The Red Room

by Nicci French

  “We don’t know,” I said. I glanced briefly at Oban to see if he wanted to add anything to my bald statement, but he was sitting perfectly still, staring down at his hands, which were resting on the kitchen table, as if he was trying to remember a fragment of a dream.

  She opened her mouth to say something, but then dropped her head into her hands. Her glorious hair hung over her face like a curtain. “Can’t be happening,” I heard her mutter. And then again. “It can’t be happening.”

  Behind us on the cooker something hissed then boiled over. A smell of burning sugar filled the kitchen but Bryony didn’t move. Oban lumbered to his feet and lifted a pan off the hob, then came back to where Bryony was crouched over the table.

  “One of the victims wrote down your name,” I said. “Yet you say that you never met her?”

  “I didn’t,” she said slowly. “I really didn’t.”

  Oban lowered his big, tired face into his hands.

  “You’re sure, Bryony? We meet so many people, maybe you didn’t know her name. Maybe she knew you.”

  “I’ve never met her. Don’t you think I’d have remembered, with all the stuff in the papers? I’ve never set eyes on her. I’d never heard her name before she was killed.”

  “Nor Lianne?”

  “For God’s sake, I didn’t meet her. What more can I say?” Her voice was a wail.

  “What about the name Daisy? Daisy Gill?” This from Oban, who had suddenly lifted his head.

  “No! No! Who’s she? Another victim?”

  Oban silently handed her a photograph I had never seen before. The police can work fast when they have to. It was one of those strips of four, taken in a photo booth, of a girl with a peaky triangular face and spiky black hair. In the first she was serious, her lips slightly open to show a chipped tooth. In the second she was beginning to grin, and was glancing sideways, presumably at some invisible friend. In the third, Daisy was giggling, and had shifted sideways, so that the left slice of her face was cut off. In the fourth, she was gone and only a hand waved in the air.

  Bryony stared at the photo for a minute then pushed it away, shaking her head violently. “No,” she spluttered, then burst into tears. I leaned across the table and took her hand. She held on to it as if she was drowning and only I could save her.

  “Yet Philippa Burton wrote down your name before she died,” said Oban quietly, almost as if he was talking to himself.

  “I know she fucking did!” snapped Bryony, through her tears. “I heard you loud and clear. Sorry. Sorry. Shooting the messenger and all that. This is a shock, to say the least.” She wiped away her tears with the heel of her hand, and made a visible effort to compose herself, sitting up straighter in the chair and pushing her hair behind her ears. “I need to get a grip on this. Shall I get us all some coffee?”

  “I never say no to coffee,” I replied, at the same moment as Oban said, “Not for me, thanks.”

  She stood up in one graceful movement. She was wearing a long black cotton skirt with a black T-shirt over it and her feet were bare. There was a silver chain around her ankle.

  “Give me a few seconds to let this sink in,” she said, as she padded over to the kettle. “Please.”

  Oban smiled tiredly at me and undid the top button of his shirt. His blue eyes seemed even smaller and paler than usual, and he kept blinking them, as if he could somehow clear his vision. His straggly hair was greasy and his face unshaven. On the way over here, between frantic calls on his mobile, he had turned to me and said, “I want you with me on this from now on.” It hadn’t sounded peremptory, but humble, as if he had turned from boss to supplicant in an instant. There was no doubt that I was the hero of the hour: the woman who had seen what was invisible to everyone else. I didn’t feel particularly good about it. I had discovered a pattern, sure, but one that made no sense. Rather, it actually destroyed whatever sense there had been remaining to us. In the meantime, there was a killer out there.

  I picked up the picture of Daisy Gill and stared at it. There was a stud in her eyebrow and, I saw, one in her tongue. There was a locket round her neck. In the third photo, the one where she was sliding out of the frame, I could see it more clearly. It was a little heart, like the one that Lianne had been wearing when she was killed, bearing the word “Best…” I wondered if Daisy’s locket said “…Friend.”

