The Dark Room

by Minette Walters

WPC Blake, comfortably unobtrusive in jeans and a T-shirt, finally tracked Samantha Garrison to earth in a city centre pub. She was alone at the bar, a rather pathetic sight in a tight black strapless sheath that showed every one of her middle-aged bulges and encouraged her underarm fat to flow like soft lard over the sequined border. Limp hair hung like a damp curtain about her heavily made-up face and cheap scent rose in a thick miasma from her warm pores.

  ‘Samantha Garrison?’ she asked, slipping on to the neighbouring stool.

  ‘Oh, Jesus,’ sighed the woman, ‘tell me you’re not the filth, there’s a love. I just don’t need the aggro at the moment. I’m having a quiet drink in my local, all right? Do you see any customers because I sure as hell don’t. Chance’d be a fine thing on a Sunday night in this miserable hell-hole.’

  ‘I’m not here for aggro,’ said Blake, catching the barman’s eye. ‘What are you drinking?’

  Samantha eyed the half-pint of bitter that she’d been spinning out for the last forty minutes. ‘Double rum and Coke,’ she said.

  Blake ordered a gin and tonic for herself, waited for the drinks to arrive, then suggested they adjourn to an isolated table in the window.

  ‘You said no aggro,’ Samantha reminded her. ‘What do you want to say to me over there that you can’t say here?’

  ‘I want to talk about what happened to you on the twenty-third of March. I thought it would be less embarrassing if we were a little more private.’

  A bleak expression settled over the painted face. ‘I knew that one would come back to haunt me. What if I say I don’t want to talk about it?’

  ‘Then I’ll be conducting a one-sided conversation which everyone will hear.’ She glanced towards the barman. ‘I’m trying to make things easy for you, Samantha. If you’d rather, we can go back to your house.’

  ‘Gawd no. D’you think I want my kids reminding what happened?’ She eased off the stool. ‘Get your arse over here then but I’m not making no promises. It still gives me the sweats just thinking about it. I suppose it’s what happened to that other girl that’s got you on my back again.’

  Blake took the chair opposite and leaned forward, elbows on the table. ‘Which other girl’s that?’

  ‘The word is another one got done same as me.’

  ‘It certainly looks like it.’

  ‘Is she talking?’

  ‘Not at the moment. She’s too scared.’

  Samantha took a huge swallow of her rum and Coke. ‘Not bloody surprised.’

  Blake nodded. ‘We need one of you to help us. We’re worried that if he does it again he might kill the next girl.’ She examined the woman’s face closely. ‘Girl,’ she thought, was quite the wrong expression. Flossie had given her age as forty-six and Samantha would never see forty again. There were other similarities, too. They were both plump, both blonde and both extremely heavy-handed with near-white face powder. ‘How did he contact you, Samantha? Did he pick you up off the street, or do you advertise somewhere?’

  ‘Listen, love, I said I wouldn’t make no promises and I meant it.’

  ‘Flossie called me “love”. You call me “love”. Look, please don’t take offence, but you and she are very alike. I’d describe you both as “motherly”.’ She paused to collect her thoughts. ‘The only reference Flossie made to her attacker was to call him Little Lord Fauntleroy, so I’m guessing he’s much younger than both of you, probably well spoken and probably handsome, and I’m guessing, too, that he didn’t choose either of you by accident. Judging by the fact that you and Flossie are of similar age and similar appearance, he was clearly looking for a specific kind of prostitute. Which means he must have picked you up off the street or he wouldn’t have known what you looked like. Am I right?’

  ‘I’m long past walking the streets, love.’ Samantha sighed again. ‘Look, get me another double rum and Coke, then maybe – just maybe – I’ll tell you.’

  ‘I’m not shelling out again unless it’s a definite maybe,’ said Blake firmly. ‘This isn’t official, you know, it’s my own hard-earned money I’m using.’

  ‘More fool you, dear. No one thanks you for anything these days.’

  ‘How much did he pay you to keep quiet?’

  ‘Forty,’ said Samantha, ‘but it’s not the money, love. It was him. He promised me another going over if I opened my mouth, and I believed him. Still do, if it’s of any interest to you. He was mad as a bloody hatter.’

