Dark Room

*15*

TUESDAY, 28TH JUNE, THE NIGHTINGALE CLINIC, SALISBURY-11:30 A.M.

When Alan Protheroe summoned Jinx to his office to break the news of Meg's and Leo's deaths, she drew away from him into the corner of the wide leather sofa in his office, a distant expression on her gaunt face. He wondered if she was even listening, or if, like so much in her life, she was choosing to blank out what she didn't want to hear. She, for her part, refused to be soothed by the sympathy in his voice or the look of compassion in his eyes, both of which she felt were false. Dr. Protheroe was not a man to take on trust, she thought.

"Bar the identities of the two bodies, I doubt many of the other details in the newspaper are true," he finished quietly. "It reads to me as if Leo's father has made some sweeping statements in a moment of grief which he will probably come to regret, but I'm afraid we can expect another visit from the police and I didn't want you to hear about this from them."

She favored him with a tight little smile. "I've known since Sunday night. But you knew that already, didn't you?"

He nodded.

"Who told you?"

"Simon Harris. He phoned yesterday afternoon. He wanted to warn me that the story would break today."

A look of relief crossed her face. "Simon?" She searched his face. "Why would he bother to do that?"

"I think he and his father feel this sort of treatment"-he tapped the newspaper on his lap-"isn't justice. He talked about his mother and Sir Anthony whipping up a kangaroo court."

"Caroline doesn't like me at all," she said disconsolately. "For some reason she's always blamed me for Meg's behavior. She thinks Meg fell into bad company. I suppose she looked at Adam and decided, like father like daughter."

"It's not uncommon. We all blame other people for our children's failings." He paused. "Why didn't you tell me the police visit upset you?''

She rubbed her eyes. "I don't trust the police," she said, "but it's a form of paranoia that I'm not particularly happy about. I might have been imagining things. There was no sense in worrying you unnecessarily until I knew for certain."

"You could have told me yesterday."

"Yesterday I was paranoid about what my father was planning."

He raised his hands in a gesture of despair. "How am I supposed to help you if you keep everything to yourself?"

"You're a very arrogant man," she said without hostility. "Hasn't it occurred to you that I might not want your help?"

"Of course," he said curtly, "but that doesn't mean I have to stop offering it. Do you think my other patients want my help any more than you do? They begin with good intentions, but within hours, most of them are climbing the walls to get out for their next fix. The only arrogance I see is on your side, Jinx."

"Why?"

"You think you're clever enough to outwit me, the police, and your father combined."

She shifted her gaze back to his. "I'm certainly contemptuous of fools who shut themselves away in their ivory towers, and close their eyes to the madness outside," she snapped. "Russell was murdered. For ten years I avoided any sort of serious involvement. Then, when I thought the dust had settled, I let myself go and fell for Leo. Now he's dead too, along with the only real friend I've ever had. So precisely what sort of help are you offering me? Help in remembering the deaths of my husband, my friend, and my lover?" She looked very angry. "I like it the way it is. I don't want to remember anything. I don't want to know anything. I don't want to feel anything. I just want to be allowed to take surrealistic photographs where all my repressed fears and desires jostle for expression in an idiosyncratic juxtaposition of purity and corruption." She bared her teeth at him in a ferocious smile. "And that's a direct quote from a review of my work in The Sunday Times. It's pretentious rubbish, but it sounds great."

He shook his head impatiently.' 'You know perfectly well it's not rubbish. I've looked at some of your published work, and that same theme appears over and over again." He leaned forward. "You seem to see the world in extraordinarily stark terms. Black and white. Good and evil. For every kindness, a cruelty; for every positive, a negative. Why are there are no gray areas for you, Jinx?''

"Because perfection can only exist in an imperfect setting. In a perfect setting it becomes ordinary."

"So it's perfection that fascinates you?"

She held his gaze for a moment but didn't reply.

"No," he said, answering for her, "it's imperfection that fascinates you. You're more attracted by the black than by the white." He studied her face closely. "The backgrounds to your pictures are always more compelling than the subjects, except in the few instances where you've turned the idea on its head by making ugliness the subject and beauty the setting."

She shrugged. "I expect you're right. Black humor certainly appeals to me."

"As in Schadenfreude?"

"Yes."

