Room 15: a gripping psychological mystery thriller

by Charles Harris

  I come to a single A4 sheet: Haskins’ report about the tip-off he received before he raided the Kleizas. He claims it was sent from a payphone near the station. Either this was the murderer or Haskins was lying.

  Suddenly my phone buzzes in my pocket, once, very loud in the silence of the empty room. It’s a message from Becks. It reads: Watch out, Winstanley’s around.

  43

  Seeing Becks waiting alone in the frozen car park next to a black Focus, tossing the electronic key up and down in his hand, yet again I feel surprised and grateful that he’s going so far out of his way to help me when everyone else seems to be against me.

  ‘You dodged the Skull,’ he says as I approach.

  ‘The Skull?’

  ‘Winstanley. I spotted her while I was digging around for the log book for the Focus.’

  ‘Is that her nickname? The Skull?’

  ‘She looks like one.’

  I hand Becks the two Lithuanian folders and tell him we need to move fast. In return he points to the car. Inside, I can see a thick manila file and a wad of fifty-pound notes. ‘Your first three wishes,’ he says.

  ‘Not here.’ I push his hand away quickly. ‘What reason did you give?’

  ‘Don’t ask. The less you know the better.’

  ‘And the fourth?’

  He nods and recites a street name and house number. ‘Kilburn.’

  I reach for the key to the Focus, but Becks hands me the key to his own car. ‘I couldn’t take the risk of booking the Focus in your name.’

  I look over the Astra, its scrapes and patches, and open the door. It gives a sick groan. I ask him to confirm the car will drive okay and he says proudly, ‘No problem. You could drive to Mecca and back.’

  I say that’s his religion not mine.

  ‘If you take the Focus while you’re suspended and get found out, all hell will break out… And that’s your religion.’

  I can’t disagree. ‘We should turn off our phones.’

  He looks dubious. ‘You think?’

  ‘We don’t know who could track us. Who might be tracking us even now.’ I turn off mine and reluctantly he does the same. Climbing into his car, I look up at him. ‘You lead, I’ll follow.’

  The house is tall and thin and stands on a windy T-junction on the border between Kilburn and Willesden Green, with a scruffy pub on one corner and a closed petrol station on the other. The houses on this road were once cheap and are now expensive, only this one is less fashionably bright, with a scuffed wooden door and dull brass knocker.

  I walk over to Becks, who’s parked four cars ahead. He hands me the manila file. ‘You think it will work, boss?’

  I don’t answer. The fact is, I don’t know. I need to make contact with R and this is the only way I can think of, short of praying to God. But, as I’ve always been taught to believe, God helps those who take the first step. After a lifetime of half-belief, I’m no longer sure I believe in anything at all. But I do know I have to make that move.

  As we cross to the house, I ask, ‘What’s my nickname?’ He seems not to have heard. ‘Everyone has a nickname.’

  ‘You really want to know?’

  ‘I want to know. My dad was The Sheriff. He always refused to tell me why. Years later I learned he got it when he was a probationer. He walked unarmed into a Brixton shebeen full of Jamaican nutcases with guns and pulled out a villain he wanted. They said he looked like John Wayne in a Hollywood movie – so sure of himself everyone thought he must have backup.’

  ‘You’re called Jesus.’

  ‘Jesus?’ I laugh. Maybe the all-seeing Father is watching over me after all.

  ‘In CID, yes. Jesus.’

  ‘You call me that too?’

  ‘Not to your face.’

  ‘Why? I mean, why Jesus?’

  ‘You want to know? Because you believe you can walk on water. And I think many are waiting for your crucifixion.’

  ‘They hate me that much?’

  ‘Some do. But you get the job done, man. It’s what’s needed, isn’t it? Me, I never saw anything wrong in that. I hope one day I’ll be able to do the same. To be ruthless when that’s what it takes.’

  I’m about to use the door knocker when Becks points to a set of treacherously icy steps leading down to a basement. I go first and there’s a bell so I ring it. After a time the door opens and the psychiatrist Nathan stares out, gangly in a loose green cardigan and jeans, and as irritable as when he refused me treatment in A&E.

