The Red Room Page 30

  “All right,” I said. “Last question. What about Philippa Burton’s list? What about the phone calls to the hostel?”

  Oban drained his glass and placed it on the bar. “The first thing is that we don’t need to know. When a murderer dies before being tried, there are always details you never recover. It could be anything. Maybe… maybe…” he cast around “… maybe Bryony took a photograph of Lianne, and… and Philippa saw it in an exhibition and wanted to get a copy of it and…”

  “Bryony said she didn’t know either of them, and why would she want to phone the hostel? And why would that make Michael Doll kill them all?”

  “That was just off the top of my head,” Oban said, a little irritably. “Given time I could come up with something better.”

  “Doesn’t it worry you?”

  “What worries me is the half-dozen or so murders I’ve worked on where we never found anybody at all. I think of those every evening before I go to sleep. About once a year I dig out the old files and I wonder if we missed anything or if something new has been developed that we can try on it. This case is closed. That’s what makes me happy. I don’t mind a few gaps. Remember, reality is cleverer than we are. You can’t expect to understand it all.”

  I wanted to say more but I’d promised and, besides, a brass band was striking up inside.

  41

  Lottie and Megan were playing an intricate, unintelligible game on the grass. An hour earlier I had given a bright purple floppy dinosaur to Lottie and a red and white floppy snail to Megan, and both featured prominently in their game. I had given a green and blue floppy crab to Amy and she was rolling down the hill and trying to encourage the crab to roll with her. Behind them was London, looking pleasantly hazy in this hot afternoon from high on Primrose Hill.

  I was lying on a rug, propped up on an elbow. I took another sip of cold white wine.

  “I want to hear all about it,” Poppy said. “Of course, Seb has told me some…” She glanced over at Megan and then at Amy. “Megan, stop that! Stop it now or I’ll take it away from you. But Seb’s version is probably rather different from yours.” Her tone was dry.

  I lay back on the rug.

  “I don’t know if I can tell it coherently,” I said. “Especially on an afternoon like this, with two glasses of white wine already coursing round in my blood.”

  It was an all-female picnic. Three girls playing on the grass, while two mothers and one non-mother sat on the rug. The other mother was Ginny, an old friend of Poppy. The fathers were elsewhere. Ginny’s husband was playing cricket—somewhere in the Home Counties, she said—and Seb was in a television studio somewhere in front of us in central London.

  “What’s he talking about now?” I asked. “Still the Philippa Burton case?”

  “I think so. He’s plugging this book he’s nearly finished.”

  “About the case? That’s amazingly quick.”

  “He was writing it as it went.”

  “Is everything all right between you now?”

  “Not really.” She glanced over at the girls again. “But I can’t talk about it now.”

  “Of course. Later.”

  “About the book—actually, you’ll be really flattered. Guess why?”

  I took a sip of wine. “I don’t know,” I said. “Why?”

  “He partly got the idea from that bedtime story you told the girls when you came round for dinner a few months ago. Kept them awake for about a month. Something about a castle, wasn’t it?”

  “What’s the book called?”

  “The Red Room, I think. Could that be it?”

  “Yes, it could be. It was a nightmare I was having. That’s what it was about.”

  “Oh, I see. Seb must have talked to you about it.”

  I didn’t reply because for the moment I was drenched, smothered, plunged in self-pity. I had been slashed in the face and had a nightmare that had haunted me. And now I felt as if I had been mugged and my nightmare, my own personal private nightmare, had been stolen from me. I drained my glass and then I thought, So fucking what? Who cares?

  Scattered around the blanket were sandwiches, fruit, fizzy drinks and some things I’d grabbed during a swoop on a supermarket: plastic tubs of hummus and taramasalata, pita bread, olives, breadsticks, miniature pork pies, baby carrots, chopped cauliflower. I prodded the tip of a baby carrot into some pink-colored dip and nibbled it experimentally.

