The Red Room (5 page)

5 63

Michael Doll's bedsit was above a
dog-grooming parlor in Homerton, in a road
full of strange and dingy shops that always made me
wonder how they could possibly make any money.
There was a taxidermist, with a stuffed and faded
kingfisher staring with dull eyes out of the window. Who
had wanted to stuff a kingfisher? There was a clothes
shop selling flowery aprons and Crimplene
slacks with heel straps; an everything-under-l1
shop; a twenty-four-hour grocer, where dented
tins were stacked in pyramids on the shelves and a
fat man sat at the till picking his nose.
Number 24A. One of the windows was covered with a
billowing stretch of plastic. A light was on.
I turned to Furth. "You know it's not meant
to be this way round. You should be looking at the
case, and theorizing a suspect, not looking at a
suspect and seeing if he can be fitted into your
case. I'm only doing this because you've already
fucked up, sending your pretty Colette in with
her wires and flashing her slim legs."
"Of course, Kit," he replied blandly,
looking ahead down the grim street. "Are you
all right, though?"
"Fine." I wasn't going to tell him that
I'd been awake since three in the morning,
rehearsing for this moment.
As we got out of the car, I felt a spasm of
apprehension and clenched my fists. I had put
on a pair of black jeans, a long-sleeved
white T-shirt under an old suede jacket, which
hid my alarm. My hair was loosely tied
back. I wanted to look relaxed and
approachable, but business-like as well. I was the
doctor, friendly but not a friend.
I pressed the doorbell, but couldn't hear if
it was ringing upstairs. There was no reply. I
rang again and waited. Still no one came. I
pushed against the door and it swung open. I
stepped inside, and called: "Hello?
Michael?" My voice hung in the msty air.
The stairs were narrow and bare. Balls of
fluff lay on the boards. The stairwell was
painted hospital green. I put my hand on the
varnished banister, which was tacky to the touch, as if
lots of sticky fingers had held it before mine.
There was hardly room for the two of us. I went first
and Furth followed, as if we were climbing a
winding staircase in the turret of a 65
castle. As I went up the flight of steps
toward the door at the top, I became aware of a
thick, meaty smell. Suddenly I knew this was
all wrong. "We can't do this," I said to Furth,
in a low voice.
"What do you mean?" Furth hissed. "Have you
lost your nerve?"
I shook my head. "No, no. I need
to see him on my own."
"What are you talking about? I can't let you do
that, for Chrissake."
"Don't you see? You and me and him all over
again. What would he think?"
Furth looked around desperately, as if there
was someone else on the stairs who could take
charge. "You're not going in there on your own."
"You told me he was a petty little pervert.
What's the problem?"
"I've told you, I think he's a killer."
I thought. "You stay on the stairs. I'll
tell him you're there. It'll work."
Furth was silent for a moment. "I'll be right
outside. Just shout and I'll be in. Do you hear
me? One second's doubt and you scream,
Kit."
"Perfect." I said, taking a deep breath.
"Stay a few steps down until I'm inside.
Michael?" I called again, and rapped firmly
against the door, painted in the same depressing
green.
Someone slid a chain lock into place, then
pulled the door open a couple of inches. "What
do you want?"
A tiny segment of Doll's face peered out
at me. His eyes looked slightly bloodshot;
his pasty forehead was covered in dozens of tiny
under-the-skin pimples. The smell was stronger now.
"It's Kit Quinn, Michael. Dr.
Quinn. The police phoned about me dropping
by."
"But I wasn't expecting, I haven't ...
It's a mess in here. You're too early.
Everything's a mess."
"That doesn't matter at all."
"Wait. Wait." The door shut on me and
I could hear sounds of him clearing up; things were being
dragged across the floor, drawers slamming shut,
a tap running.
A few minutes later the door opened, this time
full. Doll was there. I made myself 67
smile and I saw him smile back. I made
myself step forward.
He had brushed his lank hair back behind his
ears, and dabbed some kind of lotion over himself. The
sweet smell of it, combined with the meaty odor,
caught in my nostrils.
I made myself hold out my hand. I saw it was
quite steady. He shook it delicately, as if it
was a bomb that might go off. His palm was soft and
sweaty against mine. He couldn't meet my eye.
"Hello, Michael," I said, and he stood
back to let me into the room. As I stepped over
the threshold, I heard a low growl, then a dark
shape hurtled toward me. I saw yellow
teeth, a red tongue, shining eyes, and smelled the
fierce reek of its breath against me before Doll
pulled it off.
"Down, Kenny!" Kenny was big and
blackish-brown, with a large amount of Alsatian
in him. "Sorry. Sorry."
"That's fine. He didn't even touch me."
