Room 15: a gripping psychological mystery thriller

by Charles Harris

  I’d always wanted to be a policeman. My mother was already ill by the time I first told anyone and in no real state to have an opinion either way – or maybe she was afraid to express one – but Paul always refused to accept the idea of me joining him in the job.

  No matter. My first posting after police college at Hendon was well away from him, on the streets of Hillingdon. I remember my promotions. I became an acting detective constable over in Hackney. (By then I’d begun to joke that there was some devious assistant in Human Resources who’d marked my file so I’d only be sent to boroughs beginning with H. I waited patiently to be assigned next to Haringey or Harlesden.) I enjoyed life in plainclothes, but the police expect you to zigzag, so it was back to uniform after my sergeant’s exams (Walthamstow. HR must have had a change of heart – or staff) before escaping as detective sergeant into the DPS. If you want to be despised by your fellows, go to the Directorate of Professional Standards. No one should be confused by the bland name – we earned our living investigating bent coppers; and I soon learned that while honest coppers hated bent coppers, they hated the coppers who arrested them even more.

  This summer I took my inspector’s exam and passed first time – the only exam I’ve done particularly well in – to my gratitude and relief. Last week I was busy planning my promotion party.

  The sergeant slows for a queue of cars, blips the siren and slides into the oncoming lane. The traffic seems to be as thick as the weather and I watch every move he makes. He’s treating me with friendly respect, as if we’re on good terms. I remember passing him in the corridor but have never known his name. Then again, I’ve not been in the borough long. How close are we then? Have we worked together and I’ve forgotten it? Have we shared personal secrets I’m supposed to remember? It terrifies me, not knowing what he expects me to know.

  He taps the wheel heavily and says, ‘It was great you could make it to the pub for my birthday, sir. And that you could stay so long. It went down well with the lads. And a nice little speech too. Very funny,’ he adds warmly. ‘Though you didn’t have to.’

  I don’t know what to answer to this, since I don’t remember going with him for any drinks and I normally hate making speeches.

  ‘No trouble,’ I say in the end, feeling sick with fear. But he smiles and focuses back on the road. Talks about everything except where we’re going. Even when he’s complaining about the traffic, his voice has a rolling lilt that could lull me into relaxing my guard and confessing that I don’t remember him.

  ‘Shitting weather,’ he says. ‘And did you hear the forecast? Snow for the entire weekend.’

  ‘Well, it’s going to fuck up the summer tourist trade,’ I say, in an attempt at humour. But he gives me a weird look. What have I said?

  ‘It’ll certainly fuck up something.’

  I stare out of the window at the pedestrians and lighted shopfronts. I feel I should recognise these streets. They look like Camden Town. If so, we might be heading south, but I can’t be sure and I keep my mouth shut.

  Spilled wine. With a shock I realise this is the last thing I remember. A glass broke at my promotion party only a few minutes ago. Except it’s night now, so it must be more than a few minutes.

  I was standing in the hot summer sunshine. I’d been relaxing, drinking with a couple of friends but I’d started to feel tense – I don’t remember what about. Laura was nearby. Smiling at me and then dragging her fingers absent-mindedly through her hair. It’s a habit of hers. She’d been talking energetically to one of her work colleagues, going over cases, no doubt, or office politics. It’s not an easy life for a woman lawyer – and black.

  Something interrupted her and she’d given me a worried glance before smiling at me. A sudden unexpected smile of togetherness and support. It was then that I heard a glass break and smelled spilled wine. I felt angry. About the glass? About something else? I can’t recall.

  Next thing I know, I was standing in the middle of the street, staring up at the falling snow.

  The sergeant looks across at me in the passenger seat, as if I’ve spoken, but I’m sure I haven’t.

  He says, ‘You want to have those looked at.’ He means my face and neck. I try to stay calm and tell him I’m fine. He’s too much of an old hand to ask directly what caused the damage, but I can see him working out the odds.