"You're wrong, woman. You experience anguish on behalf of others while the only person you laugh at is yourself." He quoted her own words back at her. " 'My education was a waste of time.' 'The Sunday Times writes pretentious rubbish about my art.' 'I won't get out of bed in front of you because you'll turn me into a golfing club joke.' " He paused. "Are you laughing at Leo now? You should be if you enjoy Schadenfreude. There's no blacker joke than the timely comeuppance of someone who's done you wrong."

"I can think of several," she said flatly. "Like when you wake up one morning in a police cell and remember it was you who dealt the death blow. That's going to be a gut wrencher when it happens. Ho ho ho! We'll all be splitting our sides." She looked towards the window, cutting herself off, symbolically extending the space between them.

"I don't think that's very likely to happen."

"Somebody killed them. Why shouldn't it have been me?"

"I'm not quibbling over whether or not you did it, Jinx. I'm quibbling with your waking up in a police cell one morning and remembering it was you. That's what's unlikely. Amnesia doesn't vanish overnight, so you'll know long before the police arrest you whether they' ve got good cause to do it.'' He watched her.' 'Have they?''

She continued to stare out of the window for several seconds before finally, with a sigh, turning back to him. "I keep seeing Meg on her knees, begging," she said, "and last night I remembered going to her flat and feeling terrible anger because Leo was there. I have nightmares about drowning and being buried alive, and I wake up because I can't breathe. I can remember feeling strong emotions." She fell silent.

"What sort of emotions?"

"Fear," she said. "It hits me suddenly and I start shivering. I remember fear."

These revelations had come at him so suddenly that he wasn't ready for them, and he experienced a terrible sadness, for she seemed to be remembering an overwhelming guilt. "Tell me about Meg," he prompted at last.

"She was begging, holding her hands out. Please, please, please." Her eyelashes glittered with held-back tears.

"Was she begging from you?"

"I don't know. I just keep seeing her on her knees."

"Where were you?"

"I don't know."

"Was anyone else there?''

"I don't know."

"Okay, tell me what you remember about going to Meg's flat and finding Leo there."

"I just had this image of Leo opening the door to me, and I knew it was Meg's flat because Leo was holding Marmaduke. Marmaduke's a cat," she explained. "The funny thing is, I heard him purring, but the rest of it was completely static, like a photograph."

"But you remember feeling angry with Leo."

"I wanted to hit him." She pressed her lips together. "That's really what the memory was, not the picture so much as a sense of incredible rage. It came to me suddenly that Leo had made me furious and then I saw him in Meg's doorway."

"Do you know when that was?"

She pondered deeply. "It must have happened after June the fourth because that's the last thing I remember-saying good-bye to Leo. He came into the hall and said, 'Be good, Jinxy, and be happy'..." She lapsed into another thoughtful silence.

"What did you say?"

"I don't know. I just remember what he said."

He pulled forward a notepad and pen. "Give me a rundown of the day before. What sort of day was that?"

She spoke with confidence. "I was at work. We were doing some publicity shots of a new teenage band. It was tough to come up with anything original because they were deeply uninteresting and horribly pleased with themselves. Four clean-cut young men with flashing white teeth and hairless chests, who thought they were so pretty we could just take a few snapshots and every prepubescent girl in the country would swoon." She laughed suddenly. "So I told Dean to needle them a bit, and after three hours, we ended up with some brilliant shots of four extremely angry young men glowering into the lens."

Alan chuckled in response. "What did Dean say to them?"

"He just kept calling them his 'pretty little virgins.' They got pissed off very quickly, especially as we kept them hanging around for a couple of hours while we fiddled with lights and lenses. They really hated us by the end of it but we got some good pictures as a result."

"So you developed the film straightaway?"

"No. We had some location work in the afternoon and we were running out of time, so we grabbed some sandwiches and left." She paused in sudden confusion. "I went straight home afterwards." She stared at him. "So when did I see those photographs?''

"Well, let's not worry about that for the moment. Was Leo there when you got home?"

"No," she said slowly, "but he wasn't supposed to be." Her eyes lit with sudden excitement. "I remember checking the rooms to make sure he'd really gone, and then I felt a sense of absolute peace because I'd got the house to myself again." She clapped her hands to her face. "I remember. He wasn't there, and I was pleased."

