The Lazarus Hotel

by Jo Bannister

  ‘How’s he getting up here?’ wondered Richard.

  ‘Maybe he was here all along,’ said Tariq.

  They’d searched carefully after Larry’s encounter; now they wondered if they’d missed something. Sheelagh walked the length of the corridor again in case they’d overlooked a cupboard he could have used but they hadn’t. The locked door was still locked.

  ‘There’s nowhere he could have been.’ She’d pulled on not her sharp suit but a powder-pink track suit; her hair, tangled from sleep, was tied loosely in the nape of her neck. ‘There’s also nowhere he could have come from. Make sense of that.’

  ‘Did you try the lift?’ asked Joe.

  Resigned to the fact that it was inoperative, she hadn’t. She went to try it now and Will went with her.

  No lights came on and no sound whispered in the shaft at the press of Sheelagh’s finger, its crimson point chipped. ‘Someone would have heard it anyway.’

  Will chewed pensively on his lip. ‘Even without a lift there’s still a shaft. Could there be another way up it – a ladder fixed to the wall, something like that?’

  ‘But you can’t open the doors if the lift isn’t there. For obvious reasons.’

  ‘They can be forced. The Fire Brigade would have it open in a moment.’

  She pursed her lips, half-amused, half-annoyed. ‘Got a handy fireman, have you?’

  ‘No.’ He put his hand to the seal on the doors. ‘But neither has this boy. If he’s coming and going quickly and quietly it isn’t so much a hatchet job as a five-finger exercise. Maybe there’s a weak spot that—’

  He never finished the sentence. His hand went through the rubber seal to the depth of his elbow; off balance he stumbled against the door, and the door opened.

  Joe said, ‘Until we get out of here on Monday we have to protect ourselves. We should double up on the rooms.’

  Though he still had teeth marks in his hand Larry was having trouble equating the terrified boy he’d cornered with Miriam’s injuries. ‘Is that necessary?’

  The older man waved an unsteady hand at the bed. ‘That happened because we had a room each. Do you want to wait till somebody else gets their head stove in? Is your privacy that important?’

  ‘He’s a boy,’ said Larry calmly, ‘only a boy. Maybe if he was scared enough, but—’

  ‘How old do you need to be to break someone’s head with a rolling-pin? Look, this isn’t a normal kid. He’s not much more than a wild animal, and he’s got some way of getting in here that we don’t understand. Sheelagh’s right – there isn’t a key left in the place. We’re stuck here for the rest of tonight and tomorrow, all tomorrow night and the next day, and all the night after that. If we double up we can look out for one another.’

  Larry shrugged, not troubling to hide his scorn. He was a physical man, considered himself equal to any physical threat. ‘If it makes you happy. Though you may have noticed we’re an odd number.’

  Tariq said, ‘No problem. Will you stay with Miriam, Tessa? I’ll stay too – until she wakes up she’s not going to be much use to you if the kid comes back.’

  ‘If you like,’ Tessa said, without much enthusiasm. ‘Joe’s right, it’s silly to take chances. We don’t want this happening again.’

  There was a muttered chorus of agreement from the gathering around the door. But then quiet fell and they moved aside for Sheelagh who, chalk-faced, was walking with one hand on the wall as if she couldn’t feel the floor. Richard reached for her but she brushed him off. She was concentrating on what she had to do, couldn’t afford to be distracted.

  Once in the room, with every eye on her and into a waiting silence she said, ‘Will’s dead.’ Her voice was low and empty; shock had stretched her eyes to huge cobalt pools in the parchment pallor of her face.

  For long seconds they could only stare at her. Will? Will was fine. They’d seen him a minute ago when he went to check the lift just down the corridor. If anything had happened to him they’d have known.

  Joe pressed her into the chair. ‘Sheelagh, what’s happened?’

  ‘The lift,’ she said. Her voice remained an aching monotone. ‘It wasn’t working, but he thought there might be a ladder inside. He felt for a weak place in the seal.’ She barked a little gruff laugh, cut it short when she felt it getting away from her. ‘He was right: there was one. When he found it the doors opened and he – and he – and—’

  Tariq said briefly, ‘I’ll go see.’ He left at a run.

