The Dark Room

by Minette Walters

  ‘The only truth that matters now is that your son was murdered,’ he grunted. ‘Do you want his murderer to get away with it?’

  She looked at him. ‘No,’ she said, ‘which is why it’s important that the Superintendent knows the truth.’

  ‘You’re hurting your wife, Sir Anthony,’ said Frank calmly.

  The haggard face turned blankly towards him.

  ‘Your hand, sir. I think you should remove it.’

  Obediently, he unclenched his fist.

  ‘Tell me why Jinx was angry the last time you saw her.’

  ‘Oh, because she’d had enough of his lies and deceits,’ said Lady Wallader matter-of-factly. ‘Like every other girlfriend Leo ever had. In the end they all discovered that the charm and the good looks disguised a very selfish personality.’ She glanced briefly at her husband. ‘He couldn’t share, you see, even as a child. He became quite violent whenever another child borrowed something of his, so in the end we took him to a psychologist who diagnosed a personality disorder. She told us there was nothing we could do about it but that he would probably learn to control his aggression better as he got older.’

  ‘And did he?’

  ‘I suppose so. He stopped using his fists, but I can’t say hand on heart that he felt any less angry inside about having to share what he had. He was very immature.’

  ‘Miss Kingsley described him as excessively secretive. Is that how he solved the problem, do you think? By refusing to divulge what he was worth.’

  ‘Yes.’ She gestured towards the fax. ‘Well, clearly that’s true. We had no idea he owned so many properties. I did recognize that he was much better off than he said he was, but not to this extent. I’m sure we must seem very gullible, Superintendent, but life with Leo was so much calmer when he was allowed to keep his secrets.’

  Frank waited a moment. ‘You said Jinx had had enough, Lady Wallader. Does that mean it was she who called off the wedding?’

  It was her husband who answered. ‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘She was very abusive to us all, though to what purpose remains a mystery. At no point did she say she wouldn’t go through with it. It was Leo who told her there wasn’t going to be a wedding when she finally stopped shouting.’

  ‘Did he explain why?’

  ‘He said he’d been having an affair with Meg Harris and was going to marry her.’

  ‘And what was Jinx’s reaction?’

  ‘Shock,’ he said. ‘It was the last thing she’d expected and she stared at him in complete shock.’

  ‘Would you agree, Lady Wallader?’

  She looked up. ‘Yes,’ she admitted, ‘I would. She didn’t say anything, but she clearly hadn’t expected a response like that. I got the impression she was very angry but I think she was more angry with Meg than Leo. It’s difficult now to say for certain. We were all very distressed and, frankly, Anthony and I were relieved when they left.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘It was the bank holiday weekend at the end of May.’

  Cheever frowned. ‘Yet, according to the evidence we have, the last thing Miss Kingsley remembers is saying goodbye to Leo on June the fourth when she set off to stay with her parents. Why was he still in her house a week after he said he was planning to marry her best friend?’

  ‘We don’t know,’ said Sir Anthony. ‘They left our house furious with each other, then Leo telephoned later that evening to ask us not to say anything to anyone until he gave us permission. But he didn’t explain why and he didn’t call until nearly two weeks later. It was the Saturday, June the eleventh, and he said he and Meg were making themselves scarce until the fuss died down.’ His brows drew together in an angry frown. ‘I accept Leo had his faults but he was a damn good catch for the daughter of an East End crook. My view is she wasn’t going to let him go that easily. She flared up the May weekend for no good reason and then changed her mind. That’s how I see it. Kept him with her till she went to Fordingbridge, then lost him back to Meg while she was away. I mean to say, if she was planning to back out of the whole thing, then why didn’t she tell her father to send out cancellation notices during the week she spent at the Hall? That would have been the obvious time to do it. You see, it doesn’t add up.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Cheever slowly, ‘I see your point.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  Tuesday, 28 June, Nightingale Clinic, Salisbury – 11.30 a.m.