  I watched Bryony as she spooned coffee into two mugs. She was biting her lower lip and frowning slightly, but when she felt my gaze on her she turned her head and gave me a rueful grimace.

  “Is your husband here?” I asked.

  “Gabe? No, he’s just gone down the road to the post office. He’ll be here any minute. He doesn’t usually work until mid-afternoon. Here, you don’t take milk, do you?”

  “No milk, no sugar. Thanks.”

  She sat down at the kitchen table again, wrapping her fingers around her mug as if for comfort. Suddenly she looked terribly young and vulnerable.

  “All right,” she said to us. “What happens now?”

  Oban cleared his throat, and said, with portentous meaninglessness, “We’ll be making extensive inquiries.”

  Bryony stared at him, looking baffled.

  “Look,” I said, “it makes no obvious sense that a victim should know the identities of two other victims or potential victims. We don’t know when she wrote down the names, of course, so we don’t know if Lianne was already dead, or not.” I hesitated for a beat, but she was an intelligent woman. She already knew what I was about to say. “One thing it seems to suggest is that it wasn’t just a mugger by the canalside.”

  She nodded. Her lips were white.

  “And that the killer isn’t just acting randomly,” I added gently.

  “No,” she murmured. “I see.”

  “So the police will be spending some time with you now, trying to find out…”

  As I spoke, I heard the sound of a key turning in the front door, then someone whistling tunelessly in the hall.

  “Gabe!” called Bryony. “Gabe, I’m in the kitchen. With the police.”

  The whistling stopped abruptly. When he came in, he was shrugging off a battered leather jacket. His face was tense. “What’s happened?” he asked. “Bry? Are you OK?”

  “Please don’t be alarmed, Mr. Teale,” said Oban, but Bryony cut in, “Philippa Burton wrote my name down before she was killed.”

  Gabriel opened his mouth but didn’t seem able to say anything. He just stared at her, at us. He looked absolutely stricken.

  “Mine and the girl Lianne’s, and someone called Daisy,” continued Bryony slowly, as if to make sure he was taking it in. His horror seemed to give her new calm and resolve. “Daisy Gill, did you say?”

  “That’s right, Mrs. Teale.”

  “So it looks like it wasn’t just a mugging. And it looks as if he wanted to get me, not just anyone.”

  Gabriel came over and knelt beside her chair. He gathered both her hands in his and kissed them, and then he buried his head in her lap. She stroked his dark, tousled hair softly, then took his head and lifted it so that he was looking at her. “It’s all right, you know,” she said. I thought she was probably reassuring herself as well as him. “It’s all going to be all right, I promise. Nothing will happen. Do you hear, my darling?”

  “Can we ask you a few more questions before we leave you in the capable hands of my detectives?” said Oban.

  Gabriel got up, and stood behind Bryony, both hands on her shoulders.

  “Do you know a man called Will Pavic?” asked Oban.

  I stared at him—why was he asking that?

  “I don’t think so. Do we, Gabe?”

  “Well, of course I know who he is,” said Gabriel. “I mean, most people know him in this area.”

  “Why?” Oban asked. “I mean, I don’t even know the woman who lives next door, let alone the couple across the road.”

  Gabriel raised his palms. “I meant, we’re all in the same kind of world. I run a community theater
and one of the things we do is to try and get some of the people who feel most isolated and abandoned by their community involved again. He runs a hostel for young people. And he’s kind of famous, isn’t he? He’s always, er, how shall I put it? Making waves. We come across each other, sure. That’s all, though. Why? Why do you ask about him?”

  “That’s all for now,” Oban said. “Detective Inspector Furth will be wanting to talk to you, though.”

  We left them in the kitchen, Gabriel with his hands still on his wife’s shoulders; she with her head twisted round to look up at him. She looked terrified, and I was flooded by a sense of dread.

  __________

  “What do you make of this, Kit?” Oban said, as we drove back toward the station. “Guess what I heard on the way over: Three calls were made between the Burton household and Pavic’s center during the month leading up to Mrs. Burton’s death.”

  “Oh,” I said. I felt cold to the bones, though the day was sticky.

