Room 15: a gripping psychological mystery thriller

by Charles Harris

  Laura speaks. ‘My clients will be here in half an hour.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ says Becks the peacemaker. ‘We can disappear off now if you want–’

  I break in. ‘Let’s just take a moment.’

  ‘Thirty minutes,’ she repeats, and taps her watch in case I missed the point.

  Becks joins me by the TV, tossing peanuts up and down in his hand.

  ‘We know Javtokas had a bad temper and was obsessed with Amy,’ I say. ‘But he knows she’s not interested in Crystal. So why does he then beat Crystal to a pulp?’

  ‘If it was him in fact that did it. He could have just found her, then run away in fear.’

  ‘So, fine – What, in all this mess, do we know for sure? You could be right. Okay, I’ll be Devil’s advocate: we’ve found no evidence of any connection between him and anyone else. Was there ever a connection? What if nobody tipped him off? What if there’s no corrupt detective? Could it be that we’ve been making all this up in our heads?’

  I sit down on the sofa and stare at my hands. It’s like a sick joke. What do you call a detective who can’t remember? Or one who jumps to conclusions based on nothing? I feel empty. ‘Did you get the photos from last night, outside the Aviva Hotel?’

  ‘Yeah, those.’ Becks takes printouts from his jacket and spreads them over the coffee table. The quality isn’t brilliant, it’s difficult to see anything in the dark areas, and the rest is fogged by the glare of the headlamps from the police cars, but I can make out some faces. The usual collection of the curious, attracted to flashing blue lights. ‘Haskins,’ I say, pointing to a figure climbing out of an unmarked car. I indicate a shape far behind, sitting on a motor scooter. ‘Is there a blow-up of this one?’

  Becks finds it. ‘Javtokas.’

  ‘So perhaps no tip-off after all. Coincidence. He went to meet Matthews at the hotel. Saw the police, saw me being driven off by Norris and followed. If Haskins had time to get there, then so did he.’

  ‘You always told me there’s no coincidences.’

  ‘Maybe. I’m not so sure anymore.’

  ‘Why would he follow you and attack you then? Because you failed to save his friend’s life? It doesn’t add up.’

  ‘Because he thought I killed Amy Matthews.’

  ‘Why would he think that?’

  ‘Because someone told him that. Someone set him up…’ I hesitate. The one thought I’ve been avoiding. The one thing I hardly dare say, because I don’t know what R is really capable of. ‘Or he attacked me because I did kill her.’

  ‘What?’ Laura looks across at me in shock.

  Becks stares at me and shakes his head.

  ‘We can’t dismiss it. I don’t remember. I could have done anything.’

  Laura says nothing but blankly stirs her teaspoon around her half-empty cup.

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ Becks says. ‘Gerry said you were on the track of a bent cop. What about the call to the armed guard, man? Someone called giving your name. Someone with a good English accent, not Lithuanian.’

  I tap my hands together and try to think. ‘Some memories have been coming back,’ I say to the room in general. Then I say it straight out. ‘I saw the murder. I was there.’

  Laura glances at Becks as if for some kind of confirmation or reassurance, but he’s gazing at me.

  ‘What did you see?’ he says.

  ‘If it’s a real memory.’

  ‘You think it might not be?’ Laura says.

  ‘It seemed real. But false memory syndrome is a thing too. I could be imagining I remember from what I already know. It’s not coherent – more like clips from a movie that have been chopped up out of order. What I think I’ve remembered is Amy Matthews phoning me, but I can’t get the words. I just have her voice, like it’s in my ears even now. High pitched but jumbled up. There’s me driving like a madman, and running desperately into Lonely’s and then up the stairs of the Aviva Hotel, and crashing into the room she was hiding in, and there’s Amy pointing behind me, with a kind of scary giggling half laugh, half cry, and there’s a man. He attacks me in the darkness from behind the door.’

  ‘Who’s behind the door?’

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t get his face. But we fight.’

  ‘Shit.’ Becks sits up. ‘That means there’ll be forensics – your blood, your DNA. That means Winstanley will be able to put you at the scene.’

