The Lazarus Hotel

by Jo Bannister

  He said, inanely, ‘Hello.’ Then his knees folded under him and he sat down with the surprised expression of a puppet breaking a string. The laughter of sheer relief rippled through the anxious gathering.

  Richard came next, twisting awkwardly, extending his left hand to Tariq, gripping the edge of the door with the other.

  In a fraction of a second everything changed. Richard’s right hand skidded wildly; instead of guiding him to safety Tariq was left carrying his whole weight, his hand Richard’s only contact with reality. Richard let out a startled squawk as his feet swung in space. His flailing right hand found the track again but grease on his fingers ruined his grip. Whatever he touched took the slippery contagion and would not support him.

  A moment later Larry realized what had happened. ‘Hold him!’ He hauled Will to his feet and stripped the cord off him like undressing a child. There was nowhere to tie it so he knotted swift loops in both ends and tossed one to Joe. ‘And you hold that, tight!’ Full length on the floor with his head and shoulders in the void, he fished for Richard’s foot.

  Time warped again. It took Larry maybe a minute to make his catch and join Joe on the rope. But Tariq was holding Richard much longer than that. He had all the time in the world for two perfectly coherent thoughts. The first was that Richard was heavier than he looked: he couldn’t hold this thin cord much longer without it cutting through his flesh. And the other was that if that was what it took that was how it would have to be, because he’d rather die than turn his back on another desperate human being.

  Then small strong hands – Sheelagh’s – joined his on the cord. Her support may have been more moral than practical, but it kept him going until Joe and Larry were able to share the strain, pulling Richard to safety over the lip, landing him like a gasping, exhausted fish. The doors closed on the void with a faintly disappointed hiss.

  For a long time no one spoke. They sprawled in the corridor recovering breath and nerve. One hand after another patted Will’s arm or shoulder as if to confirm that he was alive. But no one spoke. Even when Richard realized Midge wasn’t with them, had vanished again into the empty carcass of the building, he managed only a pant of regret.

  Joe was the first to find a voice, and it climbed in a gravelly plaint at how near to disaster they had come. ‘What the hell happened?’

  ‘Grease.’ Richard held up his right hand, palm out. ‘Must have been left over from when they installed the lift. Mustn’t have expected people to be climbing up and down the shaft. No imagination.’ He had to break the sentences in half to get them out a breath at a time.

  The older man peered at his hand with an intensity no one else understood. Then he cleared his throat. ‘If that was left by the men installing the lift, this must have been where they ate their sandwiches. That isn’t grease. I think it’s butter.’

  Chapter Nineteen

  Richard stared at the pale oily residue in amazement. ‘Where the hell did I pick that up?’

  Tariq hauled himself up, padded over to the lift. The doors were closed now; there was an oily smear to the left of the join. ‘Here, by the looks of things.’ He exhaled in a silent whistle. ‘Thank God you didn’t touch it on the way down. You’d never have made it.’

  On her knees beside him Tessa peered into Will’s eyes, felt along his ribs till he winced. ‘Come into the cottage hospital. I’ll see if I can make you a bit more comfortable.’ With Joe to help, Will made it to his feet and, shakily, into the room where Miriam Graves still slept impervious to all the drama.

  A frown creased Richard’s freckled brow. ‘I don’t get this. If that’s where it came from, how did I miss it on the way down? But there was nothing wrong with my grip right up to the moment when I had no grip at all.’ He stood at the door making t’ai chi movements, trying to remember exactly where he put his hands as he climbed into the shaft. Still he could make no sense of it. He must have held the side of the door, couldn’t have reached the track without. Defeated, he shook his head. ‘It couldn’t have been there earlier.’

  ‘It must have been,’ Tariq said reasonably. ‘How could it have got there in the fifteen minutes you were down below? You think maybe Larry got bored holding the door open and sent out for a sandwich?’ He meant it as a joke. When Richard failed even to smile his eyes widened and his voice stumbled. ‘In God’s name, what are you thinking? That it wasn’t an accident? You’re crazy. Why would Larry want you to fall? Why would anyone?’

