The Red Room (18 page)

The next morning, very early, the phone rang.
It was Oban. "Get a paper."
"What do you mean? What paper?"
"One of the tabloids. Any of them. Fuck
it." And he put the phone down.
Five minutes later after a breathless run
down to the man outside the tube station, a
selection of the day's tabloid newspapers was
spread out on my table. The familiar, slightly
eager, slightly dazed expression of Michael
Doll was staring up at Julie and me out of a
mess of huge, raucous headlines: ARREST
IN PIPPA MURDER. "I'M INNOCENT"
SAYS PIPPA SUSPECT. PIPPA
SUSPECT'S "WEIRD" PAST.
Pippa. That name again. The right length for a
headline. And where was Lianne? Who cared about
her? I scanned the papers. It was all 303
there. The questioning, a suspiciously detailed account
of what had been obtained by Colette's wire,
the release on what were described as "technical
grounds." There was a sketchy account of his life and
times: children's home, reformatory, minor sexual
offenses. A young woman from the Daily News
had managed to get an "exclusive" interview,
as if there was any problem in getting this pathetically
lonely man to talk to a young woman. Here, at
least, Lianne was mentioned. Doll boasted that he
had been close by. To make things worse, he
tried to deny that he had been a suspect. No,
not at all, he said, he was an important
witness, he was the only person who had actually
seen anything. There was a photograph of him in his
room looking proud of himself.
That room. There was a description of the room
by the journalist--a rich, clever young woman coming
face to face with a desperate, poor, fucked-up
man--that was a form of accusation in itself. The article
ended on a note of caution that looked as if it
had been composed with a lawyer looking over the
writer's shoulder: "We do not suggest that
Mickey Doll has any involvement in the
crime. He is not a suspect. No evidence
has been found linking him to the tragic murders of
Lianne and young mum Philippa Burton.
Yet men like Mickey Doll, with his
porn-fueled fantasies and his criminal
record, are an obvious threat to the community,
to our families, to our children. In identifying a
man like Doll, in printing his photograph, in
revealing where he lives, we are not, of course,
recommending any actions against him by members of the
public. That would be illegal, however understandable,
however legitimate the concerns of ordinary people. It
is time for the politicians to act."
Julie took away the interview and read it with
her coffee and a bowl of the fruit she ate for her
breakfast. "Hmm," she said, when she had
finished. "It doesn't really capture his full
charm."
But the following day Oban told me, rather
casually, I thought, that Doll was in hospital.
A concerned citizen had walked up to him in a
pub and smashed him in the face with a broken
bottle. "So he's scarred too," he added
cheerfully. "He's apparently been asking for you,
but I wouldn't visit, if I was you."
"No, it's probably not a good 305
idea," I agreed, with a pang of guilt, and
put Doll out of my mind.

24

Two days after Doll had been attacked, I
went back to the Burtons' house, not because I
thought it was a particularly fruitful idea but because
Oban pressed me into x. "Something odd about the
bloke," he'd said.
"Something odd about most people," I replied.
"He's not upset enough."
I wondered what that meant. Jeremy Burton
had seemed upset enough to me, with his hopeless, tired
face, his little grimaces of bafflement and misery.
Was there a right amount of grief, then? How did you
measure it? I thought about the thousands of people who'd
laid flowers on the site where Philippa's
body had been found, and wept copiously for a
pretty young mother and for the little girl she had left
behind. Was that grief? I didn't say any of this
to Oban, of course--he'd just have raised his
eyebrows ironically and sent Seb instead.
I arrived at the house on a Sunday
morning, as Jeremy Burton had requested.
Philippa's mother opened the door, and ushered me
through the hall and into the gleaming kitchen. There were
flowers everywhere--faded velvet irises,
shriveled ox-eye daisies and numerous vases
of white lilies, whose thick, oppressive
fragrance filled the house. As I passed the
living room, I saw banks of condolence cards
on the mantelpiece and the table.
I looked out of the kitchen window. The father and
daughter were in the garden together, sitting on a
wrought-iron bench with their backs to the window. He
was doing a crossword, and she was kicking her legs
back and forth. Something made him look round, and
I raised a hand and made my way out into the garden
and across the lawn. He gave a nod of
recognition. I had worried about blundering back
in but he didn't seem displeased to see me.
We shook hands and he folded up the paper
self-consciously, although not before I'd noticed he
hadn't filled in a single clue. He was wearing
an open-necked T-shirt and khaki shorts, but
nevertheless looked rather neat and smart. Some people always
look respectable, I thought, and some people never do.
