The Red Room

by Nicci French

  “Moving,” said Oban, kicking a roll of Sellotape out of his path.

  “I kind of gathered.”

  “A bloody disaster is what it is. Have you ever moved house?”

  “Yes. Awful.”

  I looked around for Furth but, to my relief, I couldn’t see him. And then I got irritated with myself. What did I have to feel bad about? I hadn’t asked for this. We stopped at the far side of the office, in a corner. Oban signaled to various people hunched over desks, and phones were replaced, files closed and a small group of detectives, male and female, gathered round. Oban gave an introductory cough.

  “This is Dr. Kit Quinn. She’s attached to the Welbeck Clinic and to Market Hill Hospital for the Criminally Insane.” He turned to me. “I won’t introduce you to everybody now. You’ll probably run up against most of them.”

  “Hello,” I said, trying to aim a smile at the whole room. At that moment, Furth came in. He stood by the door and folded his arms across his chest.

  “It was because of Dr. Quinn,” Oban continued, “that we let Michael Doll go.” This statement wasn’t exactly greeted with a round of applause. Instead there were some murmurs at the back and a shuffling of feet. “And if anybody has a problem with that, I’d like them to come and see me. If this case had gone in front of a judge, it would have been tossed straight back in our faces. I won’t repeat here what I said in private to Guy, but let’s do some old-fashioned legwork, all right? And in the meantime, give Dr. Quinn what she needs.” More murmurs. I sensed that not everybody was delighted to have me foisted on them. “Kit, is there anything you want to say?”

  I started. I hadn’t been prepared for this. I looked at the slightly sullen faces that were pointed at me. “Well,” I said. I hated beginning sentences when I had no idea what was going to come next. “I just want to say that I’m not here to tell you how to do your job. The best I can do—perhaps—is to help by pointing you in one direction rather than another, making suggestions.”

  “It was Doll,” someone said. I couldn’t see who.

  “Was it?” I said, for want of a more effective riposte.

  “Yeah.”

  I could identify the speaker now, a man at the back in shirtsleeves, tall, the build of a rugby player.

  Oban stepped forward. “Then find some real evidence, Gil,” he said.

  “What if you were wrong? What if Doll did it?”

  “Look, I never said Doll was innocent. I said there was no evidence. What I want to do is look at what you’ve got and pretend that I never heard his name.” Somebody muttered something I couldn’t hear and someone else guffawed.

  “That’s enough,” said Oban sharply. “Meeting’s over. Sorry, Kit,” he said, looking over his detectives with an expression of disdain. “I’d say they aren’t a bad lot, really, except it’s not true. But I know you can stand up for yourself. I’ll leave you with Guy. All right?”

  “Fine.” It wasn’t.

  Oban left and the others drifted away, not looking very busy. I looked at Furth. “Can I get you some tea?” he asked, with careful courtesy.

  “In a minute, thanks.”

  “Got any ideas, then?”

  “No,” I said, honestly. “I haven’t. Anyway, at this stage, ideas would be an obstacle. I want to look through the material with an empty mind.”

  Furth gave a thin smile. “I don’t see why we need to hire empty minds as long as we’ve got Gil. But I told you already, this is just a simple case.”

  “Really?”

  “A runaway found dead by a canal.”

  “Is that simple?”

  Furth shrugged and looked around, almost as if he was embarrassed that anybody should be eavesdropping while he stated the obvious to a stuck-up shrink. “Perverts pick on prostitutes and runaways because they’re easy targets. They pick on them by canals because they’re deserted. No passing traffic.”

  “Yes. I’ve read all that.”

  “You disagree?”

  “Can I make a suggestion?”

  Furth tightened his lips. I think he wanted to tell me to fuck off out of the station and not come back, but this wasn’t allowed. “That’s what we’re paying you for,” he said.

  “Sometimes it’s too easy just to put a label on someone. It might help not just to think of Lianne as a runaway. It stops you seeing her as an individual.”

  “She was a runaway.”