  Sheelagh was standing beside them, following their exchange intently. She said quietly, ‘I know who might want you to fall, and it isn’t Larry.’

  They stared at her. ‘Who?’

  ‘That crazy boy. No, don’t look at me like that,’ she said, fielding Tariq’s dismissive glance. ‘Think about it. We’ve already had two incidents he was responsible for. Doesn’t that alone make him prime suspect for a third?’

  ‘We don’t know that he hit Miriam. And though you could blame him for Will’s fall it wasn’t deliberate. And he helped us to get him back when we couldn’t have managed alone.’

  ‘We gave him no choice! Larry was about to beat the crap out of him and he knew it – he’d have said and done anything then. Yes, he helped Richard get to Will. But if he greased the handholds he never intended them to get back. It was only good luck that saved them. He made damn sure he wasn’t there to, didn’t he? Isn’t that a little suggestive too?’

  ‘But – why?’

  ‘Because he resents us and he’s scared of us. Because this is his home and his adventure playground, and it was all his every night when the builders went home. When we moved in he felt invaded. God knows how he expected to get away with murder. He may be just crazy enough to think that if he got rid of us no one else would come.’

  Richard was slowly shaking his head. ‘It doesn’t work. No, listen.’ Sheelagh swallowed her interruption and listened. ‘Midge went down the shaft ahead of me and when we came up he kept going. He never touched that door again. How did he grease it so that I missed it going down but met it coming up?’

  Tariq shrugged. ‘Maybe it was there all along and you were luckier where you put your hand first time. Maybe it really does date back to the builders’sandwiches.’

  ‘And maybe you’ll keep making excuses for that boy until he finally kills someone,’ snapped Sheelagh in exasperation. ‘I’m not suggesting that we lynch him on the basis of what I suspect. I’m suggesting we take precautions in case I’m right, and if we get another opportunity we hold on to him and never mind how little he likes it.’

  Tessa joined them, drying her hands on a towel. ‘I agree. Too many odd and dangerous things are happening. There are only two choices – either Midge is behind them or someone else is. Who do we consider more likely to be rifling through our belongings, stealing keys and attacking us? Do we really think there’s another Care in the Community case wandering round up here?’

  ‘All right,’ conceded Richard, ‘some of it was obviously him. It was him knocked over Mrs Venables’tray, and it was him rooting round in Sheelagh’s belongings. I don’t think he meant any harm – he’s like a child, he likes pretty things. But he swears he didn’t hit Miriam, and if he wanted to harm us why did he help rescue Will?’

  Tessa shrugged. ‘You’re talking as if he’s normal. He’s not. He may not be able to form and carry through coherent plans the way you and I can. He may not be capable of sustained logic. Anyway, what’s the alternative? If it wasn’t him it was one of us.’

  ‘Don’t let’s get silly.’ Tariq fetched a cloth from the kitchen, scrubbed the grease off the lift door. Feeling their eyes, a little bashfully he explained. ‘If he didn’t put it here it’s more of a danger to Midge than to anyone. You don’t really want him to fall.’

  Sheelagh shook her head in wonder. ‘God forbid.’

  By then it was full day. Because it was Saturday the streets below were not filling at the customary rate with jostling, blaring traffic but there were signs of life that made th
eir isolation atop a pinnacle of glass and masonry more pointed somehow, more offensive. Six hundred feet away, which is nothing measured in strides along the ground, there were people who could help them: turn on the power, send up the lift, summon the police to investigate the violence they had suffered.

  But the people below, delivering milk and papers, hurrying to their high-powered breakfast meetings or Saturday morning exercise classes, didn’t know there were others marooned in the empty building, and those in the penthouse didn’t know how to tell them. They might have dropped messages – a hundred might have blown away but eventually one would have been found and read – if they could have opened a window. But it was a modern air-conditioned building, its toughened windows impervious to all but light. They could have launched their paper planes from the roof, but wherever the access was it wasn’t in the small block of rooms between the blank wall and the locked door. Anything they dropped down past the lift would only be found when the builders returned on Monday morning.

