The Red Room

by Nicci French

  “Yes?” I said delicately.

  “Oh, it’s probably nothing.”

  I waited. She was aching to tell me.

  “I sometimes think she was having an affair.”

  “Mmm?” I murmured.

  “I don’t know why, and maybe I shouldn’t say it, but I just sensed it in her behavior, and she wasn’t at home in the day so much. I think women have an instinct for that kind of thing. I wouldn’t dream of telling anyone else this, it’s probably not true, but I’m sure there was something like that going on.”

  “Do you know who she might have been having an affair with?”

  “No. Could have been loads of people. I mean, she is lovely to look at. Was. Slim and blond, lucky thing. Lots of men would jump at the chance. Rick, even. I don’t mean that, of course, but you know how men are after the first flush of passion is over with their wives and they’ve settled down and their life seems a bit dull, everyone gets like that, I think, and anyway Rick always had a bit of a soft spot for Philippa. But don’t get me wrong, no way am I saying it was him—God, I’m sure I’d know that, woman’s instinct, and I’d kill Rick if he did anything like that, and of course Philippa was my best friend forever…” She came to a halt and looked at me in a bewildered kind of way, as if she’d tied herself up in her words. “I’m just saying there were lots of men she knew, husbands of friends, men who moved in the same circle. But I don’t suspect anyone particularly, I just think in the last few weeks of her life there was something going on.”

  “Something?”

  “Hmm, maybe I should say someone. Her attention kept wandering. She had this excited, secret look. She let me down a couple of times when we’d arranged to meet, which she never used to do, and then made some pathetic excuse. She was fidgety, kind of. Not all there. She’d fallen for a man. I’m sure of it.”

  __________

  I left Tess’s house half an hour later, at midday. I felt drained. Before Tess, I had revisited Philippa’s husband and her mother. Jeremy had moved back into his house, which was a bit smaller and a bit newer than Pam Vere’s. The long, narrow garden had an orchard at the bottom, a swing hanging from one of the apple trees. They had been rather less forthcoming about Philippa than Tess had been. I didn’t think they were holding anything back, but they seemed naturally reticent. He was bewildered and helplessly sad. She seemed dazed and numb.

  I had two messages on my mobile. One was from Poppy, asking me why I hadn’t been in touch with her for so long. The other was from Will. “Please ring,” was all he said.

  “Yes?” he barked into the phone, when I dialed.

  “It’s Kit.”

  “Hang on a minute.” I heard him giving some kind of instructions to whoever was with him. “Kit? Can you be here this evening, at about six-thirty?”

  “Why?”

  “There are some people coming to meet you.”

  “Who knew Lianne?”

  “Why else would they be coming to meet you?”

  I opened my mouth to snap back, then closed it again. “I should be able to get there in time.”

  “See you, then.” And he was gone. He was like a man with a swarm of bees in his head.

  22

  I rang the bell and a young man with dreadlocks and a tattoo of a ladybird on his forearm answered. I assumed he was one of the residents, but he turned out to be a volunteer member of staff who introduced himself as Greg. Unlike the time I had been here before, the center was buzzing with activity. A knot of teenagers stood about in the hall, smoking cigarettes. Through an open door, I could see into a games room, where a loud game of snooker was in progress. The sound of voices drifted down from upstairs. Greg took me across the hall to Will’s office and pushed open the door without knocking.

  “Hi,” I said to Will. “This is good of you. Thanks.”

  “Thank them, not me. They’re waiting for you in an upstairs room. Shall I show you up?”

  “How many of them?”

  “Five, I think, unless any have wandered off. They may have done.”

  __________

  The room was hot, and thick with smoke. There was a pinball machine in the corner, and two boys were standing idly by it in a fog of cigarette smoke. One had a shaved head with a white scar running across his scalp, and the other was squat and rather hairy. They looked up when I came in but didn’t acknowledge me. The other three were girls, or young women. They sat in the three easy chairs and on the floor. Among them was the startlingly pretty girl that I’d seen the first time I’d met Will Pavic. She looked up, frowning slightly. She had thick dark brows and spooky green eyes.