  “Oh? Is that all? Jesus, Kit, did you hear? The first two calls were just a minute or so long. The final one lasted eighty-seven minutes. What do you make of that, eh?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Pavic, eh? This is going to be interesting.”

  “Very interesting,” I said slowly. Then: “I think,” I said painfully, “that I ought to mention something.”

  “Hang on.” He punched some numbers into his phone. “Tell me later.”

  “All right.”

  I leaned my forehead against the window and briefly closed my eyes. What a colossal mess.

  34

  We pulled in at the police station and Oban leaped out and set off at speed so that I had to run to keep up with him.

  “What are we doing?” I said breathlessly, to the back of his head.

  “Talking to some people.”

  A uniformed officer joined from a corridor to one side and moved into step with Oban. “Is he here yet?” Oban asked.

  “He’s in Two,” the man replied. “You want me to talk to him?”

  “We’ll do it straight away. Won’t take a minute.”

  I followed Oban as he turned left and then right down the corridor. We came to a door and Oban knocked briskly. It opened and a policewoman stepped out. She nodded respectfully.

  “Is he all right?”

  “Don’t know, sir,” the woman said. “He hasn’t really opened his mouth. Except to yawn.”

  “Stay here,” he said, to her, not to me. “We won’t be more than five minutes.”

  He held the door open for me and I stepped inside. I don’t know what I was expecting. I hadn’t really had time to think. So when I saw Will Pavic I felt as if, quite unexpectedly, I had been punched in the face. He was leaning on the far side of the table, his hands in his pockets. He looked round and caught my eye. Even my legs felt unsteady. He displayed almost no reaction except for the smallest trace of a sardonic smile. He was wearing a gray suit and a white shirt with no tie. I wondered if he had actually been arrested. Did they still take ties away from men to stop them hanging themselves? I turned toward Oban. “I didn’t…” was all I managed at first. “I didn’t realize…”

  “Mr. Pavic has kindly come in for a quick word. Obviously we need to clear one or two things up. Please sit down.”

  Oban gestured at one of the chairs by the table. Will sat down. He still didn’t speak. I leaned on the wall just inside the door, as far away from him as I could get. I looked at him but his bored gaze was on the table. It was an expression I already recognized, unyielding, opaque. I was gibbering by the door but Oban was affable and relaxed, sitting down opposite Will as if they were having a drink together.

  “There’ve been developments in the murder case involving Lianne and Philippa Burton.” No response from Will. Oban gave a cough. “Maybe you know there was a further attack by the canal on a woman named Bryony Teale. I think you may know her husband, Gabriel.”

  “I’ve heard of him,” Will said tonelessly. “I don’t know him.”

  “He’d heard of you. But then, you’re pretty well known, aren’t you, Mr. Pavic? And you’d had contact with Lianne, of course. Until this morning, I must admit that I doubted there was anything that connected the women in this case.”

  Will’s eyes narrowed and the sour smile became more apparent, but he didn’t speak.

  “You’ve never come across Bryony Teale?” Oban continued. “She’s a photographer. Apparently she spends a lot of time walking around this area, in the streets and by the canal.”

  “No,” Will said.

  “What about Philippa Burton? Do you know her? Have you met her? Heard of her?”

  Behind my back I clenched my fists, my fingernails digging into the palms of my hands.

  Will shook his head. “No,” he said.

  “Why should you?” said Oban. “She lives over in Hampstead. Married to a businessman. But I suppose you meet all sorts of people.”

  No reply. This time he looked over at me. I didn’t look away. I tried to make a face at him conveying that, although I was a part of the investigation, I was still aware of the awkwardness of the situation and also how completely unnecessary it was to interrogate him in this way. It was a lot for one expression to convey, and it probably came out as a form of panic. It didn’t seem to matter, though. Will was looking at me as if I was a coat Oban had hung up on the way in.