  ‘Forty,’ Blake echoed in genuine astonishment. ‘Christ! He must have money to burn. What do you normally charge? Ten?’ No answer. ‘So he’s a rich, well-spoken, handsome young man?’ Again no answer. ‘Come on, Samantha, how did he know what you looked like? Tell me that at least. It means I can put the word out among the other girls to be careful in future.’

  The woman nudged her glass towards the WPC. ‘I reckon you’ve got it back to front, love. I reckon he was expecting something young and pretty, and found a fat old slag instead. All I know is, he rang me on the number on my card – and the card’s in that many shop windows I wouldn’t know which one he saw – made an appointment to visit, climbed on to my sodding bed and went berserk. Claimed I was old enough to be his mother and that I’d no business to be advertising under false pretences. Now give us a fill-up, there’s a good girl.’

  Blake took the glass and stood up. ‘So you think he’s a regular round the prostitutes but only lashes out at the older ones?’

  The heavy shoulders rose in a shrug. ‘Thinking’s never been my strong point, dear. If it had, I’d have been a brain surgeon. Mind, I reckon his father beats up on his ma. “Tell ’em your old man did it,” he said, “and they’ll believe you.”’

  Chapter Eleven

  Sunday, 26 June, Nightingale Clinic, Salisbury – 7.00 p.m.

  THERE WAS NO pattern to Jinx’s thoughts. Bits of remembered conversation plagued her weary brain. Do your brothers resent you? Yes, yes, YES! You were so condescending she wanted to slap you . . . She had been seven years old. A baby, still . . . the perfect child already in residence with pictures of her perfect mother all over the walls . . . Was it her fault that her father had begun to despise his second wife within months of the wedding? Relationships don’t have to be disappointing, Jinx . . . She had never known one that wasn’t. She had married Russell because she felt sorry for him and discovered too late that pity is a bad basis for marriage. Yet, without the wisdom to predict events before they happened, could anyone in her shoes have done better? So what are you saying? I don’t know, I don’t know, I DON’T KNOW! Something terrible happened . . . Russell’s dead . . .

  Dr Protheroe looked in on her at seven o’clock. ‘How’s it going?’

  She was propped up on her pillows. ‘I’m a mess,’ she said honestly, feeling again that ridiculous urge to be plucked from the bed and held in the comfort of his arms. Oh, God, she had never felt so alone.

  He leant over her and she could smell the soap on his hands. ‘You told me the police hadn’t upset you when the Sergeant called me in, but I think you were lying. What did they really want to talk to you about?’

  She fixed on the hairs that were sprouting from his shirt where the button was missing, funny little black tendrils that poked out wickedly and made a mockery of his position as clinic director. Adam would have fired him a long time ago pour encourager les autres, but then Adam rated presentation above content, and Adam was a bully. ‘They just wanted a few details about Meg,’ she said. ‘And they didn’t upset me. I’m just very tired at the moment.’

  He pulled the chair forward and sat in it. ‘OK. So what’s this mess you’re in? Physical? Mental?’

  A tear glittered along her lid. ‘Life,’ she said. ‘I’ve made a mess of life, and I don’t know how to put it right.’

  What a very seductive combination it was, he thought, this switch from tough-minded independence in the company of policemen to tearful vulnerability when alone with her doctor. He wished he felt more confident that the tear was genuine. As
Veronica Gordon, one of the nursing sisters, had said to him that morning: ‘She has a way with her, Alan. I think it’s those extraordinary eyes. They say one thing and her voice says another.’

  ‘What do the eyes say?’ he’d asked her.

  ‘Help,’ she’d said succinctly, ‘but it’s the one thing she never asks for.’

  ‘Perhaps life has made a mess of you,’ he suggested now.

  ‘No,’ said Jinx flatly. ‘That’s the excuse I’ve always used, but it’s not true. I allow things to happen instead of controlling them. Like this place, for example. I don’t want to be here, but I am. And the only reason I stay is because my father will pursue me to London and put pressure on me to go home with him, and I want that even less than I want this.’ She raised the sheet to her eyes to wipe away her tears. ‘I’m only just beginning to realize how passive I am.’