  I felt numb—almost pleasantly so—as I lay and nibbled, sipped, chatted, but I could see that the attention of the other two women was always incomplete. Whether they were telling me something urgent, or crunching on a floret of cauliflower, they would always be glancing around or looking over my shoulder in search of the little girls. At one point I murmured something intended to be reassuring about how they were only a few yards away, and Ginny immediately responded with a story of a friend of a friend who had left a three-year-old unattended for just two or three minutes in a garden with a little pond that was hardly more than an inch deep. Well, you can imagine the rest. Ginny was a comfy-looking dark-haired woman with a lovely laugh. She was such a motherly mother, I wondered who she was before having Lottie. Someone like me, probably, thinking she was all right as she was.

  I lay back and closed my eyes. Close to my ear, Poppy shouted for the girls to come and have their lunch right now and I mean right now. There was a scramble of small bodies and screams because someone had arrived at the blanket without waiting for someone else and I suddenly felt a shock of cold on my jeans. I sat up with a yell and saw the wine bottle had been tipped over on to me by Megan as she clambered across toward the chicken drumsticks. When she saw what she had done, her howls drowned even those of her little sister. Poppy took her in her arms.

  “That’s absolutely all right, Megan, my darling. Don’t cry. It doesn’t matter at all, does it? Kit, could you tell Megan that it doesn’t matter?”

  “It doesn’t matter, Megan,” I said obediently.

  “I’m sorry, Kit,” Poppy said, “but Megan gets ridiculously upset by these things.”

  By this time Megan seemed already to have recovered her spirits and was gnawing at a piece of chicken.

  “Anyway,” said Ginny cheerfully, “white wine doesn’t stain. In fact, it’s what you use for getting red wine stains out, isn’t it?”

  “It’s just a bit wet,” I said, dabbing at it with a sheet of kitchen roll. I felt that it was me who should be saying it didn’t matter, rather than them.

  “God,” laughed Poppy, “you should be grateful it’s just wine. You couldn’t begin to imagine the stains I’ve had on my clothes.”

  I smiled, with only a small hint of strain, and filled my glass again.

  “You know,” said Ginny, “I think lots of mothers have been particularly affected by your murders.”

  “Hardly mine,” I objected.

  “That poor little girl whose mother was snatched away while she was playing in the playground. I’ve hardly let Lottie out of my sight ever since it happened. I know it’s irrational.”

  I murmured assent.

  “Didn’t it get you down terribly, Kit? Didn’t you find it unbearable?”

  I placed my wineglass on the rug, then thought better of it and picked it up again. “I don’t know if that’s the right word,” I said. “It made me feel sad.”

  “Speaking for myself, I feel safer, anyway, now that the person who did it isn’t around anymore. I saw the detective on telly. He was being so nice about you.”

  I looked at the little girls. Amy had reached the pudding course. She was supposedly eating a chocolate muffin but this involved so much mashing up of the muffin, so much smearing of it over her face and such a vast spillage of crumbs onto the blanket that it was difficult to believe any of it had ended up in her mouth.

  “It wasn’t as satisfying as you might think,” I said. “This man—he was called Michael Doll—he was just found dead—”

  “Killed by vigilantes,” Poppy interrupted.
<
br />   “Obviously I wouldn’t defend something like that,” said Ginny. “But I must admit when I read about it, my first thought was, Great.” She pulled Lottie close to her and hugged her. “It may be rough justice, but there’s a man who won’t do harm again.”

  “Or good,” I added.

  “But you must know all about him,” Poppy said, in an encouraging tone, sensing my distress.

  “I’d met him.”

  “Ugh,” said Ginny. “Creepy. What was he like?”

  “He was creepy,” I said. “He was very disturbed, he was repulsive in many ways, a bit pathetic.”

  “But what’s it like having known somebody who’s done these terrible things?” Poppy asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “You should ask Seb. But I didn’t think he had done the murders. And he died before things were properly sorted out.”

  “But there was solid evidence. The police said so.”

  “That’s right. There was solid evidence. Lots of evidence. Unfortunately it doesn’t really fit together very well. But you don’t want to hear about that.”

