‘I’ll organise a minicab. How soon do you need to go?’
She turns away to rinse the mugs, so I can only see her back, and says that she still has time. Two German property developers are flying in to Heathrow and she’s meeting them at their motel in two and a half hours.
‘In this weather? You sure?’ We’re both talking with a horrible carefulness.
She dries her hands. ‘They’re on their way.’
I want to touch her. I want her more than I ever have before. Outside, the sky is darkening. The house feels like a ship sailing towards an Atlantic storm and the houses beyond the garden are already starting to disappear as the light dwindles. Laura says nothing but plays violently with her silver bracelet. Not for the first time, I am aware she can be simultaneously furious and vulnerable. I want to comfort her, tell her everything will be all right, but I can’t.
‘Gerry’s suspended me,’ I add. ‘And he’s put a copper outside guarding the house.’
She looks up suddenly. ‘Is this about the man who attacked you last night?’
‘It’s connected.’
But when I go to my study I can see Yussef outside on the path, speaking quietly on his phone, too quietly for me to hear. He glances back towards the house, then rings off and takes up his position again.
I return to Laura and say, ‘Phone for a minicab now, but tell them not to come here. We’ll pick it up by the bus stop.’
She takes a step back. ‘What the fuck’s going on, Ross? One moment we’ve got a police guard, now you want to run.’
‘I don’t want to worry you.’
‘So you said before. I’m already worried, okay. So I can take it if you worry me some more.’
‘There’s a corrupt cop. And he might try to target me before I get my memory back.’
‘But what about Gerry’s man outside?’
‘I don’t know whose army he’s fighting for. I don’t know who I can trust anymore,’ I say, and she says she’ll be as quick as she can.
On my way to the bedroom to change out of the cheap anorak and jeans Forensics gave me, I pass the spare room as I did last night, and this time I see the suitcases have been partly filled with my clothes.
I undress rapidly in the main bedroom. It’s unreal. I sit on the double bed where Laura slept for eighteen months with a stranger who looked like me.
Unexpectedly, the terror rises up again and wraps itself round me like a rope. Everything that has disappeared, that I can’t remember. What is happening to my mind? For a time – I have no idea how long, maybe thirty seconds, maybe five minutes – I sit on the bed stark naked, shivering, hugging myself until the fear slips away silently like it came, and I catch my breath and start to focus again.
I text Becks to join me at Laura’s motel, then change into a smart Ralph Lauren open-necked shirt and designer jeans hanging in the wardrobe, the cheapest I can find, but I still feel awkward in them, as if I’ve stolen R’s clothes. Then I go downstairs, find some wake-up pills in my desk drawer and swallow a couple with coffee. I can feel the chemicals in my veins immediately, like electricity.
It’s taking Laura a surprisingly long time and I call to her to be quick. She shouts back that she’s gathering her papers for the meeting. I hear her phone ring a moment later and she answers it, then announces the minicab is on its way.
Looking out of my study window, I see Yussef hasn’t moved, still staring out at the road. Is he waiting for someone?
So, as I wait for Laura, I drop into the black mock-leather chair and swivel – this was R’s room, where I/he sat for eighteen months, thinking, dealing with problems. And I try to make contact. Earth to R.
Immediately I feel stupid and scared, so I stop and urgently scoop together the files scattered over the floor. But every now and then a phrase comes to me, a word, from nowhere. A part of me is trying to send a message. How can that be? How can a part of me not be me? The very idea frightens me.
But I have to face it somehow. Shaking, I ask again for a connection, inside, and I listen, and get another random word, another disconnected phrase. But none of it makes sense.
I tour the house, for something practical to do, checking the windows are locked. It’s growing duller as the afternoon fades and the snow returns. Then at the front, a car approaches, wipers flailing. I stiffen, but it passes without stopping.
Finally Laura joins me, still taut with anger, and leaving the lights on, we go out by the back door, unseen by Yussef, following a path that leads behind the frozen gardens to the next road, where we find our minicab already waiting.
