The Lazarus Hotel

by Jo Bannister

  He would have died rather than say any of that. Instead he chewed his lip reflectively. ‘I’ll get another chair.’

  Tessa laughed out loud, the first time anyone had done so for some time, and the hazel eyes danced. ‘Are you always such a clown?’

  ‘Um – probably.’

  ‘Well, go and be a comfortable clown in your own bed. I don’t need watching over. Anyway, I think Mrs Venables is going to sit with Miriam so we can keep one another company. We’ll call if we need you.’

  ‘No,’ he said, serious now, ‘it’s too risky. Too much has happened already. I’m not leaving two women to cope with him alone. Mrs Venables, why don’t you get some rest in the other room? You could give Tessa a break halfway through the night if they’re still both OK.’

  The wrinkles on Mrs Venables’ brow reflected the grey corrugations of her perm. Though plainly unwilling to leave her employer with strangers, she’d been on watch for eighteen hours with hardly a break; if she didn’t take the chance to sleep now she’d nod off at her post, a poor guardian for the helpless woman. ‘You’ll both stay here? You’ll call me if either of you’s going to leave?’

  ‘Promise,’ said Tariq.

  ‘And if she wakes up?’

  ‘And if she wakes up. Go on, get a break while you can.’

  The housekeeper nodded, reluctantly conceding the wisdom of it. In the doorway she turned back. ‘And if—’

  ‘Mrs Venables, if she snores, sneezes, rolls over or starts whistling “Dixie” I’ll call you. I promise. Now go!’ She went.

  Tessa examined the big woman by torchlight, Tariq watching from a respectful distance. ‘I think she’ll wake up before long.’

  ‘Then maybe we can find out once and for all who hit her.’

  ‘If she remembers. People often don’t after concussion. Or they think they remember but it’s wrong, they dreamt it.’

  ‘So even if she says it was Joe we still can’t be sure?’

  ‘Not beyond reasonable doubt,’ Tessa said wryly. She turned then to her newest patient, played the torch over his stolid sleeping countenance. ‘He’s not going to hurt anyone else, you know. Not in this state. You should get some sleep while everything’s quiet.’

  He shrugged broad shoulders. ‘I know, I worry too much. But I promised Mrs V. Besides, Joe waking up isn’t the only danger. If it was him who hit Miriam you’re probably safe enough. But if it wasn’t, neither of them will be much help if the real culprit comes back.’

  They were alone with the sleepers. Tessa spoke her mind. ‘I can only express a medical opinion. I didn’t know any of you before we came here, I certainly don’t know anything about Joe that you don’t. But pathologically it makes sense. He’s been under a lot of stress – he’s been through a double grieving, and before he found his feet he was planning this. Stress is a major factor in maturity-onset diabetes.

  ‘We know he was behind a lot of what’s happened. He launched a hate campaign against the people he blamed for his daughter’s suicide. Then at the last minute someone he needed to carry it through let him down. He was already wavering between sanity and the other thing. Suppose fury tipped him over and he hit her? The emotional stress of that would send his need for insulin soaring. A healthy pancreas responds, a fragile one loses control.’ Her gaze was steady. ‘I’m not saying that going into a diabetic coma proves Joe attacked Miriam. I’m saying it would be consistent medically.’

  It was the least unpalatable of the options before them. Joe had a motive, he’d had time to plan his actions and enough freedom to carry them out. He and Miriam were friends; she’d have lowered her guard with him in a way she wouldn’t with the others. He could have booby-trapped the lift as easily as anyone else. But carrying so much anger in his heart brought on a disease that betrayed him into the hands of his victims. As well as medical consistency there was a kind of justice to that which almost compelled belief.

  Tariq would have been satisfied but for the sheer convenience of it. If Joe was responsible for all that had happened and now he’d collapsed, they were safe. It didn’t matter if the lights were out; it didn’t matter if they had to survive another day and night on cold baked beans and mineral water. They were safe. Even when he came round they wouldn’t let him threaten them again. If they watched Joe they wouldn’t have to watch each other.

