Blood Evidence Page 7

  Will says nothing, and when I look up at him, he just shrugs and shakes his head as if I didn’t catch him doing something completely shady.

  “I’m waiting for a call from…” I start, but then cut myself off to look at my phone buzzing on the counter in front of me.

  “Better get it, then,” Will prompts helpfully.

  I shoot him daggers, then swipe the phone up to my ear. “Morning, Alex.”

  “I’ve had a look at the files from this missing person case. I had to pretend I thought it was potentially linked to an ongoing murder investigation, so thanks for making me lie to my colleagues,” he says, by way of hello.

  “Fine, thanks. And how are you?” I reply.

  Alex breezes right on past. “They’ve got CCTV of the guy in a hotel in Kent – the Highcastle Inn. Which you know about already.”

  “Have you seen the footage yourself? Does it look like him?”

  “It’s definitely him,” Alex confirms. “You’re missing my tone. I know that you already knew about the Inn. How did I know that?”

  “Because when you asked to see the files, they told you that someone was murdered there this weekend and they arrested one Julius Rakktersen,” I say. “I didn’t miss your tone, but I also didn’t think it was worth wasting time on something that fucking obvious.”

  “Alright, alright. The report says that Riley affirmed he was going to be staying at the Inn for the next week. When the Sergeant went to follow up a few days later, however, the guy was gone. Looks like he took all of his stuff and left without checking out. Probably spooked by being questioned.”

  “Because that’s normal,” I mutter. I give Will a significant raised eyebrow in response to his questioning look. Seems like there might be more to this disappearance after all.

  “That’s all they have. They didn’t record a formal interview or anything like that – according to them, Riley was acting normally and they had no reason to suspect coercion, drug use, mental imbalance, or so on. They let it go,” Alex says. I hear the dull thump of a folder being closed. “Look, tell me about this murder case.”

  “It’s nothing,” I say, sighing. We might have our work cut out here. “We just happened to be in the right place at the wrong time. We were supposed to be questioning the staff about Riley, but before we could make any significant headway, this body turns up.”

  “Stabbed, they said?”

  “Yep. Will and I were practically first on the scene. Heard one of the barmaids screaming after she opened up for the morning.”

  “That’s rough,” Alex says, actually sounding genuinely sympathetic. “Crazy that this would happen in such a small hotel, right at the time that you were staying there.”

  “Hell of a way to stop us asking questions,” I laugh. “Overkill, you might say.”

  Alex sucks in a breath. “Too soon,” he cautions. “You met the killer, though?”

  “The suspect, anyway. Although they said he’d given a full confession.”

  “Stayed out all night with her getting drunk and then killed her by accident, according to the guy I spoke to. He blacked out and can’t even remember doing it, but he woke up with blood on his hands.”

  Blood on his hands?

  I’ve been drunk. I’ve probably even been that drunk, if I’m honest. In fact, I might be one of the world’s foremost experts on being blackout drunk who is still coherent enough to lecture on the subject. But something about that story sticks in my head. He gets so drunk he can’t even wash blood off his hands, but he’s still stable and sober enough to stab someone to death?

  “Something about this isn’t right,” I say, thinking out loud more than anything else. It’s slowly starting to creep up on me, like a chill going up my neck, and I don’t think I can ignore it.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Well, we saw Cameron that evening when we went up to our room. He was getting room service. A bottle of champagne.”

  “And?”

  “Two glasses. Don’t you think that’s weird? A bottle of champagne with two glasses, in his room – and then apparently he went downstairs, met the girl, and decided to murder her?”

  “Well,” Alex says, clearing his throat. “To be honest with you, I’ve always found murderers to be a bit weird.”

  “There’s something… I don’t know,” I rub my forehead. What is it that doesn’t feel right? I switch the phone onto speaker. “Will, get over here. Alex, repeat that again about what he said in custody.”

  Alex’s voice comes louder over the speakers as I set the phone down on the counter and Will pads over.

