The Dark Room (2 page)

Interviews by Richmond police with her neighbours in Glenavon Gdns, Colonel and Mrs Clancey, reveal that she made an attempt on her life on Sunday, 12
June. Col. Clancey, whose garage adjoins Miss Kingsley’s, heard her car engine running with the door closed. When he went to investigate, he found her garage full of fumes and Miss Kingsley
half-asleep at the wheel. He dragged her outside and revived her, but did not report the incident because Miss Kingsley asked him not to. He and his wife are deeply upset that she has ‘tried
to do it again’.

Both Col. and Mrs Clancey and Mr and Mrs Adam Kingsley made reference to a Mr Leo Wallader who was until recently Miss Kingsley’s fiancé.
It appears he left 12 Glenavon Gdns on Friday, 10 June, after telling Miss Kingsley he couldn’t marry her because he had plans to marry her closest friend, Meg Harris, instead. Mr Wallader
and Ms Harris are unavailable for interview at the moment. According to Sir Anthony Wallader (father) they are currently travelling in France but plan to return some time in July.

In view of a recent MOT certificate on Miss Kingsley’s vehicle, which tends to rule out malfunction, and the fact that the chances of hitting
the concrete stanchion by accident are virtually nil, it seems clear that she drove her car into it deliberately. Therefore, unless she recovers enough of her memory to give an explanation of the
events leading up to the incident, Gregg and Hardy incline to the view that this was a second attempt at suicide after a drinking session in her car. Mr Adam Kingsley, her father, has offered to
pay the costs of the emergency services, meanwhile Miss Kingsley has been transferred to the Nightingale Clinic where she is receiving treatment from Dr Alan Protheroe. Mr Kingsley’s
solicitor is pressing for a decision on whether or not we intend to proceed against Miss Kingsley. My view is to do nothing in view of her father’s willingness to pick up the tab, her
disturbed state of mind and the fact that she chose such a deserted location. Please advise.

Chapter Three

Wednesday, 22 June, Nightingale Clinic, Salisbury,
Wiltshire – 8.30 a.m.

HOW DRAB REALITY
was. Even the sun shining through her windows was less vivid than her dreams. Perhaps it had something to do with the bandage over
her right eye, but she didn’t think so. Consciousness itself was leaden and dull, and so restrictive that she felt only a terrible depression. The big bear of a doctor came in as she toyed
with her breakfast, told her again that she’d been in an accident and said the police would like to talk to her. She shrugged. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’ She would have added
that she despised policemen if he’d stayed to listen, but he went away again before she could put the thought into words.

She had no memory of the first police interview at Odstock Hospital and politely denied ever having met the two uniformed constables who came to her room. She explained that she
could not remember the accident, indeed could remember nothing at all since leaving her house and her fiancé in London the previous morning. The policemen resembled each other, tall, stolid
men with sandy hair and florid complexions, who showed their discomfort at her answers by turning their caps in unison between their fingers. She labelled them Tweedledum and Tweedledee and
chuckled silently because they were so much more amusing than her sore head, bandaged eye and hideously bruised arms. They asked her where she had been going, and she replied that she was on her
way to stay with her parents at Hellingdon Hall. ‘I have to help my stepmother with wedding preparations,’ she explained. ‘I’m getting married on the second of July.’
She heard herself announce the fact with pleasure, while the voice of cynicism murmured in her brain.
Leo will run a mile before he hitches himself to a bald, one-eyed bride.

They thanked her and left.

Two hours later, her stepmother dissolved into tears at her bedside, blurted out that the wedding was off, it was Wednesday, the twenty-second of June, Leo had left her for Meg
twelve days previously and she had, to all intents and purposes, driven her car at a concrete pillar four days later in a deliberate attempt to kill herself.

Jinx stared at her ugly, scarred hands. ‘Didn’t I say goodbye to Leo yesterday?’

‘You were unconscious for three days and very confused afterwards. You were in the hospital until Friday, and I went to see you, but you didn’t know who I was. I’ve
come here twice and you’ve looked at me, but you didn’t want to talk to me. This is the first time you’ve recognized me. Daddy’s that upset about it.’ Her mouth
wobbled rather pathetically. ‘We were so afraid we’d lost you.’

