So, for lack of a surgeon or three years to spend with a therapist, I search my phones for downloaded music – there isn’t any. However, I do find ten photos of Laura in hot and exotic places that I don’t remember visiting. I stare at each in turn but nothing happens.
I need something stronger and scour the office for confiscated weed, urgently pulling open drawers and emptying cupboards. Sadly there’s none, but next to a kettle I find a half-empty packet of limp cashews. They’re not almonds, but they are nuts. I eat them all and they taste like damp carpet.
I sit back at my desk waiting for something to happen, but no new memories arrive, with or without the help of cashews. The tiredness that I’ve temporarily ignored seeps back. I stand and stretch and sit down on the office chair again and close my eyes.
Then suddenly, to my horror, the face of Amy Matthews appears in front of me, fresh from the crime scene, deathly white, furious like a demon from an old nightmare. She’s accusing me of failing to protect her.
Shaken, I open my eyes again and get out my notebook. I find the next blank page and draw a line down the middle. On the left I start a list:
East European knife man
Police tip-off(?)
One bent cop or more than one?
Matthews
Crystal…
Paul
I move over to the right. Here, next to knife man, I write: Why?
Against Matthews, I think about what Tina told us and put: Afraid. Hyped up. Threatened?
I contemplate my words and below I add: Does anyone else know about my amnesia?
I’m running in circles.
One step at a time. I pick up my phone and flip back to the photos I took of her body last night. But even as I look at them, I find myself remembering the other nurse lying on the floor of the flat in the Estates. I failed her too.
And suddenly I recall with horror what I must have seen at the time but immediately forgot. I was stooped over Crystal’s broken body in the early sunshine. I shouted to Becks to call an ambulance. And for a second, her eyes opened, as if she’d heard my voice deep inside her coma, and she looked up at me, like she was trying to move her arms and her lips, but she couldn’t move them at all, couldn’t speak at all. Paralysed. Imprisoned inside her body, unable to cry out. I couldn’t imagine how terrifying that must be. It had to be the closest thing to hell.
My hands are shaking. I make an effort to stop the tremor and am beginning to succeed when I remember I still have Amy Matthews’ diary, hidden in my anorak.
Pulling on my latex gloves, I take the book from its bag and start working back from the fateful last date. I need to know why she wrote R on the day she died. A meeting? A cry for help? Or is it not me at all? Amy Matthews is not a great diarist. There’s something childlike about the entries, as if writing them was something she was told to do when she was young and still performed dutifully, week by week. Sometimes she inscribed a line from a self-help book or a poem she’d found in a magazine – something about love or peace – or made notes about clubs she liked.
On a typical page, in mid-January, she wrote:
We are who we think we are. We can do what we think we can do.
Renew library books. Late rota on ward.
Reread The Secret. We don’t have to put up with shit.
DJ played some Asian Dub. Cool in parts.
Tell Crystal her turn to defrost frig.
German poet Goethe: ‘Whatever you can do or dream you can begin. Boldness has magic.’
Yes – Begin.
What did she want to begin? To be bold about? It’s all strangely innocent and unrevealing. I’m probably getting to know more of Amy Matthews’ private life than almost anyone in the world and yet that’s virtually nothing. It’s frustrating. Here was a living woman sharing her most important thoughts but from what she writes I get almost no sense of what she was like at all. However, I turn to the beginning and work through the diary again and this time, rereading the entries in date order, I do notice a change that takes place around two weeks ago. The writing becomes sparser. There are no more inspiring quotes, just a few reminders of her shift times at the hospital, scribbled rapidly. Leading up to that last page and the single enigmatic R.
What happened two weeks ago? Tina said Amy was excited about something last night. ‘Things would either go really well or totally screw up.’ What screwed up?
I stare out of the window and then sit down again and try to concentrate. Leaning my head on my forearms, I shut my eyes once more.
I must have had them closed longer than I thought because when I open them, a note has been pushed under the door. I pick it up – it tells me that DI Winstanley is on her way to talk to me.
