The Red Room

by Nicci French

Genres: Police Procedurals; Female Sleuths; Crime Fiction; Psychological Thrillers

Synopsis

At the request of London police, psychologist Kit Quinn agrees to evaluate Michael Doll, a sexual predator who slashes her face. As she recovers, Kit has horrible dreams of a red room. Months later, Doll is arrested for murder. As Doll's obsession with Kit escalates, Kit is gripped with a paralyzing fear that the killer isn't Doll--but someone close to her heart.

Release date: August 7, 2001

Publisher: Mysterious Press

Print pages: 480

Sample

THE RED ROOM

“Stylish and engrossing… brilliant.”

—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Stylish… to be read in one sitting.”

—BookPage

“Razor-sharp… vivid… a hit.”

—Booklist

“Exciting… absorbing chiller.”

—BookBrowser

“A sizzling hot suspense read… intense.”

—Romantic Times

BENEATH THE SKIN

“Brilliant… frightening… a tale of sheer terror.”

—People

“[An] insinuating tale of sexual obsession.”

—New York Times Book Review

“Captivating… brilliant… a gripping read for anywhere but home alone.”

—Mademoiselle

“Stunnning…. French knows how to carry a chilling situation to frightening extremes.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Creepy…. French ups the suspense to nail-biting effect.”

—Orlando Sentinel

“Genuine suspense keeps pages turning…. Don’t plan on doing much else once you start reading this one.”

—Cleveland Plain Dealer

“So imaginative and well executed that I can’t stop thinking about it.”

—San Jose Mercury News

“Stunning… elegantly conceived and executed….. Few writers command the virtuosity displayed here.”

—Star-Telegram (TX)

“Plenty of psychological suspense… a textured, elegant novel with writing and characterization that bind an atypical triplex
structure.”


—Baltimore Sun

“A beautifully written tale with a twist.”

—Austin American-Statesman

“Mesmerizing and disturbing… a novel that will definitely get beneath your skin… a fascinating, suspenseful scenario that
will hold you enthralled until the shocking outcome.”


—Romantic Times

“Its insinuating suspense doesn’t disappoint…. French makes the reader complicit, a voyeur getting a series of glimpses of
three women on a craggy path from denial to disintegration. The sensation is intimate and disquieting.”


—Newark Sunday Star-Ledger

“A gripping whodunit.”

—Associated Press

KILLING ME SOFTLY

“A compulsive read… peak psychological suspense.”

—People

“First rate… genuine chills run down the spine…. French can show John Grisham and Patricia Cornwell a thing about good writing.”

—Orlando Sentinel

“Undeniably fascinating…. You can’t stop reading this book once you’ve picked it up…. French whips up a perfect confection.”

—Washington Post Book World

“Elegantly chilling.”

—Philadelphia Enquirer

“A sleek, utterly gripping tale.”

—Mademoiselle

“French pulls off [sexual obsession] as well as anyone in recent memory.”

—Chicago Tribune

“Stunning…. every decade or so a psychological thriller appears that graphically recounts an intelligent woman’s willing sexual
subjugation; this gripping novel joins that group.”


—Publishers Weekly

“An elegant, chilling take on love, murder, and obsession.”

—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Beware of beautiful days. Bad things happen on beautiful days. It may be that when you get happy, you get careless. Beware
of having a plan. Your gaze is focused on the plan and that’s the moment when things start happening just outside your range
of vision.


I once helped out my professor with some research on accidents. A team of us talked to people who had been run over, pulled
into machinery, dragged out from under cars. They had been in fires and tumbled down stairs and fallen off ladders. Ropes
had frayed, cables had snapped, people had dropped through floors, walls had tipped, ceilings had collapsed onto their heads.
There is no object in the world that can’t turn against you. If it can’t fall on your head, it can become slippery, or it
can cut you, or you can swallow it, or try to grab hold of it. And when the objects get into the hands of human beings, well,
that’s a whole other thing.


