Room 15: a gripping psychological mystery thriller

by Charles Harris

  ‘Wait. Before anything, I want an armed guard on her, round the clock.’

  The fact is, it’s not just that the guard should be armed. Firearms Command is run centrally, so has nothing to do with the borough police force. I’ll feel a great deal happier if Crystal is being watched over by a policeman from outside Camden.

  Becks is about to go when I ask him to hold on. I check there’s no one close by. ‘While you’re there, can you make a few calls? On the side. Find out who was in the station last night when I was stabbed, who would have known where I was. Can you do that without alerting anyone?’

  ‘It might take a little time.’

  As he speaks, a silver Volvo comes fast round the corner of the nearest block. It slides to a halt, sending a spray of snow into the air.

  ‘A little time may be all I have.’

  19

  Gerry Gardner always makes an impression. He’s slim, not wide like my father, but he has presence. Even the public can tell. They turn to watch him climb out of his car, buttoning up his expensive all-weather jacket. And it’s a relief to see someone I remember – and unchanged. Or at least not very changed – aged in a way that’s difficult to define: more weighed down. He looks at me slyly and throws me a small pink plastic bag.

  ‘What’s this, boss?’ I say.

  ‘Eat,’ he says. ‘You must be starved.’

  I open it. There’s an assortment of rolls and sandwiches, a can of Irn-Bru and a sausage roll. I’d forgotten I was hungry. Gratefully, I take a cheese and chutney sandwich.

  He slides a look around the square, with its police cordons, nosy passers-by and squabbling children. ‘Fucking snow. Come with me.’

  ‘I should be up in the crime scene, Gerry.’

  But he’s already striding towards an alleyway between two of the blocks. On my work BlackBerry, a message arrives. A Detective Inspector Winstanley is looking for me. Whoever he is. A moment later, the phone rings, not a number in my contacts, so possibly the same Winstanley. As I send the call to voicemail, I ask myself how long I can carry this off before Gerry realises I’ve got a problem. I catch up with him in the alley and he glances at me again – a wily flash of the eyes.

  ‘I thought you were off duty,’ I say.

  ‘So did I. I’m supposed to be home for the weekend, tucked up in bed, cuddling the wife and kids and a nice cup of tea.’

  He’s playing me, but I’m not sure why. I know his moves. I’ve known him since I was six. He was Uncle Gerry, who used to come round to our house to watch football with my father, take me out for pizzas and tell meandering stories of thugs and conmen. But, I remind myself, DCI Gerald Gardner is one of the best political operators on the force. He built his career step by step. He was one of the youngest detective sergeants ever. Then as detective inspector, under my father, he broke an IRA cell planning a major bombing here in London. That got him another fast promotion. This man could have been a contender. But he backed the wrong side in one of those internal wars that flare up regularly in the Met. At that time many people had lost faith in the commissioner, but didn’t say so. Gerry Gardner said so – to the wrong person at the wrong time – and suddenly his career came to a halt. I watched and decided the Lord may well delight in honesty but few seem to agree with Him.

  ‘You did a runner from Camden General last night?’ says Gerry.

  ‘I had my reasons.’

  He lights a Lambert and Butler. ‘I’ve had Mike Oxley over at the hospital, trying to investigate the stabbing of one of my fucking men without the victim to talk to. He needs a statement from you. And I want a full report on what you’ve been up to.’

  ‘I’ll talk to him. Statement, report, you’ll get it all.’

  Gerry blows out smoke, drinks from a can of Dr Pepper, and wipes his mouth with his hand. I can tell he senses something’s not right, he’s too good a detective not to. I think about telling him the truth, or at least the truth as far as I know it, but as soon as he knows about my memory, he’ll put me straight onto sick leave and I’ll be a sitting target for whoever told the East European to stab me in the first place. If the killer can organise a hit in hospital, he can have me killed anywhere. Forget what you’ve read about witness protection, safe houses and new identities, if a bent policeman wants to find you, you’ll be found.

  ‘Go on,’ Gerry says. ‘What’s it all about? Why did you disappear?’

  ‘Trust me, I had information I needed to follow up.’

  ‘Information about what?’