There are also two texts from Winstanley on my work BlackBerry. The first says: What the fuck were you doing in my crime scene? The second says she’ll be here by 9.55.
It’s 9.50.
I need to move. There are two directions to go when leaving my office. One is the way that Winstanley will come. I decide to take the other.
I pull on my jacket, look quickly around the room. And then I freeze.
Quietly, almost unnoticeably, the door handle is turning.
22
I wait, motionless. It’s not Winstanley. She’d have knocked. The handle moves once more and the door pushes noiselessly into the chair jammed against it, as if someone is trying to open it without being heard.
I grab the bloodstained baseball bat, drag the chair away and fling the door open.
Becks jumps back, flapping his hands nervously in front of his face. ‘You’re not going to hit me again, boss?’
‘Shit,’ I say. ‘You know how to make an entrance.’
He looks surprisingly pleased to see me, though not the baseball bat.
‘Sir,’ he says, watching me carefully as I return the bat to its place by my desk, ‘there’s an office I sometimes use, over on the far side of the station, where hardly anybody goes on weekends. I do stuff in it from time to time when I don’t want to be interrupted. I spoke to O’Shea and suggested we use it as a pop-up incident room.’
‘You didn’t tell him why we wanted to be away from everyone else?’
‘No, I said you were steering clear of Winstanley in case Area pinch the Crystal case off us. O’Shea might moan a lot, but he’s devoted to the borough. I trust him.’
Do I trust O’Shea? The fact is, he wasn’t on shift when I was attacked. Becks beams happily when I tell him he’s done a good thing. I rewrap Amy Matthews’ diary in the Next bag and lock it in a desk drawer. He sees me but says nothing. Is it loyalty or is he storing it up for the future?
Unable to escape these anxious circular thoughts, I allow Becks to lead me through the warren to a remote office, dusty and disused except for O’Shea and two detective constables Becks has recruited. Again the knot in my stomach – have we worked together before? Do we have shared memories? Shared references they expect me to know?
To my relief, Becks introduces them to me as if we’re meeting for the first time. Helen Bannon and Charlie Toth. Bannon is short, with a restrained manner. She takes my hand warmly and says, ‘Sir, I’ve heard a lot about you.’
Toth, I do actually remember from before the Forgetting. He’s taller, slightly hunched and methodical. He smiles and says simply, ‘Sir.’
Our makeshift incident room is small. Four desks have been jammed in with phones and terminals and someone has laid out chocolate bars on a paper plate. Large sheets of flip chart paper have been blu-tacked onto one wall with photos of Crystal and Amy Matthews. Outside, the corridors are silent and I can feel the tension in the room. And as they wait I search for what to say next. Strange to say, despite all that’s gone before, it’s only now, standing in front of them, seeing them all waiting, and the shadow of panic in Becks’ eyes, that I realise just how much I’m falling apart. So far I’ve been running on automatic.
Opening one of the chocolate bars, I take a breath and try hard to
keep myself under control and maintain at least an appearance of normality. ‘Okay, what do we know so far?’
‘No CCTV in the flats,’ O’Shea says. ‘All the cameras have been broken for years, haven’t they? And so far no neighbours admit to hearing a mouse fart.’
‘How’s Crystal now?’ I know that I sound cold, robotic even, but for the time being it seems to work.
Becks speaks. ‘Still not woken up. The other bad news is there’s next to no forensics on her. Nothing useful under her fingernails. No sign of sexual assault.’
I bang a marker pen down on a table. ‘Anything they can say at all? Something to help us, for fuck’s sake?’
O’Shea opens his notebook. ‘Almost nothing of use. Your woman Crystal was working in geriatrics. Friendly, they said, but not the brightest pixel on the computer screen. And there were odd rumours of money issues.’ He flips the page. ‘It seems Matthews joined her in the flat three months back, after she left her previous place rather suddenly with a month’s rent unpaid and without giving her new address to the agency. Which is why our good friend Winstanley didn’t know about it.’
‘Cash shortage?’ I pick up the marker pen and make a note on one of the flip chart sheets on the wall.
