The Red Room

by Nicci French

  Furth was silent for a moment. “I’ll be right outside. Just shout and I’ll be in. Do you hear me? One second’s doubt and you scream, Kit.”

  “Perfect.” I said, taking a deep breath. “Stay a few steps down until I’m inside. Michael?” I called again, and rapped firmly against the door, painted in the same depressing green.

  Someone slid a chain lock into place, then pulled the door open a couple of inches. “What do you want?”

  A tiny segment of Doll’s face peered out at me. His eyes looked slightly bloodshot; his pasty forehead was covered in dozens of tiny under-the-skin pimples. The smell was stronger now.

  “It’s Kit Quinn, Michael. Dr. Quinn. The police phoned about me dropping by.”

  “But I wasn’t expecting, I haven’t… It’s a mess in here. You’re too early. Everything’s a mess.”

  “That doesn’t matter at all.”

  “Wait. Wait.” The door shut on me and I could hear sounds of him clearing up; things were being dragged across the floor, drawers slamming shut, a tap running.

  A few minutes later the door opened, this time full. Doll was there. I made myself smile and I saw him smile back. I made myself step forward.

  He had brushed his lank hair back behind his ears, and dabbed some kind of lotion over himself. The sweet smell of it, combined with the meaty odor, caught in my nostrils.

  I made myself hold out my hand. I saw it was quite steady. He shook it delicately, as if it was a bomb that might go off. His palm was soft and sweaty against mine. He couldn’t meet my eye.

  “Hello, Michael,” I said, and he stood back to let me into the room. As I stepped over the threshold, I heard a eyes low growl, then a dark shape hurtled toward me. I saw yellow teeth, a red tongue, shining, and smelled the fierce reek of its breath against me before Doll pulled it off.

  “Down, Kenny!” Kenny was big and blackish-brown, with a large amount of Alsatian in him. “Sorry. Sorry.”

  “That’s fine. He didn’t even touch me.” The chemical rush of fear sluiced through my veins. The growl was still rumbling at the back of Kenny’s throat.

  “No. I’m so sorry. So sorry.”

  “Oh. You mean about this.” I touched my face and he stared at the scar.

  “Sorry,” he said again. “Sorry sorry sorry. I didn’t mean… It was just the way they treat you… It wasn’t really my fault, you were just there and they said things.”

  “I’m not here to talk about that, Michael.”

  “You’re with them.”

  “I’m not with them. I want to be straight with you. I’m a doctor, I talk to people who have troubles, or who need to talk, or want to talk. And I give the police advice. They brought me here but I told them to wait outside. I wanted us to talk, just you and me.”

  “Yes. They beat me up too, you know. It wasn’t only you. Both of us.”

  I looked at him and considered why it might be that a man like Michael Doll would never be given a normal job, why he would scare most women away. There was no single explanation. It was simply that everything was a bit askew. I thought of the way that drunk people pretend to be sober, the way they might get all the details right but fool nobody. Doll was imitating a normal, socialized member of the public. He had even made a special effort for my visit. He had fastened the buttons of his shirt all the way to the top and he was wearing a tie. There was nothing strange about the tie, but the knot had been pulled incredibly tight and small. It looked as if it would be impossible to undo. His worn corduroy jacket was slightly too big and he had rolled one sleeve inwards and the other outwards, so that the lining showed on one side but not on the other. His belt had apparently split because it was wound about with masking tape. He had shaved but he had missed an improbably large section, an archipelago of stubble, under the line of his jaw.

  I didn’t know if he was an evil person or a psychopath. I knew that he was poor and always had been. I knew that he lived alone. I’ve sometimes thought that the most important words anybody says to us are not “I love you,” but “You can’t go out looking like that.” People say it to us over and over again as children, and as we grow up, we internalize it and say it to ourselves. So we grow up learning to do the sort of things other people do, to say the sort of things other people say, so that we can pass unnoticed in the world. There are men like Michael Doll who never had it said to them, or not in the right way. For them, doing the things people do is a foreign language that they always speak with a strange accent.

  “Tea? Coffee?” Sweat was gathering on his forehead.

  “Tea would be lovely.”

  He got two mugs out of an otherwise empty cupboard. One was a Princess Diana mug; the other had a chipped rim. “Which would you like?”

  “How about the Diana one?”

  He nodded as if I had passed some test. “She was special, Diana.” He met my eyes for a second then his gaze flickered off again. He put his hand up under his shirt and scratched vigorously. “I loved her. Do you want, um…” gesturing at the sofa.

  I sat on it gingerly, and said, “Yes, lots of people loved her.”

  He frowned, as if searching for the right words, then repeated hopelessly, “She was special.”

  In the corner of the cramped room, which doubled as sitting room and kitchen, were two large bones. A cloud of flies buzzed noisily around them, and around a bowl on the floor, half full of jellied dog meat. On the wall, over the small, greasy cooker, was one of those calendars featuring naked women with vast breasts and dewy smiles. A pan with hardening baked beans sat on the hob. A small television was on in the corner, with the sound on mute. A horizontal white line flickered down the screen. The sofa was covered in dog hairs and stains that I didn’t want to think about. Beer cans and crisp packets and overflowing ashtrays lay on the floor. Through the door I could see a section of Doll’s bedroom. There were pictures, torn from newspapers and magazines, all over the wall. As far as I could tell, they ranged from the semi-naked pouting page-three girls to graphic pornography.