  Sheelagh began to weep, without reserve or dignity, her mouth open and ragged, spit coming out with the words she couldn’t now stop. ‘He fell. He was terrified of heights, and he died falling forty storeys down a goddamned lift shaft. Six hundred feet falling in the dark. It must have felt like for ever.’

  Larry put an arm round her, clumsily, a man unpractised at gentleness, but she wouldn’t be comforted. ‘I could have saved him. I could have pulled him back. I grabbed for him as the doors opened. I touched his clothes. But I couldn’t— And then he was gone. He didn’t even shout. He fell into the darkness, and it was as if he’d never been here.’

  ‘It happened too fast,’ the coach explained, as if she’d missed a return. ‘Nobody reacts instantly. It takes a moment to work out what’s happening, what you have to do. By then it was already too late. You couldn’t have saved him, Sheelagh. No one could.’

  But as the shock faded her distress grew, great racking sobs bursting from her. There was no point talking any more. He pulled her into the curve of his body, stifled her crying against his shoulder.

  Richard was grey. He’d liked Will but that wasn’t the only reason. What had happened, what Sheelagh was feeling now – the grief and the guilt of being nearly and not quite able to save a life – was something he knew in the deepest fibres of him.

  Joe looked as if he’d been kicked in the face. For him too the thing had a personal dimension. It wasn’t just a tragic accident: Will’s death resonated in him as if he’d loosened the doors and given him a shove to make sure.

  There was nothing to learn at the lift. The doors had opened because of an obstruction between them and closed when it was gone. They looked like any pair of lift doors, except that the triangles that indicated where the gondola was were dark. Tariq dragged a couple of chairs from the conference room and made a barrier of them, not expecting anyone to repeat Will’s mistake but needing to do something. Then he returned to the sickroom.

  He was just in time to see Joe sway and his eyes roll. He grabbed him but there was nowhere left to sit him down. He steered him into the next room and into a chair, tipping him forward to get the blood back into his head.

  The older man moaned, ‘This is my fault.’

  ‘That’s nonsense,’ Tariq said firmly. ‘It’s nobody’s fault – not even the boy’s. He couldn’t know that by continually forcing the seal he was weakening it to the point where someone was going to fall. It was an accident. If you hadn’t suggested checking the lift someone else would have.’

  ‘You don’t understand.’ He pushed aside Tariq’s steadying hands. ‘I have to talk to – everyone.’

  Tariq watched with concern and wouldn’t let him up for fear he would fall. But as the seconds ticked by, the ghost of an intuition solidified into understanding. Eyes wide, he backed away and straightened up. ‘All right.’ His voice was hollow.

  When they saw the two men coming back and took in their expressions – Tariq’s watchful and controlled, Joe’s harrowed and defensive – they thought something else had happened. Tessa traded a quick, troubled glance with Richard, and Larry muttered, ‘Now what?’

  Joe cleared his throat and looked round. ‘Is everyone here?’ They were, including Mrs Venables, standing by the bedhead as if on sentry duty. ‘I have some things to say. I owe you – explanations, apologies – more than that, but— Oh God, what a mess. I didn’t want this. I didn’t want anything like this. I never intended anyone to get hurt. I just—

  ‘God,’ he groaned a
gain, ‘I’m doing this so badly. I wanted to meet you, to talk to you, mostly to listen. None of the rest of it—’ The half-formed sentences broke down in an incomprehensible jumble of words.

  Tariq sighed. ‘In case anybody didn’t get that,’ he said, ‘Joe is Cathy’s father.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  Sheelagh cried out and flew at him, claws out like a cat. She actually reached his face, leaving a bloody trail down his cheek. Then Tariq swept her up in one arm and held her against him. But he shared her feelings, saw no reason to protect Joe from a verbal assault.

  ‘You bastard!’ she screeched. ‘Will’s dead because of you. He needed a psychologist like God needs pockets. Now he’s all smashed up on the floor of the atrium. Are you satisfied? You wanted revenge, didn’t you? You wanted to make us pay. Will that do? Or won’t you rest till you’ve smashed us all?’

