The Red Room (28 page)

I rang Poppy. Her greeting sounded a
bit brittle.
"What's up?" I asked.
"Nothing," she said huffily. But then she added,
"I've just been calling and leaving messages with that
Julie and you never bother to call back."
"I'm so very sorry," I said. "I've been
busy."
"Fine. But you can't put people on hold."
"Oh, Poppy, look, I really am
sorry. Shall I come round now?"
"No. Seb and I are going out for a talk--not
that it'll do any good." She gave a bitter
laugh.
"What's wrong? Is something up?"
"Oh, you know, the usual. Successful man and
stay-at-home wife."
"You mean ..."
"I don't know, Kit. Let's talk
later. OK? I've got to go and put some
makeup on. I look like a frumpy old
matron at the moment."
"Don't say things like that."
"Why not? It's true."
"No, it's not. You're lovely."
"Don't be stupid. I can't fit 491
into any of my dresses anymore."
"No, I mean it. You're lovely and
wonderful and he doesn't know how lucky he
is."
She sniffed. "Sorry to have been curt."
"No. I'm sorry."
I put the kettle on to boil water for some
pasta. What I really wanted was to sit on my
sofa and have someone serve me tea and crumpets,
cosset me, look after me. For the briefest
second, I let myself dream of my mother stroking
my hair and telling me I could rest now. I
felt shaky with fatigue and emotion as I thought of
Lianne's coffin sliding into the flames. I
imagined Poppy desperately trying on clothes
in front of the tall mirror in her room, and
saw her disappointed face as she stared at her
reflection. And then I imagined Will, all alone
in his echoing house.
Suddenly, I could bear it no longer. I
pulled on my suede jacket and ran to the car.
I drove very fast, impatient with every traffic
light. When he opened the door, he was still wearing
his black suit. He stood back and let me
in, and I pushed the door shut behind me. I led
him to the sofa and pushed him into x and sat beside him.
I took his two cold hands between my warm ones and
blew on them. I undid the top buttons of his
shirt. I eased off his stiff black shoes.
"I'll make you a cup of tea," I said, and
he didn't protest.
In his kitchen, I toasted two slices of
bread and spread them with the marmalade I found in the
fridge.
"You're mothering me," he said, but he took a
large bite of the toast anyway.
I didn't ask him why he'd been so sad.
I just watched him eating his toast and drinking his
tea. Then I led him upstairs and took off
all his clothes as if he was a child, and he lay in
bed and I sat beside him and stroked his bristly
head. At last he closed his eyes and I took
away my hand. "I'm not asleep," he said
softly.
"I only came to make sure you were all
right."
"Yeah, yeah. You shouldn't worry so much about
other people, Kit."
"I can't help it." 493
"Ah." He was slipping away from me. "You
should worry about yourself, you know."
"Why?"
"The good doctor."
"Will?"
"Mmm."
"About what I said ..."
But he was asleep at last. His weary face
softened, his lips parted slightly, his fingers
relaxed and curled gently against the sheet. I
watched him for a while, then I got up, closed
the curtains and left.

40

My date hadn't arrived so I bought myself a
beer and stood outside on the steps watching the
theater-goers arrive. Gabe Teale's theater, the
Sugarhouse, was an abandoned warehouse that stood
on railway land between the huge gas works and the
canal. There had been what looked like a hasty
conversion with scaffolding and Portakabins but the people in
nice suits or high heels were still picking their
way from the road between piles of rubble. The West
End was only a quarter of an hour's walk
away but it seemed like a different continent. I
loved that about London. However safe and
familiar you were, you were never more than five
minutes' walk away from something strange.
The respectable people shuffled across to the
improvised main entrance and then, almost without
exception, they looked round at their surroundings and
smiled with that childlike pleasure of doing something
familiar in an improbable, almost secret
place. Or maybe it was self-congratulation at
having ventured into sch a dangerous, out-of-the-way
spot.
The crowd was starting to thin as people drifted to their
seats. I looked at my watch. Twenty-two
minutes past. I wasn't going to be stood up,
was I? But there he was, puffing a little as he
caught sight of me and did that rather pathetic
attempt at a slow-motion jog to show that he was in
a hurry.
"I'm not late, am I?" Oban said,
looking round sheepishly.
"We've got a few minutes. Can I get
you a drink?"
