The Red Room

by Nicci French

  “No tea for me,” I said, easing myself into an orange plastic chair and putting my report, in its blank white envelope, in front of me. “You asked me to deliver this in person. Here it is.”

  “Nice one,” Furth said, with a look across at Oban. Then he winked at me. “She looks gentle, but you’ve got to watch yourself.”

  I slid my finger under the sealed flap and tore it open. “Do you want this?”

  “Before you start, you might like to know that we’ve brought Doll in.”

  “What?”

  “Apart from your report, things are moving ahead. There are divers in the canal as we speak. His own testimony places him in the area, there’s his suspicious behavior before and after, and his own taped confession, of course. It’s all bubbling away nicely. Everything done to the letter, don’t worry. Legal aid, of course. John Coates. He’s on his way now. You must know him.”

  I’d met him once in here with Francis. Nice, smiled a lot. You’d want him for your bank manager rather than your lawyer. I looked at Jasmine Drake, but she was doodling on her notebook and wouldn’t look up. I glanced across at Oban and was disconcerted to find his pale, unblinking eyes on me. I pulled out the single sheet of paper and placed it on the table in front of me.

  “Is that it?” said Furth.

  “Summarize it for us, please, Dr. Quinn.” The voice was Oban’s.

  “Let him go.”

  The room filled up with silence. I could hear my heartbeat. It was quite steady. I felt better with it out, now that I had crossed the line.

  “What?”

  “Unless there’s other evidence you haven’t told me about, I don’t see a case. As yet.”

  Furth’s face flushed. That was the worst moment. I was meant to be on his side but now it seemed that I wasn’t. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, not looking me in the eye.

  I took a deep breath. “Then you shouldn’t have asked me for my report.”

  “It’s your report I’m bloody talking about,” said Furth, with a sudden angry hilarity, as if this were something that could be laughed away. “You were just asked to assess Doll. That’s all. A simple brief. He’s a pervert. Isn’t he? That’s all you have to say. Anthony Michael Doll’s a pervert.”

  “He’s a disturbed young man with violent and lurid fantasies.”

  “So what—”

  “Fantasies. There’s a difference between the fantasy and the act.”

  “He’s confessed and he will confess again. You’ll see.”

  “No. He fantasized during sexual acts with WPC Dawes.” I looked around. That had done it. There was silence. “Did you know? Did you know that when she en-couraged—her word for it—him to talk, she was jerking him off, allowing him to fondle her? Did you encourage it, without actually spelling it out? Interests would be best served, that sort of thing. Wasn’t she getting good enough material at first? Anyway, it doesn’t matter. It’s not a confession, it’s a piece of pornography.”

  “Listen, Kit.” His face was flushed. “I should never have brought you in. That was my mistake. I should have realized that after your accident your judgement might be impaired. You’re actually identifying with Michael Doll, protecting him in some strange way. It’s like people falling in love with their kidnappers.” He stole a glance at Oban, then turned his concerned face back to me. “We thought we were helping you, but now I see we were wrong. It was all too early. So maybe we should just say thank you for your time, and we’ll reimburse you.”

  I said, as mildly as I could manage, “You told Colette Dawes to solicit a confession from Michael Doll. Did she know what she was dealing with? Did she get carried away?”

  “He’s a murderer,” Furth said, openly scornful. “We know he is and you bloody well ought to know he is. We just need to prove it before a jury. WPC Dawes did a fine job in difficult conditions.”

  I looked him in the eyes. “Was this your idea?”

  Furth made an obvious attempt to speak calmly. “We’ve got a murderer in there,” he said. “In my opinion. We’ve built a case. We’ve got a confession. If we’ve stretched the rules a little, I’d have thought you would approve of that, Kit, of all people. We’re on the side of the women—the one who has been killed and the others who will be.”