  If Joe were the attacker. If not, the fact that they believed themselves safe was the most dangerous thing of all.

  This wasn’t Tariq’s world. He put together deals. He wooed clients, charmed money out of sponsors. He’d walked a lot of tightropes in his time but they all had nets beneath: nobody suffered, except financially, from wearing the wrong logo on their shirt. He’d never made decisions that lives could depend on. He didn’t want that responsibility.

  But somehow it had come his way and no one wanted to take it back. So he made the best decisions he could, but any mistakes would be on the side of caution. Maybe Joe did attack Miriam Graves; maybe he wanted to kill them all; but Tariq wasn’t going to stake anyone’s life on it.

  ‘So I’m fussing. But let’s make sure, OK? We’ll both stay. If only to save me from Mrs Venables’wrath if she finds out I fibbed.’

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  In the conference room they prepared for the night ahead with a strange ambivalence. They very much wanted to believe it was over. They’d been anxious, even afraid, even those who would never admit it; but if things were as they seemed this time there was no more cause for concern. They would still be cold, they might be hungry, they would ache for rescue by Monday morning, but they had nothing more to fear in the way of violence. No one had to worry that he was turning his back on a would-be murderer.

  If the jigsaw pieces were giving the true picture this time, and the sick man across the corridor had done all they believed. But they’d had a suspect before: they’d blamed Midge. It seemed they’d been wrong. Or they were wrong this time, in which case they were warming their hands at the hearth of relief altogether too soon.

  So although it was late, and they’d been awake since early morning, and all the light they had was one small torch – Tessa having claimed the other for the sickroom – they were less keen to sleep than they might have been. With the mattresses pushed together in a corner of the room, with their warmest clothes on under the duvets and their coats spread on top, they looked for some other way to pass the time.

  They began by talking about what they’d do when they got out on Monday morning. But that was like discussing Christmas: it was too far away to seem real. After this long cold night there would be another, with a long cold day between. And when they left here, after they’d told their story to an incredulous constabulary – ‘You’re saying you couldn’t find any way of letting us know what was happening in nearly three days?’ – they would have nothing in common any more. They would go back to their diverse lives, to families who would listen raptly to the first and second tellings, dutifully to the third, then go and feed the cat. It was a future they yearned for, but here and now reality was one another, people they hadn’t known before Friday.

  So the conversation drifted back to the one thing they had in common: Cathy Beacham, who had the world at her feet and somehow kicked it over the fence and past recovery.

  ‘The bit I have trouble with,’ said Sheelagh, ‘is that it ended in suicide. I’d never have believed that. Cathy was a born survivor. I’d have said nothing could happen to her that she couldn’t hammer into some sort of viable compromise. She was the last person in the world to take a dive because things didn’t work out.’ She meant it as a figure of speech, winced at its aptness.

  ‘She didn’t lose her grip because things went wrong,’ remembered Larry. ‘It was the other way round.’

  ‘Then why? What made her change?’

  He shrugged. ‘I never found out. There are always ups and downs, you have good games and bad ones, times when the run of the court seems against you and others when you’d win playing wit
h a biscuit-tin lid instead of a racket. But Cathy knew that. She’d been through rough spots before. She knew the answer because it’s always the same – work. If you’re playing badly work not only improves your game, it makes you feel positive about it and that gets you winning again. And if you’re cruising work keeps you sharp. Nobody’s at their peak all the time. You have to be philosophical about the odd defeat. But not so philosophical that it becomes easier to lose than to fight.’

  The others who knew her had seen the change taking place, had tried to help and had their efforts repulsed, had finally accepted they were powerless to reverse the process and make the girl who she had been before. Even Sheelagh, who hadn’t seen her for years, met Cathy shortly before her death and knew that her childhood friend was long gone.

