The Red Room

by Nicci French

  “What’s this?” I said.

  Oban gave me an uneasy smile. “Would you sit down, Kit?” he said, gesturing at the chair in front of the desk.

  Unable to think clearly, I did so and immediately regretted it because it made me the lowest person in the room. Oban nodded across at Rosa.

  “Dr. Deitch?”

  Rosa bit her lower lip. It was a way of signaling that this was going to hurt her more than it hurt me. She leaned forward and put her hands together almost in an attitude of prayer. “Kit, I want to make it clear that I blame myself for all this.”

  “All what?” I asked—knowing that that was what she wanted me to ask. I should just stay quiet, I told myself. “All what?” I asked again helplessly.

  “We feel,” said Oban, looking at me kindly, which was worse than anything else, “or that is, I feel and I think that Rosa agrees with me, that we rather unfairly plunged you into this case without proper regard for, er, level of expertise and…”

  “You have become rather involved, haven’t you, Kit?” said Rosa gently.

  “In the first place,” said Oban, “it was a purely routine matter, a brief assessment of a suspect. We felt we owed it to you to ask you. And you performed that task admirably. We remain indebted to you. Then—and I admit this was entirely my fault—I asked you to become more involved. But recently… well, there have been some murmurs….”

  “Bella?” I said, twisting round in my chair to look at her.

  Bella looked at me steadily. “I’ve not made any complaint, Kit. But after you left I talked to Jeremy Burton, and to the mother, and I’m afraid I had to report to DCI Renborn that I couldn’t see any point to your interview with them. I’d describe it as a fishing expedition, but I couldn’t even see that you were fishing for anything. This is a delicate case. It’s getting a lot of attention.”

  “I know,” I said. “I only wanted to—”

  “I want to echo Dr. Deitch,” said Oban. “I blame myself for pushing you into this pressured situation.”

  “You don’t want me to work for you anymore?”

  There was a pause. “We think it was too soon for you,” said Rosa. “And that this particular case has touched some nerve in you that may not be particularly healthy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Rosa has told me something of your early history,” said Oban.

  I stared at Rosa.

  “Kit, all I have said to Dan is that personal circumstances—losing your mother so young—may, in certain ways…” her face was going red “… well, have affected your judgement in some ways.”

  “Oh.” I sat there for a few minutes, my cheeks burning as well. Then I swallowed hard and painfully. “You may be right. I may be too involved. I do care, I don’t know what the right level of caring is. But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong. And I haven’t been derailing the investigations. I haven’t been telling other people what to do. I’ve just been following up different lines of inquiry.”

  “Well, now,” Oban said, “this isn’t one of your bits of academic research. You’re talking as if we can just let anybody roam round a murder inquiry, pursuing their own interests. It’s not like that. And, I’m sorry to have to say this, in a way you’re in danger of derailing the investigation. You put my men’s backs up, you trample on other people’s turf, and it seems, I’m sorry, but it seems that you’re doing it without any reason. I mean, without any proper reason. I accept that you’re upset by these victims. So are we all. We all want to catch these killers. You’ve helped us,” he added, more gently, “but now we think it’s time for us to move on.”

  “Can I say something first? Before I go, I mean?”

  Oban leaned back in his chair. “Of course.”

  “First of all,” I said, “tell me, just in a sentence, how you would describe the murder of Lianne.”

  “Standard murder of an accessible victim by a psychopath,” he said. “The crime was committed by someone with a pathological hatred and fear of women. Hence the violent stabbing.”

  “And the murder of Philippa Burton?”

  “Completely different. I hardly know where to start. She was severely battered with a blunt object. She is a high-risk victim for the perpetrator. She was abducted in a public place while she was with a child. Different kind of person, different method, different area, different level of violence. But you disagree.”

