Room 15: a gripping psychological mystery thriller

by Charles Harris

I turn the heating on full in a vain attempt to blow out the chill that freezes my bones and drive back into town. The storm has lessened, the snow falling heavily but with less wind, and everything I do is still automatic. The Astra’s suspension rattles like an old metal bed and there are knocking sounds from places that I don’t dare imagine. The last thing I want is for Becks’ car to break down. The wipers strain and creak and I peer through the tiny space of cleared windscreen like I’m driving an ancient wounded tank.

  After ten minutes I find the park I was looking for. Pulling on my winter gloves, I carry the recycling bag across the snow-covered grass. All around me is flat desolation, dimly visible in the night. Halfway over there’s a frozen lake that I remember playing around as a child – formed like a misshapen egg, with a bridge across the middle. Trees hide it from the road and nobody is insane enough to be taking a walk in the park tonight. Prising out a heavy rock from the bank, I walk to the middle of the bridge and heave it over the rail, breaking the ice at the deepest part. The water revealed beneath is black, sluggish and evil. Next I open the bag. The bloodstained jacket, hat and gloves I scrub with muddy snow, inside and out. I weight each item with large stones and drop them one by one into the lake, where they fall with a dull splash.

  I trudge back to the road, the storm shrieking in my face and thickening my hair. Here I tear the diary page and the memo about SDC into tiny damp illegible shreds and feed them into a drain.

  And then comes the adrenaline dump. After everything that’s happened, I find myself powerless to move. I lean against the car, shuddering, muscles in spasm, freezing tears on my cheeks, legs drained of all strength.

  When I reach Kentish Town, I pull over and stop. I’m in a side street next to a bank business office, a large Georgian building, covered in snow and soot, and it’s after nine o’clock – almost exactly twenty-four hours since I found myself wandering the streets not far from here, with no memory of the days and months before.

  Is it all over? Is R trying to help me, or is he fighting me for control? Did R just solve the case or make me kill an innocent man? I am afraid. Afraid of what I might find out. But I must find out.

  Police procedure – this is an investigation, like any investigation. Detective work is a branch of science, not art. Look at the evidence. Start with what I dug up. Who buried that box? Was Becks trying to stop me opening it?

  I reach over to the glove compartment and re-examine what I put in there. There are thirteen rounds. Checking the headstamps, they are all 9-millimetre. The same as found in the Kleizas’ office and the same calibre that killed Amy Matthews.

  Along with the 9mm cartridges are nine small ounce bags filled with pale brown powder. I lift one up and smell it, and it has that familiar earthy aroma that reminds me weirdly of Elastoplast. The smell of heroin.

  I search Becks’ glove compartment for more clues. Next to the parking tickets, I find a slip from a cashpoint. I turn on the Astra’s interior light to read it. The cashpoint slip shows that fifty pounds was withdrawn at 8.43pm yesterday evening in Waltham Cross, almost exactly the time that Amy Matthews was killed ten miles away.

  There’s a slim chance Becks was trying to be clever, though he would have known that all cashpoints have security cameras. Turning on my work mobile, I phone the security department of the bank. I explain who I am and that I need an urgent confirmation from their CCTV, giving the branch code and cashpoint ID. Then, with a heavy heart, I sit, not moving, not even thinking, empty, just watching the street.

  After ten minutes, a time-stamped picture downloads from the bank onto my phone. It shows Becks, juggling three large bags of Sainsbury’s shopping, taking his money exactly when it says on the receipt.

  So Becks couldn’t have attacked Crystal or killed Amy Matthews. My head still feels dull but an idea has started to come to me and I’ve tried hard to work it through from all directions. It’s a stupid idea if not dangerous. If I hadn’t failed at everything else, if I hadn’t let Darjus die under the ice, if I hadn’t killed Becks in the blizzard, I don’t know I’d be brave or foolish enough to try it, but right now it’s all I can think of.

  I phone Laura, hoping she’s going to take my call. Her phone rings fully fifteen times before she answers and there’s a thickness to her voice I haven’t heard before. Once more my heart gives a lurch of pity for all I’ve put her through.

