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  ACCLAIM FOR THE NOVELS OF NICCI FRENCH

  THE RED ROOM

  “Stylish and engrossing… brilliant.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “Stylish… to be read in one sitting.”

  —BookPage

  “Razor-sharp… vivid… a hit.”

  —Booklist

  “Exciting… absorbing chiller.”

  —BookBrowser

  “A sizzling hot suspense read… intense.”

  —Romantic Times

  BENEATH THE SKIN

  “Brilliant… frightening… a tale of sheer terror.”

  —People

  “[An] insinuating tale of sexual obsession.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “Captivating… brilliant… a gripping read for anywhere but home alone.”

  —Mademoiselle

  “Stunnning…. French knows how to carry a chilling situation to frightening extremes.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Creepy…. French ups the suspense to nail-biting effect.”

  —Orlando Sentinel

  “Genuine suspense keeps pages turning…. Don’t plan on doing much else once you start reading this one.”

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “So imaginative and well executed that I can’t stop thinking about it.”

  —San Jose Mercury News

  “Stunning… elegantly conceived and executed….. Few writers command the virtuosity displayed here.”

  —Star-Telegram (TX)

  “Plenty of psychological suspense… a textured, elegant novel with writing and characterization that bind an atypical triplex structure.”

  —Baltimore Sun

  “A beautifully written tale with a twist.”

  —Austin American-Statesman

  “Mesmerizing and disturbing… a novel that will definitely get beneath your skin… a fascinating, suspenseful scenario that will hold you enthralled until the shocking outcome.”

  —Romantic Times

  “Its insinuating suspense doesn’t disappoint…. French makes the reader complicit, a voyeur getting a series of glimpses of three women on a craggy path from denial to disintegration. The sensation is intimate and disquieting.”

  —Newark Sunday Star-Ledger

  “A gripping whodunit.”

  —Associated Press

  KILLING ME SOFTLY

  “A compulsive read… peak psychological suspense.”

  —People

  “First rate… genuine chills run down the spine…. French can show John Grisham and Patricia Cornwell a thing about good writing.”

  —Orlando Sentinel

  “Undeniably fascinating…. You can’t stop reading this book once you’ve picked it up…. French whips up a perfect confection.”

  —Washington Post Book World

  “Elegantly chilling.”

  —Philadelphia Enquirer

  “A sleek, utterly gripping tale.”

  —Mademoiselle

  “French pulls off [sexual obsession] as well as anyone in recent memory.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Stunning…. every decade or so a psychological thriller appears that graphically recounts an intelligent woman’s willing sexual subjugation; this gripping novel joins that group.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “An elegant, chilling take on love, murder, and obsession.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  Also by Nicci French

  Killing Me Softly

  Beneath the Skin

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  GRAND CENTRAL PUBLISHING EDITION

  Copyright © 2001 by Nicci French

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Grand Central Publishing

  Hachette Book Group,

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

  First eBook Edition: August 2001

  ISBN: 978-0-7595-2564-1

  Contents

  ACCLAIM FOR THE NOVELS OF NICCI FRENCH

  Also by Nicci French

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  eBook Special Feature:

  A Preview of "KILLING ME SOFTLY"

  ONE

  A Preview of "BENEATH THE SKIN"

  PART ONE

  ONE

  A Preview of "LAND OF THE LIVING"

  To Karl, Fiona and Martha

  Beware of beautiful days. Bad things happen on beautiful days. It may be that when you get happy, you get careless. Beware of having a plan. Your gaze is focused on the plan and that’s the moment when things start happening just outside your range of vision.

  I once helped out my professor with some research on accidents. A team of us talked to people who had been run over, pulled into machinery, dragged out from under cars. They had been in fires and tumbled down stairs and fallen off ladders. Ropes had frayed, cables had snapped, people had dropped through floors, walls had tipped, ceilings had collapsed onto their heads. There is no object in the world that can’t turn against you. If it can’t fall on your head, it can become slippery, or it can cut you, or you can swallow it, or try to grab hold of it. And when the objects get into the hands of human beings, well, that’s a whole other thing.