  “As I was saying,” said Oban, “I wasn’t convinced of any sort of link. I just assumed women were being attacked at random. Dr. Quinn, though, she nagged away at the idea of a link. Now she’s found a note kept by Philippa Burton. It was all there: Lianne’s name, Bryony Teale’s. Amazing, don’t you reckon? Two of the victims’ names written down by the other victim.”

  Will gave a tired shrug. “What’s this about?”

  “That’s what I was getting on to. We checked her phone calls for the last month or so. It was mostly what you’d expect, her mum, husband at work, couple of friends, a travel agent, that sort of stuff, but there was a funny thing. On July the ninth, a call was made from the house to your hostel. Now, I know what you’re going to say, but it wasn’t to the payphone you’ve got in the hallway, the one that people use to do their drug deals.”

  “They don’t use that phone to make drug deals,” Will said. “I think you’ll find that dealers prefer their own mobile phones.”

  “The point I was making is that the call was made to the phone in your office. We were interested in any comment you might like to make on that.”

  If this had been an exam testing impassivity, Will would have got ten out of ten. But it wasn’t an exam, and I knew that any normal person in Will’s situation would have been startled by the connection between the women, then thoroughly taken aback by the call made to his own phone. A normal innocent person would have started behaving like a guilty person. Will just looked bored. “I have no comment,” he said.

  “Do you mean you’re refusing to answer? That is your right.”

  “No, I don’t mean that. I don’t know what sort of comment you’re expecting. Ask me questions and I’ll answer them.”

  “Did you talk on the phone to Philippa Burton?”

  “No.”

  “Do other people have access to the phone?”

  Another shrug. “Probably.”

  “I don’t want ‘probably.’ Yes or no.”

  Will clenched his jaw. “Yes,” he said.

  “Supervised access?”

  “I’m out a lot. My assistant, Fran, is there most of the time. We have lots of casual helpers and volunteers. But I’m sure the phone is left unattended at times.”

  “Was Lianne staying at the hostel at that time?”

  “She never stayed at the hostel. She might have been around.”

  “It’s an important point because this call was made before either of the murders occurred.”

  “Obviously,” said Will.

  “I’m sorry,” said Oban. “Am I missing something? What’s so ob
vious?”

  Will drummed his fingers lightly on the table. “It’s not important,” he said.

  “But what did you mean?”

  Will sighed. “If these people were talking to each other, then it was before they were murdered. That’s all I meant.”

  “Who said they were talking to each other?”

  “You did.”

  “No. I said a call had been made from Philippa’s phone to yours. She could have talked to you. For example. Except, of course, now you’ve assured us that she didn’t. But it might have been someone else. Or else somebody else rang from that phone. There are endless possibilities. So it would now be more useful than ever to know when Lianne was at the hostel. Do you have records?”

  “They’re not very precise.”

  “That’s a pity,” Oban said, his benign tone cracking at the edges. “Some detailed records might have been extremely helpful.”

  Will pushed back his chair, the way people used to do after finishing large Victorian meals. Its metal legs squeaked horribly on the linoleum floor. He looked engaged for the first time, which with Will Pavic was the same as saying he was angry. “You know,” he said, “after years of experience, I’ve discovered that the only way to stop people like you getting at my records is not to keep them.”

  For a moment Oban concentrated very hard on removing invisible dirt from his fingernails. “Mr. Pavic, I’m not much interested in whatever political point it is you’re trying to make. A young woman who spent time at your hostel has been murdered. Another victim called the hostel. I’m sorry if you find that boring.”

  Then there was a silence. When Will spoke his voice was very quiet, but also clear and icy, so I could hear it from across the room. “I work with these people all the time,” he said. “They’re invisible. Something happens and people like you get terribly interested. Then you go away. So you’ll forgive me for not being grateful for the attention.” He stood up. “You don’t seem to understand how my house works. People don’t punch a clock. They don’t write in a little book when they use the phone.” Now, for the first time, he looked at me with clear recognition. “It’s not Cheltenham Ladies’ College. It’s more like a little rock in the middle of the sea. People get washed up on it. They cling to it for a bit. Then they get washed away again. If they are a little stronger than they were when they arrived, that’s about the best I can hope for.”