  WHEN ALAN PROTHEROE summoned Jinx to his office to break the news of Meg and Leo’s deaths, she drew away from him into the corner of the wide leather sofa in his office, a distant expression on her gaunt face. He wondered if she was even listening or if, like so much in her life, she was choosing to blank out what she didn’t want to hear. She, for her part, refused to be soothed by the sympathy in his voice or the look of compassion in his eyes, both of which she felt were false. Dr Protheroe was not a man to take on trust, she thought.

  ‘Bar the identities of the two bodies, I doubt many of the other details in the newspaper are true,’ he finished quietly. ‘It reads to me as if Leo’s father has made some sweeping statements in a moment of grief which he will probably come to regret, but I’m afraid we can expect another visit from the police and I didn’t want you to hear about this from them.’

  She favoured him with a tight little smile. ‘I’ve known since Sunday night. But you knew that already, didn’t you?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Who told you?’

  ‘Simon Harris. He phoned yesterday afternoon. He wanted to warn me that the story would break today.’

  A look of relief crossed her face. ‘Simon?’ She searched his face. ‘Why would he bother to do that?’

  ‘I think he and his father feel this sort of treatment’ – he tapped the newspaper on his lap – ‘isn’t justice. He talked about his mother and Sir Anthony whipping up a kangaroo court.’

  ‘Caroline doesn’t like me at all,’ she said disconsolately. ‘For some reason she’s always blamed me for Meg’s behaviour. She thinks Meg fell into bad company. I suppose she looked at Adam and decided like father like daughter.’

  ‘It’s not uncommon. We all blame other people for our children’s failings.’ He paused. ‘Why didn’t you tell me the police visit upset you?’

  She rubbed her eyes. ‘I don’t trust the police,’ she said, ‘but it’s a form of paranoia that I’m not particularly happy about. I might have been imagining things. There was no sense in worrying you unnecessarily until I knew for certain.’

  ‘You could have told me yesterday.’

  ‘Yesterday I was paranoid about what my father was planning.’

  He raised his hands in a gesture of despair. ‘How am I supposed to help you if you keep everything to yourself?’

  ‘You’re a very arrogant man,’ she said without hostility. ‘Hasn’t it occurred to you that I might not want your help?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said curtly, ‘ but that doesn’t mean I have to stop offering it. Do you think my other patients want my help any more than you do? They begin with good intentions but, within hours, most of them are climbing the walls to get out for their next fix. The only arrogance I see is on your side, Jinx.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You think you’re clever enough to outwit me, the police and your father combined.’

  She shifted her gaze back to his. ‘I’m certainly contemptuous of fools who shut themselves away in their ivory towers and close their eyes to the madness outside,’ she snapped. ‘Russell was murdered. For ten years I avoided any sort of serious involvement. Then, when I thought the dust had settled, I let myself go and fell for Leo. Now he’s dead, too, along with the only real friend I’ve ever had. So precisely what sort of help are you offering me? Help in remembering the deaths of my husband, my friend and my lover?’ She looked very angry. ‘I like it the way it is. I don’t want to remember anything. I don’t want to know anything. I don’t want to feel anything. I just want to be allowed to take surrealistic photographs where all my r
epressed fears and desires jostle for expression in an idiosyncratic juxtaposition of purity and corruption.’ She bared her teeth at him in a ferocious smile. ‘And that’s a direct quote from a review of my work in the Sunday Times. It’s pretentious rubbish, but it sounds great.’

  He shook his head impatiently. ‘You know perfectly well it’s not rubbish. I’ve looked at some of your published work, and that same theme appears over and over again.’ He leaned forward. ‘You seem to see the world in extraordinarily stark terms. Black and white. Good and evil. For every kindness, a cruelty; for every positive, a negative. Why are there no grey areas for you, Jinx?’

  ‘Because perfection can only exist in an imperfect setting. In a perfect setting it becomes ordinary.’

  ‘So it’s perfection that fascinates you?’

  She held his gaze for a moment but didn’t reply.