  “Hello,” I said, walking into their midst. “I’m Kit.”

  No one said anything. I went round shaking their hands one by one, realizing almost at once that this was a mistake but unable to stop what I’d started. Most of them looked self-conscious; their hands were limp and sweaty in the baking room.

  “Thank you very much for seeing me.” I sat on the floor and pulled out a packet of cigarettes I had bought, offering them round. That got their attention. Everyone took one, even if they already had one on the go. “How about if you all tell me your names?”

  “Spike,” said the boy with the shaved head by the pinball machine. There was a splutter of laughter from the others. A joke I didn’t get.

  “Laurie.” That was the hairy one.

  “Carla,” said the black girl sitting on my right, in a whisper.

  “Catrina.” She had the worst acne I’d ever seen, and a beautiful mane of red hair.

  “Sylvia.” That was the green-eyed girl. She smiled knowingly. “That’s the name I’ve given myself, at any rate.”

  “I’ll try and remember. Will’s probably told you why I’m here. I want to find out as much as I can about Lianne, because the more we know the more chance there’ll be of finding who killed her. For instance, if we could find out where she had come from, what her real name was, her background, that might help a lot.” There was a stony silence. “But apart from that,” I went on, “I just want to find out, well, what she was like. The kind of person she was.”

  “Will said you were all right,” said Spike. He made the sentence sound like a question.

  “He means, you won’t go running to the cops with things we tell you,” added Sylvia. “Not that we’d tell you anyway. We never told the other one.”

  “What other one?”

  “You’re not the first.”

  “The police talked to you already?”

  Sylvia shrugged and a shuffling kind of silence descended on the room, broken only by the flare of a match as Spike lit up again.

  “Anyway,” I said at last, “I won’t tell them anything that isn’t connected to Lianne. OK?” There was a general grunting of assent. “How long had she been around here, do you know? In this area, I mean.”

  “Will said about five months,” said Spike. I wished Will had told me that.

  “Which of you saw her last, do you reckon?”

  “That’d be me.” Carla wouldn’t look up to catch my eyes. She talked to her folded hands.

  “What did you do together?”

  “We just walked around together, looking in shop windows. We talked about the things we’d buy if we had the money. Clothes and nice food and stuff. CDs. We didn’t have any money though, did we? Unless Lianne—” She stopped.

  “Yes?”

  “She was a pretty good pickpocket,” interrupted Laurie admiringly. “She could slide her hand into anyone’s bag. She and Daisy used to go round the underground stations together. They were a wicked pair. One would bump into the person and the other would lift their wallet.”

  “Cool,” said Spike.

  “Daisy Gill?” I asked.

  “Yeah, the one who topped herself.”

  “How did you two meet?” I asked Sylvia.

  “Here. She was quite shy, really. Or rather…” She wrinkled up her nose and pushed her blond hair fastidiously behind her ears, “she d
idn’t talk much. Not about herself, if that’s what you’re wanting. She never said where she came from. I bet it was somewhere in London, though. She knew London really well.”

  “I bet she’d been in care for ages.” This was Catrina.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “You can tell. I only met her the once. I met her here, like Sylvia, a couple of months back. We had a game of table tennis, and she was crap at it and stormed off when one of the others teased her. But if you’ve been in care, you can tell.”

  “It’s like a smell.” Spike sniggered.

  “That’s horrible.” Sylvia turned on him. “That’s a stupid thing to say.”

  He winked at her. “Don’t worry, you don’t smell, Sylvia. You’re lush.”