  I stood up. I had to pretend at least to be authoritative. I walked to the window and looked out. Outside was an area of virtual wasteland at the back of the police station. There were three overflowing Dumpsters and some large metal bins, piles of planks, something covered by a tarpaulin. To one side, growing out of the concrete was a vast explosion of buddleia, flaming purple. Butterflies were fluttering around it like tiny scraps of paper tossed in the wind. That was nice. I turned back to my reluctant audience. “When I looked through the files on Philippa Burton something rang a bell.”

  “What was it, Kit?” asked Rosa, at the same time as Oban said, “We don’t employ you to listen to bells ringing. There are psychics telephoning us every day about Philippa Burton who hear bells ringing.”

  I thought of my group of men at Market Hill; I thought of the things they had done and the skewed way they looked at the world. There were things I had learned from them that nobody else in this room knew. I had that at least. “People leave signatures behind,” I said. “Always, even when they try to cover it up, because the signature of a murderer is a bit like the meaning of a poem. There’s the meaning that the poet intended, but there may also be hidden meaning that the poet wasn’t conscious of. Sometimes they think their signature is one thing but it’s actually another.” I hurried on, anxious to get to the end of my last stand before they lost interest entirely. “What caught my eye about the murder of Philippa Burton was that she was lying face down. Like Lianne.”

  I paused and looked at Oban. His expression remained gentle, even pitying. “Is that it?” he said kindly. “We’ve already covered this, Kit.”

  “Have you ever seen a recently killed body lying face up?” I asked.

  “I suppose so,” said Oban doubtfully.

  “I’ve seen lots of pictures of them. The eyes are open, staring upwards. You know how eyes in paintings are meant to follow you around the room. The eyes of a dead person are the opposite. They are obscenely static, just staring ahead, accusing, maybe. You can imagine that if you’d killed someone, you might want to turn them face downwards, so they weren’t looking at you.”

  “Maybe, but for God’s sake, Kit, a body is like a piece of bread. It can only fall two ways, butter side up or butter side down. It’s not enough to build a case on.”

  “Remember the wounds on Lianne’s body? Where were they?”

  “Abdomen. Stomach, chest, shoulders.”

  “On her front. And yet she was laid face down. That’s like painting a watercolor then hanging it so that it faces the wall.” I looked at Rosa. She was pulling a face.

  “I find it difficult,” she said, “when you talk of these women as if they were works of art.”

  “I know, but they are works of art,” I said. “They are wicked and incompetent and of no aesthetic interest, but they are works of art and we have to read them. That’s what I do at the hospital. You know that. I read crimes as if they were symptoms and patterns. I search for meanings. What about the wounds themselves?”

  “Brutal,” Oban said. “Frenzied.”

  “Those aren’t the words I would use. Tepid, maybe. Precise. Decorous, even. In some ways, it looked like a frenzied sexual attack but it just didn’t ring true.” I saw Oban wince again. “It’s not that there were no signs of sexual assult—these psychopathic murders can be a punishment of women for their sexual threat. But in those cases you see terrible aggression directed at the breasts and genitals. Not here, though. The stabbings were all above the waist and avoided the breasts entirely. Display of this kind is very rare and this form of mutilation, it’s called piq
uerism, is even more so. And yet she was turned face down.”

  “This is just not enough, Kit,” said Oban. He was gradually losing his patience. “Where’s the connection? Two bodies lying face down?”

  “I’ve seen a number of attacks on women that were comparable to the Philippa Burton one. They were all very violent. Also, it seemed as if the presence of the child was an attraction, as an audience or a victim. But this murderer didn’t want the child present. What I felt looking at Philippa Burton’s body was the relative restraint. I mean, think of it: You hate women, you’ve just killed a woman, and you’ve got something like a claw hammer in your hand. Why not really go for it?”

  Oban leaned forward and put a hand on my shoulder. “Kit, you’re not giving us anything. All right, you’ve got a feeling. True, I don’t know what the fuck it means. Sorry, ladies.” The ladies looked up, but mainly because they were being called ladies. “But I’ve got nothing to take to the people who think you’ve been wasting our time.”

