Guess Who

by Chris McGeorge

  “You know something,” Sheppard said, “I know you do.”

  “I know everything and I know nothing,” Ahearn said, almost singing it in her tuneful voice. “It depends what type of everything you want to know.”

  “You killed a man. You killed a man like it was nothing. Like slicing butter. You’ve done it before. I know it’s you.”

  “As I’ve already said, Mr. Sheppard, I didn’t kill Dr. Winter. Why would I kill him? I have no motive.” Constance winked at him. “But I do know who did.”

  “I knew it,” Sheppard said, through clenched teeth. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “Because I cannot dishonor by telling.”

  Sheppard laughed in her face. “You understand we’re dying, don’t you? That when that timer runs down, we’re all exploding? We’re all going to die in a mess of fire.”

  Constance smiled. “Rapturous.”

  Sheppard stood up in annoyance and felt someone at his side. It was Ryan—anger flared in his eyes. “Why won’t you tell us, you bitch?” Ryan said, and Constance smiled at him too. Ryan turned to Sheppard. “We can make her talk.”

  “What do you mean?” Sheppard said, but he thought he already knew. He could see it in Ryan’s eyes. “No, we can’t...”

  “You said it yourself. We don’t find out and we all die. I just have to hurt her a little bit. She’ll crack easily.”

  Sheppard opened his mouth and closed it again—had he discounted Ryan so quickly?

  Ryan made his way behind Constance. She tried to follow him with her eyes but he was in her blind spot. She looked back at Sheppard, with confused eyes.

  “We can’t do this,” Sheppard said. Could they?

  “Yes, we can,” Ryan said, bending down behind Constance. “Just ask her the question.”

  “What is he doing behind there? Demon.” Constance looked at Sheppard, as though she could see him entirely. She could see all his secrets, all his bad decisions, all his failed relationships. She could see him, the real him, beyond all the clutter and the bad blood.

  Mandy stepped forward, seeing what Ryan intended to do. “No, you can’t do this.”

  “We need to do this. Whether we want to or not. We don’t do this and we’re all going to die,” Ryan said. He had clearly justified it to himself. He nodded with such a conviction, it was exciting.

  “Sheppard,” Mandy said, “please stop this.”

  “When are you going to see, Mandy?” Ryan said, “Sheppard failed. He doesn’t know who did it, so now it falls to the rest of us.”

  “This is what he wants,” Mandy cried. “This is exactly what the horse man wants. Don’t make him turn you into this.”

  “I’m confused,” Ryan said. “Are you saying this because of the well-being of Ms. Ahearn here, or because you’re scared of what she’ll say.”

  Silence. Ryan’s gaze darting from Mandy to Sheppard and back.

  “Ryan,” Sheppard said, as Mandy gave an exasperated sigh, “come on, this is lunacy.”

  “Just ask the question.”

  “Ryan.”

  “Sheppard, ask the question.”

  “I...” Sheppard said, unsure how to start the sentence, let alone finish it. With a glance at Mandy, he got down in front of Constance again.

  “Sheppard, no,” Mandy said.

  Sheppard looked at Constance and tried a sad smile. She smiled back. “Ms. Ahearn, I need to ask you, who killed Simon Winter?”

  Constance looked at him, then at Mandy and Headphones, even trying to look at Ryan although she couldn’t manage it. “I won’t tell you. But God will forgive us in the kingdom of Heaven.” She gave a yelp of surprise and struggled. “What are you doing back there? Don’t you think about hurting me.”

  “Ryan,” Sheppard said.

  Ryan disappeared behind the chair for a few long moments. Sheppard could only see what was happening sketched on Constance’s face. She looked slightly uncomfortable and he thought that maybe Ryan had a hold of her fingers. But her expression didn’t change. And a moment almost became a minute, when a sorrow-filled yelp came from behind the chair, and not Constance.

