5 Tuesday 11 July
I’m dreaming of my mother.
I hear her laughing. I feel happy, and I’m seeing everything sideways, like I’m lying with my head on the ground, on the warm grass. A bright spring day. Children playing, happy noises. I see pretty shoes, dainty feet, the hem of a summer dress. Bending knees as she crouches down to my level. Sunlight across her face, her smile, all sideways in my view of the park.
Coram’s Fields.
I was too young to give it a name, this golden place she and I used to share. A place for children to be happy in. Even now, it’s still the case that adults can’t enter Coram’s Fields unless they’re accompanying a child.
But I guess it must have been there that she used to take me, when she was OK, before the dark days began. We lived in a flat above a shop, maybe somewhere near Gray’s Inn Road, and I think she used to take me to Bloomsbury, to Coram’s Fields and to Russell Square Gardens: I remember the freshness, the spring warmth, the leaves of the trees, a glowing green roof against the sky. I look up, her face shades me, hovering above me, and I feel loved. But in my dream, her lips turn cold and white, like a marble tomb in a church. I struggle, try to cry out for her but she’s turned to stone. I sit up suddenly in bed, in the dark. I want to call out for Jazz, and I know she’d come, but I tell myself: get through this yourself, Holly. Jazz is your friend, not your crutch.
The previous day replays in my head like a video. Well, I got home from the police station, at least. They didn’t charge me. The humiliation of the fingerprinting and swabbing was all supervised by Rainbow, of course. The female officer who did it clearly thought he was God’s Gift to Policing. I wonder what his sex life is like, I think for the fiftieth time.
I got home and fell into bed, tired, hot, maybe around 8pm. Needing to lie down, to close my eyes, to see nothing, feel nothing. Now I look at the clock: it’s 1.15am, I’ve spent the last five hours sliding round on my mattress, half-waking, squirming about feeling for the cool places in the bed. I move my fingers over my skin. God, how hot am I? Sweaty armpits, sweaty crotch. I feel my thighs could chafe. Turn my hot pillow over. About midnight, sleep came at last, and then my dream, my mother, that happy place. But now sleep, and happiness, have gone for good. I feel tired-beyond-tired, but everything is racing round and round in my mind: I’m running in circles in my head. And the place I keep coming back to is this: I’m their main suspect, they know I’ve already lied to them, they’re assembling all the information now. Rainbow has already made up his mind that I killed Wycherley: now he’s just got to gather enough evidence to justify charging me.
I snap the light on. I’ve got to stop this cycle of negative thoughts. One cure would be action. Krasniqi again? First thing tomorrow, I could go back there, and – what? Have more contact with the cops’ key witness, make myself look even more guilty?
I sit up in bed, restless, like an animal in a cage. What else have I got to go on?
Then I think: Wycherley’s iphone. What calls did he make? Maybe there’s a clue there, something that would tell me more. My imagination runs ahead; before I’ve even got the thing and switched it on, I’m seeing Krasniqi listed among his contacts, a trail of texts showing that Krasniqi arranged Room 412 for him.
I switch it on. It’s not passworded. I look at Messages – nothing. Contacts – nothing. Photos – the photo of me in my bra is still there, but the other one I saw, that young girl – is gone. Krasniqi must have wiped every fucking thing from it – except the one photo which he knew would incriminate me. I frantically open app after app, I look at Facebook, at Twitter, at any bloody thing, my fingers punching the screen. Fuck, fuck. I throw it down, and I wish I could cry again like I did this morning in Martin’s arms. It’s useless; I put the light out again, stare into nothing.
But somehow, I’m not beaten yet. There is really no hope left now, but like a condemned man on his last night alive, in the dark of the prison cell, I go systematically through my brain, looking down every alley, thinking hard about every last little thing that could offer some way out.
I lie there in the blackness. What is it, on the edges of my mind? I’m going back to that booking, and anything that was odd about it, anything out of place that might offer a clue. Start at the beginning. I remember waiting at Brucciani’s, finishing my latte. It was a few minutes to ten, I was just about to leave and walk to the hotel, and I got Wycherley’s text. And yes, that’s the first odd thing: Wycherley texting me because he was half an hour late.
Outcalls are never late. Incalls – they’re late, very occasionally. They might have traffic problems, delays on the bus or the tube. Even that’s rare, because they want to make sure they get their full hour. But outcalls – never, ever have I had a text before telling me to arrive a bit later. So what caused the delay?