  “Anyway, I know for a fact she was in care because she once told me about a home she’d been in,” said Sylvia, ignoring him. “She tried to organize a sleepover with her friend at Christmas. They slept in next-door rooms anyway, so it was no big deal, but the staff wouldn’t let them have a sleepover. That’s typical of the way things are run. Red tape. They said nobody was allowed to share rooms. Against the rules. So Lianne said she barricaded herself and her friend into her room and they wouldn’t come out and then the next day as a punishment they weren’t allowed Christmas dinner. Or crackers or anything. But she said she was still pleased she did it, just to make a stand. She didn’t say where the home was. She was dead secretive, really.”

  “You don’t ask?”

  “You respect people’s privacy.”

  “I know she slept in the park sometimes. She said it was better than most of the poxy hostels round here.”

  “Had she been in lots of homes?” I asked.

  “Probably,” said Sylvia. “Most of us have by the time you get to our age.” She looked almost smug as she said this, her beautiful face demure. “If she was a runaway, then like as not she’d been round the houses.”

  “Look at me.” I turned to Catrina’s soft, monotonous voice. “I’ve been in twelve foster-families and eight homes.”

  “I was with a foster-family once for nearly two years,” said Laurie. His face was plump and young behind all the hair. He didn’t look more than fourteen.

  “Yeah? What did you do wrong, then?” asked Catrina.

  “They moved up north. They said there wasn’t room in their new house. It sounded really cool there, with a garden and all. Close to the sea.” There was no self-pity in his voice. He sounded quite matter-of-fact.

  “Can you tell me about Lianne’s sexual relationships?” I asked cautiously. There was silence. Spike ground out his cigarette furiously. “I’m asking because it might help. Had she been abused, for instance?”

  “Probably,” said Sylvia casually.

  Spike rattled the pinball handle loudly. There was a nasty kind of sneer on his face. I thought he was trying to stop himself crying.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “If she’d been in care for a long time, I mean.”

  “You mean, you expect people in long-term care to have been sexually abused?”

  “I’ve had enough now,” said Spike. “I’m off.” But he didn’t move.

  I looked at him. His pasty face had flushed; there were red blotches on his cheeks. “So you reckon she’d been sexually abused.”

  “I wouldn’t say sexually, necessarily,” said Catrina, “but you don’t get through it unharmed, if you see what I mean. You stop being a child pretty quickly.”

  “You don’t trust anyone,” agreed Laurie. He came and sat down among the girls at last, while Spike hovered by the door. I took out my packet of cigarettes again and he moved forward to take one, but still didn’t sit.

  “Did she have boyfriends?”

  They looked at each other.

  “I didn’t see anything,” said Sylvia. “And she never said. I mean, lots of people say, don’t they? They like to brag about things. But Lianne never mentioned anything like that. Mind, none of us knew her that well, did we?” Again, she looked round the group and they shook their heads. “She was just around.”

  “She was close to Daisy,” said Carla. “They painted each other’s toenails once, I remember. I came into Lianne’s room and they were giggling and painting each other’s toenails. One color for each nail. It was nice,” she said, a bit wistfully. “Lianne didn’t giggle much. They told me they were going to save up the money Lianne stole and have a restaurant together.”

  A silence fell on the group as they thought of the two girls, both dead now. All of a sudden, they looked young and defenseless. Even Spike, still on his feet, with his cigarette hanging off his upper lip and his hands in his pockets, looked as if he had been caught off-guard. I sat quite still, not wanting to interrupt the moment.

  “She once kissed me,” said Laurie, his face scarlet. “I told her I’d never, you know.” He ground to a halt. Carla took his hand and put it on her lap with a gesture that was unexpectedly touching and maternal. “Anyway, I told her, I don’t know why, maybe because I had had a review that week, with my social workers, you know, and I’d heard there was still no one who wanted to foster me, and I just felt rotten that day, you know, lonely or something, like you get every now and then, and she was sitting there, downstairs where the snooker table is, just sitting and not doing anything, and no one else was around. And all of a sudden she kissed me. Held my face and kissed me.” His eyes filled with tears. Carla patted his hand.

