Dick Francis's Bloodline (9781101600931)

by Francis, Felix

  I approached one of the uniformed and top-hatted doormen.

  “Excuse me,” I said, trying to control my voice. “Where did the girl fall?”

  “Never you mind,” he said somewhat brusquely. “Now, move on, please, sir.” He spread his arms and walked straight toward me, forcing me back.

  “She was my sister,” I said to him quickly, “and I need to know where she died.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” he said, stopping and holding up his hands in apology. “I thought you were another of those ghoulish creeps we’ve been getting here all week.” He must have spotted that I was not doing too well, as he took me by the arm. I think it was his intervention that may have stopped me collapsing altogether.

  He guided me inside the hotel.

  “Would you like to sit down, sir?” he asked. “You don’t look well.”

  I nodded weakly, and one of his colleagues pulled up a chair.

  “I’m sorry,” I croaked.

  Someone arrived with a glass of water, and I slowly recovered my composure.

  “Sorry,” I said again to my savior. “I didn’t realize how much it would affect me.”

  “It’s no problem, sir,” he said. “When you’re ready, I’ll take you back outside.”

  “Thank you.”

  And, in due course, he did just that, showing me exactly where Clare had met her end.

  I stood staring at the unremarkable spot on the concrete paving and offered up a silent prayer for Clare’s soul. Then, once more, my eyes were drawn upward toward the balconies high above me.

  She had fallen quite a distance away from the building, and I wondered if she had purposely jumped outward. She must have only just missed the overhanging steel canopy. In a funny sort of way, I was glad. Its edges appeared very sharp, although that surely would have made no difference to Clare or to the outcome.

  But why had she done it? Why? Why? Why?

  “Will you be all right now, sir?” asked my friendly doorman.

  “Yes. Thank you,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”

  He nodded at me, then moved away to help some people into a black London taxi. I, meanwhile, remained rooted to the spot for a few moments longer, even bending down to stroke the rough, cold surface, as if in doing so I was somehow offering a final caring touch to my dead sister.

  Finally, I stood up and moved away. It had been a necessary journey to see where she had died, but I would always remember Clare as brimming with life. I once again thanked my lucky stars that I hadn’t accompanied James and Nicholas to see her battered and broken body. That was one mental image I could readily live without.

  I waved to my doorman and went back into the hotel.

  I suspect that the lobbies of all the larger London hotels are busy places at eleven o’clock on Sunday mornings, and the Hilton was certainly no exception. There were several lines of guests waiting at the reception desk to check out after a big Saturday-evening event in the hotel ballroom, while a large group of brightly dressed American tourists hung around aimlessly, desperate to check in and sleep after their overnight red-eye flight across the Atlantic. And there was baggage everywhere, lined up in long snakes like dominoes waiting to be toppled.

  I went over to a young woman sitting at a desk marked “Guest Relations” and asked if I could please speak with the hotel’s general manager. To my eyes, she hardly looked old enough to be out of school, and she instantly became defensive, asking me what I wanted him for. Perhaps she believed that anyone who wanted to talk to the manager was going to complain about something. I told her that it was a personal matter, but she still refused to pass on my request.

  “Are you sure I can’t help you?” she asked with an irritating smile.

  “It’s rather delicate,” I said. “Would you please just call the general manager.”

  “I’m sorry, sir, I can’t do that without knowing why you need him.” She continued to smile at me in her annoying way.

  OK, I thought, I had tried, but with no result. Now I was getting slightly irked by her attitude. “Young lady,” I said loudly and somewhat condescendingly, “my name is Mark Shillingford. And I’m trying to discover why my beautiful twin sister fell to a violent death from one of your hotel balconies. Now, can I please talk to the general manager?”

  She looked rather shocked, and, in truth, I had also somewhat surprised myself by my own determination and resolve.

  “He’s not here on Sundays,” she said, the smile now having vanished altogether.

  I sighed slightly. “Then I will speak to whoever is in charge of the hotel at this very moment.”

  She used the telephone on the desk. “Someone is coming,” she said to me, putting down the handset.

  I stood and waited, looking around me. A man wearing a suit soon appeared and came over toward us.

  “Mr. Shillingford,” he said, holding out his hand, “I’m Colin Dilly, duty manager. How can I help?”

  He was about the same age as me but shorter and with a slighter build.

  “I notice you have lots of CCTV cameras in this hotel.” I pointed up at the one positioned above the Guest Relations desk. “I would like to see the images for the Friday before last.”

  “I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” said Mr. Dilly. “The images are recorded on a rolling seven-day cycle. Those for that Friday will have been overwritten by this past Friday’s.”

  Dammit, I thought. I should have come sooner.

  “Didn’t the police make copies?” I asked in desperation.

  “I believe they did, sir, but you will have to ask them if you want to see them.” He said it rather dismissively. “Now, is there anything else I can help you with?”

  “I’d like to speak with whoever checked in my sister on Friday evening nine days ago.”