He perked up. "Is there a bar here?" he
asked. I held up my beer in 495
response. "Double Scotch."
I fought my way through the crowd. By the time I'd
got it for him a bell had rung. "We'll need
to be fairly quick," I said, giving him the drink.
He swallowed it in a single gulp.
"I needed that," he said hoarsely. "I'm not
used to this sort of thing."
"Nor am I," I protested. "I haven't
been to the theater for months, years. I thought it would
be a good thing to come to this. A sort of celebration."
Oban looked dubious. "The last time I
went was in about 1985. It was some sort of
musical. On roller skates. I never felt
the need to go again. What's this one about?"
I looked at my program. "I don't
know," I said. "It's something to do with the history of
this area."
Oban looked wistfully into his empty
glass. "I didn't know there was any history,
apart from criminality."
A voice came over the sound system telling
us that the performance was about to begin. We went in
to take our seats, except that it turned out that there
weren't any seats.
Market Day wasn't a normal play,
any more than the Sugarhouse was a normal theater.
It was more like wandering around an indoor carnival.
There were jugglers, clowns, performers on stilts,
people on soapboxes giving speeches. There were children
playing games, singing and shouting. There were stylized
sketches performed by people of different ages in
costumes they got out of a chest in the middle of the
arena. The action happened all over the place,
sometimes at the same time, and you had to wander around
trying to catch what you could. At first I was
irritated, tantalized by the feeling that I was
missing something important on the other side of the
hall, but after a bit I relaxed and treated it like
a walk through an exotic foreign city. Oban
grumbled at first about there not being a proper story but
he was suddenly pulled out of the crowd by a rather
beautiful young female magician. She asked
him his name and what he did and there was a big laugh
when he confessed to being a policeman. He went
very red and then got wonderfully startled when she
found an egg in his inside jacket pocket.
I loved it, and I loved it partly because in a
strange way it freed me to think. I gazed with
immense pleasure at the man walking across the
wire above us but at the same time my 497
head was buzzing as I remembered all I'd been
through in the last month. I went over it and tried
to assemble it in some kind of order and of course it
wouldn't go. But for the first time, in the middle of a
happy crowd, it didn't seem to matter so very
much.
In the interval the performers didn't disappear
into theirthe changing rooms but wandered through the crowd
introducing themselves and chatting. Oban and I
talked to one of the jugglers, an accordion player
and a group of children who went to the local primary
school. Oban suggested in a hopeful tone that
we go and talk to the young woman behind the bar, so we
walked out into the "foyer," which was really just another
section of the old warehouse. Oban bought me a
gin and tonic and another double scotch for himself. The
girl who served must have been a teenager. She had
hair cut quite short and bleached. She had rings
all round her ears, in her nose and through her lower
lip. I asked her how long she'd been working
here.
"A few weeks," she said.
"Are you from around here?" I asked.
"I s'pose," she said.
"It must be good to have a place like this in the area."
"I s'pose," she said, and then someone behind me
ordered a bottle of Mexican beer from her rather
crossly and we moved away.
"Cheers," I said to Oban, and we clinked
glasses. "Clearly Gabe is doing his bit for
local people. It seems as if this theater is a bit
like Will Pavic's hostel."
Oban sipped his drink with a murmur of
pleasure. "I think he's doing a bit better
than Will Pavic," he said. "This isn't
exactly my sort of show. I prefer a good
story. I couldn't follow most of it. But I can
see that it's a clever bit of work. Hello,
look who's here."
He nodded at something and I looked round and
saw Gabe Teale in conversation with a seriously
trendy-looking couple. "Let's go over," I
said.
"He looks busy."
"Then we'll interrupt him."
We pushed our way through the crowd and I nudged
Gabriel's arm. He looked round and gave a
start, as well he might. "Surprise,
surprise," I said.
"Indeed," he said. 499
He introduced us to the two people he was talking
to. I didn't catch their names but it didn't
matter because, with a slightly curious look at us,
they drifted away toward another group of people who
looked as if they, too, were in the know.
"You didn't think we were the cultural
types," I said.
He looked at us with genuine confusion. Did
he think we were a couple? What was it about me?
Was there anybody in the world so weird that if they were
standing next to me people wouldn't assume I was going out
with them?
"Well ..." he began.
"It's fantastic," I said. "I hadn't
realized this was such a huge set-up. And this
amazing show. And employing these local people." I was
babbling. Stop babbling, Kit.