The chemical rush of fear sluiced through my
veins. The growl was still rumbling at the back of
Kenny's throat.
"No. I'm so sorry. So sorry."
"Oh. You mean about this." I touched my face
and he stared at the scar.
"Sorry," he said again. "Sorry sorry
sorry. I didn't mean ... It was just the way
they treat you ... It wasn't really my fault,
you were just there and they said things."
"I'm not here to talk about that, Michael."
"You're with them."
"I'm not with them. I want to be straight with
you. I'm a doctor, I talk to people who have
troubles, or who need to talk, or want to talk.
And I give the police advice. They brought
me here but I told them to wait outside. I
wanted us to talk, just you and me."
"Yes. They beat me up too, you know. It
wasn't only you. Both of us."
I looked at him and considered why it might be
that a man like Michael Doll would never be given
a normal job, why he would scare most women
away. There was no single explanation. It was
simply that everything was a bit askew. I thought
of the way that drunk people pretend to be sober, the
way they might get all the details right but
fool nobody. Doll was imitating a normal,
socialized member of the public. He 69
had even made a special effort for my visit.
He had fastened the buttons of his shirt all the
way to the top and he was wearing a tie. There was
nothing strange about the tie, but the knot had been
pulled incredibly tight and small. It looked
as if it would be impossible to undo. His worn
corduroy jacket was slightly too big and he
had rolled one sleeve inwards and the other
outwards, so that the lining showed on one side but not
on the other. His belt had apparently split because
it was wound about with masking tape. He had shaved but
he had missed an improbably large section,
an archipelago of stubble, under the line of his jaw.
I didn't know if he was an evil person
or a psychopath. I knew that he was poor and
always had been. I knew that he lived alone.
I've sometimes thought that the most important words
anybody says to us are not "I love you." but
"You can't go out looking like that." People say it to us
over and over again as children, and as we grow up, we
internalize it and say it to ourselves. So we grow
up learning to do the sort of things other people do, to say
the sort of things other people say, so that we can pass
unnoticed in the world. There are men like Michael
Doll who never had it said to them, or not in the right
way. For them, doing the things people do is a foreign
language that they always speak with a strange accent.
"Tea? Coffee?" Sweat was gathering on his
forehead.
"Tea would be lovely."
He got two mugs out of an otherwise
empty cupboard. One was a Princess Diana
mug; the other had a chipped rim. "Which would you
like?"
"How about the Diana one?"
He nodded as if I had passed some test.
"She was special, Diana." He met my
eyes for a second then his gaze flickered off
again. He put his hand up under his shirt and
scratched vigorously. "I loved her. Do you
want, um ..." gesturing at the sofa.
I sat on it gingerly, and said, "Yes, lots
of people loved her."
He frowned, as if searching for the right words, then
repeated hopelessly, "She was special."
In the corner of the cramped room, which doubled as
sitting room and kitchen, were two large bones.
A cloud of flies buzzed noisily around them,
and around a bowl on the floor, half full of
jellied dog meat. On the wall, over 71
the small, greasy cooker, was one of those
calendars featuring naked women with vast breasts and
dewy smiles. A pan with hardening baked beans
sat on the hob. A small television was on in
the corner, with the sound on mute. A horizontal
white line flickered down the screen. The sofa was
covered in dog hairs and stains that I didn't
want to think about. Beer cans and crisp
packets and overflowing ashtrays lay on the
floor. Through the door I could see a section of
Doll's bedroom. There were pictures, torn from
newspapers and magazines, all over the wall.
As far as I could tell, they ranged from the
semi-naked pouting page-three girls
to graphic pornography.
There were shelves on the wall, but not for books
-comfor apparently random clutter: a plastic
ballerina with one leg broken off at the knee,
six or seven old and cracked radios, a
bicycle bell, several muddy sticks, a dog
collar, a notebook with a picture of a tiger
on the front, a yo-yo without any string, a
cracked pitcher, a girl's pink hairband with a
rose on the front, one pale blue sandal, a
hairbrush, a length of chain, a pewter basin,
a ball of twine, a heap of colored
paper-clips, several old glass bottles.
I could imagine that a good fifty percent of the
British public would believe Michael Doll
deserved a life sentence just for what he had done
to this flat.
He saw me looking and said, half proudly and
half defensively, "That's just stuff I
collect. From the canal. You'd never believe the
things people throw away."
I watched as he put a tea-bag in each
mug, then four spoonfuls of sugar into his. His
hand was trembling so much that the sugar scattered over
the work surface.
"I like it sweet," he said. "Want a
biscuit?"
I felt I couldn't eat anything he'd even
looked at. "No," I said. "Help yourself."
