The Dark Room

by Minette Walters

  ‘I know I was going to see my father,’ she said slowly.

  He waited. ‘And?’ he prompted at last.

  ‘My bag was hanging on the back of the chair.’ She stared into the past. ‘It’s a small leather pouch on a long strap. I slung it over my shoulder and said, I’m off now.’ She frowned. ‘I think I must have put the suitcases in the car the night before.’

  ‘Is that what you usually did?’

  ‘It’s the only thing that makes sense.’

  ‘I wonder if it is.’ He took a diary out of his jacket pocket. ‘Let’s work forwards,’ he suggested, ‘beginning with what you know to be true. Tell me about the first time you met Leo.’

  The Vicarage, Littleton Mary, Wiltshire – 12.15 p.m.

  Simon Harris answered the door and looked in some dismay at Frank Cheever. ‘We – that is, my father and I—’ He broke off as the sound of shouting erupted from the window to the right. ‘My mother’s not very well, I’m afraid. She can’t really come to terms with what’s happened. We’d like her to see the doctor but she won’t have him near her. The problem is she’s making some very wild accusations, and we’re worried – well, frankly, she’s accusing Dad of some terrible things and we – that is I—’ He fell silent as Mrs Harris’s voice rose to a scream, her words carrying clearly through the open window.

  ‘How dare you deny it? Did you think I didn’t know how you lusted after her? Did you think she wouldn’t tell me what you did to her? She couldn’t wait to get out of this house, couldn’t wait to get away from you. You made her what she was and you dare to accuse her now of weakness. You disgust me. You’ve always disgusted me.’

  Charles Harris said something in a murmur which wasn’t audible.

  ‘Of course I’ll tell the police. Why should I protect you when you never protected her? You disgusting man.’ Her voice rose to a scream again. ‘CHILD ABUSER!’ There was the sound of a door slamming, followed by silence.

  Frank looked at Simon’s shocked face. ‘None of that would be admissible in court, sir. I couldn’t possibly swear that it was your mother I was listening to and not a radio programme, so please don’t worry unnecessarily. As you say, she’s overwrought and we all say things we don’t mean when we’re angry.’

  ‘But you heard it.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s completely untrue. My father has never abused anyone in his life, and certainly not Meg. It’s my mother who has the problem.’ Anguish pinched his already drawn face. ‘This is so awful. I keep asking myself, why? What have we done to deserve it?’

  Frank was spared an answer by the door opening behind Simon’s back and his father putting an arm round the young man’s shoulder and drawing him inside. ‘Come in, Superintendent. You find us in turmoil, I’m afraid. Grief is often the most selfish of emotions.’

  Nightingale Clinic, Salisbury – 12.30 p.m.

  Alan smiled encouragingly as Jinx showed her first signs of faltering. ‘You’re doing very well. We can check all this with Dean later, but you’ve taken me up to Friday, the twenty-seventh of May without any hesitation at all.’ He consulted his diary. ‘The following Monday, May the thirtieth, was a bank holiday. Does that help at all? You’re unlikely to have gone to work so maybe you took the opportunity for a long weekend away.’

  ‘Friday was the last day of the Cosmopolitan fashion shoot,’ she recapitulated slowly. ‘Dean had tickets to a rock concert at Wembley and he had to meet his lover at five o’clock at the tube station, so he left me to develop the films. I wanted to get it done because . . .’ She paused at the same place she’d paused before. ‘I know it was urgent,’ she said, ‘but I can’t remember why.’

  ‘There were only four working days the following week because of the Bank Holiday Monday,’ he pointed out, ‘and you were spending the week after that at Hellingdon Hall. Perhaps you realized you were running out of time.’

  She stared into the middle distance. ‘Miles and Fergus came,’ she said suddenly. ‘It was after Angelica had left and they kept hammering on the studio door until I let them in. There was a cab-driver with them, demanding money. They were both pissed. They said they’d lost all their cash gambling, couldn’t go home and needed beds for the night. I said why hadn’t they gone to Richmond and waited for me there, and they said they had, but Leo had refused to pay the taxi fare and told them to come to the studio instead and make me pay for it. Which I did.’ She took out a cigarette and lit it, watching the blue smoke spiral from its tip for a second or two before going on.

