Dark Room

by Minette Walters

  "This isn't my car."

  Her stepmother took her hand and stroked it gently. "Leo's not going to marry you, Jinx. Daddy and I have had to send out notices to everyone saying the wedding's been canceled. He wants to marry Meg instead."

  She watched a tear drip from the powdered chin onto her own upturned palm. "Meg?" she echoed. "You mean Meg Harris?" Why would Leo want to marry Meg? Meg was a whore. You whore ... you whore ... YOU WHORE! Some horror-what?-lurched through her mind, and she clamped a hand to her mouth as bile rose in her throat.

  "She's been out for what she can get for as long as you've known her, and now she's taken your husband. You were always too trusting, baby. I never liked her."

  Jinx dragged her wide-eyed stare back to her stepmother. That wasn't true. Betty had always adored Meg, largely because Meg was so uncritical in her affections. It made no difference to Meg if Betty Kingsley was drunk or sober. "At least Meg thinks I've something sensible to say," was her stepmother's aggressive refrain whenever she was deep in her cups and being ignored by everybody else. The irony was that Meg couldn't tolerate her own straitlaced mother for more than a couple of hours. "You and I should swap," she often said. "At least Betty doesn't play the martyr all the time."

  "When was this decided?" Jinx managed at last. "After the accident?"

  "No, dear. Before. You went back to London a week ago last Friday after Leo phoned you during the afternoon. Horrible, horrible man. He called every day, pretending he still loved you, then dropped the bombshell on the Friday night. I don't suppose he was at all kind in the way he did it either." She held the handkerchief to her eyes again. "Then on the Sunday, Colonel Clancey from next door rescued you from your garage before you could gas yourself, but didn't have the sense to ring us and tell us you needed help." She swallowed painfully. "But you were so cool about it all on the Saturday when you phoned home to tell Daddy the wedding was off that it never occurred to us you were going to do something silly."

  Perhaps she'd been lying ... Jinx always lied ... lying was second nature to her... Jinx looked down at the newspaper clipping again and noticed amid the wreckage in the photograph the JIN of the personalized number plate that her father had given her for her twenty-first birthday present. J.I.N. Kingsley. Jane Imogen Nicola. Her mother's names-the most hated names in the world. JINXED! She had to accept it was her car featured there. You got drunk ... Colonel Clancey rescued you... "There's no gas in my garage," Jinx said, fixing on something she could understand. "No one has gas in their garage."

  Mrs. Kingsley sobbed loudly. "You were running your car engine with the doors closed. If the Colonel hadn't heard it, you'd have died on the Sunday." She plucked at the girl's hand again, her warm fat fingers seeking the very comfort she was trying to impart. "You promised him you wouldn't do it again and now he wishes he'd reported it to somebody. Don't be angry with me, Jinx." The tears rolled on relentlessly in rivers of grief, and Jinx wondered, basely, how genuine they were. Betty had always reserved her affections for her own two sons and never for the self-contained little girl who was the product of Adam's first wife. "Someone had to tell you, and Dr. Protheroe thought it should be me. Poor Daddy's been knocked sideways by it all, you've broken his heart. 'Why did she do it, Elizabeth?' he keeps asking me."

  But Jinx had no answer to that. For she knew Betty was lying. No one, least of all Leo, could drive her to kill herself. Instead, she dwelled on the incongruities of life. Why did she call her father Adam while his wife of twenty-seven years called him Daddy? For some reason it had never seemed significant before. She stared past her stepmother's head to her own reflection in the dressing table mirror and wondered suddenly why she felt so very little about so very much.

  A young man came into her room uninvited, a tall gangling creature with shoulder-length ginger hair and spots. "Hi," he said, wandering aimlessly to the French windows and flicking the handle up and down, before abandoning it to throw himself into one of the armchairs in the bay. "What are you on?"

  "I don't know."

  "Heroin, crack, coke, MDMA? What?"

  She stared at him blankly. "Am I in a drug rehabilitation center?"

  He frowned at her. "Don't you know?"

  She shook her head.

