The Lazarus Hotel (14 page)

‘How is she?'

Tessa let the injured woman's eyelids close. ‘It's a bad knock. She won't wake up for a while, but I think she'll be all right. If there's a fracture it's not depressed. There are worse things you can be hit with than a wooden rolling-pin – harder things, things with corners. I think she'll wake up with a headache later today and feel a good bit better tomorrow.'

Richard was trying to think through the cloying mists of the nightmare. ‘I suppose we'd better wake everyone up, ask them—'

‘What?' asked Tariq, one eyebrow arching. ‘If they brained anyone tonight? They'll say no. Most of them, maybe all of them, will be telling the truth. If it was one of us, there's been plenty of time for him or her to calm down and wash their hands. Someone might confess in a fit of remorse, but if she's been lying there for three hours the urge has probably passed by now.'

‘We have to do something!'

‘We are doing,' said Tessa calmly. ‘We're caring for her. And in fact Mrs Venables is getting everyone up. Until we know what happened we ought to be awake.'

As she spoke the others began arriving at the open door, in silence, faces pale and drawn. They looked into the room, saw the doctor tending the woman on the bed, didn't come in. Tariq repeated what he knew.

‘So someone finally voted with their fists,' said Larry. ‘Well, it wasn't me.'

Tariq's gaze was level. ‘No one said it was.'

‘No. But it's me keeps losing his temper, me who wanted to leave and couldn't, me who threatened her in front of everyone. I want it on record that it was someone else who laid her out with a blunt instrument.'

The note of flippancy in his voice grated but it may only have been his reaction to stress. Tariq nodded. ‘She'll tell us what happened when she wakes up.'

‘She'll be all right then?'

‘Oh, I think so,' said Tessa from the bed. ‘Concussion is never trivial but her vital signs are pretty good. I think she'll wake up when she's ready.'

‘Thank God for that,' said Tariq fervently. ‘I don't know how we'd set about getting help for her.'

They had worried about their isolation before, but Miriam had promised no one would get hurt and by and large they'd believed her. But she'd been wrong; and if they couldn't get out when they wanted to, they also couldn't get out if they needed to.

Sheelagh pushed through the gathering in the corridor and felt behind the door. Her voice was barbed with meaning. ‘There's no key.' Seeing their puzzlement she spelt it out. ‘They've all gone. When we first arrived there were keys in the bedroom doors; now there aren't. Miriam was hurt because somebody took her key.'

‘Who?'

Fear as much as impatience made her snap. ‘That crazy bloody boy, of course! The one who was fooling around in my underwear and Tariq's briefcase. And the kitchen. I presume that's where the rolling-pin came from?'

Mrs Venables nodded. ‘He could have taken it. I hadn't missed it, but then I wasn't looking for it.'

‘How's he getting up here?' wondered Richard.

‘Maybe he was here all along,' said Tariq.

They'd searched carefully after Larry's encounter; now they wondered if they'd missed something. Sheelagh walked the length of the corridor again in case they'd overlooked a cupboard he could have used but they hadn't. The locked door was still locked.

‘There's nowhere he could have been.' She'd pulled on not her sharp suit but a powder-pink track suit; her hair, tangled from sleep, was tied loosely in the nape of her neck. ‘There's also nowhere he could have come from. Make sense of that.'

‘Did you try the lift?' asked Joe.

Resigned to the fact that it was inoperative, she hadn't. She went to try it now and Will went with her.

No lights came on and no sound whispered in the shaft at the press of Sheelagh's finger, its crimson point chipped. ‘Someone would have heard it anyway.'

Will chewed pensively on his lip. ‘Even without a lift there's still a shaft. Could there be another way up it – a ladder fixed to the wall, something like that?'

‘But you can't open the doors if the lift isn't there. For obvious reasons.'

‘They can be forced. The Fire Brigade would have it open in a moment.'

She pursed her lips, half-amused, half-annoyed. ‘Got a handy fireman, have you?'

‘No.' He put his hand to the seal on the doors. ‘But neither has this boy. If he's coming and going quickly and quietly it isn't so much a hatchet job as a five-finger exercise. Maybe there's a weak spot that—'

He never finished the sentence. His hand went through the rubber seal to the depth of his elbow; off balance he stumbled against the door, and the door opened.

