The Red Room

by Nicci French

  “I’m off. If she’s able to make a statement, I’ll send one of my DCs over.” As I opened the car door, Oban put his hand on my wrist. “Get me something, Kit. I’m desperate.”

  The young female officer opened the door. “Dr. Quinn?”

  “That’s right. How is she?”

  “Dunno. She hasn’t said much.”

  I looked round. The floor and the stairs were stripped and polished but there was a casual, slightly raffish feel to the interior. A bike hung from a heavy-duty hook on one wall. There were shelves with rows of battered paperbacks in the hall and I could see more shelves with more books on the landing at the top of the stairs. The hall led through to the kitchen and I could see a garden beyond that. The door opened next to me and a man came out, the man I’d seen at the hospital. He was unshaven now, and his dark curly hair was rumpled. He was dressed in a navy blue sweatshirt, jeans and worn tennis shoes with no socks. He looked the way I felt. I guessed he’d slept even less than I had. He was tall, six foot or so. He shook my hand. “I’m Gabe,” he said.

  “I saw you,” I said. He looked puzzled. “At the hospital. Last night. This morning. Whatever.”

  “Oh, yes, sorry, I wasn’t at my best. Can I get you something?”

  “I’ll make some tea,” said WPC Devlin, officiously, and padded off toward the kitchen like an Edwardian maid.

  “How’s your wife?”

  Gabe’s expression changed to one of concern. “I don’t know. Better than last night.”

  “That’s good. Can I have a word with her?”

  Gabe looked uncomfortable. He put his hands in his trouser pockets, then took them out again. “Can I ask you something first?”

  “Of course.”

  “Bry was attacked by this person who did these other awful murders?”

  “It seems possible, at least. It was in exactly the same place as one of the bodies was found.”

  “But it seems so far-fetched,” he said. “Why on earth would someone come back to the spot where he’d already committed a murder? It sounds so risky.”

  “Yes, but murderers do that. It’s not a theory, it happens. Murderers go back.”

  “Right, right,” said Gabe, as if he were talking to himself. I had an impulse to put my hand on him, to offer him comfort, but it was better to let him talk. “What I wanted to ask, I mean it probably sounds stupid or paranoid, but I just wanted to know if Bry could be in any danger. Could he want to get at her again?”

  I thought for a moment. I wanted to be precise about this.

  “The opinion of the investigating officers is that the perpetrator of these crimes is an opportunist. Late at night, on the canal, your wife was an obviously vulnerable target.”

  Gabe’s eyes narrowed and he looked at me. “But what do you think?”

  “I should say that I’m hired by the police to suggest possible ideas. I consider different directions. I have always suspected that something links the first two victims.”

  “What? Why?” Gabe Teale sounded as if he was in the middle of a bad dream.

  “I don’t know. It’s just a feeling. It may be wrong. It’s probably wrong. The police don’t agree with me, that’s for sure. I just wanted to be frank with you.”

  “But if you’re not wrong…” he was speaking slowly, in a fog of tiredness and stress, “that would mean Bry was still in danger.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” I said. “There is no question whatever that the police will provide basic protection. All right?”

  “That’s good,” he said, not looking very reassured. “Thank you.”

  “Can I see your wife now?” I said, as gently as I could.

  “I’ll take you through. Would you rather talk to her alone?”

  “That’s up to you,” I said. “I’m sure she’d rather you were there.”

  “She’s in here,” he said, leaning against the door, pushing it open. He looked through. “Bry? The doctor’s here.”

  I followed him in. Two rooms had been knocked into one, making a large space that ran the depth of the house. I could see the street through the large window at one end and the garden through the French windows at the other. Toward the garden end Bryony Teale was sitting on a large rust-colored sofa. She was wearing a bright orange sweater and blue three-quarter-length trousers. Her bare feet were tucked up under her. I walked over and her husband pulled up an armchair for me. Then he sat down on the sofa, lifting her up so that she could lean against him. They exchanged glances and Gabe gave her a reassuring smile.

