The Dark Room

by Minette Walters

  For Colleen

  and

  in memory of my father

  And we forget because we must

  And not because we will.

  Matthew Arnold, ‘Absence’

  The idea of the false self was put forward by R. D. Laing, adapting some theories of Jean-Paul Sartre. The false self was an artificially created self-image designed to concur with expectations, while the true self remained hidden and protected.

  Brian Masters, Killing for Company

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  WITH HER SHARP little face set in lines of dissatisfaction, the twelve-year-old girl sat up and searched for her knickers among the forest leaves. It had finally begun to dawn on her that sex with Bobby Franklyn wasn’t all it could be. She put on her shoes and kicked him hard. ‘Get up, Bobby,’ she snapped. ‘It’s your turn to find the bloody dog.’

  He rolled over on to his back. ‘In a minute,’ he muttered sleepily.

  ‘No, now. Mum’ll skin me alive if Rex gets home before me again. She’s not stupid, you know.’ She stood up and dug the heel of her shoe into his naked thigh, twisting it back and forth in a childish desire to hurt. ‘Get up.’

  ‘OK, OK.’ He rose sulkily to his feet, tugging at his trousers. ‘But this is pissing me off, you know. It’s hardly worth doing if we have to go looking for the dog every time.’

  She moved away from him. ‘It’s not Rex that makes it hardly worth doing.’ There were tears of angry humiliation in her eyes. ‘I should have listened to Mum. She always says it takes a real man to do it properly.’

  ‘Yeah, well,’ he said, zipping his fly, ‘it’d be a damn sight easier if I didn’t have to pretend you were Julia Roberts. What would your sodding Mum know about it, anyway? It’s years since anyone gave her a good shagging.’ He had few feelings for these girls beyond the purely animal, but he grew to hate them very quickly when they gave him lip about his performance. The urge to smash their jeering little faces in was becoming irresistible.

  The girl started to walk away. ‘I hate you, Bobby. I really hate you, and I’m going to tell on you.’ She tapped her watch. ‘Three minutes. That’s as long as you can keep it up. Three lousy minutes. Is that what you call a good shagging?’ She gave a triumphant glance over her shoulder, saw something in his face that alerted her to the danger she was in, and took to her heels in sudden fear. ‘REX!’ she screamed. ‘RE-EX! He’ll kill you if you touch me,’ she sobbed, her small wiry body darting through the trees.

  But it was Bobby who was going to do the killing. His anger was out of control. He threw himself at her back and brought her crashing to the ground, breathing heavily as he tried to get astride her thrashing legs. ‘Bitch!’ he grunted. ‘Bloody bitch!’

  Fear lent her strength. She scrambled away from him, crying for her dog, slithering and sliding in a flurry of decomposing leaves into a broad ditch that scored the forest bed. She landed on her feet, only yards from the huge Alsatian, who stood, hackles up and growling. ‘I’ll set him on you, and he’ll rip you to pieces. And I won’t care, and I won’t stop him.’ She saw with satisfaction that Bobby had turned white to the gills. ‘You’re such a CREEP!’ she yelled.

  And then she saw that Rex was growling at her and not at Bobby, and that what had drained the colour from her boyfriend’s face was not his fear of the dog but stunned horror at what the dog was guarding. She had a glimpse of something half-unearthed and repulsively human, before panic drove her up the slope again in sobbing, wide-eyed terror.

  Chapter One

  SHE CLUNG TO sleep tenaciously, wrapped in beguiling dreams. It was explained to her afterwards that they weren’t dreams at all, only reality breaking through the days of confusion as she rose from deep unconsciousness to full awareness, but she found that difficult to accept. Reality was too depressing to give birth to such contentment. Her awakening was painful. They propped her on pillows and she caught glimpses of herself from time to time in the dressing-table mirror, a waxen-faced effigy with shaven head and bandaged eye – hardly recognizable – and she had an instinctive desire to withdraw from it and leave it to play its part alone. It wasn’t her. A huge bear of a man with close-cropped hair and close-cropped beard leant over her and told her she’d been in a car accident. But he didn’t tell her where or when. You’re a lucky young woman, he said. She remembered that. Forgot everything else. She had a sense of time passing, of people talking to her, but she preferred to drowse in sleep where dreams beguiled.

  She was aware. She saw. She heard. And she felt safe with the pleasant female voices that smoothed and soothed and petted. She answered them in her head but never out loud, for she clung to the spurious protection of intellectual absence. ‘Are you with us today?’ the nurses asked, pressing their faces up to hers. I’ve been with you all along. ‘Here’s your mother to see you, dear.’ I don’t have a mother. I have a stepmother. ‘Come on, love, your eyes are open. We know you can hear us, so when are you going to talk to us?’ When I’m ready . . . when I’m ready . . . when I want to remember . . .

  Chapter Two

  SHE AWOKE ONE night with fear sucking the breath from her lungs. She opened her eyes and strained them into the blackness. She was in a dark room – her dark room? – and she wasn’t alone. Someone – something? – prowled the shadows beyond her vision.