Obviously there were certain problems with the research. There was a core of accident victims who were inaccessible to our
inquiries because they were dead. Would they have had a different tale to tell? That moment when the basket slipped and the
window-cleaners fell from twenty floors up, their sponges still in their hands, did they think anything apart from, Oh, fuck?
As for the others, there were people who, at the time of their mishap, had been tired, happy, clinically depressed, drunk,
stoned, incompetent, untrained, distracted or just the victims of faulty equipment or what we could only and reluctantly characterize
as bad luck, but all of them had one thing in common. Their minds had been on something else at the time. But, then, that’s
the definition of an accident. It’s something that breaks its way into what your mind is on, like a mugger on a quiet street.


When it came to summing up the findings, it was both easy and hard. Easy because most of the conclusions were obvious. Like
it says on the bottle, don’t operate heavy machinery when intoxicated. Don’t remove the safety guard from the machine press,
even if it seems to be getting in the way, and don’t ask the fifteen-year-old doing a week’s work experience to use it. Look
both ways before crossing the road.


But there were problems, even with that last one. We were trying to take things that had been on the edge of people’s minds
and move them to the front. The obvious problem with that is that no one can move everything to the front of their mind. If
we turn to face a source of danger, something else has an opportunity to sneak up behind us. When you look left, something
on your right has the chance to get you.


Maybe that’s what the dead people would have told us. And maybe we don’t want to lose all of those accidents. Whenever I’ve
fallen in love, it’s never been with the person I was meant to like, the nice guy with whom my friends set me up. It hasn’t
necessarily been the wrong man, but it’s generally been the person who wasn’t meant to be in my life. I spent a lovely summer
once with someone I met because he was a friend of a friend who came along to help my best friend move into her new flat;
the other friend who was meant to come and help had to play in a football match because someone else had broken his leg.


I know all that. But knowing it isn’t any help. It only helps you understand it after it’s happened. Sometimes not even then.
But it’s happened. There’s no doubt about that. And I suppose it started with me looking the other way.


It was toward the end of a May afternoon and it was a beautiful day. There was a knock at the door of my room and before I
could say anything it opened and Francis’s smiling face appeared. “Your session has been canceled,” he said.


“I know,” I said.

“So you’re free…”

“Well…” I began. At the Welbeck Clinic, it was dangerous ever to admit you were free. Things were found for you to do, which
were generally the things that people more senior than you didn’t want to bother with.


“Can you do an assessment for me?” Francis asked quickly.

“Well…”

His smile widened. “Of course, what I’m actually saying is, ‘Do an assessment for me,’ but I’m putting it in a conventionally
oblique way as a form of politeness.”


One of the disadvantages of working in a therapeutic environment was having to answer to people like Francis Hersh who, first,
couldn’t say good morning without putting it in quotation marks and providing an instant analysis of it, and second… don’t
get me started. With Francis, I could work my way through second, third, and all the way up to tenth, with plenty to spare.


“What is it?”

“Police thing. They found someone shouting in the street, or something like that. Were you about to go home?”

“Yes.”

“Then that’s fine. You can just pop into the Stretton Green station on your way home, give him the once-over, and they can
send him on his merry way.”


“All right.”

“Ask for DI Furth. He’s expecting you.”

“When?”

“About five minutes ago.”

I rang Poppy, caught her just in time, and told her I’d be a few minutes late meeting her for a drink. Just a work thing.

When someone is doing the sorts of things that are likely to cause a breach of the peace, it can be surprisingly difficult
to assess whether they are bloody-minded, drunk, mentally ill, physically ill, confused, misunderstood, generally obnoxious
but harmless, or, just occasionally, a real threat. Normally the police handle it in a fairly random fashion, calling us in
only when there are extreme and obvious reasons. But a year earlier, a man who had been picked up and let go turned up a couple
of hours later in the nearby high street with an ax. Ten people were injured and one of them, a woman in her eighties, died
a couple of weeks later. There had been a public inquiry, which had delivered its report the previous month, so for the time
being the police were calling us in on a regular basis.


I’d been in the station several times, with Francis or on my own. What was funny about it, in a very unfunny way, was that
in providing our best guesses about these mostly sad, confused, smelly people sitting in a room in Stretton Green, we were
mainly providing the police with an alibi. The next time something went wrong, they could blame us.


