The Red Room

by Nicci French

  He winked at me anyway, as if he’d caught me. “If he’s guilty,” he said, “he might like to get involved in the inquiry, even in a small way. What do you think?”

  “It’s been known,” I said.

  “Of course it’s been known. People like that love it. They want to be close to it, to feel how clever they are. A little extra kick. The sick bastards.”

  “So what did he say?”

  “We haven’t interviewed him.”

  “Why not?”

  “We’ll let him stew a bit. But we haven’t been lying down. We’ve got this young officer called Colette Dawes. Nice lady. Clever. She’s got to know him. In plain clothes, of course. Got him talking. You know the sort of thing. Bit of a drink, bit of flattery, bit of crossed legs when he’s looking, steer the conversation. In the meantime, she’s wearing a wire and we’ve got the tapes. Hours of them.”

  “That’s your investigation?” I said, baffled. “Getting a female officer to flirt with him?”

  Furth leaned forward with an urgent expression on his face. “I’m not going to say anything,” he said, in a conspiratorial whisper. “We just want your professional opinion of him. Off the record. It wouldn’t take long. Just look at his file and then have a brief talk with him. You know the kind of thing—a preliminary assessment of him.”

  “Talk to him?”

  “Sure. Have you got a problem with that?”

  Of course I had a problem with that and now I knew that I couldn’t say no. “No problem,” I said. “This woman, Colette Dawes, does she know what she’s doing?”

  Furth pulled a face. “She can look after herself. We’re always around, anyway. Look, Kit, I can understand you feeling nervous. We thought it might be a way of making you feel better.” He took a sip from his beer. And you wanted to make sure I wouldn’t sue for compensation, I thought to myself.

  “Thank you, Doctor,” I said. “Maybe it would.”

  “So, what do you say?”

  I stood up and walked to the window, looking out over that hidden lawn trapped between the backs of office buildings. It was early evening now but it wasn’t dark or even twilight. The light was softening from harsh yellow into gold.

  “It’s a plague pit, you know,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Bodies were tossed in a pit there during the plague. Covered with quicklime. Buried. Forgotten about.”

  “Bit creepy.”

  “No, it isn’t,” I said, turning back to him. “I’ll just say one thing now. I don’t know anything about your case. I think this woman playing Mata Hari is a crackpot idea. I don’t know what authority you’re doing this on and I don’t want to know. To me it seems irresponsible, it may even be illegal, but then I’m a doctor, not a lawyer.”

  “Will you let me know, though?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “How about a couple of days? There’s someone I need to talk to first.”

  “You’ll ring?”

  “Yes.”

  He went and I stayed for many minutes looking out of the window. Not at Furth, not out of that window. I looked out at the grass, watching the green change and fade in the glorious evening. Dead people. Dead people everywhere.

  4

  I phoned Rosa at once, at home. I couldn’t wait.

  “Furth came to see me,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “The detective. The one who was there when it happened, when I was attacked.”

  I told her the whole story and as I told it the more bizarre and unprofessional it sounded.

  “And what did you say?” she asked finally.

  “I was taken aback.”

  “But curious.”

  “Curious? I felt pulled.”

  “What does that mean, Kit?”

  “I wake in the night. Or sometimes I don’t wake in the night. It hardly seems to make a difference. And I go over and over it, as if it is still happening to me. Or as if it is about to happen and I can do something to stop it, wind back the clock. It’s like I am back in that room again, and there’s red blood everywhere. Mine. His.”

  “So you want to meet Doll again and reduce him to his human size?”

  “You’re a clever woman, aren’t you?”

  “You know, I’ve never thought being clever was very important. Look, Kit, I’m just going to say two things to you and they’re the two things you must have had in mind when you decided to ring me. The first is whether you’ll do yourself any good by seeing this man. The second is that it doesn’t really matter what good it does you. You’re being brought in to do a job. Can you do that?”

  “Yes. I think so.”

  There was a pause.