  ‘I can remember now,’ she said in a strange voice. ‘I made them some coffee and told them to wait in the reception area till I’d finished what I was doing, but Miles was so drunk that he barged in on me in the dark room and let the light in.’

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘The film I was working on was completely buggered, so I did what my father does and beat the shit out of him.’ She gave a hollow laugh. ‘I chased him into the studio and started hitting him with a plastic chair. I was so angry. And then Fergus came lurching in to find out what was going on, so I hit him as well. But the person I really wanted to have a go at was Leo. It was the last straw, sending them on to me when he knew I was up to my eyes in work.’

  ‘How did he know?’

  ‘Because when Dean left I phoned to tell him. We were going to his parents’ for the weekend and he wanted to leave on the Friday evening. So I rang to suggest that he go on his own and leave me to follow on the Saturday, but he said he had things to do himself so it didn’t matter.’

  ‘And it was after the phone call that he sent Miles and Fergus on to you?’

  She nodded.

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘I made up my mind to call off the wedding. It was the money more than anything, the fact that he wouldn’t pay their taxi fare.’ Her lips thinned angrily. ‘He’d been scrounging off me for so bloody long, and he wouldn’t even pay one miserable taxi fare, and I thought, I’m mad. What the hell am I doing tying myself to this selfish bastard who doesn’t give a toss for anyone except himself?’ She looked at Alan. ‘So I packed it in for the evening, got the boys into the car and went back to have it out with him. And he wasn’t there.’ She shrugged. ‘So I ordered a pizza, made the boys eat some, and sent them to bed to sleep it off.’

  There was a short silence.

  ‘Weren’t Miles and Fergus angry when you hit them?’

  ‘I think they were too shocked.’ She thought back. ‘The funny thing is I lost my temper with Fergus the other day and I thought it was the first time I’d ever done it but it was nothing to the anger I felt that night. I remember screaming at them so much that I had a sore throat the next morning.’ She smiled slightly. ‘I didn’t hit them very hard. It was the fact that I did it at all that shocked them. Miles burst into tears and said I was just like Adam, and I thought: For the first time I understand why Adam does it.’

  ‘And why is that, Jinx?’

  She looked at him. ‘Because you’re so bloody tired, you’re working so bloody hard, you’ve tied yourself to a worthless parasite, and two immature drunks come along and ruin everything you’ve done because they think it’s funny. I could have killed them all that night, every one of them. I got no sleep because I was so angry, and all I could think about was what hell the next week was going to be because I’d have to work late to catch up. And I kept worrying that the ruined film was the only film that was any good, and how was I going to explain to Cosmopolitan that we’d have to do the shoot all over again.’

  ‘Did Leo come back that night?’

  ‘If he did, I didn’t hear him. I bolted the front and back door on the inside, so he couldn’t get in.’ She brushed imaginary fluff from her sleeve. ‘He came back at lunchtime on the Saturday.’

  ‘Were Miles and Fergus still there?’

  She nodded. ‘We were all in the kitchen when he came in through the back door. They couldn’t go unless I lent them some money for the tube fare ba
ck to Miles’s Porsche, which was parked outside a casino somewhere, but I was refusing to shell out any more. I said they could walk for all I cared, or phone Adam and explain what they’d been doing. He’d already told them that if they persisted with the gambling he’d cut them out of his will.’ She closed her eyes and touched her fingertips to her eyelids as if she had a pain there. ‘So Leo offered to drive them and they all left.’

  There was another silence.

  ‘And what did you do then?’ asked Alan.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I can’t remember anything after they left. I think I must have gone to sleep.’ She lowered her hand and looked at him with a kind of despair.

  The Vicarage, Littleton Mary, Wiltshire – 12.30 p.m.

  They sat in the drawing room in deep discomfort. Caroline Harris was crouched on the sofa, misery etched into every line of her face. Charles sat as far away from her as he could, while Simon perched unhappily on a stool. Frank, overheated and tired, was offered a deep leather armchair which hurt his back.