  We turn towards King’s Cross. I’m now sure of the streets. It’s a relief. I take out my work BlackBerry, open the messages, and this time I scroll back to look at the older ones. One of the earliest arrived at eight yesterday morning: a reminder of a three o’clock meeting at Scotland Yard with a deputy assistant commissioner. But I have no memory of it and this frightens me all over again. An appointment with one of the top officers is not something you easily forget. But then I notice with a shock that the message isn’t dated August 2008. It says February 2010.

  It’s a strange mistake for someone to make. I check the phone for today’s date. It shows 2010 there too. Saturday, 13 February. There must be a problem with the network. I look at my personal phone. The same. I’m sweating, in spite of the cold. How can they all be wrong by a year and a half?

  ‘Found him,’ the sergeant says, without warning. I’m about to ask him what he means when I realise he’s talking to his radio. ‘And we’re five minutes out.’

  During the interchange he gives his name as Norris. I think that’s what he says. He signs off, looks across at me and repeats, ‘In five.’ But he doesn’t say what we’re five minutes away from.

  I don’t reply. I can’t. What I really want to say is: what year is this? Is this a Sunday in August 2008 or a Saturday in February 2010? Have I lost eighteen months of my life? It’s like I’m holding a single thread. Pull on it and my whole mind might unravel. But where that leads I don’t want to begin to contemplate.

  5

  We pass King’s Cross station and turn into a narrow one-way street, busy with night-time traffic, and ahead of us is a police car, blues flashing but empty. Norris (if that’s his name) pulls over behind it and climbs out, muttering. I fight an irrational urge to turn and run. But Norris is a muscular man and in my state I’d get about five metres before he caught up with me. And then, as if reading my thoughts, he says, ‘Our good luck, me seeing you, sir. Short-staffed. Half the station sick with flu. Barely a DI standing. I think you’re the only one around at the moment. With this weather. The snow…’

  And it’s now I realise to my dismay what he needs me for.

  Most cases start with someone phoning 999. The first to arrive at the scene will be a PC. Often there’s nothing to report. A drunken fight or a shouting match between husband and wife. The trick for the PC, in those cases, is to make the peace and not get caught in the middle. But sometimes the incident is bigger. A fatal accident, say, a suicide or a murder. He secures the scene and asks for the on-call DI. There’s always a detective inspector on call for emergencies, allocated by rota. Tonight of all nights, that must be me. I’ve been called.

  A belief in duty can be a curse. Most of the rest of the world gets away without it but that’s not the way I am. I don’t like letting people down. Sometimes I wish I wasn’t like that. So I limp after Sergeant Norris across the icy pavement, treacherous with new snow, till we reach an unlit sign saying: Aviva Hotel. He bangs on a glass door and it’s opened immediately by a young night porter in jeans and an Oasis T-shirt.

  ‘Upstairs, room 15,’ he says simply and points towards the rear of the hotel.

  Norris says, ‘Mr Blackleigh,’ very formally, and indicates for me to go ahead.

  My job is to take charge of the scene. My fear is that there’s something seriously wrong with my brain and I could screw up the investigation from the start. But the weather… the snow… I’m trapped by my sense of duty.

  So we follow the night porter in a line, me, then Norris, past an unused business lounge with a single computer, up a flight of narrow stairs to the first floor. The hotel appears tidy and smells freshly pa
inted, though with an undertow of something less pleasant I can’t pin down. Norris talks on, back on his favourite subject, the weather, delighted to find a new person to moan to, and the young night porter nods and sighs from time to time, to show solidarity with a fellow night-worker, even if that worker is police.

  We pass two rooms, lights on, bedclothes thrown aside as if the occupants left in a rush, then the route bends in the strange awkward way of old hotels and the ceiling suddenly lowers and there stands a copper, waiting for us with an air of self-congratulation. He straightens up respectfully and addresses me as ‘sir’. Norris calls him Ryan. I don’t know if I’m supposed to remember him.

  Ryan looks like he’s only just finished his probation – young, ruddy-faced. Unable to ignore the side of my neck, he asks, ‘Is that all right, sir?’

  ‘It’s all right,’ I answer but he can’t keep his eyes off it. What does he think of me, bleeding, clothes battered? But duty works both ways: he has a duty to defer to me as his superior, at least until he has a good reason not to. Then, for all his presumption, he falls silent and I see the half-open door behind him: room 15. Inside, I can just make out a crumpled rug and the corner of a bed.