  WHAT?

  Fear . . . fear . . . FEAR . . .

  She sat bolt upright, sweat pouring down her back, screams issuing in a tumult of sound from her gaping mouth.

  Light flooded the room. Comfort came in the shape of a woman’s soft breasts, strong arms and sweet voice. ‘There, there, Jane. It’s all right. Come on, love, calm down. You had a nightmare.’

  But she knew that was wrong. Her terror was real. There was something in the dark room with her. ‘My name’s Jinx,’ she whispered. ‘I’m a photographer, and this isn’t my room.’ She laid her shaven head against the starched white uniform and knew the bitterness of defeat. There would be no more sweet dreams. ‘Where am I?’ she asked. ‘Who are you? Why am I here?’

  ‘You’re in the Nightingale Clinic in Salisbury,’ said the nurse, ‘and I’m Sister Gordon. You were in a car accident, but you’re safe now. Let’s see if we can get you back to sleep again.’

  Jinx allowed herself to be tucked back under the sheets by a firm pair of hands. ‘You won’t turn the light off, will you?’ she begged. ‘I can’t see in the dark.’

  Query prosecution of

  Miss J. Kingsley /driving

  with 150mg per 100ml

  Date: 22 June, 1994

  From: Sergeant Geoff Halliwell

  Miss Kingsley was thrown from her vehicle before it impacted against a concrete stanchion in one corner of the airfield. She was unconscious when she was found at 21.45 on Monday, 13 June, by Mr Andrew Wilson and Miss Jenny Ragg. Miss Kingsley suffered severe concussion and bruising/laceration of her arms and face when she was thrown from the car. She remained unconscious for three days and was very confused when she finally came round. She ha
s no recollection of the accident and claims not to know why she was at the airfield. Blood samples taken at 00.23 (14.6.94) show 150mg per 100ml. Two empty wine bottles were recovered from the floor of the car when it was examined the following day.

  PCs Gregg and Hardy had one brief interview with Miss Kingsley shortly after she regained consciousness, but she was too confused to tell them anything other than that she appeared to believe it was Saturday, 4 June, (i.e. some 9 days before the incident on 13.6.94) and that she was on her way from London to Hampshire. Since the interview (5 days) she has remained dazed and uncommunicative and visits have been suspended on the advice of her doctors. They have diagnosed post-traumatic amnesia, following concussion. Her parents report that she spent the week 4–10 June with them (though Miss Kingsley clearly has no memory of this) before returning to Richmond on the evening of Friday, 10 June, following a telephone call. They describe her as being in good spirits and looking forward to her forthcoming wedding on 2 July. She was expected at work on Monday, 13 June, but did not show. She runs her own photographic studio in Pimlico and her employees say they were concerned at her non-appearance. They left several messages on her answerphone on the 13th but received no reply.

  Interviews by Richmond police with her neighbours in Glenavon Gdns, Colonel and Mrs Clancey, reveal that she made an attempt on her life on Sunday, 12 June. Col. Clancey, whose garage adjoins Miss Kingsley’s, heard her car engine running with the door closed. When he went to investigate, he found her garage full of fumes and Miss Kingsley half-asleep at the wheel. He dragged her outside and revived her, but did not report the incident because Miss Kingsley asked him not to. He and his wife are deeply upset that she has ‘tried to do it again’.

  Both Col. and Mrs Clancey and Mr and Mrs Adam Kingsley made reference to a Mr Leo Wallader who was until recently Miss Kingsley’s fiancé. It appears he left 12 Glenavon Gdns on Friday, 10 June, after telling Miss Kingsley he couldn’t marry her because he had plans to marry her closest friend, Meg Harris, instead. Mr Wallader and Ms Harris are unavailable for interview at the moment. According to Sir Anthony Wallader (father) they are currently travelling in France but plan to return some time in July.

  In view of a recent MOT certificate on Miss Kingsley’s vehicle, which tends to rule out malfunction, and the fact that the chances of hitting the concrete stanchion by accident are virtually nil, it seems clear that she drove her car into it deliberately. Therefore, unless she recovers enough of her memory to give an explanation of the events leading up to the incident, Gregg and Hardy incline to the view that this was a second attempt at suicide after a drinking session in her car. Mr Adam Kingsley, her father, has offered to pay the costs of the emergency services, meanwhile Miss Kingsley has been transferred to the Nightingale Clinic where she is receiving treatment from Dr Alan Protheroe. Mr Kingsley’s solicitor is pressing for a decision on whether or not we intend to proceed against Miss Kingsley. My view is to do nothing in view of her father’s willingness to pick up the tab, her disturbed state of mind and the fact that she chose such a deserted location. Please advise.

  Chapter Three

  Wednesday, 22 June, Nightingale Clinic, Salisbury,

  Wiltshire – 8.30 a.m.