  ‘Why? Because you don’t want to do battle with your father?’

  ‘Among other things.’ She sat up and linked her arms around her raised knees. ‘Do you know that the only man I have ever been able to talk to on an equal basis is my next-door neighbour in Richmond, and he’s in his eighties. I’ve been trying to remember all afternoon whether there’s ever been anyone else and I haven’t come up with a single person.’

  ‘What about your people at the studio? Dean and Angelica. Surely you talk to them on an equal basis. As a matter of interest, have you called either of them since you arrived?’

  He knew she hadn’t. There had been only two calls out. And neither had been to her studio.

  ‘There’d be no point. We only ever talk about work and I trust them to get on with it. Besides, I don’t find it easy discussing my private life.’

  He’d noticed. ‘Josh? Can’t you talk to him?’

  She pulled a face. ‘When I see him, which isn’t very often. In any case, I usually end up apologizing for being Meg’s friend. God knows why he ever went into business with her. She can be very unreliable at times.’

  For the moment, he let Meg go. ‘What about Russell?’

  She stared beyond him out of the window. ‘He was like my father. He was possessive, he was jealous and he thought I was wonderful.’ She fell silent, lost in the past somewhere. He was about to prompt her again, when she continued of her own accord. ‘It was a classic case of out of the frying pan and into the fire. The odd thing is, he was fine as long as we weren’t married. It was ownership that changed him. He became like my father.’

  ‘Why do you feel your father owns you, Jinx?’

  ‘I don’t. That’s how Adam sees it. He thinks he can control us all.’ She glanced at him. ‘You, too, Dr Protheroe.’

  He frowned. ‘Because he’s paying this clinic to look after you? That’s hardly control.’

  She smiled. ‘But if push came to shove, whose interests would you put first? Your own and your daughter’s, or mine and the other patients’?’

  He found that amusing and gave a short bark of laughter. ‘That’s like asking me if I’d rather be the Archbishop of Canterbury or Jack the Ripper. Why should I be faced with such a dramatic choice?’

  ‘Because if you do something my father doesn’t like, you’ll probably find yourself out of a job,’ she said bluntly. ‘Why do you think that, at the age of forty, Russell suddenly left a comfortable well-paid career in Oxford to buy a down-at-heel art gallery in London? Not through choice, believe me.’ She smiled grimly. ‘To coin a phrase, my father made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.’

  Interesting use of words, he thought. ‘What was the offer?’

  ‘Leave voluntarily, or leave in disgrace.’

  ‘You’ll have to explain, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Adam doesn’t play by civilized rules. He uses information to destroy people who get in his way.’ She shrugged. ‘He paid fifty thousand pounds for the information on Russell, and that’s discounting what he paid his team of investigators to unearth the fact that it existed at all. He doesn’t mess about.’

  He hid his scepticism. ‘Am I allowed to know what this piece of information was?’

  She looked at him. ‘You don’t believe me, do you?’ She could see that he didn’t. ‘Then it’ll be your funeral, Dr Protheroe. Everybody underestimates Adam. He encourages people to believe they’re dealing with a gentleman, when they’re not. You see, he’s not like Betty. You can’t tell his origins by looking at him or speaking to him. He’s far too clever for that.’

  Protheroe felt he was being drawn once again towards a choice between her and her father, and chose to sidestep the issue. ‘I neither believe nor disbelieve,’ he said. ‘I am merely wondering what Russell could have done that was so bad. Even ten years ago, and particularly at a liberal university like Oxford, leaving in disgrace seems a somewhat old-fashioned concept.’

  ‘Not if you go to jail, it isn’t.’ She sighed. ‘Russell went to Europe every summer on lecture tours. When he came back he’d bring upwards of fifty kilos of cannabis packed into the chassis of his car. It was a straightforward transaction. He made the collection in Italy and was paid on delivery in England. He used the money to fund his art collection. He had no conscience about it. His view was that cannabis was less dangerous than alcohol or cigarettes and that the Government was mad to criminalize its use. But the penalty for smuggling is prison. Adam offered him resignation or prosecution. Russell chose resignation.’

