He came here after the club.
He came here.
He propped the door open with a piece of wood he found, in case he needed to make a quick exit and he ran up the stairs. ‘Go Wenger’ graffiti on the walls, with a number of gang tags, some in Arabic, and ‘Life is Shite’ and ‘You Suck to Hell’. He tried to control his breathing, hot and scared.
When Crystal opened the door, he pushed her aside and slammed it behind. She started to make up some story, but he cut across her.
He told her to calm down, everything would be all right. He was going to save Amy’s life, but she refused to believe him. He slapped her and told her not to be sodding stupid. He was on her side. She had to listen.
‘Hot or cold?’
She stared at him confused, so he upturned three living room drawers to see how she responded.
‘Didn’t you ever play games as a kid? Weren’t you ever a kid? Where is it? Hot or cold?’
She said tearfully, ‘I don’t know.’
Again he said, ‘I’m on your fucking side. But that phone is going to get her killed and you too.’
He didn’t know if she could be persuaded, but didn’t wait. Went into the next room. Did Amy have the mobile with her or had she hidden it? If so, where? He moved methodically from room to room, dragging Crystal with him and watching her reactions because her eyes would tell him. He tipped out the rest of the drawers and kicked over the coffee table and all the sodding stupid magazines.
He grabbed Crystal by the hair and pulled her into the sitting room, and she was sobbing. He thought nurses were made of more guts than this, thought they were tough, maybe it’s only other people’s pain they’re tough about. Not so easy to be brave when you’re the one hurting.
‘Where’s she gone, Crystal? Where’s she taken it?’
She whimpered something he couldn’t make out. She was still crying. She thought she was helping Amy but she didn’t understand. She had no idea what Amy had got herself into.
He punched her on the jaw and felt as much as heard it crack.
Shaken, I restart the car, make a turn and leave the estates behind. It feels as much as if R is driving as I am. He saw Crystal last night – and hit her. I feel sick at the thought. But it was what he felt he had to do. He needed to save Amy. That’s what I tell myself. Is it right to hit someone to save a life? It’s too easy to say ‘of course not’. But then it’s also only too easy to say ‘of course’.
In the end, she must have told R where Amy was hiding and he set off at speed, following this same road I’m driving down now.
This is where he drove in his pearl-blue Audi, heading for the hotel Crystal had told him about, still convinced he was being watched.
If someone had him under surveillance who would it be? The Kleizas? Rahman? Whoever it was, was good at their job. Police, then? Gerry, Dave Haskins or even DPS. The Directorate of Professional Standards would have the resources. They’d use cars and bikes, they’d use the parallel streets either side, so as not to be spotted. And they’d hide a tracker in his car.
A tracker. He slewed the car round, making an illegal U-turn, ignoring the other cars hooting at him angrily, then doubled back down a side street before stopping. He twisted round but no one had followed him through those illegal turns. He’d stopped by the rear of one of the large hotels that cluster along Euston Road, in what was little more than a service road. Wiping his hands with a fresh Kleenex, he checked his watch and gave himself ten minutes, no more.
Sweat running down the back of his neck, he searched the Audi, kneeling to peer under the wheel arches, lifting the interior mats, looking in the door pockets and dashboard compartments. He didn’t expect to find anything obvious, they’d be cleverer than that. He checked next for panels that might have been messed with, looking for small unexplained scratches, loosened screws. Urgently, he opened the boot, cleared the spare tyre compartment, the toolkit, the first aid box.
He scrambled desperately under the gleaming new chassis, breathing heavily, scraping his hands on the underside, reaching up beneath the engine as best he could. He pulled himself out and swore and kicked the side of the car. Climbed into the rear and tugged out the back of the rear seat. He found a pair of scissors in the first aid box, then ripped furiously at the expensive leather upholstery, tugged out handfuls of unpleasant grey filling.