Maybe there was a problem with the hotel room which Wycherley had to ask them to sort out – a bad smell, a leak, an uncomfortable bed. No. I can’t imagine that kind of thing making any punter want to delay for half an hour: blokes don’t even notice stuff like that. What problem could there be with Room 412? It’s horrible to do, I don’t want those pictures in my head, but I recall the room, in as much detail as I can. Tidy, a totally standard room – until it was sprayed with blood. In my mind I see red-on-white, red-on-white. I start to feel the familiar sick feeling, but suddenly, a different picture appears in my brain. Something that I ignored at the time. Not in the room, but just outside it. When I went up to Room 412 – yes, and they were still there when I ran away! – I saw odd things in the corridor. Leaning against the corridor wall were large boards, their surfaces covered with gray paper.
I picture the boards in my head. The sort of things that builders use? I think of Aleksander, a half-regular who’s a builder, he sees me when he’s got lots of cash in hand. Well he’s never talked to me about building materials, his bedroom chat is a tad better than that, but he did once mention that he was going on from my place to a depot, he’d ordered stuff online, then it was ready for him to pick up at a set time, a really good place he said. So, I get my ipad and google ReadyBuild, the name that I think he said. Here’s their website. Yes it seems logically laid out, even to a dimbo like me. I browse the website menus, and after five minutes I see a picture, and a word. Plasterboard.
Yes. I do a google image search for ‘plasterboard’. That’s definitely what I saw. I wiki ‘plasterboard’: ‘forms the body of an interior wall, provides a surface for plaster’. Anything to do with Wycherley being late? An alteration, a repair, to Room 412? God this seems pointless.
So tired. My head feels like it’s stuffed with cotton wool. But through the fuzz I see something vague, some connection, but I can’t quite grasp it. I cover my eyes with my hands and try to clear my brain. I try to picture the room minus the blood, but then I hear in my head the sounds of what happened. That awful banging, where some mate of Krasniqi’s, probably, smashed Wycherley’s head down on the desk, again and again. It’s loud in my ears.
“Why the fuck does no one in this hotel hear this?”
And the answer comes: there was no-one to hear it.
No-one on that floor, anyway, or at least that wing of that floor. Replacing plasterboards, working on interior walls – that’s not a running repair to a room being used by a guest: it’s major work. Probably several rooms closed off for repairs. The rooms around Room 412 were deserted.
And I’m thinking it through now. Yes: because Krasniqi works at the hotel, he knew that Room 412 – which, I guess, had not yet been refurbed, perhaps was next on the workmen’s list – would be free. And he told Wycherley that he can use it for sex. Officially, the room was not in use at all: Wycherley’s ‘room booking’ will not be on their system: Krasniqi pockets all the money that Wycherley pays for the room. Of course. And that’s why workmen felt that they could leave materials in the corridor – no guests would be coming that way.
But in itself, that fact tells me nothing. And the cops will know it already.
I remember the Lego at the nursery. Sometimes I’d arrange the pieces on the table in front of me, look at their shapes, look at them all together, before deciding what I could make with them. Playing through in my mind the different ways they would fit together.
Suddenly the Lego clicks firmly. If the room was fixed up by Krasniqi – and that part of the hotel was being refurbed – then, Wycherley was not staying overnight in that room. That’s why the room was so tidy, without any of his possessions or clothes lying around. He was not staying at the Excel hotel at all: he just travelled there for the time of the booking, exactly as I did, to use that room for one thing only: meeting me.
And if that’s true, then the half-hour change to the booking time was not caused by a delay with the room at all. The half-hour delay was caused by a problem with Wycherley’s journey to the hotel.
I picture Wycherley travelling, running late. Maybe he texted me as soon as he could… if he was on the tube, the moment he came up from the Underground, and got signal on his phone? – before he even arrived at the hotel? Yes, that makes sense.
2.30am. I get up, I make a coffee, sit up in bed, pull the sheet up round me, drink by the light of the bedside lamp.
My Lego pieces. OK, let’s say Wycherley travelled to Bloomsbury that evening. He was delayed. He maybe travelled on the tube. Any other pieces? I got the phone off Krasniqi, but the phone has told me nothing.
I got the cash off Krasniqi.
I pick up the freezer bag holding the roll of notes. Like the phone, I’ve not looked at it since I got it. I wonder, idly, if the money’s all there. My prints are on it anyway, so I might as well count it again, just in case Krasniqi kept any of it. I roll the elastic band off it. Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty… it’s all there. And then, like it’s magic, like a rabbit from a hat, there’s something else in the roll of notes. It pops up, a tiny gray-white square between my fingers as I riffle through the bills. Stuck between the last two £20s. A scrappy little till receipt. Maybe it’s from the bank machine. No. It’s tiny, and the poorest quality paper. The print is too faint to read. Oh no, maybe it says an amount? – £1.80, perhaps? And maybe a name – Manzoor. Probably a newsagent or grocer. So was it Krasniqi’s, buying a sandwich before his shift at the hotel? No, I don’t think he’s touched these notes. He was too careful to keep his prints off them. So the receipt was Wycherley’s.