  I ask if she’s still at the motel and she says she’s finished the meeting and is taking a taxi home. So I ask if the meeting went well and she says yes, slowly. I tell her I’m pleased it went well.

  ‘What happened before, in the motel room–’ she continues, ‘–between us. All of that. What we did…’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It was a mistake, you understand that, don’t you? You heard what I said. You know how I feel.’

  ‘And you know how I feel.’

  ‘You’re not listening, Ross.’ Her words are clipped, impatient.

  I take a deep breath. This is not the time to start arguing. Not the time to face the truth about my marriage. ‘That’s not why I phoned. There’s one more thing that I need your help with. Just one.’ She doesn’t reply so I continue, ‘Can you make some phone calls?’

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘It’s the only way it’s going to work.’ Again I get no answer. ‘Do you want to help me, Laura?’ I feel bad, but I don’t know what to say except that she’s free to walk away from this. The words don’t come easily. I remember only too well that I said the same to Becks.

  ‘I’m retracing the route I went last night. I’m going back to the Aviva Hotel where Amy Matthews was killed.’

  ‘Why do you want to do that?’ The impatience has gone and she sounds concerned.

  ‘To get my memory back.’ There’s a silence at the other end. ‘I want you to phone the following people and say precisely this: tell them you’re worried about me. I called and sounded in a bad way, going on about retracing the route I took last night to the murder scene, to see if I can remember. I should get there after eleven. That’s important.’

  ‘Eleven.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t understand. Why do you want me to do this?’

  ‘I don’t want to go into it now. It’s better you know as little as possible.’

  ‘Is Becks with you?’

  I stare out of the window at the dark street between its steep concrete cliffs. ‘No,’ I say.

  ‘You’re setting a trap for the killer, Ross? What if he goes there? What if he tries to kill you?’

  A black cab passes, kicking up a spray of fresh snow. I think: this is killing me one way or another. It’s driving me insane. But what I answer is, ‘I can take care of myself. Remember, I know he might be coming. I won’t be taken by surprise.’

  ‘Ross, I don’t know if I can do this.’

  ‘Please, Lolo, this is the last thing I’ll ask you to do. Then you can have the divorce. On any terms. You won’t see me again.’

  ‘And if they ask why I’m phoning?’

  ‘Say you’re worried about me going insane. You think all this is doing my head in. You don’t like the sound of my voice.’

  ‘I just tell the truth, then,’ she says.

  And she doesn’t ask any other questions. I tell her who I want her to call and remind her when I want her to do it, and she repeats my instructions back without comment. I love my wife more than I ever realised, now that it’s too late.

  Then she says, ‘Be careful, Ross.’

  And that gives me heart. I think for a moment about commenting on this, but instead I ring off and sit staring out at the icy city street for a long while. Then I turn the mobile off so no one can phone me or track me and I put it in the glove compartment, with the 9-millimetre cartridges and the heroin.

  47

  I’m going to come full circle. Automatically, carefully, meticulously. Like a machine. And when I get to the end, I tell myself, he will be there. The uncertainties will disappear. The nightmare wi
ll be over. I have to believe this, because there are fewer and fewer ways out. Soon Winstanley will discover evidence that I was in the hotel room at the time of the murder. Blood. DNA. I’ll be the obvious suspect.

  There’ll be witnesses in Lonely’s who’ll testify I was in the bar, searching for Amy Matthews. Phone calls from her on my phone. Blood from Crystal on my jacket from when I found her on the floor of her flat.

  I turn the key in the starter and the car shudders a moment before the engine kicks. There’s a groaning at the back that wasn’t there before and the Astra stalls. A gritting lorry comes up behind and blares its frustration like a ship’s horn in the night.

  Swearing at the Astra, I restart and the lorry grinds noisily past, its driver glaring down at me as if I’ve never driven before.

