The Red Room Read online

  “I know,” I said. “I saw it.” It felt very quiet in the kitchen, as if the world outside had stopped.

  “We got dragged into the story as well,” she said, with a long sigh. “It doesn’t matter anyway, does it? It’s over. The police said it’s over, that I’m safe. That’s what you said as well. I’d feel better eventually. But I’m so tired. I’m so tired I could sleep for a hundred years.”

  There was a soft click behind us and a hush fell on the room. Every object seemed clear and sharp: the pot plant on the window-sill, the cups hanging from hooks, the tiny web on the light bulb, the sun glinting off the copper pans, making geometric patterns on the wall, my hands, folded peacefully on my lap. All that I could hear was myself, breathing calmly, and the faint tick of my watch. It was twenty-two minutes past ten. Bryony sat very still.

  At last I turned around. Gabriel stood framed in the doorway. He closed the door with a second soft click and looked at us; from Bryony to me, and back again. Nobody said anything. The sun shone through the window.

  I opened my mouth to speak then closed it again. What was the use? I had nothing more to say. I put up a finger and traced my scar, from hairline to jaw. It comforted me, somehow. It reminded me of who I was.

  “I forgot my bag,” said Gabriel.

  “I’d better go,” I said. But I didn’t get up.

  “She was just passing,” said Bryony at last, in her new flat voice.

  Gabriel nodded.

  “I want to go to bed,” she muttered, and stood up unsteadily. “I’m ill.”

  “It was just a social call,” I said. “We were talking about things. You know.”

  “What things?” He looked across at his wife.

  “She was talking about it all,” Bryony said. “She mentioned a girl. What was her name?”

  “Daisy,” I said. “Daisy Gill.”

  “She killed herself. And she was a friend of Lianne’s. And she worked at the Sugarhouse.”

  “This is so stupid,” Gabriel said wearily. “This was all meant to be over. What do the police say about this?”

  “It’s just her,” said Bryony, almost inaudibly. “She’s alone.”

  He came over to me. “What did you want?” he asked. He bent down and touched my shoulder, softly at first, then he gripped my shirt and pulled me to my feet.

  “Gabe!” Bryony exclaimed.

  I looked into his exhausted face, his bloodshot eyes. Behind him I saw Bryony’s wan face. Beyond her, a closed door. There was no escape.

  “Are you going to kill everybody in the world?” I said.

  His hands were warm when he put them around my neck. I let myself remember my mother’s face in the photograph I carried with me wherever I went, as if she could protect me. The way she smiled and the sunlight stroked her pale skin. My mother, sitting on the grass. Gabriel’s face was very close to me now, like a lover’s, and I heard him whispering, “We didn’t want this.” His face was set in a grimace of horror. His eyes were half closed, as if he couldn’t bear to see what he was doing. I lashed out at him, but his body was solid and unyielding, like a grim tower. So I made myself go slack, and he began to squeeze. Against every instinct in me, I let my knees buckle slightly. The world was red and black and pain, and the sound of someone crying. And then, with my body as limp as I could make it, as if I was about to go under, I brought my right hand up and fast and as hard as I could and I opened my fingers into a V and jabbed into the direction of his eyes. I felt a soft wetness, and I heard a yelp. His fingers loosened for an instant then tightened once more. I tore my hand down his cheek, feeling the rip of skin under my nails, then hooked them into his screaming mouth and yanked back as hard as I could. His roar filled my ears; pain was pumping round my head and all that I could see was red. Blood filled my vision. I jabbed again and again, hitting something soft, feeling the stickiness of his blood, the wet of his saliva, the jelly of his eyes.

  “Bryony. Finish it now, for fuck’s sake! Bryony!”

  Something black arced through the red fog in front of me. I closed my eyes at last, but there was a loud crack, like a gun going off a few inches from me, and his fingers fell from my throat. I toppled onto the floor, feeling the wood of the boards splintering into my cheek. Another noise and I could just make out a black tripod, coming down once more. Then Gabriel fell on top of me. His body covered mine and his blood ran down my face and his gasps were in my ears, and her screams. I pushed him off, and stood up although the world was still howling around me, and the floor tipped dangerously beneath my feet. Gabriel was lying in his own blood with his eyes closed. There was a violent gash in his head, his face was ripped and one eye was entirely red. But his chest moved up and down with his breathing. I took the tripod off Bryony and, half leaning on her for support, led her to a chair, pushing her down into it.

  “I’m not a bad person,” she sobbed at me. “I’m not a bad person. I’m good. Good. I’m a good person. This was all just a mistake. A horrible mistake.”

  46

  The visitors’ room at Salton Hill remand center was like a squalid cafeteria in a very bad area. There was even a hatchway to one side where a woman who looked as if she might be an inmate filled paper cups with tea from a large metal urn or poured industrial-looking orange squash. There were plastic plates of biscuits with circles of jam in the middle. Children were running around, there was shouting, the squeak of chair legs on the floor, cigarette smoke, and the reek of poverty everywhere.

