The Red Room Read online

  __________

  I went into the clinic and spent a busy day taking calls, answering mail, chairing a case meeting on a boy who had set fire to his foster-home, sitting in on interviews of two hopeless applicants for a job. I made concerned comments, I discussed and argued, and all the time my mind was somewhere else. I didn’t get home until eight and there was a note on the table: “Out. Back very late. The weirdo called. Love J.” Had he remembered something?

  I had a long bath during which I briefly fell asleep. I knew that you could fall asleep while driving, then crash and die. Could you fall asleep and drown in the bath? I didn’t take the risk. I got out and put on a dressing-gown. I phoned Will. No answer. I looked in the fridge and found a bowl of rice there, so I ate it standing up. It would have been better heated, with olive oil and Parmesan on it. Then I ate two gherkins and a tomato. There was an open bottle of wine in the fridge and I poured myself a glass.

  I turned on the radio and, with no surprise, realized that the voice I heard belonged to Seb Weller and he was talking about Lianne and Philippa. God, he was a pro. Words flowed smoothly from him, no hesitations, occasionally a small pause to establish his spontaneity.

  “Obviously, this case touches on a central nerve for many women living in the area,” he said. “I often think that men do not understand it properly.”

  “Except you, of course,” I muttered, then felt ashamed of myself.

  “Men don’t know what it is like for women to walk down a dark street, stand in a lonely subway hearing footsteps coming towards them, lie in bed at night and listen to the strange sounds outside. All women, bold or cautious, always have this hidden basement of fear. I like to call it…” he paused once more “… I like to call it their red room….”

  “Oh, Christ!” I exclaimed loudly.

  “A red room where all the things they fear the most…”

  The phone rang and I banged the off-knob on the radio angrily.

  “It’s me.”

  “Who?”

  “Mike.”

  It took me a second to connect this name with Michael Doll. So it was Mike now.

  “Hello.”

  “What are you doing?”

  I felt a slight wave of nausea. Was he going to ask me next what I was wearing? I pulled my dressing-gown more firmly around me. “Why are you calling, Michael? Have you remembered something?”

  “I was just calling,” he said. “You just called on me, down at the canal. I’m just calling you.” There was a pause. “It was good to see you.”

  “I’ve got to go now,” I said.

  “That’s all right,” he said.

  “Good night.”

  “Sleep well.”

  I didn’t. Not after that. Not for hours. I woke up feeling as if I hadn’t slept at all. My tongue felt as if it had been glued to the roof of my mouth. I hadn’t drunk that much, had I? It was half past eight when I got up. Julie was sitting at the table with a pot of coffee looking through a newspaper. Others were scattered on the table. It felt like Sunday morning, but it was Thursday. She’d gone to sleep about four hours after me and she looked like someone in an advertisement for being young and fresh-faced.

  “What’s up?” I said.

  “I went to get a paper and there was stuff about your crime in the papers, so I bought some of them.”

  “It’s not really my crime.”

  “It’s amazing. There’s a woman who says she can find the murderer using crystals. There’s someone else who thinks it’s to do with the moon. There’s another psychologist. There’s a photofit picture.” She held up the newspaper. “He definitely reminds me of someone. It’s been driving me mad.”

  “Buster Keaton,” I said.

  “That’s right. But he’s dead, isn’t he?”

  “I think so. Also, it’s the way he looked in about 1925.”

  So that was what they had got out of Terence and Bryony. God, they must be desperate.

  “It doesn’t mention you, though,” said Julie, in a slightly disappointed tone. Maybe she suspected that I’d been making it all up, that I wasn’t really involved, or just at some very, very low level. Tea-girl or something. “Do you want to read it?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  I drank some coffee and dressed quickly. There were things I wanted to do. If I drew a blank, then I would call a halt, make an attempt to become normal again, stop seeing patterns everywhere, shapes in the clouds.

  “We need to talk,” said Julie, as I rushed past on my way out.

