The Red Room (21 page)

"A pretty lady," he said, and his voice
trembled. "Such a pretty little lady."
"Michael," I said, trying to hold his eyes,
which wandered all over the room, not resting on anything
for long, except the view out of the window, which
overlooked the car park.
"Twice," he said, in a strange, high
tone. "Two times it's happened now to me.
I've been there twice, Kit."
He looked dreadful. There was an ugly,
suppurating gash running from his left nostril,
over the corner of his mouth and down his chin, which gave
his face a distorted appearance, and set his mouth
into a vague twitchy smile. The wound was
swollen and purple, and it looked to me 353
as if he'd been tugging at the stitches; ends of
nylon thread stuck out of his skin. Even as we
spoke, he couldn't keep his hands off it, but
touched and picked at it. His lip was swollen, and
he kept dabbing at it with the tip of his tongue.
There was a large graze on his forehead. One
wandering eye was bloodshot. His hair was greasy.
His clothes hung off him, as if in a couple of
days he'd lost several pounds in weight. He
smelled bad, too--a thick, sour odor that
filled the poky room.
"Why me, Kit?" he asked, in his fretful
voice. "Why am I always the one?"
"I don't know," I answered, truthfully
enough. "You're all right, though, aren't you? Hero
of the hour."
"Pretty lady," he said again. His eyes
flickered round to rest on me for a moment. "Not as
pretty as you. You're always the prettiest,
don't worry about that. Soft hair, though." He
made a faint mewing sound, which made me shudder.
His statement was a jumble of contradictory
assertions--that he'd seen a huge man, a
giant of a man, trying to strangle Bryony, that
she'd run from her attacker and straight into his
outstretched arms, that he'd rescued her himself, that
he'd seen the man drive off in a blue estate
car, maybe it wasn't blue, maybe it was red,
maybe it wasn't an estate car, that maybe,
come to think of it, he'd seen him run off down the
canal, that Bryony had fainted.
"Just tell me the things that you know for sure,
Michael. Why were you by the canal so late?"
"Fishing. Good time for it. Full moon.
Nobody around, no bloody noise."
"Where were you? Right on the edge?"
"My patch. In the shadows, just near the
tunnel, where no one can see me, but I can see
them."
"What did you see?"
"You know," he said. "The lady. The man after
her. And the other man. Terry. Have you met
Terry? We both rescued her. Chased him off,
saved her."
"Can you describe him?"
"A man. A big man."
"Anything more?"
"Not exactly. I just saw shapes and then I
got up, I think I got up, I don't know
exactly, I was confused, anybody'd 355
have been confused, Kit, and I held on to her so
he couldn't get her."
"Are you sure? You are quite sure it happened like
that? You pulled her away?"
"Oh, yes." He smiled with his misshapen
mouth. "I saved her. I'm sure I saved
her. Does she realize that? The papers say
terrible things about me, but I saved her from him.
Tell them that, will you? Tell everyone what I
did, Kit, so then they'll know. They'll be
sorry for the things they did. Everyone'll be sorry
then." Once again he touched his face, licked his
cut lip.
"What happened after that?"
"After?"
"After you pulled her."
"Then this other man came out of the tunnel, and
she ran to him and the other one ran off. And she
screamed and screamed and screamed. I didn't know
anyone could scream that loudly."
"Michael, listen. You must think. Is there
anything you can remember, anything at all, anything
you saw, or you heard, no matter what, that you
haven't told the police or me?"
"I stroked her hair to comfort her."
"Yes."
"And the other man, the one who came out of the
tunnel, he said--excuse me, Kit--he said
very loudly: "Fucking hell." Sorry."
Doll looked prim.
"Where are you going now, Michael?"
"Where?" His eyes wavered on me. "I
don't suppose I could come to ..."
"You should go home, Michael. Get yourself a
solid meal. Clean clothes. Rest up."
"Rest up," he repeated. "Yes. Things have
got a bit out of hand, really. They gave me
pills but I don't know where I put them."
"Go home, Michael."
"Am I safe?"
"Are the police protecting you?"
"They said they'd keep an eye out."