  I rubbed my eyes with my fingers. I had said my piece and my mind felt empty. He was right. What was there, after all I’d said? What was there to do? I didn’t want to think, I wanted to crawl away, but with a last effort, I managed to retrieve something very small from the corner of my mind.

  “OK,” I said in a small voice. “I’m finished. I’ll just say one last thing. We know that Lianne’s dead body was brought to the canal towpath in the back of a car.”

  “We don’t know that at all,” said Oban, irritably.

  “And Philippa Burton’s body was found a mile and a half from where she was last seen. So, in all probability she was taken by car as well. Has there been any cross-reference for fibers or traces?”

  “No, there hasn’t, as you well know,” Oban said truculently. “Nor have we cross-referenced them with the Jack the Ripper murders. We don’t have time—”

  “That’s my last suggestion. Will you do it?”

  “Why would we—”

  “Please,” I said. I wanted to cry. “Please.”

  18

  There were fireworks in my head, hissing and wheeling, in the red and purple dark. I don’t know how I managed to walk out of the station, with my chin up and my legs not giving way beneath me. I even gave a friendly nod to the woman on duty at the front desk. I reached my car, but my hands were trembling so much I dropped the key on the ground and had to scrabble around for it. My eyes stung, as if there was grit in them. I had to get out of here, to where nobody could see me. I didn’t want anyone looking at me with that terrible, terrible compassion in their eyes. I had looked at people like that. Once, in a different life. Everything seemed impossibly far off, as if I was looking at my past through the wrong end of a telescope.

  I made it into the car. For a minute I laid my head back against the head-rest and shut my eyes. A nasty sick headache was screwing its way into my left temple. I slid the key into the ignition and drove carefully out of the car park, looking straight ahead. I imagined the three of them watching me go from their window and looking at each other with troubled expressions. How would I ever be able to face them again?

  I drove as far as the little triangular churchyard between the delicatessen and the watchmaker’s, not so far from my flat, where I got out of the car and went and sat on the grass, with my back against the beautiful copper beech. Albie and I used to come here sometimes, and sit under this tree. It was still damp from last night’s rain, and I felt the chill seeping into my bones. I turned my face up to the sun, which was just sliding out from behind a gray cloud. A blackbird sang full throttle just above me. I breathed in deeply. In, out, in out; trying to get rid of the bubbles of panic.

  I stood up wearily and walked back to the car. My legs were no longer shaky, but they felt heavy. My head throbbed. Before driving off, I pulled down the shade and stared at myself in the mirror for a few seconds. I looked at my scar, snaking white down my cheek, then I leaned forward, so that it was just my eyes gazing into my eyes.

  __________

  I hoped that Julie wouldn’t be there. But as I fumbled with my key in the lock, she came to the door and pulled it open for me. Her cheeks were flushed. She threw me a rather frantic glance and said in a bright voice, “Kit! Good. You have a visitor. I said I didn’t know when you’d be back but he wanted to wait. He said he was a friend of yours.”

  I took off my jacket and walked forward. I could see the back of a head above the sofa. He stood up. “You said you would come back to see me,” he said, in his soft, high voice. Michael Doll, in the same grubby orange trousers he’d been wearing last time I saw him, and an ancient gray vest with rings of sweat under the armpits.

  “Michael!” I didn’t know what to say. He was like my recurring nightmare, come to squat in the corner of my flat.

  “I waited,” he said plaintively.

  “How did you know where I lived?”

  “I followed you back from the station once,” he replied, as if it was the most normal thing in the world. “You never noticed me.”

  “I’ll be going now,” said Julie. “Is that OK, Kit? Or do you want me to stay?”

  “How long’s he been here?” I hissed, turning my back on Michael, who had sat back down on the sofa.

  “A good hour.”