  “Later,” I said, racing down the stairs.

  As I came out of the door, I sensed someone close by. I could smell it. I turned.

  “Morning, Kit.”

  It was Doll, his dog beside him. He was wearing the same jacket as the day before and the same hat. He had added a scarf, which was tied around his neck with two ferociously tight knots. How could he ever untie them? And how long he had been waiting for me?

  “Michael,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “You’ve got some evidence?”

  “I just need to talk to you.”

  “I’m in a hurry.”

  “I’m not.”

  The oddness of the reply stopped me in my tracks. “I’ve got to go,” I said.

  I began to walk but he walked along with me. “I wanted to call round,” he said. “I wanted to see you.”

  “What about?”

  “You understand. I need to talk about things.”

  I stopped. “You mean the murders?”

  He shook his head too vigorously. It looked as if it must hurt. “Things. You understand.”

  I tried to think clearly. What I really wanted was to get away and never see him again. But did he have something important to tell me? “Michael, I’m working on these murders. You know that. If you’ve anything to say about that, I’ll listen. I haven’t time for anything else.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m busy.”

  “That’s all you care about, isn’t it? You only care about me because you think I might tell you something. You’re like all the others.”

  “Which others?”

  “I’ll talk to you later,” he said, his face a fiery red now. “I’ll talk to you later when I feel like it. I’ve got my eye on you now, Kit. But I’m going. I’m busy as well, you know. It’s not just bloody you.”

  And he was away, muttering and twitching. A young man walking toward him crossed the road.

  32

  “I don’t know how I can help you,” said Pam Vere. She had placed herself in the armchair opposite me, but upright, with her hands tense on the armrests, as if she was about to stand up again and show me the door.

  I sat in the room where Philippa used to sit, where the light flooded in through the French windows. The bouquets of flowers that had been standing on every surface last time I’d been here had all gone now; people lose interest pretty quickly. Only a vase of massed pink and dark purple sweet peas stood on the table between us—I remembered that her talkative friend, Tess, had said they were Philippa’s favorite flowers. There was a large black-and-white photograph of the dead woman on the mantelpiece behind Mrs. Vere, so that in looking at the mother I was also looking at her murdered daughter, whose grave smile and dark eyes seemed to be staring intently into the room she’d left.

  Pam Vere seemed to have aged ten years since I last saw her. She was probably still in her fifties, or early sixties, but her face was pale and weary, and the wrinkles on it were so deep that they were like grooves carved in stone. Her mouth was a thin line. There were dark smudges under her eyes. When I had been here before, I had been touched by Emily, and had imagined what it must be like for her to lose her mother so young, but I hadn’t really imagined what it must be like for Pam to lose her daughter, her beloved only child—not until now, when I looked into her bleak face and saw how her hands, when they released the arms of the chair, trembled on her lap.
r />   “I don’t know how I can help you,” she repeated.

  “I’m so sorry to disturb you again. I just wondered if it was possible to look through some of Philippa’s things.”

  “Why?”

  “Have the police already been through her possessions?”

  “No. Of course not. Why on earth would they? She was killed by a mad person, out there….” Her hands gestured toward the windows.

  “I’d like to take a look.”

  “You don’t want to talk to Emily again, do you?”

  “Not at the moment. Is she here?”

  “She’s upstairs, in her room. I look after her at the moment, most of the time at least. I come in the mornings and I stay until her father gets back. Until things get on an even keel. She spends half her time in her room. She’ll be going to nursery school, anyway.”

  “How’s she doing?”

  “There’s a cardigan Philippa used to wear a lot, which she uses as a blanket. She curls up on it and just lies there sucking her thumb. The doctor said I should let her. He said she was coming to terms with Philippa’s death in her own way.”

  “That sounds right,” I said, looking at her intently. Was I making her angry? Was I blundering in?

  “Jeremy does his interminable crosswords and cries when he thinks no one can hear him. Emily lies on her carpet….” She rubbed her eyes. “I don’t know. I don’t know what’s best.”