Detective Inspector Furth was a good-looking man, not much older than I was. As he greeted me, he had an amused, almost impudent,
expression that made me glance nervously at my clothes to make sure nothing was out of place. After a few moments I saw that
this was just his permanent expression, his visor against the world. His hair was blond, combed back over his head, and he
had a jaw that looked as if it had been designed all in straight lines with a ruler. His skin was slightly pitted. He might
have had acne as a child.


“Dr. Quinn,” he said with a smile, holding out his hand. “Call me Guy. I’m new here.”

“Pleased to meet you,” I said, and winced in the vise of his handshake.

“I didn’t know you’d be so… er… young.”

“Sorry,” I began, then stopped myself. “How old do I need to be?”

“Got me,” he said, with the same smile. “And you’re Katherine—Kit for short. Dr. Hersh told me.”

Kit used to be the special name my friends called me. I’d lost control of that years ago, but it still made me flinch a bit
when a stranger used it, as if they’d come into the room while my clothes were off.


“So where is he?”

“This way. You want some tea or coffee?”

“Thanks, but I’m in a bit of a hurry.”

He led me across the open-plan office, stopping at a desk to pick up a mug in the shape of a rugby ball, with the top lopped
off like a breakfast egg.


“My lucky mug,” he said, as I followed him through a door on the far side. He stopped outside the interview room.

“So who am I meeting?” I asked.

“Creep called Michael Doll.”

“And?”

“He was hanging around a primary school.”

“He was approaching children?”

“Not directly.”

“Then what’s he doing here?”

“The local parents have started an action group. They give out leaflets. They spotted him and things got a bit nasty.”

“To put it another way, what am I doing here?”


Furth looked evasive. “You know about these things, don’t you? They said you work at Market Hill.”

“Some of the time I do, yes.” In fact, I divide my time between Market Hill, which is a hospital for the criminally insane,
and the Welbeck Clinic, which provides assistance for the middle classes in distress.


“Well, he’s weird. He’s been talking funny, muttering to himself. We were wondering if he was a schizophrenic, something like
that.”


“What do you know about him?”

Furth gave a sniff, as if he could detect the man’s stench on the other side of the door. “Twenty-nine years old. Doesn’t
do much of anything. Bit of minicabbing.”


“Has he got a record of sexual offenses?”

“Bit of this, bit of that. Bit of exposure.”

I shook my head. “Do you ever think this is all a bit pointless?”

“What if he’s really dangerous?”

“Do you mean, what if he’s the sort of person who might do something violent in the future? That’s the sort of thing I asked
my supervisor when I started at the clinic. She answered that we probably won’t spot it now and we’ll all feel terrible afterwards.”


Furth’s expression furrowed. “I’ve met bastards like Doll, after they’ve done their crime. Then the defense can always find someone who’ll come in and talk about their difficult childhood.”


Michael Doll had a full head of shoulder-length hair, brown and curly, and his face was gaunt, with prominent cheekbones.
He had strangely delicate features. His lips in particular looked like a young woman’s, with a pronounced Cupid’s bow. But
he had a wall-eye and it was difficult to tell if he was staring at me or just slightly past me. He had the tan of a man who
spent much of his life outside. He looked as if the walls were pressing in on him. His large callused hands were tightly clutched
as if each was trying to prevent the other from trembling.


He wore jeans and a gray windbreaker that wouldn’t have looked especially strange if it weren’t for the bulky orange sweater
underneath, which it failed to cover. I could see how, in another life, another world, he might have been attractive, but
weirdness hung about him like a bad odor.


As we came in he had been talking quickly and almost unintelligibly to a bored-looking female police officer. She moved aside
with obvious relief as I sat down at the table opposite Michael Doll and introduced myself. I didn’t get out a notebook. There
probably wouldn’t be any need.


“I’m going to ask you some simple questions,” I said.

“They’re after me,” Doll muttered. “They’re trying to get me to say things.”

“I’m not here to talk about what you’ve done. I just want to find out how you are. Is that all right?”

He looked around suspiciously. “I don’t know. You a policeman?”

“No. I’m a doctor.”

His eyes widened. “You think I’m ill? Or mad?”

