The Red Room (29 page)

41

Lottie and Megan were playing an
intricate, unintelligible game on the grass.
An hour earlier I had given a bright purple
floppy dinosaur to Lottie and a red and white
floppy snail to Megan, and both featured
prominently in their game. I had given a green
and blue floppy crab to Amy and she was rolling
down the hill and trying to encourage the crab
to roll with her. Behind them was London, looking
pleasantly hazy in this hot afternoon from high on
Primrose Hill.
I was lying on a rug, propped up on an
elbow. I took another sip of cold white
wine. 505
"I want to hear all about it," Poppy said.
"Of course, Seb has told me some ..."
She glanced over at Megan and then at Amy.
"Megan, stop that! Stop it now or I'll
take it away from you. But Seb's version is
probably rather different from yours." Her tone was
dry.
I lay back on the rug.
"I don't know if I can tell it
coherently," I said. "Especially on an afternoon
like this, with two glasses of white wine already
coursing round in my blood."
It was an all-female picnic. Three
girls playing on the grass, while two mothers and
one non-mother sat on the rug. The other mother was
Ginny, an old friend of Poppy. The fathers were
elsewhere. Ginny's husband was playing cricket
-comsomewhere in the Home Counties, she said--and
Seb was in a television studio somewhere in front
of us in central London.
"What's he talking about now?" I asked.
"Still the Philippa Burton case?"
"I think so. He's plugging this book he's
nearly finished."
"About the case? That's amazingly quick."
"He was writing it as it went."
"Is everything all right between you now?"
"Not really." She glanced over at the girls
again. "But I can't talk about it now."
"Of course. Later."
"About the book--actually, you'll be really
flattered. Guess why?"
I took a sip of wine. "I don't know,"
I said. "Why?"
"He partly got the idea from that bedtime story you
told the girls when you came round for dinner a
few months ago. Kept them awake for about a
month. Something about a castle, wasn't it?"
"What's the book called?"
"The Red Room, I think. Could that be
it?"
"Yes, it could be. It was a nightmare I was
having. That's what it was about."
"Oh, I see. Seb must have talked to you about
it."
I didn't reply because for the moment I was
drenched, smothered, plunged in self-pity. I had
been slashed in the face and had a nightmare that had
haunted me. And now I felt as if I had
been mugged and my nightmare, my own 507
personal private nightmare, had been stolen from
me. I drained my glass and then I thought, So
fucking what? Who cares?
Scattered around the blanket were sandwiches,
fruit, fizzy drinks and some things I'd grabbed
during a swoop on a supermarket: plastic
tubs of hummus and taramasalata, pita
bread, olives, breadsticks, miniature pork
pies, baby carrots, chopped cauliflower. I
prodded the tip of a baby carrot into some
pink-colored dip and nibbled it experimentally.
I felt numb--almost pleasantly so--as I
lay and nibbled, sipped, chatted, but I could see
that the attention of the other two women was always
incomplete. Whether they were telling me something
urgent, or crunching on a floret of
cauliflower, they would always be glancing around or
looking over my shoulder in search of the little girls.
At one point I murmured something intended to be
reassuring about how they were only a few yards
away, and Ginny immediately responded with a story
of a friend of a friend who had left a three-year-old
unattended for just two or three minutes in a
garden with a little pond that was hardly more than an inch
deep. Well, you can imagine the rest. Ginny was
a comfy-looking dark-haired woman with a lovely
laugh. She was such a motherly mother, I wondered who
she was before having Lottie. Someone like me,
probably, thinking she was all right as she was.
I lay back and closed my eyes. Close
to my ear, Poppy shouted for the girls to come and have
their lunch right now and I mean right now. There was a
scramble of small bodies and screams because someone
had arrived at the blanket without waiting for someone
else and I suddenly felt a shock of cold on
my jeans. I sat up with a yell and saw the wine
bottle had been tipped over on to me by Megan
as she clambered across toward the chicken
drumsticks. When she saw what she had done,
her howls drowned even those of her little sister.
Poppy took her in her arms.
"That's absolutely all right, Megan, my
darling. Don't cry. It doesn't matter at
all, does it? Kit, could you tell Megan that
it doesn't matter?"
"It doesn't matter, Megan," I said
obediently.
"I'm sorry, Kit," Poppy said, "but
Megan gets ridiculously upset by these
things." 509
By this time Megan seemed already to have recovered
her spirits and was gnawing at a piece of chicken.
"Anyway," said Ginny cheerfully, "white
wine doesn't stain. In fact, it's what you
use for getting red wine stains out, isn't it?"
"It's just a bit wet," I said, dabbing at it
with a sheet of kitchen roll. I felt that it was me
who should be saying it didn't matter, rather than them.
"God," laughed Poppy, "you should be
grateful it's just wine. You couldn't begin
to imagine the stains I've had on my clothes."
I smiled, with only a small hint of strain,
and filled my glass again.
"You know," said Ginny, "I think lots of
mothers have been particularly affected by your
murders."
"Hardly mine," I objected.
"That poor little girl whose mother was snatched away
while she was playing in the playground. I've
hardly let Lottie out of my sight ever since
it happened. I know it's irrational."
I murmured assent.
"Didn't it get you down terribly, Kit?
Didn't you find it unbearable?"
I placed my wineglass on the rug, then
thought better of it and picked it up again. "I
don't know if that's the right word," I said. "It
made me feel sad."
"Speaking for myself, I feel safer, anyway,
now that the person who did it isn't around
anymore. I saw the detective on telly.
He was being so nice about you."
I looked at the little girls. Amy had reached
the pudding course. She was supposedly eating a
chocolate muffin but this involved so much mashing up
of the muffin, so much smearing of it over her face and
such a vast spillage of crumbs onto the
blanket that it was difficult to believe any of it
had ended up in her mouth.
"It wasn't as satisfying as you might think,"
I said. "This man--he was called Michael
Doll--he was just found dead--was
"Killed by vigilantes," Poppy
interrupted.
"Obviously I wouldn't defend something like that,"
said Ginny. "But I must admit when I read about
it, my first thought was, Great." She pulled
Lottie close to her and hugged her. "It may be
rough justice, but there's a man who won't do
harm again." 511
"Or good," I added.
"But you must know all about him," Poppy said, in
an encouraging tone, sensing my distress.
"I'd met him."
"Ugh," said Ginny. "Creepy. What was he
like?"
"He .was creepy," I said. "He was very
disturbed, he was repulsive in many ways, a
bit pathetic."
"But what's it like having known somebody who's
done these terrible things?" Poppy asked.
"I'm not sure," I said. "You should ask
Seb. But I didn't think he had done the
murders. And he died before things were properly
sorted out."
"But there was solid evidence. The police said
so."
"That's right. There was solid evidence. Lots
of evidence. Unfortunately it doesn't really
fit together very well. But you don't want to hear
about that."
I looked at them. They really didn't want
to hear about it. The girls, who had wandered away,
had come back now and were demanding attention. The two
mothers were tied to their children as if by steel wires, their
faces jerking round ceaselessly. Had they fallen
over? Had they run away? were they being too
noisy? were they being too quiet? Had they been
murdered? I thought of little Emily in the
playground, digging in the sandpit while her mother was
seized and taken away and beaten to death. I
created the scenario in my mind as I had so many
hundreds of times before and played through it with
Michael Doll in the role of the psychopathic
killer. That was it. I jumped to my feet.
"Where are you going?" asked Poppy. "You
look as if you've seen a ghost."
"Maybe I have. Sorry. Got to rush.
Something ..."
"Can I look at the sun?" said Megan.
"No," cried Poppy. "You must never ever
ever look at the sun."
"Why not?" said Megan.
"It'll burn your eyes."
"If I close my eyes." She closed her
eyes. "Is it all right if I close my
eyes?"
"I suppose so. But you can't see anything."
"It's not dark," said Megan. "It's red.
Where's the red from?" 513
"I don't know," said Poppy. "I
suppose it's the blood in your eyelids."
"Blood?" said Megan. "Yippee. I'm
looking at my blood. Let's all look at
our blood."
And the little girls staggered blindly around on the
sunny green hillside looking at their blood
while I ran from them as if I was being pursued.