  Joe looked like an old, old man. He wasn’t surprised by her reaction. When he had decided to tell them, he’d known how they’d respond – had to: he was the author of great misfortune for reasons which seemed increasingly bizarre even to him. He‘d planned this before he met them. If he’d been right about them the consequences would still have been appalling but he could have justified what he did. Now even that consolation was denied him. His misjudgment had led to the death of a decent young man and a murderous attack on a woman who was his friend. He didn’t blame Sheelagh for swiping at him with her nails. He’d expected Larry to knock him down.

  But he needed to put the record straight, for his sake and theirs. He couldn’t maintain the deceit any longer. If in their fury they decided to chuck him down the lift shaft too he would hardly have resisted.

  ‘I don’t expect you to understand.’ His voice was a gravelly murmur, thick with emotion. ‘But I swear to you I never wanted anything like this. Miriam explained what I was trying to do. It doesn’t make much sense, I know – by the time we’d talked a little I knew it was a mistake. But I never imagined anyone could get hurt.’

  ‘Hurt?!’ echoed Richard, and his voice cracked. He looked as if he wanted to say more but nothing more came.

  Larry said flatly, ‘You’re lying. You may have set this up but you’re not Cathy’s father. She was black all the way through – she’d none of your blood in her.’

  ‘Neither mine nor Martha’s,’ agreed Joe, ‘but she was our child legally and every way that matters. We fostered her as a toddler, adopted her when her mum died. She chose to keep her own name. Since no one was ever going to take her for our natural child we thought it best too. As far as I can remember, that was the only problem we had adopting a black child. Twenty-odd years ago there weren’t the same ideological hoops to jump through. They reckoned if you wanted a kid and could look after it, and you were a nice couple, she was better off with you than in care. Political correctness hadn’t been thought of then. They still reckoned you were doing a child a favour by taking it in.’

  ‘Only a grown woman with a mind of her own wasn’t just as cute as a little black kid in pigtails. Was that when you lost interest?’ Larry was keeping his hands off the older man but the effort showed in his face. ‘I never coached anyone else whose parents didn’t want to see them play. I never met you, never even spoke to you on the phone. I knew I was taking care of her but you didn’t!’

  ‘That’s a monstrous thing to say!’ Joe literally spluttered with anger. ‘Cathy was our girl for most of her life. We loved her, wanted the best for her. When she asked us not to come to matches, reluctantly we agreed. Except sometimes we’d buy our tickets like anybody else and watch from the grandstand. A couple of times she spotted us but mostly she didn’t. Why didn’t she want us there? Like Will said, she wanted a private life, a place where she wasn’t anybody’s rising star. And it was easier not having to explain us. The racial awareness lobby made her feel a freak for having white parents.’

  Tessa was puzzled by practicalities. ‘You did all this? The hotel, everything? You said you were a printer. But this took serious money.’

  ‘I was a printer. Cartwright’s was a family firm – it ended up mine. I sold up when Martha became ill. One of the things I put the money into was Lazaire’s Hotels, and it bought me a favour when I needed it. Miriam explained how I got you all here. It began as a crusade – I wanted you to know the harm you’d done. After I’d listened to you for a while, found you weren’t what I was expecting, it wasn’t that clear-cut any more. But by then I had other reasons to keep going. I was learning things about Cathy – not all of them good. But she was my daughter, I wanted to know everything. Just hearing her name was like having her back for a little while. If I’d confessed you’d have left and I’d have lost her for good.’

  ‘So you marooned us up here,’ gritted Larry. ‘You had them fix the lift so we couldn’t leave before you’d gorged on all our sad little memories. What kind of a man would do that – pick over the bones of his dead child?’

  A little earlier, staggering under a burden of remorse, Joe had come to bare his soul before these people, willing to accept almost any expression of their fury. But he was not a victim by nature and as he recovered from the initial shock of Will‘s death the urge towards martyrdom diminished. Fisting big artisan’s hands in the front of Larry’s sweatshirt he slammed the startled athlete against the wall.