  Instinctively, I fall back on procedure, hoping the right words will come. ‘Okay, tell me,’ I say, and he pulls out his notebook with a nervous shake to his hands he can’t conceal.

  ‘I arrived at 9.05pm,’ he reports. ‘The door was as you now see it, sir, two inches open. I perceived the window partially opened also. Definitive signs of recent struggle. I made a contemporaneous sketch–’

  I feel sorry for him. He’s hiding in police officialese but in truth his hesitancy helps me, giving my mush-filled brain a minute to dredge up the routine. I put a hand on his shoulder and tell him to relax.

  He unbends a little but still doesn’t look towards the room. ‘Young woman sitting on the bed. On inspection from the doorway, I found her to be apparently lifeless.’

  ‘“Apparently lifeless”?’ The technical language jars more than usual.

  ‘Sir. Yes, as I said. To avoid contaminating the crime scene, I remained at the door and I took notice of many bullet holes… entry wounds…’ Ryan comes to a shaky halt and glances at me hopefully.

  ‘Her name?’ I ask, playing for time while the steps come back to me. He shakes his head. We all turn to the night porter, but this is not the kind of hotel that takes names from its guests. I search for inspiration. ‘The scene should have been cordoned off.’ This is something concrete I can grasp hold of. ‘Why wasn’t it?’

  The PC reddens even more. ‘I was the only one here, sir. I didn’t want to leave it unguarded while I got the tape from the patrol car.’

  I take pity on him and tell him not to worry and then somehow I find myself recalling the process. It feels good to be doing something definite. I only have to keep the ball rolling, follow the rules, then go home and sleep. I could get this right after all.

  I ask for two cordons, blue tape downstairs, red across the corridor up here, then when Norris disappears to get the tape I tell the night porter I’ll interview him in five minutes. He remains hovering and I tell him to go down and wait in his office. He leaves reluctantly, as if I’m shutting him out from the fun. I’ve started a headache and my brain feels full of fog, but it doesn’t matter. I’ve seen my way out. This is not going to be my case, I’ll hand it on to the Homicide Assessment Team, who in turn will pass it over to the Murder Investigation Team – I’m a small link in the chain.

  ‘Get on your phone. Make sure the HAT car’s on its way,’ I remember to say to Ryan. ‘You’re sure you didn’t enter?’ He shakes his head again. ‘Why the fuck not? You don’t know she’s definitely dead. You can’t make that call till a doctor has declared life extinct.’

  I lever myself unsteadily away from the wall, reach into my fleece pocket and pull on my latex gloves.

  ‘Sir?’ he says. ‘Shouldn’t you put on full forensics?’

  ‘Do you have the suits and boots tucked away here? Because she could still be just hanging on to life, or there could be another victim lying there or the perpetrator could be still inside. I’m not fucking waiting to find out.’

  Indeed, I could easily leave inspecting the scene to the HAT car, but who knows how long they’re going to be. Again it’s that sense of responsibility I can’t ignore, no matter how ill and frightened I might be. At the least it might take my mind off my own fears.

  I use the toe of my shoe to push at the door to room 15.

  6

  There’s something frozen and strange about a murder scene. It’s like you’ve walked on stage before the end of a play. One sole actor remains, waiting for a cue that will now never come.

  Just in time, I remember blearily to check for safety before moving in. Not to take anything for granted. The room is bent in an L around a makeshift bathroom, whose thin partition stops short of the ceiling. But the bathroom door is half closed and I can’t tell yet if there’s someone hiding inside. To add to the complications, the room’s main centre light fitting has been smashed, leaving everything in a gloomy half-darkness. A double bed lies along the far wall, still neatly made, but the duvet is drenched in blood. There’s spatter on the wall and half-open window. I feel surprisingly cold. Outside, snow spirals down, flickering blue in the flashing lights of the two police cars in the street below. And then…

  It’s her eyes. She stares at me from the bed where she’s been flung backwards, wedged into the corner beside the window. There’s no chance she’s not dead.