  There were shelves on the wall, but not for books—for apparently random clutter: a plastic ballerina with one leg broken off at the knee, six or seven old and cracked radios, a bicycle bell, several muddy sticks, a dog collar, a notebook with a picture of a tiger on the front, a yo-yo without any string, a cracked pitcher, a girl’s pink hair-band with a rose on the front, one pale blue sandal, a hairbrush, a length of chain, a pewter basin, a ball of twine, a heap of colored paper-clips, several old glass bottles. I could imagine that a good fifty percent of the British public would believe Michael Doll deserved a life sentence just for what he had done to this flat.

  He saw me looking and said, half proudly and half defensively, “That’s just stuff I collect. From the canal. You’d never believe the things people throw away.”

  I watched as he put a tea-bag in each mug, then four spoonfuls of sugar into his. His hand was trembling so much that the sugar scattered over the work surface.

  “I like it sweet,” he said. “Want a biscuit?”

  I felt I couldn’t eat anything he’d even looked at. “No,” I said. “Help yourself.”

  He took two biscuits from a packet and dipped both of them together into the tea until it touched the tips of his fingers. The biscuits were so soggy he had to hold them in his other hand. He lifted them to his mouth and ate them, licking them off his own skin with relish. His tongue was thick and grayish. “Sorry,” he said, with a grin.

  I brought my lips very close to the tea in imitation of a sip. “So, Michael,” I said. “You know why I’m here?”

  “They said I should tell you about the girl.”

  “I’m a doctor who’s done some work on people who commit crimes like this.”

  “Like what?”

  “Violent, against women, that sort of thing. Anyway, the police have asked me for my advice on the canal case.” I saw a flicker of interest in his good eye. He looked at me intently for the first time. “Obviously,” I continued, “I’
m interested in chatting with anybody who might have seen anything. You were one of the people who came forward. You were in the area.”

  “I fish,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “I sit there every day,” he said. “When I’m not working. It’s peaceful down there, away from all the noise. It’s like the countryside in a way.”

  “Do you eat the fish?”

  Doll looked appalled and disgusted. “Can’t stand fish,” he said. “Slimy smelly things. And you wouldn’t want to eat anything from that water. I took one back for my dog once. Wouldn’t touch it. Now I just keep them in my net and chuck them back at the end of the day.”

  “You were quite near the spot where the victim was found.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Do you know what happened?”

  “I looked for it in the papers. There wasn’t very much about it. She was called Lianne. I saw an old picture of her when she was alive. She was just a girl. About seventeen, they said. That’s just a girl. It was terrible.”

  “Is that why you came forward?”

  “The police asked. They wanted to talk to anybody who was in the area.”

  “How near were you?”

  “I was a few hundred feet away. Toward the river. I was there all day. Fishing, like I said.”

  “If Lianne had walked along that way you’d have seen her.”

  “I didn’t see her. But she might have walked past. When I’m fishing I get lost in my thoughts. Did you see her?”

  “What?”

  “Did you see the body?”

  “No.”

  “The throat was cut.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Is that a quick way of dying?”

  “If you cut the main arteries then it would be quick.”

  “There’d be a lot of blood, wouldn’t there? The killer, he’d be covered in it.”

  “I suppose so. I’m not really that sort of doctor. Have you been thinking about it?”

  “Yeah, of course. I can’t get it out of my mind. That’s why I wanted to hear about what the police were doing.”

  I pretended to take another sip from my tea. “Are you interested in the investigation?” I asked.

  “I’ve never been near anything like this before. I thought I could be part of it. I wanted to help.”

  “You said you can’t get it out of your mind.”

  He shifted in his chair. He took another biscuit but he didn’t eat it. He broke it into pieces and then into smaller pieces until there were just crumbs on the table. “I go over it.”

  “Go over what?”

  “That girl, walking along the canal and then suddenly having her throat cut and dying.”

  I took a packet of cigarettes from my pocket, lifted from Julie’s stash specially for the occasion. He looked up. I offered him one and he took it. I tossed my box of matches across the table, as if I was among friends. “The police must have asked you if there was anything at all you remembered.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I want to approach it from a different angle that might jog a memory. I want to know a bit about what you felt.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “About Lianne being killed?”

  He shrugged. “I think about it.”

  “Because you were nearby?”

  “I suppose.”

  “What do you think about?”

  “I go over it in my mind.”

  “Over what?”

  “It. It,” he insisted. “I think what it must have been like.”

  “What do you think it was like, Michael?”

  He laughed. “Isn’t that your job? Don’t you try to imagine what it must be like to kill women?”

  “You said you couldn’t get it out of your mind.”

  “I didn’t see anything. So I imagine it.”

  “That’s what interested me,” I said. “If you didn’t see anything, why did you come forward?”

  “Because I was in the area. The police asked.”

  “Are you all right, Michael? Have you been talking to anybody?”