  “It’s dangerous to ask for advice, Kit. You might not get the advice you wanted.” She gave a sigh. “I’m sorry. In my opinion you shouldn’t do this. Now why do I think you’re not going to pay any attention to what I say?”

  “It must be a bad line.”

  “Yes, it must be that.”

  I put down the phone. It was twilight outside. Once more the rain splashed down the window-panes and rattled and slapped in the wet trees outside. Wild July, bashed and drenched by warm gales. I went and stood by the window and looked out at the garden below, the waterlogged lawn.

  A couple, holding hands, sloshed together across the grass, through the piles of sodden blossom and the shallow puddles. She turned her face toward his, laughing in the half-darkness. I moved away from the window. Love and work, that’s what gets you through the days.

  The phone rang, startling me out of my reverie. “Is that Kit?”

  The voice sounded very far away. Crackly. Was it abroad? Maybe not. New York can sound closer than South London. It is, in a way.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Julie.” Dull silence. Julie. Julie. Julie. Couldn’t think of anybody. “Julie Wiseman.”

  “Oh, Julie. But I thought you were…” She’d gone away. Dropped off the face of my earth.

  “I’m back in London.”

  Back from where? Should I know? I tried to picture her as I’d last seen her. Dark curly hair—pinned up, wasn’t it? There was a rush of memory, like a breath of warm air, that made me smile. Cigarettes late at night in cheap restaurants. One night we were all there so late that the cooks came out of the kitchen with a bottle of wine and sat with us. Above all, Julie had done the thing we all said we wanted to do and secretly knew we would never dare to. She had been a math teacher in a secondary school and she handed in her notice and set off around the world or around South America or wherever it was. I felt myself soften. I said that we’d missed her and that it would be great to see her. And she said it would be great to come and see me, and then it quickly emerged that it would be great if she could do even more than that. I remembered now. She’d given up her flat when she left. What had she done with her stuff? Given it all away, knowing her. That was Julie, generous with her own possessions, generous with your possessions. Could she stay for a day or two? I paused for a moment. I couldn’t think of a single reason why it wouldn’t be better to have somebody else here with me for a bit.

  She came through the door with a waft of elsewhere about her. A vast rucksack and a brown canvas bag hit the floor so that dust rose off them. She wore brown leather shoes, rough khaki trousers, a blue padded jacket that had a sort of Tibetan look to it. Her face didn’t just look tanned. It was beyond tanned. It looked sanded, seasoned, weather-blown, polished. Her hands and wrists were brown as well, and her eyes, bright as semi-precious stones, were grinning at a joke you hadn’t seen yet.

  “Blimey, Kit, what on earth happened to your face?”

  “Oh, well, as a matter of fact…”

  But she was head down, rummaging in a plastic bag.

  “I’ve got something for you,” she said. I expected her to produce some hand-carved antique Buddha, but it was a bottle of duty-free gin. “I thought you might have some tonic to go with this,” she said. “I could pop ou
t and get some.”

  Clearly there was no doubt that this was to be opened and poured straight away.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I’ve got some.”

  “And could I make myself something? I slept for about thirteen hours on the plane.”

  “Where have you come from?”

  “I stopped over for a couple of weeks in Hong Kong,” she said. “Amazing. Some fried eggs maybe.”

  “And bacon?”

  “That would be great. And fried bread if you’ve got some. For the last couple of months I’ve been having a dream about coming back to England and having a real old fry-up—eggs and bacon and tomatoes and bread all fried up together.”

  “I’ll get some tomatoes while I’m at it. There’s a twenty-four-hour shop on the corner.”

  “I’ve got something else for you too.” She got out a huge duty-free carton of Marlboro cigarettes.

  “Actually I don’t smoke.”

  “I sort of knew that,” Julie said with a smile. “Do you mind if I light up?”

  “Not at all.”