Protheroe wondered why she hadn't noticed the glaring inconsistency. Or perhaps the inconsistency was part of the game. "So now did you celebrate?"

Her eyes gleamed with sudden amusement. "I drank two pints of beer, ate baked beans out of a tin, smoked ten cigarettes in half an hour, watched soaps on the telly, and had fried eggs and bacon in bed at half past ten."

He looked up with a smile. "That's very precise."

"I was making a statement."

"Because they were the things Leo disapproved of?"

"A mere fraction of them. His view of how women should behave was modeled on his mother, and she's kept herself in clover by constant appeasement of a chauvinistic husband."

He arched an interested eyebrow but didn't pursue the issue. "So what did you watch on television?"

"Wall-to-wall soap. One after the other. EastEnders. The Bill. Brookside." She smiled. "Then I couldn't stand it anymore, so I watched the news. Soap operas are pretty bloody boring when you haven't a clue what's going on."

"Why didn't you watch Coronation Street?"

"It wasn't on."

"Are you sure about that?"

"Positive," she said. "I went through the Radio Times and picked out the soaps deliberately. If it had been on, I'd have watched it."

He stroked his beard thoughtfully. "I'm not much of an expert, admittedly, but I'm sure Coronation Street goes out on a Friday, and you say you remember this as being Friday, the third of June." He eased gingerly out of his chair, his shoulder protesting at the movement, and went to the desk. "Hilda,'' he said into the intercom, "can you rustle up a Radio Times from somewhere and bring it in? I need to know which days of the week don't have Coronation Street, but do have EastEnders, The Bill, and Brookside.''

Her giggle rattled tinnily down the wire. "There now, and I always thought you preferred the intellectual stuff."

"Very funny. This is important, Hilda."

"Sorry, well, I can tell you without the Radio Times. Coronation Street is Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. EastEnders is Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. The Bill is Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, and Brookside is Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. So, if you don't want Coronation Street but you do want the others, then that means Tuesday."

"Good Lord!" said Alan in amazement. "Do you watch them all?"

"Most days," she agreed cheerfully. "Anything else I can help you with?"

"No, that's fine, thank you." He returned to his seat. "Did you hear that?" he asked Jinx. "You appear to be remembering a Tuesday and not a Friday, and it does seem a little unlikely that Leo would have returned for breakfast immediately after he had packed his bags and gone."

She stared unhappily at her hands.

"I wonder if you're quite as clear about Saturday the fourth as you think you are. You remember saying good-bye to Leo and you're very specific about the day and the date, but do you know why? What happened to fix Saturday the fourth in your mind?"

"It was in my diary for ages," she said. "Week at the Hall, beginning June the fourth."

"And you were definitely leaving for the Hall when you said good-bye to Leo?''

"Yes."

"So how many suitcases were you carrying?"

She stared at him in confusion.

"Did you have any suitcases?" he asked.

"I know I was going to see my father," she said slowly.

He waited. "And?" he prompted at last.

"My bag was hanging on the back of the chair." She stared into the past. "It's a small leather pouch on a long strap. I slung it over my shoulder and said, 'I'm off now.' " She frowned. "I think I must have put the suitcases in the car the night before."

"Is that what you usually did?"

"It's the only thing that makes sense."

"I wonder if it is." He took a diary out of his jacket pocket. "Let's work forward," he suggested, "beginning with what you know to be true. Tell me about the first time you met Leo."

THE VICARAGE, LITTLETON MARY-12:15 P.M.

Simon Harris answered the door and looked in some dismay at Frank Cheever. "We-that is, my father and I-" He broke off as the sound of shouting erupted from the window to the right. "My mother's not very well, I'm afraid. She can't really come to terms with what's happened. We'd like her to see the doctor but she won't have him near her. The problem is she's making some very wild accusations, and we're worried-well, frankly, she's accusing Dad of some terrible things and we-that is I..."

He fell silent as Mrs. Harris's voice rose to a scream, her words carrying clearly through the open window.

"How dare you deny it? Did you think I didn't know how you lusted after her? Did you think she wouldn't tell me what you did to her? She couldn't wait to get out of this house, couldn't wait to get away from you. You made her what she was and you dare to accuse her now of weakness. You disgust me. You've always disgusted me."

Charles Harris said something in a murmur which wasn't audible.