  "You're in the Nightingale Clinic, where therapy costs four hundred quid a day and everyone leaves with their heads screwed on straight."

  Oh, but her anger was COLOSSAL. It wheeled around her brain like a huge bird of prey, waiting to strike. "So who runs this place?" she asked calmly.

  "Dr. Protheroe."

  "Is he the man with the beard?"

  "Yeah." He stood up abruptly. "Do you want to go for a walk? I need to keep moving or I go mad."

  "No thanks."

  "Okay." He paused by the door. "I found a fox in a trap once. He was so scared he was trying to bite his leg off to free himself. He had eyes like yours."

  "Did you rescue him?"

  "He wouldn't let me. He was more afraid of me than he was of the trap."

  "What happened to him?''

  "I watched him die."

  Sometime afterwards, Dr. Protheroe returned.

  "Do you remember talking to me before?" he asked her, pulling up one of the armchairs and sitting in it.

  "Once. You told me I was lucky."

  "In fact, we've talked a few times. You've been conscious for several days but somewhat unwilling to communicate." He smiled encouragement. "Do you remember talking to me yesterday, for example?"

  How many yesterdays were there when she had functioned without any awareness of what she was doing? "No, I don't. I'm sorry. Are you a psychiatrist?"

  "No."

  "What are you then?"

  "I'm a doctor."

  The waxen image in the mirror smiled politely. He was lying. "Am I allowed to smoke?" He nodded and she plucked a cigarette from one of the packets Betty had brought in, lighting it with clumsy inefficiency because it was hard to focus with one eye. "May I ask you something?"

  "Of course."

  "Wouldn't it have been courteous to tell me before I spoke to the policemen that the accident happened several days ago?" He had a rather charming face, she thought, a little weary, but lived in and comfortable. Like his sports jacket, which had seen better days, and the cavalry twill trousers that drooped at the hem where his heel had caught it. He was the sort of man whom, in other circumstances, she might have chosen for a friend because he seemed careless of convention. But she was afraid of him and sought refuge in pomposity.

  He balanced his fountain pen between his forefingers. "In the circumstances, I thought it better to let you speak the truth as you understood it."

  "What circumstances?"

  "You had almost twice the legal limit of alcohol in your blood when you crashed your car. The police are considering whether to charge you but I think they may let the matter drop after this morning. They tend to be somewhat skeptical of a doctor's diagnosis, less so of the patients themselves. I could see no harm in wringing a little sympathy out of PCs Gregg and Hardy."

  Her reflection smiled at him in the mirror. "That was a kind thought." She had never been drunk in her life, because she had watched Betty stagger about the house too often to want to emulate her. "Could you pass me the ashtray?'' You got drunk and tried to kill yourself... "Thank you." She placed it on the bed in front of her. "What exactly has happened to me, Dr. Protheroe?"

  He leaned forward, clamping his large hands between his knees. "In a nutshell, you left a car traveling at approximately forty miles per hour, gave yourself the sort of knockout blow that would have felled an ox, then continued under your own impetus, grazing your scalp, eye, and arms as you did so. The first miracle is that you're here at all, the second miracle is that you didn't fracture anything in the process, and the third miracle is that you'll be as good as new before you know it. Once your hair grows back over the torn flaps of skin that had to be stitched, no one will know you had an accident. The price you paid for all that, howeve
r, was concussion, one symptom of which is post-traumatic amnesia. You have been conscious but deeply confused for the last five days, and that confusion may persist on and off for some time to come. Think of your brain as a computer. Any memory that is safely filed has a good chance of reinstatement, but memories that you were too confused to store properly may never return. So, for example, despite the fact that you were conscious, you're unlikely to recollect your transfer here from Odstock Hospital, or indeed your first interview with the police."

  She looked past him towards the gardens that lay beyond her window. "And is pretraumatic amnesia equally normal?" she asked him. "I have no memory of the accident or what led up to it."

