Blood Evidence Page 14

  I remember being at the Inn, trying to crack Will’s laptop password and failing. Will! Right. He will be able to help. And my phone will have other things on it, too, like Maps. I see my jeans on the floor and scramble around in the pockets.

  Nothing.

  Okay, where next? Ah – my leather jacket, draped over the back of a chair. I search all the pockets – but still nothing.

  Shit, shit, shit.

  I search the entire room – which is not difficult, because it isn’t big. There’s nothing under the bed, under the covers or the pillows, or in any of my own discarded pieces of clothing. Nor in the drawers or pockets of whoever’s room this is.

  Okay, Julius. This is serious now. Think back. What happened?

  I remember thinking it was almost time for the sun to go down and that it was tragic for me to sit inside the Inn on my own all night. Aha, yes, so I went out for a drink. Where did I go? I called a cab, I think, and told them to take me into town.

  The driver dropped me off on the high street, and I looked for a bar.

  Then what? I must have met someone. I remember laughing, joking, touching someone. Soft cotton. Didn’t I see…? Yes, that hoodie over there! That must be his. It was dark out, I remember. The air getting cold.

  And what was his name?

  Shit, I can’t even bring his face into focus. There are no pictures here, nothing for me to go by.

  Alright, fuck it, I need to make some kind of move. There aren’t any answers in here. I should just go find this guy, figure out where I am, and get back to Will. He’s probably wondering where I am.

  I head out of the only door, still feeling like I’ve been hit in the head with a hammer.

  In the open-plan kitchen/living room, a guy is sitting on a threadbare sofa engrossed in his phone. He looks up at my entrance, and blinks twice, fast.

  “You’re Jimmy’s, uh… Well, I mean, last night, the two of you…?” he stammers, clearly having trouble getting to the right words.

  “I guess,” I shrug. “Is that Jimmy’s room?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “Um, do you need something?”

  “I don’t know where we are,” I say, rubbing the back of my neck awkwardly.

  “Oh! No worries. I guess it was dark when you came back. I can give you directions to where you need to go. I, uh… I just wonder if you’d like to get dressed first?”

  I look down, and realise I’ve been giving him a free show.

  “Oh,” I say. “On that note, where’s your shower?”

  I take a quick, cold shower, feeling the icy sensation at least numb my head for a moment. The pain comes back almost immediately, but it helps. Shit, I can’t believe I put myself in this situation. It starts to flood over me, then, the awareness of what might have happened.

  I had no idea about where I am, the name of the guy I was with last night or what he even looked like, and I have no phone. My wallet appears to be empty, and I was laying there totally naked.

  If this random stranger I met had been the Highgate Strangler, I wouldn’t be waking up to have a shower this morning.

  And he didn’t even need to be a killer. He could have been some deranged stalker, some psycho who finally snapped. He could have taken my clothes while I slept and kept me in the house, isolated, unable to tell anybody where I was.

  I turn off the water with an abrupt finality, sluicing drops of water off my face with my hands. There’s no point thinking like that. Not everyone on the street is a serial killer. Even if I truly believe that most of them could be, given provocation and opportunity.

  Dressing in last night’s clothes, wrinkling my nose at the fact that my shirt is clearly covered in dried beer, I try to get my heartrate under control. Anything could have happened, really, and it would have been my own fault. I made myself completely vulnerable. Shit, I need a drink.

  Fuck, no, that’s what got me here in the first place. What I need is to go back and find Will, and do whatever amount of grovelling is necessary to make up for the fact that he hasn’t known where I was all night.

  Jimmy’s roommate, it turns out, is a decent kind of guy. He calls a taxi for me so I can at least get back to the Inn, and doesn’t bring up the fact that he had an eyeful of my dick this morning. Or that it’s almost lunchtime and I’ve only just managed to emerge from Jimmy’s bed. Or the fact I didn’t know Jimmy’s name.

