The Red Room Page 6

  “Poor.”

  “That’s it? That’s your profile of him? Poor? This is the man who’s wrecked your face. Remember?”

  I sighed. “OK. Poor, sad, uneducated, disturbed, self-pitying, self-righteous, vicious, lonely, damaged, scared.”

  Furth grinned. “And you’ve only had the starter. Now it’s time for the main course.”

  6

  Back at the police station, I splashed cold water over my face and wiped it dry on a thin paper towel from the dispenser, scrubbing off the last traces of lipstick. I brushed my hair and tied it back more tightly, no loose strands. I took off my earrings and dropped them into the side pocket of my shoulder-bag. I felt as if something soft and almost indefinable was drifting over my face, like cobwebs or a few thin strands of hair. The air was warm and thick and stagnant. Second-hand. I was sucking in air that other people had just expelled from their lungs. I caught a glimpse of myself in the spotted mirror. I looked stern and pale. And plain—but plain was good right now.

  Furth was waiting for me, standing among all the packing cases. He had a tiny mobile pressed against his ear, half hidden under his shiny hair, but he slid it into his breast pocket as soon as he saw me. “Bloody phones don’t work here anymore,” he said. “Half the computers have already gone. Nothing to sit on in half the rooms. No fucking toilet rolls in half the cubicles.” Then he jerked his chiseled jaw. “Upstairs,” he said.

  I followed him into a small square room, with a dead rubber plant drooping in one corner and a window that was painted shut. In the corner, a broken chair lay on its side. On the table in the center of the room there was a large tape-recorder, and a box of tapes with small neat writing on the labels. Furth sat down, and I sat opposite him. Our knees were almost touching under the table and I drew back a little, put my hands on the wooden armrests of my chair.

  “Ready?” he asked, lifting a hand. “We’ve wound it forward to the spot you’ll be most interested in.”

  I nodded and he jabbed the “play” button with his forefinger.

  I didn’t recognize the voice at first. It was higher, for a start. And the pace was completely different—sometimes very fast, so that I could barely make out what was being said, and then, abruptly, it would slow down and each syllable would be slurred. For a few seconds I almost thought there was something wrong with the machine, the batteries running down—except it was plugged into a wall socket and when I leaned over, I could see the spools running evenly.

  “I go down there. At nights I go down there when I can’t sleep and I often can’t sleep, Dolly, thinking about…”

  I pushed the “stop” button. “Dolly?”

  Furth gave a modest cough. “That’s the name Colette—WPC Dawes—chose for herself. Delores—Dolly for short. See? He’s Doll, and she’s Dolly. That’s how she struck up a conversation at first. You know—‘What a coincidence,’ she said, all surprised, blinking her long lashes, ‘my name’s Doll too!’ Clever, eh?”

  “I’m awestruck.”

  He laughed. “You’re a hard woman to please, Kit Quinn. Do you want to continue?”

  “Go on then.”

  “… the women. You know.”

  “Go on, Michael,” said the woman. “Go on.”

  “I got to where it happened. When no one else is there and it’s all dark and I stand where she was standing.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes, Dolly. Is this right?”

  “You know it is.”

  “I go there and I imagine—I imagine it all happening again, just like then. This girl walking up the path and she’s quite pretty, right? She’s young, seventeen maybe, and she’s got long hair. I like hair that’s long. Like your hair, Dolly, when you let it down. And I imagine for a bit I just follow her, a few steps behind. She knows I’m there, right, but she doesn’t look round. I can see she knows. Her neck’s gone all stiff, right, and she walks a bit faster. She’s scared. She’s all scared of me. I feel tall and strong. You know. Manly. Can’t mess with me. She walks a bit faster and I walk a bit faster. I get closer.”

  There was a pause, just silence and breathing and an ambient hiss. WPC Colette Dawes said again: “Go on.” Quite sharply this time, as if she was his teacher.

