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  THE RED ROOM

  by Nicci French

  Volume I of Three Volumes Pages i-x and 1-196

  Published by: Warner Books. A Time Warner Company. New York. Further reproduction or distribution in other than a specialized format is prohibited.

  Produced in braille for the Library of Congress, National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, by the American Printing House for the Blind, 2003.

  This braille edition contains the entire text of the print edition.

  Copyright 2001 by Nicci French

  BOOK JACKET INFORMATION iii

  THE RED ROOM

  People magazine summed up her last book, Beneath the Skin, with four chilling words: "Goose bumps all over." Mademoiselle cautioned that it was "a gripping read for anywhere but home alone." Now, in her newest novel, bestselling author Nicci French ratchets up the level of psychological suspense as a psychiatrist becomes a psychopath's obsession ... and perhaps his next victim.

  Interviewing people in police custody is part of Dr. Kit Quinn's job. But when Michael Doll, a disturbed derelict caught hanging around a London schoolyard, breaks a mug and tears up her face during questioning, he also cracks her composure and self-confidence. The incident leaves her with recurring dreams of a red room, where nightmares become real ... Three months later, Kit is again called upon to talk to Michael Doll after the police pick him up for the murder of a teenage runaway. Her colleagues in the department think that involving Kit in the case might help her recovery and put Doll behind bars for good. It doesn't do either. For Kit believes Doll didn't do it, and he walks free. Touched by the fate of the homeless girl, Kit becomes involved in a dangerous, deadly inquiry. But when she links the teenager's murder to the high-profile case of a pretty blond housewife, abducted in broad daylight and killed, the main figure in the middle of it all is ... Michael Doll. As her investigation continues, Kit finds him always in the shadows. Outside her doorway. Inside her apartment. Calling her on the phone. Wanting to love her. Yet, even with her fear escalating, Kit has the gut feeling that Doll isn't a killer. Even more frightening is her suspicion about who is ... In her previous books, Nicci French claimed the territory of violent obsession as her own. Here she explores the geography of the twisted psyche even more deeply, breaking new ground as she opens up the dark places in the human mind ... and reveals the red room, a place of nightmares, inside us all. v

  Nicci French is the author of the bestsellers Beneath the Skin and Killing Me Softly, as well as two earlier books, The Memory Game and The Safe House, both published in England to great acclaim.

  GREAT ACCLAIM FOR NICCI FRENCH'S PREVIOUS THRILLER, BENEATH THE SKIN

  "Brilliant ... frightening ... a tale of sheer terror." -com.People

  "An insinuating tale of sexual terror." -com..ationew York Times Book Review

  "Captivating ... brilliant ... a gripping read for anywhere but home alone." -com.Mademoiselle

  "Plenty of psychological suspense ... a textured, elegant novel with writing and characterization that bind an atypical triplex structure." -com.Baltimore Sun

  "Genuine suspense keeps pages turning. ... Don't plan on doing much else once you start reading this one." -com.Cleveland Plain Dealer

  "Creepy ... French ups the suspense to nail-biting effect." -com.Orlando Sentinel

  "Stunning ... French knows how to carry a chilling situation to frightening extremes." -com.Publishers Weekly

  "Strong ... accomplished." -com.Kirkus Reviews

  "Compelling ... absolutely first rate." -com.Booklist

  ALSO BY NICCI French vii

  Killing Me Softly Beneath the Skin

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  ix

  To Karl, Fiona and Martha

  SPECIAL SYMBOL USED IN THIS VOLUME

  @ (4) Accent sign. Placed immediately before the letter marked with an accent in print.

  THE RED ROOM1

  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. 3 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 s
mile 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 5 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 it is?" "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 7 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 9 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 an 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 11 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 13 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.
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  1 15

  "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 17 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. 19 "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--was 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 21 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 23 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. his... called Amy and Megan ..." his... 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--was "Panthers," said Megan firmly. "All right, panthers. Suddenly, Megan saw a light shining through the trees." "What about--was "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 25 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 ever been before. So they walked a bit further and came to another room. It was a green room, with ferns and trees in pots, and it reminded them of the parks they liked playing in and made them feel more homesick than they had ever felt before. So they walked a bit further and came to a third room. The door was shut. It was painted red. For some reason they felt very scared of this room, before they even opened the door." "Why?" asked Megan. She reached out a hand and I clasped it in my own. "Behind the red door lay the red room. They knew that inside this room was everything they were most afraid of. Different things for Megan than for Amy. What are you most scared of, Megan?" "Dunno." "What about being high up?" "Yeah. And falling off a boat and dying. And being dark. And tigers. And crocodiles." "That's what was inside the red room for Megan. And Amy?" "Amy hates spiders," said Megan gleefully. "She screams." "Yeah, and poison snakes. Fireworks exploding in my hair." "OK. So what did Megan and 27 Amy do now?" "Run away." "No, they didn't. They wanted to see inside. They wanted to see those tigers and boats and crocodiles--was "And poison snakes--was "And poison snakes. So they pushed open the door and they went into the red room, and they looked around and it was red everywhere. It was red on the ceiling and red on the walls and red on the floor." "But what was in it?" asked Megan. "Where was the crocodiles?" I paused, nonplussed. What actually was in the room? I hadn't thought of this bit of the story. I toyed with the idea of a real live tiger that would eat them both. "There was a little stuffed tiger," I said. "And a stuffed crocodile." "And a stuffed snake." "Yes, and a little toy boat and there was lovely food to eat and a big lovely soft bed. And Megan and Amy's parents. And they tucked them up in the bed and gave them a big kiss and they fell asleep." "With a night-light." "With a night-light." "I want another story," Megan said. I leaned down and kissed two grumpy foreheads. "Next time," I said, backing out of the room. "Tailed off a bit at the end, I thought." I started and looked round. Seb was smiling at me. "Where did you get it from? The Bruno Bettelheim collection of bedtime stories?" He said it with a grin, but I answered him seriously. "It was a dream I had in hospital." "But I don't suppose there were toys and a warm bed in your red room." "No." "What was there?" "I don't know," I said. I was lying. I felt my stomach lurch at the memory of it.