  Obviously there were certain problems with the research. There was a core of accident victims who were inaccessible to our inquiries because they were dead. Would they have had a different tale to tell? That moment when the basket slipped and the window-cleaners fell from twenty floors up, their sponges still in their hands, did they think anything apart from, Oh, fuck? As for the others, there were people who, at the time of their mishap, had been tired, happy, clinically depressed, drunk, stoned, incompetent, untrained, distracted or just the victims of faulty equipment or what we could only and reluctantly characterize as bad luck, but all of them had one thing in common. Their minds had been on something else at the time. But, then, that’s the definition of an accident. It’s something that breaks its way into what your mind is on, like a m
ugger on a quiet street.

  When it came to summing up the findings, it was both easy and hard. Easy because most of the conclusions were obvious. Like it says on the bottle, don’t operate heavy machinery when intoxicated. Don’t remove the safety guard from the machine press, even if it seems to be getting in the way, and don’t ask the fifteen-year-old doing a week’s work experience to use it. Look both ways before crossing the road.

  But there were problems, even with that last one. We were trying to take things that had been on the edge of people’s minds and move them to the front. The obvious problem with that is that no one can move everything to the front of their mind. If we turn to face a source of danger, something else has an opportunity to sneak up behind us. When you look left, something on your right has the chance to get you.

  Maybe that’s what the dead people would have told us. And maybe we don’t want to lose all of those accidents. Whenever I’ve fallen in love, it’s never been with the person I was meant to like, the nice guy with whom my friends set me up. It hasn’t necessarily been the wrong man, but it’s generally been the person who wasn’t meant to be in my life. I spent a lovely summer once with someone I met because he was a friend of a friend who came along to help my best friend move into her new flat; the other friend who was meant to come and help had to play in a football match because someone else had broken his leg.

  I know all that. But knowing it isn’t any help. It only helps you understand it after it’s happened. Sometimes not even then. But it’s happened. There’s no doubt about that. And I suppose it started with me looking the other way.

  It was toward the end of a May afternoon and it was a beautiful day. There was a knock at the door of my room and before I could say anything it opened and Francis’s smiling face appeared. “Your session has been canceled,” he said.

  “I know,” I said.

  “So you’re free…”

  “Well…” I began. At the Welbeck Clinic, it was dangerous ever to admit you were free. Things were found for you to do, which were generally the things that people more senior than you didn’t want to bother with.

  “Can you do an assessment for me?” Francis asked quickly.

  “Well…”

  His smile widened. “Of course, what I’m actually saying is, ‘Do an assessment for me,’ but I’m putting it in a conventionally oblique way as a form of politeness.”

  One of the disadvantages of working in a therapeutic environment was having to answer to people like Francis Hersh who, first, couldn’t say good morning without putting it in quotation marks and providing an instant analysis of it, and second… don’t get me started. With Francis, I could work my way through second, third, and all the way up to tenth, with plenty to spare.

  “What is it?”

  “Police thing. They found someone shouting in the street, or something like that. Were you about to go home?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then that’s fine. You can just pop into the Stretton Green station on your way home, give him the once-over, and they can send him on his merry way.”

  “All right.”

  “Ask for DI Furth. He’s expecting you.”

  “When?”

  “About five minutes ago.”

  I rang Poppy, caught her just in time, and told her I’d be a few minutes late meeting her for a drink. Just a work thing.

  When someone is doing the sorts of things that are likely to cause a breach of the peace, it can be surprisingly difficult to assess whether they are bloody-minded, drunk, mentally ill, physically ill, confused, misunderstood, generally obnoxious but harmless, or, just occasionally, a real threat. Normally the police handle it in a fairly random fashion, calling us in only when there are extreme and obvious reasons. But a year earlier, a man who had been picked up and let go turned up a couple of hours later in the nearby high street with an ax. Ten people were injured and one of them, a woman in her eighties, died a couple of weeks later. There had been a public inquiry, which had delivered its report the previous month, so for the time being the police were calling us in on a regular basis.

  I’d been in the station several times, with Francis or on my own. What was funny about it, in a very unfunny way, was that in providing our best guesses about these mostly sad, confused, smelly people sitting in a room in Stretton Green, we were mainly providing the police with an alibi. The next time something went wrong, they could blame us.

  Detective Inspector Furth was a good-looking man, not much older than I was. As he greeted me, he had an amused, almost impudent, expression that made me glance nervously at my clothes to make sure nothing was out of place. After a few moments I saw that this was just his permanent expression, his visor against the world. His hair was blond, combed back over his head, and he had a jaw that looked as if it had been designed all in straight lines with a ruler. His skin was slightly pitted. He might have had acne as a child.

