Emilia comes to the end of the story and she collapses backwards in the chair, exhausted, the emotional toll of the truth grinding her down. She feels as though there is nothing left of her, nothing more than dust and bone.
After watching the video, Wild and Brennan informed her of her entitlement to a legal representative. She peers at him sideways now, her mind flashing back to all the interviews she had conducted where the suspect shook their head defiantly, believing that refusing a lawyer would make them look innocent. But it doesn’t make you look innocent. It simply makes you look foolish. He must be in his fifties, his eyes weary as he looks down at his notebook, his pen poised. They spoke briefly, just for a few minutes before coming back into the room together, and he advised her to say nothing. She told him that she would be telling them everything. He simply shook his head, a disappointed sigh escaping his lips. ‘I’ve given you my advice,’ he muttered.
She told them everything about what happened, and the man and woman, describing them as much as she could without having seen their faces. Everything except approaching Isabella Santos. All that would do was show that she had considered telling them earlier, and that Isabella had refused. Is she in a room down the corridor? Maybe she’s being interviewed directly next door, just on the other side of this wall. Is she answering any of their questions? Or is she staying silent, repeating no comment like a record, the needle sticking? Every time Emilia says something, her lawyer sighs, as if it’s disappointing him all over again that she is choosing to speak.
‘Emilia,’ Wild says, tucking one ankle behind the other, her posture still perfect after almost an hour of sitting on a cold plastic chair. ‘Did you have any contact with the man and woman you’ve described after they left you on Wheelhouse Avenue?’
The room seems to shrink, the walls inching inwards. Do they know about Harris Keaton? Did the man and the woman record the phone calls? If they did that might be a good thing for her – it would show that she was threatened; it might help prove that they were being forced to follow the rules.
She rubs her eyes with the back of her hand, the skin sore. With a sigh, she nods.
‘Yes,’ she mutters.
‘How did they contact you?’ Brennan asks, his shoulders curving forwards, his forearms extending to the centre of the table.
‘They called me from a blocked number. The voice was disguised. Distorted.’
‘And what did they want?’
Emilia swallows. ‘They wanted me to help them,’ she whispers.
‘Help them do what?’ Brennan asks.
‘H-help … h-help them abduct their next victim.’
Brennan and Wild exchange quick glances with each other, Wild’s face still neutral, the image of professionalism. But Brennan’s cheeks are flushed, his gaze unfocused, as if he hadn’t expected that admission to leave Emilia’s lips.
‘Who was the victim?’ Wild presses.
Once again, faces appear in front of Emilia, each of them a swift, unexpected blow. Harris. His two children: George and Maisie. Her face crumples. She collapses her head into her hands, her shoulders shaking as she is consumed by sobs, coming from deep inside her.
‘I know this isn’t easy for you,’ Brennan says – good cop to Wild’s bad. ‘But we need you to calm down and answer our questions. Who did they want you to help them abduct?’
Emilia’s chest aches as she tries to catch her breath, willing his name to form in her mouth.
‘Was it Harris Keaton?’ Wild says, her voice calm.
Emilia’s breathing hitches, her cheeks flushed with emotion. ‘Was it him?’ she whispers. ‘Was it him inside the Room this morning?’
Her eyes dart from Brennan to Wild and back again as she implores them silently for the answer.
‘Yes,’ Wild says bluntly. ‘It was him.’
Emilia lets out a broken wail. ‘I tried. I tried to stop it! Who was the woman?’
‘Her name was Lucy Platt. She worked at the same firm as Harris Keaton – there were allegations of assault.’
Another two people dead. And she could have stopped it. She could have saved them.
‘Why didn’t you call the police straightaway?’ Wild says, leaning forward, her elbows pressing into the table.
‘I told you. They threatened me – they told us that they would –’
‘They said that they would hurt your families. But that’s the consequence you risked when you came to us today, identifying the location. So why didn’t you do it earlier, when it could have saved Harris Keaton’s life?’
‘I really wish I had. But until last night I was too scared. I just couldn’t do it. You don’t understand what these people are like. I was terrified of them. They’ll do anything to get their own way –’
‘And you agreed to help them.’
Emilia clears her throat. ‘I didn’t help them,’ she says firmly, wiping her tears away roughly with the knuckle of her index finger.
Wild stares at Emilia for a moment, then runs her finger over the trackpad and the frozen video appears once again, the image still there: Ryan’s body on the floor, Emilia’s hand still raised, the gun turning upwards from the recoil.