"It's not just me," he said. "I'm just the
artistic director. There's a board of
directors and various other people."
"Don't be modest," I said. "Is
Bryony here?"
"She doesn't work here," he said. "She's
at home. She's still not very well."
There was a moment of silence.
"So," I said, "you've probably got things
to see to."
"Yes," he said. "There are a couple of
things."
We shook hands formally in one of those curious
goodbyes that aren't very momentous. It wasn't
exactly as if Gabriel and Bryony were
emigrating. He would be working in the area, I would
be living in the area, and yet, London being
London, we would probably never meet again.
When he was gone, Oban gave me a smile.
"You look very cheerful," I said.
"I am. I've spent about an hour and a half
with you and you haven't told me that I've been all
wrong about everything."
I couldn't suppress a smile. "I was working
my way to that," I said. The bell rang for the
second half. I took a sip. "You know,
I'm feeling quite cheerful as well. It's been a
nice evening. I've got out of the house. Trouble
is, when I'm feeling cheerful, that's when I start
worrying. I'm a Puritan, you see. I
believe that people are only happy when there's something
that they don't know about."
"You're never going to be happy with that 501
attitude," Oban said.
"People keep telling me that. I just want to say
one thing and then I'll shut up. I know we should be
pleased with ourselves, job well done and all that, but
things keep nagging away at me--you know like when you
buy a shirt and, however careful you are, there's
always a pin left over that sticks into y."
Oban looked baffled. "Is that the one thing you
wanted to say? About shirts?"
"No, listen. Michael Doll was found dead
with these trophies."
"There's no problem with that, is there? You're the
one who knows about these men. Murderers keep
trophies, don't they?"
"They do," I agreed. "It's absolutely
standard. They do it to maintain power over their
victims, to relive the experience. Obviously
these aren't normal trophies. The feeding cup
belonged to the little girl, who wasn't his victim."
"Yes, but it's still a trophy, isn't it? It
was the reminder that he killed her mother. And for all that
we know there could be something else that belonged
to Philippa Burton in that rubbish dump he
lived in."
"You're right," I said. "And in the same way,
the leather pouch he got from Bryony wasn't a
normal trophy. For a start, she wasn't
dead."
"He grabbed it during the struggle and kept it.
Handy as well. It had the key to Bryony
Teale's house. He could have made use of it."
"Yes," I said. "So I'm just going to mention
two loose ends and then we'll go and look at the
play and that will be the end of it. We're now
assuming that it was Michael Doll who was
attacking Bryony on the towpath. That would
certainly deal with the coincidence of him being on the
scene. But what about the other man?"
"I've thought about that," said Oban, taking
another sip of his drink. "We were looking at it
from the wrong angle. Instead of Terence Mack and
Mickey Doll rescuing Bryony from unknown
man, we have Terence Mack and unknown man
rescuing Bryony from Mickey Doll. We
knew that the different accounts were totally hopeless
anyway, so it's not surprising that Mack and
Bryony didn't realize what was going on."
"And this unknown hero ran away because he was too
modest to take all the credit?"
"There are plenty of people who don't 503
want to meet the police, even as a witness.
Maybe he was carrying drugs, something like that."
"All right," I said. "Last question. What about
Philippa Burton's list? What about the
phone calls to the hostel?"
Oban drained his glass and placed it on the
bar. "The first thing is that we don't need to know.
When a murderer dies before being tried, there are
always details you never recover. It could be
anything. Maybe ... maybe ..." he cast
around his... maybe Bryony took a
photograph of Lianne, and ... and
Philippa saw it in an exhibition and wanted
to get a copy of it and ..."
"Bryony said she didn't know either of them, and
why would she want to phone the hostel? And why would
that make Michael Doll kill them all?"
"That was just off the top of my head," Oban
said, a little irritably. "Given time I could come
up with something better."
"Doesn't it worry you?"
"What worries me is the half-dozen or so
murders I've worked on where we never found
anybody at all. I think of those every evening before
I go to sleep. About once a year I dig out the
old files and I wonder if we missed anything
or if something new has been developed that we can
try on it. This case is closed. That's what
makes me happy. I don't mind a few
gaps. Remember, reality is cleverer than we
are. You can't expect to understand it all."
I wanted to say more but I'd promised and,
besides, a brass band was striking up inside.