by Adam Croft
Daniel’s been lucky. He’s never been sent to see Mr Duggan. He’s not quite sure why, because some boys have been sent twice, three times. They’re the ones who are quiet when they return. They don’t look angry or hurt. They just look empty. They’re the ones who have given up.
It’s Thursday tomorrow. Thursday means games. It means getting outside in the fresh air and running around for an hour or two. It means letting off some steam. It builds up and starts to eat away at you from the inside if you’re not careful. That’s why you need things to look forward to. Like games. Like your sixteenth birthday. Eight years, eight months and fifteen days. November the sixteenth is the next big milestone. His eighth birthday. He’ll be exactly halfway there. Halfway to the first day of his life.
Teddy Tomlin’s sobbing has quietened down a bit. Daniel daren’t ask him why he’s crying. He knows why he’s crying. It’s the same reason boys throughout Pendleton House are crying right now. Even in his formative years, he knows that the most painful truths are truths unspoken. Truths that everybody knows but nobody dares speak.
He pulls Percy, his stuffed bear, closer to him. Percy’s his only link to before. He’s the only thing Daniel came here with. The bear’s starting to get a little scruffy around the edges, some cotton threads starting to fray and come loose. Much like Daniel himself. But he’s going to keep on hugging Percy every night, well aware that this comforting act will put more pressure on the bear’s fraying threads and loose seams, helping the inner stuffing ooze out through the gaps.
The moonlight coming in through the window is a pretty shade of blue. It gives some colour to the wall and the pencilled penguin. It won’t last long – the light will move to the other side of the room by dawn and Teddy Tomlin will be greeted by the warm morning’s sun on his face. It’s the way it’s always been, and it’s the way it always will be for another eight years, eight months and fifteen days. But he doesn’t mind that. He’s counting down.
The radiators clatter and gurgle as the central heating winds down for the night. Not that it does a particularly good job of heating Pendleton House when it’s on, but its daily death rattle signifies the end of another day and the impending dawn of another day closer to the big day.
In the silence, he registers that Teddy Tomlin’s sobs have become a gentle snore. He rolls over as quietly as he can and squints against the moonlight. The reflection from the whitewashed walls allows him to see the dried tears on Teddy Tomlin’s cheeks, belying his peaceful, sleeping face.
Daniel decides to close his eyes and do the same.
4
It’s the dreadful, bland food I’m not especially looking forward to as I get dressed and head downstairs to the restaurant. There’s no-one on reception as I walk through, which is nothing new, and I wonder where Jess might be.
Despite it being fairly early, there are still two families in the restaurant with screaming bloody kids. It’s almost like they’re trying to outdo each other. I say restaurant, but it’s more like a cross between a McDonald’s and a farm. Another put-you-up identikit gastropub designed to make hotel guests feel at home wherever they are. If home happens to be an abattoir, that is.
The barman tries to engage me in conversation. He asks me if I’m staying here for business or pleasure. Both, I want to tell him. I’m screwing that little receptionist you’ve probably had your eye on for the past couple of months. ‘Business,’ I say. ‘I work in TV.’ I immediately regret saying it, as those two letters inevitably draw people into conversation.
‘Oh cool!’ he says, his voice rising an octave as his shoulders bob and he tucks a long strand of hair behind his ear. ‘My brother’s a runner on that programme. The one that’s on in the mornings.’
‘This Morning?’ I ask, more than a hint of sarcasm in my voice.
‘Yeah, that’s the one. He wants to get into presenting at some point. That’s how quite a lot of them get started, apparently.’
‘Apparently.’
‘So what do you do?’ He leans forward on the bar, and I realise I’m in for the long haul.
‘Nothing very exciting,’ I say. ‘I design and put up lighting rigs on location sets.’
‘Oh cool!’ he says again. ‘Do you get to meet lots of big stars?’
