned, uncomfortable. ‘Do you ever turn people away?’
‘If I think they don’t need therapy, or if I think they’d be better off with someone else. I only take on people I think I can help.’
‘And what made you become a therapist?’ This was what he really wanted to know but had little expectation of her answering. They had sat companionably together and talked, and yet he did not understand her much better or have more sense of her vulnerabilities or doubts. She kept herself to herself, he thought. The self-possession that had struck him so forcefully at their first meeting rarely wavered.
‘That’s enough questions for one night. What about you?’
‘What about me?’
‘Why did you join the police force?’
Karlsson shrugged, then stared into his whisky. ‘Fuck knows. Recently, I’ve been asking myself why I didn’t become a lawyer, the way I was meant to, earning serious money and sleeping properly at night.’
‘What’s the answer?’
‘There isn’t an answer. I work too hard, get paid too little, am drowning in paperwork, only get noticed when things go wrong, get pissed on by the press and by my own boss, and the public distrust me. And now that I’m heading up the Murder Investigation Team, I get to meet lots of killers and wife-beaters and perverts and drug dealers. What can I say? It just seemed like a good idea at the time.’
‘You like it, then.’
‘Like it? It’s what I do, and I think I do it pretty well, most of the time. Though you wouldn’t guess it from this case.’
He seemed to remember something and reached into his bag. He took out two cardboard files. ‘These are statements made by Rosalind Teale. She’s the sister of Joanna Vine. The first statements were made just after the disappearance and then we interviewed her again the other day.’
‘Is there something significant about them?’
‘I know you’re resistant, but I’d like you to have a look at them.’
‘What for?’
‘I’d be interested in anything you had to say.’
‘Now?’
‘That would be good.’
Karlsson refilled his glass and didn’t add water. He stood up and walked around the room as if he was at a gallery. Frieda didn’t like being watched while she was reading. And she didn’t like the idea of him looking at her possessions and using them to try and learn something about her. But the quickest way to get him to stop was to read the statements. She opened the older one and began, making herself read slowly, word by word.
‘Have you read all these books?’ Karlsson asked.
‘Shut up,’ said Frieda, in a mumble, without even looking up from the file. As she moved on to the second, more recent, file, she was aware of Karlsson, out of her eyeline. Finally she closed it. She didn’t speak, although she knew that Karlsson was waiting.
‘So?’ he said. ‘If she was your patient, what would you ask her?’
‘If she was my patient, I wouldn’t ask her anything. I would try to stop her feeling guilty about her sister. Apart from that, I think she should be left alone.’
‘She’s the only possible witness,’ said Karlsson.
‘And she didn’t see anything. And it’s more than twenty years ago. And every time you talk to her you damage her all over again.’
Karlsson came over and sat back down so that he was facing Frieda. He contemplated his whisky glass. ‘This is good stuff,’ he said. ‘Where did you get it?’
‘Someone gave it to me.’
‘Tell me something else about the statements,’ said Karlsson. ‘You’re clever. Don’t you see this as a challenge?’