  He pursed his lips. “I’m not sure that will be possible either. It’s not hotel policy to provide that sort of information.”

  “Then I will spend all day, and all night if necessary, asking every member of your staff that I can find until someone tells me who did check her in. They must know. It’s the sort of thing one might remember, don’t you think? Being the last person to see a suicide alive.”

  Mr. Dilly looked at me for a few moments. Perhaps he was deciding whether to have me thrown out.

  “And if you chuck me out,” I said, “I promise you I’ll cause a fuss. I’ll call the newspapers and the TV companies. I’m quite well known in media circles, and I don’t think it would be good publicity on your part.”

  “Perhaps you had better come into the office,” said Mr. Dilly. “I am sure we can find the information for you.”

  “Very wise,” I said.

  I followed him through a door that was disguised as a wooden panel and into some offices behind.

  “Please sit down,” he said, pointing to a chair in front of a desk. “I’ll look up the work sheets for last week.”

  He sat opposite me at a computer, and I could hear him tapping the keys. “Now, let me see,” he said. “Friday the sixteenth. Evening, wasn’t it?” He tapped some more keys. “Right. I’ve found it.”

  I stood up and went and looked over his shoulder. If he didn’t like it, he didn’t say so.

  There were six reception staff listed for the period from three o’clock in the afternoon until eleven at night on the sixteenth, with four others for the night shift, which ran from eleven on Friday until seven on Saturday morning.

  So the staff on duty when Clare had checked in had been different from those when she’d fallen.

  Nothing was ever simple.

  Colin Dilly wrote down the names of staff from both shifts, but he didn’t give me the list. Rather, he compared it to the record of the staff currently on duty that he also brought up on the screen.

 
“There is one person who was on duty that night who is also working right now. If you wait here, I’ll go and fetch her.”

  Mr. Dilly went off to find the woman while I went on studying his computer screen, but there wasn’t much of interest on it.

  Presently, he returned with a small, neat woman who I took to be in her mid-thirties.

  “Mr. Shillingford,” Colin Dilly said, “this is Mrs. Rieta Dalal. She was working on reception during the evening of Friday the sixteenth, and she says she remembers your sister arriving even though it wasn’t she who actually checked her in.”

  “Then how do you know it was my sister?” I asked.

  “Because my colleague and I talked about her,” said Mrs. Dalal quietly. “Because she had no luggage. No bags at all. Not even a handbag or a makeup bag.” She smiled. “It’s very rare indeed for a guest to check in with no luggage, especially a woman with no makeup. I remember her specifically because of that. It was only much later I heard that she had been the poor lady who fell from the balcony.”

  “Was she with anyone when she checked in?” I asked.

  “No, sir, she was not,” said Mrs. Dalal. “But she was talking on the telephone the whole time. That is why my colleague mentioned her to me in the first place. My colleague thought it rather rude, and she was quite cross about it.”

  “Which colleague was it?” Mr. Dilly asked.

  “Irena.”

  “Irena Zelinska,” he said, consulting his handwritten list. “She’s not working today.”

  “She has gone home to Poland,” said Mrs. Dalal.

  It was definitely not going to be simple.

  “Did my sister specifically ask for a room with a balcony?”

  “I don’t know, sir. Have you checked her reservation?”

  “I don’t think she had a reservation.”

  She seemed surprised. “We were very full that night, we always are when there’s a big event in the ballroom. If she didn’t have a reservation, we must have had a cancellation. She must have just been lucky to get a room with a balcony.”

  “Lucky” was not the term I would have used.

  “But even then,” Mrs. Dalal went on, “she would have had to ask to have the balcony door unlocked. All the balconies are normally kept locked to prevent suicides.”

  There was a silence as we all digested what Mrs. Dalal had just said.

  “Are you saying that someone had to have gone to her room to open the balcony door?” I asked.

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Dalal. “We have to call security if guests request that the balcony door be unlocked. It is a common thing. It happens almost every day.”

  “Why do you keep them locked if you then unlock them on request?”

  “The hotel policy,” said Mr. Dilly, “is that there has to be a minimum of two registered guests in a room for the balcony door to be unlocked.”

  “The policy seems to have failed in this case,” I said rather pointedly.

  Neither of them said anything.

  But it had also been the hotel policy not to give me the name of the person who had checked Clare into the hotel, and I’d found a way around that. Clare was infinitely more pushy than I was, and I didn’t doubt that the “double occupancy” rule would have been as easy for her to circumvent.

  Or had there, in fact, been two people in the room?

  “Do you know who my sister was talking to on the telephone while she was checking in?” I asked Mrs. Dalal.

  My question made her blush, her olive-brown skin distinctly flushing around her neck. And she looked down as if embarrassed.

  “Sorry, I do not know,” she replied while still studying the floor.

  “Then why are you unsettled by the question?” I asked.

  “It is nothing,” she said, but she still wouldn’t look up at me.

  “It must be something,” I said. “Tell me.”