  On the TV, an actor in army uniform lies bleeding under a palm tree in a movie, telling another how they’ve done the right thing, though I’ve missed what this right thing actually was. I turn it off.

  ‘But you were a mile away when Norris found you, just a few minutes after the night porter phoned 999,’ Becks says, suddenly hopeful. ‘And on foot. You never would have had the time to get there from the murder scene.’

  ‘That hotel was empty when Ryan Turnbull arrived. I saw the vacated rooms and the lights left on. That can only mean the night porter waited till everyone had left before he made the call. We don’t know how long he would have delayed, but he wasn’t going to be in a hurry. No, good try, but I was there when Amy Matthews died.’

  Becks subsides and scratches his ear.

  ‘What were you doing there?’ Laura asks slowly.

  ‘He was trying to save her,’ Becks says.

  ‘So, surely Winstanley will realise that… And there’ll be forensics from the other man. Your bent cop.’

  ‘Except he can say the same – that he was trying to save Amy Matthews from me. The moment Winstanley finds I was there, she has to arrest me. Then while I’m locked up, our man has me where he wants me. A word to an inmate before I get my memory back and I have a fatal accident or am found to have hanged myself in my cell…’

  ‘Oh God!’ Laura starts tidying away the cups, as if she needs something to do. ‘No. Don’t even think that. Get a good lawyer. Fight it. They can keep you out of jail.’

  ‘Great. Tell me how. A suspected murderer.’

  I stand up. There’s something going round my mind that I’m trying to get a fix on. Lost in the confusion. I keep almost grabbing it and then it slips away.

  ‘How do the Kleiza twins suddenly get caught with drugs and guns in their office toilet and their prints all over the bags they’re in?’ I ask.

  ‘They’re gangsters,’ Laura says, but I shake my head.

  ‘That’s not the point. Petras and Karolis Kleiza are unpleasant but not stupid. In the four years they’ve been in this country they’ve not even had a library fine, and suddenly they’re nabbed with a load of heroin and two Baikals down the back of the toilet cistern.’

  ‘You think they were set up?’ Becks says, working it through.

  ‘There are many things a bent cop can do if he wants to.’ I come to a realisation. ‘I have to go back to the station.’

  Becks stops chewing. ‘That would not be a great idea.’ He has good instincts. He has a copper’s nose for when to jump in and when to step back. He’s right, of course, but he’s also wrong.

  ‘I have to take the risk. I’ve got to flush him out.’ I look at both of them. The only two people I trust right now.

  Laura straightens the reports on the table and says nothing.

  ‘It’s a stupid idea,’ Becks says. To my surprise, he’s getting angry. ‘You could be walking into a trap. You don’t know who it is who wants you dead. It could be the guy behind you on the stairs. Anyone.’

  ‘You don’t have to come.’ In truth, I feel guilty about still involving him in this.

  ‘Too right I fucking don’t.’ He looks like he wants to hit me. ‘This could be just what he wants you to do.’

  ‘Then at least one person will be happy.’

  42

  He walked into the station, and though nobody in the front office looked at him he knew what they were thinking. Nobody trusts a copper who nicks coppers. In his pocket was a search warrant and in his hand was a plastic bag. He swiped his card and made his way up the back stairs to the first floo
r, second office on the right. Door locked. He took the next one along, into the Writing Room, which was empty, and doubled back through a connecting door. She turned from her computer in surprise. A fresh-faced constable in her thirties.

  He stood in front of her, while her partner at the next desk glanced up uncertainly from typing a report, and he opened the bag and smiled. He held it up to her nose and said, ‘I believe this is yours.’

  Inside the bag was a brick of marijuana he’d found in her section house room, part of a recent raid that didn’t get logged when it should have been. This fresh-faced woman swore at him and her mate swore at him. This is what happened when cops spent too much time with villains. He kept smiling, because this was what Gerry had brought him in for.

  To be hated.