  Actually, he doesn’t say much at all, and I end up waiting outside on the road for the taxi, wishing the sun wouldn’t shine so fucking brightly.

  Twenty-two – Will

  I had spent a long morning after a largely sleepless night.

  Ram didn’t leave me a note to explain where he had gone, but there was an empty bottle of the kind of drink you’re supposed to serve by the shot, not the pint. That was as much of a calling card as any. I didn’t have to have Met Police training to figure out that he’d gone in search of a pub or bar somewhere.

  I had been feeling so much better after talking to Harry. Even if I hadn’t exactly made any progress or done anything that gave any kind of result, I still felt lighter. Like a weight would be lifted off my shoulders one day soon, even if I was still carrying it now.

  And then I got back, and the room was empty, and Ram was off on a bender somewhere.

  I tried to sleep, but all I could do was worry about him. Where he was, what he was doing. Whether he was choking to death in a pool of his own vomit or getting run over after stumbling into the middle of the road in the dark. I had the bed to myself, but that was no kind of comfort at all. I’d even started, somewhere in the middle of all this madness, to get used to the idea of him sleeping behind me, back to back.

  Maybe the kind of thing I shouldn’t have been getting used to, but still.

  I tried to call him in the morning only for his phone to ring in the same room, stuffed under his pillow. I looked at it in despair. It wasn’t like him to go out without his phone. What if something had happened? What if the killer had come back, thinking we were getting too close to the truth…?

  I went down to breakfast simply in the hopes that he would be there, but he wasn’t. I wandered aimlessly and headed back upstairs, brushing off concern from Beverley in the restaurant. I tried to look confident and calm, but I don’t think I was anywhere close.

  I paced our room, back and forth, looking out of the windows at a comically small pony and finding nothing to smile about at all.

  And then he came in through the door.

  “Hey,” he said, a little sheepishly.

  I stared at him, and he backed off a pace. He must have seen the murderous look in my eyes.

  “Um, sorry,” he said. “I’ve lost my phone.”

  “Your phone is over there,” I said, slowly and carefully, pointing to the table. “It stayed in all night. Unlike its owner.”

  “I’m back now,” Ram said, as if that wasn’t self-evident.

  I couldn’t believe he could stand there all butter-wouldn’t-melt. Totally innocent, as if he had done nothing wrong at all. As if he didn’t know full bloody well that I would have been waiting for him, worrying about him, all night and all morning.

  “Sometimes I wish you wouldn’t come back at all,” I said.

  The words hung in the air between us as if frozen in ice. I knew some small part of me didn’t really mean them, but at that moment, it was true in its way. If he just left and didn’t come back, I wouldn’t have to deal with this worry. I wouldn’t have to wonder when he was coming back, like some locked-up puppy waiting for its master to return.

  Even if it would have hurt beyond measure to have him out of my life, I was angry enough for that not to count, at least for a little while.

  Ram cleared his throat. He had gone pale, and no longer wore the usual cocky expression that made most people either want to punch him or kiss him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I got drunk, and I -”

  “You got drunk!” I repeated, not caring if other people would hear my raised voice. “There’s
nothing else to the story, is there? It’s always the same – you got drunk. Blew the case? You got drunk! Forgot an appointment? You got drunk! Lost your wallet? You got drunk!”

  “I get it,” Ram said, lifting up his hands, palm outward, in a calming gesture. “There’s no need to shout.”

  “No, you don’t get it!” I said, slamming my closed fist down on the side table. “Because you keep doing it over and over again. I had no idea whether you were still alive, do you realise that? We’re looking for a murderer and you just go missing all night without warning!”

  Ram blanched even paler. “I didn’t think,” he said. “I… I didn’t think about how it would look. I should have left you a note.”

  “You shouldn’t have gone out at all,” I countered. “You should have been an adult and stayed here and worked on the case like you said you were going to. You should have waited for me to get back so we could get dinner and get some sleep. You’re not a teenager anymore.”