"Good," I said. I smiled at him. In the
middle of my confusion about what had happened, my
deep weariness, my distaste for Doll, I felt
a jolt of surprising and unwelcome tenderness for
him, with his slashed face and reddened eyes and his
general squalid hopelessness and helplessness. "I
think you're quite safe, really. It won't happen
again. Just take care." 357
"Kit. Kit."
"Yes."
But he didn't have anything to say to me. He just
stared at me for a few seconds. His eyes
filled up with tears. They ran down his cheeks,
over his cut face, into his dirty neck.
It was eleven o'clock. I had two hours before my
meeting with Oban and Furth, three before I was
due at Bryony Teale's house. I thought about
going home and taking a shower, maybe lying down.
But suddenly I didn't feel tired anymore.
I felt sharp and clear with lack of sleep, as
if I was standing on a high mountain, breathing in thin
air. I thought about getting myself something to eat, but
the idea of food made me feel slightly
nauseous. All I wanted was a glass of
cold water to wash through my body, dilute some
of the bitter coffee I'd gulped down.
I walked out of the station, and on the high street
I bought a large bottle of carbonated water and
took it to a patch of green nearby, where there were
seats and drooping rose bushes. There, I sat
on a bench in the sun, drinking my water and
watching the people who walked past. The warmth felt
lovely on my skin, gentle and soothing. I
sighed and closed my eyes and felt sunlight
trickle down my neck. My head buzzed
lightly with fragments of the last twenty-four
hours: I heard Will's groan of last night,
felt his hand on my breast. I saw him as he
had been this morning, so careful not to promise me
anything. I pictured Bryony's face on the
hospital pillow; her pale orange hair and
caramel eyes, her trembling hands. I let
Doll into my mind, with his plaintive incoherence and
his blotchy oozing face. The other witness--
Terence Mack with the square, hairy hands--had
been momentarily blinded by the light of the tunnel.
Nobody had seen anything that mattered. Everyone
was always looking in the wrong direction. Drama
happened in the dark shadows.
I sat there for a long while, thinking and not
thinking, letting the images drift across my brain
like wisps of fog, insubstantial but suggestive.
The sun moved in and out of clouds. People came out of
their offices and sat on the patch of grass to eat
their sandwiches. I thought about Albie, but he
seemed a long way off now--a man laughing in the
distance, head thrown back, white teeth 359
gleaming; a stranger. It was hard to believe that for
months on end I had gone to sleep wishing he was
beside me, and woken each morning remembering all
over again that he had hurt me and that he wasn't
coming back to take me in his arms and say that he was
sorry. Never again. He'd never again hold me and
touch me. Such a hard, sharp word: never.
Definite, like a knife, like a line drawn under
something.
And tonight I'd see W. I'd go to his house
and I'd make him look at me and see me, and
I'd feel happy for a while. I stood up, and
wrenched my mind back to Bryony Teale.

29

"Nice," I said, looking out of the window.
"Bad area, though," said Oban, sniffily.
Oban had told me that Bryony Teale was
willing to talk to me. Especially to me. A
sympathetic female ear, Oban had said on the
phone. Not as a compliment. I had walked over,
and as I approached the house, the window of a car
outside had slid down and a hand emerged,
beckoning me over. Oban peered out. He opened
the door and invited me to sit next to him on the
back seat. He said he wanted to talk first. It
would have been nicer outside, even on this gray
day, but Oban was obviously more comfortable in the car.
Maybe it seemed like a mobile office.
The house was part of a terrace that curved in a
gentle crescent, not so much a bold letter C, more
a parenthesis. The houses were tall and narrow,
late Victorian. Some were shabby, one was
boarded up, but a few bore the tell-tale
signs of gentrification: shiny-painted front
doors with brass knobs and knockers, freshly
pointed brickwork, metal shutters on the lower
windows. Oban pointed down the street. "Ten
years ago a stack of flowers was piled up there."
"Why?"
"A couple of boys were walking along down
toward Euston Road when they ran into a gang of
other kids. They chased them and they caught one
by those railings. They beat him up and then when they were
done someone pushed a knife into hm." He looked
back at the house. "I don't know why people like that
want to move here."
"From what I hear they're trying to do some good
to the area, show some faith in the local 361
people."
Oban pulled a face. "Right," he said.