‘Or afraid of someone?’ Bannon says from her desk on the right.
‘Partners, stalkers, rejected lovers?’
Becks cuts in, ‘There is one thing. As we left, one of the other agency nurses came over to me on the quiet. She’d been working in a hospital in Barking a couple of years ago at the same time as Matthews, when a ward manager thought someone had been skimming prescription drugs. There was no solid proof and the whole affair got dropped.’
‘Pills to sell or to take herself?’
‘Like I say, just smoke.’
I try to smile. ‘Strictly speaking, Matthews is Winstanley’s case, not ours. But if we happen by chance to find the same guy that almost killed Crystal killed Matthews too, I’m not going to apologise.’ I make another note. ‘But no one’s to talk about this case with anyone else in the station. No matter who it is. Let’s get a move on.’
‘I’m preparing some pictures for you to ID,’ Becks says. ‘But I’m waiting on a download.’ The non-glamour of police work. Files, searches, downloads, more searches – byte by byte, round and round. Not like the books or the TV shows.
I ask Bannon to chase up reports of drugs missing at Camden General and Toth to find out more about Rahman and Lonely’s. O’Shea to keep his PCs knocking on doors on the Estates. I stop and look at my little team. They appear keen but the big tests will come later.
‘One thing, sir,’ Bannon says. ‘Becks said you found Crystal after a tip-off. Where did the tip-off come from?’
I hesitate. It’s going to come out sooner or later. ‘My father. Who used to work here as DCI, now retired.’
‘Shouldn’t we ask him where he got the tip from, boss?’ Toth this time. I remember from before that he was never a man to be fobbed off.
‘I did – he can’t help there.’ Of course, the reason he can’t help is that it was me who told him, only I can’t remember anything about it. But I am certainly not going to tell them this.
Luckily Toth jumps to the wrong conclusion. ‘Anonymous?’ It’s a good thing he said this, not me. I haven’t had to lie.
But Bannon’s not leaving it there. ‘With respect, sir, and I know it’s your father, but shouldn’t we push a bit more?’
Becks saves me. ‘I know DI Blackleigh’s father,’ he says with a touch of embarrassment. ‘He used to do Gerry Gardner’s job, running CID here. He’s helped me out a few times, with advice when I needed it.’ Becks scratches his arm nervously. ‘If the tip wasn’t anonymous, Paul Blackleigh wouldn’t say it was. That’s my opinion. He wouldn’t shaft his own son.’
Becks is, of course, telling the truth about the tip-off as he knows it. Toth accepts it with good grace. I stand for a moment, exhausted with the effort of appearing normal, watching them turn to their tasks.
23
Becks pulls his keyboard closer and goes back to waiting for his download. With difficulty I gather my thoughts and I text Gerry Gardner to ask if my new computer password has come through yet. He replies five seconds later: No. Then I try Laura again and this time she answers. It’s good to hear her voice.
‘I’m back at work,’ I say, turning away from the others, who are in any case busy at their own computers, and she says she guessed as much. Laura – she’s used to being married to a cop. I really ought to tell her what I did to the Prius.
‘You guessed right, comrade,’ I say brightly, and her voice breaks up, so I move into the corridor. I can hear her preparing breakfast as she talks, and she still sounds husky with morning sleepiness. I want to be there with her and I tell her this, dropping my voice.
‘Well,’ she answers, ‘there’s a thing!’ Again there’s that slight delay. As if she’s checking everything she says before she says it.
‘I mean it, Lolo. But I’m not going to be back for some time. And certainly not in time to go to church.’
‘Church! When’s the last time we went to church, Ross?’
I dodge this one with a laugh, but once more there’s that stab of fear. Something else that doesn’t make sense. She then says, ‘I need your help.’
‘What’s the problem, Lolo?’ Through the doorway I see Becks has his head in his computer, either concentrating or making like he is.
‘I’ve put up with a lot, Ross.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Don’t you dare get angry with me.’
‘I’m not getting angry–’
‘I’m not asking for much. I need my car.’