  Ryan stood up behind her, tears in his eyes. “I can’t do it,” he said, with all the defensiveness of a child who had been caught stealing pic ’n’ mix. “I can’t do it. It’s over. We’re all going to die.”

  Mandy let out a skittering breath, sounding as though she was holding back a cry. She sat on the bed with her back to them. Ryan wiped his nose with his hand and looked at Sheppard.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, before going to sit down as well. Sheppard got up, looking at Constance with one final, long glance. Their last hope. Not much of a hope anyway. It was indeed all over. Time always runs out in the end.

  Sheppard walked over to the wall beside the TV and slid down it. As he hit the floor he was struck by one final opportunity. And the more he thought about it, the more it made sense. His heart rose in his chest, he had worked it out. It was all so simple, and he had finally worked it out. “Horse Mask,” he shouted, almost sounding happy, “the murderer is Horse Mask.” He waited a few seconds. Nothing. Nothing at all.

  The timer slid to two minutes left.

  38

  Sheppard looked from Ryan to Headphones to Mandy. Behind him, Constance had started chuckling about something. Most likely, the prospect of dying. Looking at the others’ faces, they were contemplating it too.

  He had to try again. “Constance Ahearn. The murderer is Constance Ahearn.”

  He waited again. Nothing happened. The seconds slipping away too fast. This was it—it was over. They were really going to die.

  Why not? He was already a joke. He couldn’t protect himself, let alone the others.

  “Rhona,” Sheppard said, turning away from her as he said it. He couldn’t look her in the face. “The murderer is Rhona.”

  Again, a few seconds wait yielded nothing. “Ryan Quinn, the murderer is Ryan Quinn.” One, two, three. Nothing.

  One name left. That meant...

  “Amanda Phillips. The murderer is Amanda Phillips.” One, two, three. Nothing.

  Had he expected that to work? He had at least hoped for some kind of response. Maybe a comical uh-uh “No” noise? That sort of seemed like the horse man’s style.

  He looked up to the television. It was still showing the flickering, putrid-colored words “We Hope You Enjoy Your Stay.”

  Sheppard grabbed it by the corners and stared into it, as if he could summon up the horse man. “Hey, hey. You. I need to talk to you.” The words flickered. “You. You bastard. Come on.” Nothing.

  Frustration welled from his stomach. In a swift move, Sheppard—not thinking—leapt up and picked up the television. He lifted it over his head and was poised to throw it on the floor, but at the last second, he felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned to see Mandy giving him a sad smile. He looked to Headphones and Ryan, and he saw something like acceptance in their eyes.

  Sheppard sank to his knees, feeling the carpet rub against his sore knees. The timer slid down to one minute. He looked up to the ceiling as if to ask a higher power for help, but instead he just said, “Morgan Sheppard. The murderer is Morgan Sheppard.”

  39

  “What’s your biggest fear?” Winter had once said, sitting in his high-backed chair assuming his usual therapist pose. His legs crossed, his glasses down his nose, his notebook in his lap—there was no confusing the profession Winter was in.

  “To be forgotten,” Sheppard said, after a moment’s deliberation.

  Winter regarded him and leaned forward. “Most people say their greatest fear is death.”

  “Death is inevitable; being remembered is a courtesy.”

  Winter took off his glasses and tapped them against the arm of the chair. “You’re an interesting man, Morgan.”

 
; Sheppard smiled. “Thank you.”

  Winter smiled too, albeit a bit too late. “I don’t know if I meant that as a compliment.”

  * * *

  The only thing Sheppard could take with him now was that he’d never be forgotten. No matter how this played out, he would go down as a tragic figure held hostage in a hotel room. But sitting there, looking into the faces of the people he had failed, he wished it could end any other way. He wished he could have saved them.

  Saying his own name had done nothing. Had he really expected it to? Did he really think in some warped way that he had killed Winter, and forgotten it? No, he was clutching at straws.

  But now there were none left.