"And this is the thanks they get. They're so
bloody na@ive. I've seen it all before. That
woman walking down the canal as if it's a
country lane. I mean, I'm not a particular
fan of country lanes, but this is stupid. Did
you hear of the woman a few years ago who was
staying in one of the local hotels?"
"I don't know," I said. "I hear stories
about lots of women."
"This one stayed on the road, but some boys
dragged her down on to the towpath. She was raped.
They asked her if she could swim. She said no,
clever thing. So they threw her in. She swam
across to the other side. Got away."
"What's your advice?" I asked. "To stay
indoors with the door locked and the TV on?"
"It would be safer."
"The best idea would be if everybody went
walking by the canal."
"Who wants to walk by a smelly canal?"
Enough was enough. "Do you think we should go in and talk
to Bryony Teale?" I asked.
Oban looked thoughtful. "It might be better
if you talked to her on your own," he said. "At
first anyway."
"I'm not sure if we'll get anything from her
at all yet," I said. "She seemed in a bad
way last night."
"Just do what you can. Give us something, anything."
Then Oban's voice dropped into a mutter that
I couldn't make out at all.
"What was that?"
Oban started to speak but nothing except a
sort of twitching splutter emerged. "It's that
bloody Doll," he finally managed. "He's
in it somewhere. I don't know how but he is."
"You said he was just a witness."
"Witness my arse," said Oban, his face a
fiery red now. The police driver sitting in the
front of the car turned round and gave me a
look. "I want to bury that bastard. Ask her
about Doll. Ask her what he was doing there."
"Sorry," I said. "As I understand it, the
point of the connection was the place, this same area of
canal, and the same method of abduction. That's
where Doll spends his life, sitting there with his
rod and his maggots. And there was the girl and the
witness. He helped her." 363
Oban gave a sarcastic laugh that was part
grunt, part cough. "I haven't got a bloody
clue what's going on," he said. "But Doll
has been in this from the beginning like a bad smell.
He's bound up with it somewhere. I just know. So do
you. You've seen him, you've seen where he
lives."
I gave a shudder. "I know. All right,
I'll ask. Do I just knock at the door?"
"That's right. We've had an officer there all
day, just to make cups of tea probably.
She'll answer."
"What are you going to do?"
"I'm off. If she's able to make a
statement, I'll send one of my DC'S over."
As I opened the car door, Oban put his hand
on my wrist. "Get me something, Kit. I'm
desperate."
The young female officer opened the door.
"Dr. Quinn?"
"That's right. How is she?"
"Dunno. She hasn't said much."
I looked round. The floor and the stairs were
stripped and polished but there was a casual,
slightly raffish feel to the interior. A bike
hung from a heavy-duty hook on one wall.
There were shelves with rows of battered paperbacks
in the hall and I could see more shelves with more
books on the landing at the top of the stairs. The
hall led through to the kitchen and I could see a garden
beyond that. The door opened next to me and a man
came out, the man I'd seen at the hospital.
He was unshaven now, and his dark curly hair was
rumpled. He was dressed in a navy blue
sweatshirt, jeans and worn tennis shoes with no
socks. He looked the way I felt. I
guessed he'd slept even less than I had.
He was tall, six foot or so. He shook my
hand. "I'm Gabe," he said.
"I saw you," I said. He looked puzzled.
"At the hospital. Last night. This morning.
Whatever."
"Oh, yes, sorry, I wasn't at my
best. Can I get you something?"
"I'll make some tea," said WPC
Devlin, officiously, and padded off toward the
kitchen like an Edwardian maid.
"How's your wife?"
Gabe's expression changed to one of concern.
"I don't know. Better than last 365
night."
"That's good. Can I have a word with her?"
Gabe looked uncomfortable. He put his hands
in his trouser pockets, then took them out again.
"Can I ask you something first?"
"Of course."
"Bry was attacked by this person who did these
other awful murders?"
"It seems possible, at least. It was in
exactly the same place as one of the bodies was
found."
"But it seems so far-fetched," he said. "Why
on earth would someone come back to the spot where he'd
already committed a murder? It sounds so risky."
"Yes, but murderers do that. It's not a theory,
it happens. Murderers go back."