  "Don't be confused by the term 'post.' That's simply referring to amnesia after trauma. But with regard to what you don't remember, that's usually referred to as retrograde amnesia. It's not uncommon and seems to depend on the severity of the head injury. We talk about loss of memory," he went on, "when we should talk about temporary loss. Bit by bit you'll remember events before the accident, though it may take a little while to understand how the pieces fit together because you may not remember them in chronological order. You may also, although it's less likely, remember things that never happened, simply because your memory will have stored plans of future events and you may recollect the plans as real. The trick is to avoid worrying about it. Your brain, like the rest of your body, has taken a knock and needs time to heal itself. That's all this amnesia is."

  "I understand. Does that mean I can go home quite soon?"

  "To your parents?" he asked.

  "No. To London."

  "Is there anyone there who can look after you, Jinx?"

  She was about to say Leo before she remembered that, according to her stepmother, he wasn't there anymore. Do yourself a favor, said the intrusive voice of cynicism. Leo look after you? Ha ha ha! Instead, she said nothing and continued to stare out of the window. She resented the way this man called her Jinx, as if he and she were well acquainted, when her entire knowledge of him resided in an avuncular chat about a condition that was rocking her to her very foundations. And she resented his assumption that she was a willing participant in this conversation when the only emotion she felt was a seething anger.

  "Your father's keen for you to remain here where he feels you'll be properly looked after. However, it's entirely your choice, and if you think you'll be happier in London, then we can arrange to transfer you as long as you understand that you do need to be looked after. In the short term anyway."

  Her reflection examined him. "Is Adam paying you?"

  He nodded. "This is a private clinic."

  "But not a hospital?"

  "No. We specialize in addiction therapy," he told her. "But we do offer convalescent care as well."

  "I'm not addicted to anything." You got drunk...

  "No one's suggesting you are."

  She drew on her cigarette. "Then why is my father paying four hundred pounds a day for me to be here?" she asked evenly. "I could have convalescent care in a nursing home for a fraction of that."

  He studied her where she sat like a dignified, one-eyed Buddha upon her bed. "How did you know it costs four hundred pounds a day?"

  "My stepmother told me," she lied. "I know my father very well. Dr. Protheroe, so, predictably, it was the first thing I asked her."

  "He did warn me you'd take nothing for granted."

  The reflection smiled at him. "I certainly don't like being lied to," she murmured. "My stepmother told me I tried to commit suicide." She watched him for a reaction, but there was none. "I don't believe it," she went on dispassionately, "but I do believe that Adam would pay a psychiatrist to straighten me out if he believed it. So what sort of therapy is he buying for me?''

  "No one's lying to you, Jinx. Your father was very concerned that you should be in an environment where you could recover at your own speed and in your own way. Certainly we have psychiatrists on the premises, and certainly we offer therapy to those who want it, but I am precisely what I said I was, a doctor pure and simple. My role is largely administrative, but I also take an interest in our convalescent patients. There is nothing sinister about your being here."

  Was that right? It didn't feel right. Even the woman in the mirror found that one hard to swallow. "Did Adam tell you I am very hostile to psychiatrists and psychiatry?"

  "Yes, he did."

  "Why does he think I tried to kill myself?"

  "Because that's the conclusion the police have reached after their investigation into your crash."

  "They're wrong," she said tightly. "I would never commit suicide."

  "Okay," Protheroe said easily. "I'm not arguing with you."

  She closed her eye. "Why would I suddenly want to kill myself when I've never wanted to before?" Anger roared in her ears.

  He didn't say anything.

  "Please," she said harshly. "I would like to know what's being said about me."

  "All right. If you accept that there's a good deal of physical evidence to support the police theory, then the rationale behind it seems to be that you were upset by your broken engagement.

  Your last real memory is saying good-bye to Leo when you left London two and a half weeks ago to stay with your parents at Hellingdon Hall. You probably don't remember doing it, but you've repeated that memory several times-to the police and to my colleagues at Odstock Hospital-and they have concluded, possibly wrongly, that it's important to you to preserve a happy memory over the memory of the night a week later when Leo told you he was leaving you for your friend, Meg Harris."

  She considered this in silence for a long time. "Then they're saying my amnesia isn't entirely physical. There's an element of face-saving in it. Because I can't bear to think of Leo rejecting me, I've wiped his shabbiness out of my mind and then gone on to forget my own weakness in being unable to face life without him."

