Read Online The Red Room by Nicci French - Free Book Online

ear, half hidden under his shiny
hair, but he slid it into his breast pocket as
soon as he saw me. "Bloody phones don't
work here anymore," he said. "Half the computers
have already gone. Nothing to sit on in half the
rooms. No fucking toilet rolls in half the
cubicles." Then he jerked his chiseled jaw.
"Upstairs," he said.
I followed him into a small square room,
with a dead rubber plant drooping in one corner and a
window that was painted shut. In the corner, a
broken chair lay on its side. On the table in
the center of the room there was a large
tape-recorder, and a box of tapes with small
neat writing on the labels. Furth sat down,
and I sat opposite him. Our knees were almost
touching under the table and I drew back a little, put
my hands on the wooden armrests of my chair.
"Ready?" he asked, lifting a hand. 85
"We've wound it forward to the spot you'll be most
interested in."
I nodded and he jabbed the "play" button with
his forefinger.
I didn't recognize the voice at first.
It was higher, for a start. And the pace was completely
different--sometimes very fast, so that I could barely
make out what was being said, and then, abruptly, it
would slow down and each syllable would be slurred.
For a few seconds I almost thought there was something
wrong with the machine, the batteries running down--
except it was plugged into a wall socket and when
I leaned over, I could see the spools running
evenly.
"I go down there. At nights I go down there
when I can't sleep and I often can't sleep,
Dolly, thinking about ..."
I pushed the "stop" button. "Dolly?"
Furth gave a modest cough. "That's the name
Colette--WPC Dawes--chose for herself.
Delores--Dolly for short. See? He's
Doll, and she's Dolly. That's how she struck
up a conversation at first. You know--"What a
coincidence," she said, all surprised, blinking
her long lashes, "my name's Doll too!"
Clever, eh?"
"I'm awestruck."
He laughed. "You're a hard woman
to please, Kit Quinn. Do you want to continue?"
"Go on then."
his... the women. You know."
"Go on, Michael," said the woman. "Go
on."
"I got to where it happened. When no one else
is there and it's all dark and I stand where she was
standing."
"Yes?"
"Yes, Dolly. Is this right?"
"You know it is."
"I go there and I imagine--I imagine it
all happening again, just like then. This girl walking
up the path and she's quite pretty, right? She's
young, seventeen maybe, and she's got long
hair. I like hair that's long. Like you hair,
Dolly, when you let it down. And I imagine
for a bit I just follow her, a few steps behind.
She knows I'm there, right, but she doesn't look
round. I can see she knows. Her neck's gone
all stiff, right, and she walks a bit faster.
She's scared. She's all scared of me. 87
I feel tall and strong. You know. Manly.
Can't mess with me. She walks a bit faster and
I walk a bit faster. I get closer."
There was a pause, just silence and breathing and an
ambient hiss. WPC Colette Dawes said
again: "Go on." Quite sharply this time, as if she was
his teacher.
"I get closer," he repeated. His voice
had slowed right down. "She turns round and as she
turns round I see her mouth wide open and her
eyes wide open and she looks just like a fish, like
one of my fish before I throw it back in the dirty
water. Like a fish under my thumb."
I listened to the sound of Michael Doll
laughing. A nervous, liquid laugh. At least
the woman didn't join in.
Silence. Furth and I sat and listened to the
sound of the tape turning. I looked at the other
tapes in the box. There were three more, labeled and
dated. Doll spoke again: "Does that make me
a bad man? What I've just said, does that mean
I'm bad, Dolly?"
"Did you hate her, Michael?"
"Do I hate her?" he asked, fretfully.
I made a mental note of the jumbled tenses.
I wished I had a pad of paper in front of
me, that I was making pedantic little notes and
concentrating on that. "No, not hate. I