  ‘Apparently lifeless,’ Ryan says again, behind me. His voice is strained, as if he’s trying not to see.

  The woman looks early twenties at a guess, with a short pink quiff, but she’s almost camouflaged against the wallpaper by her thin brown coat. I force myself to focus on the coat, thrown on over a plain green dress, both soaked with blood. Silver moon boots, spattered too. Despite years of experience, I feel sick. No matter how many deaths I’ve seen, I can never forget that this was a person with a life, and who now has none.

  ‘Five entry wounds that I can see,’ I say. Falling back on routine again. Just do the job. Like a robot. Automatic. Ignore the emotion.

  ‘And one more bullet hole behind her, sir, in the wall,’ says Ryan.

  ‘Okay, why so many? Is this a gang shooting? A lovers’ tiff gone badly wrong? Or some act of desperate revenge?’

  Ryan doesn’t reply and in my muzzy state I try not to jump to conclusions. She isn’t beautiful but not unattractive either, round face – no make-up, not even lipstick – and that stare, eyes fixed wide, as if she’s seeing someone in the corridor behind me. Feeling as disconnected and foggy as I do, her eyes petrify me and I look away.

  I shouldn’t let the scene get to me. Ryan again asks if I’m all right and I ignore him. I step further into the room.

  ‘When did you get the call?’

  ‘Sir?’

  I look behind the door. Nothing but shadows. Then I move across and ease open the door to the tiny bathroom. It’s empty. No killer. No further body on the scuffed vinyl floor but the icy draught from the window makes me shiver. I need to warm myself and reach out to the radiator under the window. It’s tepid, of course. What a great hotel – no expense spent.

  ‘What time was the 999 call?’

  Ryan flaps his notebook. ‘Nine fifteen. Shots heard.’

  ‘You got here in five minutes?’

  ‘I was only the other side of King’s Cross, sir.’

  ‘And did anyone else hear or see anything? Did you speak to the other guests?’

  ‘Empty,’ says Ryan after a pause. ‘If there were any guests, they’d all done a runner before I arrived.’

  Which doesn’t surprise me any more than the lack of heating or a register. I open up my own notebook with shaky hands and quickly sketch the layout for myself. There seems to have been a fight by the door, fierce and brutish. A chair’s been broken in half and a porcelain bedside lamp lies smashe
d by my feet, glass splinters over the floor. The threadbare rug has been rucked up and the cheap wardrobe hangs open – no clothes, but also no murderer trying to hide. Nearer the bed lies a large shoulder bag with the usual rubbish spilling out: eyeliner, lipstick, a crumpled Kleenex.

  ‘Did you find a weapon?’ I ask.

  ‘No, sir.’

  Then I look up to the ceiling. ‘Does that look like a bullet hole in the plaster?’

  Ryan glances up from the doorway and believes it does.

  ‘Do you think the gun might have gone off during a struggle?’

  He thinks it might.

  ‘Did you check the room upstairs for more bodies?’

  When he shakes his head, I tell him to do it now, maybe more brusquely than I intended and, as he runs off, I pull out one of my mobiles to take pictures, controlling the tremor in my hands. I become aware of an unpleasant odour in the room, mixed with the smell of blood. It’s not a smell I can place: it hangs in the air like marsh gas, fetid and rotten, but it’s too soon for the smell of death and anyway it’s more insidious than that.

  Keep on, I tell myself. Keep on doing my job. Then suddenly I remember the Squaddie. I can’t recall knowing Norris or Ryan, but my memory of my first corpse is pin-sharp, as if I was watching a video. ‘The Squaddie’ was what Alan Cheever called him; I don’t recall his real name. A forty-year-old ex-soldier who’d hanged himself from his own chin-up bar, bolted to his bedroom ceiling, and wasn’t found for three days. I was a young ambitious PC on probation. Cheever, a shrewd closed-faced copper from Belfast, was breaking me in. ‘The smell of death sticks to your skin,’ he said later as we watched the body being wheeled away. ‘Wash as much as you like, it stays.’ He was right. Later I’d learn the only way to lose the aroma of decayed human is to scrub with lemon juice.