  As Becks drives, I gaze fearfully out of the side window. The new snowstorm’s dumping heavy flakes. For a moment there’s a sudden crack in the clouds and the setting sun flares red and angry.

  More memories are coming back. Memories of the job, of the last eighteen months. Of myself, or rather of R. The self I was.

  As Becks and I were leaving the Haywain Hill Motel, I stopped at the door and said to Laura, ‘Don’t make any decisions. Don’t do anything you can’t undo. Not till I come back.’

  She said, ‘How do I know who’s going to come back?’

  A chill wind gusts round the yard at the back of the police station like a warning of the night to come. The parking area is surrounded on all sides by the darkened office buildings. It’s a bad place to be trapped. Anyone could be waiting here. Winstanley… DPS investigators… a copper ready to betray me.

  As Becks finishes locking his Astra, still cross at even being here with me, he points across to where six silver and red police cars are parked next to a pearl-blue Audi A4. But I don’t understand what he’s trying to tell me.

  ‘This morning the murder team did a sweep of the area round the Aviva Hotel,’ he says. ‘The A4 was found two streets away. I imagine Winstanley will want to go over every inch.’ I still don’t understand. ‘It’s yours.’

  I have no memory of ever seeing this car before. Becks reaches it first and says, ‘Shit!’

  Someone has thoroughly trashed the interior. The upholstery has been slashed, grey fibrous filling tossed all over the inside.

  ‘Who would do that?’

  ‘Someone who doesn’t like Audis,’ I say. ‘Or doesn’t like me.’

  I tell Becks to use his pass to open the door to the main building, in case mine is being tracked, then I ask him for four things. He nods thoughtfully and says they’ll take him fifteen minutes to arrange.

  On a Sunday evening the back corridors of the station are unearthly in their emptiness. I make my way upstairs, slowly and carefully, ready for anything. I hear a great hoot of laughter from one of the CID rooms as I pass. I stop, tense. But when no one appears, I move on.

  I don’t take a chance on the makeshift incident room. Instead I limp up to my shared office on the second floor. The lights are off, but on the door hangs a damp waterproof jacket that wasn’t there before, and a half-empty coffee mug sits on the middle desk. I close the door and check the mug. It’s slightly warm.

  Urgently, I log in to my computer and find once more the brief notes written by R.

  I search them for names: Gardner, Haskins, Winstanley… Many deal with staff meetings, while others are full of oblique references and acronyms. I now realise why I understood so little this morning. R was writing in code, knowing that anything can be accessed by someone with the right authority.

  I pick up the phone. Gerry never said I couldn’t call my own incident room for updates. The detective constable who answers sounds mildly surprised. He’s Scottish, his name is Anderson and he came on shift in the afternoon. They were told, he says, that I was on sick leave, no details given. I accept his good wishes and ask what’s going down at his end. I learn officers have finished talking to Crystal’s neighbours about last night, and nobody saw or heard a thing.

  Oh, and Gerry has put a new man in charge of the investigation: Detective Sergeant Dave Haskins.

  ‘A DI Winstanley’s been asking around too,’ adds the DC. I stiffen and probe for more information in an offhand way and the DC says, ‘That’s all I’ve heard, sir. Except Winstanley’s probably at the station right now if you want me to put you through.’

  I decline, ring off and go to check the corridor. It’s empty. I close the door again, unlock my desk and take out Amy Matthews’ diary in its plastic bag. I can’t leave it here for Winstanley to find with its potentially incriminating ‘R’ as the last thing she wrote before she died. I place it on the floor to remind me to take it with me when I go, then return to my computer and revisit all the memos that mean nothing to me. I’m about to give up when I surprise myself by finding one that does indeed mean something.

  I print it out and lay it on the desk. It doesn’t make sense that I should write what I did. But I did.

  I’ve only five minutes before I rejoin Becks, but there’s one more place I want to try first, so I walk down a floor as fast as I can to Gerry’s office – the one that was my father’s, many years ago. The door’s closed and there’s no light inside. Two rooms away is the small office Gerry gave to Dave Haskins. I knock lightly on the door, then turn the handle and to my surprise it’s not locked. I step in, without turning on the light, and ease the door shut behind me.