  I go for counter-attack as the best form of defence. ‘I’m one of the borough DIs, Gerry. I was doing my job. Is this an interrogation?’

  ‘Should it be?’ He’s angry, but how much of that anger is real? He can be slippery, can Gerry. Anyone who gets to DCI has to have a political mind. The job’s less about detecting and more about balancing the books, keeping the borough commander satisfied, providing him with the right arrest statistics at the right price. Gerry looks at me sharply. ‘You’re one of the best detectives, Ross. I’d trust you to the ends of the earth. But are you up to this? You were in A&E for some reason you won’t tell me, you’ve been stabbed, you’ve been smacked in the face, you look like shit. I should send you home.’

  ‘I need to stay on this case, Gerry.’

  He contemplates his Dr Pepper for a moment.

  ‘I had a tip-off,’ I say. ‘That flat up there was where Amy Matthews lived.’

  ‘The dead nurse?’

  ‘The woman I found beaten up was her flatmate.’

  ‘Fuck! Where did this tip-off come from?’

  ‘Anonymous.’

  He glares at me. He knows I’m lying, but isn’t ready to challenge me on it yet. ‘Matthews is not your case, Ross. That’s being handled by DI Winstanley, who incidentally also wants to talk to you for trampling all over her crime scene last night. You seem to be making friends everywhere.’

  So Detective Inspector Winstanley is a she. And is in charge of the Matthews Murder Investigation Team.

  ‘Winstanley’s ambitious. As ambitious as you. And she’s not a person to piss off. You’re cleverer than that.’ He kicks irritably at the snow. ‘She’ll want both cases for Serious Crimes. She’s not the most imaginative cop and she likes things to be easy and straightforward. So if she thinks you’re trying to make things more complicated, if she thinks you’re trying to screw her, she’ll fight.’

  ‘Well, tough. It’s complicated.’ He waits for me. ‘Gerry, I think there was a copper involved.’

  This gives him pause. ‘A copper?’

  ‘Yes.’

  His response takes me by surprise. ‘That’s what I hired you for.’ He stubs his cigarette out on his empty can. ‘Who?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Send it over to your old friends at DPS. That’s their job. You know better than I do, they’ll roast our balls on kebab skewers if we try to handle it ourselves.’

  ‘I can’t. I don’t know enough yet. That’s why I need to be here. To find out more.’

  He looks at me warily. ‘Is this about your CV? Is this so you can get a big trophy to put on your shelf that’s going to get you into the commissioner’s office at the Yard? Because it won’t.’

  I take a deep breath. ‘This is not about promotion, Gerry. That’s my crime scene in that flat.’

  ‘Not if Winstanley wants it.’

  ‘Fight her. The second nurse isn’t dead, and until she is, it’s not murder, it’s assault, and that makes it one for us, not the MIT.’

  He drops his fag end into the remains of his Dr Pepper and strides back up the alley, glaring at the darkening clouds, complaining loudly about the politics that pollute every single thing in the Met today, paperwork that throttles you, all these boxes to tick, community liaison, PR, and targets, don’t get him started on targets. You don’t hit impossible targets, you carry the can and get stabbed in the back.

  ‘Let’s get to the crime scene,’ he says finally. ‘I’ll back you all the wa
y and I’ll fight for you to have your case. But Winstanley won’t be giving you the first dance at the Area Christmas party. Don’t fuck this up, Ross. Whatever it is you’re not telling me, I’m sticking my neck out for you here.’ He takes out another cigarette. ‘Oh for the days when I didn’t have to freeze my dick off for a fag. And another thing – you’ve already been attacked once. I’m putting someone with you to watch your back.’

  ‘You don’t need to do that.’ I dig into the plastic bag for another sarnie.

  ‘What I love about you,’ Gerry says, lighting his next Lambert and Butler, ‘is that you never have any doubts.’

  It’s unlike Gerry to get someone so wrong.

  O’Shea is waiting for us in the hallway outside the flat. He informs me contentedly that his men have finished their flash-search of the path outside and found nothing. I’m reaching for a set of paper overalls when Gerry puts his hand on my arm.

  ‘You should stay clear of this place,’ he says. ‘Cross-contamination.’