"Right, right," said Gabe, as if he were talking
to himself. I had an impulse to put my hand on
him, to offer him comfort, but it was better to let him
talk. "What I wanted to ask, I mean it
probably sounds stupid or paranoid, but I just
wanted to know if Bry could be in any danger.
Could he want to get at her again?"
I thought for a moment. I wanted to be precise
about this.
"The opinion of the investigating officers is that
the perpetrator of these crimes is an
opportunist. Late at night, on the canal,
your wife was an obviously vulnerable target."
Gabe's eyes narrowed and he looked at me.
"But what do you think?"
"I should say that I'm hired by the police
to suggest possible ideas. I consider different
directions. I have always suspected that something
links the first two victims."
"What? Why?" Gabe Teale sounded as if
he was in the middle of a bad dream.
"I don't know. It's just a feeling. It may
be wrong. It's probably wrong. The police
don't agree with me, that's for sure. I just
wanted to be frank with you."
"But if you're not wrong ..." he was speaking
slowly, in a fog of tiredness and stress, "that would
mean Bry was still in danger."
"Don't worry about that," I said. "There is
no question whatever that the police will provide basic
protection. All right?"
"That's good," he said, not looking very
reassured. "Thank you."
"Can I see your wife now?" I 367
said, as gently as I could.
"I'll take you through. Would you rather talk to her
alone?"
"That's up to you," I said. "I'm sure she'd
rather you were there."
"She's in here," he said, leaning against the
door, pushing it open. He looked through. "Bry?
The doctor's here."
I followed him in. Two rooms had been
knocked into one, making a large space that ran the
depth of the house. I could see the street through the
large window at one end and the garden through the French
windows at the other. Toward the garden end
Bryony Teale was sitting on a large
rust-colored sofa. She was wearing a bright
orange sweater and blue three-quarter-length
trousers. Her bare feet were tucked up under her.
I walked over and her husband pulled up an
armchair for me. Then he sat down on the sofa,
lifting her up so that she could lean against him. They
exchanged glances and Gabe gave her a
reassuring smile.
Above her on the wall was a large,
poster-sized photograph showing a little girl standing
in a deserted city street. The child was ornately
dressed--she almost looked like a gypsy
fortune-teller--but what struck me most were her
dark, fiery eyes, which gazed directly into the
lens. It was as if the girl had that moment looked
round, and focused her extraordinarily intense
glare on the photographer. You knew that at the
next moment she must have looked away again, but it was
enough. It made you want to know about the girl, what
had happened to her, where she was now.
"That's amazing," I said.
Bryony looked round then forced the beginning of a
smile. "Thanks," she said. "I took it."
"You're a photographer," I said.
"I don't know if I can still call myself that,"
she said ruefully. "I have difficulty finding people
who want to publish the sort of pictures I
want to take."
"I can't believe that," I said.
"I took that one last year about a quarter of a
mile from here," said Bryony. "I was walking and
I met her with her family. They were refugees
from Romania. Isn't she beautiful?"
I looked again. "She's fierce," I said.
"Maybe I scared her," said Bryony.
"How are you feeling?" I said. 369
"Sorry to be so collapsed."
"Don't be ridiculous," I said. "You
don't have to prove anything. You don't even have
to talk to me if you don't feel like it."
"No, no, I want to. This isn't like
me."
I looked closely at her. She was
obviously better than when I'd seen her at the
hospital, but she was still pale with dark rings under
her eyes. "Anyone would have been shocked by what you
went through," I said. "So I suppose your work
means you do a lot of walking around in strange
places."
"A bit," she said.
"But you should be careful. I was just talking to the
head of the murder inquiry. He doesn't think that
walking by the canal at night is such a good
idea."
"I keep telling her that," said Gabe. "But
she's fearless. And stubborn. She's always loved
to walk."
"I feel a bit differently now," she said.
"Well, maybe not alone at night," I said
cheerily, noticing the first stirrings of an argument.
"Do you feel all right to talk about it?"
"I want to help."
"If it feels bad, just tell me and I'll
stop."
"I'm all right."
"Can you tell me what happened?"
"I've spent today going over and over it in my
mind, but I don't think I'll be of much use.
