The Red Room

by Nicci French

  The service began at last. At least the chaplain didn’t pretend he knew Lianne or could say anything about her. He just made his way quickly through the required ritual. Halfway through, I felt as though someone was staring at me and turned round. A small pain jabbed me in the chest. He was there. Will. Dressed in an austere black suit and looking more like a crow than ever. He sat at the back with his arms crossed and stared at me. No, that wasn’t it. He was staring through me, as if I wasn’t there at all. His eyes looked like holes in his gaunt, stubbly face. His hair was cropped to his skull, and I could see a small white scar on his scalp. I turned back, but it was as if his gaze was burning a hole in my neck.

  When the coffin slid away I imagined Lianne’s body inside it, burning up. From a fridge to a fire. I imagined her sweet little face, her bitten nails, that heart locket: “Best…” Tears pricked at my eyes but I blinked them back. Across the aisle, there was the sound of weeping. When I glanced over, it was not one of the girls but Laurie. Laurie who had once been kissed by Lianne, who’d let her take his clumsy face in her hands and kiss him full on his hopeless mouth. Timid Carla was holding his hand. Spike was looking down at his big black boots and I couldn’t see his face. Only Sylvia gazed ahead, with her calm, sea-green eyes.

  The piped music played, and we stood up to leave. Will was still sitting at the back. His gaze was fixed on the space where the coffin had been. He looked impassive until I saw that his face was a sheet of tears. He didn’t bother to wipe them away or conceal them. I walked to his pew and held out a hand. “Come on,” I said. He looked at me then, but I might have been a stranger. I took his hand and pulled. “Come on, it’s the next funeral in a minute. You don’t want to sit through another one, do you?”

  I steered him out, blinking, into the sunlight. His hand was cold and he moved stiffly.

  “Are you all right, Will?”

  He didn’t answer but he looked at me at last, blindly. I pulled a tissue out of my bag and wiped his face. He stood still and let me. I put a hand on his shoulder, but it was like touching a board. “Will? Will, can I drive you home?”

  “No.” He jerked away from me.

  “Where’s your car?”

  “I walked,” he managed. His face was stunned, as if someone had brought a brick down on his head.

  “Let me help you.”

  “I don’t need help.”

  I looked at his closed face, his stony despair, and all the old tenderness welled up in me. He needed help more than anyone I’d ever met.

  “Come on,” I said, and put my arm through his. “Let’s walk a bit.”

  We walked in silence away from the crematorium. He went whichever way I steered him, as if he were stumbling along in a pitch-dark cave. I could have led him to the canal and pushed him over into the brown water and he wouldn’t have noticed. But bit by bit I felt him relax against me. I wanted to take him home with me and take care of him. I wanted to rub the back of his neck, run him a bath, cook him a meal, make him smile, watch him sleep in the darkness, hold him tight, kiss the side of his unhappy mouth—not for sex but for intimacy. Human contact: the feel of someone else alongside you in this crappy cold world. But he was never going to let me in. Not like that.

  “Here’s my car. I’ll run you home.”

  He didn’t argue. I opened the passenger door and pushed him inside. He looked up at me and seemed to be about to say something, but he changed his mind. I drove in silence, and left him at his front door. The last I saw of him, he was still standing there like a stranger who had no idea where he was. He looked so lonely.

  __________

  I rang Poppy. Her greeting sounded a bit brittle.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” she said huffily. But then she added, “I’ve just been calling and leaving messages with that Julie and you never bother to call back.”

  “I’m so very sorry,” I said. “I’ve been busy.”

  “Fine. But you can’t put people on hold.”

  “Oh, Poppy, look, I really am sorry. Shall I come round now?”

  “No. Seb and I are going out for a talk—not that it’ll do any good.” She gave a bitter laugh.

  “What’s wrong? Is something up?”

  “Oh, you know, the usual. Successful man and stay-at-home wife.”

  “You mean…”

  “I don’t know, Kit. Let’s talk later. OK? I’ve got to go and put some makeup on. I look like a frumpy old matron at the moment.”

  “Don’t say things like that.”

  “Why not? It’s true.”

  “No, it’s not. You’re lovely.”

  “Don’t be stupid. I can’t fit into any of my dresses anymore.”

  “No, I mean it. You’re lovely and wonderful and he doesn’t know how lucky he is.”

  She sniffed. “Sorry to have been curt.”

  “No. I’m sorry.”

  __________

  I put the kettle on to boil water for some pasta. What I really wanted was to sit on my sofa and have someone serve me tea and crumpets, cosset me, look after me. For the briefest second, I let myself dream of my mother stroking my hair and telling me I could rest now. I felt shaky with fatigue and emotion as I thought of Lianne’s coffin sliding into the flames. I imagined Poppy desperately trying on clothes in front of the tall mirror in her room, and saw her disappointed face as she stared at her reflection. And then I imagined Will, all alone in his echoing house.