"Of course I'll tell the police. Why should I protect you when you never protected her? You disgusting man." Her voice rose to a scream again. "CHILD ABUSER!" There was the sound of a door slamming, followed by silence.

Frank looked at Simon's shocked face. "None of that would be admissible in court, sir. I couldn't possibly swear that it was your mother I was listening to and not a radio program, so please don't worry unnecessarily. As you say, she's overwrought, and we all say things we don't mean when we're angry."

"But you heard it."

"Yes."

"It's completely untrue. My father has never abused anyone in his life, and certainly not Meg. It's my mother who has the problem." Anguish pinched his already drawn face. "This is so awful. I keep asking myself why. What have we done to deserve it?"

Frank was spared an answer by the door opening behind Simon's back and his father putting an arm round the young man's shoulder and drawing him inside. "Come in, Superintendent. You find us in turmoil, I'm afraid. Grief is often the most selfish of emotions."

THE NIGHTINGALE CLINIC-12:30 P.M.

Alan smiled encouragingly as Jinx showed her first signs of faltering. "You're doing very well. We can check all this with Dean later, but you've taken me up to Friday, the twenty-seventh of May, without any hesitation at all." He consulted his diary. "The following Monday, May the thirtieth, was a bank holiday. Does that help at all? You're unlikely to have gone to work, so maybe you took the opportunity for a long weekend away."

"Friday was the last day of the Cosmopolitan fashion shoot." She spoke slowly. "Dean had tickets to a rock concert at Wembley and he had to meet his lover at five o'clock at the tube station, so he left me to develop the film. I wanted to get it done because-" She paused at the same place she'd paused before. "I know it was urgent," she said, "but I can't remember why."

"There were only four working days the following week because of the Bank Holiday Monday," he pointed out, "and you were spending the week after that at Hellingdon Hall. Perhaps you realized you were running out of time."

She stared into the middle distance. "Miles and Fergus came," she said suddenly. "It was after Angelica had left and they kept hammering on the studio door until I let them in. There was a cabdriver with them, demanding money. They were both pissed. They said they'd lost all their cash gambling, couldn't go home and needed beds for the night. I said why hadn't they gone to Richmond and waited for me there? And they said they had, but Leo had refused to pay the taxi fare and told them to come to the studio instead and make me pay for it. Which I did." She took out a cigarette and lit it, watching the blue smoke spiral from its tip for a second or two before going on.

"I can remember now," she said in a strange voice. "I made them some coffee and told them to wait in the reception area till I'd finished what I was doing, but Miles was so drunk that he barged in on me in the darkroom and let the light in."

"What happened then?"

"The film I was working on was completely buggered, so I did what my father does and beat the shit out of him.'' She gave a hollow laugh. "I chased him into the studio and started hitting him with a plastic chair. I was so angry. And then Fergus came lurching in to find out what was going on, so I hit him as well. But the person I really wanted to have a go at was Leo. It was the last straw, sending them on to me, when he knew I was up to my eyes in work."

"How did he know?"

"Because when Dean left I phoned to tell him. We were going to his parents for the weekend and he wanted to leave on the Friday evening. So I rang to suggest that he go on his own and leave me to follow on the Saturday, but he said he had things to do himself so it didn't matter."

"And it was after the phone call that he sent Miles and Fergus on to you."

She nodded.

"What happened then?"

"I made up my mind to call off the wedding. It was the money more than anything, the fact that he wouldn't pay their taxi fare." Her lips thinned angrily. "He'd been scrounging off me for so bloody long, and he wouldn't even pay one miserable taxi fare, and I thought, I'm mad. What the hell am I doing tying myself to this selfish bastard who doesn't give a toss for anyone except himself?" She looked at Alan. "So I packed it in for the evening, got the boys into the car, and went back to have it out with him. And he wasn't there." She shrugged. "So I ordered a pizza, made the boys eat some, and sent them to bed to sleep it off."

There was a short silence.

"Weren't Miles and Fergus angry when you hit them?"

"I think they were too shocked.'' She thought back. "The funny thing is, I lost my temper with Fergus the other day and I thought it was the first time I'd ever done it, but it was nothing to the anger I felt that night. I remember screaming at them so much that I had a sore throat the next morning." She smiled slightly. "I didn't hit them very hard. It was the fact that I did it at all that shocked them. Miles burst into tears and said I was just like Adam, and I thought, for the first time I understand why Adam does it."