  Above her on the wall was a large, poster-sized photograph showing a little girl standing in a deserted city street. The child was ornately dressed—she almost looked like a gypsy fortune-teller—but what struck me most were her dark, fiery eyes, which gazed directly into the lens. It was as if the girl had that moment looked round, and focused her extraordinarily intense glare on the photographer. You knew that at the next moment she must have looked away again, but it was enough. It made you want to know about the girl, what had happened to her, where she was now.

  “That’s amazing,” I said.

  Bryony looked round then forced the beginning of a smile. “Thanks,” she said. “I took it.”

  “You’re a photographer,” I said.

  “I don’t know if I can still call myself that,” she said ruefully. “I have difficulty finding people who want to publish the sort of pictures I want to take.”

  “I can’t believe that,” I said.

  “I took that one last year about a quarter of a mile from here,” said Bryony. “I was walking and I met her with her family. They were refugees from Romania. Isn’t she beautiful?”

  I looked again. “She’s fierce,” I said.

  “Maybe I scared her,” said Bryony.

  “How are you feeling?” I said.

  “Sorry to be so collapsed.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “You don’t have to prove anything. You don’t even have to talk to me if you don’t feel like it.”

  “No, no, I want to. This isn’t like me.”

  I looked closely at her. She was obviously better than when I’d seen her at the hospital, but she was still pale with dark rings under her eyes. “Anyone would have been shocked by what you went through,” I said. “So I suppose your work means you do a lot of walking around in strange places.”

  “A bit,” she said.

  “But you should be careful. I was just talking to the head of the murder inquiry. He doesn’t think that walking by the canal at night is such a good idea.”

  “I keep telling her that,” said Gabe. “But she’s fearless. And stubborn. She’s always loved to walk.”

  “I feel a bit differently now,” she said.

  “Well, maybe not alone at night,” I said cheerily, noticing the first stirrings of an argument. “Do you feel all right to talk about it?”

  “I want to help.”

  “If it feels bad, just tell me and I’ll stop.”

  “I’m all right.”

  “Can you tell me what happened?”

  “I’ve spent today going over and over it in my mind, but I don’t think I’ll be of much use. It happened so quickly. I was walking along the canal towpath. I felt an arm on me, pulling at me. Pulling and pulling, and I gave a scream. Then immediately there were these other people grabbing at me. It sounds so stupid but at first I didn’t realize that they were trying to help. Before I knew what was going on, the man had run away.”

  “That was all?”

  “All?”

  “Look, Bryony, after the attack you were in a state of shock. Trauma. You don’t need to downplay what happened to you.”

  “Oh.” She gave a shaky laugh. “Well, to be honest, I was scared shitless. It’s true that the kind of work I do means that I wander around in the strangest places, and if you let yourself be frightened by things then you’d never get anything worthwhile done. I’d just take self-portraits of myself in my garden.” She gave another sma
ll laugh. “But, to be honest, I think I almost walked along the canal as a kind of dare to myself—does that sound completely mad to you?”

  “No. It sounds reckless, not mad.”

  “Well, so I was a bit spooked anyway, walking along in the shadows”—she glanced up at Gabe, who gave her an encouraging little nod—“and then this shape loomed up at me and his hands were all over me. I thought I was going to die, or be drowned. Or raped.” She gave a shudder. “When I look back on it, I try to tell myself it was nothing, but I thought I was going to be killed, just because I was stupid enough to be by the canal in the middle of the night. I dreamed about it last night and I woke up crying.”

  “Did you notice anything about the man?”

  She shook her head hopelessly. “It was dark. This is going to be so pathetic. I think he was fairly short. He may have had closely cropped hair. I’ve got an image of that in my mind. That’s all.”

  “White?”

  “Yes. Or I think so.”

  “Do you remember what he was wearing?”

  “No.”

  “Or what he wasn’t wearing? A suit? A long coat? Jogging shorts?”