  I continue on my way. I can barely focus on the lights that blur towards me. I shake my head like a horse and they come sharp for a moment. Long enough to cross the next junction and head towards Lonely’s. The first place R went to last night. Despite the tiredness, despite the chemicals in my bloodstream, I’m on his track now, of that I’m sure. I can smell him.

  He drove along these roads yesterday. He saw these traffic lights turn red, and went through them at speed. Snow was forecast on the car radio and before the Audi’s heating came on, his breath made a freezing mist.

  Like through a split in a screen, a tear in a window blind, some fragments of picture start to appear. I turn into Fortress Road and the sporadic Sunday evening traffic is flowing slowly, the road thick with filthy slush. Three buses crawl along, lit brightly against the darkness.

  Life is messy. Misleading. I feel angry at how unjust this is, how unjust too that my own mind is fighting me. Why me? There’s a cancer in my brain, a maggot, a virus, and I must root it out and kill it before it poisons every thought I have…

  Then when I’ve almost given up, another memory comes, and another, with an electric shock: a feeling maybe, or a sound, a voice, a few words.

  Ten minutes have gone and I don’t know how but I’ve reached Lonely’s and stop close to the weather-warped plywood door.

  The sky is as dark as it ever gets at night in London, a thick brown. He parked here yesterday when the club was open, next to the same abandoned shops. Now, though, the plywood door is padlocked shut.

  I bang on the door. A hollow echo comes from inside.

  He parked his Audi close to the club and, as he locked the car, he checked around rapidly for cars following, surveillance vans, but nothing stood out.

  He hammered on the door and then when the bouncer let him in, he ran down the ramp. The club had only just opened for the night but he wasn’t here to drink. He was searching for Tina.

  He found her in one of the chill-out rooms, with some young man, gazing into his eyes, a cloud of musky perfume, and he dragged her away by a thin upper arm.

  ‘Fuck you,’ she said, trying to pull back. ‘I’m working.’

  He pushed her towards the double doors and said, ‘We need to talk.’

  I turn away from the locked plywood door and return to the Astra, as a middle-aged woman in a Puffa jacket and moon boots makes her way down the middle of the road leading a schnauzer, as if there was nothing more in the world to worry about than walking a dog in the snow.

  I’m still planning to take the route R followed last night – from Lonely’s to the flat Amy Matthews shared with Crystal. But first I have some business to finish, so I head east, around the back of Kentish Town and as I drive I ask R, ask him deep inside, I ask if he’s listening. This is mad, talking to myself. What next? A giant rabbit?

  He’s silent. But I know he’s there. In a strange way that both strengthens me and makes me deeply afraid.

  Stopping opposite Tina’s flat, I put one of the ounce bags of heroin in my jacket pocket.

  Upstairs, in her main room, a pink luggage set straggles limply over the sofa in ascending sizes, piled with make-up, tights, dresses, skirts and shoes. A tangle of gold and silver accessories waits on the cheap wooden dining table. She’s changed into a neat conservative jumper and jeans, with relatively low heels for her and more subdued make-up, and she’s trying to keep still and failing. She locks the door behind me, comes back and sits lumpily in an armchair but I don’t. I have to fight to keep focused, to remember.

  ‘I’m going home,’ she says. ‘London’s a horrible place. Without Amy.’ She stares at her painted nails, her mouth curved in a red grimace of pain. ‘It’s this time of the evening. I’d wait for her in the club, when she wasn’t on night shift, and she’d turn up late with something rude to say about a consultant… I spend all my life waiting. Waiting for operations that never come. Waiting for Amy and now – I’m being a stupid bitch. Where’s my hanky? Ignore me. I lined up all my pills this afternoon. It would only have taken a few minutes, Ross.’

  ‘You’ll get there,’ I say and I search for a clever phrase and come up with only, ‘You’re a survivor.’

  She stands and pushes the gold chains, painted enamel brooches, everything into a plastic Tesco’s bag.

  ‘Darjus Javtokas is dead,’ I say. I wish I could add something consoling but I can’t. She fiddles distractedly with a bowl of potpourri.

  ‘Did he kill Amy?’