Nothing. No device that he could find. He was scared and angry, and his heart was thumping. The seats were ruined. Clumps of grey fibrous filling littered the back of the car. Thirteen minutes were up and more than he could spare. He needed to get to her fast. And he still had that bad feeling.
I pass the side street where R ripped apart his own car. Here’s where he rejoined the main road, speeding again, the first smell of snow in the air, still sure he was being watched, feeling a pair of eyes behind his head – never there when he turned round – but still knowing, feeling the prickling in the back of his neck. Telling himself not to be stupid, to concentrate on the road.
My head throbbing, I follow his route, thinking his thoughts, down through the knot of streets and then, as I slow for a cyclist who jumps a red light, the Astra’s engine dies.
For a moment, I don’t move. A car hoots from behind. I turn the key to restart, but I already know. A cough and a groan of machinery is all I get. I try twelve, thirteen times, turning the key, punching the dashboard, but nothing. I shouldn’t have slowed, I should have just run the stupid cyclist over.
I snatch the bullets and the heroin from the glove compartment and search for a carrier bag, finding one under the passenger seat – Aldi. I stuff them in and climb out, slamming the door. I leave the Astra at the lights, ignoring the angry drivers all around, and start off on foot across the junction with Ossulston Street.
Time is still on my side. I’ve got 10.10 on my watch, which means, what? Fifty minutes to go. I want to be in place, watching the hotel room before the killer expects me to be there. But I have no energy left. I’m almost sleepwalking, as if drawn by a powerful magnet that’s outside my control. As I half run, half limp towards the hotel in King’s Cross, I blearily try to go over the plan again in my head, not that there’s much to think about. Either the trap will work or it won’t. Either R will reveal the truth or he won’t. Simply follow the plan. Trust the process. It’s all I can do now.
When I reach King’s Cross station, I calculate I can just afford the time for a coffee to wake me and calm my nerves. The concourse is busier than I expected, the usual British confusion that always comes with bad weather. I push through two queues of passengers with heavy bags, the station clock is showing 10.21 – three minutes fast. Buying myself an Americano from a kiosk, I watch people move through, searching, arguing, rushing, slow.
I am scared of him. Afraid, because he is me and also separate from me. He acts while I think. He knows who shot Amy Matthews. He knows who the shadow behind the door was – the shadow I was fighting when she was killed. And I know the answer will not be one I want. Because there are only a few people it could be now and I don’t want it to be any of them.
People like to think of stations either as romantic or lonely. But they are neither: merely places where people might be leaving or returning, picking pockets or dealing drugs, meeting or parting or just watching other people pass.
And right now they might be watching a man clutching an Americano, crying for no apparent reason, then drying his eyes.
I walk away, passing the newsagent’s, and flick my eyes over the headlines: politics, weather, war, environment, celebrities, names that I’m only now slowly beginning to remember. Turning on my phone, I dial Laura.
‘It sounds busy where you are,’ she says.
‘Very busy. It’s a station. You’ve made the calls?’
‘Yes.’ She pauses. ‘Are you sure you know what you’re doing?’
‘You told them about the room, the time, everything?’
‘No – Yes, of course I did.’
‘Okay. Any
response? Anyone call back? Anyone else phoned for any reason?’
‘Just one.’ And she tells me who it was. ‘Are you catching a train?’ she asks after a particularly loud platform announcement.
With an effort, I push through the crowds towards the exit. ‘No. Like I said before, I’m going back to the hotel.’
‘Is it working, Ross?’ There’s a new uncertainty in her voice. ‘Retracing your steps. Are you learning anything?’
‘Yes. In parts.’
Another gap in the conversation and a woman announces the imminent departure of a train for Edinburgh from Platform 14. For a second, I contemplate the idea of asking Laura to join me on such a train, no baggage, no ties, and then I remember that he’ll be there too. He’ll always be there.
‘Good luck,’ she says finally. And then, ‘I’m frightened.’
‘What have you got to be frightened of?’