  ‘Fuck off,’ he says, but I raise the file and show him his name on it. I say, ‘Benjamin Thomas Nathan?’ This always scares them, when you give their full name, and true to form his face hardens. I suggest the three of us should talk.

  Without a word, Nathan ushers us into a back room that smells of damp walls and surgical spirit. The room is bare except for two chairs and a desk, piles of dusty papers and a line of psychiatry books on a makeshift shelf.

  I tap the file. ‘Mr Nathan, you remember meeting me in Camden General earlier today and denying me help?’ He nods and starts to defend himself indignantly, but I cut across him. ‘At the time, I had a feeling I’d seen your face before. Now I know.’

  Nathan glances nervously towards the file and then perches on a chair, feet planted awkwardly, as if he might jump up at any time. He looks across at Becks, who’s stayed by the door, arms crossed.

  Becks says, ‘My boss has amnesia, like he told you this morning, and we need to get his memories back.’

  Nathan is trying his best to act angry, but his body is giving him away. He clicks his knuckles and crosses one bony leg over the other. ‘I told Mr Blackleigh at the hospital this morning that this can’t be done quickly.’

  ‘I think there’s someone else inside me,’ I say and Becks glances across at me in surprise. It’s not easy, but I have to say it. ‘Like another person. I’ve seen his work on my computer. He signs himself “R”. He’s like me but different – tougher. People hate him. I’m not sure I like him myself. But he knows things I don’t know. I get glimpses. I think I remember seeing a woman killed last night. Or rather, he saw a woman killed – he was trying to save her. I need him. I need to know what he knows. Dig him out. Whatever it takes – surgery, you name it.’

  ‘Maybe, but this isn’t something you do in a rush, Mr Blackleigh. It will probably take weeks to get the confidence of this person you call R inside you, to ask him to come out and speak. Get it wrong and you may cause long-lasting mental–’

  ‘There isn’t time,’ I cut in. ‘There’s a dead woman who got killed when I – he – was supposed to protect her, and another who’s in hospital in a coma. I need you to do something to make me find R. To help me talk to that other person I was.’

  Nathan leans back and glares at the ceiling. I can hear voices shouting on a TV at the far end of the flat. He gives a sigh and I reckon this is probably one of his standard ploys. I don’t think a psychiatrist’s job is much different from mine. We both manipulate people to get them to fess up. I might offer a suspect a cigarette. He might offer a patient a pill. We both pretend we know more than we do; make the other guy feel big, or small, or alone, until they pop. Whatever it takes.

  I break the silence first. ‘Tell us your going rate.’

  There follow a few seconds of ethical and professional contemplation. Finally he speaks. ‘Hypothetically… there’s one drug. Sodium amytal. The Americans used to inject spies with it to get them to reveal secrets. It’s an anticonvulsant, once approved for psychiatric treatment, but it’s rarely used now. It’s too dangerous. Too small a dose and nothing happens. Too large and you have a dead patient on your hands.’ He stops and looks at me. I notice he’s avoided the money issue.

  ‘How long does it take?’ I ask.

  ‘Sodium amytal? As long as necessary. If it does anything at all. There are no guarantees. It might even make it worse. The side effects aren’t nice and include confusion, poor judgement, hallucinations, loss of reflexes and heart fai
lure, to name but a few. I keep some for emergencies but only use it in hospital. Without expert resuscitation you could well die.’

  I take a deep breath. ‘No hospital. I don’t want anyone else involved.’

  Nathan sits forward. ‘I’d be risking my job. And your life. I don’t give a fuck about your life, but I do care about my job.’

  I tap the file again. ‘We can make this public or it can stay hidden.’

  He reaches out a hand. ‘Let me see what’s in that.’

  ‘You know only too well what’s in here. After the injection, you can have it to keep or destroy. It’s the only copy there is.’

  He takes his hand back and drums his fingers on his desk. ‘I’m not saying I’ll do this.’