40
The Haywain Hill Motel overlooks a half-deserted car park, fronted by flagpoles that rattle in the wind. Inside, the motel is as sleek as an airport lounge. The main conference rooms are being redecorated over the winter, so Laura’s taken a suite for her meeting. She drops her briefcase, coat and files in the small bedroom and checks herself in the wardrobe mirror. It’s five o’clock and her meeting isn’t until seven.
‘What did Izzie mean when she said my amnesia was convenient?’ I ask. ‘Does that make sense to you, Laura, because it doesn’t make sense to me. Is there anything else I should know?’
‘You’re not lying to me, Ross?’
‘No, God’s truth,’ I say warmly. ‘I wouldn’t do that to you.’
She sits down heavily at a small dressing table in the other room. I avoid looking directly at her through the doorway, because I want more than ever to be sensitive to the shifts of tone, the false hesitations and the true ones. Even so, at the edge of my vision, I can see her nails digging furiously into her wrist.
‘Us…’ she finally says. Then stops herself again. ‘This is stupid. What’s the use?’
‘What’s stupid?’ I glance up. In the dressing table mirror, her face is working – unsightly and pained. It’s weird, but my heart goes out to her more like this than when she’s composed, normal. I want to protect her from all that’s happening.
‘We’re not working, Ross. Last week, you said to give it another try, but people don’t change. Never. Nobody changes.’
I toy mindlessly with the bottles in the minibar. ‘We can still talk.’
She takes a hairbrush from her handbag. ‘We’ve talked. We’re nothing but talk. You’ve half packed your suitcases.’
‘Look, I know you’re angry–’
‘Why not? I hate what we’ve become. I hate what we do to each other. I hate what your job has done to you.’
‘And you hate me?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know if I hate you.’ She brushes her hair with rapid brittle movements.
I come into the bedroom holding a mini Bacardi, a Coke and two glasses. ‘But we’re breaking up?’
‘We’re breaking up.’
‘Did I sleep around?’
‘For shit’s sake! I don’t believe this. Yes. Yes, you fucking slept around. After the first, you promised never again, but it’s too easy for coppers. Even Gerry.’
‘Gerry’s been screwing around?’
She nods. ‘He and Izzie have had their difficulties.’
I turn away, but before I can process this new information, she says, ‘Look at me.’
At first I don’t, and then I do and she’s facing me, sitting hard and composed on the dressing table stool. In a peculiar way, I’m proud of her. She’s so tough.
‘We lost it. Gradually at first. Then faster. Over the last year or so. It happens, Ross. I trusted you not to hurt me. We supported each other. We swore oaths in church and we thought we meant them. We swore before God. We made a holy sacrament. The words were spoken, but there was nothing behind them.’
There’s an awful finality in her voice.
‘How many did I go with?’
She shakes her head.
‘Okay, I shouldn’t have asked.’
‘Two. Just the two that I know about.’
I take a long time before asking the next question.
‘Was one of them
a nurse?’
Laura puts away her brush, opens her briefcase and takes out a thin file of bound reports for her meeting.
‘No. One of them was a detective,’ she says with control as she stands and walks into the main room. The wind blusters at the double-glazing and the flagpoles rattle and whine outside. She positions the reports on a low table. ‘You were both working long hours on an important case, interviewing suspects late into the night and I was busy day and night with my own work, a major management buyout I thought would be good for my career, was good for my career. I’d even fucking met her – once – when we bumped into her, shopping in Morrisons. She was attractive and she had good contacts with Scotland Yard. You’ve always had good taste. That’s not to excuse you. You told me it only happened twice, and you regretted it, but before you ask, no, I don’t know if I believed you or where you fucked her or what positions you used. In any case, she’s now left the force.’
She returns and picks up a larger stack of ring files.
‘The second?’ I don’t want to put her through this, but I have to. The whole horrible truth.
‘The second… You still really don’t remember, do you?’
She drops the stack noisily onto the desk and sweeps aside a little pile of hotel stationery, welcome packs and room service menus. Her expression is taut.