  “Plenty of adults go out for a drink,” Ram said dismissively, closing the door behind him with a glance down the corridor and crossing over to pick up his phone.

  “You didn’t go out for a drink,” I told him, snatching up his phone before he could get to it. “You went on a bender and left all your responsibilities behind. Left me, as usual, to pick up the slack. Because you don’t care about anything but getting drunk!”

  “That’s not true,” Ram said, reaching after his phone and then running a hand back through his hair in a sharp, frustrated gesture. “I care about you. I’m sorry I made you worry.”

  “You don’t care about me!” I screamed, throwing his phone across to the other side of the room. It landed with dull thud, hitting the skirting board and spinning back over the floor. “You couldn’t! If you gave a single damn, you wouldn’t do this to me over and over again – leaving me to sit and wait for you to show up, dead or alive!”

  “I do care about you, Will,” he said, quietly. I didn’t want him to be quiet and apologetic. I wanted him to shout and scream and prove that he only cared about himself. I wanted him to make it easy for me.

  “How can you say that to my face?” I asked, not shouting any longer. How could I keep up the energy to yell when he wouldn’t even show any emotion?

  “I care about you more than you care about yourself,” Ram said, stooping to pick up his phone and check the screen.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I snapped.

  Ram sighed, and grabbed his duffel bag from the floor. “I need a change of clothes and some food,” he said. “I’ll go downstairs for lunch, and then get back to investigating. Alright?”

  I stared at him coldly, unable to even muster a response.

  No, it wasn’t alright. None of it was alright.

  I sat down on the bed, facing the wall. He changed in the bathroom, then came back past me without a word. I didn’t look at him or say anything as he left the room, his footsteps receding down the hall to the stairs.

  And as soon as I was sure he was gone, I swept everything off the table and onto the floor. That didn’t help enough, so I emptied my bag upside down, and kicked clothes into the air, and ripped the pillows from the bed and threw them at the TV.

  And stood there panting, gripping onto the back of the chair for strength, feeling my body turn dizzy and weak from the exertion. I hadn’t eaten since lunchtime yesterday. Nearly twenty-four hours.

  Slowly, carefully, I eased myself down to the floor, and started picking things up and putting them back in my bag.

  “What the hell…? Will?”

  I looked up at Ram, standing in the doorway with two packages in his hands, staring around the room with an aghast expression. I had heard the door opening too late to react or tell him not to come in.

  His face softened, and he put whatever he was holding down on the table. He didn’t say a word, but started to gather things from the floor, putting the pillows back onto the bed and examining my laptop for damage.

  “Thanks,” I said, at last, as the last piece of evidence of my moment of madness was put back into its rightful place.

  “I brought us some lunch,” he said, going back to the paper bags and handing me one. I looked inside to find a steaming toasted sandwich in thick bread, filled almost to bursting with hot, stringy cheese and ham.

  My knees almost buckled at the smell of it. I sat down fast, and shoved a bite into my mouth before I could convince myself not to. It tasted so good, that burst of cheese across my tongue and the warm, slightly smoky taste of the grilled bread.

  Ram was watching me carefully until I looked up and met his eyes, and then he pretended to be very interested in his own sandwich. “Nothing like a bit of grease to fight the hangover,” he said. “I got two for myself. I can… We can share the second one, if you like? Half each?”

  I just shrugged. I couldn’t bear to say yes, even though I wanted it.

  Ram opened his paper bag, pulled out a triangle of sandwich, and put it in front of me.

  And these were the moments why it was worth putting up with all of the rest of it.

  “I got the security footage from DCI Fairlight,” I said, once I had eaten enough to stop shaking and remember how to breathe properly. “The night of the murder, plus the whole day before. I asked for the footage of Ray’s visit but he said they don’t keep it that long.”

  “What’s the fucking point of recording it if you’re just going to delete it?” Ram asked.

