The Lazarus Hotel

by Jo Bannister

  Bello:

  hidden talent rediscovered

  Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.

  At Bello we believe in the timeless power of the imagination, of good story, narrative and entertainment and we want to use digital technology to ensure that many more readers can enjoy these books into the future.

  We publish in ebook and Print on Demand formats to bring these wonderful books to new audiences.

  About Bello:

  www.panmacmillan.com/bello

  Sign up to our newsletter to hear about new releases events and competitions:

  www.panmacmillan.com/bellonews

  Contents

  Jo Bannister

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Jo Bannister

  The Lazarus Hotel

  Jo Bannister

  Jo Bannister lives in Northern Ireland, where she worked as a journalist and editor on local newspapers. Since giving up the day job, her books have been shortlisted for a number of awards. Most of her spare time is spent with her horse and dog, or clambering over archaeological sites. She is currently working on a new series of psychological crime/thrillers.

  Chapter One

  He didn’t know what to expect and he lay awake all night restless with apprehension. It was a timely reminder, if he needed reminding, of why he was doing this. Eighteen months ago the unknown was a joy to him: no situation was too alien, too alarming then. He’d left for the bloodiest of foreign wars with a spring in his step, his elf-green eyes bright with curiosity.

  Now he lay on sweat-damp sheets, aching with the effort to be still while his wife slept curled peacefully beside him, fretting over an encounter with a psychologist in a London hotel. It was pathetic. He was ashamed of his timidity, didn’t know where it had come from, why he couldn’t shake it off. At first he’d refused even to acknowledge it: everyone at the TV station knew he was in trouble except Richard Speke. But he had to seek help when he couldn’t get out his passport without his hands shaking.

  This was the solution the station medico came up with: a Personal Discovery weekend with a psychologist and a bunch of other misfits. Eighteen months ago it would have amused the hell out of him; now he lay sweating in the dark, anxious about what waited for him at Lazaire’s Hotel

  At six o’clock he gave up the pretence of rest and dressed in the half-light. When he finished Fran was propped up on the pillow, watching. ‘Did you sleep at all?’

  He shook his head, avoiding her gaze as if it were a confession.

  She wasn’t surprised: he hadn’t slept properly for months. ‘I’ll make some breakfast.’ She padded through to the kitchen. She wore a choirboy mop of short brown hair that fell into place with a shake and one of Richard’s T-shirts that came to her knees. She was everything he was not: small, neat, self-contained. Oh yes: and sane.

  Richard picked at the meal as he picked at sleep, without enthusiasm. Now he was up he felt exhausted. ‘Oh God, Fran, this had better work.’

  ‘I hope it does,’ she said evenly. ‘I’m just not convinced. You know my view.’

  Endless rehearsals meant they knew each other’s views intimately. Fran’s was that it was not Richard but what he did that was the problem; that the solution was to do something else. His eyes rolled. ‘It’s my job, Fran. It’s what I do, who I am. I’m not going to give it up without a fight.’

  ‘Fine,’ she said shortly. She didn’t want to argue with him, not again. She knew from bitter experience that it would do no good: not shouting at him, pleading with him nor rational discussion. It wasn’t that he wouldn’t talk about it, more that the debate never resolved anything. His determination to crucify himself was unshakeable. ‘Just remember that fights cause casualties.’

  Richard raked long fingers through his sandy hair. ‘I’ll take my chances.’

  Fran rounded on him for that, angry colour in her cheeks. ‘And you think you’re the only one in the firing-line, do you? That your choices don’t affect anyone else?’

  A famously articulate man, he could be reduced to gibberish by her scorn, most of all when it was justified. He knew he’d let her down. He was trying to make things right again, how they’d always been. He didn’t understand why that wasn’t what she wanted too. He was confused, his voice a plaint. ‘Fran, I don’t know what else to do. There are only two things in the world I care about, and one of them’s falling apart around me. And if I can’t get it back without losing the other I think maybe I will go mad.’

  Compassion and fury warred in her breast. ‘Don’t you dare put this on me!’

  Richard winced; he’d got it wrong again. Words were the one thing he’d always been able to do: now they betrayed him like everything else. Couldn’t she see that? Couldn’t she see how it hurt, losing something that important to him, feeling it crumble to dust in the palm of his hand? ‘Please—’

  One word, cracked and stumbling, reached her where any amount of skilful oratory would not have. She blinked and looked at him, and saw the pain crowding the corners of his eyes. She sighed and reached for him, her arms going round his waist. He dropped his cheek on to the top of her head, resting there.

  After a time she said carefully, ‘I know how much this matters to you. And for the record, you’ll never have to choose between your job and me. I love you, Richard Speke. That’s why I hate what you’re doing. You’re hurting someone I care deeply about, and I don’t believe it’s necessary. You don’t have to change what you do, only where you do it. You don’t have to go to wild and dangerous places. There’s plenty of work closer to home.’