  Suddenly, I could bear it no longer. I pulled on my suede jacket and ran to the car. I drove very fast, impatient with every traffic light. When he opened the door, he was still wearing his black suit. He stood back and let me in, and I pushed the door shut behind me. I led him to the sofa and pushed him into it and sat beside him. I took his two cold hands between my warm ones and blew on them. I undid the top buttons of his shirt. I eased off his stiff black shoes.

  “I’ll make you a cup of tea,” I said, and he didn’t protest.

  In his kitchen, I toasted two slices of bread and spread them with the marmalade I found in the fridge.

  “You’re mothering me,” he said, but he took a large bite of the toast anyway.

  I didn’t ask him why he’d been so sad. I just watched him eating his toast and drinking his tea. Then I led him upstairs and took off all his clothes as if he was a child, and he lay in bed and I sat beside him and stroked his bristly head. At last he closed his eyes and I took away my hand. “I’m not asleep,” he said softly.

  “I only came to make sure you were all right.”

  “Yeah, yeah. You shouldn’t worry so much about other people, Kit.”

  “I can’t help it.”

  “Ah.” He was slipping away from me. “You should worry about yourself, you know.”

  “Why?”

  “The good doctor.”

  “Will?”

  “Mmm.”

  “About what I said…”

  But he was asleep at last. His weary face softened, his lips parted slightly, his fingers relaxed and curled gently against the sheet. I watched him for a while, then I got up, closed the curtains and left.

  40

  My date hadn’t arrived so I bought myself a beer and stood outside on the steps watching the theater-goers arrive. Gabe Teale’s theater, the Sugarhouse, was an abandoned warehouse that stood on railway land between the huge gas works and the canal. There had been what looked like a hasty conversion with scaffolding and Portakabins but the people in nice suits or high heels were still picking their way from the road between piles of rubble. The West End was only a quarter of an hour’s walk away but it seemed like a different continent. I loved that about London. However safe and familiar you were, you were never more than five minutes’ walk away from something strange.

  The respectable people shuffled across to the improvised main entrance and then, almost without exception, they looked round at their surroundings and smiled with that childlike pleasure of doing something familiar in an improbable,
almost secret place. Or maybe it was self-congratulation at having ventured into such a dangerous, out-of-the-way spot.

  The crowd was starting to thin as people drifted to their seats. I looked at my watch. Twenty-two minutes past. I wasn’t going to be stood up, was I? But there he was, puffing a little as he caught sight of me and did that rather pathetic attempt at a slow-motion jog to show that he was in a hurry.

  “I’m not late, am I?” Oban said, looking round sheepishly.

  “We’ve got a few minutes. Can I get you a drink?”

  He perked up. “Is there a bar here?” he asked. I held up my beer in response. “Double Scotch.”

  I fought my way through the crowd. By the time I’d got it for him a bell had rung. “We’ll need to be fairly quick,” I said, giving him the drink. He swallowed it in a single gulp.

  “I needed that,” he said hoarsely. “I’m not used to this sort of thing.”

  “Nor am I,” I protested. “I haven’t been to the theater for months, years. I thought it would be a good thing to come to this. A sort of celebration.”

  Oban looked dubious. “The last time I went was in about 1985. It was some sort of musical. On roller skates. I never felt the need to go again. What’s this one about?”

  I looked at my program. “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s something to do with the history of this area.”

  Oban looked wistfully into his empty glass. “I didn’t know there was any history, apart from criminality.”

  A voice came over the sound system telling us that the performance was about to begin. We went in to take our seats, except that it turned out that there weren’t any seats.

  Market Day wasn’t a normal play, any more than the Sugarhouse was a normal theater. It was more like wandering around an indoor carnival. There were jugglers, clowns, performers on stilts, people on soapboxes giving speeches. There were children playing games, singing and shouting. There were stylized sketches performed by people of different ages in costumes they got out of a chest in the middle of the arena. The action happened all over the place, sometimes at the same time, and you had to wander around trying to catch what you could. At first I was irritated, tantalized by the feeling that I was irritated, tantalized by the feeling that I was missing something important on the other side of the hall, but after a bit I relaxed and treated it like a walk through an exotic foreign city. Oban grumbled at first about there not being a proper story but he was suddenly pulled out of the crowd by a rather beautiful young female magician. She asked him his name and what he did and there was a big laugh when he confessed to being a policeman. He went very red and then got wonderfully startled when she found an egg in his inside jacket pocket.

  I loved it, and I loved it partly because in a strange way it freed me to think. I gazed with immense pleasure at the man walking across the wire above us but at the same time my head was buzzing as I remembered all I’d been through in the last month. I went over it and tried to assemble it in some kind of order and of course it wouldn’t go. But for the first time, in the middle of a happy crowd, it didn’t seem to matter so very much.

  In the interval the performers didn’t disappear into their changing rooms but wandered through the crowd introducing themselves and chatting. Oban and I talked to one of the jugglers, an accordion player and a group of children who went to the local primary school. Oban suggested in a hopeful tone that we go and talk to the young woman behind the bar, so we walked out into the “foyer,” which was really just another section of the old warehouse. Oban bought me a gin and tonic and another double scotch for himself. The girl who served must have been a teenager. She had hair cut quite short and bleached. She had rings all round her ears, in her nose and through her lower lip. I asked her how long she’d been working here.