He took two biscuits from a packet and
dipped both of them together into the tea until it
touched the tips of his fingers. The biscuits were so
soggy he had to hold them in his other hand. He
lifted them to his mouth and ate them, licking them
off his own skin with relish. His tongue was thick and
grayish. "Sorry," he said, with a grin. 73
I brought my lips very close to the tea in
imitation of a sip. "So, Michael," I said.
"You know why I'm here?"
"They said I should tell you about the girl."
"I'm a doctor who's done some work on people
who commit crimes like this."
"Like what?"
"Violent, against women, that sort of thing.
Anyway, the police have asked me for my
advice on the canal case." I saw a
flicker of interest in his good eye. He looked
at me intently for the first time. "Obviously," I
continued, "I'm interested in chatting with anybody
who might have seen anything. You were one of the people who
came forward. You were in the area."
"I fish," he said.
"I know."
"I sit there every day," he said. "When I'm not
working. It's peaceful down there, away from all the
noise. It's like the countryside in way."
"Do you eat the fish?"
Doll looked appalled and disgusted. "Can't
stand fish," he said. "Slimy smelly things. And
you wouldn't want to eat anything from that water. I
took one back for my dog once. Wouldn't touch
it. Now I just keep them in my net and chuck them
back at the end of the day."
"You were quite near the spot where the victim was
found."
"That's right."
"Do you know what happened?"
"I looked for it in the papers. There wasn't
very much about it. She was called Lianne. I saw
an old picture of her when she was alive. She
was just a girl. About seventeen, they said. That's just
a girl. It was terrible."
"Is that why you came forward?"
"The police asked. They wanted to talk
to anybody who was in the area."
"How near were you?"
"I was a few hundred feet away. Toward
the river. I was there all day. Fishing, like I
said."
"If Lianne had walked along that way you'd
have seen her."
"I didn't see her. But she might have
walked past. When I'm fishing I get lost in
my thoughts. Did you see her?"
"What?"
"Did you see the body?" 75
"No."
"The throat was cut."
"That's right."
"Is that a quick way of dying?"
"If you cut the main arteries then it would be
quick."
"There'd be a lot of blood, wouldn't there? The
killer, he'd be covered in it."
"I suppose so. I'm not really that sort of
doctor. Have you been thinking about it?"
"Yeah, of course. I can't get it out of my
mind. That's why I wanted to hear about what the
police were doing."
I pretended to take another sip from my tea.
"Are you interested in the investigation?" I asked.
"I've never been near anything like this before. I
thought I could be part of it. I wanted to help."
"You said you can't get it out of your mind."
He shifted in his chair. He took another
biscuit but he didn't eat it. He broke it
into pieces and then into smaller pieces until there
were just crumbs on the table. "I go over it."
"Go over what?"
"That girl, walking along the canal and then
suddenly having her throat cut and dying."
I took a packet of cigarettes from my
pocket, lifted from Julie's stash specially
for the occasion. He looked up. I offered him one
and he took it. I tossed my box of matches
across the table, as if I was among friends. "The
police must have asked you if there was anything at
all you remembered."
"That's right."
"I want to approach it from a different angle
that might jog a memory. I want to know a bit
about what you felt."
"What do you mean?"
"About Lianne being killed?"
He shrugged. "I think about it."
"Because you were nearby?"
"I suppose."
"What do you think about?"
"I go over it in my mind."
"Over what?"
"X. It," he insisted. "I think what it must
have been like."
"What do you think it was like, Michael?"
He laughed. "Isn't that your job? Don't
you try to imagine what it must be like to kill
women?" 77
"You said you couldn't get it out of your mind."
"I didn't see anything. So I imagine
it."
"That's what interested me," I said. "If you
didn't see anything, why did you come forward?"
"Because I was in the area. The police asked."
"Are you all right, Michael? Have you been
talking to anybody?"
"You mean a doctor?"
"Yes."
"What for?"
"Sometimes it helps to talk about it."
"I have talked about it."
"Who to?"
"To a friend."
"And?"
He shrugged. "We talked."
There was another pause. "You're interested in the
case. Is there anything you'd like to know about it?"
His look shifted now. Evasively? "I'm
interested in what the police are doing. I want
to know how it's going. I feel strange, being there
and not knowing anything."
"When you can't get it out of your mind, what do you
see in your mind?"
He thought for a moment. "It's like when you flash a
light on and off very quickly. I see the woman."
"Which woman?"
"Just any woman. I see her out there on the
towpath. Someone coming up behind her, grabbing her,
cutting her throat. I see it all in a moment.
I see it over and over."
"What does it make you feel?"
He shook himself, almost shivered. "I dunno.
Nothing. I just can't get rid of it. It's there.
I only wanted to help." His voice was
plaintive and high. He sounded like a little boy.
I remembered the details I had read about his