by Helen Smith
“I wondered if she could have fallen from her room.”
“No. Her bones would have been shattered, wouldn’t they? I heard she was sitting propped against the wall.”
“Yes, I know. But she’d been posed like that. Her neck was broken.”
“A violent sneeze, perhaps?”
“A sneeze?”
“There was someone I was at school with who broke his neck playing rugby. Thing is, he didn’t realize it; he walked around like that for years. The doctors found the fracture years later in an X-ray. Said that he was a walking time bomb. He could have been paralyzed just by a violent sneeze.” Nik became quite animated, remembering the story. Emily didn’t doubt that it was true. She just didn’t think it relevant.
“I was thinking, you see. Could she have been having a crafty cigarette and fallen out of the window?”
“None of our windows open wide enough for a toddler to slip through, let alone a grown woman. We take the safety of our guests very seriously—and we’re wise to the wiles of smokers. No. She was killed by thugs next door on that estate.”
“I just…the idea of her being killed by thugs is so horrible. So violent.”
“I wouldn’t walk through that estate myself late at night. Couple of the kitchen porters live there, and they walk together for protection. Tough blokes, too—from war-torn countries. Who’d think it, eh? Living through a civil war in Africa and then scared of walking alone in Bloomsbury. It’s the young kids with knives—no respect for human life. They don’t understand consequences. You see it all the time on the news.”
Emily didn’t believe that the porters were frightened of walking through the estate. “The policeman I talked to said it looked as though she’d been picked up and dropped by a giant cat.”
“That’s their theory is it? A giant cat’s responsible for that woman’s death?”
Nik wanted to be getting on with his day. He stood and picked up a file at random from his desk, trying to signal that he had finished talking and that he had work to be getting on with, without being too rude.
“No, it was…an expression. A way of explaining something inexplicable.” Emily frowned. Nik wasn’t being very cooperative. “But it made me think she might have fallen.”
“Be that as it may, this poor lady died elsewhere. There’s no need to drag her body back over the threshold, so to speak. Let’s leave this business outside where it belongs. We work hard to create an atmosphere of calm, here. It’s not just me—there’s a whole network of people, mostly unseen, who rely on the hotel for their livelihood, and strive to keep it going to the best of their ability. People who have never worked in a hotel find it difficult to appreciate, but we function like a family. And it’s not just the workers that I have to think about, of course. Our guests need to feel that they’re cosseted and protected once inside our walls. I don’t want to disturb them by suggesting a stronger link between the hotel and this poor lady’s murder than the fact that she was planning to stay here. I’m sure you understand.”
Emily did understand. Nik didn’t want Winnie’s death connected to the Coram.
“Is there CCTV in the hotel?”
Nik looked startled, and then irritated, and then he recovered himself. Emily was really getting under his skin. She was forcing him to look at her, really look at her and try and work out why she was bothering him so much, while reappraising his own sense of himself. It was like a romantic comedy, without the romance or the comedy. He saw an earnest, inquisitive brunette with a dimpled smile. And he knew that she saw an evasive, slightly sweaty man with a narrow, angry face and a cheap suit. He put his left hand up and smoothed a lick of his hair with his palm. He said, “We’d consider it an invasion of our guests’ privacy to have CCTV inside the hotel.”
“Outside, though? You must have it outside.”
“We do have security cameras outside. Yes.”
Now they were getting somewhere!
“But the system was undergoing a reboot earlier today.”
“It had been turned off!”
“The system was being reset.”
“So there are no pictures around the time that Winnie was killed?”
“That’s correct. Though of course it would show nothing anyway, since she was killed on the estate.” Nik smiled and touched Emily’s shoulder very lightly. He couldn’t give her a shove, much as he would like to, so instead, like an angry poltergeist, he used the sheer force of his will to propel her the three paces to his office door. She really would have to leave, whether she considered him rude or not.