"And why is that, Jinx?"

She looked at him. "Because you're so bloody tired, you're working so bloody hard, you've tied yourself to a worthless parasite, and two immature drunks come along and ruin everything you've done because they think it's funny. I could have killed them all that night, every one of them. I got no sleep because I was so angry, and all I could think about was what hell the next week was going to be because I'd have to work late to catch up. And I kept worrying that the ruined film was the only film that was any good, and how was I going to explain to Cosmopolitan that we'd have to do the shoot all over again?"

"Did Leo come back that night?"

"If he did, I didn't hear him. I bolted the front and back door on the inside, so he couldn't get in." She brushed imaginary fluff from her sleeve. "He came back at lunchtime on the Saturday."

"Were Miles and Fergus still there?"

She nodded. "We were all in the kitchen when he came in through the back door. They couldn't go unless I lent them some money for the tube fare back to Miles's Porsche, which was parked outside a casino somewhere, but I was refusing to shell out any more. I said they could walk for all I cared, or phone Adam and explain what they'd been doing. He'd already told them that if they persisted with the gambling he'd cut them out of his will." She closed her eyes and touched her fingertips to her eyelids as if she had a pain there. "So Leo offered to drive them and they all left."

There was another silence.

"And what did you do then?" asked Alan.

"I don't know," she said. "I can't remember anything after they left. I think I must have gone to sleep." She lowered her hand and looked at him with a kind of despair.

THE VICARAGE, LITTLETON MARY-12:30 P.M.

They sat in the drawing room in deep discomfort. Caroline Harris crouched on the sofa, misery etched into every line of her face. Charles sat as far away from her as he could, while Simon perched unhappily on a stool. Frank, overheated and tired, was offered a deep leather armchair which hurt his back.

"We've located Leo's house in Chelsea," he explained, "and according to the information phoned through before I left, there are several boxes and suitcases on the premises which appear to belong to your daughter. Preliminary searches have uncovered a photograph album which shows several snapshots of Meg and Leo together, taken in July 1983." He addressed his question to Mrs. Harris. "Were you aware they had known each other for at least eleven years?"

Her lips thinned to a narrow line. "No," she said.

"Was she a secretive person, Mrs. Harris?"

The woman glanced spitefully at her husband. "Not with me. She told me everything. It was her father she kept secrets from."

"That's not true," said Simon.

Frank glanced at him. "You'd say she was secretive."

"Very. She didn't want anyone to know anything about her life, least of all Mum or Dad. Particularly Mum, in fact. She knew how much Mum hated sex, so she didn't tell her until recently how many men she slept with, and she only did that because she was angry." He closed his eyes to avoid looking at his mother's pain. "She loved sex, saw it as a healthy expression of life, love, and beauty, and couldn't bear to have it treated as something dirty and disgusting.''

"You wanted her too, Simon," said Caroline in a whisper, "just like your father. Never mind she was your sister. You think I didn't notice. I saw how you looked at her."

A dull flush rose in Simon's face. "It was you who made her uncomfortable," he said quietly, "not Dad. Everything she did was the opposite of what you've done. She got herself a decent education, she rejected God, she loved sex, she stayed single, she dove into London life to get away from the sterility of village rectitude. She experienced more in her thirty-four years than you will experience in a whole lifetime." Tears glittered in his eyes. "She didn't strangle life, she glorified every minute as if it were her last. I wish to God the rest of us could do the same."

There was a desperate and terrible silence.

Frank cleared his throat. "One of the photographs has a somewhat cryptic caption underneath it. It reads"-he consulted a notebook-" 'Happiness AA.' I'm told Meg is sitting in Leo's lap on a beach." He looked up. "Do you know what 'AA' stands for? It seems unlikely that Automobile Association or Alcoholics Anonymous would fit the bill."

Simon looked towards his mother, but she had retreated into some internal world and was rocking herself tenderly on the sofa. "After Abortion," he said quietly. "Married couples always talk about their lives BC-Before Children. Meg always referred to life after her abortion as 'double-A time.' She said she'd never realized before just how awful it would be to have children and she thanked God she'd discovered early on that she wasn't cut out to be a mother."