  ‘It’s incredible,’ said Larry, shaking his head in savage amusement. ‘Here we are in the heart of one of the great cities of the world, with thousands of people inside a half-mile radius, and we could die up here before we could attract their attention.’

  ‘I’ve got an idea about that,’ murmured Will. There was a purpling bruise on his temple and he moved stiffly, his ribs bound up beneath his shirt. ‘But it’ll have to wait till tonight – it won’t work in daylight.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘We’ve got lights, haven’t we? This high up we must be visible for miles. If we start flashing an SOS somebody’s bound to notice.’

  ‘They’d just think we were having trouble with the power,’ objected Sheelagh.

  ‘Maybe most of them would. But as Larry says, there are thousands, maybe millions of people who can see this building. All it needs is for one of them to be looking, to recognize the most identifiable piece of Morse code in the world and to pick up the phone. It might take a couple of hours but it could save us a day and a half.’

  Richard was nodding with growing conviction. ‘He’s right. Something like that, somebody would notice. Why did nobody think of it last night?’

  ‘Stupidity?’ hazarded Tariq, and they grinned. ‘At least somebody’s thought of it now. Another twelve hours and it’ll be dark again. What shall we do till then?’

  ‘Come and eat your breakfast,’ said Mrs Venables firmly, coming in with a tray. Joe carried another and together they set the table. ‘It’s a bit skimpy, I’m afraid – I don’t want to run out of things if we’re not sure how long we’re going to be here. Incidentally,’ she added, gazing round with a certain censure, ‘it would be easier to judge what we’re going to need if people would stop raiding the pantry. Somebody must be eating butter with a spoon!’

  There was a sharp intake of breath around the table. ‘So much for the builders’sandwiches,’ murmured Tariq, his eyes low. Against all the odds he’d still hoped it was an accident. It was impossible to go on believing that now.

  ‘Why?’ whispered Richard, appalled.

  Tariq shook his head. ‘The question is who?‘

  ‘You do know what you’re saying?’ Sheelagh’s small, strong body was taut. ‘That while Richard was hand-over-handing it down the lift shaft in the hope there was enough left of Will to be worth rescuing, one of us was greasing the door so they’d both fall, and this time maybe they’d die. Is that what you believe? Honestly?’

  Tariq would have given anything to be able to deny it. But the situation was too serious for good manners. His eyes were steady. ‘Yes.’

  Larry said tightly, ‘I was there from when Richard went down until he came up. I never left the door – if I had it would’ve closed. You’re saying either I did it or I stood by and let someone else do it.’

  ‘I’m not accusing anyone,’ Tariq insisted. But in the circumstances the words lacked conviction.

  Will had been present more in body than in spirit, so his mind was uncluttered by recollections. ‘Which side of the door were you standing?’

  ‘On the right. They climbed down on the left so I stood on the right to shine the torch past them.’

  ‘And the grease was on the left?’ Richard nodded. ‘How much was there?’

  ‘Enough. It wasn’t plastered on but it was well spread about.’

  ‘It could have been done without Larry knowing. Say it was me. I put some on my left hand, then I go and ask Larry what’s happening. He looks down the shaft and says, Nothing much. He isn’t going to notice that I’m resting my hand on the side of the door. I could have run it up and down a dozen times and he still wouldn’t have seen.’ It was a modest enough demonstration of logic, but they were impressed enough to embarrass him. He lifted narrow shoulders self-deprecatingly. ‘Just because it could have been done that way doesn’t mean it was.’

  ‘No,’ Larry said slowly. ‘It could still have been me. But I know it wasn’t.’

  ‘Before we go any further,’ Tariq said, ‘has anyone got an innocent explanation? I mean, we all do daft things. If somebody dropped the butter and got it on their hands, now’s the time to say so.’ He waited but no one said anything. ‘Then who was standing by the lift while all this was going on? We know about Larry. Who else?’

  After a moment the hands started going up. Only the housekeeper’s remained in her lap. Larry nodded ruefully. ‘That’s my recollection – just about everybody had a look at some point.’