  HOW DRAB REALITY was. Even the sun shining through her windows was less vivid than her dreams. Perhaps it had something to do with the bandage over her right eye, but she didn’t think so. Consciousness itself was leaden and dull, and so restrictive that she felt only a terrible depression. The big bear of a doctor came in as she toyed with her breakfast, told her again that she’d been in an accident and said the police would like to talk to her. She shrugged. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’ She would have added that she despised policemen if he’d stayed to listen, but he went away again before she could put the thought into words.

  She had no memory of the first police interview at Odstock Hospital and politely denied ever having met the two uniformed constables who came to her room. She explained that she could not remember the accident, indeed could remember nothing at all since leaving her house and her fiancé in London the previous morning. The policemen resembled each other, tall, stolid men with sandy hair and florid complexions, who showed their discomfort at her answers by turning their caps in unison between their fingers. She labelled them Tweedledum and Tweedledee and chuckled silently because they were so much more amusing than her sore head, bandaged eye and hideously bruised arms. They asked her where she had been going, and she replied that she was on her way to stay with her parents at Hellingdon Hall. ‘I have to help my stepmother with wedding preparations,’ she explained. ‘I’m getting married on the second of July.’ She heard herself announce the fact with pleasure, while the voice of cynicism murmured in her brain. Leo will run a mile before he hitches himself to a bald, one-eyed bride.

  They thanked her and left.

  Two hours later, her stepmother dissolved into tears at her bedside, blurted out that the wedding was off, it was Wednesday, the twenty-second of June, Leo had left her for Meg twelve days previously and she had, to all intents and purposes, driven her car at a concrete pillar four days later in a deliberate attempt to kill herself.

  Jinx stared at her ugly, scarred hands. ‘Didn’t I say goodbye to Leo yesterday?’

  ‘You were unconscious for three days and very confused afterwards. You were in the hospital until Friday, and I went to see you, but you didn’t know who I was. I’ve come here twice and you’ve looked at me, but you didn’t want to talk to me. This is the first time you’ve recognized me. Daddy’s that upset about it.’ Her mouth wobbled rather pathetically. ‘We were so afraid we’d lost you.’

  ‘I’ve come to stay with you. That’s why I’m here. You and I are going to confirm the arrangements for the wedding.’ If she said it slowly and clearly enough, Betty must believe her. But no, Betty was a fool. Betty had always been a fool. ‘The week beginning the fourth of June. It’s been in the diary for months . . .’

  Mrs Kingsley’s tears poured down her plump cheeks, scoring tiny pink rivulets in her over-powdered face. ‘You’ve already been, my darling. You came down a fortnight and a half ago, spent the week with Daddy and me, did all the things you were supposed to do, and then went home to find Leo packing his bags. Don’t you remember? He’s gone to live with Meg. Oh, I could murder him, Jinx, I really could.’ She wrung her hands. ‘I always told you he wasn’t a nice man, but you wouldn’t listen. And your father was just as bad. “He’s a Wallader, Elizabeth . . .”’ She rambled on, her huge chest heaving tragically inside a woollen dress that was far too tight.

  The idea that nearly three weeks had passed without her being able to recollect a single day was so far beyond Jinx’s comprehension that she fixed her attention on what was real. Red carnations and white lilies in a vase on her bedside table. French windows looking out on to a flag-stoned terrace, with a carefully tended garden beyond. Television in the corner. Leather armchairs on either side of a coffee table – walnut, she decided, and a walnut dressing table. Bathroom to her left. Door to the corridor on her right. Where had Adam put her this time? Somewhere very expensive, she thought. The Nightingale Clinic, the nurse had told her. In Salisbury. But why Salisbury when she lived in London?

  Betty’s plaintive wailing broke into her thoughts. ‘I wish it hadn’t upset you so much, my darling. You’ve no idea how badly Daddy’s taken it all. He sees it as an insult to him, you know. He never thought anyone could make his little girl do something so’ – she cast about for a word – ‘silly.’

  Little girl? What on earth was Betty talking about? She had never been Adam’s little girl – his performing puppet perhaps – never his little girl. She felt very tired suddenly. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘You got drunk and tried to kill yourself, my poor baby. Your car’s been written off.’ Mrs Kingsley fished a newspaper photograph out of her handbag and pressed it into her stepdaughter’s lap. ‘That’s what it looked like afterwards. It’s a mercy you survived, it reall
y is.’ She pointed to the date in the top left-hand corner of the clipping. ‘The fourteenth of June, the day after the accident. And today’s date’ – she pushed forward another newspaper – ‘there, you see, the twenty-second, a whole week later.’

  Jinx examined the picture curiously. The writhing mass of twisted metal, backlit by police arc lights, had the fantastic quality of surrealist art. It was a stark silhouette and, in the distortions of the chassis and the oblique angle from which the photographer had taken his shot, it appeared to portray a gleaming metal gauntlet clasped about the raised sword of the pillar. It was a great picture, she thought, and wondered who had taken it.

  ‘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 cancelled. He wants to marry Meg instead.’

  She watched a tear drip from the powdered chin on to 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 as long as you’ve known her, and now she’s taken your husband. You always were 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 her 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 strait-laced 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.’