The Red Room Page 9

  I turned back to the spot and stared at it.

  “And then Doll came forward a couple of days later to say he’d been lurking in the area,” said Gil. “He didn’t exactly use those words.”

  I frowned and he gave me his cocky grin again and whistled through his teeth.

  I tried to picture the scene to myself. When she was found, she had been wearing a very short red Lycra skirt, pulled up over her buttocks. Her underpants had not been removed. She had been wearing a purple cotton shirt with no bra underneath. She had been wearing the clothes when she died and they hadn’t been removed subsequently. The stabbings had been through the shirt. On her left wrist she wore one of those digital watches they give away free at garages, and round her neck was a tacky gilt locket in the shape of a broken heart. It had curly pink writing on it: “Best…” Was someone, somewhere, wearing the other half of the heart, bearing the legend, “… Friend”?

  __________

  I rang up Poppy, my best friend. I needed to hear a warm voice again.

  “Kit! How’s it gone, your first week back?” In the background I could hear children shrieking and yelling. Poppy was stirring something, the chink of a spoon.

  Only a week, I thought. Four days. “Odd,” I answered. “Very odd.”

  “I tried to ring you before. Some woman I didn’t know answered.”

  “Julie. Did you ever meet her years ago? Maybe she was before your time. She’s been away.”

  “Didn’t she give you my message?” She hadn’t. “Who is she? Hang on—Megan! Amy! Come and get your hot milk and honey! Sorry. This Julie…”

  “She’s been away, traveling round the world. She’s staying here. For a bit.”

  “Oh. Do you mind?”

  “Not yet, not really.”

  “But are you all right? Oh, Christ, clear that up now. Now! Get a cloth or something, it’s running everywhere.”

  “Do you have to go?”

  “I think so. Call you back.”

  __________

  I’d bought food the previous day, including a bag of fresh pasta, a jar of red pepper and chili sauce and a couple of those bags of salad that you don’t have to wash. But they had disappeared. So had the slice of lemon and ginger cheesecake. There was almost nothing in the fridge except for a couple of cartons of milk, some cream cheese and—I lifted them up to make absolutely sure—a pair of new black knickers, with their price tag still attached.

  I knocked on Julie’s door. No answer. I pushed it open. Clothes were flung everywhere, including some of my own. There were jars of cream and tubes of lipstick on the filing cabinet, where she’d propped a mirror from the bathroom. My slippers lay by her unmade bed.

  I didn’t feel like going out to the shops again—I was too tired—so I made myself some toast and marmalade and a mug of cocoa. I retrieved my slippers and put on my dressing-gown. Then I got out my sketch-pad. I sat at the table, taking small sips of frothy hot chocolate, and I tried to draw Lianne—not her face, though; her small childish hands, with the nails chewed to the quick. Hands are difficult, worse than feet or faces, even. It’s almost impossible to get the proportions right. Fingers bulge out like bananas; the thumb twists at an improbable angle.

  I couldn’t get it right, and after several attempts I gave up. I was mildly bothered by the black knickers in my fridge and the rain slapping at my window and the itchy notion that I was missing something.

  11

  Being busy brings its own adrenaline rush. That morning, instead of lying in a hot bath until I heard Julie leave, I took a quick shower and washed my hair. I didn’t bother to dry it, just toweled it briskly then twisted it up. I drank my coffee while I pulled on a dress and sandals. Then, putting my car keys and an apple in my bag, I managed to whisk out past Julie, who sat at the kitchen table with a mug of tea, looking as sleepy as a cat in a puddle of sunlight. I drove straight to the Welbeck and parked my car in its old place, under the acacia tree. The morning was misty and damp. No one else was there yet except a cleaner, moving backwards over the lobby with a vacuum cleaner.

  In my office I pulled the door shut and opened the windows, which looked out over the small patch of gardens at the back. There were no papers in my out-tray, but a small mountain in the in-tray. Patients I should see, referrals I had to deal with, correspondence I needed to reply to, forms to fill in, journals to read, invitations I was going to turn down. According to my answering-machine, I had twenty-nine messages. I switched on my computer and found a dozen or so e-mails there, too. I’d read somewhere that a busy executive can get up to two hundred e-mails a day. It was so unfair. Couldn’t they be shared out among all the people sitting alone in rooms to whom nobody wanted to send messages?