  She gave a thin smile. “No, none of that,” she said.

  “One last thing,” I said. “I wonder if you could say anything about the two witnesses.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What did they do?”

  Bryony looked puzzled. “I don’t understand. You know what they did, they scared the man off.”

  I couldn’t quite think of what to say. I had another try. “From what you say, it was all terribly confusing. It might have felt like you were being attacked by three people. Or attacked by two people who were scared off by the third person.”

  “Why?”

  “I was just wondering.”

  Bryony looked thoughtful. “I’m trying to go over it in my mind. All I can say is what I’ve said all along. I was attacked by a man and he ran away. That’s it.”

  “Just the one attacker and two witnesses who scared him off?”

  “Yes.” She looked more confused than ever.

  “Sure?”

  “Yes. No. Well, as sure as I can be of anything, that is.”

  “If you give a statement to the police, they’ll ask you a lot more questions along those sort of lines. It’s amazing what you can remember if you approach it in the right way.”

  “I’ll do my best, Dr. Quinn, I really will.”

  “Please call me Kit. When people call me Dr. Quinn I look around the room for someone else.”

  “All right, Kit. Can I say something else?”

  “Anything.”

  She swallowed. “I’m so grateful for everything that’s being done for me but… but…”

  “What?”

  “I wonder whether it was just an attempt at a mugging. Maybe he was going for my purse.”

  “Yes,” I said. “One of the witnesses mentioned that. He said that you said it was nothing, that you didn’t even want to phone the police. He insisted on doing it with his mobile.”

  She pulled up her legs even further so that her knees were under her chin. She looked into my tired eyes with her tired eyes. “Does that seem strange to you?”

  I gave my best doctor’s smile of reassurance. “Not at all. Have you ever been walking along the street when you’ve seen someone trip and fall over? Sometimes they’ll give themselves a nasty knock but as often as not they won’t wait to get over it. They’ll try to walk on as if nothing has happened. It’s a strong human impulse to try to insist that things are carrying on as normal. You see it even in quite serious accidents. People with severe bleeding try to continue on their way to work. It’s completely natural to try to persuade yourself that nothing serious has happened. Maybe it’s the brain trying to protect itself from stress.”

  “But it might be true.” There was a tone of appeal in her voice. “It might be, mightn’t it, just a mugging? A horrible coincidence.”

  “You may be right. We’ll definitely consider it. But I’ve already been talking to your husband about this. We won’t take any chances.”

  “That’s good,” she said bleakly.

  I leaned forward. “You’ve probably already been told this, but I want to tell you again. It’s very common for people who’ve been through experiences like yours to suffer depression. You feel confused about it, you may even blame yourself, or be blamed.”

  I looked at Gabe. “I know what you mean,” he said. “I know we’re sometimes a bit ratty with each other. But I couldn’t possibly blame Bry for anything.”

  “I didn’t mean that,” I said. “I was just trying to say that these things are difficult for you in ways you don’t expect. And it’s difficult for partners as well.”

  Bryony sat back on the sofa and closed her eyes. “I just want it all to go away,” she said.

  “I think it has, for you,” I said. “I believe that. What we really want is to make it go away for everybody.”

  She leaned back against Gabe, who stroked her hair. Suddenly I felt a bit envious and entirely unnecessary and made an awkward exit.

  30

  When I turned left, off the busy arterial road and into the cul-de-sac where Will lived, I was slightly taken aback. His house, as he’d said on the phone, was a smallish Victorian semi, the one with a bottle-green door and a black iron gate, not the one with the straggly privet hedge and the boarded-up window on the first floor. What he hadn’t said was that these two were the only old houses in a large new estate, with high-rise blocks of flats, a network of walkways and car parks and a small playground whose roundabout had been chained up. Two teenagers swung on the swings meant for toddlers, smoking and dragging their heels on the rubberized Tarmac. Will’s house, with its front garden and neat fencing, looked quite surreal, as if it had been plucked out of some middle-class residential street and been placed here by mistake.