  “What do you do?” I asked.

  “Me?” She gave a faint shrug. “I get through the day.” She stood up abruptly. “What are you looking for?”

  “Did she have somewhere she kept her things—letters, diaries, things like that?”

  She took a deep breath, flinching as if there were a pain deep in her chest. I knew that she must be toying with the idea of telling me to go away and never come back.

  “There’s the desk in the bedroom upstairs,” she said finally. “I’m not sure there’s much in there, except bills and letters. We haven’t been through all her things yet.” She glanced up at her daughter’s photograph for an instant, then looked away. “Jeremy’s packed up most of her clothes now. He gave most of them to Oxfam. It makes me feel odd to think of strangers walking around wearing her nice dresses. She had some lovely clothes, you know. The police took away her diary.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “There’s nothing to find. She just went to the park one day, and she didn’t come home.”

  “Can I see her desk anyway?”

  “All right. What does it matter?”

  __________

  It felt illicit to be in the large bedroom, which had clearly been decorated by a woman, and still looked as if it was shared by a couple, with a cluttered dressing-table against one wall, and two plumped-up pillows on the bed. But one side of the open wardrobe was empty, except for dozens of bare hangers on the rail, and only men’s clothes were slung on the chair near the door.

  The bureau-style desk was near the window that overlooked their back garden. There was a little jug of dried flowers, a cordless telephone and several photographs on its top. I sat down at it, looking once more into the face of Philippa Burton, this time holding a younger Emily, legs wrapped around her mother’s waist, round flushed cheek pressed against Philippa’s smooth pale one.

  I pulled down the lid. Inside, it was unpromisingly neat and empty. I started with the little compartments, lined with green baize. There were pens, sharpened pencils, paper glue, Sellotape, two books of stamps, one first- and one second-class. Also a stack of headed stationery, white envelopes, brown envelopes, ink cartridges in a small plastic bag, blank postcards, a collection of bills with “Paid” written across them. I examined them, but there was nothing odd there: £80 to unblock the drain; £109 for a case of wine; £750 for a set of eight ladder-backed chairs, including two carvers; that kind of thing. There was a bundle of drawings by Emily—people with heads and legs and no bodies, blotchy rainbows, wonky flowers, crooked patterns. Philippa had written the dates when they were drawn on the back; clearly she had been a methodical woman.

  I found a stiff glossy card showing National Trust paints that were called things like sepia and old linen, saffron yellow and drawing-room red. There were circulars from charities appealing for donations; three invitations, inviting Philippa and Jeremy to parties that she would never attend now; quite a few summer postcards—scrawled, barely legible messages sent by Pam and Luke, Bill and Carrie, Rachel and John, Donald and Pascal, sent from Greece, Dorset, Sardinia, Scotland. And there were also a couple of handwritten letters. One was from a woman called Laura, thanking Philippa and Jeremy for the lovely dinner. The other was from someone called Roberta Bishop, introducing herself as a near-neighbor and proposing that Philippa should come to the next residents’ meeting to discuss parking on the road and the plan for traffic calmers. She used lots of exclamation marks.

  I shut the lid and opened the first drawer. A stash of A4 paper, a pile of holiday brochures, old bank statements chronologically arranged and neatly clipped together. I leafed through them, looking for anything that might snag my attention. Nothing did. Philippa hadn’t been extravagant. She spent about the same amount each month; withdrew the same amount each week from the cash machine. I was about to close the drawer when I felt something right at the back, pushed up behind the pile of paper: a slim paperback book with a pink cover called Lucy’s Dream. It was, it announced on the cover, “an erotic novel for women.” There was a soft-focus image of a woman with blurred bare breasts, the dark shadow of one nipple, head thrown back, hair falling over her shoulders like water. I toyed with the idea of taking the book away before Jeremy started to clear out his wife’s desk, but decided against it. Philippa wouldn’t mind now what he found out.