I fall asleep, and like it happens sometimes, I’m back into my dream, the same dream. My mother. But this time I don’t see her face, and I’m an adult, everything is like it is in real life, but I’ve been to the Social Services, I’ve made enquiries, I’ve traced her after all these years, I’m about to meet her. I’ve gone to the address they gave me, somewhere like Hampstead, big, quiet houses set well back amongst hedges and trees. It’s a beautiful, fresh early summer day, leaves and flowers are bursting out everywhere. The green, like Coram’s Fields, is vivid, totally alive, and the sky is a blue dome, but instead of joy, I feel worry, butterflies in my tummy, almost a feeling of fear. I’m about to knock on the door and disturb the peace of someone who’s not seen me for twenty-two years. I’m going to see her face. My mother’s face. The door opens and it’s an Asian woman: the face of Geeta Pawan. Her brown eyes look deep into mine.
She says “I’m Mrs Manzoor.”
I look at the clock again, it’s 3.30am. And then I realise, Aftab, my mate from Walthamstow who drives me sometimes, will just be getting home from his shift. He works for Transport for London, he’s an engineer on the Underground. I pick up my phone, and he answers immediately. And yes, he can help.
“Yeah, you’re right. There was some urgent repair work on the evening of 3 July, from about 8.30pm, at Holborn tube station. It affected both the Central and the Piccadilly lines, coming into the station from the west. Maybe twenty minutes to half an hour’s delay, on either line.”
I can’t thank Aftab enough. It’s still hopeless, but there’s no way I can sleep, and worrying at the problem, like a dog with a bone, is preferable to letting my mind wander, to thoughts of gloom, doom, prison, my life going down the fucking toilet. Let’s go through it in my head again. Wycherley’s delay might have been due to the problem Aftab described, which means he’d be coming from the west. Brilliant. I’ve narrowed my search to somewhere/anywhere, most likely perhaps West London, and it could be a house, a flat, a hotel. Which might be near a shop, which might be called Manzoor. Satellite tracking this is not.
4am. The air in my room is still hot, and there’s no breeze or coolness from the open window, even though it must be the coldest part of the night: the sky’s a bit lighter outside, dawn is maybe only an hour or so away. Shall I try to sleep again? I’ve got only one john tomorrow, and that’s at 3pm, so I could have a big lie-in. I’ll sleep when sleep happens to me: right now, this thing about Wycherley’s journey keeps twirling in my brain. OK. Let’s start at the other end. Let’s picture Wycherley, think about him. I can see him, he’s sitting there on the bed, blue eyes shining but serious, as I walk into Room 412. “Sorry about the half-hour rescheduling.” What was that accent? A slight West Country burr?
I realise that I know nothing about Wycherley: no clues about his life, his personality, anything. That’s what rang those alarm bells for me when I met him. Like he was thinking through what he was doing, defences up, every single moment. Giving nothing away about himself. That’s why the sex was like it was. Of course you get punters who are cagey, nervous, over-sensitive – but there was something – controlled, with him. Strange.
Well, whatever made him so guarded, it worked. I’m totally in the dark. There’s really only one thing I know for sure about Wycherley – he was a punter. Even if he was, as I suspect, a first-timer. So, let’s go with that really basic fact – a punter: is there anything in that to help me? I think about my other johns, my regulars; how they act, how their minds work. I have one, Robert, he visits me regular as clockwork, every three months. He’s a rep for some trade union, he lives and works in the West Country, but he comes to London four times a year, for the national union meetings, and that’s when – well away from his wife, kids, and work colleagues – he visits me. He’s a sensible guy, careful not to be naughty where anyone might know him. And he told me that the union can’t pay central London hotel rates as expenses, so he drives in, stays in the suburbs at a fraction of central London rates, and then gets the tube into the centre. What if Wycherley did the same kind of thing?
I look at the google map of the major roads leading into London from the west. Just off the main road is Alperton tube station, and nearby are suburban streets, a quiet place to leave a car. I look at every StreetView of Alperton on google. Photos of shops, houses, pavements, bits of brightly coloured litter. Slate-gray skies, flat dull lighting, every one of these photos seems to be taken on a crappy mobile phone late afternoon in November. Who uploads all this useless rubbish? I’m wading through shit, visual shit. Screen after screen of shit. And then, a little run-down newsagent’s appears on the screen. ‘Manzoor Super Stores.’