  ‘We’ve located Leo’s house in Chelsea,’ he explained, ‘and, according to the information phoned through before I left, there are several boxes and suitcases on the premises which appear to belong to your daughter. Preliminary searches have uncovered a photograph album which shows several snap-shots of Meg and Leo together, taken in July 1983.’ He addressed his question to Mrs Harris. ‘Were you aware they had known each other for at least eleven years?’

  Her lips thinned to a narrow line. ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Was she a secretive person, Mrs Harris?’

  The woman glanced spitefully at her husband. ‘Not with me. She told me everything. It was her father she kept secrets from.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ said Simon.

  Frank glanced at him. ‘You’d say she was secretive.’

  ‘Very. She didn’t want anyone to know anything about her life, least of all Mum or Dad. Particularly Mum, in fact. She knew how much Mum hated sex so she didn’t tell her until recently how many men she slept with, and she only did that because she was angry.’ He closed his eyes to avoid looking at his mother’s pain. ‘She loved sex, saw it as a healthy expression of life, love and beauty, and couldn’t bear to have it treated as something dirty and disgusting.’

  ‘You wanted her, too, Simon,’ said Caroline in a whisper, ‘just like your father. Never mind she was your sister. You think I didn’t notice? I saw how you looked at her.’

  A dull flush rose in Simon’s face. ‘It was you who made her uncomfortable,’ he said quietly, ‘not Dad. Everything she did was the opposite of what you’ve done. She got herself a decent education, she rejected God, she loved sex, she stayed single, she dived into London life to get away from the sterility of village rectitude. She experienced more in her thirty-four years than you will experience in a whole lifetime.’ Tears glittered in his eyes. ‘She didn’t strangle life, she glorified every minute as if it were her last. I wish to God the rest of us could do the same.’

  There was a desperate and terrible silence.

  Frank cleared his throat. ‘One of the photographs has a somewhat cryptic caption underneath it. It reads’ – he consulted a notebook – ‘“Happiness AA”. I’m told Meg is sitting in Leo’s lap on a beach.’ He looked up. ‘Do you know what AA stands for? It seems unlikely that Automobile Association or Alcoholics Anonymous would fit the bill.’

  Simon looked towards his mother but she had retreated into some internal world and was rocking herself tenderly on the sofa. ‘After Abortion,’ he said quietly. ‘Married couples always talk about their lives BC – Before Children. Meg always referred to life after her abortion as double-A time. She said she’d never realized before just how awful it would be to have children and she thanked God she’d discovered early on that she wasn’t cut out to be a mother.’

  ‘Was Leo the father?’

  ‘I don’t know. She never told me who it was, and I didn’t ask.’

  ‘Did you know about Leo before your parents did?’

  ‘Not by name. I knew she had a long-term lover who came and went between her other affairs. She was very fond of him, called him her old stand-by. I presume that was Leo if she’d known him eleven years.’

  ‘Did she ever say why she didn’t marry him?’

  Simon shrugged. ‘She said once that he was permanently broke, but the truth is I don’t think she wanted to get married. She certainly didn’t want children.’ He glanced towards his father. ‘She always felt that I fitted into our family better than she did, and she was afraid of bringing a child into the world who didn’t belong. She said it wasn’t fair.’

  ‘It can’t have been Leo,’ said his father. ‘Surely she wouldn’t describe a man with a house in Chelsea as permanently broke.’

  Frank Cheever tucked his notebook into his pocket. ‘In fact, sir, he had several properties both in this country and abroad, but no one knew about them, not even his parents. He made a habit of pleading poverty when, according to his solicitor, he was worth a very tidy fortune. Miss Kingsley describes him as a parasite who was obsessively secretive about money. His mother describes a disturbed young man with a pathological dislike of sharing. He wasn’t a straightforward character by any means, so it’s highly probable he did give your daughter the impression he had no money.’

