The Red Room Read online

  She died before I was old enough to keep her as a memory, though I used to try to edge myself back through the foggy early years of life, to see if I could find her there, on the bleached-out edge of recollection. All I had were photographs like this, and stories told to me about her. Everyone had their own versions. I had only other people’s word for her. So it wasn’t really my mother I was missing now, but the impossibly tender idea of her.

  I knew, because of the date my father had written punctiliously on the back, that she was already pregnant, though you couldn’t tell. Her stomach was flat, but I was there, invisible, rippling inside her like a secret. That’s why I loved the photograph: because although nobody else knew it, it was both of us together. Me and her, and love ahead. I touched her with my finger. Her face shone up at me. I still cry when I see her.

  2

  I have always been nervous of New Year’s Eve. I can’t make myself wholly believe in a fresh start. A friend once told me this meant I was really a Protestant rather than a Catholic. I think she meant that I trail my life behind me: my dirty linen and my unwanted baggage. Nevertheless, I wanted my return to work to be a new beginning. The flat was cluttered with all the things that Albie had left behind. It had been six months, yet I still had a couple of his shirts in the cupboard, an old pair of shoes under my bed. I hadn’t properly thrown him out. Bits of him kept turning up, like pieces of wreckage washed up on a beach after a storm.

  That Sunday evening, I put on a pair of white cotton trousers and an orange top with three-quarter-length sleeves and lace around the neck, like a vest. I put mascara on my lashes, gloss on my lips, the smallest dab of perfume behind my ears. I brushed my hair and piled it, still damp, on top of my head. It didn’t matter. He would come, and then a bit later he would go away again, and I would be in my flat on my own once more, with the windows open and the curtains closed and a glass of cold wine and music playing. Something calm. I stood in front of the long mirror in my bedroom. I looked quite steady. I smiled and the woman smiled back, raising her eyebrows, ironical.

  He was late, of course. He is always just a bit late. Usually he arrives panting and out of breath and smiling and talking before the door is even half open, sweeping in on a gust of conversation, on the crest of some idea or other, on a boom of laughter. I heard him laugh before I ever saw him. I turned round, and there he was, delighted with himself, enviable in that, I thought at the time.

  He was quieter today; his smile was wary.

  “Hello, Albie.”

  “You’re looking very fine,” he said, contemplating me as if I were an artwork on a wall that he hadn’t quite made up his mind about. He leaned forward and kissed me on both cheeks. His stubble scratched my skin, my scar, his arms held my shoulders firmly. There was black ink on his fingers.

  I allowed myself to look at him, then stepped back, out of his embrace. “Come on in, then.”

  He seemed to fill my spacious living room.

  “How have you been, Kitty?”

  “Fine,” I said firmly.

  “I came and saw you in hospital, you know. When I heard. You probably don’t remember. Of course you don’t. You were quite a sight.” He smiled, and put up a finger to trace my injury. People seemed to like doing that. “It’s healing well. I think scars can be beautiful.”

  I turned away. “Shall we get going?”

  We started in the kitchen. He took his special mushroom knife, with a brush on the end to flake away dirt, his fondue set with its six long forks, his ludicrous striped apron and chef’s hat that he insisted on wearing when he was cooking, three cookbooks. Eel stew, I remembered. Passion-fruit soufflé that had risen too much and blistered on the roof of the oven. Mexican tacos filled with mince and sour cream and onions. He ate with gusto too, waving his fork around and stuffing food into his mouth and arguing and leaning across the candles on the table to kiss me. Last Christmas he’d eaten so much goose and swigged it back with so much hearty red wine that he’d gone to the casualty ward thinking he was having a heart-attack.

  “What about this?” I held up a copper pan we’d bought together.

  “Keep it.”

  “Sure?”

  “Sure.”

  “And all those Spanish plates that we—”

  “They’re yours.”

  But he took his dressing-gown, his South American guitar music, his poetry and physics books, his aubergine-colored tie. “I think that’s everything.”

  “Do you want a glass of wine?”

  He hesitated, then shook his head. “I’d better be getting back.” He picked up his bag. “Funny old world, isn’t it?”

  “That’s it, then?”

  “What?”

  “Your epitaph on our relationship. Funny old world.”

  He frowned at me. There were two vertical creases above his nose. I smiled to reassure him that it didn’t really matter. Smiled when he got up to leave with his boxes, smiled when he kissed me goodbye, smiled as he walked down the steps to his car, smiled as he drove away. Now I was going to look ahead, not behind.

  __________

  The Welbeck Clinic stands in a quiet residential street in King’s Cross. When it was built in the late fifties, the whole point was that it shouldn’t look like an oppressive institution. After all, it was going to be a building in which psychiatrists solved people’s problems and made them happy and sent them back into the world. What was meant by not looking institutional was that it didn’t look Victorian, with Gothic towers and small angled windows.

  Unfortunately the design was so successful and highly praised and prize-winning that it influenced the construction of urban primary schools, medical centers and old people’s homes, and the Welbeck Clinic now looked very institutional indeed. Normally I didn’t really see the building, just as I wasn’t conscious of my own breathing. I went to it every day, worked and talked and studied and drank coffee there. But now, walking up the steps after weeks away, I saw that the building was middle-aged, the concrete stained and cracked. The door dragged on the stone step, scraping like fingernails as I pulled it open.

