The Red Room

by Nicci French

  “I don’t know.” I gave a small sob. “But the point is, there are some.”

  He smiled. “That’s completely incomprehensible, you know.”

  “I know.” He handed me a tissue and I blew my nose. “Anyway, for tonight at least, I’m going. And maybe that’s what I should be doing altogether.” I put a finger on his lip. “Ssh, don’t say anything else. Not now.”

  I stood up and pulled on my trousers and shirt.

  “I don’t like the idea of you walking around here at this time of night,” Will said.

  “I think I’ll be all right,” I said. “My name wasn’t on the list.”

  __________

  I stepped out of the house and walked away without looking back. There was a full moon so bright that it lit wavelike rims on the clouds across the sky. My body was quivering with tension. I felt tears running down my cheek, hot, stinging, but I took some deep breaths. I wiped my face. That was better. I’d done the right thing, there was nothing to get in a flap about. It was probably all over now, anyway, but I went over and over it in my mind. Move on, I told myself. Move on. I had other things to think about.

  I’ve never been worried about walking in cities late at night. I have a theory that if you walk briskly, and look as if you know where you’re going, you’ll be safe. I’ve spent quite a lot of my career talking to dangerous men, and I’ve frequently asked them how they select their victims. I think the answer is that they pick on people, women mainly, who, through weakness or lack of judgement or insecurity, seem to be inviting their attentions. I’ve tried to make myself believe that if you don’t look like a victim, you won’t become one. Maybe I’m just kidding myself. The randomness of suffering is unbearable. Better to believe that people are responsible for the things they bring on themselves.

  I walked through empty dark streets until I reached the brightness and noise of the main road and Kersey Town station. The taxis were squealing, the stall was there selling tomorrow’s newspapers, as if there wasn’t time enough for that tomorrow. Usually I would have been fascinated with the sights of the late-night city. I love looking at people who seem to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I try to imagine what strange errands and wrong turnings have brought them here, I tell myself stories about them. But now there were other stories in my head, interrupting each other, shouting to be heard. I crossed the busy road and cut across the square, leaving the bustle behind me. I thought of Bryony, walking late at night along the canal. It was stupid, as Oban had said, but I understood the impulse. The darkness, the quiet, the barely shifting black water, a strange secret world right in the middle of the city. I thought of Philippa, on Hampstead Heath in broad daylight, in a crowded children’s playground.

  My mind was working so furiously that my walk home had become almost unconscious, even though I was following a complicated route through back streets and small alleyways. I was barely a hundred yards from my front door when something jerked me out of my reverie and I looked around feeling startled. Had I heard something? I was in a quiet street with a row of houses on one side and a churchyard on the other. I saw nobody but then, in the corner of my eye, I caught a movement. When I looked more carefully in the direction I’d come from, there was nothing. Had someone moved back into a shadow? I’d be at my front door in a minute. I started walking briskly, my hand closed around the key in my jacket pocket. A minute, less, thirty seconds. I broke into a run and reached my door. At the moment I pushed the key into the lock, I felt a hand on my shoulder and gave a stupid little cry of shock. There was a tightness across my chest as I looked round. It was Michael Doll. His sour-sweet breath was on my face.

  “I just caught up with you,” he said, with a smile.

  I tried to think. Be calm. Defuse it. Make him go away. But I had to seem surprised. I mustn’t seem to take his presence for granted. “What on earth are you doing here?”

  “I missed you,” he said. “You didn’t come and see me.”

  “Why should I come and see you?”

  “I’ve been thinking about you.”

  “Were you following me?” I asked.

  “No, why should I?” he said, taking a step back, looking away.

  He had been following me. For how long? Had he been outside Will Pavic’s house?

  “You been with someone else?”

  Someone else? What was going on?

  “I’ve got to go now, Michael,” I said.

  “Can I come in?” he said.

  “No, you can’t.”

  “Just for a few minutes.”

  “It’s too late. My friend’s up there.”