42

I was breathless when I arrived back at my
flat, and my head buzzed with the white wine and the
sun, but I immediately picked up the phone and
called Oban. He was out somewhere. I could hear
traffic, people talking. "Are you busy?" I
asked.
"It's the weekend, Kit," he said. "What
is it? Want to take me to the opera?"
"I wanted to alert you that I'm going to see the
little girl, Emily Burton."
"What?"
"You know, Philippa Burton's daughter."
"I know who she fucking is. That ... that ..."
He seemed to be gasping for breath. "That is such
a bad idea."
"There's just one question I've got to ask."
"Kit, Kit," he said soothingly, as if he
were trying to talk me off a window-ledge, "there's
always one more question. Think of what you're doing.
You'll stir up that poor family all over again.
You'll drive yourself crazy. You'll drive me
crazy. Just leave it."
"I wanted to ask if you thought a police
officer should come along with me."
"No, definitely not. The case is closed.
This is a free country. You can call on
anybody you like but it's nothing to do with us.
Honestly, Kit, I like you but you need something, I
don't know what it is--was
And the line went dead. I don't know whether
Oban had walked into a tunnel or just given up
in despair. A tape-recorder. That was what
I needed. I had one somewhere. A few minutes'
rummaging produced a tatty little cassette
player from the bottom of a cupboard and then, in a
drawer of old plugs, rubber bands, pens without
caps and a huge daisy chain of paper-clips,
I found a dusty cassette tape, a party
tape from when I was at college. That 515
would do. I phoned the house. A woman
answered.
"Hello. Is that Pam Vere?"
"Yes."
"This is Kit Quinn. Do you remember?
I'm the--was
"Yes. I remember."
"I wondered if I could come and spend a few
minutes with Emily."
"She's not here at the moment."
"Could I come later?"
"But I thought it was over."
"I just want to dot some I's, cross some
T's. And I wanted to see how Emily is."
"She seems to be all right. She's happy with
friends. And an au pair has started."
"Can I come? I'll be five minutes."
"I don't want to be difficult, but is it
really necessary?"
"I'd be very grateful," I said firmly,
unrelentingly.
There was a pause. "She'll be back at just
past four. Maybe you could talk to her before she
has tea."
"I'll be there."