‘I’ve come to stay with you. That’s why I’m here. You and I are going to confirm the arrangements for the wedding.’
If she said it slowly and clearly
enough, Betty must believe her. But no, Betty was a fool. Betty had always been a fool.
‘The week beginning the fourth of June. It’s been in the diary for months . . .’

Mrs Kingsley’s tears poured down her plump cheeks, scoring tiny pink rivulets in her over-powdered face. ‘You’ve already been, my darling. You came down a fortnight
and a half ago, spent the week with Daddy and me, did all the things you were supposed to do, and then went home to find Leo packing his bags. Don’t you remember? He’s gone to live with
Meg. Oh, I could murder him, Jinx, I really could.’ She wrung her hands. ‘I always told you he wasn’t a nice man, but you wouldn’t listen. And your father was just as bad.
“He’s a Wallader, Elizabeth . . .”’ She rambled on, her huge chest heaving tragically inside a woollen dress that was far too tight.

The idea that nearly three weeks had passed without her being able to recollect a single day was so far beyond Jinx’s comprehension that she fixed her attention on what was
real. Red carnations and white lilies in a vase on her bedside table. French windows looking out on to a flag-stoned terrace, with a carefully tended garden beyond. Television in the corner.
Leather armchairs on either side of a coffee table – walnut, she decided, and a walnut dressing table. Bathroom to her left. Door to the corridor on her right.
Where had Adam put her this
time?
Somewhere very expensive, she thought. The Nightingale Clinic, the nurse had told her. In Salisbury.
But why Salisbury when she lived in London?

Betty’s plaintive wailing broke into her thoughts. ‘I wish it hadn’t upset you so much, my darling. You’ve no idea how badly Daddy’s taken it all. He
sees it as an insult to him, you know. He never thought anyone could make his little girl do something so’ – she cast about for a word – ‘silly.’

Little girl? What on earth was Betty talking about? She had never been Adam’s little girl – his performing puppet perhaps – never his little gir
l. She felt
very tired suddenly. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘You got drunk and tried to kill yourself, my poor baby. Your car’s been written off.’ Mrs Kingsley fished a newspaper photograph out of her handbag and pressed it
into her stepdaughter’s lap. ‘That’s what it looked like afterwards. It’s a mercy you survived, it really is.’ She pointed to the date in the top left-hand corner of
the clipping. ‘The fourteenth of June, the day after the accident. And today’s date’ – she pushed forward another newspaper – ‘there, you see, the twenty-second,
a whole week later.’

Jinx examined the picture curiously. The writhing mass of twisted metal, backlit by police arc lights, had the fantastic quality of surrealist art. It was a stark silhouette and, in
the distortions of the chassis and the oblique angle from which the photographer had taken his shot, it appeared to portray a gleaming metal gauntlet clasped about the raised sword of the pillar.
It was a great picture, she thought, and wondered who had taken it.

‘This isn’t my car.’

Her stepmother took her hand and stroked it gently. ‘Leo’s not going to marry you, Jinx. Daddy and I have had to send out notices to everyone saying the wedding’s
been cancelled. He wants to marry Meg instead.’

She watched a tear drip from the powdered chin on to her own upturned palm. ‘Meg?’ she echoed. ‘You mean Meg
Harris
?’
Why would Leo want to marry
Meg? Meg was a whore. You whore . . . you whore . . .
YOU WHORE
!
Some horror –
what?
– lurched through her mind, and she clamped a hand to her
mouth as bile rose in her throat.

‘She’s been out for what she can get as long as you’ve known her, and now she’s taken your husband. You always were too trusting, baby. I never liked
her.’

Jinx dragged her wide-eyed stare back to her stepmother. That wasn’t true. Betty had always adored Meg, largely because Meg was so uncritical in her affections. It made no
difference to her if Betty Kingsley was drunk or sober. ‘At least Meg thinks I’ve something sensible to say,’ was her stepmother’s aggressive refrain whenever she was deep
in her cups and being ignored by everybody else. The irony was that Meg couldn’t tolerate her own strait-laced mother for more than a couple of hours. ‘You and I should swap,’ she
often said. ‘At least Betty doesn’t play the martyr all the time.’

‘When was this decided?’ Jinx managed at last. ‘After the accident?’