  ‘How very tragic.’ Charles Harris looked distressed. ‘One tends to think the type doesn’t exist any more, certainly not amongst the young. I suppose we must blame Dickens for creating so extreme an example that the rest pass unnoticed.’ He saw the Superintendent’s perplexed expression. ‘Scrooge,’ he explained. ‘Misers. People who need to hoard wealth but can’t bring themselves to spend it. You come across them in the newspapers from time to time, old people who’ve died in shocking squalor only to leave a fortune behind.’ He folded his hands in his lap. ‘As I say, it’s not something one associates with youth, but presumably a miser is a miser all his life. Poor Leo. What a sad, sad state of affairs.’

  His wife began to scream. It was a piercing terrible sound that curdled sympathy and frayed nerves.

  Nightingale Clinic, Salisbury – 12.45 p.m.

  ‘Let’s try a different tack,’ suggested Alan. ‘You said you and Leo were supposed to be staying with his parents for the weekend. Have you any recollection of doing that or was the whole idea abandoned when you decided you weren’t going to marry him?’

  Jinx’s expression cleared. ‘No,’ she said, ‘we did go. I had a row with them. I seem to have had rows with everyone that weekend.’

  ‘It’s not surprising. You were under a lot of pressure. The wedding was only a few weeks away and you were having second thoughts about going through with it.’

  ‘But why did I go down there with him if I knew I wasn’t going to marry him?’ It was a puzzle, but not one she thought Protheroe could solve.

  He recalled her acceptance of Matthew Cornell’s invitation to lunch. ‘Presumably they were expecting you, so perhaps you thought it was the polite thing to do.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said in surprise. ‘I didn’t think it would be fair to Philippa not to go.’

  ‘Tell me about the row.’

  ‘I remember it so clearly,’ she said. ‘It was after lunch on the Monday and I blew my stack when Leo asked his father for some money and Anthony said he was a bit short because he’d been forced to pay for some building work he’d had done.’ She shook her head. ‘The job had been completed six months before and he was angry because the builder had gone to a solicitor.’ She pulled a rueful face. ‘I’d been holding myself back for twenty-four hours, and I went berserk. I called him every synonym for skinflint I could think of, then turned on Leo and let rip at him. Poor Philippa looked mortified, and I was sorry about that because she’d always been so sweet to me.’ She sighed. ‘I wish I’d had the sense not to go in the first place. It wasn’t a very dignified display. I kept spitting saliva all over the place because I couldn’t get the words out fast enough.’


  ‘Was that when you told Leo it was all off?’

  A look of irritation crossed her face. ‘I never got the chance. I just made an awful lot of noise, screaming and yelling and calling them names. I don’t know what I thought I was doing really, except getting all the poison out of my system. It was Leo who said he wasn’t going through with it.’ She gave a small laugh. ‘He said he’d been having an affair with Meg, and was planning to marry her instead.’ She looked at him. ‘I did tell you I wouldn’t have wanted to kill myself over Leo and Meg. Do you believe that now? I can remember my relief when he said it. Thank God, I thought. I’m off the hook.’

  ‘But it must have been a shock.’

  ‘I suppose it was. I never thought she’d do it again, not after what happened to Russell.’

  He was lost. ‘Do what again?’

  She looked at him rather blankly. ‘It was history repeating itself,’ she said impatiently, as if it was something he ought to have known. ‘Meg was having an affair with Russell when he was murdered.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  Tuesday, 28 June, Nightingale Clinic, Salisbury – 12.50 p.m.

  ALAN PROTHEROE WIPED a weary hand across his face, then pushed himself out of his chair and wandered restlessly towards the window. Could he, hand on heart, say he believed anything Jinx told him? When what she claimed to remember could be as fantastic as she chose because there was no one left to contradict her. There were three dead people, and all three were intimately connected with this one woman. Logic dictated that she must know something about their deaths. Logic also dictated that her father knew something, or why had he put her in here with such very precise instructions concerning her care? Adam was as anxious as she was, it seemed, that her memories lie dormant.

  ‘I’m not sure I can believe that,’ he said with his back to her. ‘You described Russell to me only a couple of days ago as possessive and jealous. You said your marriage was stifling. Now you tell me he and your best friend were having an affair. That doesn’t quite square, does it?’