  ‘Darjus? No.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I’m getting close.’ I take out the ounce bag of heroin. ‘You know what this is?’

  ‘I don’t do H.’

  ‘Did Amy?’

  ‘It was never her style. Coke was her thing. She said it made her feel like a City banker.’

  ‘I think this is what got her killed all the same.’

  While she works, opening drawers, deciding which of her things she absolutely has to keep with her and which she is going to have to leave behind, I glance around the room. It occurs to me then that if R can do things I don’t know about, maybe I can ensure there are things he doesn’t know.

  ‘Don’t tell me where you’re going,’ I say. ‘I don’t want to know.’

  She turns and gives me a sharp look.

  ‘Have you got enough money?’ I ask.

  ‘I don’t need money. I wish all cops were like you. If there’s ever anything I can do for you.’

  ‘If, in the future, I ever need a blow job from a trannie, you’re the first person I’d go to.’

  ‘That’s sweet of you. But you won’t know where I am.’

  I shrug. ‘My loss.’

  She clicks shut the rest of her luggage, takes her pink leather Prada handbag and leaves.

  With Tina gone, all the strength I’ve been putting into looking strong just dies. I walk into her tiny bathroom and the face I see in the speckled mirror gives nothing away but gazes back at me with hollow eyes. Then I open the mirror and in the cabinet she’s left all kinds of old pills, two boxes of half-used make-up and enough Nembutal, I guess, to do the job.

  I envy Tina, because despite all her doubts she does have a future to look forward to. Her problems can be solved – or at least improved – by a surgeon’s knife. Despite everything, she knows who she is. Right mind, wrong body. It won’t be easy for her, but it will work, I have no doubt. By contrast, I try to list what I myself have to look forward to. Living without Laura. Living with the memory of failing to save Amy Matthews, of seeing Crystal lying in a coma, of not being able to stop Darjus Javtokas dying, and of killing Becks, who trusted me and risked his career for me and whose son will grow up without him. I can hardly breathe for remorse. The grief envelops me. All around me is death. All I see is destruction. Unable to trust myself, not knowing who’s in charge of my mind. No surgeon can cut us apart.

  I pour the Nembutal onto the closed toilet seat, to look at them, to see what Tina was thinking of doing, and the yellow capsules smile up at me, inviting and simple. I take an abandoned tooth glass, filthy at the bottom, rinse it out and fill it with cold water. And set it next to the pills. It would be easy to do. Shovel them down, finish this pain
and finish R at the same time.

  Dropping to my knees in the gloom, on the fake-wood vinyl floor of the bathroom, I kneel up against the toilet. My knees press against the ceramic side and I look down at the scattered capsules and the glass of water.

  This would be the time to pray, but I can’t. All my old faith has disappeared and all that is left to replace it is fear and emptiness. Not even the certainty of these pills remains. Slowly, I come to a decision and sweep them back into their plastic bottle.

  All I have, I’ve realised, is my determination to find out the truth and deal with it, whatever it is, to see the true face of R, however awful that may turn out to be.

  48

  I head south.

  I can feel him, hear him. He’s inside me. And I feel ashamed. Ashamed at my doubts.

  It’s getting on for ten o’clock and I speed towards the Gordon Road Estates.

  He came this way. There was no snow on the road yet and I can smell his terror. There was a phone call. He heard her voice. He started driving. He was afraid. Afraid of being watched. Afraid of a trap.

  The car has stopped. I’m parked by the side of the road, clutching the steering wheel and sweating, my whole body hurting. In a panic, I check my watch, anxious about how much time might have gone, but in fact it’s only two minutes.

  I restart the engine and move off with a lurch.

  A car hoots and passes at speed and I don’t give a fuck.

  Or was that him saying that?

  This is the way he came, past the closed shops, turning towards the tower blocks, lit red-orange, as if from the light of a dying fire.

  The latest snow has iced over again making the road as slippery as hell. I slow, squinting, my arms and legs feel like I’ve run a marathon. It takes effort to change the Astra’s gears.