  Sheppard looked from his hands to Ryan. The young man who worked at the very hotel he would die in. Now, Ryan seemed a lot younger than he was. A scared child trying to put on a brave face, he peeked out from his hands occasionally to see that everything was still in its place. Ryan would never see his family again, the parents he was working to support.

  Next to Ryan sat Mandy. The blonde who had stuck her head over the bed when he had only just woken up handcuffed to the bed. She had looked so scared then, but now she was wearing a stoic expression, almost resigned. Sheppard knew from the brief time he’d known her that she wouldn’t be one to die crying and screaming. She was noble, someone with a set of morals to live by. And one of them was dying silently.

  On the floor was Rhona, her headphones around her neck. She had her hands dug deep into her hoodie pockets. She was silently crying, tears falling down her cheeks erratically. She took a hand and jabbed at the tears sporadically, as if angry that she had even created them. When she had finished mopping them up, she quietly stood up and walked over to Constance Ahearn. She didn’t even look at the woman cuffed to the chair but instead walked straight past her to the desk. She climbed under the desk and resumed the position she had been in for most of the three hours. She caught Sheppard’s eye and hollowly looked at him. She took her headphones and slid them onto her head.

  Constance Ahearn seemed to be all out of lunacy. She was finally quiet and looking down at the bloodstain on the lap of her dress. The woman had turned herself into a monster and this was the first time that Sheppard thought she might have realized it. Her faith had got her nowhere in the end, a means to facilitate her worst fears. Sheppard knew that faith was not always like that, but it only served to help Constance in her conviction. Gone was the woman whose biggest problem was her estranged daughter, now she was a murderer. Maybe, if there was a God, she could make up for it somewhere else.

  Sheppard looked at his four roommates in turn, and still didn’t know which one did it. Maybe his first hunch had been true. Maybe it was Alan Hughes who had killed Simon Winter, it all being something to do with the MacArthur case. Somehow though, this didn’t really fit. This wasn’t what it was about, couldn’t be. Because they weren’t the biggest clues. And who killed Simon Winter wasn’t the biggest mystery.

  Thirty seconds on the clock and how many people? How many children and families would there be in this hotel? How many around the building? What would the body count be? Would they blame him? All the families who knew that the building exploded just because he couldn’t solve a simple puzzle?

  The simple fact was one that he had been running from for as long as he could remember—a fact that he was forever scared that someone would find out. “I’m not a detective,” he said into the quiet room. No heads turned, no one acknowledged it. It just hung there in the air. An epitaph of a nightmare.

  Because that was what the horse man had wanted, wasn’t it? That’s what this whole thing had been about.

  Ten seconds, and Sheppard thought of his mother for the first time in a long time. She was rotting in a care home in North London. And he thought of his agent, who would probably lament the loss of a revenue stream. The two people who might possibly miss him. Yes, there may be fans who would weep for him, but they would move on to bigger and better things, often without even knowing it. The living were much more interesting than the dead.

  Eight.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. Again, no one responded, but he knew he had to say it. He had failed them. He had failed them all. And now they were dead because of him.

  Seven.

  The Great Hotel becomes the Great Mess. Six.

  A funny place to die. Five.

  Would there be an investigation? Would they hunt the horse man down?

  Four.

  Or would they all dance on his grave and say “Good Riddance?”

  Three.

  He was so, so sorry.

  Two.

  Sometimes all we want is to be seen, said Winter, in his ear, and he told him to shut up. He wanted to die in peace.

  One.

  He closed his eyes. Would it be quick? Would it be painless?

  Zero.

  The sound of the explosion and the piercing white light was his only answer.

  40

  1992

  The body was hanging there in the center of the room. A strange mass in a strange place, almost like a specter of something impossible. It was ever-so-slightly moving, swaying. At first, he thought it was because of the breeze coming from the open window. Later, however, he would come to realize that it was probably from struggling.