  I arrived at Rosa’s office and she immediately came out and gave me a long hug. Then she held me back to contemplate me with a semi-humorous expression of inquiry. She was dressed simply in charcoal slacks and a navy blue sweater. Her hair was quite gray now and when she smiled her face almost shimmered in all its fine wrinkles. What was she thinking? When I had first met her, almost seven years earlier, I had already known her extraordinary work on child development. I’d occasionally been puzzled by this great expert on children who had never had children herself, and I sometimes wondered if the rest of us at the clinic were competing to be her cleverest son or daughter. There may have been something maternal about the way she presided over the Welbeck, but it wasn’t necessarily wise to rely on a mother’s softness and forgiveness. She had a steely objectivity as well.

  “We’ve missed you, Kit,” she said. “Welcome back.” I didn’t speak. I just pulled a face that was meant to look affectionate. There were butterflies in my stomach; it felt like my first day at secondary school. “Let’s go outside and talk,” she added briskly. “I think it’s cleared up. Isn’t the weather funny at the moment?”

  We walked toward the garden at the back and Francis met us on the way. He was also dressed casually, in jeans and a dark blue shirt. As usual he was unshaven, his hair rumpled. He was a man who wanted to look like an artist rather than a scientist. When he saw me, he held out his arms and we had rather an awkward few seconds of walking toward each other before I could step into his embrace.

  “So good to have you here again, Kit. You’re sure you’re ready?”

  I nodded. “I need to work. It’s just… this bit is rather like getting back on a horse again after a fall.”

  Francis pulled a face. “I’m glad to say I’ve never been anywhere near a horse. Best idea is not to get on one in the first place.”

  It had rained earlier but now the sun was out
and the wet flagstones glittered and steamed. The benches were sodden so we stood in a group self-consciously, like people who had just been introduced at a drinks party.

  “Remind me of today’s schedule,” said Rosa, for something to say.

  “This morning I’m going to see Sue.” Sue was an anorexic twenty-three-year-old, so thin she looked as if the light could shine through her. Her beautiful eyes were like brimming pools in her shriveled little face. She looked like a child, or an old woman.

  “Good,” she said crisply. “Take it at your own pace. Let us know if there’s any help you need.”

  “Thanks.”

  “There’s one more thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “Compensation.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yes. Francis is certainly of the view that you should consider legal action.”

  “Open and shut case,” said Francis. “It was even done with the policeman’s own bloody mug, wasn’t it? What on earth did he think he was up to?”

  I looked over at Rosa. “What do you think?”

  “I would rather hear what you think.”

  “I don’t know what I think. It was all so confused. You know that the Crown Prosecution Service…” I tried to recall the wording of the letter I’d received “… declined to proceed against Mr. Doll. Maybe it was their mistake. Maybe it was my mistake. Maybe it was just an accident. I’m not sure what I’d be after.”

  “About a couple of hundred grand, some of us reckon,” said Francis, with a smile.

  “I’m not sure that Doll really meant to hurt anybody. He was just flailing around, panicking. He picked up the mug and smashed it against the wall, and cut himself, and then he cut me. He was a mess even before the police had finished with him. You know what happens to people in police cells. They go crazy. They kill themselves or fly at other people. I should have been prepared for that.” I looked at Rosa and Francis. “Are you shocked? Do you want me to be angrier? Out for Doll’s blood?” I shuddered. “The police beat him up pretty badly before throwing him into a cell. By the sound of it, they thought they were doing me a favor. They must be furious that he got off.”

  “They are,” said Rosa drily.

  “And it was Furth’s mistake, though he will never admit to that, of course. And mine, too. Perhaps I wasn’t concentrating hard enough. Anyway, I just don’t see the point of suing them. Who would it help?”

  “People should be held responsible for their mistakes,” Francis said. “You could have died.”

  “But I didn’t. I’m fine.”

  “Think about it, at least.”

  “I think about it all the time,” I said. “I dream about it at night. Somehow the idea of getting someone to compensate me by giving me money doesn’t really seem relevant just now.”

  “I hear what you’re saying,” said Francis, in a tone that made me want to tweak his nose.

  __________

  It was raining steadily as I drove back; warm summer rain that splashed on my windscreen, and sprayed up in iridescent arcs from the wheels of the trucks that thundered past. The rush-hour traffic was building, and my eyes felt gritty, my throat a bit sore.

  As I pulled up outside my flat, I saw that a man was standing at the front door. He had on a raincoat, his hands in the pockets, and he was looking up at the house. He heard my car door slam, and turned to me. His blond helmet of hair gleamed in the rain. His thin lips stretched into a smile. I looked at him for a long time and he just looked back at me.

  “Detective Inspector Guy Furth,” I said.

  I felt myself surveyed and evaluated under his gaze and I tried not to flinch.

  “You look good, Kit,” he said, and smiled, as if we were old mates.

  “What’s this about?”

  “Can I come in for a moment?”