  “I think you’ve misunderstood me,” I said, hearing my voice tremble. Was it nervousness or anger? “I’m not saying that Michael Doll cannot have killed this woman, but you’ve got no case. I’m here as someone who works with the emotionally troubled and the criminally insane, not a lawyer, but I would guess that that tape would be entirely inadmissible in any trial. More than that, I reckon that if any judge heard it, he would throw the whole case out for the most blatant entrapment.” I looked at him, his handsome face. “If I were you, I would bury that tape in a very deep hole and pray that Doll’s lawyer never ever hears about it. In any case, I want no more to do with the case.”

  “That’s the first sensible thing you’ve said.”

  That did it.

  “This whole thing,” I said, almost gasping for breath, “is a fucking grotesque obscenity. And you”—this was to Jasmine Drake—“you should know better. And I don’t just mean as a policewoman. As a bloody woman. And that goes for you too.” I turned to DCI Oban, who was sitting apart, with a blank expression on his large, soft, slightly florid face. I looked furiously at the report lying on the table, the report that was expressed in such calm and scientific language.

  Oban didn’t reply to me. He stood up and as he opened the door he looked at Furth with a gloomy expression that reminded me of a very old, wrinkled bloodhound. “Let him go,” he said, in a voice that was soft and almost casual.

  “Who?”

  “Mickey Doll. Anything else?” Nobody spoke. Now he looked at me. “Send us your invoice, Doctor, or whatever it is you normally do. Thank you.” But he didn’t sound very grateful. I had spoiled his day. Then he left. Jasmine Drake followed, with a narrow-eyed glance at me before she disappeared into the corridor outside.

  I was alone with Furth, who was sitting in silence, staring at the wall. I got up to go. The sound of my chair scraping on the floor woke him from his reverie. He seemed surprised that I was still there. He spoke as if he were in a dream. “It’ll be your fault,” he said, “when he does it again. He did it to you, he did it to that girl, and outside, walking around, is someone—probably, shall we say probably?—that he’ll do it to next.”

  “Goodbye, Furth,” I said, leaving. “I’m, um, you know…”

  “Keep an eye on the newspapers,” he called after me, having to shout to be heard. “This week, next week—it’ll be there.”

  8

  As I reached the street I was trembling with suppressed emotion. I wanted to do something extreme and violent, like throwing a large object through a shop window or leaving the country, assuming a new identity and never coming back to Britain as long as I lived. I would settle for going home, locking the door and not emerging for a week.

  When I got back to my car, the BMW was gone. Doubtless I would soon be hearing from an insurance company. “We have been notified by our client…” A scrape along two panels. How much would that cost?

  My flat had a wonderful clattery emptiness about it. Julie wasn’t home. This was a precious opportunity. I ran a bath, poured some exotically and absurdly named salts into the water, grabbed a newspaper and a magazine and slid into the water like a walrus. I quickly tossed aside the newspaper and read the magazine: I read about the five best country-house weekend getaways for under a hundred pounds, I learned seven ways to shock your man in bed and I answered a questionnaire entitled “Are You a Homebody or a Party Animal?” It turned out that I was a party animal. Why did I so rarely go to parties?

  Finally I tossed aside the magazine as well and slowly slid down the bath until only my nose and mouth protruded above the surface of the water. Unconcerned, I heard the phone ring, once, and the intervening beep of the answering-machine.
I imagined lying in a flotation tank. A saline solution adjusted to give you perfect buoyancy, maintained at the same temperature as that of your body. Darkness. What was the point? Were you totally detached or totally absorbed? I knew that either a very short time felt extremely long or else it was the other way round.

  I felt a succession of thumps and the slamming of the door. Julie. It sounded as if she had kicked the door shut. Time to get back into the world. I dried myself slowly as if to delay the inevitable, then wrapped the towel around my body and stepped out.

  “Fantastic,” said Julie. “Bath in the daytime. That’s the way to live.”

  “It feels a bit illicit,” I admitted, though at the same time I felt irritated at being teased for self-indulgence by somebody who had spent years drifting around the world.

  “Don’t worry about supper,” she said brightly. “I was looking at a couple of your cookbooks and I went out and did some shopping. Are you in this evening?”

