The Red Room

by Nicci French

  “Was Lianne stronger when she left?”

  Now, despite everything, Will couldn’t hide the sadness in his eyes. “I don’t know,” he said.

  When he left, he didn’t look at me and I didn’t hold out my hand or say anything. But when he was gone, I bit my lip and told Oban in faltering, half-formed sentences that in the last week or so I had been seeing Will Pavic. Sort of. Oban looked punch-drunk and flabbergasted, as if I had woken him from a very deep sleep only to tell him something incomprehensible.

  “Pavic?” he said dully. “But I thought… But what about… You and him? Oh, well.” He gave a puzzled frown. “Pavic? You’re sure? You and him, a couple?”

  “We’re not exactly a couple.”

  “Like my wife and me. I know what you mean.”

  35

  “I want you to stick with me now,” Oban had said. So here I was beside him, standing once more on Jeremy Burton’s waterlogged lawn and conscious all the while of Emily—watching us out of her bedroom window with her thumb stuck in her mouth. Jeremy had insisted we go outside to talk, as if he felt oppressed in the house. He was wearing only a short-sleeved shirt, no jacket, but he didn’t seem to feel the chilly wind that was rippling round the garden. I was wearing a cardigan but I still felt cold. Water seeped through my shoes.

  “I don’t understand,” he repeated. That was almost all that he’d said since we arrived. He had looked at the photographs of Daisy, Lianne and Bryony, picking each one up and holding it away from his face as if he was longsighted, before handing it back to Oban. “No,” he had said to each one. “No. I’ve never seen this face. I’ve never heard this name. No, no, no. I don’t understand why you’re showing them to me.”

  “Your wife wrote down the names of the other victims before she died,” Oban said patiently. “Lianne. And the name of the woman who was recently attacked by the canal, Mrs. Teale—Bryony Teale. And Daisy Gill was a girl who killed herself a few months ago, and was apparently a friend of Lianne’s. Your wife also wrote down her name.”

  “Why?” He shook his head vigorously, and frowned at us as if he couldn’t quite make out our shapes. “Why?” His face sagged. He looked tired. His skin had a gray pallor to it and his eyes were red-rimmed and looked sore.

  “We don’t know why, Mr. Burton,” said Oban. “We have only just found this new evidence, and obviously it changes the way we’re looking at everything.”

  “Philippa never knew them,” he insisted. “She didn’t.”

  “She wrote down their names.”

  “It’s all a mistake,” he said frantically. “I can’t explain it but it’s all a mistake. She never knew them.”

  “What makes you so sure?” I asked, as gently as possible.

  “She would have told me.”

  “What would she have told you?”

  “Anything. Everything. All the things in her life.” For a moment he looked as if he was going to burst into tears, but then he glared at us and started striding down the garden.

  “Mr. Burton,” interjected Oban firmly, “I know this is a shock but—”

  “It’s not a shock, it’s—it’s like a bad dream.”

  “Could she have been threatened or…?”

  “I don’t know why she wrote them down. Why would anyone threaten her?” He suddenly stopped walking and turned on us, so that we were standing in a tight knot. “I know what you’re thinking.”

  “What are we thinking?”

  “That she was up to something. Having an affair, or some such rubbish. Or maybe that I was. Maybe I was having an affair with all those women and she found out. Is that what you want me to deny? All right, I deny it.”

  He walked away again.

  “Jeremy.” I caught up with him and put my hand on his arm to slow him down. “Please listen carefully. We are not suggesting anything or assuming anything. Please listen. I know—”

  “What do you know? Nothing. I’m not much good at showing my emotions. I never have been. That doesn’t mean I don’t feel them. Phil knew that. She could see when I was down or worried about something, or if work had got to me. I would walk in through the door, and she would look at my face and she’d know if I was all right or not. I didn’t have to say anything with her. We weren’t all over each other, nobody would call us a passionate couple. But there are ways and ways of loving someone. And I loved her and she loved me, and now she’s dead and you stand there insinuating things about us and our life together. We had a good life. The life we both wanted. Not glamorous or anything like that. But we had each other and then we had Emily. And we were trying for another child. Then we would be a family, complete. That’s what she said. Now she’s dead and we’re never going to be complete, are we?”

  “Mr. Burton…”

  And then we both saw that he was crying. He stood under the apple tree, bowed down by its half-ripe fruit, and howled like a little boy until his face was blotchy, and shiny with tears.

  __________

  “No,” said Pam Vere, sitting upright in a chair. Her amber earrings swung as she shook her head firmly. She didn’t recognize any of the faces. Yes, she was sure. Perfectly sure.

  __________

  “How long was Daisy here, Mrs. Winston?”

  Mrs. Winston was plump and curly-haired, and would have looked cozy except that she wore too much makeup and her eyes were shrewd and appraising behind her thick glasses. We sat in her warm kitchen, three cats winding themselves round my legs, and ate chocolate digestive biscuits. Oban was back at the police station and dismissive of my desire to find out about Daisy. “We’ve got to concentrate on the main players, Kit,” he’d said. “And, anyway, my men have been there, done that.”