  By nine, the heap of paperwork had sunk and I’d refused invitations to conferences in three different countries; I’d separated requests for me to see patients into the yes, no and don’t-know piles; I’d filled up my diary with satisfying little blocks of allotted time. There were crumpled balls of paper all round my chair. I could hear the sounds of the clinic coming to life: phones ringing in other offices, doors slamming, the murmur of conversations in the corridor. I went down to the coffee machine, which was on the ground floor, then bolted back to my office with my cup slopping against my fingers.

  There I pulled out the notes I’d made on Lianne. I stared at the sentences I’d jotted down until they blurred, became hieroglyphics. The only name I had that could provide any kind of illumination was the man who ran the drop-in center where she sometimes slept or went for a hot bath, a warm meal and clean clothes. Will Pavic, that was it. On an impulse, I picked up the phone and dialed his number.

  “Yes.” The voice was abrupt and impatient.

  “Could I speak to Will Pavic, please?”

  “Yes.”

  There was a pause.

  “Is that Will Pavic speaking?”

  “Yes.” Crosser this time.

  “Good morning. My name’s Dr. Quinn and I’m helping the police—”

  “Sorry, I don’t deal with the police. I’m sure you’ll understand that, in the circumstances.” The line went dead.

  “Bastard,” I muttered

  I took the apple out of my bag and ate it slowly, everything except the stalk. Then I dialed my own number.

  “Hello!” Julie sounded much livelier than she had when I’d last seen her.

  “It’s me, Kit. Something’s been bugging me all morning. Why is there a pair of knickers in my fridge?”

  “Ooops!” There was a splutter of laughter. “I read in some magazine that if it’s hot weather, it feels glorious to put on a chilled pair of knickers. That’s all.”

  “But it’s not that hot.”

  “That’s why they’re still there. I’m waiting.”

  So that was sorted. I phoned Will Pavic once again.

  “Yes.” Same voice, same tone.

  “Mr. Pavic, this is Kit Quinn, and please would you hear what I have to say to you before putting the phone down again.”

  “Ms. Quinn—”

  “Doctor.”

  “Dr. Quinn.” He managed to turn the title into an insult. “I am a very busy man.”

  “As I said—or was trying to say—I am helping the police with their inquiries into the death of Lianne.” There was a pause. “Lianne who was found by the canal?”

  “I know who you mean. I don’t know how you expect me to help you.”

  “I wanted to talk to people who knew her. Who knew what her life was like, what company she kept, what was worrying her, whether she was the kind of person who—”

  “Certainly not. I won’t have the young people here badgered by your lot. They’ve got enough problems as it is.”

  I took a deep breath. “What about you, then, Mr. Pavic?”

  “What about me?”

  “Can I talk to you about her?”

  “I’ve nothing to say. I scarcely knew Lianne.”

  “You knew her well enough to identify the body.
”

  “I knew what she looked like, of course.” His voice was harsh. I imagined a stern gray man with a face like a hatchet and gimlet eyes. “I hardly think that’s the kind of discussion you want, is it? You want to know about her mind, right?” His voice dripped sarcasm.

  I wasn’t going to lose my temper. The more cross he became, the calmer I felt. “I won’t take long.”

  I heard a pencil tapping rapidly against a surface. “Very well, what do you want to know?”

  “Can I come and see you in person?” No way was he going to tell me anything like this.

  “I have a meeting in less than an hour and after that—”

  “I’ll be with you in fifteen minutes,” I said. “It’s very kind of you, Mr. Pavic, I appreciate it.” Now it was my turn to put down the phone. I grabbed my bag and jacket and ran out of my office before he had the chance to ring me back.