‘Tell me,’ I say.
‘The second one was Izzie.’
I feel my chest tighten. Laura goes back for the rum I’ve poured for her and brings it into the main room.
‘You’re sure?’
‘She and Gerry were going through one of their bad patches, and you were being supportive and she told me it just kind of happened.’
‘She told you.’
‘She told me. I wanted to kill her at first. Part of me still does. I couldn’t bear to speak to her, to see her. How could she? She was one of my best friends, Ross; she and Gerry, they’ve known you since… And then I realised it was you. You’d turned into someone who poisons everything and everyone.’
She perches on the anonymous beige sofa, rubbing a hand over her forehead. I feel heavy and sick.
‘Gerry knows?’
‘No.’
‘And you?’ I ask, knowing that I don’t want to hear this answer either. Dreading it. ‘Did you have any…?’
‘Oh yes. I didn’t want to be left behind,’ she says bitterly, opening a ring file. ‘I wanted to see what it was like. A trainee at work. I didn’t even fancy him that much, but he was keen to forward his career, and grateful for the attention, and it was stupidly easy. It was only the once, but it made me hate myself. Like I’d become you.’
‘And I knew about it?’
‘Why not? I wanted you to hurt too. A good contract should have something for both sides. That makes it all legally binding. There are breaking-up contracts as much as joining-together contracts. With a good dose of pain for each of us.’
I do hurt – like I never remember hurting before – and I want to touch her and hold her. I admire her. And I hate her. I want to comfort her and to possess her and to fuck her and she’s so far away from me, so far.
I put my hand on her shoulder, lightly, on the thin material of her blouse. I can feel the soft dark skin and the bone hot underneath. She sits unmoving.
‘You do understand that wasn’t me? That Ross wasn’t me. You have to believe this. I don’t care what else you believe, but I want you to hear the truth.’
‘Yes, like I’m going to believe that.’
‘You must.’
‘So it was a different Ross who called me a slag. A different Ross who told me it was God’s will when I couldn’t get pregnant. That He was punishing me.’
‘If that happened, yes. I don’t remember any of it.’
She gets up and says she needs to prepare for her clients, and something gives me courage. I follow her into the bedroom, where she stops, standing over her briefcase.
‘I’m the same Ross you married, not the Ross you knew in the last year and a half. It fucking horrifies me when I hear things like you just said. I hate those things and I hate the person who did them. I don’t have the clever words – you’re the one with the good degree. I’m still the Ross who fell in love with you, the Ross that you fell in love with, not the Ross I became. You have to believe that.’
She stares at me. ‘Can amnesia do that? Can it change people?’
‘I don’t see why not.’
‘In your dreams.’
‘It’s possible, Lolo.’ I stroke her hair.
‘No.’
‘I miss you. Don’t you miss that Ross? The one I was?’
‘No, he’s gone. There’s no point in thinking like that. He went a long time ago.’
She walks back to the dressing table. Outside, the gale grows stronger still, buffeting the windows more fiercely, howling through the strings of the flagpoles. I’m leaning against an empty cupboard, like I need it to hold me up. My legs feel weak like a small kid’s and she’s peering into her make-up bag.
‘I’m scared, Laura. I’ve been trying to find out what kind of person I became; all that I’ve forgotten. At first I was terrified I’d fail and now I’m terrified I’m going to succeed.’
‘Sounds like everyone’s fantasy,’ she says, opening a lipstick. ‘Like Izzie said: you get to delete the past and start again. Like it never happened.’
I can’t tell if Laura’s voice is bitter or wistful. I reach out and gently massage the nape of her neck. I can smell her, soft and musky.
‘What are you doing, Ross?’
‘Help me.’ My hand moves down to her shoulder, slipping under her bra strap, gently massaging.
‘I don’t know who I’m being asked to help, Ross.’ She holds herself rigid, like she’s braced for a fight.
I unhook her bra and she says, ‘Don’t do that,’ but she doesn’t push my hands away. ‘What do we think we’re doing here?’