  Fifteen minutes later, I was sitting opposite Julie at the kitchen table. I was sipping at my gin and tonic. She was alternating sips from her gin with gulps of treetrunk-brown tea and assaults on the great platter of her very, very late breakfast. As she ate she told me bits of stories: treks at altitude, canoes, hitchhikers, campfires, strange foods, a flood, war zones, brief sexual encounters, a full-blown affair in a harborfront apartment in Sydney, crewing on a yacht between Pacific Islands, waitressing jobs in San Francisco and Hawaii and Singapore, or was it São Paulo and Santo Domingo? And all this—it was under-stood—was like a film trailer advertising coming attractions. The full stories, in all their texture, would be told to me in due course.

  “I love this flat,” she said. “I always did.”

  I was puzzled for a moment.

  “Was I living here before you left?”

  “Of course,” she said, mopping up a thick pool of yolk with a corner of greasy bread. “I’ve been here several times. I’ve been to dinner here.”

  That was right. I remembered now. It felt like a rebuke. She had done so much, seen so many strange sunsets, had so many “experiences,” all those sights, and all the time I’d been here in Clerkenwell, going out to work, having a room painted. My work had seemed so important, I hadn’t even taken a holiday in the time Julie had been broadening her mind. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I looked so pale. As if Julie had come back from being in the sun and lifted a stone and found me stuck to the underside, damp and sickly.

  “But in a way I really envy you,” she said, not meaning it at all. “I stepped off the ladder. I mean the career ladder. Now I’m back and I’ve got to find a way back on. Here I am. Back and totally unemployable.” She gave a laugh. She was clearly, and rightly I had to admit, very proud of herself. “And you,” she said, in the moment I’d been dreading. “What have you been up to? How did you get that amazingly sexy scar?”

  “Someone attacked me in a police cell.”

  “God!” She looked suitably impressed. “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Because he was panicking, I suppose.”

  “How awful.” She chomped loudly for a few seconds. “Was it really bad?”

  “Pretty bad. It happened three months ago and I went back to work today.”

  “Today? You don’t mind me coming, do you?” Her face creased in an anxious frown. “Landing on you like this.”

  “No, it’s fine. As long as it isn’t for too—”

  “What else is happening? Apart from being attacked by a madman and nearly dying, I mean.”

  I searched for a significant event. “Albie and I split up,” I said. “Finally.”

  “Yes,” Julie said sympathetically. “I remember you talking about having problems.” Oh, fuck, I thought to myself. Really? Three years ago? I seemed to be living a life like one of those old-fashioned deep-sea divers, walking along the bottom very, very slowly in heavy lead boots. “So is there anybody new?”

  “No,” I said. “It only happened recently.”

  “Oh,” she said. “What about work?”

  “I’m still at the clinic.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  I had to think of something. I just had to. Or else I might as well leave the room and phone the Samaritans.

  “I’ve been asked to do some work for the police. Maybe it might even turn into a kind of consultancy.” Saying it out loud to an outsider made it seem real.

  She took a giant slug of gin, swallowed it, then yawned. I could see her white teeth, pink tongue, a glistening tunnel of throat.

  “Amazing,” she said. “Did I tell you about this man who picked me and a friend up when we were going up to the Drakensberg Mountains?”

  She hadn’t but we moved over to the sofa and she did now. The full version, this time. It felt soothing, Julie stretched out like a cat talking with fond pleasure about these faraway dangers while I took a sip of my drink every few minutes, and outside the night came on very slowly, like a game of Grandmother’s Footsteps that I could never win. And finally I looked up and Julie was asleep, her drink still in her hand, her brain having told her strong brown body that it was in Thailand or Hong Kong, and that it was actually three in the morning. I slid the glass from her fingers and she murmured something unintelligible. Then I fetched a duvet from the cupboard in my bedroom and covered her with it, right up to her chin. She gave a sigh and wrapped herself up in it like a hamster in its nest. I couldn’t help smiling at the sight. This wanderer was already more comfortable in my flat than I was.