  She looked up at Colin Dilly. “Tell him,” he said.

  “I am so sorry,” she said to me, “we thought your sister was a prostitute. Irena was absolutely sure of it. Irena told me that she must be talking to her next client on her telephone. That is why she had no luggage. Irena said she would only have condoms, and they’d be in her pockets.”

  “But she paid for the room with her credit card,” I said with some degree of anger. “A prostitute wouldn’t do that.”

  She looked up again at Colin Dilly. “Sometimes they do,” she said. “At least we are pretty sure they do. And Carlos then checks.”

  “Carlos?” I asked.

  “He is one of the bellmen,” she said. “If Irena gives him the nod, then he likes to check.”

  “How does he check?” I asked.

  “When Irena gives Carlos the nod, he goes up ahead of the girl onto the same floor as her room and then waits and watches to see if a man comes.”

  “And did she give him the nod on that Friday night?” It was Colin Dilly who asked the question that I was itching to ask.

  “Of course,” said Rieta Dalal. “Especially after she’d been so rude at reception.”

  “And what did Carlos discover?” I asked.

  “I do not know that,” Rieta said. “I went home soon after your sister arrived.” She again glanced at Colin Dilly. “I always worked right through my breaks so that I could leave early. I don’t like to travel home by myself on the tube after ten o’clock at night. But that was my last late shift and now I’ve been switched to the early one.” She smiled, clearly much happier with the new arrangement. “I have not seen Carlos since that night.”

  “Did you tell any of this to the police?” I asked.

  “Police?” she said. “No one from the police has asked me anything.”

  “Do you know if the police spoke to Carlos? Or to Irena?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, shaking her head, “I know nothing more than I’ve told you. Can I go now, please, Mr. Dilly?”

  “Yes,” Colin Dilly said while looking at me with raised eyebrows for confirmation, which I gave by nodding. “Thank you, Rieta. You can get back to work now.”

  She went out of the office, and Colin Dilly closed the door behind her.

  “Surely the police must have interviewed the people who saw or spoke to my sister that night.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I was off last weekend.”

  Why was I not surprised?

  “I’d now like to talk to Carlos,” I said. “And also to the security man who unlocked her balcony door.”

  “What difference will it make?” Colin Dilly asked, his tone clearly indicating that he thought I was wasting my time, only making things harder for myself.

  I looked at him. “At nine o’clock that Friday evening my sister told me she was driving straight home to Newmarket from Edenbridge in Kent. Instead, an hour and twenty minutes later she checked into this hotel without any luggage and without having a reservation. And just over an hour after that she was dead.”

  I paused and looked at him.

  “I cannot believe she would have suddenly decided, after leaving me, to drive all the way into central London on the off chance that this hotel might have a free room and that that room would just happen to have a convenient balcony on a sufficiently high floor so that she could jump off it to her death.”

  I paused again to let what I was saying sink in.

  “I think she had to be coming here to meet someone, someone she must have spoken to after she left me. I also think that committing suicide, if indeed it was suicide, must have been a last-moment decision. If she had been planning to kill herself, she would, at the very least, have made a reservation for a high balcony room.”

  I paused once more.

  “So I’d like to talk to Carlos to find out if she did meet someone in her ro
om here that night. And if Carlos didn’t see anything, the security man might have.”

  Colin Dilly sat down once more at his computer and tapped away again on the keyboard.

  “Carlos Luis Sanchez,” he said, “the bellman. He’s working today from three o’clock until eleven.” I looked at my watch. It was ten minutes to midday. He tapped some more. “I can’t find the details of the security men who were working that night.”

  “I’ll come back at three o’clock to see Carlos. Can you find me the details by then?”

  “I doubt it,” he said, “but I’ll try. I don’t have access to the security company’s work sheets, and their office will be shut today. I’m actually off duty at three, but I’ll wait round to hear what Carlos has to say. Ask for me at reception.”

  “OK,” I said. “I will. And thank you.”

  We shook hands, then I emerged through the wooden secret-panel door and back into the bustle of the hotel lobby.

  —

  “TWO MEN,” Carlos Luis Sanchez said. “One follow the other.” He made no attempt to disguise his disgust.

  “The lady was not a prostitute,” Colin Dilly assured him.

  “Huh,” Carlos replied. “Then why she have two men in her room?”

  It was a good question.

  “How were the men dressed?” I asked him.

  “Dressed or undressed, it makes no difference.”

  “No,” I said, realizing that he hadn’t understood the question. “What were they wearing when you saw them in the corridor?”

  “Suits,” he said. “You know, black suits with ties.” He moved his hands back and forth at his neck. Bow ties.

  “Both of them?” I asked.

  “The first one. Yes. I see. The second . . .” He shrugged his shoulders.

  “Did you see the second man?” I spoke slowly.

  “Mario see him.”

  “Who is Mario?” I asked.

  “My friend,” Carlos said. “One more porter. He work nights. He say he see second man coming out later, during all fuss over falling girl.”