  “Cameron Winter got drunk with the victim and stayed up all night, even after they’d closed the bar. I guess he avoided the security guard. Then he got so drunk he killed her by accident, blacked out, and woke up with a hole in his memory and blood all over his hands.”

  “No memory of it, and yet he says it was an accident,” I muse out loud.

  “Probably just trying to put a better spin on it,” Alex suggests. “Make himself less guilty. It will be a murder charge anyway, I should think.”

  “What about the CCTV footage?” I ask. “It captured Riley, so surely it captured Cameron?”

  “It only covers the entrance and the outdoor patio area, apparently,” Alex says. He’s hesitant as he talks; I figure he must be reading through his notes made while talking to the unit in Sevenoaks.

  “Shit,” I mutter. “That’s fairly useless.”

  “They were only expecting to need it in the case of break-ins.”

  “What about his clothes?” Will speaks up for the first time.

  “What was that?” Alex asks.

  “What about his clothes?” Will repeats. “You said he woke with blood on his hands. We saw him downstairs and he looked clean. So, did they find bloodstained clothes in his room?”

  Alex pauses, and I can hear the rustling of paper on his end of the line.

  “… No,” he says, at length. “No bloodstained clothes. Apparently, the sheets were bloody where his hands had been resting, but his clothes were clean.”

  “Doesn’t that strike you as odd?” Will asks.

  We all consider it in silence for a moment.

  “I’ll give them a call back and mention it,” Alex says. “I can’t do much more than that. It’s not my case.”

  “Thanks, Alex,” I say. “And for the information, too.”

  “I’m going to call in two favours for this,” he says. “And Julius?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t hide the fact that you’ve been arrested from me in the future. It’s embarrassing.”

  He hangs up, and the line goes dead.

  Will and I stand in the kitchen, thinking it over quietly.

  But there’s one thing that’s clear in my mind now. I don’t know how I didn’t see it before. But now that I do, I feel it like a lead weight in my gut as much as I understand it in the facts.

  “Cameron Winters is innocent,” I say out loud. “He made a false confession. And I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I think we have to figure out why.”

  Twelve – Will

  “We can’t know that,” I said. I didn’t like the manic, almost glowing look in his eyes. It was the kind of look that usually preceded the excuse for ‘fun’ nights out. Those usually ended in Ram being the kind of blackout drunk that I was just now learning could end in accidental murder.

  “I’m one hundred per cent sure,” Ram insisted. “We have to take another look at this. He’s either protecting someone, or he’s been framed.”

  “If he’s being framed, why would he confess?” I asked. “And if he’s protecting someone, then maybe he has good reason. We’re not actually the police, you know. We don’t have to uphold the truth at all costs. Especially if the truth isn’t justice.”

  Ram gave me an odd look. “You know,” he started. His voice was strangely strangled, and he cleared his throat before continuing. “For usually such a black-and-white
kind of guy, you do come out with fucking poetry at times.”

  I flushed, an unfamiliar giddy feeling. Praise from Ram? Calling me a poet, no less? This was different to his normal joking-around kind of compliments, and it lit me up from my toes to the crown of my head.

  “We should leave things how they are,” I said, reaching for a cereal box and putting it down in front of Ram.

  He took the box with a grunt, and gathered two bowls from the cupboard with the grating sound of porcelain sliding against porcelain.

  “I think it’s worth another look,” he said. “What if he’s been coerced, threatened into confessing? If it’s not him, and he’s not protecting someone, then he needs our help.”

  I sighed. He had a point. I just didn’t like the way he had managed to avoid and ignore mine.

  Or the way he was pouring cereal into a second bowl, just as overloaded as the first. It didn’t take a detective to guess that he didn’t intend to eat them both himself.

  “You might be right,” he said, stopping and putting a hand on my shoulder. It made me look up and meet his eyes. He seemed sincere enough. “And if you are, then we back off. We let things play out. But if Cameron needs letting off the hook, then we’ll do that.”