A second’s hesitation. ‘You started to sound more like him again.’
‘I’m not him,’ I say emphatically.
I turn off the phone for the last time.
49
10.30. The Aviva Hotel stands dark, behind the last of the thinning snow. A single police car remains outside but the front door to the hotel has been left unlocked and there’s no one in reception. A glance at the rack of keys behind the desk shows that the local prostitutes have taken their custom elsewhere for the time being.
It wasn’t a bad place for Amy Matthews to hide. Rapid turnover and no questions asked. I can hear high-tension violins coming from the office behind the desk, where a night porter, an Indian this time, nods in front of a small TV. He twists round as he hears me approach the counter. I tell him who I am and he waves a hand before turning morosely back to his film.
Upstairs, I stop and look round the bend in the corridor. As I feared, a PC sits on a plastic stool; the inner cordon do-not-cross tape still stretched in front of room 15. Ideally, I want to put myself where Amy Matthews was murdered, but that’s not going to be possible. Doubling back, I climb to the next floor and locate the room exactly above – room 25.
I limp wearily back down to reception, and the night porter doesn’t shift his eyes from the TV. A woman on the screen is clutching a camera as she hides in an alleyway by a city cemetery, petrified. A gun is fired.
Stepping behind reception, I locate the keys I want.
Back upstairs, I unlock room 25. Then I open up the room opposite. I go down and replace the second key, keeping hold of the first. The empty space stands out in a satisfying manner. Easy to spot.
The room above where Amy Matthews was killed looks very similar, except the wallpaper is beige instead of green, and the bed is ranged against the left-hand wall rather than the window – so I drag it across, to precisely above where she died. My skin crawls, as if I’m invoking a ghost. I can see a bullet hole in the floor and remember the corresponding hole in the ceiling of room 15 below. This must be the shot fired while I was fighting the other man, the one that grazed me on the neck. Though only a flesh wound, it still jabs like shards of glass and I feel increasingly feverish and fatigued, though of course this could be down to the chemicals Nathan pumped into me.
I’d love to sleep. To be somewhere else. To forget again. But with an effort I take an upright wooden chair and place it facing the bed. I cross to the opposite room, pull the duvet off the bed there and bring it back, rolling it into a sausage shape roughly the size of a man, which I sit upright in the chair. Then I remove my jacket, place it over the rolled-up duvet with a small dark cushion on top for a head and turn off the light. In the half-darkness, it might fool someone for about two seconds, but it’ll have to do.
I return to the other room, leaving both doors just open enough to see through to the dimly lit shape sitting in the chair beyond. Street lamps cast a faint orange reflection up onto the ceiling, a treacherous glow like a fire secretly creeping up the hotel walls. I splash cold water on my face from a sink in the corner, then I sit on a chair and wait, aching with tiredness. Watching the opposite door. Asking myself who I’ve set the trap for – the killer, R or myself.
There’s no movement from the corridor. No one’s falling into what I now feel is my rather obviously constructed trap. And no memories are returning either. I can’t do this. I must but I can’t. But I must. I must face the truth however bitter, that’s what I said to myself in Tina’s bathroom.
But what if I’d be happier not knowing? I’ve spent so much of my life trying to be certain. There’s a time early in every case, when you feel almost anything can happen. It’s alive with possibility. When it closes, something dies. Sometimes, the truth is never known. More often, the truth is found. And as with the workings of a magic trick it is rarely as interesting as the mystery.
I wake with a jolt and stand, breathing heavily. Only a minute has passed. I walk to the window and look down at the alley below, empty except for a mottled grey cat that moves slowly through and disappears into a hole under one of the walls. I need something to keep me alert. Lifting a picture of St George and the dragon off the wall, I pull out the nail it was hanging from, limp back to the chair and sit again.