  ‘No,’ he said, answering for her, ‘it’s imperfection that fascinates you. You’re more attracted by the black than by the white.’ He studied her face closely. ‘The backgrounds to your pictures are always more compelling than the subjects, except in the few instances where you’ve turned the idea on its head by making ugliness the subject and beauty the setting.’

  She shrugged. ‘I expect you’re right. Black humour certainly appeals to me.’

  ‘As in schadenfreude?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re wrong, woman. You experience anguish on behalf of others while the only person you laugh at is yourself.’ He quoted her own words back at her. ‘My education was a waste of time. The Sunday Times writes pretentious rubbish about my art. I won’t get out of bed in front of you because you’ll turn me into a golfing club joke.’ He paused. ‘Are you laughing at Leo now? You should be if you enjoy schadenfreude. There’s no blacker joke than the timely comeuppance of someone who’s done you wrong.’

  ‘I can think of several,’ she said flatly. ‘Like when you wake up one morning in a police cell and remember it was you who dealt the death blow. That’s going to be a gut-wrencher when it happens. Ho! Ho! Ho! We’ll all be splitting our sides.’ She looked towards the window, cutting herself off, symbolically extending the space between them.

  ‘I don’t think that’s very likely to happen.’

  ‘Somebody killed them. Why shouldn’t it have been me?’

  ‘I’m not quibbling over whether or not you did it, Jinx. I’m quibbling with your waking up in a police cell one morning and remembering it was you. That’s what’s unlikely. Amnesia doesn’t vanish overnight, so you’ll know long before the police arrest you whether they’ve got good cause to do it.’ He watched her. ‘Have they?’

  She continued to stare out of the window for several seconds before finally, with a sigh, turning back to him. ‘I keep seeing Meg on her knees, begging,’ she said, ‘and last night I remembered going to her flat and feeling terrible anger because Leo was there. I have nightmares about drowning and being buried alive, and I wake up because I can’t breathe. I can remember feeling strong emotions.’ She fell silent.

  ‘What sort of emotions?’

  ‘Fear,’ she said. ‘It hits me suddenly and I start shivering. I remember fear.’

  These revelations had come at him so suddenly that he wasn’t ready for them, and he experienced a terrible sadness for she seemed to be remembering an overwhelming guilt. ‘Tell me about Meg,’ he prompted at last.

  ‘She was begging, holding her hands out. Please, please, please.’ Her eyelashes glittered with held-back tears.

  ‘Was she begging from you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just keep seeing her on her knees.’

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Was anyone else there?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘OK, tell me what you remember about going to Meg’s flat and finding Leo there.’

  ‘I just had this image of Leo opening the door to me, and I knew it was Meg’s flat because Leo was holding Marmaduke. Marmaduke’s a cat,’ she explained. ‘The funny thing is I heard him purring, but the rest of it was completely static, like a photograph.’

  ‘But you remember feeling angry with Leo.’

  ‘I wanted to hit him.’ She pressed her lips together. ‘That’s really what the memory was, not the picture so much as a sense of incredible rage. It came to me suddenly that Leo had made me furious and then I saw him in Meg’s doorway.’

  ‘Do you know when that was?’

  She pondered deeply. ‘It must have happened after June the fourth because that’s the last thing I remember – saying goodbye to Leo. He came into the hall and said: Be good, Jinxy, and be happy . . .’ She lapsed into another thoughtful silence.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just remember what he said.’

  He pulled forward a notepad and pen. ‘Give me a run-down of the day before. What sort of day was that?’

  She spoke with confidence. ‘I was at work. We were doing some publicity shots of a new teenage band. It was tough to come up with anything original because they were deeply uninteresting and horribly pleased with themselves. Four clean-cut young men with flashing white teeth and hairless chests, who thought they were so pretty we could just take a few snap-shots and every pre-pubescent girl in the country would swoon.’ She laughed suddenly. ‘So I told Dean to needle them a bit and, after three hours, we ended up with some brilliant shots of four extremely angry young men glowering into the lens.’

  Alan chuckled in response. ‘What did Dean say to them?’