  __________

  The Tyndale Center for Young People was a large and unprepossessing pre-war building with metal windows, squeezed between a slatternly pub and what must have been one of the ugliest low-rise apartment blocks in London—dirty gray breeze-blocks and mean little windows, some of which were smashed. A brightly colored mural made its way up one edge, flowers, tendrils curling up to the roof. It might have been Jack and the Beanstalk. In another hand “Fuck Off” was scrawled across the design about six feet off the ground. On the other side of the street, there were several derelict houses with boarded windows and doors, and weeds taking over the front yards. Two teenage boys with shaved heads were kicking a ratty tennis ball between them in the street, but they stopped and stared suspiciously at me as I approached the door.

  “Hello?”

  I couldn’t work out if the person who opened it was one of the young people or a helper. She had purple hair, several studs in her eyebrows and her nose, a sweet smile. She was wearing massive shaggy slippers. Behind her, I could see a large hallway, with corridors leading off it, and I could hear, coming from upstairs, the insistent throb of rap music and someone shouting.

  “I’m Dr. Quinn. I’ve got an appointment with Will Pavic.”

  “Appointment?” shouted a voice, out of sight. “Let her in.”

  The woman stepped aside. The hall was painted pale yellow. There was a spindly tree in a pot in the corner, a table stacked with leaflets against one wall and an old sofa near the stairs where a ginger cat lay asleep. I saw at once that it had been carefully designed to be unintimidating for anyone who made it through the doors.

  Will Pavic was in a small room opposite, with the door open. He was sitting at a desk staring directly at me over the top of his computer. He must have been in his forties, with hair cropped to about the same length as his dark stubble, and thick dark eyebrows. In the brightness of his office, he looked monochrome, all black and gray and chipped, as if he had been hacked out of granite. He was scowling. He stood up as I crossed the hall toward him, but stayed behind the cluttered fortress of his desk.

  “Hello,” I said.

  He shook my hand firmly but cursorily. “Take a seat,” he said, nodding at a hard-backed chair in the corner. “Just put the papers on the floor.”

  I cleared my throat. I gave a nervous smile, which Will didn’t return. There were yellow Post-it stickers on every spare inch of the wall behind him. Suddenly it occurred to me that I hadn’t really thought about what I was going to ask. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t really understand. Is this a children’s home?”

  “No,” he said.

  “What then? A council half-way house?”

  “The local authority have nothing to do with it. The government have nothing to do with it. Ditto the social services.”

  “Then who runs it?”

  “I do.”

  “Yes, but who do you answer to?”

  He gave a shrug.

  “But what actually happens?” I asked.

  “Simple,” he said. “This is a place where homeless young people can stay for a short period. We give them some help, make some calls, whatever, and send them on their way.”

  “Did you send Lianne on her way?” At that his face froze. “Look, I’m starting from zero here,” I said, smiling at him. No response at all, like a computer that’s been turned off. “I want to find out whatever I can about Lianne—I don’t mean about her movements round the time of her death, last-known sighting, that kind of thing. That’s for the police. More, the kind of girl she was, you know.”

  His phone rang but was picked up by the answering-machine.

  “I didn’t know her like that,” said Will.

  “How long was she here?”

  “She wasn’t here. Not the way you mean. She came occasionally. She knew people.”

  “This doesn’t make sense. If you’ve got so little connection with her, why was it you who identified the body? How did the police make the connection?”

  “The police made the connection because they put her face on a poster and a concerned citizen phoned up anonymously and said that she had spent time at the Tyndale. And the reason I identified her was because I was the only supposedly respectable person they could find who admitted to ever having met her. But, then, this is Kersey Town, which isn’t the sort of place you come from.”

  “You don’t know where I come from.”

  “I can guess,” he said, with a slight smile at last.

  “I just want to know what she was like, Mr. Pavic. Do you know anything about her background, for instance? Or her friends?”

  Now he looked uncomfortable and irritated, as if I were being obtuse.

  “You don’t get it,” he said. “I don’t want to know about these people’s lives. I’m not going to pretend to be their friend. I try to give a small amount of practical help and most of the time I fail. That’s all. Runaways have their reasons for running away, Dr. Quinn. Do you think they do it for fun? Lianne probably had very good reasons for running away.”