  He looked up at the flat.

  “There’s no light on.”

  “She’s in bed.”

  “I want to talk.”

  I couldn’t believe that I was standing on my doorstep at half past midnight negotiating with Michael Doll about whether he could come in. “I’ve got to go.”

  “You’d let other people.”

  “Michael, it’s late. You’ve got to go home.”

  “I hate my home.”

  “Good night, Michael.” I said it with a slight, but not a welcoming, smile and a touch on his arm, which signaled sympathy but not real warmth.

  “I want to see you,” he said, but more feebly.

  “It’s late,” I said. “I’m going.”

  Not too quickly, I eased myself back into the doorway and pushed the door shut but it jammed. He had his foot against it. He leaned forward so that his face was in the gap. “You hate me?” he said. It was hardly a question. “You want me to go. Never see me.”

  Oh, how I wanted him to go. To scuttle out of my life, and if he was going to fasten himself to somebody, then let it be to somebody else. “I don’t mean that at all,” I said. “I’m tired. I’ve had a difficult day. Please.”

  His face was quite close to mine now. He was breathing with a wheezing whistling sound. His arm reached through the gap and I felt his hand on my cheek.

  “Night, Kit,” he said.

  I didn’t reply. The hand withdrew. I felt the pressure against the door relent and I was able to push it shut. I leaned against it and felt a sudden rush of nausea. I could still feel the traces of Michael Doll on my face. I could still feel Will Pavic inside me. It seemed to me that I was smelling of these men. I ran upstairs and, although I’d already had a shower at Will’s, I had another long one, until the water ran cold. Then I rummaged in a cupboard and found a bottle of whiskey. I took a glass to bed with me and sat in the dark sipping at it in mouthfuls that burned me inside and dulled my brain.

  37

  The next morning I phoned Oban and told him about Michael Doll. He seemed to find it mildly amusing.

  “So you’ve got an admirer,” he said. “Another admirer, I should say.”

  “It’s not funny,” I said. “I think he may have been following me.”

  “Why?”

  I hesitated. I didn’t want to talk about Doll following me back from Will’s place. “It’s getting more serious,” I said. “He’s hanging around the house, watching me. I don’t feel safe.”

  There was a cough that might have been a laugh.

  “I don’t believe this,” he said. “We’ve spent the last few weeks trying to convince you that Doll is dangerous and you’ve been trying to convince us that he’s a sweet, misunderstood boy.”

  “That’s not what I was saying.”

  “I know, love, can’t you take a joke? But what do you want me to do about it?”

  “I’m not sure. But I’m starting to feel threatened by him.”

  “Dear me,” said Oban. “And I was just starting to get more interested in your other friend.”

  “What?”

  “It’s hard to avoid. I’ve been thinking about it and all roads seem to lead to Will Pavic and his bloody drug-dealing center.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Maybe. But we need to think about it. If you like I can send someone round to whisper in
Mickey Doll’s ear.”

  I gave a sigh of relief. “That might be a good idea,” I said. “The problem is, everything I say to him, whether I’m friendly or angry, just seems to encourage him. I don’t want to bully him but it’s getting out of hand.”

  “Don’t worry. We’ll lean on him. In a nice way, of course. Are you coming in today?”

  “Maybe later,” I said. “I’ll be at the clinic for most of the day.”

  __________

  In the morning, I was sitting in one of the seminar rooms at the clinic with a fifteen-year-old girl called Anita, her whey-faced, stunned mother, a social worker and a solicitor. I was looking through a file. It was the usual disaster. Worse than the usual disaster. Supervisory visits had been omitted, medication not administered, papers lost. That was all standard. But a school building had been set on fire. That had certainly done the trick. Anita had attempted suicide twice, repeatedly mutilated herself and her case had got stuck in the in-tray. But if you set fire to public buildings, you get attention.

  There was a knock and the door was pushed open. It was the clinic’s receptionist. “Phone for you,” she said to me.

