by Mark Watson
The more he thought about it, the more plausible it was. It would explain why Jason had to be chaperoned everywhere, why nobody was allowed to speak to him directly; why scripts had to be delivered via his agent. What had seemed the power of his position – declining to sign things, sidestepping tedious admin – might really be about the precariousness of it. If it came out that he couldn’t read, well, it might not be the end of his career, but it would certainly be embarrassing and debilitating. If Tim was right, it would be a secret worth defending by almost any means; that is, if anyone knew it. Someone like Raf. But this was all amateur-sleuth stuff again, thought Tim as he slid back against the propped-up pillows on the bed: he might as well be in the Poirot, where the characters were being asked to assemble in the library for the detective’s verdict. Tim was filled with the wish to be back in Devon, Mrs Callaghan chipping in with her own findings: ‘Would you really murder someone for that, though, Henry?’ His father replying gently: ‘I personally wouldn’t, no, love.’
What was big enough to justify a murder? Could Raf really have become a target because of this secret, if he had discovered it – if indeed there was anything to discover? The trouble was that ‘motive’ felt too indistinct an idea: as Bradley had implied, most people who committed a crime probably didn’t wake up that day knowing that they were going to do it.
Shortly, Poirot would deliver answers. ‘It was you who did it,’ he would say, and one of the suspects’ faces would twist in knee-jerk denial, and then finally flatten out in defeat. Like all the hard-bitten sleuths of other TV shows, the doddery-but-clever ones, the tortured-by-a-dark-past ones, the detective would have put together a series of logical but nearly impossible mental wriggles and joined the dots to the answer. That was what the viewer wanted: for death to be shocking, but ultimately explicable. No bank holiday special ended with its characters in Tim’s predicament: unsure what had happened, let alone who was responsible. He hung up the phone, letting the recorded message – as he imagined – go on talking silently to itself.
Before preparing tomorrow’s clothes and putting the light out, he finally unlocked the door, opening it an eighth of the way, then a quarter, and finally the full swing. Naturally, there was no one there. Looking left and right down the corridor he saw nothing but the purpose-built living space, which meant him no harm, which had been designed for people like him to switch off in, to forget their problems, to have all their desires fulfilled.
10: NOCTURNE
By lantern-light, Tim was walking towards Raf’s chalet. He carried on. The door of the chalet was wide open. Raf greeted him with a regretful smile. ‘I know what’s coming,’ he said. Tim’s grip was tight on Raf’s throat, and the next time he glanced down the face was lifeless and uncomprehending. Tim had sleepwalked to the chalet, found it open, murdered Raf Kavanagh and gone back to his own bed without being aware of it. He had done it because he hated Raf, nothing more than that; because he hated him, and was drunk enough to lose control of himself. He was a murderer, and everything else he’d done – the aggregation of everything he had strived for, and worked towards – meant nothing.
Then it was over and he wasn’t screaming any more. His back was so plastered in sweat that it felt as if he were wearing some clinging garment. His face was feverish. He was in the corridor, with his back to the door of his room. Studded ceiling-lights shone on, like cat’s eyes on a road, and it was neither night nor day.
Understanding came in unsteady spurts: he had sleepwalked out of his room. It was a dream, not a memory. Of course I didn’t kill him, he thought, putting his hand to his heart, which was pumping ostentatiously in his bare chest. It was not possible to kill someone in your sleep, was it? With every second that followed, the dream seemed more flagrantly removed from reality. Tim marvelled at the idea something could be so real, and then so impossible.
It was only as he pushed the door that his current circumstances lined up properly in front of him. He was wearing only underpants, he was locked out of his room, and did not have a card to let himself back in.
Tim snorted at the stupidity of it and gave the door a couple of shoves in some spirit of feeble defiance. He sank down almost to his haunches, feeling the exhaustion of the nightmare in his limbs, and then got straight back up, thinking it was better to deal with this now. He would call down to somebody. But how? His hands went in an absurd phone-finding dance across his bare torso.