It happened so quickly. I was walking along the
canal towpath. I felt an arm on me,
pulling at me. Pulling and pulling, and I gave
a scream. Then immediately there were these other people grabbing
at me. It sounds so stupid but at first I
didn't realize that they were trying to help. Before
I knew what was going on, the man had run
away."
"That was all?"
"All?"
"Look, Bryony, after the attack you were in a
state of shock. Trauma. You don't need
to downplay what happened to you."
"Oh." She gave a shaky laugh. "Well,
to be honest, I was scared shitless. It's true that
the kind of work I do means that I wander around in the
strangest places, and if you let yourself be frightened
by things then you'd never get anything 371
worthwhile done. I'd just take
self-portraits of myself in my garden." She
gave another small laugh. "But, to be honest,
I think I almost walked along the canal as a
kind of dare to myself--does that sound completely
mad to you?"
"No. It sounds reckless, not mad."
"Well, so I was a bit spooked anyway,
walking along in the shadows"--she glanced up at
Gabe, who gave her an encouraging little nod--
"and then this shape loomed up at me and his hands were
all over me. I thought I was going to die, or be
drowned. Or raped." She gave a shudder.
"When I look back on it, I try to tell
myself it was nothing, but I thought I was going to be
killed, just because I was stupid enough to be by the canal
in the middle of the night. I dreamed about it last
night and I woke up crying."
"Did you notice anything about the man?"
She shook her head hopelessly. "It was dark.
This is going to be so pathetic. I think he was
fairly short. He may have had closely
cropped hair. I've got an image of that in
my mind. That's all."
"White?"
"Yes. Or I think so."
"Do you remember what he was wearing?"
"No."
"Or what he wasn't wearing? A suit? A
long coat? Jogging shorts?"
She gave a thin smile. "No, none of that,"
she said.
"One last thing," I said. "I wonder if you
could say anything about the two witnesses."
"What do you mean?"
"What did they do?"
Bryony looked puzzled. "I don't
understand. You know what they did, they scared the man
off."
I couldn't quite think of what to say. I had
another try. "From what you say, it was all
terribly confusing. It might have felt like you were being
attacked by three people. Or attacked by two people who
were scared off by the third person."
"Why?"
"I was just wondering."
Bryony looked thoughtful. "I'm trying to go
over it in my mind. All I can say is what
I've said all along. I was attacked by a man
and he ran away. That's it." 373
"Just the one attacker and two witnesses who
scared him off?"
"Yes." She looked more confused than ever.
"Sure?"
"Yes. No. Well, as sure as I can be of
anything, that is."
"If you give a statement to the police,
they'll ask you a lot more questions along those sort of
lines. It's amazing what you can remember if you
approach it in the right way."
"I'll do my best, Dr. Quinn, I really
will."
"Please call me Kit. When people call me
Dr. Quinn I look around the room for someone
else."
"All right, Kit. Can I say something
else?"
"Anything."
She swallowed. "I'm so grateful for everything
that's being done for me but ... but ..."
"What?"
"I wonder whether it was just an attempt at a
mugging. Maybe he was going for my purse."
"Yes," I said. "One of the witnesses mentioned
that. He said that you said it was nothing, that you didn't
even want to phone the police. He insisted on
doing it with his mobile."
She pulled up her legs even further so that
her knees were under her chin. She looked into my
tired eyes with her tired eyes. "Does that
seem strange to you?"
I gave my best doctor's smile of
reassurance. "Not at all. Have you ever been
walking along the street when you've seen someone
trip and fall over? Sometimes they'll give
themselves a nasty knock but as often as not they won't
wait to get over it. They'll try to walk on as
if nothing has happened. It's a strong human
impulse to try to insist that things are carrying on as
normal. You see it even in quite serious
accidents. People with severe bleeding try to continue
on their way to work. It's completely natural
to try to persuade yourself that nothing serious has
happened. Maybe it's the brain trying
to protect itself from stress."
"But it might be true." There was a tone of
appeal in her voice. "It might be, mightn't
it, just a mugging? A horrible coincidence."
"You may be right. We'll definitely consider
it. But I've already been talking to your 375
husband about this. We won't take any chances."
"That's good," she said bleakly.
I leaned forward. "You've probably already
been told this, but I want to tell you again. It's