  I looked round in disbelief.

  “I’ll call back later.”

  “It’s the police. He said he tried your mobile.”

  “It’s switched off. Tell him I’ll ring back in a minute.”

  “He said to get you out of wherever you were. And he’d hang on.”

  I made profuse apologies, ran down the corridor and picked up the phone. “This had better be—”

  “Doll’s dead.”

  “What?”

  “In his flat. Get there now.”

  __________

  When I’d visited Michael Doll in his flat before, I’d thought it a squalid, desolate home for a strange and lonely man. He had seemed the sort of person who would have been obscure while he was alive and whose death would have been ignored. No longer. He had become notorious. There were three police cars, an ambulance and other unmarked cars double-parked along the road. The area around the street entrance was taped off. Two policemen stood outside, and there was a small crowd of people with nothing better to do on a weekday afternoon in Hackney.

  I pushed my way through with murmured apologies, and as I approached the policemen I saw the old women with wheeled shopping baskets looking at me with new interest. What could I be? A detective? An undertaker? One of the police went inside and I heard a muffled shout. After a few moments Oban emerged. He seemed deeply shocked, his face a startling gray-green color. I found myself asking how he was.

  “Jesus,” he said in a low voice. “Un-fucking-believable. Pardon me.” He looked around guiltily at the old women.

  “What’s happened?” I asked.

  “The crime-scene guys are just starting,” he said. “I wanted you to have a quick look. Just so you’ve seen it before they take him away. Are you up to it?”

  “I think so,” I said, gulping slightly.

  “It’s not pretty,” he said.

  I had to put things like miniature hairnets over my shoes. Oban told me not to touch anything. Mounting the stairs required some care because they were covered with a sheet. At the top Oban turned to me and told me to take a deep breath. He pushed the door open and stood back, leaving me to go in first.

  The body was sprawled on the floor, face downwards, except there was no face. It looked like an effigy but the head wasn’t finished. I recognized the clothes from the previous night. The soles of his shoes were pointing up at me. The lace on the right shoe was undone. Brown corduroy trousers. Anorak. Above that just dark wetness. I started to speak but my mouth was too dry. I had to swallow several times. I felt a hand on my back. “Steady, love,” said Oban.

  “Where’s his head?” I asked, in a voice that didn’t sound like my own.

  “All over the place,” said Oban. “Repeated massive blows with a very heavy, very blunt object, much of it after death. It was a fucking frenzy. Hence all this.”

  I looked around. It was the red room. It was the red room of my nightmares. I had thought of it as an idea, a symbol, but I was standing in it. It looked as if the room had been sprayed with blood from a hose. The walls, even the ceiling, thick globs on the ceiling that looked as if they were about to drop on us but they had coagulated.

  “You know, head wounds,” said Oban, looking round. “They always bleed a lot, don’t they?”

  I looked round. I tried to be dispassionate, but I kept thinking about that irritating disgusting presence on my doorstep last night, that repellent urgency, all reduced to that wretched bundle on the floor. I had put some sort of curse on him. I had wanted him out of my life forever. Had I wanted him dead?

  “Take a look at this,” said Oban.

  He held a transparent folder, which contained a piece of paper. Written on it in crude capital letters was: MURDRUS BASTAD.

  “That was lying on the body. Do you see?” he said. “They can’t even bloody spell.”

  “So they caught up with him,” I said.

  Oban nodded. “What a shithouse,” he said. “You’ve been here before?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I thought it might be useful for you to have a look at it. Take as long as you want. Or as short.”

  My legs shook and I moved to sit down on the arm of a chair but a man stepped forward and prevented me. I apologized.

  “What a fucking mess,” Oban said, again. “It looks like a slaughterhouse in a museum.”

  “Michael Doll was a collector,” I said. I mustn’t be sick. I swallowed hard and breathed shallowly through my mouth.

  Oban pulled a face. “Really? What did he collect?”