  ‘This is my crime scene, sir.’ I use ‘sir’ as O’Shea is listening. ‘I’ve already been in there, so any contamination will have happened. Forensics have got my jacket and shoes and I’ll be fully covered up.’ Then I move aside and speak quietly, so O’Shea can’t hear. ‘Gerry, let me do my job.’

  Gerry gazes at me, then gives a sigh. ‘No fucking falling over.’

  So the three of us pull on our disposables. O’Shea appears happy with his own thoughts, so for conversation I ask Gerry how Isobel is doing. He’s focusing on his coverall, so it’s a few seconds before he answers that she’s okay. I mention in passing that we spoke briefly last night and that she sounded stressed.

  ‘You interrupted her watching some TV programme,’ Gerry says, tugging angrily at the flimsy paper. ‘Time on her own, away from the girls.’

  A PC stands guarding the inner cordon. He’s more battle-hardened than the one at the hotel last night and watches impassively as we sign in. Despite my show of confidence for Gerry, I feel uneasy as I lead him and O’Shea to where I found Crystal.

  Was I here last night? Assuming Tina was telling the truth, she gave me the address shortly after seven thirty. Lonely’s is a good two miles away – fifteen minutes to half an hour on a busy Saturday night, possibly more. So I would have got here between eight and eight thirty. Did I manage to warn her? Or was the attacker already here, stopping her answering the door?

  As we stand over the spot where Crystal lay, a man comes out of a small kitchenette, stepping round a pile of broken plates. He’s wire thin with scraggy hair and a perpetual look of disgust. He introduces himself as the Scene of Crime Officer, shakes hands with everyone and establishes very quickly that he knows nothing yet. Forensics have already finished in the entrance and have moved on to photographing and cataloguing all the rooms, but they did find a bloodstained footprint by the door.

  ‘I’ll have to check your shoes,’ he says to me. ‘I suppose you were marching all over the place.’ I tell the SOCO that the team already has my trainers. ‘And I felt that saving a woman’s life was more important than the state of the floors.’ Nonetheless, he looks at my shoe size.

  ‘Too large,’ he says, as if disappointed that I didn’t screw up his work.

  Covering my nerves, I enter the nearest room – a bedroom – and the others follow in a little line, with a rustling of disposable paper. O’Shea’s watching me carefully, but before I can speak, Gerry’s phone rings.

  ‘Winstanley,’ he says, giving me a sideways glance, then retreats into the corridor, where I can’t hear him.

  ‘Whose room was this?’ I ask and the SOCO flicks through his notes and says, ‘Matthews.’

  Amy Matthews’ bedroom is a tight fit for the three of us. There’s the same violent chaos as in the rest of the flat: the mattress has been hurled off the narrow bed, the bed itself tipped over, the single cupboard pulled down, a web of Amy’s bras and knickers flung into the centre of the room along with textbooks on nursing and plastic holiday souvenirs. A small life tossed into a pile of rubbish. I try to imagine what kind of person lived here, to connect it with the dead woman I saw last night. But it’s not easy. The memory of her body is strangely at odds with the jolly coloured beads that dangle over the light and the three magazine pictures of boy bands blu-tacked onto the wall.

  Gerry returns, putting his phone away as the others move on. ‘That was ugly,’ he says to me quietly, looking even more weighed down than before. ‘Winstanley wants access to this flat as of now.’

  ‘She can have it – when we’ve finished with it.’

  ‘She says she has a murder investigation to conduct. And your phone isn’t answering.’

  But to my relief he doesn’t insist. He follows the others into the next room and I’m about to join them when I see a small diary lying face down on an upturned wastebasket. It’s one of those garishly coloured things that teenage girls buy to pour their hearts into, a cover photo of an impossibly handsome couple standing under cherry blossom, gazing into each other’s eyes. I open the book carefully in my gloved hands, only to find she has barely poured out her heart at all. Amy Matthews, it seems, liked to confide to her diary that she needed to buy milk or had argued with Crystal over whose turn it was to clean the toilet. Amy jotted down the odd quotation that caught her eye and wrote brief notes about clothes and clubs and DJs. She entered appointments as simple times of day. No indication of who, where or what. Her round schoolgirl writing gives nothing away. And it stops yesterday with: Weather cold. Must buy a new jumper. Can’t wait.