  But the last time Will saw the girl he’d wanted to marry she was riding her success, high on achievement and ambition, sure where she was going and willing to make whatever sacrifices were necessary. As one of those sacrifices he had not shared her enthusiasm, but he hadn’t thought she was on the brink of disaster either. He had worried that those around her would let her down, never imagined she’d let them down.

  They’d had two good years together, had made each other happy. Cathy’s decision to separate came out of nowhere, devastatingly sudden, irrevocable. She’d said (or had he assumed? – so long after it was hard to be sure) that it was forced on her, that her agent or coach had thought him a poor consort for their golden girl. It was a comfortable notion in a way because it relieved him of responsibility for what followed. But meeting the two men, confronting the gap between perception and reality – Tariq an amiable guru, even Larry with his iron dedication no thug – challenged his memory of events. Carefully not looking at the man he murmured, ‘Larry, did you tell her to finish with me?’

  Larry was plainly startled. ‘Me? No.’

  ‘Advise her, then.’

  The coach shook his head. ‘It was none of my business. I told her how to play tennis. I told her how to eat, how to exercise, how to train and how to win. But her personal life was just that – personal, and hers. You think she’d have let me tell her who she could and couldn’t see? A couple of times I warned her the late nights were damaging her game. But what she was doing when she should have been sleeping, and who she was doing it with, were her concern. I didn’t expect her to be a nun. All I cared was that her extramural activities didn’t spoil her game. Tell her to elbow you? I didn’t know you from a hole in the wall.’

  ‘But she said—’ Will heard the plaintive whine in his voice and stopped.

  Larry’s tone softened. ‘Maybe she was trying to let you down lightly.’

  ‘There was someone else?’ He sounded surprised.

  ‘After you? Of course there was. She didn’t go into purdah just because you left the scene.’

  ‘Who?’

  Larry shrugged. ‘I never met him either. He wasn’t a tennis-player, that’s all I know. Harry something – or was it Jerry? I only remember that because of some joke she made about his name and mine.’ What she’d said was that it was enough to have one of them riding her all night without having the other on her back all day, but some impulse of decency stopped him sharing that with Will. The man was hurting enough.

  But Will was also thinking. ‘Then where’s he?’

  Larry didn’t understand. But Sheelagh did and her eyes sharpened. ‘That’s right. We’re here because Joe reckoned we let her down, yes? But if she left Will for this other guy, why isn’t he here instead?’

  ‘Maybe he couldn’t find him,’ Richard suggested.

  ‘So he roped in the guy Cathy dumped for him? Is it likely?’

  Richard’s sandy eyebrows climbed. If logic was any criterion none of them would be here. But he took her point. ‘Then maybe he didn’t know about Harry. He didn’t see much of Cathy that last year, remember – maybe she never told him she had someone new.’

  ‘He knew about me,’ said Sheelagh. ‘Not just that Cathy and I used to be friends – he knew she’d come to me for a job and I turned her down. She must have talked pretty freely that last time he saw her. So why didn’t he know about Harry?’

  Richard puzzled over it but came up with no answer. If she’d poured out her heart in enough detail to include the fact that she’d been refused a job by an old school-friend, why had she made no mention of the man in her life? Perhaps by then he was the ex-man in her life. But her father thought it was Will who let her down. Why did she let him think that?

  ‘Maybe he was married,’ offered Larry. ‘Maybe she knew there was no future in it.’

  ‘So she didn’t tell her people she’d finished with Will? She let them go on asking after him, wondering when she was going to bring him home? You wouldn’t,’ said Sheelagh, shaking her head with the certainty of someone who’d been there. ‘You’d say, It wasn’t getting anywhere, I gave him the push. And to stop them asking if there was anyone else you’d say, I’m too busy, I haven’t time for men right now.’