Sleep at last, sleep without dreams. I wake at 12, saunter down in the hot sunshine to Stroud Green Road, lunch at my usual café, stroll in the park, back home, snack, shower, dress. Ready. Incall: showtime. The john is new, he’s really nice – aged forty maybe, black. Polite, clean, slim – but my mind is not there. I’m on a journey. What can Manzoor Super Stores tell me? Although I like him, the new punter isn’t the chatty type, he doesn’t hang about, he’s gone. Quick shower, pull some jeans and a t-shirt on and here I go.
6pm. Alperton tube station is just typical suburban London, bland to the point of forgetting it even as you’re looking at it. In the photos, it looked cold, tired, unloved and gray. Now, it looks hot, tired, unloved and gray. Faceless commuter crowds hurrying out of the station, desperate to get home after long working days of sweat, stress and boredom: I’m jostled as I look around, get my bearings. Manzoor Super Stores is five doors away from the station. I walk i
n, and there’s a very polite young Asian man behind the till, serving a customer, an old duffer buying a Lottery ticket. There’s some slow confused kerfuffle over the change, it seems to take for ever. At last the young man turns to me. I try a demure, ditzy manner, and my best effort at a middle-class accent.
“I’m wondering if there is any temporary accommodation in the area? Do you know of a hotel or a guest house nearby, as close as possible?”
“I’m very sorry, I don’t know, I’m afraid. Do you need somewhere for tonight? You can use my phone if you like, search on the Internet? Or there is a Premier Inn about two miles away, down near the A40, if you have a car.”
“Thanks, no. Thank you anyway. I was looking for somewhere very close to here.”
He looks hard at me. “Is it just for tonight? Or, were you looking for accommodation more long term?” Despite my Miss Ditzy act – or maybe because of it – he’s guessed my job. What are his beliefs, his values, his scruples?
He repeats. “Not accommodation for tonight, but later this week? – are you looking for that?”
“I could be, yes.”
“Well, we do have a flat. Above the shop. It’s taken right now, a gentleman paid for it a few days ago, he took it for ten days. After tomorrow, it will be free.”
“Could I see it?”
“Well – he’s got his things in there. But he’s not in the room right now. In fact, we’ve not seen him at all for a few days. So yes – of course. I have a key. The steps are outside, so you would have your own way in and out. No need to go through the shop.”
I can tell he’s thinking of the visitors I might get. He’s kind, but mainly he wants the money. I look him in the eyes and I can see: he’d like a little share of my takings. He’s already considering how he’ll propose a deal to me, the embarrassment, the fumbling towards the awkward, naked truth.
We go up the steps, like a little fire escape, to the flat door. He tinkers with a key. “Sorry, wrong key. These Yales, all alike. Ah, here we are.”
It’s frowsy, stale-smelling. Thin curtains don’t quite reach the sill. Single bed in one corner, no headboard. Beige carpet, fraying. MDF bedside cabinet and wardrobe. There are a few A4 sheets of paper on the bedside cabinet. I casually open the wardrobe, like a vague bimbo who might forget another person’s privacy, that someone lives here already. There’s a few mismatched hangers, holding a jacket and a pair of trousers. Nothing else.
“Where’s the bathroom? Is it through that door?”
“I’m sorry, that’s just a toilet and washbasin in there. There’s a separate room with a bath – it’s back down the stairs that we came up. Not ideal, I know.”
“Look, I’m afraid I’m really desperate. May I use the toilet?”
“No problem – feel free.”
I go through the door. “Excuse me, it doesn’t seem to lock. In fact, I can’t quite get the door shut.”
“It’s the carpet, it’s frayed a bit there, the door sticks on it. I’ll pull it shut.” And then, of course, he feels embarrassed. “Actually, I’m just going to pop back down and check the shop. I may have a customer. I’ll be back in one minute.”
I have one minute. He’s careful, this young man; he’ll notice if those papers on the bedside cabinet are taken. I leaf through them frantically. A few sheets of blank paper. Underneath the papers, a couple of used tube tickets; so he had no Oyster card. If this was Wycherley’s room, he was no Londoner. Well, I’d guessed that already. So I’ve come all this way for nothing at all. The cabinet doesn’t have drawers: just one shelf, totally empty.
Think, think.
I open the wardrobe again. Nothing in the jacket pockets, nothing. The trousers are actually a pair of jeans. I pull something out of one pocket of the jeans – ugh, a used hanky. The other pocket’s empty. But as I feel through that last pocket, knowing it’s the end of the track, I register a tiny noise that happened a few seconds before, when I pulled the hanky out. Like something else might have fallen out the pocket. I look in the bottom of the wardrobe. And there, in the dust, a glint of gold. At this moment, it’s the most welcome sight in the whole world that I could possibly see.
A SIM card.
It’s in my pocket as I hear footsteps on the stairs.