It was more formal than before. I had arrived before
Emily and I found a spot in the kitchen where I
could plug in my tape-recorder. Neurotically
I tested it a couple of times, saying one-two,
one-two into x and playing it back. The second
time I suddenly wasn't sure whether it was the first
one-two or the second, so I did it again saying
A-B-C-D, for want of anything better.
Emily burst into the room like a little chattering
gremlin in paint-spattered red dungarees, a
blond au pair running to keep up with her. She
looked so happy. Suddenly I pictured her in
five years' time, with no surviving memory of
her mother, nothing that could be disentangled from snapshots
and half made-up stories told to her about
Philippa by others. She ran forward and hugged
her grandmother's knees. When she saw me, she
fell silent. I walked over and knelt down
beside her.
"Remember me?" I said. She shook her
head solemnly and looked away. "I've got
something to show you."
She had just been getting ready to be shy but in
her interest she forgot. She gave me 517
her hand and we walked over to the kitchen table and my
tape-recorder. Pam sat opposite us,
watchful.
"Look at this," I said.
"What?" she said.
I pressed the "record" button.
"Say something."
"Don't want to say something."
"What do you do at play-school?"
"I do anything," she said firmly.
I switched it off, rewound and played the tape
back. Her mouth fell open in amazement.
"Do it again," she said.
"All right." I pressed the "record"
button. I sat very close to her. I could
smell soap and paint.
"Well," I said, "so what shall we talk
about?"
Emily crinkled her nose and giggled.
"Dunno," she said. "That's your mark," she said,
pointing at my face.
"That's right," I said. "See? You
remember."
"Does it hurt?"
"Not so much," I said. "It's got better."
"Can I feel it?"
"All right."
I leaned forward and Emily stretched out a
stubby forefinger. She traced a stinging, itching
progress from near my ear, down my cheek to the
edge of my jaw. No pain now.
"When we talked before," I said, "you were playing
with your friend and we talked about the playground. You were
playing in the playground when your mummy went
away. Do you remember that?"
"Yeah," she said.
"Lots of people talked to you about that, didn't
they?" I said.
"Pleecemen," she said.
"That's right," I said. "And those policemen and
comwomen, they asked you if you had seen your mummy
go away with somebody and you said you hadn't."
Emily was scratching on the table. I could
feel I was losing her. The tiny attention span
of a nearly-four-year-old was almost at an end.
I looked at the tape-recorder. The spools
were rotating. I had come here with just one shot in my
gun. I would fire it, and if nothing came of it,
that really would be it. I would say goodbye
politely, go home and return to those 519
bits of my life I had neglected for too
long. I put out my hand and enfolded Emily's
own tiny, warm, sticky hand. I gave a little
squeeze to attract her attention. She looked
at me.
"I don't want to ask you about that, Emily.
I want to ask you about something different. Could you
tell me about the nice woman?"
"What?" Emily said.
"What are you ...?" Pam said.
"Sssh," I said abruptly, holding up my
hand. "Emily, what did she give you?"
"Nuffing."
"Nothing?"
"A lolly."
"That's nice," I said. I could feel the
thump of my heart all over my body, even in
my head. "What did she do? Did she push you
on the swing?"
"A bit. She took me to the sand."
I tried to picture the playground. Yes, of
course. The sandpit was the furthest point from the
railings where Philippa had been standing, watching
her daughter.
"That's fun," I said. "And then she went
away. She left you there?"
"Dunno."
"What did the lady look like?"
"I'm bo-ored," Emily said loudly.
"Was she big?"
"Bo-or-or-ored."
"That's lovely, Emily," I said. "Thank
you very much." I gave her a hug. She wrestled
herself free and ran to the door and out into the garden.
I switched off the tape-machine. I looked
over at Pam. She seemed lost in distressing
thought.
"But ..." she said. "It was that man. What was
she ...?"
I had been intending just to get up and leave, but
I owed her something.
"I should have thought of it ages ago," I said.
"You can abduct a woman on a dark night, in
a lonely place, without too much fuss. You can do
it in a crowded place as well, though it takes
a bit more care. But you can't trick a mother
into leaving her child alone, not even in a playground,
not even for a single minute. There'd have to be
somebody to look after the child. That's what I
suddenly thought. And I guessed it would have 521
to be a woman. And Emily always said her mother was
coming back, didn't she?" Pam nodded, staring at
me. "Because that's probably the last thing
Philippa said to her. She would have said something like,
"Don't worry, I'll be back soon," and
Emily's still waiting."
I unplugged the tape-recorder then stood
up, clutching it to my chest as if someone was going
to try to steal it from me. "I've got to go," I
said.
"So he had an accomplice," Pam said.
I shook my head. "I knew Michael
Doll," I said. "I don't think he was on
genuine speaking terms with a single woman."
Except me, I thought to myself. Andwitha pang I
left her sitting at the kitchen table, with her hands
folded as if she was praying.