I grasp the nail in my right hand and squeeze until it cuts into my flesh and the extra pain gives me a handhold on my brain. This is it, I say to myself, to Ross, to R, and I try to breathe slowly but the fear rises. Slowly but definitely. I can feel myself shake. I wait. I wait for what I know must come. Every time my eyes droop, I dig the nail in deeper. But still nothing happens. I stare through the gap at the opposite room and all I see is the part-closed door, no memories, no body, no blood.
The orange light grows brighter and redder, and the noise from the distant street grows with it. The traffic dies to silence only to rise again every time the traffic lights change on the corner and a new rush of cars heads round towards King’s Cross.
Suddenly, I know there’s someone here with me, I can sense him. I twist round, but the room is empty, still nobody in the corridor, just that inescapable feeling of being watched. The red light grows lighter and darker as the cars pass louder and softer; and the picture, lying on its side, gleams brighter and dimmer, its hero collapsed, the dragon a blur.
Footsteps approach heavily in the corridor, making the floorboards creak. I stiffen but then realise they’re coming from the floor below. The cordon PC, perhaps, pacing around.
The traffic lights change again and I change with them, circling the one-way system round and round, following him in his car, my car, I can hear R accelerating and braking, I accelerate and brake, the noise rises and falls, and I peer at the doorway, which is close to me and different somehow, but when I drag my eyes open again it’s the same, only there is a difference which I can’t quite place as my eyes half close once more and I follow around the bed that’s now in the centre of the road and snow is falling on the grey-green wallpaper, and I keep having to check that I’m in a room, not the street.
I can trust nobody and nothing anymore. Not even what I think I see and hear.
I look around the room where R saw Amy Matthews die. Where something must trigger his memory. Only of course, I remember, I’m in the wrong room. The gunshots from the TV downstairs. The pain in my hand. Agonised violins. The smell of blood. Snow falling on the carpet. But no, I can’t hear the TV, and there’s no smell, no snow falling…
… but there’s a movement outside the room.
There’s a movement in the corridor.
A foot-scrape on the floor outside which I heard just a moment ago and didn’t register at first. But that sound, hardly heard, now comes back to me, fresh and real.
And someone is pushing open the door to the room opposite.
At nine on Saturday evening, as the first snow started to fall, R slipped into the hotel, keeping out of sight as the young night porter heaved bags of rubbish into the alleyway at the back, swearing lightly to himself.
Going quickly to the key rack. Eleven rooms occupied. Running to the first, thumpi
ng on the door, shouting Police and holding out his warrant card.
A woman opening the door a crack and swearing at him. A man’s trousers over a chair in the background.
At the second, a middle-aged man opened the door, looking scared.
After four rooms on the ground floor, he ran up the stairs and hammered on the next two doors – round the corner and seventh time it was her. The light was red and snow was starting to fall outside the window and she backed away, looking past him.
At the other one. Behind him.
He is facing away from me now, looking at the shape I made on the chair. The man who fought me last night, when I found Amy Matthews.
He must have heard me, a slight squeak of the chair as I stood, because he turns and he’s holding a gun.
And he asks, ‘Have you remembered yet, Ross? Have you fucking remembered? Fucking have you?’
50
Paul turns back into the room, walks heavily to the bed in the room above where Amy Matthews was killed twenty-six hours ago and drops the gun onto it. Then he reaches into his pocket and takes out a mobile phone. Amy Matthews’ phone. He looks down at the bed, sadly, like it’s the actual bed that she died on below. With a kind of a wheezing sigh, he says, ‘What are we going to do?’
I follow him in and close the door. ‘That gun. A Baikal?’
Paul says, ‘You know it is.’
The third BK. The gun Rahman was asking about in Lonely’s.
Paul unbuttons his thick winter jacket. He fights for breath and when he regains it he says he really ought to lose weight.
‘Sunday nights. They always make me feel depressed. Something about them.’ He scratches an armpit. ‘You’ve remembered?’
Room 15: a gripping psychological mystery thriller Page 26