  “Do you think she might have been abused?” I asked. He didn’t reply and I felt crass for asking the question.

  “She was lonely,” he said abruptly. “A lonely, eager, frightened, angry young woman. Someone like you might say she was looking for love. Enough now?”

  “And you don’t want to help?” I said.

  He leaned over the desk, his face harsh. “But I already failed to help,” he said. “Again.”

  “I—”

  “I’ve got to go now. I’ve got a meeting.”

  “Can I walk with you to the underground?”

  “I’m driving.”

  “You could drop me off at a station on your way, then. I’ve just a few questions. Which way are you going?”

  “Blackfriars Bridge.”

  “Right past my front door,” I said, conveniently forgetting that my car was parked at the Welbeck Clinic.

  He sighed ostentatiously. “All right.”

  We walked out into the hall together. A startlingly pretty girl, with long fair hair, ran in. “I’m fucking trying!” she screamed into our faces, then bolted up the stairs, sobbing.

  __________

  “Was she on any drugs?” I asked, as I sat in the passenger seat of Will Pavic’s rusting Fiat and we eased through the traffic.

  “More questions, eh?”

  “I was curious.”

  “Tell me where to turn off.”

  “Not yet. Why are you so angry?”

  “Seems a reasonable response to me.”

  “To what?”

  “Everything. All this crap.” And the gesture he made, with his hands off the steering-wheel, took in everything: the traffic, the conversation, me beside him when he wanted to be alone, Lianne’s death, life in general.

  We drove the rest of the way in silence, apart from the instructions I gave him. He pulled up right outside the front door, and I climbed out.

  “Kit. Hey, Kit—Kit!”

  My heart sank.

  “Hi, Julie.”

  “Brilliant timing. I’ve
forgotten my key.” She bent down and smiled in at Pavic through the open door.

  “This is Will Pavic,” I said, in a muttered grunt. “Julie Wiseman.”

  She leaned right into the car, so that her skirt rode up her thighs and her breasts swelled under the flimsy shirt. “Hi, Will Pavic. Are you coming in?”

  “He just gave me a lift. He’s on his way to a meeting.”

  Julie ignored me. “Tea? Coffee?”

  “No, thank you.” His voice was remarkably courteous. So it was just me, then.

  “Thanks for the lift,” I called, and turned my back on them. I left the door open so that Julie could let herself in, and went upstairs, although in a few minutes I’d have to turn round and head back to the clinic and my car. Time for a cold drink, at least. I let the tap run, dabbling my fingers under the flow. I heard Julie’s feet clattering up the stairs.

  “Wow! He’s gorgeous.”

  “You reckon?”

  “Oh, definitely my type. Grim, weathered, strong, silent. I asked him for dinner.”

  I spun round. “You what?”

  “Invited him for dinner.” She smiled triumphantly. I spluttered something incoherent and she grinned and kicked off her sandals. “No good hanging around waiting. I’m not like you, Kit. Did you know you can divide people into herbivores and carnivores?”

  “I—”

  “You’re a herbivore. I’m a carnivore. And he’s a carnivore.”

  “Is he coming?” I managed to say.

  “Tomorrow. Eight o’clock. He couldn’t think of an excuse in time.”

  “I’m going out.”

  “You never go out,” she said dismissively. “Anyway, you can’t. I said we were having a few friends round for a meal, and why didn’t he join us if he was free. So who are you going to invite?”

  “Julie…”

  “And what shall I cook?”

  “Listen…”

  “And, most importantly, what shall I wear? Can I borrow your red dress?”

  12

  After I’d returned with my car, I went into the living room and sat down with some papers while Julie, well pleased with herself, took a shower. She took so many showers, singing unseasonal Christmas carols loudly and tunelessly. Perhaps she’d picked up all these clean habits from traveling abroad. I remembered the jokes that American and Australian colleagues had made about the English: untidy, dusty houses, bad teeth, unclean. If you want to hide something in an English-man’s bathroom, what’s the best place? Under the soap. I’d been told that late at night at a conference in Sydney.