‘I see them occasionally. They don’t tend to engage with the likes of us, though. They’re too busy trying to remember the three lines they’re getting paid a six-figure sum to say.’
He laughs and pulls another strand of hair behind his ear. ‘That’s really cool. Beats working in a bar, anyway.’
‘I wouldn’t bet on it.’
The food arrives after a rather worryingly quick eight minutes, so I wolf it down as quickly as I can and head back towards my room. As I pass through reception, I notice Jess sat behind the desk, a work colleague filing some papers beside her. I can only presume she keeps her liaisons as discreet as I do, so I throw her a cheeky wink and a smile as I pass by and head up the stairs.
The one good thing about these hotels is the satisfying duet of the click and clunk as the door to my room closes behind me. It’s the sound that tells me I’m back in my nest, safe from the outside world. I think it’s the act of locking the door, knowing that there won’t be anyone coming in to upset the quiet. No more Mr Duggans. Despite the fact that I’ve only spent a few nights in this room, its identical similarity to every other hotel room I’ve stayed in this year makes it feel like home.
I switch on the bedside light and point the remote control at the TV, pressing the big red button at the top. Something catches my eye as I walk back past the TV towards the bathroom. It’s the large number 4 in the top corner of the screen. Somehow, the telly seems to have fixed itself. Weird.
Realising that I’ll be able to spend the evening watching a couple of channels I didn’t particularly have any interest in anyway, I head into the bathroom to brush my teeth and get ready for bed.
I don’t usually like seeing myself in the mirror, for fairly obvious reasons. I’m not the best-looking bloke in the world, for starters. As I gaze into the mirror this time, though, the usual face of tiredness and lost hope has something else lurking behind it, shining through. It’s that fire I lost a long time ago; something I’m sure has been brought out by Jess. She seems to have a sense of intrigue and yearning for life which leaves me fascinated and motivated in equal measure. The fact that I won’t see her again after the next day or two doesn’t seem to matter. Sometimes you meet someone – perhaps only fleetingly – who can change your life forever. And that’s fine.
I look fresh, invigorated. As if I can take on even the biggest challenges. In that moment, I also realise that I want to try to be a better husband. Sure, I’ve done bad things. We all have. But if I can do what I want to do and limit, or completely cut out, the amount of time I’m spending staying away from home, that’ll kill two birds with one stone. No temptation, no problem.
I spit the toothpaste out of my mouth and take a few slurps from the tap to rinse. I take a towel from the rack and dry my face, and that’s when I notice it.
The shower curtain is closed.
That’s not particularly odd, I know, but I definitely left it open when I went down for dinner earlier. I always do. These horrible plastic shower curtains look dreadful, so I certainly don’t want to be looking at it every time I go to the bathroom.
It starts to make a bit more sense now. Someone’s come up to fix the TV and has, for some reason, pulled the shower curtain across as well. I really wish they wouldn’t. I take hold of the edge of the curtain and pull it back, the silver rings rattling along the rail as it flies open, revealing the horror behind it.
It’s a dead body.
It’s my wife.
5
I stare, shock and fear taking over my whole body. I don’t know how long I’m standing there, as time seems to stop completely still. Every time I blink, every moment that passes, the panic and horror seems to grow. I don’t know if I’m even breathing, if I�
�m even existing. It’s too much for me to take in.
I really have no idea how to react. I veer violently between disbelief, anger, paranoia, sadness and the sense that my whole world has just come crashing down around me. I can feel my lower lip trembling, and I can almost hear my brain trying to kick into gear, searching through the mental files for the one that tells it how to deal with immense trauma. Until the right file is found, I appear to have defaulted to ‘freeze and go blank’. There’s just nothing there. Absolutely nothing.
I steady myself and try to think straight. It’s Lisa. It’s definitely Lisa. You aren’t married to someone for eight years without knowing what they look like, even in this state. Even when it’s obvious there’s absolutely no light left in their eyes. They say you can always tell when someone’s dead; they no longer look like a person. They become a shell, a husk, the body that once held a soul.
