Free The Red Room by Nicci French

exactly sex."
"No," she said, shaking her head. She rubbed
the corner of her right eye.
"Good," I said softly. "Let's 97
go."
We walked back in silence until we were
walking up the steps to the station. I stopped and
held her back. "Colette," I said.
She looked away.
"Who prepared you for the assignment? Who gave
advice?"
"Just Furth."
"Right," I said. "And how do you feel about it
now?"
"How should I feel about it?"
"Troubled, maybe."
"Why? That's the problem with people like you. You try and
get everybody to feel traumatized."
"I was trying to be sympathetic."
"I don't need sympathy."
We parted coolly and I called Furth
immediately. He appeared looking breezily
confident. "So?" he said.
"I need to hear all the tapes," I said.
    7
    I woke and slept in snatches and then finally
I woke up late. I gulped some coffee as
I ran around getting myself ready. Julie came
out of her room wearing nothing except an old
jacket of mine she must have found in the cupboard
of the spare room that I had made a partial
attempt at turning into a study. Now her
room. We were going to have to have a talk about things.
She looked like a rodent that had been dragged out of
hibernation. Her hair was a mass of fluff, her
eyes narrow as if she needed to keep out of the
light. "I didn't know you were getting up so
early," she said. "I'd have made you some
breakfast."
"It's twenty to nine," I said, "and I'm in
a rush."
"I'll do some shopping," she said.
"Don't bother."
"It's no bother."
----
I drove back to the police station with a feeling
of ominous inevitability, like when I was fifteen
years old and taking my first real exams. I
sat very straight in the driver's seat, and 99
clenched my hands on the wheel. Every bit of my
body felt tight. My spine was like a metal
rod. My neck muscles strained. My jaw
clenched involuntarily. My head throbbed as if
someone was thrumming against my temples with their
knuckles. "Idiot, idiot, idiot," I
muttered to myself under my breath, stuck at a
traffic light that went red, green, red without any
cars moving because a tractor trailer was blocking
the road. It was raining steadily. Outside, a
few people scuttled by under umbrellas,
side-stepping the puddles and dog shit on the
pavements. Gray, clogged, mucky London.
My report lay beside me on the passenger seat.
It was about six hundred words long. Brief and
to the point. The tapes were in a plastic
shopping-bag beside it.
At the police station, I reversed into a parking
space and heard the ominous scrape of metal on
metal. The funny thing is that when it happens
to you, you almost feel it, as if the car's bodywork was
your own skin.
"Shit."
The back of my car was jammed up against the
gleaming blue paintwork of a horribly
expensive-looking BMW. I climbed out into the
downpour, and examined the long thin scratch I'd
made on the other car. My own had suffered even
more, with a light broken and one panel like
screwed-up newspaper. I fished a notebook
out of my bag and wrote a note of apology,
together with my car's registration number and my own
phone number, folded it several times to protect
it against the wet, and tucked it under the BMW'S
wipers. I'd failed to bring an umbrella and
I was already soaking. Water trickled down the
back of my neck. I picked up the report and
dropped it into my bag.
----
Furth was sitting at a table in the conference
room with a clipboard in front of him, but he
got up when I came in, giving a friendly nod.
With him was a woman with prematurely gray
hair and a smooth, placid face whom I had
met once before, a young beanpole of a PC, and a
bulky man with straggly hair around a bald
pate and small, shrewd blue eyes.
"Just the person," Furth said. "Were your ears
burning? Let me take your coat. Here, you know
Jasmine, don't you? Jasmine 101
Drake. And this is DCI Oban. He's my
governor. Coffee? Tea? Nothing?"
I looked at Oban with some alarm.