“What do you think?”


“I’m all right.”

“Good,” I said, hating the patronizing reassurance in my voice. “Are you on any medication?” He looked puzzled. “Pills? Medicines?”

“I take stuff for my indigestion. I get these pains. After I’ve eaten.” He rapped his chest.

“Where do you live?”

“I’ve got a room. Over in Hackney.”

“You live alone?”

“Yeah. Anything wrong with that?”

“Nothing. I live on my own.”

Doll grinned a small grin. It didn’t look nice. “You got a boyfriend?”

“What about you?”

“I’m not a poof, you know.”

“I meant have you got a girlfriend.”

“You first,” he said sharply.

He was quick-witted enough. Manipulative, even. But not all that much more crazy than anybody else in the room.

“I’m here to find out about you,” I said.


“You’re just like them,” he said, a tremble of rage in his voice. “You want to trap me into saying something.”

“What could I trap you into saying?”

“I dunno, I… I…” He started to stammer and the words wouldn’t come. He gripped the table hard. A vein on the side of his forehead
was throbbing.


“I don’t want to trap you, Michael,” I said, standing up. I looked over at Furth. “I’m done.”

“And?”

“He seems all right to me.”

To my side I could hear Doll, like a radio that had been left on.

“Aren’t you going to ask him what he was doing outside the school?”

“What for?”

“Because he’s a pervert, that’s why,” said Furth, finally not smiling. “He’s a danger to others, and he shouldn’t be allowed
to hang round kids.” That was for me. Now he started talking past me at Doll. “Don’t think this is doing you any good, Mickey.
We know you.”


I glanced round. Doll’s mouth was frozen open, like a frog or a fish. I turned to go and from that point on I had only flashes
of awareness. A smashing sound. A scream. A push from one side. A tearing sensation down the side of my face. I could almost
hear it. Quickly followed by a warm splashing over my face and neck. The floor rising to meet me. Linoleum hitting me hard.
A weight on me. Shouting. Other people around. Trying to push myself but slipping. My hand was wet. I looked at it. Blood.
Blood everywhere. Everything was red. Unbelievable amounts everywhere. I was being dragged, lifted.


It was an accident. I was the accident.

“And I said, ‘Yes, yes, I do believe in God,’ but God can be the wind in the tree and the lightning in the sky.” He leaned
forward and pointed at me with his fork, this man who I wasn’t going to be going home with at the end of the evening, and
whose phone number I would lose. “God can be your conscience. God can be a name for love. God can be the Big Bang. ‘Yes,’
I said, ‘I believe that even the Big Bang may be the name for your faith.’ Can I top you up?”


That was the stage of the evening that we’d arrived at. Six bottles of wine among eight of us, and we were only on the main
course. Sloppy fish pie with peas. Poppy is one of the worst cooks I know. She makes industrial quantities of unsuccessful
nursery food. I looked across at her. Her face was flushed. She was arguing about something with Cathy, waving her arms around
overemphatically, leaning forward. One of her sleeves trailed in the plate. She was bossy, anxious, unconfident, perhaps unhappy,
always generous—she was throwing this small dinner party in honor of my recovery and my imminent return to work. She felt
my eyes on her and looked my way. She smiled and looked suddenly young, like the student she’d been when I met her ten years
ago.


Candlelight makes everybody look beautiful. Faces around the table were luminous, mysterious. I looked at Seb, Poppy’s husband,
a doctor, a psychiatrist. Our territories bordered. That’s what he had once said. I’d never thought of myself as having a
territory, but he sometimes seemed like a dog patrolling his yard, barking at anyone who came too close. His sharp, inquisitive
features were smoothed by the kind, guttering light. Cathy was no longer brown and heavy but golden and soft. Her husband
at the other end was cast into secret shadows. The man on my left was all planes of light and darkness.


“I said to her, ‘We all need to believe in something. God can be our dreams. We all need to have our dreams.’”

“That’s true.” I slid a forkful of cod into my mouth.

“Love. ‘What is life without love?’ I said, I said,”—he raised his voice and addressed the table at large—“‘What’s life without
love?’”