I force myself to look in more detail, to understand what the hell I’m seeing. She’s fully dressed, her hair slightly dishevelled, but otherwise looking like the Lisa I know and love. Her mouth hangs open, and I can see her tongue resting gently against the top of her bottom teeth. It looks as though she’s been strangled; there’s a red mark right around her neck that looks like some sort of rope burn. There’s no blood that I can see, which comes as a strange sort of relief. It’s an odd word to use, but somehow the lack of blood makes her seem more peaceful.
This is my wife. The woman I married. The woman I vowed to spend my whole life with. And now she’s lying dead in front of me. I feel my legs begin to wobble, struggling to hold me upright. I turn and lean against the sink, feeling it creak as my body weight pushes down on it, my chest heaving as I struggle for breath. It’s then that I realise I haven’t been breathing since I pulled back that shower curtain. My eyes begin to hurt, the blood pulsing at my temples.
But there’s one question that comes into my mind before any other thoughts: Why is she here? She’s meant to be seventy miles away back home in East Grinstead. She was there when I spoke to her this morning. She just doesn’t belong here. It’s like seeing an old friend or work colleague in the same resort on holiday. If they’re out of context, the brain struggles for a few seconds to deal with it. Now imagine that a thousand times worse.
I blink hard and scratch my face. None of this makes any sense. When I last spoke to her she was enjoying lazing in bed on her day off. She was going to get up and watch some TV, then get on the treadmill for a couple of hours. How did she end up in my hotel room in Herne Bay? Had she come to surprise me? That really doesn’t sound like Lisa at all; she’s not a spontaneous sort of person. It wouldn’t even cross her mind. No, I know from the way she sounded when I spoke to her this morning that she had no intention of coming here. I know my wife, and she couldn’t keep a secret if her life depended on it. She even managed to tell me about the surprise birthday party she’d organised for me last year. I pretended it didn’t matter and that it was the thought that counted, but secretly I was gutted. She’s just completely incapable of keeping her mouth shut.
The mark around her neck is what’s freaking me out the most. Knowing that’s what killed her. I hover the back of my hand in front of her nose to feel for any sign of breath. There’s nothing. My hand shakes with fear, and it brushes the tip of her nose as I draw it towards me. It feels cold. She can’t have been dead more than twenty minutes – I left the room barely half an hour ago – but her nose is already cold. It’s possible she was killed before she got to the room, but how on earth would someone drag a dead body through a hotel without anyone noticing? To me, it doesn’t look like she’s been dead long at all, so I can only assume she died here, in this room.
I think back to when I returned to my room. Was the door locked? Yes, I’m sure it was. They lock automatically from the outside anyway, don’t they? I don’t think it even has an actual lock that you can operate without the key card. There wasn’t any sign that anyone had broken in. No broken windows, no damage to the door. So how did she get in here? Who brought her here? Why did she come in the first place?
The realisation suddenly hits me – far later than it should have done – that Lisa died by someone else’s hands. It sounds stupid to say it, seeing as it’s perfectly clear, but it’s something I observed rather than registered and understood. And now it’s hit me. Not only that she’s dead, but that she isn’t coming back. And someone has killed her deliberately. I can feel the tears dropping down my face, the adrenaline pulsing through my limbs. But I know I need to think clearly.
There’s no sign of what she was strangled with, so whatever was used has been taken away. By the person who did it. My wife has been murdered. In my hotel room. Seventy miles away from where she’s meant to be.
It’s like a dream; nothing makes sense and yet I can do nothing but accept that it’s all entirely true. There’s no other option. It’s here, right here in front of me, laid out as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world, yet it seems to be completely and utterly random. It feels like there’s a huge electrical charge going through my brain as it tries to comprehend what’s going on in front of me, trying to find some sort of logic in what’s happened. But it really isn’t working.