"Was Leo the father?"

"I don't know. She never told me who it was, and I didn't ask."

"Did you know about Leo before your parents did?"

"Not by name. I knew she had a long-term lover who came and went between her other affairs. She was very fond of him, called him her old standby. I presume that was Leo if she'd known him eleven years."

"Did she ever say why she didn't marry him?"

Simon shrugged. "She said once that he was permanently broke, but the truth is, I don't think she wanted to get married. She certainly didn't want children." He glanced towards his father. "She always felt that I fitted into our family better than she did, and she was afraid of bringing a child into the world who didn't belong. She said it wasn't fair."

"It can't have been Leo," said his father. "Surely she wouldn't describe a man with a house in Chelsea as permanently broke."

Frank Cheever tucked his notebook into his pocket. "In fact, sir, he had several properties both in this country and abroad, but no one knew about them, not even his parents. He made a habit of pleading poverty when, according to his solicitor, he was worth a very tidy fortune. Miss Kingsley describes him as a parasite who was obsessively secretive about money. His mother describes a disturbed young man with a pathological dislike of sharing. He wasn't a straightforward character by any means, so it's highly probable he did give your daughter the impression he had no money."

"How very tragic." Charles Harris looked distressed. "One tends to think the type doesn't exist anymore, certainly not amongst the young. I suppose we must blame Dickens for creating so extreme an example that the rest pass unnoticed." He saw the Superintendent's perplexed expression. "Scrooge," he explained. "Misers. People who need to hoard wealth but can't bring themselves to spend it. You come across them in the newspapers from time to time, old people who've died in shocking squalor only to leave a fortune behind." He folded his hands in his lap. "As I say, not something one associates with youth, but presumably a miser is a miser all his life. Poor Leo. What a sad, sad state of affairs."

His wife began to scream. It was a piercing terrible sound that curdled sympathy and frayed nerves.

THE NIGHTINGALE CLINIC-12:45 P.M.

"Let's try a different tack," suggested Alan. "You said you and Leo were supposed to be staying with his parents for the weekend. Have you any recollection of doing that, or was the whole idea abandoned when you decided you weren't going to marry him?"

Jinx's expression cleared. "No," she said, "we did go. I had a row with them. I seem to have had rows with everyone that weekend."

"It's not surprising. You were under a lot of pressure. The wedding was only a few weeks away and you were having second thoughts about going through with it."

"But why did I go down there with him if I knew I wasn't going to marry him?" It was a puzzle, but not one she thought Protheroe could solve.

He recalled her acceptance of Matthew Cornell's invitation to lunch. "Presumably they were expecting you, so perhaps you thought it was the polite thing to do."

"Yes," she said in surprise. "I didn't think it would be fair to Philippa not to go."

"Tell me about the row."

"I remember it so clearly," she said. "It was after lunch on the Monday and I blew my stack when Leo asked his father for some money and Anthony said he was a bit short because he'd been forced to pay for some building work he'd had done." She shook her head. "The job had been completed six months before and he was angry because the builder had gone to a solicitor." She pulled a rueful face. "I'd been holding myself back for twenty-four hours, and I went berserk. I called him every synonym for 'skinflint' I could think of, then turned on Leo and let rip at him. Poor Philippa looked mortified, and I was sorry about that because she'd always been so sweet to me." She sighed. "I wish I'd had the sense not to go in the first place. It wasn't a very dignified display. I kept spitting saliva all over the place because I couldn't get the words out fast enough."

"Was that when you told Leo it was all off?"

A look of irritation crossed her face. "I never got the chance. I just made an awful lot of noise, screaming and yelling and calling them names. I don't know what I thought I was doing really except getting all the poison out of my system. It was Leo who said he wasn't going through with it." She gave a small laugh. "He said he'd been having an affair with Meg and was planning to marry her instead." She looked at him. "I did tell you I wouldn't have wanted to kill myself over Leo and Meg. Do you believe that now? I can remember my relief when he said it. Thank God, I thought. I'm off the hook."

"But it must have been a shock."

"I suppose it was. I never thought she'd do it again, not after what happened to Russell."

He was lost. "Do what again?"

She looked at him rather blankly. "It was history repeating itself," she said impatiently, as if it was something he ought to have known. "Meg was having an affair with Russell when he was murdered."