  “Just anything he found. Stuff by the canal. Anything he could carry. It was a kind of illness.”

  “I don’t envy the people who have to clear this out…” Oban carried on talking but I couldn’t hear him. I couldn’t hear anything. Because suddenly I had seen it. I walked across the room, I had to maneuver carefully around the body. I walked across and reached for something on a shelf. It was between a jam-jar and a coil of rusting wire. Somebody shouted something and I felt a hand tugging at me.

  “Don’t touch,” a voice said.

  “That,” I said, pointing. “That.”

  The man was wearing gloves and he leaned forward and picked it up, very carefully.

  “What’s that?” Oban asked.

  “You tell me,” I said.

  “It’s a feeding cup, the kind you give to toddlers. What’s that written on it?”

  “Emily,” I said.

  He looked puzzled. “You’re not going to tell me that Mickey Doll had a daughter called Emily, are you?”

  “No,” I said. “But Philippa Burton did.”

  38

  “All right?” asked Oban, as we drew away from the pavement where the group of people had become a small crowd.

  “Fine.” I kept my voice firm and smiled at him. I wasn’t shaking. My voice was steady. My breathing was even. I wound down the window and let the warm wind blow into my face.

  “It was unbelievable, wasn’t it?” His face had returned to normal, and his tone was jovial, even gleeful. He looked more alert yet more relaxed than I’d seen him in weeks. I half expected him to start whistling through his teeth.

  “Yes.”

  “Tough job for the scene-of-crime lads. Nightmare. But there will be a lot of sympathy for the people who did it, even so. Rough justice and all of that. We have to tread carefully at the press conference.”

  I closed my eyes for a minute and thought of Doll’s pulped remains, the sea of blood. Red blood everywhere; a room dark red with blood.

  “So we come full circle, Kit.”

  “What?”

  “It was Doll all along. After everything.”

  I made a noncommittal noise and gazed out of the open window. The sky was blue and cloudless, the sun golden; people on the street were dressed in bright colors. It was a day of heat and
light, like the last gift of summer.

  “Come on, Kit. You can put it behind you now. It’s over, admit it.”

  “Well…”

  “Let me guess. You’re still not convinced. We find Emily’s drinking cup in Doll’s room, for Christ’s sake, with her name written across it—of course we’ll have to confirm it with Mr. Burton, but I think that’s just crossing the Ts, don’t you? But you’re not convinced. What would it take?” He turned his head and grinned across at me as he said it. He sounded fond, rather than exasperated.

  “It’s just that I don’t understand.”

  “So? Who does? We don’t need you to understand any more. You’re not required to conduct a seminar about it to your colleagues, or whatever it is you do. We just needed to find the person who killed the women, and we have, thank God.”

  “No. I meant it doesn’t make sense.”

  “Lots of things don’t make sense.” He swerved to avoid a cyclist in neon Lycra, leaned briefly on his horn. “But Doll was the murderer, Kit.”

  I didn’t reply.

  “Kit? Come on, say it. Just once. It won’t hurt.”

  “I’m not saying that I think you’re wrong….”

  “But you won’t say I’m right either.”

  “No.”

  He laughed. Then he put a warm hand over mine. “You did well, Kit. Even though, in the end, your instincts were mistaken, you did excellently. Don’t think I haven’t realized how hard it must have been for you, after everything. But we’d have been all over the place without you. You kept us on the straight and narrow.”

  “No,” I said, and was surprised by how firm my voice was. “No. I stopped you from charging Doll weeks ago. If you’d charged him then, guilty or not, he’d be alive now. In a year’s time, maybe he would have landed up in my hospital. I told him he was safe.”

  “It does no good to think like that. We’ve all made our mistakes on this one, but you saw connections we didn’t see. You stopped us from making mistakes we were poised to make. You prevented a Godawful mess.”

  “But…”

  “Christ, Kit, give it a rest. No more buts. You’re the most bloody-minded woman it’s ever been my pleasure and privilege to work with.”