  He stood in the doorway, unable to move. The room was a mess: upturned desks, scattered papers, forgotten chairs. It was nothing like the neat and normal room it had been two hours before in Maths class. He could even still see the equation they had been working on, on the whiteboard. To step inside would be to step into a deeper, darker world—a world where he had no desire to be.

  He was scatterbrained. His mother had always told him so. And this time, he had forgotten his notebook. He was halfway home when he realized and couldn’t do without it. He had written down the Maths homework he had to do that night, and for the life of him, couldn’t remember what it was.

  The halls were quiet as he returned, the ghosts of laughter and shouting in the air. His classmates were long gone and it seemed that most of the teachers were too. The only person he saw was a caretaker, who didn’t look familiar, who was unenthusiastically buffing the hall floor. The man looked up at him as he passed and smiled sadly, like he was apologizing for his mere existence.

  The door to his Maths classroom had been ajar. Not wishing to appear impolite, he had knocked. There was no answer, apart from the door slowly creaking open.

  Mr. Jefferies looked almost comical, like he was hung up on a coatrack—a discarded and empty anorak. His eyes were lifeless, his face a pale eggplant color, his arms hanging at his sides. The belt around Mr. Jefferies’s neck was barely visible under his chins but he eventually saw it. The leather was strained, cracked and discolored. It was wrapped around an exposed pipe in the ceiling. The same pipe he had always complained about because it made a weird hissing sound whenever someone flushed the toilet on the second floor. Now that pipe was holding him up. Mr. Jefferies was dead.

  At some point, he started to scream.

  He heard footsteps behind him—running, and then someone clutched his shoulders tightly. He couldn’t rip his eyes from the scene in front of him, but he smelled the familiar perfume of Miss Rain and heard his name in her soft voice.

  “What in the heavens is wrong?” she said.

  He couldn’t speak; he just pointed into the room.

  He saw the outline of Miss Rain turn and look. And then he heard her scream too.

  The next few minutes were a rush of colors and lights.

  He was so disorientated that he didn’t know what was happening. He heard more people rushing around him and then he was picked up by someone and rushed away into the staff room. When he opened his eyes, Miss Rain was sitting across from him, smiling sadly, her eyes red with tears.

  “Do you want a glass
of water?”

  Before he could reply, she got up and crossed over into the kitchen area. He looked down at his hands as he heard the tap—they were shaking. He tried to stop them but he couldn’t.

  Miss Rain put a glass of water down in front of him and then sat down again.

  “Drink this. It’ll help.”

  He picked up the glass of water. It sloshed around in the glass as he held it to his lips. Ever so slightly swaying in the glass. A wave of nausea as he took a sip. The water was cold and very real. Inviting. He took a sip and put it down again.

  “How are you—feeling any better?”

  A silly question, and from the sound of it Miss Rain knew it was. He didn’t know. He couldn’t know. There weren’t enough words in the English language to explain how he felt, at least of the ones he knew. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair to ask him that.

  “Please, sweetie, can you talk to me? I need to know what you’re feeling.”

  “I...” So many words—too many words. Why did the human race need so many words? “I’ve left my notebook in the Maths room.”

  “That’s why you’re back?”

  “I just need to go get it and everything...”

  “No...”

  “...everything’ll be okay.”

  He grew silent—his little brain was going too slowly.

  He couldn’t think. He couldn’t even... “Mr. Jefferies...” he said slowly.

  Miss Rain was crying now. He didn’t understand. He didn’t understand why she was crying. She dabbed at her eyes with the sleeve of her cardigan. “Yes, I know. It’ll all be okay. It’ll all be fine. You just have to be strong now.” Miss Rain moved round and sat next to him. He lay his head on her shoulder and she wrapped her arms around him. Soon they were both crying silently.

  More people around him. He shut his eyes—screwed them up tight like they did in the movies. He heard bodies around him, he heard sharp whispering. Miss Rain was talking to the head teacher. Then there were sirens, slowly getting closer, and someone else ran into the staff room. He felt strong arms grasp him.