  She felt him shake his head. ‘Oh sure. Political junkets, royal scandals, bishops and actresses. I cut my teeth on that stuff, I’d lose my mind doing it again.’ He sniffed sourly. ‘What’s left of my mind.’

  He’d become inclined to self-pity. When they met Richard Speke was a rising star of television journalism, ambitious, energetic, the least neurotic man she’d ever met. He did his job and lived his life at speed, snatching experiences and fast food, the good and the bad, with a sure instinct for what to keep and what to leave behind.

  But perhaps the instinct was less sure than it had seemed, because that phase of his life ended in breakdown. Fran knew that people weren’t allowed to have nervous breakdowns any more, had to have Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder instead. But she’d seen it happen, and there was no better description of how his personality cracked and fragmented. His last trip to Bosnia, that the station had to bring him home from, was only the climax: for months she’d been watching him grow thin and brittle and known it was only a matter of time before something hit him hard enough for the pieces to fly apart.

  ‘There’s nothing trivial about politics,’ she insisted. ‘You don’t have to
risk your neck to be a good reporter. Credibility doesn’t depend on bullets whistling past your ear on prime-time news.’

  He stood back, raking his hair again, automatically, unconsciously. Fran thought he needed another trip to the barber. These days his hair was the only energetic part of him. ‘Mine does. It’s all I know, Fran. I can’t do the clever stuff. There are guys reporting Westminster who know more about politics than both front benches put together and always ask the right questions because they know what the answers are. Well, I can’t do that. I don’t know enough.

  ‘What I can do – could do – is operate in places most people can’t. I know which side of a street to walk to avoid snipers. I know my way around, even places I’ve never been before. I can get into areas that are supposed to be closed, reach people who’re supposed to be inaccessible and get out with a story that makes sense to people whose experience of anarchy is limited to the buffet car on a football special. There aren’t many things I do really well, Fran, but there’s that.’

  They’d been married five years. For four of them he really was among the best. She’d seen a room full of hoary old journos, print and broadcast, burst into spontaneous applause watching one of his dispatches. So she knew how good he’d been.

  And she knew it hurt like an amputation, like flesh ripped from his body, to have that taken away. The pain of it, and the grief, glittered in his voice. ‘Only I can’t do it any more. I remember how I did it, I know what has to be done, but I can‘t do it.’ He turned away, his long body rigid with tension, his angular face flayed. ‘You want me to cover Chelsea Flower Show and Trooping the Colour instead? I’d rather dig up the roads.’

  It wasn’t mere bitter rhetoric; he meant it. In fact he wasn’t bitter. He was too honest to pretend anyone had done this to him, blamed only himself. He wasn’t strong enough and he couldn’t hack it any more: not because the job was too hard but because he wasn’t hard enough. At thirty-four he was still young enough to think that a failing.

  ‘So maybe this group encounter crap is a waste of time,’ he went on, a tremor in his voice. ‘Maybe nothing will come of it. But it’s my last shot at getting back to where I was. I know the station won’t sack me if it doesn’t work – they won’t have to. I’ll leave. I know how this job should be done. If I can’t do it I won’t stand by while people who can make kind remarks and try to find something I’m not too scared to tackle.’

  Fran laid her hand on his. He was so taut the tendons along the top stood up like guitar strings. She murmured, ‘I still don’t see how three days with a bunch of crazies is going to help.’

  Richard let out a gust of laughter. It was part of the problem, that he could do nothing in moderation. His nerves were so close to the surface that he reacted instantly and often inappropriately. ‘The only crazy there’ll be me. It’s a personal discovery course, not the Broadmoor annual outing.’

  Fran went back to the bedroom, began brushing her hair. A couple of strokes would have served; all this extra effort was to keep herself occupied. She’d given up trying to talk him out of it, looked for something neutral to say. ‘So what do people do on a personal discovery course?’

  Long in the doorway, he shrugged. ‘I don’t know. The brochure talks about Expanding Personal Horizons – what does that mean?’

  ‘Staring into one another’s navels?’ hazarded Fran, watching for his reaction in the mirror.

  For a moment, when he grinned, he looked like the man she married. ‘How to make Freud influence people?’

  ‘Keeping Jung at heart?’

  ‘Who cares what the others are looking for? I’m going because I need some help, and just maybe three days of personal discovery with Dr Miriam Graves will start shovelling out some of this, garbage that’s got into my head. Maybe there’s a simple answer – it came from nowhere, there’s no reason for it, maybe someone who knows the right mantras can exorcize it. Anyway, I’ve nothing to lose. And I don’t want it on record that our medico came up with something that might help and I turned it down.’

  ‘Come back talking psychobabble and I’ll kill you,’ promised Fran. He smiled but her eyes were serious. ‘Richard, don’t stake everything on this. I hope it works, I really do. But if it doesn’t I don’t want you thinking it’s you that failed. All right?’

  He kissed the top of her head. It was the only part of her he could reach without stooping. ‘All right.’

  But she knew even as he said it that, in the nature of his illness, it was a promise he couldn’t keep.

