The Red Room

by Nicci French

  “Pudding?” I said.

  “No.”

  I had an idea. An important idea.

  “When did we meet?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Since I woke up here, I’ve had the most terrible headache. Was it you? Did you hit me?”

  “What are you on about? Are you fucking me around? Don’t you fuck me around. I could do anything to you.”

  “I’m not. I don’t mean anything like that. The last thing I remember… I’m not even sure. It’s all so blurred. I can remember being at work, I can remember…” I was going to say “my boyfriend” but I thought that making him jealous, if that’s what it would do, might not be a good idea. “I remember my flat. Doing something in my flat. I woke up here and I’ve no idea how I got here or how we met. I wanted you to tell me.”

  There was a long pause. I almost wondered if he had gone but then there was a whinnying sound, which I realized with a shock was a wheezing laugh.

  “What?” I said. “What did I say? What?”

  Keep talking. Maintain communication. I was thinking all the time. Thinking, thinking. Thinking to stay alive, and thinking to stop feeling, because I knew dimly that if I allowed myself to feel I would be throwing myself off a cliff into darkness.

  “I’ve got you,” he said.

  “Got me?”

  “You’re wearing a hood. You’re not seeing my face. You’re being clever. If you can make me think you never saw me, then maybe I’ll let you go.” Another wheezing laugh. “You think about it, do you, while you’re lying there? Do you think about going back to the world?”

  I felt a lurch of misery that almost made me howl. But it also made me think. So we did meet. He didn’t just grab me from behind in a dark alley and hit me over the head. Do I know this man? If I saw him, would I know his face? If he spoke naturally, would I recognize his voice?

  “If you don’t believe me, then it doesn’t matter if you tell me again, does it?”

  The rag was jammed into my mouth. I was lifted down and led over to the bucket. Carried back. Dumped back on the ledge. No wire. I took that to mean that he wasn’t going out of the building. I felt his breath close on my face, that smell.

  “You’re lying in here trying to work things out. I like that. You’re thinking that if you can make me believe that you can’t identify me, I’ll play with you for a while, then I’ll let you go. You don’t understand. You don’t see the point. But I like it.” I listened to his scraping whisper, trying to recall if the voice was in any way familiar. “They’re different. Like Kelly, for example. Take Kelly.” He rolled the name around in his mouth like it was a piece of toffee. “She just cried and fucking cried all the time. Wasn’t a bloody plan. Just crying. It was a bloody relief just to shut her up.”

  Don’t cry, Abbie. Don’t get on his nerves. Don’t bore him.

  THE THOUGHT CAME TO ME out of the darkness. He’s been keeping me alive. I didn’t mean that he hadn’t killed me. I had been in this room now for two or three or four days. You can live for weeks without food but how long can a human being survive without water? If I had just been locked in this room, unattended, I would be dead or dying by now. The water I’d gulped down had been his water. The food in my gut was his food. I was like an animal on his farm. I was his. I knew nothing about him. Outside this room, out in the world, this man was probably stupid, ugly, repulsive, a failure. He might be too shy to talk to women, workmates might bully him. He could be the silent, weird one in the corner.

  But here I was his. He was my lover and my father and my God. If he wanted to come in and quietly strangle me, he could. I had to devote every single waking second to thinking of ways to deal with him. To make him love me, or like me, or be scared of me. If he wanted to break down a woman before killing her, then I had to remain strong. If he hated women for their hostility, then I had to reassure him. If he tortured women who rejected him, then I had to… what? Accept him? Which was the right choice? I didn’t know.

  Always and above all I had to stop myself believing that it probably didn’t matter what I did.

  I DIDN’T COUNT THE TIME without the wire. It didn’t seem to matter. But after a time he came back in. I felt his presence. A hand on my shoulder made me start. Was he checking I was still alive?

  TWO CHOICES. I could escape in my mind. The yellow butterfly. Cool water. Water to drink, water to plunge into. I tried to recreate my world in my head. The flat. I walked through the rooms, looked at pictures on the wall, touched the carpet, named the objects on shelves. I walked around my parents’ house. There were odd blanks. My father’s garden shed, the drawers in Terry’s desk. But still. So much in my head. So many things. In there and out there. But sometimes as I was wandering through these imaginary rooms, the floor would disappear from beneath my feet and I would fall. These mind games might be keeping me sane but I mustn’t just keep sane. I must also keep alive. I must make plans. I wanted to kill him, I wanted to hurt, gouge, mash him. All I needed would be an opportunity but I couldn’t see any possibility of an opportunity.