  “I get closer,” he repeated. His voice had slowed right down. “She turns round and as she turns round I see her mouth wide open and her eyes wide open and she looks just like a fish, like one of my fish before I throw it back in the dirty water. Like a fish under my thumb.”

  I listened to the sound of Michael Doll laughing. A nervous, liquid laugh. At least the woman didn’t join in.

  Silence. Furth and I sat and listened to the sound of the tape turning. I looked at the other tapes in the box. There were three more, labeled and dated. Doll spoke again: “Does that make me a bad man? What I’ve just said, does that mean I’m bad, Dolly?”

  “Did you hate her, Michael?”

  “Do I hate her?” he asked, fretfully. I made a mental note of the jumbled tenses. I wished I had a pad of paper in front of me, that I was making pedantic little notes and concentrating on that. “No, not hate. I love her, of course. I love her. Love. Love.”

  Furth leaned over and turned off the tape, then he sat back and crossed his arms.

  “Well?”

  I pushed my chair back and stood up. The room felt too small. I crossed over and looked out of the window at the wall opposite, the thin trickle of water coming from the leaking gutter. If I craned my head, I could almost see a line of heaving gray sky.

  “I’d like to talk to WPC Dawes.”

  “Come on, Kit, for Chrissakes. This isn’t a big deal. We just want your professional opinion, based on his background, the impression he made on you, his taped confession. What kind of man Doll is in your considered opinion, blah blah, you know the kind of thing. You’ve heard him. He did it. He as good as confessed he killed the girl and now he’s getting off on it, wanking in his squalid bedsit night after night, looking at his dirty pictures and thinking about it. He’s a pervert, a murderer. Not someone you want to be anywhere near. You of all people know that. You know what he’s capable of. Just write a few paragraphs on what you thought of him.”

  “Just a word with Colette Dawes. Then I’ll write up your report. All right?”

  He frowned. He sighed heavily. He jammed his hands in his pockets. “I’ll see what I can do,” he said.

  __________

  A woman carrying a clipboard and a bundle of envelopes came through the door. I could see immediately how Doll would have trusted her. She had yellow hair and a smooth, softly contoured face that seemed to have no edges to it, no bones. She had pale skin with a permanent blush about it. And she looked very young. We shook hands.

  “Did Furth tell you about me?”

  “Not really,” she said. “You’re a doctor or something.”

  “Yes. Furth wanted some advice about Michael Doll. I’ve seen the file. I’ve listened to a bit of the tape.”

  She lifted her bundle, holding it with both arms against her chest, like a shield. “Yes?”

  “I wanted a quick word.”

  “Yes. DI Furth said. I haven’t got much time. I’m emptying filing cabinets.”

  “Fifteen minutes. No more. Shall we go for a walk?”

  She looked wary but pushed her bundle across the desk and murmured something I couldn’t make out to the duty officer. We went in silent single file down the stairs, and walked outside. Stretton Green police station is on a quiet back-street but a minute’s walk brought us to Stretton Green Road. There is a health-food shop with a few tables that serves coffee during the day and we sat in the corner. I walked across and ordered two black coffees from a young woman who was sitting reading the paper by the till.

  “Ten,” I said, as the woman left us with our mugs.

  “What?” said WPC Dawes.

  “Piercings,” I said. “Three in one ear, four in the other, two in the nose and one through her bottom lip. And who knows what els
e?”

  She took a sip from her coffee but didn’t reply.

  “Colette. Is it all right if I call you Colette?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, Colette, it was remarkable what you got out of Doll,” I said. She gave a shrug. “Was it difficult?” Another shrug. “Where did the conversations take place?”

  “Different places.”

  “I mean the one in which he describes the murder in detail.”

  “We were in his flat.”

  “Did you like him?”

  She looked up sharply and then looked away. Crimson patches had appeared through her pale skin. “Course not.”

  “Or did you feel some sympathy?”

  She shook her head. “No, no, Doctor…”

  “Kit.”