“To love,” said Olive, opposite me, lifting her empty glass and laughing like the peal of a cracked bell. A tall, dark, aquiline
woman with her blue-black hair piled dramatically on top of her head. I’ve always thought she looks like a model rather than
a geriatric nurse. She leaned across and planted a smacking kiss on the mouth of her new boyfriend, who sat back in his chair
looking dazed.


“More fish pie, anyone?”

“Is there someone in your life?” murmured my neighbor. He really was quite tipsy. “Someone to love?”

I blinked and tried not to remember. Another party, another life away, before I’d nearly died and come back to life as a woman
with a scar bisecting her face: Albie in a spare bedroom in a stranger’s house, with someone else. His hands on her strawberry-pink
dress, pushing its straps off her shoulders; her creamy breasts swelling under his hands. Her eyes closed, her head tipped
back, the bright lipstick smudged. He said, “No, no, we mustn’t” in a drunken slur, but let her anyway, slack and passive
while her fingers unreeled him. I had stood there on the landing, gazing in, not able to move or speak. There are only so
many things one can do in sex, I thought then, watching this tableau; all the gestures we think are our own belong to other
people too. The way she rubbed her thumb across his lower lip. I do that. Then Albie saw me and I thought, There are only
so many ways you can catch your lover with somebody else. It seemed unoriginal. His lovely shirt hung loose. We had stared
at each other, the woman lolling between us. We stared and I could hear my heart beat. What’s life without love?


“No,” I said. “Nobody now.”

Poppy rapped her knife against her glass. Upstairs I heard a child shriek. There was a loud thump on the ceiling above us.
Seb frowned.


“I want to make a toast,” she said. She cleared her throat.

“Hang on, let me fill the glasses.”

“Three months ago, Kit had her terrible… thing….”

My neighbor turned and looked at my face. I put up my hand to cover the scar, as if his gaze was burning it.

“She was attacked by a madman.”

“Well…” I began to protest.

“Anybody who saw her in that hospital bed, like I did, what he’d done to her… We were desperate.” Drink and emotion made Poppy’s
voice wobble. I looked down at my plate, hot with embarrassment. “But nobody should judge her by appearances.” She blushed
with alarm and looked at me. “I don’t mean the… you know.” I raised my hand to my face again. I was always doing that now,
the gesture of self-protection I hadn’t managed at the time. “She may look gentle, but she’s a tough, brave woman, she’s always
been a fighter, and here she is, and on Monday she returns to work, and this evening is for her, and I wanted everyone to
raise their glasses to celebrate her recovery and… well, that’s it, really. I never was good at making speeches at the best
of times. But anyway, here’s to darling Kit.”


“To Kit,” everyone chorused. Glasses, raised high, chinked across the debris of the meal. Faces glowing, smiling at me, breaking
up and re-forming in the candlelight. “Kit.”


I managed a smile. I didn’t really want all this, and I felt bad about that.

“Come on, Kit, give us a speech.” This from Seb, grinning at me. You probably know his face or his voice. You’ve heard him
giving opinions on everything from serial killers’ motivations to toddlers’ nightmares to the madness of crowds. He compliments
and smiles and does his very best to make me feel good about myself, but really, I suppose, sees me as a hopeless beginner
in his own profession. “You can’t just sit there looking sweet and shy, Kit. Say something.”


“All right, then.” I thought about Michael Doll, lunging across the room, hand upraised. I saw his face, the glint of his
eyes. “I’m not really a fighter. In fact I’m the opposite, I—” There was a loud howl from upstairs, then another.


“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Poppy, rising in her chair. “Other children are in bed at ten thirty, not beating each other up.
Hang on, everybody.”


“No, I’ll go,” I said, pushing back my chair.

“Don’t be daft.”

“Really, I want to. I haven’t seen the children all evening. I want to say good night to them.”

I practically ran from the room. As I climbed the stairs, I heard footsteps pounding along the corridor, and little whimpers.
By the time I reached their bedroom, Amy and Megan were in bed with the covers pulled up. Megan, who is seven, was pretending
to be asleep, though her eyelids quivered with the effort of keeping them shut. Amy, aged five, lay on her pillow with her
eyes wide open. A velvet rabbit with shabby ears and beady eyes lay beside her.