  In men’s prisons there are all sorts: thugs, psychos, rapists, tricksters, professional crooks, minor drug-dealers. But in a women’s prison the inmates mostly look mad, sad, bereft. There aren’t any female bank robbers. There aren’t any rapists. There aren’t any villains who regard a year inside as a form of sabbatical. There are desperate, confused people who were caught shoplifting because they had no money, or women who heard voices and put a pillow over their baby’s face. They were scattered around the tables, smoking, always smoking, and talking to their baffled, shy mums and dads, boyfriends, fidgeting children.

  I was told by the woman who checked my pass at the door that Bryony was on her way, so I bought two teas and a miniature packet of biscuits, and took two small paper packets of sugar with one of those little plastic spatulas, as if a plastic spoon would have been too much of a luxury. I placed them all on a cardboard tray. Nothing that could be used as a weapon or, since this was a women’s prison, for self-mutilation.

  I sat at my designated table, number twenty-four, and took a sip of my tea, which was so hot that it burned my upper lip. And before I had time to sit back and gather my thoughts, there she was. She was in her own clothes, of course, a brown round-necked sweater, navy blue trousers, tennis shoes on bare feet. I saw her silver ankle chain, still there; her wedding ring had been pulled off, though. There was just a faint white mark where it had been. Her blazing hair was pulled back tightly and tied behind. But it was no good. She wore no makeup, which made me realize how carefully made up she had been before, even when lying on the sofa, the morning after the attack. There were new lines around her eyes and a pallor that made her look as if she had emerged from a cave. She sat down without a word.

  “I got you tea,” I said, lifting a cup across to her side of the table.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  She leaned across for the two packets of sugar. She tore the corner off each in turn and poured the sugar into the tea, watching it. Then she stirred the tea jerkily. As she did so I saw the bandages around her wrists. “I heard about that,” I said.

  She looked down. “I did it wrong,” she said. “Someone told me. People cut across because they’ve seen it done that way on TV. But it heals too quickly. I should have cut along the arm. Lengthways. Lengthwise. Whatever. You’ve come here to thank me, I guess.”

  I was startled by the abrupt change of subject. “I came because Oban said you wanted to see me. But I suppose I do want to thank you. I was going to die. You saved my life.”

&nbs
p; “That’ll count for something, don’t you think? That I saved your life.”

  “I think they’ll take it into consideration,” I said.

  “I’ve co-operated,” she said. “I’ve told them everything. Did you bring the cigarettes?”

  I reached into my jacket pocket and took out four packets. I slid them across the table, looking round. “Is this all right?” I asked.

  “So long as they’ve still got the wrapping on it’s all right. They worry about things being smuggled.” She took a cigarette from a packet of her own and lit it. “I’d got down to about one cigarette a week. Then suddenly, in here, I thought, Why not? There’s not much else to do.”

  “I can imagine.”

  She looked round and smiled. “Bit of a change,” she said. “You wouldn’t think of me in a place like this, would you?”

  I looked at this woman, who had killed Lianne and Philippa and Michael Doll, and then, like her, I looked at those other pathetic women who had had breakdowns, or failed to pay their bills and panicked and cracked up.

  “I met Gabe at college. Everybody loved him. I’d only had two boyfriends before him. I fell for him completely. I thought I was the luckiest girl in the world. Ironic, isn’t it? If I hadn’t been the girl who nabbed Gabe Teale, I wouldn’t be sitting here.”

  “I suppose you could say that about anything,” I said. “That’s what life is, isn’t it? One thing leading on to another.”

  “I find that rather hard to live with. I feel I found myself in this situation. I feel I’m a good person. And I loved Gabe and I was in his power and then I made one decision, I mean I was put in a situation, and then I was put in another situation, and then I couldn’t take it anymore. I finally fought back. That was with you. And now I’m here.”

  She paused, waiting for some kind of an answer, but disgust clogged my throat and I couldn’t speak, so she continued. “You know the funniest thing? When I met you, well, not in the hospital but when you came to the house, I thought you were the sort of person I’d like for a friend. We’d go for lunch and talk about things.”

  I was finding it difficult to breathe. I had to say something. It took an effort to maintain an even tone. “You didn’t feel that with Lianne?” I said. “Or with Philippa? That they could have been your friends, that they were humans, like you, with hopes and fears, just like you? With futures?”

  She stubbed out her cigarette in a little tin-foil ashtray on the table. Nothing you could pick up and hit someone with. “I wanted to see you because you were the only person I could think of to talk to. Who wouldn’t judge me. I thought you would understand. How’s Gabe, by the way? Have you seen him?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m under strict instructions not to talk about Gabe with you. There are legal reasons, apparently. He’s better, though. Physically, I mean.”

  “Good,” she said. “Where was I? Yes, about you. You know about these things, don’t you? I’ve been working it all out. I saved your life. That was a mitigating circumstance, don’t you think?”

  “It might be,” I said, “but maybe I’m biased.”