  “I don’t know,” I sighed. “Good job for us that the police already requested copies of the footage from the last couple of weeks. Otherwise Jude might have deleted that as well."

  “Anyway. I’m going to watch the recordings. I downloaded them last night,” I said.

  “Good plan,” Ram said. “I’ll go through those witness statements.”

  I nodded at him. Not quite forgiven, but I could see that he was trying.

  I turned on my laptop and brought up the footage, waiting for it to load. While the video player buffered, showing black, I saw our reflection clearly in the screen. Me, hunched forward and pale. Ram, behind me, rubbing the skin under one of his eyes while he read.

  I thought about what I would have done if he hadn’t shown up, and supressed a shudder.

  23 – Ram

  I’m the first one to hold my hands up and say I did a shitty thing. I really did. Will’s right.

  So that’s why I have to double down and take this seriously. I’m going to put everything I’ve got into finding Ray Riley, even if it turns out that he doesn’t want to be found.

  The witness statements were bare to begin with, and they don’t tell us anything more than we already knew. I’m getting nowhere. I glance over at Will, sitting with his eyes trained on footage from the front of the Inn running at several times real speed, and sigh.

  There’s nothing more I can do here. I need to think outside the box.

  What’s the first thing you do when you’re looking for someone you can’t find? You ask around.

  He came here to the Inn, but he must have gone out at times as well. He might have walked up and down the high street, gone shopping, had a drink or a meal. Adelaide told us he took nothing with him, so he must have needed to buy things here and there.

  “Hey, Will?” I say.

  “Yeah?” He doesn’t even take his eyes off the screen.

  “I’m going to go out and start asking people on the high street if they recognise his photo. I’m getting nothing here. We might be able to trace his movements a bit better if he bought something or did something unusual.”

  “Good idea,” Will says vaguely. He’s concentrating so closely that it’s impressive. I could never stay watching the screen like that for so long. I’m already bored of reading statements, and at least those are actually different from one another.

  I pat him on the shoulder as I leave. He raises a hand over his shoulder as I pass, his brain and eyes still focused.

  I check the photo of Ray in my po
cket and jump on my bike, heading into the town centre where I can park up and start walking. It feels a bit old-fashioned to carry a photo, but I find people respond to it better than they do an image on a phone screen. It calls to the picture of an investigation that they see on television, draws on nostalgia. It makes them take you seriously.

  I’m three shops down the high street by the time I come to my first pub.

  I shouldn’t have anything to drink. I know I shouldn’t. I have to stay focused and get this done for Will’s sake. I can’t let him down. Especially not so soon after the last time I let him down.

  After talking to the bar staff, and seeing shaking heads from every one of them, I move on.

  I’m almost all the way down the high street and no wiser for it when I take a break, sitting on a bench and taking out my phone. It’s nearly the end of the work day, so I figure I should make the call now if I’m going to do it today at all.

  “DCI Fairlight,” the man answers, clearly accustomed to giving his name no matter which number flashes up. I wonder if he answers that way when his wife calls.

  “This is Julius,” I say.

  “Made some progress, have you?” he asks. I can hear other voices in the background, the low murmuring of a taskforce at their desks.

  “Not exactly,” I say. “Look, that’s part of the problem. I really think we need to talk to Cameron to sort some things out.”

  I’m still not convinced that my instincts are right here. I can’t be sure that anything good is going to come out of trying. But Will wants to keep investigating, and so that’s what we’re going to do.

  Fairlight sighs. “You’re not going to stop asking until I say yes, are you?” he asks.

  “That’s a fair assessment,” I agree.

  “Look, I’m going to allow this only because Detective Inspector Heath vouches for you. And his DCI, too. If you do or say absolutely anything that could put our case in jeopardy, I’m pulling you out of there immediately and I may just charge you with obstruction of justice. Are we clear?”

  I think about it. Could he actually charge us with that, if we’re acting as civilian consultants? I’m not totally sure, but it sounds dubious.