  “I know,” I said. “She may have been other things as well.”

  “Like a prostitute, you mean?” He half laughed, then stopped when he saw the look on my face. I had had a sudden flash of him when he was a boy, pushed around by other boys until he developed his hard-man act.

  “No. I don’t mean that. She was a young woman. She had a history, a past, a family, a name.”

  “Which we don’t know.”

  “How old was she, about?”

  “Sixteen, seventeen—maybe a bit less, maybe a bit more.”

  “How do we even know she was called Lianne?”

  “We don’t. We just know that’s what she called herself. Character named Pavic, who runs a local hostel, identified her.”

  “But presumably it’s just a matter of time before you find out who Lianne actually was, where she came from.”

  “What makes you think that?” He had a slight smile on his lips.

  “Everyone’s on some list, some computer, some register, aren’t they?”

  “Do you know how many runaways there are?”

  “A lot, I know.”

  “Tens of thousands.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Those are the ones we know are missing, but can’t find. The ones someone, somewhere, wants us to find. What about all of the others, like Lianne, who nobody really gives a fuck about, who just drifted off one day and never came back? How do we find them, if no one’s reported them as lost? It’s like a fucking missing-luggage department in an airport. Have you ever been in one of those? I have, in Cairo—a great warehouse of suitcases, most of them completely hidden from sight, gathering dust, being eaten by rats. Hard enough to find your bag even if it’s got a label on, but if it hasn’t, you might as well forget it.”

  “Lianne’s not a piece of luggage.”

  He stared at me. “I didn’t say she was piece of luggage,” he said. “I said she was like a piece of luggage.”

  “My point is that we have to think of her as a girl, not a stray item. Not just ‘the runaway.’”

  “What about the canal? Are we allowed to call it that or do you think it might be a river in disguise?”

  “I was trying to say that it helps to come to things fresh. But maybe that’s really a reminder for myself rather than you.”

  “Good,” he said, very quietly. “We’re eagerly awaiting your contribution. What can I get you?”

  “Didn’t Oban tell you?” I tried hard to sound authoritative and as if I knew exactly what I was doing. “I want a quiet room and then I’d like to look through everything you’ve got.”

  “Anything else?” This last was said with grim politeness.

  “Tea would be nice, please. Just a drop of milk. No sugar.”

  Furth took me to a small windowless room that smelled as if it had been previously used for storing something corrosive and illegal. There was nothing but a desk and a plastic chair. Within a couple of minutes two female officers arrived carrying a bundle of files. It seemed disappointingly flimsy. Almost nothing was known about Lianne’s life, and they hadn’t even accumulated much data on her death. I started to read. I sat in the room for an hour and three-quarters. I read about puncture wounds, I read some statements, I looked at photographs of her pale body at the scene, face down in the scrubby grass behind some bushes by the canal and at the end I thought: Is that it?

  10

  On the radio they said it was the wettest summer since 1736. I parked in a puddle and sat for a minute, while water cascaded down the windscreen and bounced off the hood. I closed my eyes and heard
the rain inside my head like a roaring. I have not become used to seeing dead bodies.

  The pathologist was waiting for me. Alexandra Harris. I’d met her before. She didn’t look like a pathologist, whatever a pathologist is supposed to look like, more like an aging B-movie actress from the thirties, voluptuous in her white coat, with dark hair falling in ringlets around her creamy oval face and a dreamy, passive air about her. Or maybe she was just tired. There were dark rings under her eyes.

  “Alexandra,” I said, as we shook hands. “Thanks for giving me your time.”

  “That’s OK. It’s my job. Guy said you’d already looked through the files.”

  “Yes. It wasn’t you who did the autopsy, though?”

  “No, that was his lordship. I mean Brian Barrow. Sir Brian. He’s teaching today. What are you looking for exactly?”

  “I just want to get an impression,” I said.

  “An impression?” She gazed at me doubtfully, as if suddenly this wasn’t such a good idea.

  “A feel for her,” I added inadequately. “Lianne.”