I look at Lisa’s body more closely, slumped in the bath like a discarded rag doll. Many times I’ve watched her sleeping late at night when I’ve been unable to relax, but she looks completely different now. There’s something in her hand. Her mobile phone. I pick it up, gently, trying not to come into contact with her body, and I look at the phone. The screen is on. The screen’s never on – it’s set to turn off automatically after thirty seconds. I’ve been here much longer than thirty seconds already, so she must have disabled that setting. Why? She never fiddles with the settings on her phone. She’s a complete technophobe, and she’d be terrified of breaking it. She wouldn’t even take the protective plastic stickers off the front of it for a good four months after she bought it. That all seems so pedestrian now. Now that she’s dead.
The adrenaline is still surging through me and my hands are shaking, trembling as I look at what’s on the screen. It’s a text message.
Come up to room 112. I have something I need to tell you.
My eyes rise to the top of the screen as I look to see who sent it.
It’s from me.
6
I dart into the bedroom and grab my phone from the bedside table. It’s exactly where I left it before I went down to dinner. I always leave it up here. I’m not the sort of person to sit playing on my phone in the middle of a restaurant, no matter how bad it is. It takes me a couple of attempts to unlock my phone, my fingers shaking as I jab in the four-digit pin code.
I go into my Messages app and open up the conversation thread with Lisa. We don’t really text much, so the only messages there are spread out over the past couple of weeks. The message on Lisa’s phone isn’t here on mine, though.
I go back into the bathroom and pick Lisa’s phone up off the floor, where I dropped it. I tap my name at the top. It was definitely sent from my phone number, from my phone. I look at the time the text was sent. I can’t be sure, but I reckon it was only a couple of minutes after I went down for dinner.
The only thing I can be sure of is exactly how this looks. I’m not stupid. My wife’s lying dead in my hotel room, seventy miles away from home and anyone she knows, shortly after a text was sent from my phone to tell her to come up to my room. After I’d spent a good deal of the year working away from home as our marriage slowly broke down. Oh, and I’d been screwing the receptionist.
Again, that mix of emotions flips and turns inside me. Anger, fear, paranoia, desperation. Not only has someone murdered my wife, but they’ve tried to pin it on me.
Everything’s a blur. I can’t have been back in my room a minute, if that. Two, tops. Yet my brain seems to know exactly what to do. Even though this whole situation is confusing the hell out of my conscious mind, my subconscious is right there, dealing with this quickly and insti
nctively.
What can I do? Call the police? There’s no way I can prove this wasn’t me. I was downstairs in the restaurant for twenty minutes, perhaps half an hour at the most. They can’t be that specific about a time of death, particularly as she will have died at most fifteen minutes apart from me either leaving the room or re-entering it.
I try to think about whether or not the hotel has CCTV. Even if it does, it’ll presumably show Lisa heading to my room, then me doing the same a few minutes later. Around the time she was killed.
The husband is the prime suspect in any murder, I know that much, and this one is going to look like a pretty open-and-shut case for even the laziest police detective.
My instincts take over. I walk steadily back into the bedroom, collect my things together, shove them into my holdall and leave the room.
I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t know what I’m going to do. All I know is that running isn’t going to make things any worse this time. If I stay, I’m doomed to the same fate that I could possibly, just possibly, get away from. It sounds crazy, but that thought pops into my head again: the desire to up sticks and disappear, embracing my free spirit. In this moment, I know I will never truly be free, but right now the only option I have is to try.
My legs feel like jelly as I descend the stairs. I can hear the blood pulsing in my temples and feel my heart trying to burst through my chest. Everything else appears to be silent. I can’t even hear my footsteps on the floor, nor can I feel them. Everything is numb. It’s almost as if I’m cocooned, unable to take in any sort of external stimuli. As I push open the door to reception and head for the exit, the sound of Jessica’s voice bursts through my bubble and yanks me back into reality.