  I went into my bedroom and took off my clothes. It had been the strangest day—frantic with activity after so many weeks of convalescence. My head buzzed with thoughts. My skin felt cold and exposed, like a twig peeled of its bark. I climbed into bed and pulled my own duvet around me. I couldn’t seem to get it comfortably over me. I knew that it was square but it felt as if it were lozenge-shaped and there always seemed to be a bit of my body exposed. At last I allowed myself to think of the girl found dead by the canal. Lianne, that was her name, or the name she had called herself. Just Lianne. A lost girl with no real name. I would find out more about her soon; tomorrow, perhaps. I had to sleep, so that my brain would be clear for tomorrow. Tomorrow I had to see Doll. I touched my scar. Closed my eyes.

  She wasn’t by the canal anymore, obviously. Lianne with no last name. She would be in a cold metal cabinet, filed away. I felt, almost physically, the size of London stretching around me in all directions. There were bad things going on in some of those houses. But I tried to convince myself that it didn’t matter statistically. Think of all the millions and millions of houses in which good things were happening, or nothing much at all beyond loneliness or neglect. That was the really amazing statistic. All those houses in which no serious harm was being done. It didn’t cheer me up but I fell asleep anyway.

  5

  Michael Doll’s bedsit was above a dog-grooming parlor in Homerton, in a road full of strange and dingy shops that always made me wonder how they could possibly make any money. There was a taxidermist, with a stuffed and faded kingfisher staring with dull eyes out of the window. Who had wanted to stuff a kingfisher? There was a clothes shop selling flowery aprons and Crimplene slacks with heel straps; an everything-under-£1 shop; a twenty-four-hour grocer, where dented tins were stacked in pyramids on the shelves and a fat man sat at the till picking his nose. Number 24A. One of the windows was covered with a billowing stretch of plastic. A light was on.

  I turned to Furth. “You know it’s not meant to be this way round. You should be looking at the case, and theorizing a suspect, not looking at a suspect and seeing if he can be fitted into your case. I’m only doing this because you’ve already fucked up, sending your pretty Colette in with her wires and flashing her slim legs.”

  “Of course, Kit,” he replied blandly, looking ahead down the grim street. “Are you all right, though?”<
br />
  “Fine.” I wasn’t going to tell him that I’d been awake since three in the morning, rehearsing for this moment.

  As we got out of the car, I felt a spasm of apprehension and clenched my fists. I had put on a pair of black jeans, a long-sleeved white T-shirt under an old suede jacket, which hid my alarm. My hair was loosely tied back. I wanted to look relaxed and approachable, but businesslike as well. I was the doctor, friendly but not a friend.

  I pressed the doorbell, but couldn’t hear if it was ringing upstairs. There was no reply. I rang again and waited. Still no one came. I pushed against the door and it swung open. I stepped inside, and called: “Hello? Michael?” My voice hung in the musty air.

  The stairs were narrow and bare. Balls of fluff lay on the boards. The stairwell was painted hospital green. I put my hand on the varnished banister, which was tacky to the touch, as if lots of sticky fingers had held it before mine. There was hardly room for the two of us. I went first and Furth followed, as if we were climbing a winding staircase in the turret of a castle. As I went up the flight of steps toward the door at the top, I became aware of a thick, meaty smell. Suddenly I knew this was all wrong. “We can’t do this,” I said to Furth, in a low voice.

  “What do you mean?” Furth hissed. “Have you lost your nerve?”

  I shook my head. “No, no. I need to see him on my own.”

  “What are you talking about? I can’t let you do that, for Chrissake.”

  “Don’t you see? You and me and him all over again. What would he think?”

  Furth looked around desperately, as if there was someone else on the stairs who could take charge. “You’re not going in there on your own.”

  “You told me he was a petty little pervert. What’s the problem?”

  “I’ve told you, I think he’s a killer.”

  I thought. “You stay on the stairs. I’ll tell him you’re there. It’ll work.”