  I gave a shrug. It seemed easier just to agree.

  3

  “I’ve never been here before,” he said, looking around.

  I couldn’t help laughing at that. “Why on earth should you have been? We’ve only met the once. Remember?”

  “Feels like more,” he said, walking around as if he were thinking of buying it. He went across to the back window, which looked out over the expanse of grass. “Nice view,” he said. “You don’t see that from the front. Nice bit of green.”

  I didn’t reply, and he turned round with a smile that was betrayed by his eyes. They flickered warily around the room as if he were an animal that feared being caught from behind. I always felt that my flat changed with each person who entered it. I would see it through their eyes. Or, rather, I would see it the way I imagined the person would see it. This flat would look too bare to Furth, lacking in comfort and decoration. There was a sofa and a rug on a varnished wooden floor. There was an old stereo in the corner and a pile of CDs stacked next to it. There were bookshelves full of books, and books on the floor. The walls were whitewashed and almost bare. Most pictures irritated me or, worse still, they stopped irritating me. I found it painful the way, after weeks or months, a picture that had unsettled me would become unnoticed, just another part of the decoration. When I stopped noticing a picture, I put it away or got rid of it until I had only two. There was a painting of two bottles on a table that my father had given me when I was twenty-one. It was by a hopeless old friend of his, a distant cousin. I could never walk past it without it stopping me. And there was a photograph of my father’s father and his brother and sister in front of a studio backcloth somewhere in what must have been the mid-1920s. My grandfather was wearing a sailor suit. All three of them had a strange suppressed smile on their faces, as if they were holding back a giggle at a joke out of our view, out of our hearing. It was a lovely photograph. One day, maybe in a hundred years’ time, someone would have that picture on the wall and they would be amused by it and they would wonder: Who were those children?

  I looked at Furth and saw that for him, of course, it meant nothing. Maybe there was just a touch of bafflement and scorn. Is this all? This is what Kit Quinn comes back to every night?

  He stood too close to me and looked into my eyes with an expression of concern that turned my stomach. “How are you now?” he said. “Everything all right with the face?”

  I stepped back before he could stroke my scar. “I didn’t think we’d ever meet again,” I said.

  “We felt bad about you, Kit,” Furth said, before adding hurriedly: “Not that it was anybody’s fault. He was like a mad animal. It took four of us to lay him out. You should have paid more attention when I told you he was a pervert.”

  “Is that what you’ve come round to say?”

  “No.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “Chat.”

  “What about?”

  He looked shifty. “We wanted some advice.”

  “What?” I was so startled by the wild unexpectedness of this that I had to make some effort not to giggle “You’re here about a case?”

  “That’s right. We wanted a chat. Have you got anything to drink?” he asked.

  “Like what?”

  “A beer or something.”

  I went and found a bottle of something Bavarian-look-ing in the back of the fridge and brought it to him.

  “Do you mind if I smoke?”

  I fetched him a saucer from the kitchen. He pushed the glass I had given him to one side and took a swig from the bottle. Then he lit the cigarette and drew on it several times. “I’m working on the Regent’s Canal murder.” he said finally. “You’ve heard about it?”

  I thought for a moment. “I saw something in the paper a few days ago. Body found by the canal?”

  “That’s the one. What did you think?”

  “Sounded sad.” I grimaced at him. “A little story at the bottom of a page. A young drifter. The only reason there was any story at all was that there were some nasty injuries. They didn’t even know her name, did they?”

  “Still don’t. But we’ve got a suspect.”

 
; I shook my head. “Well done. Now—”

  He held up his hand. “Ask me the name of the suspect.”

  “What?”

  “Go on.” He grinned widely and settled back in the chair with his arms folded, waiting.

  “OK,” I said obediently. “What is the name of the suspect?”

  “His name is Anthony Michael Doll.”

  I stared at him, taking it in. He looked back, cheerily triumphant. “There now, see why you were just the person for the job? Perfect, eh?”

  “Chance to get my own back,” I said. “I missed out on my chance to give him a kicking in the cell, so perhaps I can help to send him down for murder. Is that the idea?”

  “No, no,” he said, in a soothing tone. “My boss was interested in you doing some work for us. Don’t worry, you get your fee. And it might be fun. Ask your friend Seb Weller.”

  “Fun,” I said. “How could I resist? And we had such a good time before.”

  I went over to the fridge and pulled out an open bottle of white wine. I poured myself a full glass and held it up to the fading light. Then I took a mouthful and felt the icy cold liquid trickle down my throat. I stared out the window, at the red sun low in the turquoise sky. The rain had stopped and it was going to be a beautiful evening. I turned back to Furth. “Why do you think it’s Doll?”

  He looked surprised, and then pleased. “You see? You’re interested. He spends his days fishing on the canal. He’s there every bloody day. He came forward when we had our appeal for anybody who’d been in the area.” Furth looked sharply round at me. “Does it surprise you?”

  “How?”

  “A man like that, coming forward.”

  “Not necessarily,” I said. “If he’s innocent, he’s better off identifying himself. And if he’s guilty…” I stopped. I didn’t want to be sucked into a consultation based on Furth’s thumbnail sketch of a suspect.