  I think I’d been imagining that he would open the door and draw me inside and we’d gaze at each other then fall into each other’s arms. Of course it didn’t happen like that. Will opened the door with a cordless phone tucked under his chin, and beckoned me in without saying anything. Then he disappeared into the kitchen with his phone, leaving me standing alone in the living room with the smile dying on my lips.

  But at least it gave me the chance to look around a bit. The room was almost empty. If I called out, my voice would probably echo. There were, I saw, precisely four objects in it: a splendidly large and deep mustard-yellow sofa; a sleek hi-fi system in the corner; a revolving CD stack full of discs; and one of those beautiful apothecary chests with dozens of tiny drawers that you buy for several thousand pounds in overpriced antiques shops in north London. And that was all. No table. No other chairs. No TV or video player. No bookshelves. No hooks where coats and jackets hung. No pictures or photographs on the white walls. No random objects scattered round the place. I thought of my flat: However neat and bare it is, it’s full of odd things—pens and notepads, books, newspapers and magazines, decorative bowls with dice or keys or a pair of earrings in them, candlesticks, mirrors, glasses, flowers. But here, there was absolutely none of the clutter of daily life.

  I slipped off my suede jacket, slung it on the sofa arm, and peered at the CDs. I couldn’t find a single name I recognized there. I walked over to the chest and cautiously opened one of the drawers. It was empty. So were the next three. I found a stash of paper-clips in the fifth and a broken chesspiece several drawers later. Nothing more.

  “Sorry about that.”

  I was startled. He’d padded in silently, like a cat, and caught me snooping among his things, except that he didn’t seem to possess any things.

  “Do you really live here?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, this.” I gestured round the room. “What do you do when you’re here? There’s nothing in it. There’s no sign of you being here. It’s spooky, really. It’s not so much minimalist as utterly minimal.”

>   “That’s the general idea.”

  “How long have you lived here?”

  “A couple of years.”

  “Two years! You’ve collected nothing in two years? Where were you before?”

  “In a very full house.”

  “With a wife?”

  “That was one of the things it was full of, yes.”

  “So you walked out on everything?”

  “You don’t go in for small-talk, do you? Do you want a drink?”

  “Yes. What have you got?”

  I followed him into the kitchen, which bore only a faint resemblance to any kitchen I’d been in before. There was a sink near the back window, a large stainless-steel rubbish bin, a fridge in the corner. But there were none of the usual kitchen units and surfaces, and I couldn’t see a cooker. Instead, there was an old pine table against one wall, on which stood a kettle, a toaster, a coffee grinder and two sharp knives.

  “Christ, Will, this is a bit weird.”

  “Whiskey, gin, brandy, vodka, Campari, some strange Icelandic schnapps that I’ve never opened.” He was rummaging in a tall cupboard. “Or there’s beer and wine in the fridge. Or tomato juice.”

  I didn’t fancy beer or wine, certainly not tomato juice. I wanted something that I could feel burning my throat and coursing through my veins. “I’ll try the Icelandic stuff.”

  “Brave of you. I’d better join you.”

  I went to the back door and looked out into the garden. It was dusk, but I could see in the gloom that it consisted of a small lawn and a large bay tree set bang in the middle. Will put several chunks of ice into two tumblers, then glugged in several fingers of a clear liquid.

  “Thanks.” I raised my glass to him formally, then tossed half the drink down my open throat. “Fuck!” It hit me in the back of my throat and my eyes watered.

  “All right?”

  “You haven’t drunk any.”

  He drank without flinching, then set down his tumbler on the table. Yards of floor separated us. He seemed miles away and unreachable.

  “I don’t really know why you wanted to come,” he said, over the great space that divided us.

  I didn’t bother to answer. I drank the rest of my liquor in one. The room tipped then righted itself again. Who cared what happened? At least I was here, and something was going to happen. “Do you want me to go away, then?”