The Red Room (32 page)

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 561
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 x.
"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 563
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."
"That'll count for something, don't you think? That
I saved your life."
"I think they'll take it inffccsideration," 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." 565
"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." 567
"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." 569
"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 571
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 573
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."
"It wasn't a performance. Thought I was going
to go mad."
"And then you got Doll after all."
"That was Gabriel. He said that with Doll
gone, and blamed for it, that would be the end."
"What did you say?"
"I had no will left. I just wanted it all
to end."
"When you ran away from Emily, when you were so
worried, you took her cup with you. That came in
useful. You, or maybe I should say
Gabriel, left the cup there. Of course, he
also left a leather pouch. But it didn't matter.
It was another miracle. It just incriminated
poor Mickey Doll even more. After all, what
murderer would deliberately leave behind something that
identified them? A bit tough on Doll,
though."
She blew her nose again. "I know," she said.
"It torments me. But I can't think of what
else I could have done."
"And then there was me," I said.
"I was on the verge of telling you," she said.
"You knew that. I was going to confess when he came
back. You're not sure. I can see that in your
eyes. You're not sure whether to believe me. But
I didn't let him kill you. You're sure of
that."
"Yes, I'm sure of that. You suddenly
resisted him. Why was that?"
She lit another cigarette, her pretty
face screwed up. "I thought it was going to go on
forever and we would never be safe, not safe enough for
Gabe. Maybe I was just tired."
I took a sip of my tea. It was very cold
now, with a metallic taste, though it might just have
been my dry mouth.
Bryony leaned forward with an urgent
expression. "I've been reading," she said. "I
think I was mentally ill. I've read about it.
It's an emotional-dependence 575
syndrome. It's a well-known pattern.
Women get into the power of men and become helpless.
I had years of abuse with Gabe. He's a
difficult man. A violent man. And it
wasn't a black-and-white situation. The first
death was a suicide, a tragedy. Then there was the
accident. By the time we were in the middle of it, I
had lost any sense of self." She took
another drag of her cigarette and looked at me
with narrowed eyes. "Do you think people will believe that?"
"Very possibly," I said. "People believe the
strangest things, I've found. And you're young and
pretty and middle class, which always helps."
"You're an expert," she said. "You were the
crucial person in this case. The police trust
you. Will you help me?"
I took a deep breath and put my hands in
my pockets, perhaps to conceal that they were trembling.
"I think I may be too involved in the case
to appear as an expert witness," I said.
Her expression hardened. "Kit," she said,
"I could have let you die. I saved you. We could
have been sitting at home now and you would be dead.
I saved you."
I stood up. "I'm glad to have been spared,"
I said. "I'm sorry not to be more effusive. I
keep thinking of Emily and the dead bodies. I
can't get them out of my mind. They were alive and you
killed them. Well, you seem to have forgiven yourself for
that without too much difficulty. It never ceases
to amaze me, the ability of people to justify themselves and
never feel guilty."
"But haven't you heard what I've been
saying?" Bryony said. "I'm as devastated as
anybody."
"I've heard you say that none of it was your
fault," I said. "I've heard you say that it was
all Gabe and not you. It seems that I should be