He could knock on someone’s door and get them to phone down. Yes: that was obviously the answer. It was so simple to find a solution, if you took time and didn’t panic. The trouble was that it was the middle of the night. He couldn’t tell how long he’d slept before the bad dream had taken hold.
He went along the corridor to 733 and 734. Nobody responded to his cautious knocks. But at 735, the door was opened almost immediately, as if someone had been waiting for this. Tim jumped. At the sight of him, so did Adam, the journalist, whose large bottom lip curled upwards into a smile.
‘Bit forward of you, but I’m flattered!’
Tim laughed sportingly. ‘I’ve somehow locked myself out. In my . . . in my sleep.’
‘Wow. Takes some doing.’
As he followed Adam into the room, Tim wondered whether there was some sceptical undertone to this remark. The room was laid out and lit with an elegance that made Tim feel abashed by his own lack of it. The two bedside lamps had been turned to face the wall, where they cast agreeable dish-sized pools of light. On Adam’s laptop, four opened windows were arranged in a diamond against a desktop backdrop of the Manhattan skyline, rendered in such acute definition that Tim felt he could reach out and touch the cold fibreglass of the towers. There was the aroma of freshly brewed coffee in the air.
In the time it had taken Tim to notice all this, Adam had dialled somebody somewhere in the Village, and was now passing Tim the handset. With his other hand he indicated a towelling robe hanging in the wardrobe. Adam got back into the swivel armchair and gave the appearance of working, but Tim, labouring to put on the robe while holding the receiver to his ear, still felt under observation.
‘Sir?’
‘Hello. I’m Tim Callaghan in Room 732.’ He was disagreeably conscious of his own voice, its attempt to sound dignified.
‘Room 732 in which building, sir?’
How many buildings could there be in the complex with as many rooms as this? ‘The Maritime Tower.’
Tim explained his predicament.
‘And can you help me with your activation code, sir?’
‘What?’
The voice at the end was good-humoured. ‘You should have an activation code on your key card, sir. If you quote this, I am able to activate a range of room services which—’
‘But I don’t have the key card. I’m locked out.’
‘If you try your key card on the sensor outside the door, sir—’
‘I don’t have the card. If I had the card I wouldn’t be calling.’
Eventually Tim persuaded the man to get somebody to come up with a duplicate card. Adam swivelled his chair in Tim’s direction – though he was careful, Tim noticed, to shield the laptop screen – and gritted his teeth in comic frustration.
‘They drive you mad, don’t they!’
‘He kept asking for a key card. But obviously, if I had the card . . .’
‘If you had the card,’ said Adam, rolling his eyes with such cartoonish eagerness that his eyebrows threatened to disappear over the top of his head, ‘you would qualify for help, but you wouldn’t need it. I mean, this whole place is catch-22, isn’t it?’
‘I haven’t read Catch-22,’ Tim admitted.
‘Nor have I,’ said Adam. He pointed to the coffee machine. Tim hesitated.
‘I might struggle to get back to sleep. Not a worry for you, obviously.’
‘No, I work when I work.’ Adam shrugged. ‘I work when there are stories to be written up.’
‘When are there ever not stories?’
‘N
ever.’
Tim looked at the journalist. They were roughly the same age; it was just the bags under the eyes, the rolled-up sleeves, that made Adam seem his senior. ‘So you’re always working?’
‘I try to be.’ Adam grinned. ‘Work is more fun than fun, as someone said. As a gay man, what else am I going to do around here? Go clubbing? Tea, then, if coffee doesn’t float your boat?’
Tim found himself accepting this time, even though a triple knock on the door signalled the arrival of the sadly smiling Filipino girl from earlier, with a replacement card which she handed to Tim with a look of particular melancholy as if it were an item of some personal value to her. Now that he had the means of getting back into his room, it was all the clearer to Tim that he wasn’t anxious to go there. He watched Adam open a silver tin of teabags; yes, Tim thought, he was just the sort of man to bring his own tea to a hotel.