  “A few weeks,” she said.

  “Are you from around here?” I asked.

  “I s’pose,” she said.

  “It must be good to have a place like this in the area.”

  “I s’pose,” she said, and then someone behind me ordered a bottle of Mexican beer from her rather crossly and we moved away.

  “Cheers,” I said to Oban, and we clinked glasses. “Clearly Gabe is doing his bit for local people. It seems as if this theater is a bit like Will Pavic’s hostel.”

  Oban sipped his drink with a murmur of pleasure. “I think he’s doing a bit better than Will Pavic,” he said. “This isn’t exactly my sort of show. I prefer a good story. I couldn’t follow most of it. But I can see that it’s a clever bit of work. Hello, look who’s here.”

  He nodded at something and I looked round and saw Gabe Teale in conversation with a seriously trendy-looking couple. “Let’s go over,” I said.

  “He looks busy.”

  “Then we’ll interrupt him.”

  We pushed our way through the crowd and I nudged Gabriel’s arm. He looked round and gave a start, as well he might. “Surprise, surprise,” I said.

  “Indeed,” he said.

  He introduced us to the two people he was talking to. I didn’t catch their names but it didn’t matter because, with a slightly curious look at us, they drifted away toward another group of people who looked as if they, too, were in the know.

  “You didn’t think we were the cultural types,” I said.

  He looked at us with genuine confusion. Did he think we were a couple? What was it about me? Was there anybody in the world so weird that if they were standing next to me people wouldn’t assume I was going out with them?

  “Well…” he began.

  “It’s fantastic,” I said. “I hadn’t realized this was such a huge set-up. And this amazing show. And employing these local people.” I was babbling. Stop babbling, Kit.

  “It’s not just me,” he said. “I’m just the artistic director. There’s a board of directors and various other people.”

  “Don’t be modest,” I said. “Is Bryony here?”

  “She doesn’t work here,” he said. “She’s at home. She’s still not very well.”

  There was a moment of silence.

  “So,” I said, “you’ve probably got things to see to.”

  “Yes,” he said. “There are a couple of things.”

  We shook hands formally in one of those curious goodbyes that aren’t very momentous. It wasn’t exactly as if Gabriel and Bryony were emigrating. He would be working in the area, I would be living in the area, and yet, London being London, we would probably never meet again.

  When he was gone, Oban gave me a smile.

  “You look very cheerful,” I said.

  “I am. I’ve spent about an hour and a half with you and you haven’t told me that I’ve been all wrong about everything.”

  I couldn’t suppress a smile. “I was working my way to that,” I said. The bell rang for the second half. I took a sip. “You know, I’m feeling quite cheerful as well. It’s been a nice evening. I’ve got out of the house. Trouble is, when I’m feeling cheerful, that’s when I start worrying. I’m a Puritan, you see. I believe that people are only happy when there’s something that they don’t know about.”

  “You’re never going to be happy with that attitude,” Oban said.

  “People keep telling me that. I just want to say one thing and then I’ll shut up. I know we should be pleased with ourselves, job well done and all that, but things keep nagging away at me—you know like when you buy a shirt and, however careful you are, there’s always a pin left over that sticks into you.”

  Oban looked baffled. “Is that the one thing you wanted to say? About shirts?”

  “No, listen. Michael Doll was found dead with these trophies.”

  “There’s no problem with that, is there? You’re the one who knows about these men. Murderers keep trophies, don’t they?”

  “They do,” I agreed. “It’s absolutely standard. They do it to maintain power over their victims, to relive the experience. Obviously these aren’t normal trophies. The feeding cup belonged to the little girl, who w
asn’t his victim.”

  “Yes, but it’s still a trophy, isn’t it? It was the reminder that he killed her mother. And for all that we know there could be something else that belonged to Philippa Burton in that rubbish dump he lived in.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “And in the same way, the leather pouch he got from Bryony wasn’t a normal trophy. For a start, she wasn’t dead.”

  “He grabbed it during the struggle and kept it. Handy as well. It had the key to Bryony Teale’s house. He could have made use of it.”

  “Yes,” I said. “So I’m just going to mention two loose ends and then we’ll go and look at the play and that will be the end of it. We’re now assuming that it was Michael Doll who was attacking Bryony on the towpath. That would certainly deal with the coincidence of him being on the scene. But what about the other man?”

  “I’ve thought about that,” said Oban, taking another sip of his drink. “We were looking at it from the wrong angle. Instead of Terence Mack and Mickey Doll rescuing Bryony from unknown man, we have Terence Mack and unknown man rescuing Bryony from Mickey Doll. We knew that the different accounts were totally hopeless anyway, so it’s not surprising that Mack and Bryony didn’t realize what was going on.”

  “And this unknown hero ran away because he was too modest to take all the credit?”

  “There are plenty of people who don’t want to meet the police, even as a witness. Maybe he was carrying drugs, something like that.”