  “And who looks for Ray Riley in the meantime?”

  “We do,” Ram said. He opened the fridge and hunted for a carton of almond milk, already half-empty. “We don’t have any leads right now, and this will give us some time to consider our next move. We’ve worked two cases at once before, we can do it again.”

  “Two cases of cheating spouses,” I pointed out. “Not a murder and a missing person at the same time. I just don’t want us to let Riley drop. He’s our paid job, remember?”

  “Relax, Will baby,” Ram said with one of his unignorable grins, pouring milk into the bowls with a splash. “I promise, we’ll get back to Riley as soon as we can think of a good next step. Our questions are going to be directed at the same people either way, right? We need to talk to the owners of the Highcastle Inn. So, I say we go back there.”

  I sighed as he pushed one of the bowls into my hand and gestured towards the coffee table.

  “Fine,” I said, trailing over to sit as I was told. “But you’ve failed to consider one very important thing.”

  “Huh?”

  “Spoons,” I said wearily, placing my bowl on the coffee table.

  Ram only laughed, and reached into our cutlery drawer with a clanging that seemed to rattle around inside my head long after it was over.

  For the rest of that morning, I sat and tried to write. The book was coming along, but I was tired. So tired. And the feeling of a full belly, at Ram’s insistence, didn’t help.

  I wasn’t sure exactly when I fell asleep. Maybe it was only half an hour or so after breakfast. Ram had retreated to his room to find us new accommodation and do whatever it was Ram did when he was in his room on his own. I shuddered to think.

  But I slept, my hands still resting on the keyboard. It was pure luck that Ram didn’t come in and see what was on my screen. Thank god. It was a particularly filthy moment. B.J. Wong’s readers seemed to live for them.

  Maybe it was the writing that made the dream come. Lying there with my hands quite literally on my work, it must have infiltrated my subconscious more than usual.

  With my eyes close, it was him I saw. Not Ram – but the character I’d based on him.

  I dreamed of him offering me his hand and helping me across stepping-stones in a river – the last scene I had been writing. In the middle of the water, balanced precariously, he stopped and turned to me. He called me a poet and grasped the back of my head, and then everything was mixed up between Ram and not-Ram and I felt like I might fall into the river…

  Which was when I woke up, jerking awake with such a start that I managed to type nonsense letters onto the open document.

  I closed my laptop, sighing and rubbing my eyes with my hand. Everything was getting on top of me, clearly. This book was starting to mess with my head. Maybe this was the pressure to perform brought on by the fact that my work was actually somehow popular.

  I was going to have to take a break from it all, just for a short while. Focus on investigating. Get my head clear again. Then I could go back to it once I’d had enough distance to remember what was real – and what was only fiction.

  “Will, baby!” Ram burst triumphantly out of his room, making me jump and almost drop the laptop onto the floor. “We’re going to Kent!”

  “I already knew that,” I said crossly, trying to get my heartrate back down to something resembling normality. “I take it you found a new place to stay.”

  “A place, yes. Not so much with the new. The Highcastle Inn is open for business once more. They even honoured our original booking so we don’t have to pay any extra.”

  “Generous of them,” I muttered, getting to my feet. An illogical urge told me it would be easier to hide how startled I had been by jumping into action. “I’ll go re-pack.”

  Working my way through my mental packing list was something else to focus on. Something that wouldn’t, couldn’t possibly, mess with my head. Socks, underwear. Trousers, shirts, and jumpers. Shoes inside a carrier bag and belts. A light coat. Something to read, just in case we ever got the chance. Shower gel, shampoo, comb. Razor, toothbrush, toothpaste. An empty bag for dirty laundry. Everything folded and rolled to save space.

  I glanced out through my door to the coffee table, and the laptop still sitting there. It would help with the investigation if I took it. But if I took it, maybe I would get tempted to work on the book.