  “Have you seen a cadaver before? There’s not much to see.”

  “Seen one?” I asked. “I trained as a doctor. I had one of my own for six months.”

  “Sorry. Do you want me to take you straight through?”

  “Might as well.”

  My fingers slipped on the handle of my briefcase. I wanted to see Lianne; really see her, not just flick through the ghastly color photographs looking for clues. She’d had a short, lonely life, with no one to miss her much now that she’d died. I wanted to touch her; stand by her body for a while. I didn’t think Alexandra would understand that, and I’m not sure I understood it either.

  “Do I need to change?” I asked.

  “You mean into a ball-gown?” Alexandra said, with a grin. “No, we dress pretty informally around here.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m fairly new to this. I haven’t learned to treat it all as a joke yet.”

  “You want me to talk like an undertaker?”

  “I want to see Lianne,” I said gently.

  Alexandra’s smile faded. She wasn’t quite as friendly anymore. I followed her through two sets of swing doors, hearing the click of my heels across the linoleum. Here we were in another world, cold and silent and sterile. An underworld, I thought. Beneath my thin summer clothes, my skin was covered in goose-bumps. I could hear my heart thumping—how strange, all these bodies in here, but only our two hearts beating.

  __________

  I could see what Alexandra had meant. Lianne looked as if every trace of evidence that she had lived in the messy crowded world outside had been scoured off her body. She was very, very clean. Not clean like when you wash your hands. Clean like when you’ve been scrubbing a sink and your hands are wrinkled and raw. With her head exposed, the one scrap of her life I could see was the tiny fold of a hole in an ear-lobe. Sir Brian Barrow had had a tricky job. He had cut round her neck slightly above the laceration. His own incision had now been sewn back up. The knife wound remained but, cleaned up with no blood, it had a look of padded plastic. I had attended surgical operations before and the strong cat-food smell of meat and blood had never left me. But this was different. Just a sharp medicinal odor that burned my nostrils.

  Lianne’s face was round. There was a scattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose. Her mouth was small and colorless. I laid one finger against her cheek, felt the stony flesh. Death at my fingertips, so chill and hard it made me gasp. She had coppery hair, long, shaggy, and parted crookedly in the middle. When I leaned forward, I could see the split ends. Hair appears to go on growing after death, everyone knows that. Hair and nails—but when I cautiously lifted up one side of the sheet to expose an arm, I saw that Lianne’s fingernails were chewed to the quick. She had tiny plump hands. Somehow, it was the hands that moved me most. They still looked soft, as if they could curl and hold. I touched her palm, and it was stony too.

  I took a deep breath and pulled off the covering, so that only her feet were still hidden. I took in her whole body; it was as if the sight of her was pouring into my skull and fixing there. Once more there was Sir Brian’s long incision down from her neck to her reddish pubic hair. Not quite straight. There was a little cut around her belly-button, like a road forking at an ancient monument. The wound had been neatly sewn up, like a demonstration in a home-economics lesson. I needed to concentrate on the relevant wounds. Her throat was neatly and efficiently cut, side to side, but there were also these small stab marks on her stomach, her shoulders, her thighs. There were seventeen of them—I lost count the first time and had to start again. Her high, shallow breasts were untouched; so too was her genital area. I knew from the autopsy report that there had been no injuries inside either the vagina or the perineum.

  I stepped closer to Lianne. I tried to keep calling her that in my mind. Her legs were unshaved. Her arms were downy. There were a couple of violent scratches on her left wrist—those would be from where she’d lain among brambles by the canal. A scar on her left knee. Maybe she’d fallen over when she was little. I imagined her when she was still in pigtails, with gaps in her teeth, running around some garden one summer when it didn’t rain, thinking life would be happy. That’s what is so touching about children: They are sure that life will be grand for them. Ask a six-year-old what they want to be when they grow up, and they say, a pilot, a prime minister, a ballet dancer, a pop star, a footballer, a millionaire. What had Lianne wanted to be, I wondered. Well, whatever her dreams had been, there were no dreams now. Here she was—except, of course, Lianne wasn’t here at all, only her wrong-colored, chilled corpse. There was nobody here except me. No breath of life in the room except my breath. I had never before had such a sense of absence.