  I feel he’s going to back out. ‘We can sweeten the deal.’ I nod to Becks, who shows Nathan the wad of fifty-pound notes. ‘This money has been booked out for informants. Tell me how much you want.’

  In the end, Nathan doesn’t need a great deal more persuasion when it comes to endangering my health and sanity. It’s depressing how easily people can be bought. He turns to Becks. ‘You have to watch him for at least two hours. Anything unusual, depressed breathing, loss of reflexes, don’t even think. Get an ambulance and pray.’

  Now Nathan feels better about the ethics of accepting the cash. He takes it all, counts the notes professionally and slips them into a desk drawer. Then goes to a cupboard and takes out a syringe and ampoule. He preps the needle and watches the liquid squirt and I notice with interest that all his clumsiness disappears when he does his work. On the distant TV it sounds as if a child’s crying.

  ‘I’ll tell you something as a bonus,’ he says as he turns back to me. ‘Like I said this morning about your amnesia, this other person, this R, didn’t just appear last night.’

  ‘No, he started eighteen months ago.’

  ‘He will have been there long before that.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you do. And part of me hopes you never do.’ He injects the drug straight into a vein. And suddenly he can’t wait to get rid of us. In a few seconds, he’s unlocking the front door. Outside, the snow is falling more heavily. It’s seven thirty.

  ‘I don’t feel anything,’ I say.

  ‘You won’t for a few minutes and I don’t want you here when you do. You were never here. You asked to take the risk.’ He shivers in the cold wind. ‘What about the file?’

  ‘It’s yours.’ I hand it to him and repeat it’s the only copy, he can do with it what he wants.

  ‘How can I be sure?’

  ‘Look at it.’

  He opens the file and looks up at me. ‘You fucking bastard.’

  ‘One thing you learn as a policeman, everyone’s got a guilty conscience.’

  He flings the file full of blank paper in my face. I remind him he still gets to keep the cash. I’m not a bastard, whatever he says – that’s R.

  But he says, ‘Fuck you too.’

  44

  It was at one of his birthday parties that Paul did it. I was thirteen. His birthday was in June and he’d have everyone round from whichever borough he was working in at the time. It had been raining all afternoon. The front room was crammed with his friends, mostly police and their families, and he’d been drinking liberally. His face was redder than ever and he was in a good mood, always a relief, although I never totally relaxed. You never knew when it would change.

  I’d lost track of him and was talking to Gerry and Isobel, by the drinks table. Gerry was opening cans of beer and gave me one. As I took it, I heard my father’s voice right behind me.

  ‘This is an arrestable offence.’

  I turned round, ready to make a joke, but he was holding up a clear plastic bag. A week before I’d been given a small amount of pot by a friend at school. We’d felt very brave and dangerous, rolling the joints with inept fingers in his back garden. I don’t remember much of a hit. I suspect we were too frightened to breathe deeply. But I’d brought back a tiny stash, which I’d proudly hidden in my bedroom. He must have smelled something on me when I came home and waited till this moment.

  ‘You’ve been into my room,’ I said over the general laughter.

  Paul took the beer from me. ‘You’re under arrest.’ He put his hand heavily on my shoulder. ‘Hold them out.’

  I tried to smile back. ‘Come on.’

  ‘Hold them out. Hold out your fucking hands. Hold them out. You think you’re above the law – too good for all this? A criminal is a criminal. You don’t deserve to be a Blackleigh.’

  Isobel told him enough was enough but Paul ignored her.

  ‘Ross Matthew Blackleigh, you look like you’re going to fucking wet yourself. Don’t act like such a wimp.’

  He took a pair of handcuffs from his belt. Some people giggled as he clicked one of the cuffs into place, turned me round expertly and snapped the other cuff shut behind me. They felt painfully tight against my wrists, but I didn’t care about the pain: it was standing there with my hands cuffed behind my back and half of his friends laughing.

  ‘Okay, unlock them now,’ Isobel said.

  Gerry put an arm round her shoulder. ‘Fun’s over, Paul.’

  ‘That’s for underage kids who think they can fuck with the law,’ Paul said.

