The Red Room by Nicci French Read Free Book Online Page B

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