  “I heard her cry,” said Spike, suddenly and hoarsely. As he spoke, he moved closer to the door, as if he was going to bolt. No one said a word. “I’d only met her the day before. We had a blazing argument because she nicked my radio and said it was hers. She was a right little thief. Anyway, it was in the day, and there was no one around, and I came back from doing some business.” He cast a furtive look at me and continued: “Anyway, I heard this sound coming from upstairs. I didn’t realize at first what it was. It sounded so odd. Like a cat being tortured or something. I crept up the stairs and it was coming from her room. She was kind of mewling and whimpering, just like a cat. I stood there for ages and she didn’t stop. She went on and on, just crying and crying and crying like her heart was breaking.”

  “Did you go in?” I asked.

  He frowned. “I didn’t want to embarrass her,” he said.

  __________

  I poked my head round Will’s door. He was staring at his computer screen, but his hands were slack on the desk.

  “Working late?” I leaned against the wall. My legs felt weak and my head buzzed with fatigue.

  “What? Yes, I guess so.”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Mmm?”

  “Do you have anyone to go home to?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so.” I looked at him. His face was like a stone. I leaned forward, took it in my two hands and I kissed him on his lips. Then I turned and left, and he went on sitting there.

  23

  People should enjoy their work. One of the great pleasures of life is activity, and work is the main activity for most people. Whatever it is, it should be fun, and people somehow have the capacity to turn the strangest things into fun, and it’s right that they should. I would almost prescribe this capacity for taking pleasure as a medicine against depression, against the boredom and fear in most lives; I know that, and feel it as well, yet sometimes it seems difficult to bear.

  When I was twelve I went to the funeral of my grandmother. We came out of the crematorium and were ushered over to the Garden of Remembrance, an area with short formal hedges and a small lawn that looked as though it should contain a miniature putting green. Grown-ups stood around awkwardly, reading the messages on the wreaths. After a few minutes I wandered away. I remember seeing two things. The first was smoke coming from the chimney and wondering if my grandmother was in that. Then, around the side, I entered the parking area for the hearses. It was a warm spring day and the undertakers were sitting on the bonnets of the
cars. Several of them had taken off their jackets and rolled up their sleeves. They were smoking cigarettes and talking. A couple of them laughed at a joke I was too far away to hear.

  It’s stupid, I know, even for a twelve-year-old, but it was then that I realized the undertakers weren’t really sad that my granny had died. In fact, they didn’t care at all. When I was driving back with my father I told him angrily about what I had seen and said that he shouldn’t pay them because they had been so disrespectful. My father explained patiently that the undertakers went to two or three funerals every day and they couldn’t be sad for everybody. Why not? I said. It was their job to be sad.

  My father failed to convince me. In fact, I decided that only unfeeling people could possibly become undertakers. If you were a good, sensitive person, all those deaths, all that grief, would send you mad. So, by definition, the people left doing the job must be psychopaths who were able to look serious while they carried the coffin, then rush home to watch TV and play with their children and say that they’d had a good day at work.

  Of course, I’d grown up and learned that the surgeon you’d want to operate on your baby’s defective heart valve was not someone who was as worried as you were but the person who was best at the job, even if he was a bow-tied prima donna only thinking of his reputation and about getting out to the golf course as early as possible.

  So what did I expect of Oban and Furth and the rest of the men, and a very few women, in suits? They assumed the requisite somber expressions with language to match when the cameras were around. They were gutted, absolutely gutted. This was an appalling case, everyone involved was deeply shocked. But the fact is that they were having a great time. Take DCI Oban. He wasn’t being festive exactly, but there was a new bounce to his step. It was understandable. He had been stuck with an obscure, hopeless murder case that no one else wanted. No one was paying any attention, except when it went wrong. Now, Cinderella-like, it had turned into the murder case of the year and everyone wanted to be his friend.