‘And what’s the story here?’ asked Tim, in a tone as light as he could make it.
‘You tell me,’ said Adam, his tone changing, becoming clipped and precise. ‘Or maybe you tell me and I’ll tell you. I’ve got some of it. You must have some of it.’
The kettle began a polite purr. Adam sat down in the armchair. Tim felt disconcerted by his honesty. It occurred to him that perhaps, in spite of his mannerisms and affectations, Adam might be the only person here certain to tell him the truth.
He handed Tim the tea. Its smell, suggestive of meeting-rooms in London, struck Tim as somehow reassuring.
‘Is it true you can’t be . . . openly gay here?’ asked Tim. ‘I mean, there must be places . . .?’
He’d only meant this as a conversational offering, picking up a lead. But Adam’s body changed as if the response led him even closer to an anticipated checkmate.
‘There are places,’ said Adam, ‘like there are places for anything in Dubai. There’s nothing you can’t actually do. Just things you can’t be seen to do.’ He scratched his nose, not taking his eyes off Tim. ‘Do you know who was outside Raf’s chalet?’
‘When?’
Adam looked at him. ‘Ashraf was sacked for telling reporters what he saw. He saw two people kissing outside the chalet, just before Raf was murdered. Do you know who they were?’
‘How do you know this?’ Tim countered.
‘I tracked Ashraf down. After you mentioned he’d been laid off. I found him in Deira.’
‘Is he all right?’
‘Friend of yours?’ Adam half smiled. Tim shifted unhappily in his chair.
‘Well, no, but I . . . I liked him.’
‘I gave him some money to talk to me. He asked me if I had more money for his brother. His brother’s sleeping in the same dorm. There were ten of them there. Not very pleasant. I gave them what I had, but . . .’
Tim tried to dismiss his mental picture of the little man leaving in his ill-fitting jacket, and the idea of the brother. ‘But he wouldn’t tell you who the . . . who the people kissing were?’
‘He said he didn’t know.’ This time Adam’s pout contained some real chagrin. ‘But someone knows.’
‘Not me,’ said Tim.
There was glamour to all this, this cut and thrust of journalists and detectives, clue-foraging, the piecing together of a case: it would be a great story to tell, eventually. It was just that he felt enervated by the whole business; he was almost too tired even to get out of the chair.
‘Well, let me know if you suddenly remember anything.’ Adam gave one of his knowing eyebrow-swoops. ‘That’s what they say in the movies, isn’t it?’
The continued sardonic tone made Tim want to counterattack. ‘Is it true you broke into Bradley’s room?’
Adam’s slow smile credited Tim with a little more insight than he’d previously allowed. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘He said you’d been poking around in there.’
‘He’s half right. I didn’t do it. I draw the line at violations of privacy. I mean, beyond what’s inevitable. But a colleague of mine feels less strongly about that principle.’
‘How the fuck did he get into Bradley’s room?’
Adam blinked in what might have been genuine surprise at the question. ‘Just went down and claimed to be Bradley. The people here haven’t got a clue who’s who. You must have noticed that.’ Adam sipped his coffee. ‘Anyway. Aren’t you going to ask what he found?’
Tim’s guts swilled unpleasantly. Was he going to ask? He was far from sure that he wanted to know anything compromising about Bradley, or indeed about anyone.
‘The place was covered – covered – in pieces of paper. The walls. Every surface. All of them about the ad. “What is the ‘world of the commercial’?” “What is the ‘message’?” Pages and pages of notes. Spider-graphs. Brainstorms. Word association, where he’d written the word CHARITY and then listed literally a hundred words that he thought of. Pencil-sketches of Jason Streng. I mean, the whole works. Like it was a movie.’ Adam shook his head. ‘The poor bugger. He deserves better than to work for Christian Roper.’