  ‘He just kept calling them “his pretty little virgins”. They got pissed off very quickly, especially as we kept them hanging around for a couple of hours while we fiddled with lights and lenses. They really hated us by the end of it but we got some good pictures as a result.’

  ‘So you developed the film straightaway?’

  ‘No. We had some location work in the afternoon and we were running out of time, so we grabbed some sandwiches and left.’ She paused in sudden confusion. ‘I went straight home afterwards.’ She stared at him. ‘So when did I see those photographs?’

  ‘Well, let’s not worry about that for the moment. Was Leo there when you got home?’

  ‘No,’ she said slowly, ‘but he wasn’t supposed to be.’ Her eyes lit with sudden excitement. ‘I remember checking the rooms to make sure he’d really gone and then I felt a sense of absolute peace because I’d got the house to myself again.’ She clapped her hands to her face. ‘I remember. He wasn’t there, and I was pleased.’

  Protheroe wondered why she hadn’t noticed the glaring inconsistency. Or perhaps the inconsistency was part of the game. ‘So how did you celebrate?’

  Her eyes gleamed with sudden amusement. ‘I drank two pints of beer, ate baked beans out of a tin, smoked ten cigarettes in half an hour, watched soaps on the telly and had fried eggs and bacon in bed at half-past ten.’

  He looked up with a smile. ‘That’s very precise.’

  ‘I was making a statement.’

  ‘Because they were the things Leo disapproved of?’

  ‘A mere fraction of them. His view of how women should behave was modelled on his mother, and she’s kept herself in clover by constant appeasement of a chauvinistic husband.’

  He arched an interested eyebrow but didn’t pursue the issue. ‘So what did you watch on television?’

  ‘Wall-to-wall soap. One after the other. EastEnders. The Bill. Brookside.’ She smiled. ‘Then I couldn’t stand it any more, so I watched the news. Soap operas are pretty bloody boring when you haven’t a clue what’s going on.’

  ‘Why didn’t you watch Coronation Street?’

  ‘It wasn’t on.’

  ‘Are you sure about that?’

  ‘Positive,’ she said. ‘I went through the Radio Times and picked out the soaps deliberately. If it had been on, I’d have watched it.’

  He stroked his beard thoughtfully. ‘I’m not much of an expert, admittedly, but I�
��m sure Coronation Street goes out on a Friday, and you say you remember this as being Friday the third of June.’ He eased gingerly out of his chair, his shoulder protesting at the movement, and went to the desk. ‘Hilda,’ he said into the intercom, ‘can you rustle up a Radio Times from somewhere and bring it in? I need to know which days of the week don’t have Coronation Street, but do have EastEnders, The Bill and Brookside.’

  Her giggle rattled tinnily down the wire. ‘There now, and I always thought you preferred the intellectual stuff.’

  ‘Very funny. This is important, Hilda.’

  ‘Sorry, well, I can tell you without the Radio Times. Coronation Street is Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. EastEnders is Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. The Bill is Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, and Brookside is Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays. So, if you don’t want Coronation Street but you do want the others, then that means Tuesday.’

  ‘Good lord!’ said Alan in amazement. ‘Do you watch them all?’

  ‘Most days,’ she agreed cheerfully. ‘Anything else I can help you with?’

  ‘No, that’s fine, thank you.’ He returned to his seat. ‘Did you hear that?’ he asked Jinx. ‘You appear to be remembering a Tuesday and not a Friday, and it does seem a little unlikely that Leo would have returned for breakfast immediately after he had packed his bags and gone.’

  She stared unhappily at her hands.

  ‘I wonder if you’re quite as clear about Saturday the fourth as you think you are. You remember saying goodbye to Leo and you’re very specific about the day and the date, but do you know why? What happened to fix Saturday the fourth in your mind?’

  ‘It was in my diary for ages,’ she said. ‘Week at the Hall, beginning June the fourth.’

  ‘And you were definitely leaving for the Hall when you said goodbye to Leo?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So how many suitcases were you carrying?’

  She stared at him in confusion.

  ‘Did you have any suitcases?’ he asked.