‘For the couple we once were. For the Ross that I am again now, not the one I was for the last eighteen months.’
I put my hand on her breast and she says again, ‘What are we doing?’
The truth is, I don’t know. I don’t know if what we do is love or not. Or just two people trying to comfort each other in a winter’s storm.
41
Becks knocks twice on the hotel suite door and I’m pleased to see him, but his eyes are blank with fatigue. Dusk is starting to settle outside the windows, so I turn on more lights, leave him opening a Carlsberg and a tiny overpriced bag of pretzels, then go back into the bedroom.
Laura’s pulling her skirt and blouse back on. She says, ‘If I start to believe you, I could get hurt again and I don’t want that.’
‘Neither do I. How can I convince you?’
‘You can’t.’
In the main room, Becks has made himself a tea using the plastic hotel room kettle and I pour black coffees for myself and Laura. Laura asks Becks if he’s eaten recently; she’s particularly polite, as if to establish a deliberate difference between her attitude towards him and me. Becks scratches his arm, blithely oblivious to any subtexts, and says not to worry, he’s been eating, but I don’t believe him.
The three of us sip our drinks in silence, each of us tired, wary. Discovering a remote, I turn on the TV to see if there’s any news. At first it’s all talk about war and terrorists and surges and withdrawals. Then it comes. A reporter stands in front of the Aviva Hotel with that typical TV mix of solemnity and prurience. Murder and violence is exciting, but he must make his voice deep and serious, as he shares the little that’s been released. But he can’t disguise the frisson of a big story that will be good for everyone’s CVs – young nurses, mystery, death.
We see a brief view of the Gordon Road flats, grey and forbidding, before the picture changes to DI Winstanley, outside Holborn Area CID in a well-tailored coat, telling the reporter that there is nothing to report. And I hate her for it. This case is certainly good for her. But I notice there’
s no mention of Javtokas drowning. Someone, maybe Gerry, has managed to keep that one from the press for the time being.
I turn the volume down and tell Becks that he can say anything in front of Laura. He’s relaxed with her. In some strange way, I like seeing the two of them together. They’re very similar – cool, sceptical and funny.
Becks flips open his notebook and frowns. He’s been thinking about the nine who were on duty last night. Most of them are either too new to the force, too thick or too lazy to be bent. He’d trust them with his own girlfriend.
‘Girlfriend,’ I say. ‘I remember you told me about her this morning.’
‘Aisha,’ says Laura, looking at me straight. ‘Nice girl. She’s come to our parties. Primary school teacher and likes The X Factor.’
‘That leaves me,’ Becks says. ‘And DCI Gardner.’
‘Gerry?’ Laura looks at me abruptly. ‘You aren’t saying Gerry tried to get you killed? You don’t believe that?’
‘I don’t want to fucking believe anything. I want to get my memory back. Anyway, there’s a tenth you missed.’
Becks checks his list again. ‘Who’s that?’
‘Dave Haskins. Gerry Gardner’s main man. Who we now know had been interviewing Darjus Javtokas at the station at nine, giving Javtokas his alibi. And who I saw arriving at the hotel around the same time as the HAT car. He watched me leave for the hospital with Norris.’ I finish my black coffee and should eat something, because the coffee I’ve been having all day is attacking my stomach like sulphuric acid. ‘So – the call to the armed guard, using my name, telling him to leave Crystal, where did that come from?’
‘According to BT, from a phone box just down the road from the station.’
‘As far as we know, were any of the ten at or near the nick when it was made?’
I know what Becks is going to say before he says it.
‘None of them.’
Antsy, unable to sit anywhere too long, I stand and check my watch, then go to the minibar and extract a packet of salted peanuts. I hold it up to Becks, who first shakes his head then changes his mind, so I tip peanuts into his palm and walk around the room eating the rest. Laura straightens the papers for her meeting. On the TV: people arguing about politics, then a minor celebrity plugging a new show.
Room 15: a gripping psychological mystery thriller Page 21