  The room is scarily tidy. In the semi-darkness, I can make out three books on criminal law on a shelf. Two empty steel filing trays. Two photos of Haskins and his girlfriend on the desk in plain silver frames. He’s thin, blond and uncertain and she’s plump, ginger and self-confident. They’re made for each other.

  I try the desk drawers, but they are locked of course. I search around for where someone might hide a key. I tip a plant out of a pot and look under the roots but find nothing other than earth, some of which falls on the carpet tiles. I tell myself off for being so clumsy and do my best to scrape it up. I take the photos out of the frames; again nothing. I shake each of the books energetically and all that falls out of them is dust.

  I stare at the carpet tiles for no reason other than there is nothing else to look at, except now that I think about it there is something to notice. They’re standard, grey-blue and grubby, but even with the light off I can see four of them are slightly lighter and must be replacements. Who replaces individual carpet tiles in an office like this? So I lift each up in turn and under the third I find the key to the desk.

  Gerry says loudly, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’

  I freeze in horror, trying to think of an explanation, before I realise the office door is still closed. A man replies in the corridor, Haskins. A woman joins in and from her messages and TV interviews I recognise Winstanley’s voice.

  The door opens. I’m standing in the middle of the room, still holding the key. But Haskins is looking behind him and doesn’t turn. I hear Gerry say they don’t have time. Haskins closes the door again. The voices drop to a low muttering and another office door is opened nearby, then shut firmly. Opening Haskins’ door a fraction, I see a light has been turned on in Gerry’s office. I rapidly unlock Haskins’ desk to find a neatly stacked row of hanging files. Below them, an equally neatly stacked pile of card folders. Few seem relevant, except for two, marked Kaunas and Vilnius.

  Taking them, I lock the desk, replace the key under the carpet tile and look out into the corridor. From Gerry’s office, I can hear only indistinct murmuring, so I move out to see if I can catch anything more clearly and immediately hear Gerry say my name. Winstanley laughs and replies with something unintelligible. I take two steps closer and Haskins says, ‘Why wait?’ Then Gerry tells Winstanley how to get to my office.

  With a stab of anxiety, I remember I left my computer on and Matthews’ diary on the floor. I double back to the stairs and run up with difficulty, limping, clutching the two files.

  Reaching my office, I log off from my computer,
stuffing the diary into a jacket pocket. At the last moment I see the printout of the memo with the strange message and snatch that up too.

  Voices are approaching from the direction of the stairs but they’re still out of sight. There’s no time to escape, so I slip into one of the rooms opposite and keep the door open a fraction.

  Footsteps come down the corridor towards me and I shift into the shadows. Through the gap I glimpse a shape, two shapes, one of them unmistakably Winstanley, arms swinging, full of certainty, the other Haskins, his false-apologetic stoop, the scrawniness of his neck. Gerry’s not with them – happy, I presume, to leave the work to someone else. Haskins stops at my office, opposite where I’m hiding, pauses, then opens the door briskly, like he’s expecting to catch me off guard. There’s a different pause and some rapid muttering between them, and I realise I’m shaking uncontrollably, hot with fear.

  How did they know I was here? Has Becks betrayed me? I look at my phone. There’s no warning message from him. Has he sold me out?

  They go inside and I can hear them moving around. I wait, trying to stay still and silent, as night sets in and the radiators crack and pop.

  Suddenly, the door opposite is flung open and Haskins and Winstanley come back out, talking loudly. Automatically, I step backwards. And knock into a steel filing cabinet piled high with box files. Luckily, nothing falls. I hear Haskins slam the door to my office and they stride off back the way they came.

  I wait in case it’s a trap. In case they’re waiting round the corner for me to emerge. For want of something to do, I pull on my latex gloves and open the first file – Kaunas. I must once have known all the names and crimes in it. I scan page after page in the sliver of light that comes from the door, hoping to find something useful, any clue at all.