  ‘Unlock him, Paul.’

  ‘He’ll get them taken off when he deserves it.’

  I went to go upstairs to my room, but he stood in my way. ‘Stay and face it,’ he said. ‘Fucking stay down here. Are you going to cry?’

  ‘I’m not fucking going to cry.’

  ‘This is for your own good. Rehabilitation, Ross. You stay down here for your own good.’

  So I walked around with my hands cuffed behind me, making conversation, or trying to.

  Half an hour later, some more of his junior officers turned up late and he showed me to them. What I remember is them laughing, but I’m not sure I’m right. Some of them must have been uneasy about this, surely.

  After they’d gone, he held up the key, then dropped it on the living room floor, among the crisp crumbs, with its foul after-party smell of rancid wine and beer, and left me to pick it up, my hands behind me, and work out how to get the cuffs unlocked.

  Tough love, he called it.

  I went outside, in the rain, and threw them, key and handcuffs, as far as I could into one of the neighbouring gardens. He never asked me for them back.

  We drive to a pub half a mile away. It’s a melancholy empty place, even on a snowbound Sunday evening. Clearly this is the pub everyone else doesn’t go to. The jolly music that plays from an electronic fruit machine only serves to make it feel even more dismal. I hand Becks money to buy himself a pint and I sit at a table, waiting for the injection to take effect.

  Becks comes back with the beer and sits opposite, watching me with understandable nervousness.

  ‘I’m still alive,’ I say. ‘You look like you’re expecting my head to swivel and my chest to explode.’

  ‘They never covered this in first aid.’

  I used to sit in half-empty pubs like this with Paul, after my mother died, on the nights when he felt he ought to establish some kind of father–son relationship. He’d try to talk about something other than police work or church business – he was an important figure in the local congregation until he had to resign from the force. But his range of subjects was limited and so much of his life revolved around work that those attempts at paternal bonding never rose far above embarrassing. We’d both grow tired and irritable at the effort involved and more than once we’d end up having a stupid row about some trivial matter. The sort of row you can’t even remember what it was about once you get home.

  I contemplate Becks, huddled into his coat, bear-like, one large hand wrapped around his pint glass. ‘Why are you doing all this for me? You don’t have to.’

  ‘Tell me about it!’

  ‘So?’

  ‘You’re my boss. And you helped me.�
�

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘I didn’t like you much at first, and you didn’t like me, you made that clear. I was young and thought I knew everything. And didn’t feel I was getting respect from the others in the station. There were jokes about being a towel-head every time someone got killed in Iraq. I started to get stroppy and throw my weight around. You gave me a bollocking and told me the way I was going, I didn’t deserve anyone’s respect. I didn’t know what to do or who to talk to, so I went and had a drink with your dad and he told me to hang in with you, that you knew your job, and he was right. If it wasn’t for you, I probably would have chucked it all or hit someone I shouldn’t have. You showed me the way. If not for you and him, I wouldn’t still be a cop now. You did that.’

  I think about this. More stories about not being liked. The truth is bitter. More to distract myself than anything else, I say, ‘Let’s talk about Haskins.’

  ‘He’s quiet, keeps himself to himself.’

  ‘What about the last year and a half. What’s he done?’

  ‘Sloppy bugger. He was on his way to DI, but he screwed up. There’d been a mugging and he was supposed to check through a load of CCTV from a bus station near the scene. Some of the tapes covered a period he knew the suspect was away, so he skipped them. Normally nobody would have noticed, but it was his bad luck that a separate case came up with an attempted child abduction. It was on one of the tapes he’d skipped and he hadn’t, of course, reported seeing it. He was bumped back down to constable for a year.’

  ‘It’s not exactly Jack the Ripper, is it?’

  ‘It sums him up. Gerry Gardner gave him a second chance. Haskins owes him.’ Becks takes out his phone. ‘I’ve got to check in with Aisha. I said I’d call two hours ago.’ He looks with concern at his phone before going off into a corner, presumably to either find a good signal or not have me listening in. Or both.