  ‘But for nearly a year,’ Will said slowly, ‘she let her people believe it was still her and me. Maybe there wasn’t much risk of them hearing different, but why pretend? We’d never met – why would they care if she threw me over? Why not just say, You know Thingy the solicitor? – he’s old news. Isn’t that what she said to you?’ Larry nodded without comment. ‘Then why not to her parents?’

  Sheelagh knew. ‘Because Larry was only interested in her tennis but her parents were interested in her life. They’d have asked questions she didn’t want to answer: why, why now, when she’d been happy with you for two years and you were planning to marry and then suddenly it’s over? Larry didn’t ask any of that, and she knew he wouldn’t. She was safe telling him.’

  The coach bristled. ‘It was none of my business. She had to have some life I’d no say in, for God’s sake!

  ‘Coach and athlete, that’s a relationship that’s too close for comfort a lot of the time. It has to be. You have to know a person inside out to get the best out of them, but there’s a price to pay. There’s no privacy, not even in your head. Your thoughts, feelings, desires, fears – you have to be ready to share all that, and have it picked over and pulled apart in case there’s a bit of extra performance to be got out of it. Most athletes hate their coaches most of the time. For a day or two after a good win they love us dearly, but most of the time they hate our guts. It’s not a bad thing. When you’re too damn tired to remember why you’re doing this you can keep going on hate.

  ‘But you need someone else to talk to. Friends, family, lovers, even casual acquaintances and pets – anyone who hasn’t seen you doubled up and crying with cramp and frustration. You need someone who won’t try to use what you say, because you know that sooner or later your coach will. That’s his job.’

  ‘Would Tariq have known about this – Harry?’ Will fought the urge to spit the name out and then wipe his mouth on his sleeve. After all, it wasn’t Harry who owed him better: it was Cathy, that he’d loved, that he’d been engaged to, who lied to him.

  ‘Ask him.’

  Will pushed the quilt aside and stood up, wincing at the tug on his side. Tessa had found no broken ribs. There had been just enough give in the acrylic to absorb the first massive impact of his fall, not quite enough for it to collapse and let him through. Despite the fact that he felt bruised in every muscle, and would feel worse before he felt better, he knew he’d been lucky. ‘Talk among yourselves till I get back.’ He gave a quick grin. ‘About me, if you like.’ He closed the door behind him to conserve the heat.

  Only as he felt his way up the black corridor did he remember that they were supposed to be seeking safety in numbers. But that was before Joe’s seizure, and even if the man was feeling better now he was under constant supervision. How much danger could he be? And indeed, Will reached the bedroom without incident and tapped on the door. ‘Can I have a word?’

  No one answered. That should have alerted him: two responsible people wa
tching over a psychopath were unlikely to take forty winks at the same time. But that’s what he thought: that it was late, everything was quiet, both patients were asleep and Tessa and Tariq were dozing. He opened the door and put his head round. ‘Everything OK?’

  There was no light in the room; probably they’d turned the torch off to save the batteries. But the blinds were gone, their cords sacrificed to his rescue, and the sky above a major city is never entirely dark. There was enough pinkish backwash to show him – well, nothing. No one in the chair beside the door. No one in the chair beside the nearest bed. No one in the bed.

  ‘Oh shit,’ he said, very softly and with utter foreboding.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The bed under the window was still occupied: he could see the mound that was Miriam Graves, slumbering undisturbed through another crisis. At least, he assumed she was sleeping. In sudden horrid premonition he leaned over the bed, peering in the near darkness for signs of life. For an awful moment he thought there were none – that what had been started with a rolling-pin had been finished with a pillow, or a pair of strong hands, or another blow. But then Miriam gave a little mumble that was half a snore and shifted under the duvet, and Will exhaled in relief.

  He turned his mind to the question of the three other people who should have been in that room and weren’t. He tried the bathroom, though he couldn’t imagine the circumstances in which they would all have piled in there together. With no window the place was dark enough to develop photographs: Will made sure it was empty by the simple if nerve-racking expedient of groping round until he was sure he’d have found anyone in there, alive or dead.