  In the bottom drawer there was a large doll in an unopened box. Her name, apparently, was Sally; she had brown ringlets, long brown lashes, and wide blue eyes that stared up through the cellophane. She gave me the shivers. There was a pacifier and a bottle tied into the cardboard. The writing on the box announced that if you gave Sally water, she cried and wet herself. Probably, I thought, Philippa had bought the doll for Emily; maybe for a birthday that was coming up. There was also a small notepad, which I opened. On the first page was a shopping list with items ticked off. The second page was a list of things to do: ring plumber, buy shoelaces, defrost fridge, take car to garage for service.

  The next page was covered in rather superior doodles of various kinds of fruit. The fourth page was empty, apart from several London phone numbers jotted in the margin. The fifth page had a few words scrawled across it, which I glanced at casually as I licked one finger, ready to turn over the leaf. I stopped dead, finger in mid-air.

  “Lianne” was written in a scrawl. I stared at the letters, hardly daring to move in case they should disappear, blur into something else. Suddenly my mouth felt dry. The word didn’t change, however long I stared at it. It still said “Lianne.”

  I looked down the page, gazed as if I was in a dream. For there, near the bottom and ringed in question marks and in smaller writing, still unmistakably Philippa’s: “Bryony Teal.” Lianne and Bryony Teale, misspelled. Philippa had written down the names of the two other victims. There was another name, as well, with a little flower doodled next to it, symbol of the word. “Daisy.”

  Very carefully, as if it was a bomb that would go off in my hand, I lifted the notepad and dropped it into my bag. I closed the drawer.

  For a minute, I sat at the desk and stared out of the window, allowing the knowledge of what I had just seen to sink through my brain and take root there. A small dark cloud moved across the sun, so that the garden lay in shadows. As I looked, Emily, dressed in denim shorts and a striped top, ran onto the lawn and stood there, calling something to her grandmother, who was still in the house. Suddenly she looked up and saw me, sitting at her mother’s window and for one terrible moment her whole face lit up into unbearable joy and she stretched out her arms to me; her mouth opened to c
all out a name, a word. Then her body sagged and her arms dropped limply to her side. I felt tears prick my eyes.

  I stood up and left the room, the bag with its precious cargo slung over my shoulder. All that I could think about were those names in the notebook. And that I had told Bryony she was not in danger.

  33

  I phoned in my apologies to the management meeting at the Welbeck. I canceled my lunch with Poppy. I sat in the car next to Oban, while he swore and sweated and told me for the hundredth time that it made no fucking sense. His voice was just a drone, like the traffic. I pressed my fingers against my temples. There had to be an explanation. We were just looking at this in the wrong way, somehow. If we approached it from a different angle, we would see it differently. All the things that made no sense at all would shine with meaning. I closed my eyes and tried to relax my mind, so that the knot of incomprehension would unsnarl. I waited for clarity to float down. Nothing happened. I groaned to myself and rubbed my eyes. Beside me, Oban’s face was glum. He wasn’t looking forward to this visit either.

  His mobile rang and he picked it up. “Yes,” he barked. “Yes. Go on.” His expression changed, and he leaned forward slightly in his seat, gripping the steering-wheel with his free hand. “Say that again. OK, OK, we’ll be on our way back in, say, half an hour. No more. Stay put.”

  He put down the phone. “Fuck,” he said once more.

  “What?”

  “Fuck.”

  “Yeah, but what else, Daniel?”

  He pulled up outside the Teales’ house with a shriek of brakes. “You’ll never believe what I just heard.”

  “Tell me! What?”

  “No time now, I’ll save it,” he said, and sprang from the car.

  __________

  “No,” she said, in a whisper. Her face drained of color as she stared at us. Her eyes looked huge and dark. “No!” She spoke louder this time, fiercely, and lifted both hands to her mouth as if she was praying. “I don’t understand. It can’t be true. What does it mean?”