  “How long?” Mrs. Winston frowned and took a noisy slurp of her tea. “Now, let me think. What exactly did I tell those nice officers who were here? Well, it wasn’t that long, as a matter of fact. Usually, we like our children to stay a long time, build up a proper relationship, you know, give them a family life. One girl we had for nearly two years. Didn’t we, Ken?”

  Ken, who was half her size, nodded. “That’s right.”

  “Georgina, that was, lovely girl.”

  “Lovely,” echoed Ken.

  “But Daisy, now, she didn’t stay long at all. Three months, maybe a bit longer.”

  “Why such a short stay?”

  “She never settled. We tried, you know. We gave her her own room, with new curtains that I made for her, and nice furniture. And we made her welcome, didn’t we, Ken?”

  “We did.”

  “I said to her, the day she came, I said, ‘Daisy, treat this house as your home. And if you have any problems, however big or small, then come to me.’ ”

  “And did she? Come to you with problems, I mean?”

  “Oh, no. Never. She was tight as a clam, that one. I knew, that first week, I knew it wasn’t going to work, didn’t I, Ken?”

  “You did.”

  “She kept herself to herself. Ate in her room. Crumbs everywhere. Didn’t join in or make an effort. And she said dreadful things about my boy Bernie.” I’d met Bernie—a great hulking boy of about seventeen in a T-shirt with a skull on the front who’d opened the door to me. “When he was only trying to be companionable.”

  “So, Daisy never told you much about what was going on in her life?”

  “No. Hardly anything at all. Secretive little thing.”

  “Did you meet any of her friends?”

  “No. She went out, but never brought anyone back here. Sometimes she stayed out all night. I told her, ‘Daisy, I don’t mind you going out, and here’s a key, but you have to tell me what time you’re coming back.’ Not that she ever did, mind.”

  I spread out the photographs in front of her.

  “No,” she said, flicking through them. “I already said. Of course, I recognize this one, but only from the telly.”

  “Philippa Burton.”

  “What’s someone like her got to do with Daisy?”
/>   “So you’re quite sure you never met any of them?”

  “I told the officers already, no.”

  “Thank you,” I said wearily. “Just double-checking.”

  “It’s not easy being a foster-parent, you know. You probably think I didn’t care about Daisy, but I did my best. I was very sorry when I heard about what had happened to her. ‘Poor little thing,’ I said, didn’t I, Ken? But I wasn’t surprised.”

  “Why not?”

  She shrugged. “She was an angry, wretched girl, really. Prickly and rude, flaring up over nothing, crying in her room, throwing things. She kicked the cats sometimes. I caught her at it. It was like a final straw. She thought the world was against her, that one. It was all too late.”

  “What was too late?”

  “Us. Everything, I suppose.”

  “Thank you,” I said, getting up to go, wanting to leave the overheated kitchen and the winding cats.

  “We did our best.”

  “I’m sure you did.”

  “But some people, you can’t help them.”

  “I’ll let myself out.”

  “She was her own worst enemy.”

  __________

  “In a way, I blame myself,” said Carol Harman.

  “Who found her?”

  “I did. My staff called me because her door was locked and she wasn’t answering their knocks. So I opened it with my master key from the outside and found her there. She’d hanged herself—but you knew that, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “We knew she was at risk, cutting herself and starving herself. She was on special measures at the home—one-to-ones with the staff, things like that. It shouldn’t have happened.”

  “She must have been determined,” I said. I liked this woman, who was making no attempt to justify herself to me. “It wasn’t a cry for help.”

  “If she hadn’t succeeded, she might well never have tried again. You don’t know. She was a difficult girl, very stubborn, very needy. Terrible life. She once said to me, ‘No one’s ever said they loved me.’”

  “What did you say back?”

  “That I loved her, of course—but it doesn’t really ring true, does it, coming from a woman who’s only known you for a few weeks, and is paid to look after you?”

  “At least you said it.”

  “Hmmm. Anyway, you want to know if I ever saw any of these women. I met her once.” She put the tip of one finger on Lianne’s face. “She came to call for Daisy. They went up to Daisy’s room together. That’s all.”

  “None of the others?”

  “No.”

  “Why do you think she did it?”

  “Killed herself ? I don’t know. She had a sad life, didn’t she? I don’t know of any particular circumstances, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t any. Probably because in the end it was easier than being alive.”

  36

  The next day I drove to the clinic, sat through a meeting about staff structures and pretended to do some paperwork. My brain was teeming with the events of the last twenty-four hours. I thought about the list of names; about Bryony’s white, shattered face when she heard; Jeremy’s howls under the apple tree.

  And I didn’t know what to do about Will. Would he be so angry with me he wouldn’t talk to me? Did I want to see him again? At a quarter past six I phoned him. At about ten to nine I looked at my watch as Will removed it from my wrist and put it on the floor by his bed. When I put it back on my wrist I had come out of the shower. It was just after ten. He was lying in bed. I lay down beside him. I was still damp from the shower and he was still damp from sweat and sex and me. I smelled of his soap and I could smell me all over him.