  “I think it’s unfair that we’re both being treated as murderers, as if we are both equally to blame for what happened. You’re a woman, you’re an expert, I had hoped you could understand that these were his murders. In a way, I was under his control. I thought people might understand that. If you look at it one way, I’m one of his victims as well. I finally rebelled against that when I saved you. I returned to myself, if you like. It’s as if it wasn’t me until I saved you.”

  With that, she looked me full in the eyes for the first time. Was she saying that I owed her something? Her life for mine?

  “What happened?” I said. “With Daisy.”

  “Nothing,” she said. “She killed herself. You know that.”

  “She was involved with your husband.”

  “I don’t know that much. The fact is, young girls have always been throwing themselves at Gabe. It’s not something I’m going to defend. I’m not going to pretend I like it. From the sound of it she was pretty unstable. She didn’t report it to the police, did she?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then. It’s all nonsense.”

  “She was fourteen years old, Bryony. Fourteen.”

  “As I say, I don’t know anything about that. But the fact is that this other girl, this Lianne, came round and she was hysterical. She had completely the wrong idea about Daisy. She was probably on something.”

  “I saw her autopsy report,” I said. “No traces of drugs were found in her bloodstream.”

  “I was just saying that she was out of control. She started flailing around. I came in in the middle; I hardly knew what was going on. One moment she was shouting and lashing out at Gabe and me, and the next moment she had fallen over and she must have banged her head. It was like this nightmare. I didn’t know what was going on. All I know is that she was dead and I panicked. We tried to revive her, you know.”

  “You panicked,” I said. “So you and Gabe stabbed her dead body lots of times. Around the breasts and abdomen. And then you dumped the body by the canal. That might have been your idea. You knew it after your long walks around the area.”

  “No,” she said dreamily. “No, it was Gabe’s idea. All Gabe. He was hysterical. He said we had to make it another sort of murder, as if it was done by different sorts of people from us. ‘Us,’ that’s what he said. He said we were in it together. He said that it could have ruined everything and that now we would be safe. He said that he wouldn’t let me go.”

  “But you weren’t safe, were you?”

  “No, we weren’t. This woman…”

  “Philippa Burton. She had a name, you know.”

  “Yes, she’d got our address from the other girl, from Lianne. She came to see us looking for Lianne. She knew she’d been there.”

  “Why?”

  “Lianne had told her about Gabe. That’s what she said.”

  “No, I mean why was she looking for Lianne?”

  “What does that matter? Gabe was frantic. He couldn’t think what to do. I’m trying to explain why it all looks so bad as a whole, but when you break it down into bits, there’s an… an explanation for it.”

  “Were you going to say an innocent explanation?”

  Bryony paused. She was on her third cigarette now. “I was going to, but it sounded callous. I don’t want you to think that about me, Kit. I don’t mind what most people think, but I want you to understand me.”

  “So what happened with Philippa?”

  “Gabe said he had an idea. He was going to talk to her, talk sense into her. We arranged to meet her.”

  “On Hampstead Heath.”

  “That’s right. I didn’t know what was going to happen. He told her that he wanted to talk to her, make up a story that would satisfy her. I stayed and looked after the little girl. I had no idea what he was going to do. I’m not sure if he did. He said later that he panicked and attacked her.”

  “And battered her body with a hammer and dumped it on the other side of the heath. So he presumably had the hammer with him.”

  “Presumably,” said Bryony. “That’s damning against Gabe, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is. And you were with Emily, waiting for her mother to come back?”

  “After a while I got scared. Nobody came. So I ran away. There were lots of people around, she was going to be all right. But that’s what I feel most guilty about, leaving a little girl alone like that.”

  “I can see that,” I said. “And it came as a terrible shock when you came back and Gabe told you what had happened.”

  “He wasn’t there. He didn’t come back for a whole day. He told me he was thinking of killing himself.”

  “And he had to clean the car as well.”

  “I never even thought about that. All I could do was shut it out. I was in purgatory. I wanted to shout it out. I wanted to tell everything. It feels better just telling you. I’ve so
wanted to tell the whole truth.”

  “Then there was Michael Doll. He had bad luck as well, didn’t he? As well as you, I mean. The place you chose to dump Lianne’s body was the place where Mickey Doll sat all day fishing. You saw that in the papers.”

  “That’s right.”

  “What did he have on you? Did he see you?”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t know. Gabe did it. He didn’t see anything.”

  “Did Gabe drop something that Doll found?”

  “No.”

  “So what was it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t think he knew anything. But Gabe became obsessed with the idea that this man had been there, that he might know something. He said that he was the only way we could possibly be caught.”

  “So you went down to see him at the canal. You can’t deny being present that time.”

  “No, I was there. I admit it. By then I would have done anything to help Gabe, to make it all go away.”

  “What was the plan? To knock him on the head and push him into the water?”

  She started to cry. I was prepared for this. I passed a couple of tissues across the table. She wiped her eyes and blew her nose.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “But you were caught,” I said. “You were brilliant. Your description once you had recovered from your trauma was a particularly nice touch. That mysterious criminal who was just different enough from the other descriptions to make them all seem unreliable. What a performance.”