Dark Room

'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