  “Kit. Look.” She was angry, or making herself get angry. “Didn’t you see the pathologist’s report?” she continued.

  “No, that’s not my remit. I’m just concerned with Michael Doll.”

  “He’s a dangerous man, you don’t know.”

  “Oh, yes, I do.”

  “What do you want, then? Do you want to wait until there’s another murder and maybe we can catch him then? Or maybe the next victim will fight back and catch him for us—is that what you’re waiting for?”

  I sat back in my chair. I didn’t reply and she continued.

  “This is a piece of good old-fashioned police work. Furth and the others spent days and nights going through everybody who was in the area. It was Furth who came up with the material on Doll. Didn’t he tell you that?”

  “No.”

  “I got friendly with him, got him to talk. That wasn’t a nice thing to do. So I don’t know what you’re saying.”

  I took a slow sip of my coffee, carefully not finishing it off. I didn’t want her to go yet. “I just want to get any information about Michael Doll that I can. All right?”

  She gave the smallest hint of a nod in reply.

  “So, Colette, what was your plan once you got to know him?”

  “I just wanted to get him to talk.”

  “About the murder?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But that’s hard, isn’t it? So could you tell me about your conversations?”

  A strand of hair had slipped down her forehead and she pushed it up. It slipped again and she made an effort to fasten it. “Doll hasn’t exactly got a lot of friends. I think he was desperate for somebody to talk to.”

  “Or desperate for a friend.”

  “Same thing.”

  “Yes,” I said. “How long have you known him?”

  “Not long. Not more than a couple of weeks.”

  “I understand that there were three or four taped conversations and that the one I heard came from the last of them. Is that right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What were the first ones like?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did he talk about the murder?”

  “No.”

  “Did you raise the subject?”

  “A bit.”

  “Did he talk about it straight away?”

  “I had to get his trust.”

  “You mean he had to trust you before he told you that he’d murdered someone?”

  “He didn’t exactly confess, did he? That’s why they brought you in.”

  I put both my elbows on the table, which brought my face close to Colette’s. “You know, I’ve talked to lots of people with terrible problems, who’ve done terrible things, and the barrier at the beginning is to get them to feel that their interests will be served by being honest with you, by telling you everything. How did you do it?”

  “Have you got a cigarette?” she asked.

  “As it happens,” I said, and took out of my bag the packet I’d brought along for Doll.

  “I encouraged him to talk freely,” she said. “I said I wanted to know his secrets.”

  “You said you wanted to know his secrets and he told you he had committed murder.”

  “It wasn’t like that. I was talking to him about his fantasies.”

  “This wasn’t in the pub, I take it. These conversations were back at his flat.”

  “Yes.”

  “You steered the conversation towards areas of sex and violence.”

  She took a drag of the cigarette. “I encouraged him to talk. The way people do. The way you do.”

  “Was it a sort of quid pro quo? Did you provide him with fantasies and invite him to respond with his own?”

  “I tried to get him to talk. I needed to show him that I wouldn’t be shocked by anything he would tell me.”

  “But the first couple of big conversations you had with Doll didn’t produce anything?”

  “Not really.”

  “Obviously Furth and the rest listened to the tapes.”

  “Obviously.”

  “And they said they weren’t producing anything.”

  “They weren’t producing anything.”

  “And they said, ‘Go back and get something better.’”

  “Not exactly.”

  “And they said try harder.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I imagine they said something like ‘Why should Doll tell you anything? You’ve got to encourage him a bit more.’”

  “I don’t know what you mean. I just got him to talk.”

  “Absolutely. What I heard was great stuff. Really disgusting. There’s no question, Colette, you went back in there and came away with the goods.”

  “I did my job.”

  “You met this strange, disturbed, highly unsocialized man and by the third or fourth meeting he’s giving you a lurid fantasy about murdering a woman. You see where I’m heading, don’t you?”

  “I did my job.”