  Chapter Two

  The building was so tall that from street level perspective distorted the shape, compressing the upper storeys so that as the eye climbed the walls seemed to curve in. It was like looking through a fish-eye lens: lines which common sense insisted must be straight bulged and narrowed according to rules that had nothing to do with load-bearing.

  At first Richard thought an optical illusion also explained why one storey of the building seemed to be missing. He blinked and looked again. The first five hundred feet were complete, the blush-coloured stone rising from its plinth in a confection of steps and chunky Tuscan columns like a particularly durable birthday cake. And the penthouse on top was finished, capped with a pyramidal roof that emphasized how distance could compress solid masonry towards a vanishing-point. Apart from the plaza, which still had piles of building material under plastic sheeting where the plans showed lovers drinking wine under umbrellas, it looked ready to occupy.

  Except for one thing. Immediately below the penthouse was a thin slice of nothing, the top floor with its high-pitched roof seeming to float above the building like a cubist helicopter inching in to land. Narrowing his eyes Richard could pick out a filamentary framework of brown girders like denuded ribs, as if the structure were a great animal that some other animal had been disturbed in the process of eating. He knew nothing about civil engineering but he thought it an odd way to build: like writing the headlines and the weather forecast, and trusting to luck for the news to fill the gap.

  The letter confirming his reservation gave the venue as Lazaire’s Hotel and a functioning hotel was what he’d expected. But the foyer at the top of the pink steps was screened by plywood and there seemed no prospect of finding a receptionist inside.

  Richard Speke had regularly found his way to spots so remote they were missing from their own country’s maps. Now, assailed by doubt, he studied the letter – irritatingly personalized with a picture of himself in one corner – wondering if he’d come to the wrong place.

  Someone else had the same idea. ‘Today’s Friday and I think this is the right address. Was it a hoax?’ The young man behind him was puzzling over a letter identical, except for the photograph, to Richard’s.

  ‘Personal Discovery?’ He said it as if it were a joke. Now he was here he couldn’t imagine why he’d ever taken, it seriously. ‘Dear God, where did they get these photos? Yours is worse than mine.’

  At least Richard’s had been taken by a professional, though he couldn’t recall the occasion. He’d been wearing his suit so it must have been something formal. He supposed it came from the station’s PR department, wished they’d sent something a bit less pofaced.

  The photograph on the other man’s letter was never more than a poor snapshot, grainy, out of focus and badly cropped. ‘It’s the sort of snap my mother used to have in her album,’ he said in a quiet, rather colourless voice that went with the light brown hair that wasn’t quite fair and the grey eyes. ‘She’d start off with a family group, then cut off the people she wasn’t talking to. I’m Will Furney, by the way.’

  ‘Richard Speke.’

  ‘I recognized you.’

  ‘You’ve got a good memory,’ grunted Richard.

  A fractional lift of one pale eyebrow was will Furney’s only comment. He was younger than Richard, smaller and neater, and he looked as much at home among the piles of pipes and cladding as a string quartet in a working men’s club. Everything about him said desk job: h
is weekend clothes, casual only by comparison with a suit, his pale skin and economic movements, as if he worked where a careless gesture could send things flying. Accountant, Richard decided. Wife works in a building society, two point four children, family hatchback, cocker spaniel.

  ‘I won this in a competition,’ offered Will. ‘When it said three days in the penthouse suite of a new luxury hotel, this wasn’t how I pictured it.’

  Richard pointed. ‘There is a penthouse. The problem’s going to be getting there.’

  Construction workers wearing hard hats, nonchalant grins and those special drop-waist jeans designed for the building trade rode the front of the tower in cages. Will pursed his lips. ‘If that’s the way up they’ll have to drug me first.’

  ‘Excuse me, gentlemen?’

  Even without the accent, which was that of a Scottish gentlewoman of a certain age, it may have been the oddest salutation ever heard on a London building site. The men looked round but she wasn’t behind them in the boardwalk leading to the road; she wasn’t on the steps, or where the entrance would be when they took down the plywood; she wasn’t even – Richard checked – riding the façade in a cage.

  ‘The Lazaire’s Hotel banshee,’ he decided. ‘It’s heard whenever someone’s about to make a fool of himself.’

  ‘Better get used to it then, hadn’t we?’ Will was regretting his good fortune already.

  ‘Over here, gentlemen – the side door. Stay on the duckboards and you’ll avoid the mud.’

  There are few reliable photographs but neither man had heard of a banshee that wore a navy-blue suit and sensible shoes, and brushed its hair into permed corrugations like ripples in concrete. So perhaps she was only a woman of about sixty after all.

  She glanced at a list as they picked their way towards her. ‘It’s Mr Speke, isn’t it? And Mr Furney?’

  Will nodded. ‘Dr Graves?’

  The woman laughed as if he’d said something witty. ‘I’m Mrs Venables. I’ll be looking after you while you’re here. Don’t mind this.’ She gestured at the chaos around them. ‘We’ll be comfortable upstairs. Lovely views. Dr Graves is there now. Let me show you to the lift.’