  I tried to imagine that he hadn’t really killed anybody. He could be lying to scare me. I couldn’t make myself believe it. He wasn’t just making an obscene phone call. I was here, in this room. He didn’t need to make up stories. I knew nothing about this man but I knew he had done this before. He had practiced. He was in control. The odds against me were bad. They were as bad as they could be. So any plan I could come up with didn’t have to have a particularly good chance of success. But I couldn’t think of any plan at all that had any chance of success. My only plan was to stretch it out as long as I could. But I didn’t even know if I was stretching it out. I had a horrible feeling—another horrible feeling; all my feelings were horrible—that this was all on his timetable. All talk, all my feeble plans and strategies, were just noise in his ear like a mosquito buzzing around his head. When he was ready, he would slap it.

  “WHY DO YOU DO THIS?”

  “What?”

  “Why me? What have I done to you?”

  A wheezing laugh. A rag stuffed in my mouth.

  MORE KNEE PULL-UPS. I couldn’t do more than sixteen. I was getting worse. My legs hurt. My arms ached.

  Why me? I tried to stop myself asking the question but I couldn’t. I’ve seen pictures of murdered women before, in newspapers and on TV. But not murdered. Not hardly ever. No. I’d seen them when they thought their lives were going to be ordinary. I suppose that when the families give the photos to the TV companies they choose the prettiest, smiliest pictures. They’re probably from high school yearbooks most of the time. But they’re blown up larger than they were meant to be. It gives them a slightly blurry, creepy feel. They don’t know what’s going to happen to them and we do. We’re not like them.

  I couldn’t believe that I was going to be one of them. Terry would go through my stuff and find a picture. Probably that stupid one I got for my passport last year in which I look as if I’ve got something trapped in one of my eyes and I’m smelling a bad smell simultaneously. He’ll give it to the police and they’ll blow it up so it looks all blurry and I’ll be famous for being dead and it’s so unfair.

  I went through the unlucky women I knew. There was Sadie who was left a month before Christmas by her boyfriend when she was nearly eight months pregnant. Marie has been in and out of hospital for her chemotherapy and has been wearing a head scarf. Pauline and Liz were made redundant from the firm when Laurence did the belt-tightening the year before last. He told them on a Friday evening when everybody had left and when we came in on Monday morning they were gone. Even six months later Liz was still crying about it. They’re all luckier than me. And some time in the next few days they’ll know it. They’ll hear about it and they’ll each become mini-celebrities in their own right. They’ll be saying to acquaintances, colleagues at work, with excitement covered with a thin layer of deepest sympathy, “You know that woman, Abbie Devereaux, the one in the papers? I knew her. I can’t beli
eve it.” And they’ll all be shocked and they’ll all tell themselves secretly that they may have had their problems but at least they weren’t Abbie Devereaux. Thank God that the lightning struck her and not them.

  But I am Abbie Devereaux and it’s not fair.

  HE CAME IN and slipped the wire around my throat. I was going to count the time. I’d been thinking about this, planning it. How would I stop myself losing count? I worked out a plan. Sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour. That’s 3,600 seconds. I would imagine walking up a hill in a town beginning with an A. A hill with 3,600 houses and I would count the houses as Iwalked past them. I couldn’t think of a town beginning with an A, though. Yes, Aberdeen. I walked up the hill in Aberdeen. One, two, three, four… When I got to the top of the hill in Aberdeen, I began again in Bristol. Then Cardiff, then Dublin, Eastbourne, Folkstone and then, when I was halfway up the hill in Gillingham, he was back in the room, the wire was slipped off my neck. Six and a half hours.

  IF YOU ARE IN A HOLE, stop digging. A stitch in time saves nine. Don’t cross a bridge till you come to it. Don’t burn your bridges. Was that right, two sets of bridges? What else? Think, think, think. No use crying over spilled milk. Look before you leap. Too many cooks spoil the broth and many hands make light work and don’t put all your eggs in one basket and birds of a feather flock together and one swallow doesn’t make a summer. Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight. My delight. But red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning. How many roads must a man walk down, before?… No, that was something else. A song. A song not a saying. What was the tune? I tried to remember, to put music in my brain and to hear the sound in this dense and silent dark. No use.

  Pictures were easier. A yellow butterfly on a green leaf. Don’t fly away. A river, with fish in it. A lake of clear, clean water. A silver tree on a smooth hill, with its leaves furling in the breeze. What else? Nothing else. Nothing. I was too cold.

  “HELLO. I was hoping you would come soon.”

  “You haven’t finished your water.”

  “There’s no hurry, is there? There are so many things I wanted to ask you.”