  The need to solve both of our cases won over, and I packed it. I folded up the power cable and tucked it in alongside my phone charger. Was I forgetting anything…?

  Oh, yes. Earplugs. I wasn’t exactly used to the sound of someone snoring beside me, even if it wasn’t as loud and grating as it perhaps could have been.

  “Ready?” Ram asked, seeing me exit my room with my bag in one hand.

  “Ready,” I confirmed.

  He was sitting by the door, his own bag resting on the doormat. There was something else in his hand, too. Something that made my stomach instantly churn.

  “Fancy going on a road trip?” he asked, holding up his motorcycle helmet. “It’ll be easier than having to get taxis all the time.”

  I did not want to get on that bike. Not now, not ever. Ram rode like a maniac, and for him, that was fine. He might have passed for a gang member in his leather jacket, boots, and shiny black-and-silver machine polished to within an inch of its life.

  But for me? Hell, no.

  “You’re not scared, are you?” Ram teased, throwing the spare helmet towards me.

  “No,” I heard myself say. “Lead on.”

  Why the hell did I have to go and say something like that?

  The journey to the Highcastle Inn was torture. Over an hour of thrumming along bumpy roads, sometimes slow in traffic, sometimes so fast that my knuckles turned white where I held on to Ram’s jacket. All the while the motorbike throbbed and growled beneath my legs, and Ram’s warm back pressed invitingly against my chest. For a moment there, I could almost drift away and enjoy it.

  For a moment there, I had to shut my eyes and think about my impending bloody death on the road. Or anything. Anything to keep my mind off how good he felt, and stop my body from reacting accordingly.

  13 – Ram

  Arriving back at the Highcastle Inn is like coming home. Literally in some ways – to be honest, the building is not unlike my parents’ aging country pile, to which they retreated after deciding city life was no longer for them.

  And in some ways, philosophically. The events of our last stay are already etched so indelibly onto my brain from the trauma of it all that I am probably going to be able to describe aspects of the wallpaper accurately thirty years from now. Something interesting for my future therapist to digest, anyway.

  My bike comes to a pleasing stop in the small parkin
g area, causing small gravel stones to skitter away from us in all directions. One of them pings up and ricochets off a silver Mercedes that has already taken up at least two of the available spaces with a rather impressive diagonal parking job.

  I smirk in satisfaction.

  Will finally relaxes the death grip he has claimed on my jacket for the entire ride, and starts flexing his sore hands. No wonder. I can still feel him shaking against me. Does he still really trust me that little that he thinks I’m going to throw him down on a motorway to his death?

  We pull off our helmets. Poor Will has a particularly bad case of helmet hair. I reach over and ruffle it up on his head, doing him a favour.

  He gives me an odd look and skitters away from my touch.

  Well, at least I sorted out the worst of it.

  Geez, at some point I’ve got to convince Will to fucking lighten up. I don’t know what it is with him. It’s like ever since San Francisco –

  Well. And there it is. Of course I know what it is with him.

  The same guilt that drives me to the bottle has him starving himself and avoiding any kind of human contact. Even from me. Which hurts, but I guess it is of my own devising.

  But if there’s a way to break him out of this, I swear I’m going to find it.

  We head over towards the now-familiar entrance. This time we are not confused by the lack of greeting as we enter, but simply head on deeper into the Inn until we come upon Richard Rake, the owner, doddering around with shaking hands as he shuffles the blooms in a flower display.

  He looks up at our approach, and a shadow passes over his face. Remembering the last time he saw us, no doubt. I don’t blame him.

  “You gents are back to check in, aren’t you?” he says, casting around himself for the check-in book.

  “That’s right,” I say. “I was so pleased you opened up again so quickly.”

  Richard mumbles something under his breath, something that may have been words or perhaps just a noise. Will steps back and tugs on a corner of the check-in book stashed exactly where it was last time, and Richard hums in thanks.