  ‘How dare you say that to me? This is my girl we’re talking about – of course I want to know what happened to her. One minute everything was fine; then she says she’s going through a sticky patch but she’s got her fingers crossed; then she’s given it all up and she’s making drunken scenes at nightclubs, and before I’ve got over that they’re dragging her car out of the Thames. And I don’t know how it happened. I was the only father she ever knew. I nursed her through mumps, I taught her to swim, I held her hand in the sad bits of Bambi. I loved her. I thought I knew her.’

  He swallowed hard. ‘Then there’s people on the doorstep telling me she’s killed herself. Cathy? She was a fighter, I’d have said suicide was nowhere in her nature. Something happened to change her profoundly that last year. Maybe if I hadn’t been so preoccupied with Martha’s illness I’d have seen it coming. But I didn’t, and none of those who did picked up the phone to tell me. You didn’t. He didn’t’ – a jerk of his head at Tariq. ‘You both knew she was coming apart but you never thought to discuss it with her parents. So don’t you dare criticize me. If I’d known she was in trouble when you did she’d be alive today.’

  But the coach had loved her too. Neither man could face the idea that he might have done something more, or something different, to save her. They were ready to fight rather than share the responsibility.

  Tessa interrupted icily. ‘If you’re going to scrap, don’t do it in my sickroom.’

  Trading killer looks, the men backed off. Joe cleared his throat. ‘For the record, I didn’t tell the builders to put the lift out of commission.’

  ‘Why should we believe that,’ demanded Sheelagh, ‘when you’ve done nothing but lie to us since before we met?’

  ‘I think it’s true.’ It was Mrs Venables, still on sentry go at the bedhead. ‘I’m Dr Graves’housekeeper, when we’re not doing this I look after her at home. I was involved from early on. I knew what Mr Lockhead had in mind and how he meant to do it, but the first I knew of the lifts going off was when the builders called up.’

  Sheelagh tossed her dark mane angrily. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter. The man responsible for Will being here is responsible for his death.’

  Joe’s voice was low. ‘I didn’t say I wasn’t.’

  They weren’t getting anywhere now, just piling on the hurts. Tariq broke it up. ‘We’ll have to talk some more about this. But Tessa’s right, this isn’t the place. Let’s make some coffee and plan the sleeping arrangements.’

  The rooms were all of a size: they moved bedding and belongings into those nearest the lift. It took a sweaty hour to arrange things to everyone’s satisfaction but no one complained. It was what they neede
d: something to occupy their hands and leave their minds free to consider developments. It wasn’t just the death of Will Furney, or meeting their tormentor. It was the way fear had crept up all around, barely noticed, like a mist rising out of the earth at evening.

  They’d been puzzled; they’d been angry; they’d been horrified by the lightning strikes of mayhem. But somewhere in the recent past all that had been swallowed up by fear. They were afraid of the dark. They were afraid of the emptiness of the great building under them. They were afraid of the boy, afraid of each other, afraid to be alone. Trapped between a bitter man’s vendetta and the random violence of a mad child, the millennia peeled away like sunburn and left them craving the comfort of caves, spaces they could fill with their own bodies leaving no dark corners to be colonized by phantoms, narrow entrances they could shut against the unknown and the danger of attack.

  But the human mind cannot sustain an unrelenting level of either joy or fear. By the time the last bag had found a home under the last bed the intensity of their feelings had eased. Still afraid, they were learning to handle the fear. Joe remained unforgiven but recriminations would have to wait. A time would come when they would be rehearsed in detail but for now there was a broad acceptance that, whoever was to blame for the situation, they were in it together. Somehow they had to get through the next few difficult days, and putting their grievances on hold made that possible.

  The most volatile among them, Sheelagh was also about the most resilient. She locked up deep within her the terrible memory of what she’d witnessed and threw herself into the furniture removals with a passion, even managing a small joke. Lowering the foot of a bed that had Tariq at its head, she grunted, ‘The name of this place – they spelt it wrong.’

  He didn’t follow. ‘What should it be?’

  ‘The Lazarus Hotel,’ she said, kneading a kink out of her back. ‘Take up your bed and walk.’

  Larry put his head round the door, looking for Tariq. ‘Those chairs in front of the lift. Did you put them there?’