  I leaned over so that our noses almost touched. “Did you have sex with Michael Doll?”

  She flinched. “No,” she said, almost in a whisper. Then, more loudly, “No.”

  I kept my eyes tightly on hers. “You were wearing a wire. Maybe sex would be a problem. Maybe it wasn’t exactly sex.”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. She rubbed the corner of her right eye.

  “Good,” I said softly. “Let’s go.”

  We walked back in silence until we were walking up the steps to the station. I stopped and held her back. “Colette,” I said.

  She looked away.

  “Who prepared you for the assignment? Who gave advice?”

  “Just Furth.”

  “Right,” I said. “And how do you feel about it now?”

  “How should I feel about it?”

  “Troubled, maybe.”

  “Why? That’s the problem with people like you. You try and get everybody to feel traumatized.”

  “I was trying to be sympathetic.”

  “I don’t need sympathy.”

  We parted coolly and I called Furth immediately. He appeared looking breezily confident. “So?” he said.

  “I need to hear all the tapes,” I said.

  7

  I woke and slept in snatches and then finally I woke up late. I gulped some coffee as I ran around getting myself ready. Julie came out of her room wearing nothing except an old jacket of mine she must have found in the cupboard of the spare room that I had made a partial attempt at turning into a study. Now her room. We were going to have to have a talk about things. She looked like a rodent that had been dragged out of hibernation. Her hair was a mass of fluff, her eyes narrow as if she needed to keep out of the light. “I didn’t know you were getting up so early,” she said. “I’d have made you some breakfast.”

  “It’s twenty to nine,” I said, “and I’m in a rush.”

  “I’ll do some shopping,” she said.

  “Don’t bother.”

  “It’s no bother.”

  __________

  I drove back to the police station with a feeling of ominous inevitability, like when I was fifteen years old and tak
ing my first real exams. I sat very straight in the driver’s seat, and clenched my hands on the wheel. Every bit of my body felt tight. My spine was like a metal rod. My neck muscles strained. My jaw clenched involuntarily. My head throbbed as if someone was thrumming against my temples with their knuckles. “Idiot, idiot, idiot,” I muttered to myself under my breath, stuck at a traffic light that went red, green, red without any cars moving because a tractor trailer was blocking the road. It was raining steadily. Outside, a few people scuttled by under umbrellas, side-stepping the puddles and dog shit on the pavements. Gray, clogged, mucky London. My report lay beside me on the passenger seat. It was about six hundred words long. Brief and to the point. The tapes were in a plastic shopping-bag beside it.

  At the police station, I reversed into a parking space and heard the ominous scrape of metal on metal. The funny thing is that when it happens to you, you almost feel it, as if the car’s bodywork was your own skin.

  “Shit.”

  The back of my car was jammed up against the gleaming blue paintwork of a horribly expensive-looking BMW. I climbed out into the downpour, and examined the long thin scratch I’d made on the other car. My own had suffered even more, with a light broken and one panel like screwed-up newspaper. I fished a notebook out of my bag and wrote a note of apology, together with my car’s registration number and my own phone number, folded it several times to protect it against the wet, and tucked it under the BMW’s wipers. I’d failed to bring an umbrella and I was already soaking. Water trickled down the back of my neck. I picked up the report and dropped it into my bag.

  __________

  Furth was sitting at a table in the conference room with a clipboard in front of him, but he got up when I came in, giving a friendly nod. With him was a woman with prematurely gray hair and a smooth, placid face whom I had met once before, a young beanpole of a PC, and a bulky man with straggly hair around a bald pate and small, shrewd blue eyes.

  “Just the person,” Furth said. “Were your ears burning? Let me take your coat. Here, you know Jasmine, don’t you? Jasmine Drake. And this is DCI Oban. He’s my governor. Coffee? Tea? Nothing?”

  I looked at Oban with some alarm. “Don’t mind me,” he said. “I was just looking in.”