  ‘Did you know he was smuggling drugs?’

  She shook her head. ‘Not till afterwards.’

  ‘How did Adam find out?’

  ‘According to Russell, he traced the contact in Italy and bought him off. Adam works on the principle that everyone has a chink in his armour, and if he keeps going long enough, he’ll find it. I think what probably happened is that his people calculated the value of Russell’s collection, realized he couldn’t have afforded it on his salary, and started digging into the trips abroad.’

  ‘Presumably it was Russell who told you about it, not your father.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did he explain why your father wanted him to leave Oxford?’

  ‘To get him away from me.’

  ‘Then why did Russell marry you, Jinx? Why didn’t the blackmail hold good after he’d left? Presumably he was no keener to go to prison afterwards than he was before.’

  She gave a hollow laugh. ‘You sound as though you think I’m making this up.’

  ‘Not at all. I’m just trying to understand.’

  Again, she didn’t believe him. ‘I’ve told you before, Dr Protheroe. We got married without my father’s knowledge. I persuaded Russell that Adam would back off the minute I became Mrs Landy because, whatever he might want to do to Russell, Adam would never drag me in the mud. And I was right. He didn’t.’

  Alan pondered over that for a moment, thinking that far from being passive, Jinx was describing herself as a consummate manipulator. ‘Didn’t it ever occur to you that your father would react the way he did?’

  She frowned, but didn’t say anything.

  ‘If my maths is correct, Russell was only twelve years his junior. Did you seriously think Adam would welcome him as a son-in-law?’

  ‘Of course not, but at the time Adam found out about us there was no question of my marrying Russell. Look, we were having a quiet little affair which was nobody’s business but our own.’ She stared wretchedly at her hands.

  ‘Who told him?’

  ‘My brothers.’

  ‘And how did they know?’

  She smoothed the sheet across her lap. ‘Russell used to write to me during vacations, and they opened one of his letters and showed it to Adam. I should have expected it, really. They were always looking for my clay feet.’ She paused. ‘The irony is, my father’s hated them for it ever since. I think he knows that nothing would have come of the affair if they hadn’t drawn it to his attention.’

  ‘Are you saying you wouldn’t have married Russell if you hadn’t felt guilty about what your father did?’

  Sh
e gave her faint smile. ‘He was thoroughly miserable so, yes, Reader, I married him. Actually I was pretty miserable, too. I had another year at Oxford after he’d gone and it was just a series of tearful phone calls. I thought we’d both be happier if we made the thing official.’

  ‘But you weren’t?’

  She didn’t answer.

  ‘How long were you married?’ asked Protheroe.

  She looked at him. ‘Three years.’

  ‘And you didn’t enjoy it?’ he persisted.

  ‘I found it very stifling. He was afraid I was going to leave him for a younger man, and became jealous of everyone.’ She seemed to think she was being disloyal. ‘Look, it wasn’t that bad. He was very funny when he was on form, and when I think of him now it’s with affection. On the whole, the good times far outweighed the bad.’

  Quite unconsciously, Alan echoed Fraser’s thoughts of the day before. What a dismal epitaph on a dead husband. ‘When I think of him now it’s with affection.’ But how clear it was to Alan that she tried not to think of him at all.

  ‘As a matter of interest,’ he asked curiously, ‘did you approve of his smuggling?’

  She picked at her fingernails. ‘I shared his views on the idiocy of criminalizing cannabis. Or any drugs in fact. Black markets always undermine social orders. But I thought he was a fool to have done it. Someone was bound to find out about it sooner or later.’

  ‘What sort of a lover was he?’

  She gave a snort of laughter. ‘I wondered when we’d get round to that. Sigmund Freud has a lot to answer for. Why do you give so much credence to the fantastic theories of a cocaine addict? I’ve never understood that.’

  He smiled. ‘I don’t think we do any more, or not to the extent you’re suggesting. Freud has his place in history.’ He leaned back in the chair and crossed his legs, deliberately extending the space between them. ‘But wouldn’t you agree that the sexual relationship between a man and a woman is an integral part of the whole relationship?’

  ‘No. I don’t have sex with Eric Clancey and I get on better with him than anyone else.’