  ‘I don’t know how relevant this is,’ said Tariq. ‘But when Richard slipped and I was holding him, Larry and Sheelagh were right there to help. If either of them wanted him dead they could have got themselves offside.’

  ‘If we’re trading alibis,’ offered Tessa, ‘I can vouch for Mrs Venables. She never left Miriam’s side while all this was going on.’

  Some at once and some more slowly, some with a tactful hesitancy and others quite frankly, the gaze of all present swivelled round to Joe. He’d put his tray on the dining table and sat down heavily behind it. The lines of his face were set, his expression hard to read. It could have been hurt at what they were thinking, or the soul-clenching anger of a man with enough hatred to want people dead, or a kind of defensive carapace against their accusations because he couldn’t disprove them.

  Sheelagh said softly, ‘Joe?’

  He looked at her then. ‘What? Did I try to kill Miriam and Will and Richard? No, I didn’t.’

  ‘But you did ask someone to check the lift,’ she remembered.

  ‘Check it,’ he agreed shortly. ‘Not force it open and dive through.’

  Richard was remembering too. ‘Yesterday evening I was talking to Miriam and she went to have a word with Joe. Then we heard Midge yell and we all made for the corridor.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘If she caught up with him later, Joe could have been the last person she saw before she was attacked.’

  Tariq was watching the older man. ‘Did she talk to you, Joe?’

  For a moment it seemed he would refuse to answer, hunch down behind the redoubt of his craggy impervious face and take the tentative artillery of their questions. Then he softened. ‘Yes, she did. She came to my room after supper. She thought it was time I explained. I argued. She said she wasn’t going to stand by and let me perform emotional vivisection on you.’ He looked at Richard. ‘She said you, for one, had had just about as much as you could take.’ Richard flushed but didn’t deny it. ‘She said if I wouldn’t make a clean breast of it she would.’

  ‘And you were angry,’ Tariq suggested. ‘You’d gone to all this trouble and she was going to let you down. You followed her to her room and…’ He tailed off.

  ‘And picking up a handy rolling-pin I hit her over the head?’ offered Joe, heavily ironic. ‘That wasn’t snatched up in the heat of an argument. The rolling-pin equals premeditation. Is that what you’re saying – that I meant to murder her? She’s my friend. If she wasn’t none of this would have been possible. Maybe
I do hate you, and him, and him’ – his eyes stabbed round the circle – ‘and all of you. Maybe I’ve hated you so long I want to see you dead. So I could have tried to kill any or all of you. I didn’t, but it’s possible. But do you really think I argued with Miriam, went to the kitchen for a rolling-pin, went to her room and beat her head in?’

  There was a long silence. No one ventured an opinion. Probability wasn’t the issue: everything that had happened since Friday morning had surprised them. Joe Lockhead could have attacked the psychologist and tried to kill the climbers; so, on the basis of strict possibility, could others. Actions that seemed to clear them of suspicion might have been performed for that purpose.

  Tariq sighed. ‘Tell you one thing. We’ll have to move the beds again.’

  ‘What?!!’

  He had the grace to look embarrassed. ‘One of us is dangerous. If we sleep two to a room someone’s going to be alone with that person. I suggest Tessa and I stay with Miriam and the rest of you move in here. All right with you, Tessa?’ He smiled gently. ‘I can’t prove I’m not the mad axeman, but if I’d meant Richard to fall I wouldn’t have sweated blood hanging on to him.’

  She smiled back. ‘I’ll take your word for it. Hell, I feel safer already.’

  Chapter Twenty

  No one used the words Prime Suspect but the feeling was unmistakable, hanging in the air. When they carried the mattresses into the conference room, Joe’s ended up nearest to the door; without a word of comment Richard’s was moved from the corner and put in its place.

  Joe lowered both brows in a scowl. ‘You want me to carry a bell as well?’ But no one smiled. It was only funny if he were innocent.

  To make room for the mattresses and personal effects the dining table was pushed into the middle of the long room, the sofas were pushed against the walls and the ring of chairs Miriam had set out were stacked roughly out of the way. As if there’d been a party, thought Richard, the drunks had ended up dossing on the floor, but now it was time to start tidying up.