Outside Nik Kovacevic’s office, Emily paused to write a few quick notes: reboot, back over the threshold. She’d managed to get a look at Nik’s computer before he’d closed the screen. This prompted her to write: one-star reviews.
Emily was heading back through the lobby to the Virginia Woolf room with her trio of chocolates to give to Det. James when she heard a voice calling her name.
A middle-aged woman with short gray hair, wearing a timeless (or, to put it another way, unfashionable) dark-green corduroy jacket and skirt and a maroon paisley shirt, stood at the checkin desk and waved her silver-topped cane cheerfully. “Emily!” she called. “Yoo-hoo! Emily!”
It was Dr. Muriel, Emily’s neighbor. Emily offered to carry her suitcase up to her room so that they could talk about Winnie’s death. Dr. Muriel was an academic who was used to sifting information. She could help Emily sift the information she had gathered so far.
By the time they had waited for the elevator, got the key card to open the door and gone into the room, Emily had just about finished explaining what she had learned. She put the suitcase on the floor and went to try and open the windows. None of them moved more than an inch at the top of their frames. Dr. Muriel neither protested nor expressed approval of Emily’s apparent fanaticism for fresh air. She sat on on the red velvet chaise longue by the window and put her feet up.
Emily handed over her notebook apologetically. “It’s just a jumble at the moment. I thought I’d write down everything and then worry later on about what’s relevant and what isn’t.”
“Good idea. Very interesting,” said Dr. Muriel as she scanned the pages.
“Yes, but as you can see, I wrote down some of those things just because they irritated me. They’re about me, not Winnie. But then there were other things that were niggling at me and…I don’t know. I wrote down anything that didn’t make sense in case it might have some bearing on what happened to Winnie. I’m still sorting it all out in my mind.”
“Now, if you were an undergraduate I’d suggest using sticky labels and different categories for your notes. Undergraduates like sticky labels.”
“So do I. I can’t get excited about bags or shoes. But I really love stationery.”
“So you see, looking at this, you’d have categories like…Emily, Winnie, hotel staff, smoking, litter…”
“I really hate litter.”
“Me too.”
“I think that whatever I was investigating, or whatever notes I was writing, I’d end up having a category for litter. Trouble is, just because someone drops litter, it doesn’t necessarily make them a murderer.”
“Indeed not. But perhaps the custodial sentence should be about the same. It would make a marvelous deterrent, eh?” Dr. Muriel gave a rather vulgar laugh, as if someone had just told her a dirty joke. “What troubles me most is this business with Polly.”
“You think she’s in danger?”
“Do you?” Dr. Muriel liked asking questions. She didn’t much like answering them.
“She could have been targeted because of something she has seen or heard,” said Emily. “But I’m not sure what.”
“It’s anomalous. A woman dies. Another may have been poisoned. The poisoning doesn’t fit, does it? It’s too elaborate. As if a page from one story has got mixed up with another.” She handed back the notebook to Emily. Emily opened it up and wrote anomalous next to the other words, as much because s
he liked the sound of it as anything else: I’ll have the anomalous, please, with a spoonful of blueberry flummery and a pot of tea.
“I’d say we need to stir things up, don’t you, to find out what’s going on?” Dr. Muriel picked up her cane and made poking motions before using it to heave herself up from the chaise longue.
Emily didn’t think that was wise at all and wondered whether she should say so. She didn’t actually know Dr. Muriel very well, except to say hello to in the street. While it was true that they had briefly been imprisoned together in a cellar in a very large house in Brixton during a fireworks party, they hadn’t spent the time exploring each other’s foibles and eccentricities. It had seemed more important to look for a means of escape. But Emily was starting to see that her outwardly staid neighbor was a maverick. If she was set on stirring things up, Emily doubted that there was any point trying to dissuade her. She followed Dr. Muriel to the elevator with a sense of foreboding.