  I looked at them. They really didn’t want to hear about it. The girls, who had wandered away, had come back now and were demanding attention. The two mothers were tied to their children as if by steel wires, their faces jerking round ceaselessly. Had they fallen over? Had they run away? Were they being too noisy? Were they being too quiet? Had they been murdered? I thought of little Emily in the playground, digging in the sandpit while her mother was seized and taken away and beaten to death. I created the scenario in my mind as I had so many hundreds of times before and played through it with Michael Doll in the role of the psychopathic killer. That was it. I jumped to my feet.

  “Where are you going?” asked Poppy. “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “Maybe I have. Sorry. Got to rush. Something…”

  “Can I look at the sun?” said Megan.

  “No,” cried Poppy. “You must never ever ever look at the sun.”

  “Why not?” said Megan.

  “It’ll burn your eyes.”

  “If I close my eyes.” She closed her eyes. “Is it all right if I close my eyes?”

  “I suppose so. But you can’t see anything.”

  “It’s not dark,” said Megan. “It’s red. Where’s the red from?”

  “I don’t know,” said Poppy. “I suppose it’s the blood in your eyelids.”

  “Blood?” said Megan. “Yippee. I’m looking at my blood. Let’s all look at our blood.”

  And the little girls staggered blindly around on the sunny green hillside looking at their blood while I ran from them as if I was being pursued.

  42

  I was breathless when I arrived back at my flat, and my head buzzed with the white wine and the sun, but I immediately picked up the phone and called Oban. He was out somewhere. I could hear traffic, people talking. “Are you busy?” I asked.

  “It’s the weekend, Kit,” he said. “What is it? Want to take me to the opera?”

  “I wanted to alert you that I’m going to see the little girl, Emily Burton.”

  “What?”

  “You know, Philippa Burton’s daughter.”

  “I know who she fucking is. That… that…” He seemed to be gasping for breath. “That is such a bad idea.”

  “There’s just one question I’ve got to ask.”

  “Kit, Kit,” he said soothingly, as if he were trying to talk me off a window-ledge, “there’s always one more question. Think of what you’re doing. You’ll stir up that poor family all over again. You’ll drive yourself crazy. You’ll drive me crazy. Just leave it.”

  “I wanted to ask if you thought a police officer should come along with me.”

  “No, definitely not. The case is closed. This is a free country. You can call on anybody you like but it’s nothing to do with us. Honestly, Kit, I like you but you need something, I don’t know what it is—”

  And the line went dead. I don’t know whether Oban had walked into a tunnel or just given up in despair. A tape-recorder. That was what I needed. I had one somewhere. A few minutes’ rummaging produced a tatty little cassette player from the bottom of a cupboard and then, in a drawer of old plugs, rubber bands, pens without caps and a huge daisy chain of paper-clips, I found a dusty cassette tape, a party tape from when I was at college. That would do. I phoned the house. A woman answered.

  “Hello. Is that Pam Vere?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Kit Quinn. Do you remember? I’m the—”

  “Yes. I remember.”

  “I wondered if I could come and spend a few minutes with Emily.”

  “She’s not here at the moment.”

  “Could I come later?”

  “But I thought it was over.”

  “I just want to dot some Is, cross some Ts. And I wanted to see how Emily is.”

  “She seems to be all right. She’s happy with friends. And an au pair has started.”

  “Can I come? I’ll be five minutes.”

  “I don’t want to be difficult, but is it really necessary?”

  “I’d be very grateful,” I said firmly, unrelentingly.

  There was a pause. “She’ll be back at just past four. Maybe you could talk to her before she has tea.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  __________

  It was more formal than before. I had arrived before Emily and I found a spot in the kitchen where I could plug in my tape-recorder. Neurotically I tested it a couple of times, saying one-two, one-two into it and playing it back. The second time I suddenly wasn’t sure whether it was the first one-two or the second, so I did it again saying A-B-C-D, for want of anything better.