“Hello, you two,” I said, sitting on the end of Amy’s bed. In the glow from the night-light, I could see that there was a
red mark on her cheek.


“Kitty,” she said. Apart from Albie, they were the only people I knew who called me Kitty. “Megan hit me.”

Megan sat up indignantly. “Liar! Anyway, she scratched me, look. Look at the mark.” She held out her hand.

“She said I was a bird-brain.”

“I did not!”

“I’ve come to say good night.”

I looked at them as they sat up in their beds with their tousled heads, bright eyes and flushed cheeks. I put a hand on Amy’s
forehead. It was hot and damp. A clean smell of soap and child’s sweat rose off her. She had freckles across the bridge of
her nose and a pointed chin.


“It’s late,” I said.

“Amy woke me,” said Megan.

“Oh!” Amy’s mouth opened in a perfect circle of outrage.

Downstairs I could hear the hum of voices, the scrape of cutlery on china, someone laughing.

“How shall I get you to go to sleep?”

“Does it hurt?” Amy put out one finger and poked my cheek, making me flinch.

“Not now.”

“Mummy says it’s a shame,” said Megan.

“Does she?”

“And she said Albie’s gone.” Albie had tickled them, given them lollipops, blown through his cupped hands to make owl noises.

“That’s right.”

“Won’t you have babies, then?”

“Ssh, Amy, that’s rude.”

“Maybe one day,” I said. I felt a little throb of longing in my belly. “Not yet, though. Shall I tell you a story?”

“Yeah,” they said together, in triumph. They’d got me.

“A short one.” I searched around in my mind for something usable. “Once upon a time there was a girl who lived with her two
ugly sisters and…”


A joint groan came from the beds. “Not that one.”

“Sleeping Beauty, then? Three Little Pigs? Goldilocks?”

“Bo-o-ring. Tell us one you made up yourself,” said Megan. “Out of your own head.”

“About two girls…” prompted Amy.

“… called Amy and Megan…”

“… and they have an adventure in a castle.”

“OK, OK. Let’s see.” I began to talk without any idea of how I was going to continue. “Once there were two little girls called
Megan and Amy. Megan was seven and Amy was five. One day they got lost.”


“How?”

“They were going for a walk with their parents, and it was early evening, and a great storm blew up, with thunder and lightning
and winds howling round them. They hid in a hollow tree, but when the rain stopped they realized they were all alone in a
dark forest, with no idea of where they were.”


“Good,” said Megan.

“So Megan said they should walk until they came to a house.”

“And what did I say?”

“Amy said they should eat the blackberries on the bushes around them to stop themselves from starving. They walked and walked.
They fell over and scraped their knees. It got darker and darker and lightning flashed and big black birds kept flapping past
them, making horrible screeching sounds. They could see eyes peering at them from the bushes… animal eyes.”


“Panthers.”

“I don’t think there were panthers in that—”

“Panthers,” said Megan firmly.

“All right, panthers. Suddenly, Megan saw a light shining through the trees.”

“What about—”

“Amy saw it at the same time. They walked towards it. When they reached it, they found it came from an oil lamp hanging above
an arched wooden door. It was the door to a great ruined house. It looked scary, a spooky place, but by now they were so tired
and cold and frightened that they decided to take a chance. They rapped on the door, and they could hear the sound echoing
inside, like the beat of a drum.” I paused. They were silent now, their mouths open. “But nobody came, and more and more big
black birds screeched around them, until there was a dark cloud of birds in the sky. Black birds and flashes of lightning,
and rumbles of thunder, and the branches of trees swaying in the wind. So Megan pushed hard on the door and it swung open,
with a squeaky creak. Amy took the oil lamp from the entrance, and together the two little girls went into the ruined house.
They held hands and stared around.


“There was a passageway, with water running down the walls. They followed it until they came to a room. It was painted all
blue, with a cold blue fountain bubbling in the middle and a high blue ceiling, and they could hear the sound of waves crashing
on the shore. It was a room of water, of oceans and faraway places, and it made them feel that they were further from home
than they had ev