The elevator bell dinged as it reached their floor. The polished doors opened and an elderly couple got out. Dr. Muriel and Emily got into the elevator, joined at the last minute—Emily had to hit the “doors open” button to accommodate him—by a short, skinny Mediterranean-looking kid of about thirteen.
“Ground floor?” Emily asked sweetly as she let go of the “doors open” button. He ignored her and pressed the button for floor number five. “Oh,” she said, as the elevator began its steady ascent. “We were going down.”
Dr. Muriel treated Emily and the boy to her vulgar laugh. At the top of the panel there was a button labeled “Roof Terrace and Bar.” Dr. Muriel saw it and nodded toward it for Emily’s benefit, “Our giant cat?”
“You may be right.” Since they were going that way anyway, Emily pressed the button, but it wouldn’t light up.
“That floor’s closed,” said the boy. He hitched his trousers up and smirked. “You can’t go up there till six o’clock.” He looked smug, the way boys of his age do, until hormones suddenly add twelve inches to their height and they discover rebellion, girls, music and inscrutability.
Emily pressed the button for floor number six, and when they reached it they got out and looked for a staircase to take them up to the roof terrace on the next level. They found a staircase marked “Emergency,” and up they went. The door to the rooftop bar wasn’t locked, and they went inside. The nighttime glamour of the place was lost without uplighters, candles, music, the murmur of guests and other mood enhancers, though the picture windows on three sides gave a good 270-degree view of the landmarks of the surrounding area of London. To the north, a wall blocked out the less-delightful view of the tower blocks of the neighboring estate.
Emily and Dr. Muriel walked through to the open-air terrace that adjoined the bar. It was a very pleasant area with a dab of bright green lawn, some evergreen shrubs in heavy, blue-glazed clay pots, and a stone fountain that was not currently operational. There were mint-green parasols sunk into cement in mint-green pots, to anchor them in high winds. The parasols were closed for now. Everything up here was closed or turned off. But it was still pretty.
They took a look around. There was a hip-high metal and reinforced glass fence around the edge of the terrace. Weighted pots containing plants and decorative shrubs had been placed in front of the fence, to screen out the sound of the traffic below, or the wind, or both, and presumably to discourage guests from getting too close to the edge.
If Winnie had fallen, she surely had fallen from somewhere else on the roof terrace. Behind the aubergine-colored leaves of a Japanese maple tree in a blue pot, next to the bar, Emily saw a little wooden door. She pushed it open and found herself in a small, ugly service area with bins. The fence here was a low metal one. Directly below was the courtyard that led to the hotel kitchen.
Emily looked over the fence to get a better look. Her foot kicked at a loose, moss-covered stone which skittered and clattered to the ground below, making Emily sway slightly as she watched it fall down toward the colored bins in the courtyard below.
“Careful!” said Dr. Muriel.
Emily retreated from the fence. “Let’s say Winnie’s being chased by someone; she’s frightened and she’s trying to get away. She darts in here, thinking she might be able to hide. She looks down and sees those big plastic bins full of bottles and cardboard boxes and whatever. The attacker follows. She decides to jump, hoping the boxes will break her fall.”
“But she lands awkwardly and breaks her neck?”
“I suppose so.” Emily looked down and saw the trees in Russell Square across the street, and then, when she went up on tiptoes, leaned forward and looked to the left, there was the entrance to the hotel running the length of the building. Ornate black railings demarcated the hotel’s property. These enclosed narrow, designated strips of pavement where guests could stand and smoke without mixing with the hoi polloi on the street beyond. There were a few smokers out there now.
To the other side of where the smokers were standing was the courtyard with the plastic bins, screened from the hotel entrance by a wall. Emily walked to the far end of the rooftop bar’s service area and looked down. Below her was a scrubby playing field, a scruffy children’s playground with a roundabout and a slide, and the low wall that separated the estate from the hotel.
Dr. Muriel followed. “And why was Winnie up here?”
They went to the low railings and stood there, looking down. Emily felt a little bit dizzy. She took one step back. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “Maybe she wasn’t being chased. What if she was meeting someone? Someone she trusted.”