  Emily burst into the room like a little chattering gremlin in paint-spattered red dungarees, a blond au pair running to keep up with her. She looked so happy. Suddenly I pictured her in five years’ time, with no surviving memory of her mother, nothing that could be disentangled from snapshots and half made-up stories told to her about Philippa by others. She ran forward and hugged her grandmother’s knees. When she saw me, she fell silent. I walked over and knelt down beside her.

  “Remember me?” I said. She shook her head solemnly and looked away. “I’ve got something to show you.”

  She had just been getting ready to be shy but in her interest she forgot. She gave me her hand and we walked over to the kitchen table and my tape-recorder. Pam sat opposite us, watchful.

  “Look at this,” I said.

  “What?” she said.

  I pressed the “record” button.

  “Say something.”

  “Don’t want to say something.”

  “What do you do at play-school?”

  “I do anything,” she said firmly.

  I switched it off, rewound and played the tape back. Her mouth fell open in amazement.

  “Do it again,” she said.

  “All right.” I pressed the “record” button. I sat very close to her. I could smell soap and paint.

  “Well,” I said, “so what shall we talk about?”

  Emily crinkled her nose and giggled. “Dunno,” she said. “That’s your mark,” she said, pointing at my face.

  “That’s right,” I said. “See? You remember.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Not so much,” I said. “It’s got better.”

  “Can I feel it?”

  “All right.”

  I leaned forward and Emily stretched out a stubby forefinger. She traced a stinging, itching progress from near my ear, down my cheek to the edge of my jaw. No pain now.

  “When we talked before,” I said, “you were playing with your friend and we talked about the playground. You were playing in the playground when your mummy went away. Do you remember that?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “Lots of people talked to you about that, didn’t they?” I said.

  “Pleecemen,” she said.

  “That’s right,�
�� I said. “And those policemen and -women, they asked you if you had seen your mummy go away with somebody and you said you hadn’t.”

  Emily was scratching on the table. I could feel I was losing her. The tiny attention span of a nearly-four-year-old was almost at an end. I looked at the tape-recorder. The spools were rotating. I had come here with just one shot in my gun. I would fire it, and if nothing came of it, that really would be it. I would say goodbye politely, go home and return to those bits of my life I had neglected for too long. I put out my hand and enfolded Emily’s own tiny, warm, sticky hand. I gave a little squeeze to attract her attention. She looked at me.

  “I don’t want to ask you about that, Emily. I want to ask you about something different. Could you tell me about the nice woman?”

  “What?” Emily said.

  “What are you…?” Pam said.

  “Sssh,” I said abruptly, holding up my hand. “Emily, what did she give you?”

  “Nuffing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “A lolly.”

  “That’s nice,” I said. I could feel the thump of my heart all over my body, even in my head. “What did she do? Did she push you on the swing?”

  “A bit. She took me to the sand.”

  I tried to picture the playground. Yes, of course. The sandpit was the furthest point from the railings where Philippa had been standing, watching her daughter.

  “That’s fun,” I said. “And then she went away. She left you there?”

  “Dunno.”

  “What did the lady look like?”

  “I’m bo-ored,” Emily said loudly.

  “Was she big?”

  “Bo-or-or-ored.”

  “That’s lovely, Emily,” I said. “Thank you very much.” I gave her a hug. She wrestled herself free and ran to the door and out into the garden. I switched off the tape-machine. I looked over at Pam. She seemed lost in distressing thought.

  “But…” she said. “It was that man. What was she…?”

  I had been intending just to get up and leave, but I owed her something.

  “I should have thought of it ages ago,” I said. “You can abduct a woman on a dark night, in a lonely place, without too much fuss. You can do it in a crowded place as well, though it takes a bit more care. But you can’t trick a mother into leaving her child alone, not even in a playground, not even for a single minute. There’d have to be somebody to look after the child. That’s what I suddenly thought. And I guessed it would have to be a woman. And Emily always said her mother was coming back, didn’t she?” Pam nodded, staring at me. “Because that’s probably the last thing Philippa said to her. She would have said something like, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be back soon,’ and Emily’s still waiting.”