‘No, dear. Before. You went back to London a week ago last Friday after Leo phoned you during the afternoon. Horrible, horrible man. He called every day, pretending he still
loved you, then dropped the bombshell on the Friday night. I don’t suppose he was at all kind in the way he did it either.’ She held the handkerchief to her eyes again. ‘Then on
the Sunday, Colonel Clancey from next door rescued you from your garage before you could gas yourself, but didn’t have the sense to ring us and tell us you needed help.’ She swallowed
painfully. ‘But you were so cool about it all on the Saturday when you phoned home to tell Daddy the wedding was off that it never occurred to us you were going to do something
silly.’

Perhaps she’d been lying . . . Jinx always lied . . . lying was second nature to her . . .
Jinx looked down at the newspaper clipping again and noticed amidst the
wreckage in the photograph the
JIN
of the personalized number plate that her father had given her for her twenty-first birthday present. J.I.N. Kingsley.
Jane
Imogen Nicola – her mother’s names – the most hated names in the world.
JINXED
!
She had to accept it was her car featured there.
You got drunk
. . . Colonel Clancey rescued you . . .
‘There’s no gas in my garage,’ Jinx said, fixing on something she could understand. ‘No one has gas in their garage.’

Mrs Kingsley sobbed loudly. ‘You were running your car engine with the doors closed. If the Colonel hadn’t heard it, you’d have died on the Sunday.’ She
plucked at the girl’s hand again, her warm fat fingers seeking the very comfort she was trying to impart. ‘You promised him you wouldn’t do it again and now he wishes he’d
reported it to somebody. Don’t be angry with me, Jinx.’ The tears rolled on relentlessly in rivers of grief, and Jinx wondered, basely, how genuine they were. Betty had always reserved
her affections for her own two sons and never for the self-contained little girl who was the product of Adam’s first wife. ‘Someone had to tell you, and Dr Protheroe thought it should
be me. Poor Daddy’s been knocked sideways by it all. You’ve broken his heart. “Why did she do it, Elizabeth?” he keeps asking me.’

But Jinx had no answer to that.
For she knew Betty was lying. No one, least of all Leo, could drive her to kill herself
. Instead she dwelt on the incongruities of life. Why
did she call her father Adam while his wife of twenty-seven years called him Daddy? For some reason it had never seemed significant before. She stared past her stepmother’s head to her
reflection in the dressing-table mirror and wondered suddenly why she felt so very little about so very much.

A young man came into her room uninvited, a tall gangling creature with shoulder-length ginger hair and spots. ‘Hi,’ he said, wandering aimlessly to the french windows
and flicking the handle up and down, before abandoning it to throw himself into one of the armchairs in the bay. ‘What are you on?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Heroin, crack, coke, MDMA? What?’

She stared at him blankly. ‘Am I in a drug rehabilitation centre?’

He frowned at her. ‘Don’t you know?’

She shook her head.

‘You’re in the Nightingale Clinic where therapy costs four hundred quid a day and everyone leaves with their heads screwed on straight.’

Oh, but her anger was
COLOSSAL
. It wheeled around her brain like a huge bird of prey, waiting to strike
. ‘So who runs this place?’ she asked
calmly.

‘Dr Protheroe.’

‘Is he the man with the beard?’

‘Yeah.’ He stood up abruptly. ‘Do you want to go for a walk? I need to keep moving or I go mad.’

‘No thanks.’

‘OK.’ He paused by the door. ‘I found a fox in a trap once. He was so scared he was trying to bite his leg off to free himself. He had eyes like yours.’

‘Did you rescue him?’

‘He wouldn’t let me. He was more afraid of me than he was of the trap.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘I watched him die.’

Some time afterwards, Dr Protheroe returned.

‘Do you remember talking to me before?’ he asked her, pulling up one of the armchairs and sitting in it.

‘Once. You told me I was lucky.’

‘In fact we’ve talked a few times. You’ve been conscious for several days but somewhat unwilling to communicate.’ He smiled encouragement. ‘Do you
remember talking to me yesterday, for example?’

How many yesterdays were there when she had functioned without any awareness of what she was doing?
‘No, I don’t. I’m sorry. Are you a
psychiatrist?’

‘No.’

‘What are you then?’

‘I’m a doctor.’

The waxen image in the mirror smiled politely.
He was lying
. ‘Am I allowed to smoke?’ He nodded and she plucked a cigarette from one of the packets Betty had
brought in, lighting it with clumsy inefficiency because it was hard to focus with one eye. ‘May I ask you something?’