  “That was wonderful,” I said, and then started to apologize. “I always feel stupid saying that. I feel as if I’m saying thank you for something.” I sat up with my back against the wall, propped up with a pillow, and looked at the room. There were the remains of a Chinese takeaway. An empty wine bottle lying down and another a third full. Our clothes were scattered.

  “I’m sorry about yesterday afternoon,” I said. “I didn’t know what to do.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. He was trailing his fingers over my body, but not looking at me.

  “That was what surprised me,” I said. “It really didn’t seem to matter to you. I get scared by police and I’m working with them. You didn’t seem bothered.”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “Maybe I get more scared than you do.”

  “That’s understandable.”

  “Oh, you mean this?” I raised my hand and touched my cheek, my scar.

  “What did you want?” he asked. “Should I have got on my knees and started pleading my innocence?”

  “What do you mean, your ‘innocence’?”

  “That’s what you want as well, isn’t it? You want me to look you in the eye and say, ‘Kit, I’m innocent. So help me God.’”

  “No,” I protested. “But…”

  “Aha, so there is a but after all.” He stood up. “I’m going to have a shower.”

  I lay in bed, half covered by the thin sheet, thinking. As soon as he came back into the room, wrapped in a large white towel, I said, “You know what the problem is?”

  “Whose problem? Mine or yours?”

  “You didn’t lose your cool for a second in there. You were perfectly in control.”

  “And the question is, would an innocent man behave like that?”

  “Don’t you care, though?”

  “What?” He raised his eyebrows. “About what people think of me? Why should I?”

  “No. No. I don’t mean about what people think of you. I mean about—well, all of it. Lianne and Philippa and Daisy and now Bryony, and you’re involved in it somehow. Even if you have absolutely nothing to do with it in a technical term, you’re involved. And you knew some of them, Will. You knew Lianne, and she was young and lonely and in need of help, and now she’s dead, they’re dead, and yet you just sat there with your ironic smile, scoring points. I mean, I know you must care somewhere, deep down, because otherwise why are you doing this job and everything, so I know you care, of course…”

  “No, you don’t. It doesn’t follow.”

  “Well, all right, maybe you don’t care one bit and I find that chilling.”

  Will gave a nasty smile. “More chilling than the possibility that I might be capable of murder? Maybe,” he let his towel drop to the floor in a white puddle, then pulled on a robe, “maybe the possibility even excites you? Do you like to think I’d be capable of killing someone? I know you—you like to face your fears, don’t you? Feel the fear and do it anyway?” The tone was mocking and cruel.

  I sat up in the bed. “Listen, Will, let’s not play games like this. Please. For what it’s worth, I’ve met a few dozen killers, I suppose. Maybe more. For all of them there are big fat reports explaining why they did it. I don’t know of a single example where somebody spotted them in advance as potential murderers. In fact, several of them were let out by people like me and killed somebody else. So I’m not going to stand here and say that you couldn’t kill a woman.”

  “Sit.”

  “What?”

  “You’re not standing, you’re sitting.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake. You’re proving what I’m saying. Look, what I’m trying to say is that I was looking at you this afternoon. And I suddenly thought you’d quite like people to think you’d done it. It would be great in every way. You would be a victim yet again. The great misunderstood Will Pavic. And it would show how stupid the police were. It would be pretty much your ideal situation—you being right and everybody else being wrong. Which is your basic world view.”

  Pavic’s slow smile didn’t waver. “So I didn’t manage to fool you?” he said.

  I reached over and took his hand and pulled him down beside me on the bed. I stroked his bristly short hair. I kissed his forehead. I laid the palm of my hand against his cheek and for th
e briefest moment he leaned into it. “I’ve had rather a bad year,” I said. “I have bad dreams.”

  “Kit…”

  “My sex life had been non-existent for a bit and just now it’s been the best, and that’s been so nice. Nice is the wrong word. You know what I mean, anyway. And sometimes I wonder whether I’m falling in love with you.”

  “Kit…” he said again. He wasn’t joking or sneering any longer. That was something. Even if everything was about to come to an end, that was better than his contempt.

  “Maybe you’re right,” I continued. “And I’m drawn to you because you’re bad-tempered and intimidating, and you scare me in some way. Or maybe I want you because you seem unhappy and I’m kidding myself that I can make you happy again—you know, that mad female fantasy you’ve probably read about. Whatever. I’ve been happy, anyway, just feeling wanted again like this. I’ve been happy when I’ve been working and suddenly I let myself think of you. I have felt myself coming back to life again. But I don’t want to be with someone who doesn’t care about anything, and who won’t yield to anyone. I’m not much good at passion with no tenderness. I’m not tough enough. And I’m really very bad at playing games—well, here I am putting all my cards on the table. No aces, as you can see.” I gave a small laugh and he still didn’t say anything. “So, maybe I need someone with softer edges.”

  Will put up a hand and tucked a strand of wet hair behind my ear.

  “I think it will be harder for me than for you if we stop seeing each other,” I said. “I’m a rotten leaver. I’ve never been any good at it. You’re probably better at it, though—I bet you don’t spend much time looking back.”

  “I still want to see you, Kit.”

  “You want to see me on your terms.”

  “What are your terms, then?”