She minimizes the window, navigating to a nameless folder containing several coded files. ‘Since Harris Keaton was found early this morning, officers went to retrieve CCTV to show his last movements.’ Clicking on the first one, she returns her gaze to Emilia’s face, one eyebrow arched. ‘Who is that?’ She jabs her finger at the screen, her scarlet red nails bright against the black and white of the CCTV image.
It’s the bar – the Dandy Fox. But it wouldn’t have been difficult to track down where he was – everyone from Laughton and Kemp knew he was there. The timestamp on the top right-hand corner indicates that the image was captured at 8:23 p.m.
‘What were you doing there?’
Emilia tears her eyes away from the image. ‘They asked me to go there.’
‘What did they want you to do?’
Wild shifts slightly in her seat, inching closer towards the table, her stare fixed and unblinking. Emilia sniffs, her eyes blurring, as if her mind is trying to block out the question, block out everything, even the memory of him, their brief encounter erased forever. But it isn’t working. He is there, his face as clear as theirs across the table.
‘Before they released me from the Room, they told me that they would call on me. That survivors of the Room were expected to help.’
Wild and Brennan glance across at each other again, fleetingly, a small nod passing between them. Either they are noting a question to ask the others, or somebody has already admitted to something.
They look back at Emilia, and Wild nods at her to continue.
The explanation spills out of Emilia, one word chasing another, faster and faster as she tries to get it over with. But as she finishes all she can think is that she actually did it: she followed their instructions, like a kicked dog scared of its master, until the final step. How could she do that? If she hadn’t seen the photograph of his children, would Harris Keaton have ended up drugged on her living room floor?
Her eyes blur again, her brain taking control: don’t think about it. Block it out.
‘Now, here you are approaching Mr Keaton and you stand outside chatting with him for approximately fifteen minutes. Just under.’
‘Yes.’
‘What did you talk about?’ Brennan asks.
‘I asked him for a lighter.’
‘Are you a regular smoker?’
Emilia drops her chin, staring down at her hands which are wringing together in her lap, her thumb scratching at a piece of loose skin on her index finger. ‘No. On the phone they told me he was a smoker. So I … I bought a packet of cigarettes from the shop next to the station. It’s an easy way to approach someone.’
‘So you had given it some thought? How you would approach him?’
‘Yes.’ She pulls at the loose skin and it tears away, stinging sharply. She winces. ‘I’d thought about it. I had to.’
Wild nods and plays the video. They watch in silence for a few moments: Emilia and Harris close together, their heads lowered. Then Emilia begins to back away, eventually turning and walking quickly towards the bar, disappearing inside.
‘See,’ Emilia says. ‘This is where I went inside to try to get away. I realized that I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t. I told him that I needed to quickly go to the toilet before we headed back to mine.’
‘Why the sudden change of heart?’ Brennan asks. ‘You had gone so far in approaching him.’
‘I saw a picture on his phone – a picture of his children. And when I saw their faces, I just … I knew that I couldn’t. I couldn’t be directly responsible for him being taken to that place.’
Wild sits back in her chair, her upright composure being replaced with a new body language, arms crossed, chin jutting forward. ‘This is where it gets interesting, Emilia … There’s no more footage of you at this bar. You disappear inside, and then – nothing.’
‘I rushed to the toilets, then I went out of the fire doors at the back.’
Wild pauses, scrutinizing Emilia’s expression, her smooth skin crinkling with concentration. Tearing her eyes away, she turns to the laptop and presses play once more.
‘If you could watch Mr Keaton please, Emilia,’ she says.
Emilia nods, forcing her tired eyes to concentrate, to focus on the small figure of the man on the screen. He stands in the same spot for some time, occasionally glancing at his watch. But then he moves closer to the door, coming to a stop just outside. He peers through the arched window, past the security guard partially blocking his view.
Suddenly he moves, pushing through the doors and into the bar.
‘He followed you in,’ Wild says. ‘Presumably to find out where you’d gone.’
‘I didn’t see him. When I came out of the toilets, I didn’t look to see if he was still there.’
‘And this is where things take a turn. You see, just like you, Mr Keaton enters that bar and doesn’t come back out.’
Emilia’s muscles turn rigid. ‘What do you mean?’
‘He goes inside and then he does not come out.’
‘What about inside? Surely there’s footage of him inside?’
‘When we retrieved this CCTV from the bar we asked if there was footage of the back exit to check if he left that way. There isn’t a camera out there. The only camera they have covers the bar itself,’ Brennan answers. ‘There’s another one pointing down the corridor to the toilets but it hasn’t been working for months.’ He shrugs. ‘You know how it is.’
‘So … what happened to him?’