“It wouldn’t take much to unbalance someone and give them a shove. But you’d need to temporarily distract or disable them. A sudden, warlike scream would be very effective. But not practical, in case someone heard it…You’d need something—some thing…”
“Like chloroform?”
“Pepper spray, perhaps.”
“Hairspray?”
“That would do it. But who would arrange to meet in this horrible bit by the bins up here?”
A look down at the litter at their feet answered that question. Smokers.
“Winnie didn’t know anyone here. She checked in early, but none of us saw her.”
“Someone saw her,” said Dr. Muriel, grimly. “But why would the attacker risk moving her, when he or she might so easily have been seen?”
“It’s like the killer’s trying to say something: to make some point.”
“Indeed. But what?”
Chapter Six
THE PROTEST
Emily went along to the Virginia Woolf room with her trio of chocolates and handed them over to Det. Rory James. She said, “I’m having all the chocolates from the rooms brought down to you so you can test them for poisoning.”
Rory was filling out a form. He put his pen down and pushed his chair back a couple of inches from the table, and he looked up at Emily. He didn’t say thank you. He said, “There’s a lot of paperwork involved in something like that.” He said it in the tone of voice of someone who doesn’t relish paperwork.
Emily spoke quickly, hoping that her enthusiasm might transfer itself to him. “If the poisoned chocolate was meant for Polly, then the only time it could have been tampered with would be after it had been put into the gift bag, or after it had been put into her room. If all the chocolates are poisoned, then it could have been done at M. Loman’s factory or in the hotel kitchen. But then whoever was responsible would have ended up a mass murderer if we’d all eaten them. That’s not very likely. It means that Polly was probably the target. But we need to know, don’t we? So do you think you could get them tested?”
“I can see that you’re anxious about this. Your friend’s ill. Someone has been killed in the vicinity of the hotel.” He smiled. He looked tired. He was in his shirtsleeves. Emily could feel the heat coming off him—not sexual heat. Just long-day-at-work, tired heat. Emily wondered how soon it would be before Rory became a hard-bitten maverick with a disastrous
private life, like the police detectives she saw on TV. She felt very sympathetic toward him. But then he said, “Look, if I could prove to you that this isn’t poisoned, would it make you feel better?”
He snatched up the packet of chocolates, opened it, removed a violet crème, sniffed it, broke it in two pieces. He put the smaller of the two pieces in his mouth. His eyes held Emily’s as the chocolate-coated purple fondant melted on his tongue. The air between them was tense, and there was a challenge in the way he looked at her, as if he was accepting a dare and wanted her to admire him for it. She did admire him for it. It was audacious, an act of bravery that summed up his fury about all the endless paperwork that was now part of his job. She thought, suddenly, how beautiful it would be if all protests against bureaucracy—if all protests against everything—could involve warm, tired men in clean shirts silently gathering to put chocolates with mauve-colored centers in their mouths, and melt them on their tongues while holding the gaze of young women standing across from them, with humor in their eyes and bravado in the set of their shoulders. More entertaining than student protests, anyway, which—whatever the wrongs and rights of it—were always a bit scruffy and shouty.
But as well as being admirable, there was a little part of Rory’s chocolate challenge that was somehow also patronizing, as though he needed to demonstrate to Emily that she was worrying unnecessarily and creating drama where there should be none.
“It’s actually very nice,” he said after a few moments. “I don’t think it’s poisoned.” He didn’t reach out and eat the rest of it, as Emily might have been tempted to do—perhaps he didn’t want to cross the line between using an unorthodox method to test the evidence, and consuming the evidence because it was delicious. Maybe there were even rules about not eating luxury handmade chocolates on duty, just as there were rules about not drinking on duty. He shrugged and grinned, inviting Emily to relax and forget about it.
“At least we know we’re not dealing with a mass murderer,” said Emily.