  I lifted the sheet off her feet, and saw that the nails were painted red, the varnish chipped. I touched the scar on her knee. I touched her hand again, with its pathetic bitten nails. I lifted up a strand of copper hair. Even her hair felt dead. Each cell and particle of her had stopped in its track. I could feel the blood hammering round my body, the air rushing through it, the images flooding through my eyes, the hair prickling on my clammy skin.

  Enough. I pulled up the sheet, made sure it entirely covered Lianne, not even a strand of hair showing. I wanted to say something, anything, to break the silence, but I couldn’t think of anything to say so I cleared my throat loudly instead. Immediately Alexandra clipped back into the room. She must have been waiting just outside.

  “Finished?”

  “Yes.”

  Lianne was lying in a drawer and with an effort, Alexandra pushed it back as if into a giant filing cabinet. “Nothing you couldn’t have found in the report, was there?” she asked, with a touch of sharpness.

  “I wanted to look at the wounds,” I said.

  I collected my case, my mac, stumbled through the door into the drenching downpour. I lifted my face up to the sky and let rain stream over it like tears.

  __________

  I went back to my boxy room at the station and rifled through Lianne’s file again, though I knew it pretty well by now. I looked first at the sparse sheet of biography: young woman known as Lianne, estimated age around seventeen, thought to have turned up in the Kersey Town area seven to eight months ago, stayed briefly in a hostel run by a man called William Pavic, otherwise—according to the couple of fellow drifters the police had managed to track down—slept in parks and on benches and in the doorways of shops or, every so often, on the floor of a luckier friend who lived in a B&B. That was all—nothing about her character, her friendships, her sexual history. It didn’t say whether she had been a virgin or not.

  I picked up the map of where her body had been found, X marks the spot. Then I dialed through to Furth.

  “I’d like to see where she was found,” I said. “Maybe this afternoon, after my clinic work? Say five o’clock, is that possible?”

  “I’ll get Gil to take you there,” he answer
ed. I could almost hear him smile.

  __________

  “Here’s where Doll did her,” he said, glancing sideways at me. He stood back to let me see.

  Lianne’s body had been found on a steepish bank behind the stump of a dead tree, where ragwort, cow parsley and nettles grew. You could still see from the crushed and broken stems where she had sprawled face down. Her head had been pushed right into the green forest of weeds. Her feet, in their white pumps and perky red-striped socks, had been resting against a broken bottle. Tatters of plastic hung from the brambles and floated in the oily brown water. There were cigarette packets and old stubs ground into the mud of the canal towpath. A tiny plastic horse lay just in front of Lianne’s hiding place; probably some toddler had let it drop there. Just behind it I could see a bike wheel, rusting and bent.

  “And a young man found her?”

  “That’s right. Darryl something or other.”

  “Pearce?”

  “Yeah, a jogger. Serves him right. Did you read his statement? He found her as she was dying. More or less. He was staggering along here and heard her crying out.”

  “But she had died by the time he found her.”

  “Wanker—that’s Darryl, not you. He pissed around her for ten minutes, he said, deciding what to do. Scared out of his wits, more like. Then, by the time he got his bottle back and looked and then called us and we got there, she was dead. If he’d walked straight round, she could have told him who’d done it. Saved us an inquiry.”

  “Wasn’t he a suspect?”

  “Course. But he didn’t touch the body. Old Lianne looked as if she’d been sprayed with blood. The killer must have been covered. We did swabs on Darryl, fiber tests, everything. Not a sausage.”

  “And there was the woman, Mary Gould,” I said, half to myself.

  “Yeah, the old dear with bread for the ducks. She came from the other side of the bushes, from the flats. She saw the body and just legged it back home. She didn’t phone until the next day. We’ve put her medal on hold.”