  “You mean a doctor?”

  “Yes.”

  “What for?”

  “Sometimes it helps to talk about it.”

  “I have talked about it.”

  “Who to?”

  “To a friend.”

  “And?”

  He shrugged. “We talked.”

  There was another pause. “You’re interested in the case. Is there anything you’d like to know about it?”

  His look shifted now. Evasively? “I’m interested in what the police are doing. I want to know how it’s going. I feel strange, being there and not knowing anything.”

  “When you can’t get it out of your mind, what do you see in your mind?”

  He thought for a moment. “It’s like when you flash a light on and off very quickly. I see the woman.”

  “Which woman?”

  “Just any woman. I see her out there on the towpath. Someone coming up behind her, grabbing her, cutting her throat. I see it all in a moment. I see it over and over.”

  “What does it make you feel?”

  He shook himself, almost shivered. “I dunno. Nothing. I just can’t get rid of it. It’s there. I only wanted to help.” His voice was plaintive and high. He sounded like a little boy.

  I remembered the details I had read about his life yesterday in the files, when I’d gone into the station to talk with Furth: taken into care at eight, having been neglected by his alcoholic mother and beaten by his stepfather. Twenty residential homes and ten sets of foster-parents by the time he was sixteen. A history of bed-wetting; running away; of being bullied at school, then of being a bully. He’d tortured a cat in one of his foster-homes, and set fire to his bedclothes in another. He’d been moved to a special unit for disturbed children at thirteen, where his violent behavior had escalated. By the time he was independent, living in a squalid bed-and-breakfast, wandering around streets with his wandering eyes, and spying on girls in the park, he was a crisis waiting to happen.

  “Nobody listens,” he went on fretfully. “That’s what the trouble is. Nobody ever listens. You say something and they don’t hear you because they think you’re scum, or something. That’s what they call you. They don’t hear what you say. That’s why I go fishing, where I don’t have to meet no one. I can be there all day. Even when it’s raining. I don’t mind the rain.”

  “Has nobody ever listened to you?”

  “Nobody,” he answered. “Not ever. Not her.” I guessed he meant his mother. “She never cared. Didn’t even see me after I was taken away. Never seen me. I don’t even know if she’s alive. If I ever have a little baby boy or girlie”—here his tone became cloyingly sentimental—“I’ll cuddle them and pet them and never let them go.” A column of ash crumbled onto his trousers.

  “What about in the homes?” I asked. “Did they listen to you there?”

  “Them? That’s a joke, that is. Sometimes I did bad things, I couldn’t help it, like I was all full of stuff inside me and I had to let it out, and they hit me and locked me in my room and wouldn’t let me out even when I cried and cried.” His eyes filled again. “Nobody hears you.”

  “What about your friends?” I asked cautiously.

  He shrugged, ground his cigarette out.

  “Girlfriends?”

  Doll became agitated. He picked at the cloth of his trousers and his eyes darted off. “There’s a lady,” he said. “She likes me, that’s what she said. I told her stuff.”

  “Stuff like what?”

  “Like, things I felt. You know.”

  “About feelings?”

  “Feelings, yeah. And other things. You know.”

  “Feelings you have about women?”

  He mumbled incoherently.

  “The feelings you have about women, Michael, do they make you anxious?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Do you like women?�
�

  He tittered nervously and said, “Course. There’s nothing wrong with me in that area.”

  “I mean, like them as people. Do you have friends who are women?”

  He shook his head, lit another cigarette.

  “When you think about the girl who was murdered, what does that make you feel?”

  “That Lianne, she was a girl who’d run away. Don’t blame her either. I ran away, you know. I always thought my mum would end up getting me back. I’d smash her face in if she showed up now, though. Smash it in with one of her bottles, like, till there was nothing left. That’d teach her.”

  “So you wanted to help the police, because you knew you’d been in the area?”

  “Right. I keep going over it in my mind. I can’t stop. I make up stories about it.” He glanced at me, then away. “I go back to the canal and sit there and I think to myself, It may happen again. It could, couldn’t it? It could happen again, right where I’m sitting.”

  “Does that frighten you?”

  “Kind of. It…” He licked his lips. “Kind of nervous and kind of, you know…”

  “Excited?”

  He stood up and started to prowl round the small room. “Do you believe me?”

  “Believe what, Michael?”

  “Believe me,” he repeated hopelessly.

  I hesitated before replying. “I’m here to listen to you, Michael. To hear your side of the story. That’s what I do: I listen to people’s stories.”

  “Will you come back again? I thought you’d be all angry with me, after, you know… what happened. But you don’t treat me like I’m no good.”

  “Of course not.”

  “And you’re pretty. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not—you know, coming on. You’re a lady. I like your eyes. Gray. Like the sky. I like the way they watch me.”

  __________

  Furth was sitting gloomily on the stairs. I almost tripped over him.

  “So, what do you think?” he asked, as if I had just emerged from the insect house at the zoo. We walked out and got into the car. Doll would probably be looking at us out of the window. He would see me with Furth. What would he think? I wound down the window and let the warm wind gust over my face. A few heavy drops of rain splattered against the windscreen and the sky darkened.