Give Doll a bath, a haircut, a shave,
a manicure, dress him in a 307
thousand-pound suit, and he'd still look unwashed and
somehow unsavory. You couldn't clean off his past.
"Look," said Emily.
I crouched down. She had laid her
treasures on the bench beside her. There was a round
gray stone and a sharp white one, a forked stick, a
feather, a clump of moss, a small pink
bouncing ball smeared with mud, an old cat's
collar, a wooden ice-cream stick, a plastic
tube.
"Look," she said again, and uncurled her
plump fist. There was a small shell on the
palm of her hand.
"Where did you find that?" I asked.
She pointed to the graveled area near the kitchen
door.
"It's lovely," I said, and she closed her
fist over it again. She was wearing a spotted
sundress, and her hair was clipped back behind
her ears, making her face seem thinner than
I'd remembered.
"I'm going to give them to Mummy," she said,
in a self-important voice. I glanced at
her father.
"She means, put them on Phil's grave
after she's buried," he explained, wincing. "It
was my mother-in-law's idea, that Emily should
collect things for her. I'm not so sure. She
seems to be taking the idea a bit too
literally." He frowned so that a small furrow
appeared over the bridge of his nose.
"What else have you found?" I asked Emily.
She climbed carefully down from the bench, shell
in one hand, and started to gather up the treasures with the
other. "Come and see," she said.
"Can I come in a minute? First I need
to talk to your father."
She nodded. The stones and moss and plastic
tube fell on the grass. She knelt down and
started to pick them up. Her father made no move
to help her. His hands were thrust into the pockets of
his shorts, his newspaper tucked under one arm. I
glanced across at him. His face looked bruised
with tiredness. "I tell you what, Emily, why
don't I bring those to you when I come and see what
else you've found for your mother?"
"Promise?"
"Yes."
"Don't forget that." She pointed to the plastic
tube, lying at my feet. 309
"I won't."
We watched her as she plodded away from us.
"She thinks Philippa's coming back."
"Does she?" I looked at her straight
back and spindly legs as she disappeared through the
kitchen door.
"Won't you sit down?" He pointed to the
bench.
"Thanks."
"Coffee?"
"No, thanks, I'm fine."
He sat down too, at the other end of the bench.
"I heard about your contribution," he said.
"Oh, well ..."
"I underestimated you, I think."
"How are you doing?" I asked.
"All right."
"Sleeping OK?"
"Yes. Well, no, not really. You know. I
wake and ..." He trailed off.
"Eating?"
He nodded.
"I talked to Tess Jarrett a few days
ago. She said that Philippa seemed distracted
during the last few weeks before her death. Do you
think that's true?"
"No, I don't." I waited. "I'm
sorry. That's all I can say."
"She didn't seem to have anything on her
mind?"
He stared down at the ground, as if he was
trying to pretend I wasn't there. "She seemed
the same as usual."
"Tell me about the night before she died.
Describe your evening together."
He sighed and started intoning in a monotonous
voice: "I came back from work at seven.
Emily was in bed and Philippa was reading her a
story. We both said good night to Emily."
"What did Philippa say, when she said good
night?"
"What did she say?" He blinked at me.
"Do you know, I can't remember. We went
downstairs and I poured us both a glass of wine
and we walked round the garden together. It was a nice
evening." His voice was getting a bit less
clipped. "We had supper outside, there." He
pointed at the table on the patio.
"What did you eat?"
"Moussaka. Green salad." 311
"What did you talk about?"
"I can't remember." He looked distressed.
"I can't remember anything, except at some
point she asked me if I thought she was looking
older."
"What did you say?"
He flicked something I couldn't see off his
shorts. "I must have said something about how she always
looked beautiful to me, but I can't remember the
exact words."
"So, there was nothing different about her, or your
relationship with her?"
He spoke now as if he were waking from a deep
sleep. "Different? I don't know what you're
digging for. Do you think this was something to do with me? Or
her? She wasn't depressed. She didn't
drink. She didn't take drugs. She
didn't wander round Kersey Town like that girl
..."
"Lianne."
"Yes. She got up in the morning and made
me breakfast. She looked after the house. She
looked after Emily. She met friends. She was
happy. She talked about when she should return
to work. She talked about having more children one day.
Soon." His voice cracked slightly, but he
went on, "Then, one morning, after she had made
breakfast and tidied up the house, she went out with
her child and she was suddenly murdered. End of story.