  “God. God, I’m sorry. You should have rung me.”

  “I did. I’ve left three messages on your mobile.”

  “God,” I said again.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes. No. I don’t know. You shouldn’t have let him in.”

  “Kit,” said Michael, from the sofa.

  “He seems harmless enough. He just kept staring at my breasts.”

  “I didn’t,” said Michael, as if it didn’t matter much anyway. “Why didn’t you come back to see me, like you said you would?”

  “I’ve been busy.”

  “You said you would.”

  “I know, but—”

  “People should keep their promises.”

  “Yes.”

  “Otherwise it’s not fair.”

  “You’re right.”

  Say as little as possible. Don’t allow him to establish any claim on me. Above all, get him out, but without making him feel resentful. He nodded as if satisfied and put his hands on his knees. There was a recent scar running down his left forearm, and a messy scab on his wrist.

  “Can I have coffee now? I gave you coffee.”

  “You’ve had three cups already,” interjected Julie.

  “Four sugars, please.”

  “I have to go out again now, Michael. I’m sorry, but you can’t stay here.”

  “And one of those biscuits I had before with your lady-friend.” He ran his tongue round his mouth.

  I felt sick. “Michael, listen—”

  “And can I, you know, use your bathroom?” There were little beads of sweat on his forehead and above his upper lip.

  “It’s through there.”

  As soon as he had shut the door, I turned to Julie. “Listen, can you do something for me? Can you take my mobile and ring the police from outside the flat? I’ll give you the number.” The horror of ringing the people who thought I was going crazy, and asking them to come and protect me from the man I had prevented them arresting, swept over me. I buried my head in my hands.

  “Kit?”

  “Yeah. Sorry. It’s just—oh, shit. I don’t know what to do. He’s probably fine, but I don’t want to take stupid risks.”

  “Give me the phone, then.” She held out her hand. “Come on, let’s get on with it.”

  “I might be about to do something terrible to him. Or to me.”

  “I don’t have a clue what you’re going on about, but if he’s dangerous, let’s get him out of here. Come on.”

  “No. Wait. Wait one moment.” I could hear the toilet flushing. “I know. Ring Will Pavic. He’ll know how to deal with this.”

  “Him?”

  “Please. I can’t think of anyone else just now. D
o it from outside.”

  “What’s his number?”

  “It’s in the phone’s memory. Pavic.”

  “OK, OK. This is crazy.”

  “I know. Thanks.”

  “What if he’s not there, or if he—”

  Doll came out of the bathroom, and Julie bolted for the front door. I noticed approvingly that she left it on the latch.

  “I’ll put the kettle on, shall I?” I said, too brightly.

  “Do you live here alone?”

  “No.”

  “Are you married?”

  “Why are you asking?”

  “Your friend said you weren’t married.”

  “Then you already know.” Avoid conflict. Don’t back him into a corner. Don’t catch him out. “Four sugars, you said?”

  “And a biscuit.”

  “Was there something you came here to tell me, Michael?”

  “Why don’t you have carpets?”

  “Michael, is there—”

  “It’s funny, not having a carpet. It’s like not being in a proper house somehow. Even in the home, we had carpets in every room. Mine was brown. Brown carpet and white wall, with those little bits in the paper.”

  “Woodchip.”

  “Yeah. I used to lie in bed and pick the bits off with my fingernails. I used to get beaten for that, when they found out in the morning. But I couldn’t stop myself. Like picking off a scab. I used to do it for hours sometimes. There’d be little bits of lumpy paper all over the bed, under the sheets. Like having crumbs in your bed and even when you can’t see them you can feel them against your skin. Know what I mean?”

  “Yes,” I said helplessly. I poured boiling water over his coffee and added milk. “Here. And help yourself to the biscuits.”

  “Got any fags?”

  I went over to my bag and took out the packet of ten that was left over from the time I’d visited him in his bedsit. There was one left. “Take this.”