  “Dr. Quinn,” he said with a smile, holding out his hand. “Call me Guy. I’m new here.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” I said, and winced in the vise of his handshake.

  “I didn’t know you’d be so… er… young.”

  “Sorry,” I began, then stopped myself. “How old do I need to be?”

  “Got me,” he said, with the same smile. “And you’re Katherine—Kit for short. Dr. Hersh told me.”

  Kit used to be the special name my friends called me. I’d lost control of that years ago, but it still made me flinch a bit when a stranger used it, as if they’d come into the room while my clothes were off.

  “So where is he?”

  “This way. You want some tea or coffee?”

  “Thanks, but I’m in a bit of a hurry.”

  He led me across the open-plan office, stopping at a desk to pick up a mug in the shape of a rugby ball, with the top lopped off like a breakfast egg.

  “My lucky mug,” he said, as I followed him through a door on the far side. He stopped outside the interview room.

  “So who am I meeting?” I asked.

  “Creep called Michael Doll.”

  “And?”

  “He was hanging around a primary school.”

  “He was approaching children?”

  “Not directly.”

  “Then what’s he doing here?”

  “The local parents have started an action group. They give out leaflets. They spotted him and things got a bit nasty.”

  “To put it another way, what am I doing here?”

  Furth looked evasive. “You know about these things, don’t you? They said you work at Market Hill.”

  “Some of the time I do, yes.” In fact, I divide my time between Market Hill, which is a hospital for the criminally insane, and the Welbeck Clinic, which provides assistance for the middle classes in distress.

  “Well, he’s weird. He’s been talking funny, muttering to himself. We were wondering if he was a schizophrenic, something like that.”

  “What do you know about him?”

  Furth gave a sniff, as if he could detect the man’s stench on the other side of the door. “Twenty-nine years old. Doesn’t do much of anything. Bit of minicabbing.”

  “Has he got a record of sexual offenses?”

  “Bit of this, bit of that. Bit of exposure.”

  I shook my head. “Do you ever think this is all a bit pointless?”

  “What if he’s really dangerous?”

  “Do you mean, what if he’s the sort of person who might do something violent in the future? That’s the sort of thing I asked my supervisor when I started at the clinic. She answered that we probably won’t spot it now and we’ll all feel terrible afterwards.”

  Furth’s expression furrowed. “I’ve met bastards like Doll, after they’ve done their crime. Then the defense can always find someone who’ll come in and talk about their difficult childhood.”

  Michael Doll had a full head of shoulder-length hair, brown and curly, and his face was gaunt, with prominent cheekbones. He had st
rangely delicate features. His lips in particular looked like a young woman’s, with a pronounced Cupid’s bow. But he had a wall-eye and it was difficult to tell if he was staring at me or just slightly past me. He had the tan of a man who spent much of his life outside. He looked as if the walls were pressing in on him. His large callused hands were tightly clutched as if each was trying to prevent the other from trembling.

  He wore jeans and a gray windbreaker that wouldn’t have looked especially strange if it weren’t for the bulky orange sweater underneath, which it failed to cover. I could see how, in another life, another world, he might have been attractive, but weirdness hung about him like a bad odor.

  As we came in he had been talking quickly and almost unintelligibly to a bored-looking female police officer. She moved aside with obvious relief as I sat down at the table opposite Michael Doll and introduced myself. I didn’t get out a notebook. There probably wouldn’t be any need.

  “I’m going to ask you some simple questions,” I said.

  “They’re after me,” Doll muttered. “They’re trying to get me to say things.”

  “I’m not here to talk about what you’ve done. I just want to find out how you are. Is that all right?”

  He looked around suspiciously. “I don’t know. You a policeman?”

  “No. I’m a doctor.”

  His eyes widened. “You think I’m ill? Or mad?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I’m all right.”

  “Good,” I said, hating the patronizing reassurance in my voice. “Are you on any medication?” He looked puzzled. “Pills? Medicines?”

  “I take stuff for my indigestion. I get these pains. After I’ve eaten.” He rapped his chest.

  “Where do you live?”

  “I’ve got a room. Over in Hackney.”

  “You live alone?”

  “Yeah. Anything wrong with that?”

  “Nothing. I live on my own.”

  Doll grinned a small grin. It didn’t look nice. “You got a boyfriend?”

  “What about you?”