That's what the police think anyway, and so does
that other doctor who's been round here asking questions.
If you've got reasons for thinking differently,
please tell me what they are. I want to know."
I stood up. "I'm sorry to distress you."
I stooped down and picked up the clump of
moss, the two stones, the plastic tube. "Is
it OK if I take these to Emily?"
"She'll probably be in her bedroom. Top
of the first flight of stairs."
"Thanks."

She was arranging small plastic animals on
a shelf. I squatted beside her with my hands
cupped. "Here are your things."
"Do elephants go with lions or horses?"
"If it were up to me, I'd put them with the
lions. Do you want to show me what you've
collected for your mother?"
She stood up and crossed over to her bed where
she pulled out a large cardboard box. 313
One by one, she placed things on the floor: a
small jam-jar, a thistle head, several cards
from cereal packets, three buttons, a string of
plastic beads, a marble, a small shred of
orange silken material, some spangled
wrapping-paper, a chipped china dog, an
apple. I watched her face. She was
perfectly intent on her task.
"Which is your favorite?"
She pointed at the marble.
"Which would your mother have liked?"
She hesitated, then pointed at the orange
rag.
The door opened and Philippa's mother put her
head round the door.
"Excuse me," she said, in her firm,
pleasant voice, "but a friend is due to arrive for
Emily any minute." She made me feel as
if I had sneaked in under false pretenses.
"Of course." I put the objects I was
holding carefully into the cardboard box. "'Bye,
Emily."
"And the shell," she said, not looking up. "The
shell's pretty. She liked pretty things."
Albie phoned up. He just wanted to say
hello, he said. He just wanted to see how I was
getting on. I held the phone carefully, as if
it could hurt me, and waited. We waited for the
other person to say something. Then we both said
goodbye politely.
I phoned my father but he wasn't there. I
wanted someone to say to me, "Life can be hard, but
don't worry, my darling, everything is going to be
all right." I wanted someone to hug me tight and
stroke my hair. I wanted my mother.
Ridiculous, but true. Would it never go away,
that feeling? Would I miss my mother for my whole
life, not a day going by without missing her? I
picked up the phone to ring W. It was so quiet in
my flat that I could hear my watch ticking on
my wrist and my heart beating, and the occasional
rattle of dry leaves in the trees outside.
But I didn't ring him. What would I say?
"I'm on my own, come round and hold me,
please"?
I poured myself a glass of wine and lit two
candles. Then I turned off the light and sat on
the sofa. Somewhere, a mosquito whined in the
half-darkness. Outside it began to rain 315
again and the wind sighed in the trees. What did I
know about him? Nothing, except he'd given up a
top job in the City to run a hostel for homeless
young people who'd fallen through all the safety-nets;
that the police distrusted him and suspected him of
allowing drugs to be sold on his premises; that
he was sour and ill-humored and dark. I wanted
him now because he was so unlike ebullient
Albie, and because he looked like a crow, a
solitary bird. I wanted to wrap myself up in
his ragged misery and make us both better.
In the end I didn't have to seek out Will because he
came to me. The following night, when I had already
gone to bed after a busy day, the doorbell rang.
I pulled on my dressing-gown and looked at
my watch. It was past midnight: probably
Julie had forgotten her key again. I stumbled
to the door, still tangled up in strange dreams.
He was standing there and when he saw me he gave a
kind of shrug. "I couldn't sleep," he said.
I stood back and he went up the stairs in
front of me. He sat on the sofa, and I
poured out a tumbler of whiskey for him, and a
smaller one for me. I was very conscious of my
tousled hair and tatty dressing-gown. I
couldn't think of a single thing to say to him. He
seemed so big and alien in my flat. How had
I ever dared to kiss him, or to dream of him? We
sat and sipped our drinks. He hadn't even
taken off his coat, and he stared into the glass as
if it held some answer.
In the end, I made a move, because I couldn't
bear to go on sitting there in the gloom and heavy
silence. I crossed over to the sofa, and I leaned
down toward him. I didn't kiss him: that would have
seemed too intimate. I undid the buttons
on his coat, and then on his shirt and he lay
back with his pale torso gleaming and his eyes
closed, while I touched him with tentative hands,
and watched him. He put up his hands and held my
face blindly and I sat astride him, pulled
open my dressing gown and pressed his head against
my breast, listening to the hammering of my heart.
"You should be careful," he muttered.
I didn't know what he was talking about; I
didn't care. We were just strangers, in need of
comfort. Outside, the rain was blown in waves against
the window.
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