‘You tell us,’ Wild mutters pointedly.
‘I don’t know!’ Emilia cries. ‘I left and that was it! I went home and then drove to my parents’ house, terrified that they were following me; I stayed up all night terrified that they were going to arrive at my house and do something horrible, and then when their last post came, I decided to figure out where they were to try and stop them!’ She inhales sharply, her shoulders rising and falling. ‘I don’t know what happened to him.’
Wild sighs, shaking her head, and turns back to the laptop. The CCTV footage opens again but this version is zoomed in on Harris and Emilia as they were standing outside down the side street, their bodies and faces now blurred. Wild presses play and a short clip begins.
Emilia looks slowly from Wild to Brennan. ‘I don’t understand what I’m looking at.’
Wild taps and the sequence plays again. Emilia lifts her arm and Harris takes something from her, throwing his head back before passing it back again.
Her drink. He asked for a sip of her drink.
Emilia’s stomach drops as realization hits. They think she spiked his drink, there at the Dandy Fox, and then he was abducted from the back.
‘Wait … you don’t think that –’
‘Why did you give him your drink?’
‘He asked me for it! After I asked him to come back to the house he asked if he could have a sip for Dutch courage – he made a joke out of it!’
‘Okay,’ Wild says, as if she is offering a concession. ‘If you didn’t use the flunitrazepam in that drink – where is it?’
‘Where’s what?’
‘The drug. The very strong sedative you were going to use to knock a man unconscious so he could be abducted. You say you didn’t use it.’ She lifts her hand, palm upwards. ‘So where is it?’
Emilia closes her eyes, her mind flashing back to the sound of her feet thundering down the road, terror roaring in her chest. Her arm flying outwards to throw the small plastic bag into the hedge. ‘I threw it away.’
‘Well, that would be convenient, wouldn’t it?’ Wild lifts her hand to her chin. ‘If the plan had been for Harris Keaton to go home with you, and for you to use the drug against him there, why did you take it with you?’
‘I … I took the photo and the powder and put it in my bag. I didn’t want to just leave them in my house.’
‘Or is the more sensible conclusion that there was never actually a plan for you to go back to the house? The plan was for you to give him the sedative there. After all, why would they trust that you could get him back to your house? Surely it would be easier to simply tell you to go to a location, a location where they knew without doubt he would be, and for you to slip the drug into his drink?’
‘But that isn’t true. And I never gave him the drug. They got to him another way.’
‘Mr Keaton had traces of flunitrazepam in his system when he died.’
The room turns silent, the sound of the recorder suddenly loud in her ears, white noise rushing in like the tide.
‘He had what?’
‘At some point in the hours before his death, flunitrazepam was administered to Harris Keaton.’
Emilia’s mind races, her eyes flying about the room, searching for an explanation. ‘One of them must have been there all along. And we wouldn’t know – we have no idea who they are.’
‘Or maybe, if we’re throwing theories around, you spiked his drink, pretended you needed the toilet knowing that he would eventually follow you to the back of the bar where there’s no cameras, and he was picked up there by the people behind the Confession Room. Is that what happened?’
‘No! I told you – I was going to take him back to my house, but I changed my mind. I couldn’t do it. And why would I do that? It was already a huge risk simply showing my face. Why would I drug him in public? What if something had gone wrong?’
‘Why would you do any of this when you could have simply come to the police?’
‘You don’t understand!’ Emilia shouts, her temper finally breaking. ‘And you never will! Unless you’re snatched from your house and chained to a wall in a room, not knowing if you will ever come out alive. You don’t know how it felt to be given your freedom but on condition that you obey.’
‘Emilia, I’m just doing my job,’ Wild says, holding her hands up in feigned defensiveness. ‘I have to challenge you with what the evidence is indicating. And the evidence points towards you willingly killing the man you believe murdered your sister, and then working with the man and woman behind the Confession Room to murder another man.’
‘But that isn’t true! I didn’t want to kill Ryan. I was forced. And I know that it seems like I made the wrong choice. With Ryan and with Harris. But I didn’t feel like I had one. I’ll live with what I’ve done always … but I tried. I really did try to save them.’
Emilia stops speaking, unable to utter another word, and suddenly all of the pent-up anger and confusion, her frustration at not being believed, is replaced with an overwhelming guilt. She could have done more. She should have done more.
She drops her head into her hands and she cries. Uncontrollable, soul-shaking sobs, from deep inside her, from the dark place where regret and shame and hatred hide their faces. But now they are there, their ugliness emerging into the light, refusing to stay hidden any longer.