Though used to Adam’s dismissiveness by now, to his ironic, undermining way, Tim baulked at this last sentence. He himself was working for Christian; they had all come here to do so because the cause was a noble one. If he allowed these ideas to be whipped away from him, all the effort and strain of the past few days, of the weeks that had gone into this, would come to seem meaningless. It was very important to hang on to the good in this experience.
‘That’s harsh,’ said Tim. ‘Whatever is going on with WorldWise – and I appreciate you know more than me – they’ve achieved a lot in the past.’
‘In the past, yes,’ said Adam. ‘But I’m interested in the present. And in the present, people die on their watch, cameras topple down and nearly kill journalists.’
‘You think it was aimed at you?’
‘I didn’t actually say that,’ said Adam. ‘The camera was, pretty obviously, pushed by whoever is covering up the facts of Raf’s death, or whoever actually caused it. It could have been meant to hit any of the people standing there.’ Tim’s fatigued mind tried to follow Adam’s along the route which made these huge statements so ‘obvious’ to him; he felt like one of the amateur skiers at the mall, slipping and sliding behind an instructor. ‘I mean, you heard Miles: he was fairly emphatic on the subject of whether it could have fallen off that gantry.’
‘But hang on, you weren’t even there when he was talking about that.’
‘The point,’ said Adam, sailing past this reasonable objection, ‘is that this is a dangerous place now. I have to stay here: it’s my job. But if I were you, I’d be out of here very fast. I really would. I’d be out of here on the next plane.’
This was uttered with an apparent sincerity that Tim found somewhat startling, given Adam’s track record of sniping; it made him wonder what facts Adam had in his possession that had not emerged in this conversation. He was the sort of person, Tim thought, to make you feel that he had not even delved into his top ten conversational gambits, was saving them for someone better. The fact that this was a posture – and an exasperating one – didn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t the case.
‘I’m going to try and leave tomorrow,’ Tim said, rising to his feet. The towelling robe swished around his frame and he realized he was going to have to walk out of the door with it; then he’d need to decide whether it was more embarrassing to return it, or not to.
‘I think that’s wise, I really do.’ Again, this was offered almost as a plea, and the beseeching note seemed to surprise even Adam; they avoided eye contact for a moment by unspoken agreement. As Tim’s hand found the door handle, though, Adam’s tone changed again.
‘You’ll have to persuade Jo to let you go, though . . .’
Tim pivoted around. Adam’s face wore its professional impertinence. His eyes bulged with mock contrition. ‘Sorry. Gauche of me.’
‘How do you know about . . .’
Adam winked. ‘I think everyone knows.’
Tim’s stoma
ch flipped. There was no response to this; he felt outflanked and claustrophobic. He turned the door handle, half expecting Christian to be right outside, waiting to confront him. Had it been Christian knocking earlier? Had the camera been aimed at him?
The last thing Tim noticed as he left was an overnight bag slumped in a corner. An airline baggage tag bore the same date he himself had flown out here. Adam, then, had not come out after Raf’s death. He’d been here all along.
What did this mean? It was one more thing to think about, and he had too many questions as it was. The new card let him back into his room, where the half-discarded sheet hung off the bed like wreckage. The radio was playing a delicate classical tinkle. It must be some alarm setting, Tim told himself, some automatic thing, like the air-con, like every other system here that existed more or less independently of the residents. ‘Chopin’s famous Nocturne in E Minor—’ began a college-polished voice, as Tim jabbed at the panel and shut off the sound.
Yes, there were too many things to think about, but three connected ideas were uppermost in Tim’s brain as he pulled the sheet back across the mattress. First, he should not have become involved with Jo. Secondly, he might be in danger even regardless of that, because after what had happened with the camera it felt as if everyone was. Thirdly, he had to get out of Dubai, and off this account, and perhaps think about doing something else with his life, something that wouldn’t bring him into contact with another situation like this. But to do that, he was going to have to leave this building in the morning, and for now it was difficult to imagine even stepping out of the door.