Joe said, ‘Until we get out of here on Monday we have to protect ourselves. We should double up on the rooms.'

Though he still had teeth marks in his hand Larry was having trouble equating the terrified boy he'd cornered with Miriam's injuries. ‘Is that necessary?'

The older man waved an unsteady hand at the bed. ‘That happened because we had a room each. Do you want to wait till somebody else gets their head stove in? Is your privacy that important?'

‘He's a boy,' said Larry calmly, ‘only a boy. Maybe if he was scared enough, but—'

‘How old do you need to be to break someone's head with a rolling-pin? Look, this isn't a normal kid. He's not much more than a wild animal, and he's got some way of getting in here that we don't understand. Sheelagh's right – there isn't a key left in the place. We're stuck here for the rest of tonight and tomorrow, all tomorrow night and the next day, and all the night after that. If we double up we can look out for one another.'

Larry shrugged, not troubling to hide his scorn. He was a physical man, considered himself equal to any physical threat. ‘If it makes you happy. Though you may have noticed we're an odd number.'

Tariq said, ‘No problem. Will you stay with Miriam, Tessa? I'll stay too – until she wakes up she's not going to be much use to you if the kid comes back.'

‘If you like,' Tessa said, without much enthusiasm. ‘Joe's right, it's silly to take chances. We don't want this happening again.'

There was a muttered chorus of agreement from the gathering around the door. But then quiet fell and they moved aside for Sheelagh who, chalk-faced, was walking with one hand on the wall as if she couldn't feel the floor. Richard reached for her but she brushed him off. She was concentrating on what she had to do, couldn't afford to be distracted.

Once in the room, with every eye on her and into a waiting silence she said, ‘Will's dead.' Her voice was low and empty; shock had stretched her eyes to huge cobalt pools in the parchment pallor of her face.

For long seconds they could only stare at her. Will? Will was fine. They'd seen him a minute ago when he went to check the lift just down the corridor. If anything had happened to him they'd have known.

Joe pressed her into the chair. ‘Sheelagh, what's happened?'

‘The lift,' she said. Her voice remained an aching monotone. ‘It wasn't working, but he thought there might be a ladder inside. He felt for a weak place in the seal.' She barked a little gruff laugh, cut it short when she felt it getting away from her. ‘He was right: there was one. When he found it the doors opened and he – and he – and—'

Tariq said briefly, ‘I'll go see.' He left at a run.

Sheelagh began to weep, without reserve or dignity, her mouth open and ragged, spit coming out with the words she couldn't now stop. ‘He fell. He was terrified of heights, and he died falling forty storeys down a goddamned lift shaft. Six hundred feet falling in the dark. It must have felt like for ever.'

Larry put an arm round her, clumsily, a man unpractised at gentleness, but she wouldn't be comforted. ‘I could have saved him. I could have pulled him back. I grabbed for him as the doors opened. I touched his clothes. But I couldn't— And then he was gone. He didn't even shout. He fell into the darkness, and it was as if he'd never been here.'

‘It happened too fast,' the coach explained, as if she'd missed a return. ‘Nobody reacts instantly. It takes a moment to work out what's happening, what you have to do. By then it was already too late. You couldn't have saved him, Sheelagh. No one could.'

But as the shock faded her distress grew, great racking sobs bursting from her. There was no point talking any more. He pulled her into the curve of his body, stifled her crying against his shoulder.

Richard was grey. He'd liked Will but that wasn't the only reason. What had happened, what Sheelagh was feeling now – the grief and the guilt of being nearly and not quite able to save a life – was something he knew in the deepest fibres of him.

Joe looked as if he'd been kicked in the face. For him too the thing had a personal dimension. It wasn't just a tragic accident: Will's death resonated in him as if he'd loosened the doors and given him a shove to make sure.

There was nothing to learn at the lift. The doors had opened because of an obstruction between them and closed when it was gone. They looked like any pair of lift doors, except that the triangles that indicated where the gondola was were dark. Tariq dragged a couple of chairs from the conference room and made a barrier of them, not expecting anyone to repeat Will's mistake but needing to do something. Then he returned to the sickroom.