‘The meeting with the Germans? Is that what you need it for? It’ll be cancelled with this snow.’
‘Believe me, Ross, it’s confirmed. When can you be here?’
This is my opportunity to tell her I’ve smashed up her Prius but like a coward, I duck it. I decide to delegate one of the team to get the car mended before she has to know. ‘You’ll have your car in time,’ I say. ‘Trust me.’ And before I can speak again, she puts the phone down.
After a moment, I go back into our makeshift incident room. Becks is starting to bring up photographs of possible attackers on his screen.
‘I’m sorry, boss. Was I out of order just now, talking about your father like that?’
I sit to look at the pictures. ‘I used to get tough on you, that’s what you said?’
‘It’s the way you do the job. You blow people out and it keeps them on their toes. I understand that. If I wanted to work with nice people, I’d have joined the Samaritans. And Paul, he told me you have your moods but not to worry. He said you’re a first-class cop. He’s a good man, your dad.’
Hearing what Paul said, I feel a surprising warmth. He’s never spoken like that to me directly. But yet again someone has talked about me having a temper. I file it away for the future. ‘It was okay. Mentioning Paul. Don’t worry about it.’
Becks turns back to the monitor, looking even more embarrassed. ‘Shouldn’t you phone DI Winstanley?’
‘Yes,’ I say, without moving. We finish the ID and I don’t see my attacker in any of them. I sit back, wearily. ‘Give me some good news. What have you found on Crystal and Matthews?’
‘Zilch.’ He’s irrepressible. Even when delivering bad news, he bounces in his seat, tapping his monitor with a stubby forefinger, keen to share his lack of useful information. There’s almost nothing about Amy Matthews on the system: a couple of dangerous driving offences and that’s it. Nothing on Crystal/Shannon Powney.
‘Okay,’ I say, lowering my voice so we aren’t overheard. ‘Amy Matthews – who everybody loves; works hard, parties hard; might once have skimmed prescription drugs; might not – contacts me to say she’s in danger.’
‘She went to you? Not your father?’
‘So he told me.’
‘Why you?’
To
this I have no answer. Standing again, I go to the window. I can see a gaggle of small kids in the distance, throwing snow at each other.
‘What cases were we dealing with last month?’
Becks digs dutifully into the bowels of his computer. ‘A new kind of crack that’s being sold round the schools… a spate of burglaries… rumours about the local gangs.’
‘Show me more about the gangs.’
‘Tensions between Bengalis and Lithuanians. Lithuanian gang members turning up in A&E covered in blood, swearing they’ve walked into a door. Bengalis ditto – broken knees, knife or bullet wounds.’
‘Bengalis,’ I say. ‘Like Rahman?’
My mobile buzzes and it’s a text from Gerry about my computer password. Warrant number, it says simply.
I’ve spotted a small storeroom at the side that could be an office for me. I tell Becks to go home and rest. Becks says, ‘Home is for wimps.’ And the truth is that he looks rather fitter than I do.
‘I’m a caring boss,’ I say.
At this, he frowns, as if that’s the last thing he’d expect me to say. ‘I’m fine, sir.’
‘Then do me a favour.’ I hold out the key fob for the Prius. ‘See if you can get a breakdown service to South Mimms to sort out my wife’s car.’
‘I should stay here and watch your back.’
‘My back will be safe with these guys here. You told me you trusted them.’
‘I do.’ He takes the fob but before he goes he hands me a sheet of A4.
‘What’s this?’
‘That’s what you asked for. I’ve found nine people here who could have known you were in hospital last night and tipped off the man with the knife.’
I glance down the list. There’s Sergeant Steve Norris, who found me in the street; PC Ryan Turnbridge at the hotel; two PCs in the operations room; the section sergeant; a duty inspector, who was my counterpart in uniform; and a detective constable out on a false alarm.
‘Nine, you said – this is only seven.’
‘Yes, boss. The eighth is a detective chief inspector. He wasn’t at the station but was certainly kept informed.’
Room 15: a gripping psychological mystery thriller Page 13