  Her choice of words was fascinating. "In substance that's what your father's been told."

  "All right." He saw tears glistening on her lashes. "If I was so distraught about Leo deserting me two weeks ago that I had to wipe the whole thing out of my memory, then why am I not equally distraught learning about it all over again?"

  "I don't know. It's interesting, isn't it? How would you explain it?"

  She looked away. "I was having too many problems adjusting to the whole idea of marriage. The only thing I feel now is relief that I don't have to go through with it. I'd say I wasn't distraught the first time."

  He nodded. "I'm prepared to accept that. So, let's talk about it. Was the wedding your idea or Leo's?"

  "The wedding was my father's idea, but if you're asking me whose idea it was to get married, then that was Leo's. He sprang it on me out of the blue a couple of months ago, and I said yes because at the time I thought it was what I wanted."

  "But you changed your mind."

  "Yes."

  "Did you tell anyone?"

  "I don't think so." She felt his skepticism as strongly as if he'd reached out and touched her with it. Oh God, what a bloody awful situation this was. "But I'm sure Leo must have known," she said quickly. "Does he say I was unhappy about him leaving?"

  Dr. Protheroe shook his head. "I don't know."

  She looked at the telephone by her bedside table. "I know Meg's home number. We could phone him and ask him." But did she want to do that? Would Leo ever admit that it was she who didn't want to marry him?

  "At the moment he's not available. The police have tried. He's out of the country for a few weeks."

  Not available. She already knew that. How? She licked her lips nervously. "What about Meg?"

  "She's with him. I'm told they've gone to France." He watched her hands writhe in her lap and wondered what complicated emotions had driven the other two to betray her. "You were telling me why you changed your mind," he prompted her. "What happened? Was it a sudden decision, or something that developed gradually?"

  She struggled to remember. "I came to re
alize that the only reason he wanted to marry me was because I'm Adam Kingsley's daughter and Adam's not poor." But was that true? Wasn't it Russell who had wanted to marry her for her money? She fell silent and thought about what she'd said. " 'He that diggeth a pit shall fall into it,' " she murmured.

  "Why do you say that?"

  "Because you're going to ask me if Meg Harris's family is wealthy."

  He didn't say anything.

  "They're not. Her father earns a pittance as a rural vicar." She ground her cigarette into the ashtray and fixed a smile to her lips. "So presumably Leo has discovered true love at last."

  "Are you angry with Meg? Your stepmother tells me you've known her a long time."

  "We were at Oxford together." She looked up. "And no, I'm not, as a matter of fact, but that's only because I'm finding it all rather difficult to believe at the moment. I only have Betty's word for it."

  "Don't you believe her?"

  "Not often, but that's not an indication of an Electra complex. She's the only mother I've ever known and I'm very fond of her."

  He raised an amused eyebrow. "What did you read at Oxford? The classics?"

  She nodded. "And a complete waste of time they were, too, for someone who was only ever interested in photography. I can do crosswords and decipher the roots of words, but apart from that my education was wasted."

  "What is that?" He gave his beard a thoughtful scratch. "A defense mechanism against anyone who thinks you're over-privileged?"

  "Just habit," she said dismissively. "My father finds my qualifications rather more impressive than anyone else does."

  "I see."

  She doubted that very much. Adam's pride in his only daughter bordered on the obsessional, which was why there was so little love lost between any of the inhabitants of Hellingdon Hall. How much did this doctor know? she wondered. Had he met Adam? Did he understand the tyranny under which they lived?

  "Look," she said abruptly, "why don't I make this easy for you. I mean, I know this routine by heart. How old were you when your mother died? Two. How old were you when Adam remarried? Seven. Did your stepmother resent you? I've no idea, I was too young to notice. Did you resent her? I've no idea, I was too young to know what resentment was. Have you any brothers or sisters? Two half brothers, Miles and Fergus. Do you resent them? No. Do they resent you? No. How old are they? Twenty-six and twenty-four. Are they married? No, they still live at home. Do you love your father? Yes. Does he love you? Yes."