  And then, one letter: R.

  Did she mean me? Or is it a coincidence? I have no time to think. Whatever it is, I don’t want anyone else seeing this until I’ve found what it stands for. I hear footsteps and O’Shea comes into the room. I invent something I urgently need him to tell the SOCO. Once he’s gone, I wrap the diary in a discarded Next bag, slipping it inside my coverall.

  Then I catch up with the others, examining the turmoil in the living room. The more I look at it, the more I find the mess oddly exaggerated and unreal – like a painting with a hidden message. I think again about the sharp-nosed East European kid and his pungent sweat.

  ‘I found Crystal at six thirty this morning,’ I say. ‘The hospital thinks though that she was attacked much earlier. So why was the man still here? What was he doing for all those hours?’

  ‘He stayed to gloat,’ Gerry says, without emotion.

  ‘Or he was searching for something. He’s gone and turned the place upside down.’

  ‘How long does that take?’ O’Shea says. ‘In a place this size, it wouldn’t take hours.’

  ‘So, he left and came back for something?’

  There’s one bedroom left, the one I saw the man go into. This must be Crystal’s. I step round a young woman crouched in the corner dabbing for hairs and skin. To judge by her room, Crystal seems to have been a quieter, more sober person, her walls pale blue and undecorated, fewer ornaments, no attempt at prettiness, but the same hurricane has passed through – mattress, bed and bedside table pitched aside with force, an alarm clock dangling on its wire blinking red digits.

  ‘He didn’t find it,’ O’Shea mutters, as much to himself as to the rest of us.

  Gerry joins us and looks over my shoulder.

  ‘Drugs?’ the crime scene manager asks from the back.

  I glance at the skimpy clothes tossed around on the thin carpet. ‘Not drugs. He tipped everything out of the drawers, so whatever he was searching for was not big enough to see at a glance. Would a batch of drugs so small be worth turning the whole place over for?’

  ‘If he was desperate.’

  It doesn’t feel right, but I don’t argue. Instead I leave Forensics to check for drug residue. It’s too late anyway. Whatever it was, if it was ever here, it certainly isn’t now.

  20

  While Gerry takes off at speed for a Sunday morning with Isobel and the girls, I tell O’Shea to drive me to Camden
General to meet up with Becks.

  O’Shea climbs into the driving seat of a green Mini Cooper, his stout rectangular body seeming out of place in such a small car. ‘All they had in the car pool,’ he says, happy to find someone else has let him down. He seems energised by the failures of others and enjoys pointing out the age of the car, the inefficient heating, the uncomfortable seats.

  But then, as we turn out of the Estates towards the hospital, I change my mind and tell him to head for Euston Road. We turn past King’s Cross station and stop by a police tape stretched across the road. Ahead of us is the Aviva Hotel, looking slightly more respectable in the daylight than it did last night, and in front of it straggles what looked from a distance like a line of cockroaches but has now resolved into crouched police constables, wrapped against the cold, shuffling forwards, searching through the remains of the snow.

  This is Winstanley’s investigation and that must be her, standing in the doorway of the hotel, arms crossed, watching the fingertip search with a pitiless glare and speaking to one of her bagmen, who listens and nods. She looks the part, slim and remarkably tall in a stylish short black coat, and doubtless gives good TV. I’ve been thinking about the confrontation I’m going to have to have – how I might persuade her that we can work together on this. But now I’ve seen her, I feel deeply pessimistic. There’s an inflexibility to the way she stands that I don’t like, and a worrying rigidity about her jaw.

  New snow flutters down in sporadic bursts, little memos from the drab clouds quietly gathering again above our heads, but the regulation boots are more than a match for the slush beneath and what’s left is slowly being trampled into the grubby wet pavement.

  Did I come to this hotel yesterday evening? Had I learned Amy was hiding here? I remain seated, watching Winstanley survey her kingdom and her serfs…

  O’Shea says, ‘Are you going to get out, sir?’

  I’d half forgotten he was sitting there. ‘Not now,’ I say.