  “Yes, but I hadn’t really planned—”

  “Great. Let me take care of you. It’s a secret but don’t worry about it. It’s all very light. Very healthy. By the way there’s a message for you on the answering-machine from someone called Rosa. Sorry, I didn’t know you were here and I was expecting a call. I’m not sure if I pressed the right button. I might have erased it by mistake.”

  She had. I went and got dressed very quickly and simply. I wasn’t going out. I pulled on some white jeans and a pale blue sweater. I was tempted to ignore Rosa’s message. I couldn’t think of any good news it could possibly be. But I counted to ten and dialed.

  “We need to meet,” Rosa said immediately.

  “What for?”

  “It’s to do with the police. I understand you didn’t follow my advice. It’s not exactly a surprise, but it would have been nice to have been told.”

  “Oh,” I said, with my heart sinking. “Right. Shall I come in sometime tomorrow?”

  “I’d like to see you today. Is it all right if I see you at home?”

  “Why? I mean fine,” I said.

  “I’ll be about an hour,” Rosa said, and hung up.

  I began a farcically ineffectual attempt at tidying the living room to the slightly alarming sounds of Julie doing things in the kitchen. In fact, it was barely forty-five minutes before there was a knock at the door.

  I ran down the stairs and opened the door with a rehearsed cheery greeting that froze as I looked out on the step. “Oh,” was all that I could manage, which I think was what I had said to Rosa on the phone.

  “I’m not alone,” she said.

  She wasn’t alone. Standing beside her was Detective Chief Inspector Oban. Behind him was a car. A BMW.

  “I’m sorry about the car,” I said. It was all I could think of, but as I said it I realized that if you can only think of one thing it doesn’t mean you have to say it. It may be that the one thing you can think of is the very worst thing to say. “It was completely my fault. I’ll pay for it at once. I know that the first rule of crashing is never to admit responsibility but it was completely my responsibility.”

  Rosa looked puzzled and Oban gave a faint smile. “A parking problem,” he said to her in explanation. Then he looked back at me. “That was you, was it? There was a note, but it had been rained on. Don’t worry, I think the damage will be treated as having happened in the course of duty.”

  “Which it did,” I said. “In a way.”

  I had run out even of foolish things to say, so I held open the door and stood aside as they made their way past me. At first I’d thought, in some paranoid way, that it was because of the damage to the car, leaving the scene of a crime, or something like that. But it clearly wasn’t that, so what was going on? Had some sort of official complaint been made? I followed them up the stairs. As we reached the living room, Julie came out of the kitchen looking rather striking in a striped butcher’s apron, my apron. She looked surprised. I introduced everybody.

  Oban shook hands with Julie slightly awkwardly. “You’re, erm—” he said.

  “Julie’s staying here for a few days,” I interrupted.

  What was he talking about? Then I looked at Julie, tall, tanned, Amazonian. Oh, God, he probably thought this was some sort of gay thing. I considered trying to explain our relationship, then couldn’t really see the point.

  “I’m just making our supper,” Julie said, sounding horribly domestic. “Do you want to stay?”

  “It’s just a work meeting,” I said hurriedly. The thought of Julie and me starting to entertain as a couple made me shudder.

  “You’re really a detective?” Julie said to Oban.

  “I really am,” he said.

  “That must be amazing.”

  “Not most of the time.” Oban looked toward Rosa, who had picked out a book from a shelf and was flicking through it with a frown of concentration. “Could you excuse us?” he said, with careful politeness to Julie.

  “What? Me?” said Julie in surprise. “I’ll get back to the kitchen.”

  She scuttled away. When she was gone, Rosa pushed the book back into the shelf and turned to me.

  “Please sit down,” I said.

  We all sat, slightly awkwardly, with Rosa and me side by side on the sofa, while Oban pulled over the chair so that he faced me.

  “Dan Oban phoned me this morning—”

  “Rosa,” I interrupted, “I know I should have…”

  She held up a hand to silence me. “Wait,” she said. She turned to Oban. “Dan?” They obviously knew each other well.