He was just in time to see Joe sway and his eyes roll. He grabbed him but there was nowhere left to sit him down. He steered him into the next room and into a chair, tipping him forward to get the blood back into his head.

The older man moaned, ‘This is my fault.'

‘That's nonsense,' Tariq said firmly. ‘It's nobody's fault – not even the boy's. He couldn't know that by continually forcing the seal he was weakening it to the point where someone was going to fall. It was an accident. If you hadn't suggested checking the lift someone else would have.'

‘You don't understand.' He pushed aside Tariq's steadying hands. ‘I have to talk to – everyone.'

Tariq watched with concern and wouldn't let him up for fear he would fall. But as the seconds ticked by, the ghost of an intuition solidified into understanding. Eyes wide, he backed away and straightened up. ‘All right.' His voice was hollow.

When they saw the two men coming back and took in their expressions – Tariq's watchful and controlled, Joe's harrowed and defensive – they thought something else had happened. Tessa traded a quick, troubled glance with Richard, and Larry muttered, ‘Now what?'

Joe cleared his throat and looked round. ‘Is everyone here?' They were, including Mrs Venables, standing by the bedhead as if on sentry duty. ‘I have some things to say. I owe you – explanations, apologies – more than that, but— Oh God, what a mess. I didn't want this. I didn't want anything
like
this. I never intended anyone to get hurt. I just—

‘God,' he groaned again, ‘I'm doing this so badly. I wanted to meet you, to talk to you, mostly to
listen.
None of the rest of it—' The half-formed sentences broke down in an incomprehensible jumble of words.

Tariq sighed. ‘In case anybody didn't get that,' he said, ‘Joe is Cathy's father.'

Sheelagh cried out and flew at him, claws out like a cat. She actually reached his face, leaving a bloody trail down his cheek. Then Tariq swept her up in one arm and held her against him. But he shared her feelings, saw no reason to protect Joe from a verbal assault.

‘You bastard!' she screeched. ‘Will's dead because of you. He needed a psychologist like God needs pockets. Now he's all smashed up on the floor of the atrium. Are you satisfied? You wanted revenge, didn't you? You wanted to make us pay. Will that do? Or won't you rest till you've smashed us all?'

Joe looked like an old, old man. He wasn't surprised by her reaction. When he had decided to tell them, he'd known how they'd respond – had to: he was the author of great misfortune for reasons which seemed increasingly bizarre even to him. He‘d planned this before he met them. If he'd been right about them the consequences would still have been appalling but he could have justified what he did. Now even that consolation was denied him. His misjudgment had led to the death of a decent young man and a murderous attack on a woman who was his friend. He didn't blame Sheelagh for swiping at him with her nails. He'd expected Larry to knock him down.

But he needed to put the record straight, for his sake and theirs. He couldn't maintain the deceit any longer. If in their fury they decided to chuck him down the lift shaft too he would hardly have resisted.

‘I don't expect you to understand.' His voice was a gravelly murmur, thick with emotion. ‘But I swear to you I never wanted
anything
like this. Miriam explained what I was trying to do. It doesn't make much sense, I know – by the time we'd talked a little I knew it was a mistake. But I never imagined anyone could get hurt.'

‘Hurt?!' echoed Richard, and his voice cracked. He looked as if he wanted to say more but nothing more came.

Larry said flatly, ‘You're lying. You may have set this up but you're not Cathy's father. She was black all the way through – she'd none of your blood in her.'

‘Neither mine nor Martha's,' agreed Joe, ‘but she was our child legally and every way that matters. We fostered her as a toddler, adopted her when her mum died. She chose to keep her own name. Since no one was ever going to take her for our natural child we thought it best too. As far as I can remember, that was the only problem we had adopting a black child. Twenty-odd years ago there weren't the same ideological hoops to jump through. They reckoned if you wanted a kid and could look after it, and you were a nice couple, she was better off with you than in care. Political correctness hadn't been thought of then. They still reckoned you were doing a child a favour by taking it in.'