  “I’m sorry about all this,” I charged in again, before he could speak. “I was in a bit of a state anyway, and I was so cross about the entrapment, the whole idea of it, that I couldn’t stop myself. But it was unprofessional and…”

  “You were right,” Oban said.

  I couldn’t see his expression because as he spoke he was leaning forward, rubbing his eyes. He was tired.

  “What?”

  “The whole idea was disastrous. You were right. I’ve been talking to some people in Legal and, as you said, it’s likely that the tape would be totally inadmissible as evidence. That poor girl was leading Doll by the nose. As it were.” He gave a sheepish grin toward Rosa, which he suppressed immediately when she frowned back.

  “So,” I said, with a shrug. “Good.”

  “That’s not what I was coming to say. I rang Dr. Deitch because I want you back.”

  “Back?”

  “That was good, clear-headed work. I want you on the investigation.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “Why?”

  “Lots of reasons. For a start, can you imagine me working with Furth again? He was steaming.”

  “Furth’s my problem. He is no longer in charge of the investigation, anyway. I am.”

  “Oh,” I said. “But, still, I don’t think I’ve got anything to offer. I haven’t done much of this sort of thing before. Any, really. I just work with men like Doll. I’ve got no ideas.”

  Oban stood up and paced toward the window, then turned. “This is a simple case,” he said. “This is the most basic, horrible murder. Find a woman in a lonely place, kill her, run away. He’s still out there. We just need to get a bit lucky. Just a little bit and we’ll get him.”

  “Why did you ring Rosa?” I said suspiciously. “Why not me?”

  “Because he wanted to know what I thought,” Rosa said.

  “You mean whether I’m crazy?” I said.

  Rosa couldn’t keep a straight face. “I wouldn’t presume to comment on that,” she said. “He wanted to know if it was fair to ask you.”

  “And you said?”

  “That he should ask you.”

  “You mean ask me whether it was fair to ask me?”

  She shrugged.

  “What do you think?” said Oban.

  “I’ll think about it,” I said tamely.

  “That’s good,” said Oban. “I just want you aboard. You
name the terms. You’ve got a free hand. I’ll give you whatever you need.”

  The door burst open and Julie appeared. She was carrying a tray. Where the hell had she found that? On it were three dishes.

  “Before you say anything,” she said, “this isn’t supper. It’s just a snack. You’d like some, wouldn’t you, Mr. Detective?”

  “Very much,” said Oban, looking at the tray eagerly. “What is it?”

  “They’re the simplest things. This is some ham and figs, this is an artichoke salad and this is just a little omelette made with zucchini. I’ll get some plates.”

  She returned, not just with plates and forks but with glasses and an opened bottle of red wine. A very expensive bottle of wine belonging to Albie that he had forgotten to collect but would remember sometime in the future. So Julie was good for something after all. She generously topped up our glasses. Both Oban and Rosa helped themselves to all three dishes.

  “This is very good, Julie,” Rosa said.

  “Delicious,” said Oban. “I must say, this seems a very good arrangement. How long have you and Kit, you know, er…”

  “Oh, just a couple of weeks,” said Julie brightly.

  I drained my glass in one gulp.

  9

  The next day, when I went into Stretton Green for a meeting, Oban gave me a hug, which made me feel more like a favorite niece than a professional consultant. Then he led me through the office to meet the largely new team that was investigating the canal murder. “Thanks for last night,” he said. “Delicious food. Tell me.” He looked round with a quizzical expression. “When did you and, er, Julie meet?”

  “I don’t know. Years ago. She was a friend of friends of mine. I’m not really—”

  “Nice,” he said. “You two make a good, erm—”

  “Look,” I said urgently. “I think I’d better—”

  I broke off because Oban was now leading me through the open-plan office, which looked a bit as if a burglar had got in recently—filing cabinets with all their drawers open, files lying scattered on a table, cardboard boxes half filled with stained mugs.