The Lazarus Hotel

by Jo Bannister

  Leaving the bathroom his foot came down in glass. Already broken, it splintered under his weight. He shuddered. It was only as an afterthought that he’d put his shoes on: he’d been going to pad across the corridor in his socks.

  He had to get some light. Until he could see better than this Will was doing nothing more. He stepped gingerly over the glass, reached for the door.

  Someone moaned. Will froze. Under his shirt the hairs along his arm lifted to the sound like antennae. Fear licked at the back of his neck. For a moment he tried to tell himself it was Miriam, returning from the velvet abyss to the pain of a broken head; but if she was on her way back the psychologist was comfortable enough to be at peace and anyway that wasn’t a woman’s voice. Joe or Tariq. Either Joe had woken and resumed his career of mayhem or – what? Something unforeseen that had thrown the whole bloody mess back in the melting-pot again.

  The most sensible thing would be to call for help. Whoever made that sound was hurt, another victim. But the attacker could be there too, hidden in the same dark, and that thought clamped Will’s throat. Leaving would have been the second most sensible thing, but he was loath to abandon two injured people to their assailant. So he did the third most sensible thing: listened intently for several seconds and did nothing. Then he drew a deep breath and moved towards the sound, one cautious step at a time.

  As he skirted the empty bed something grabbed his legs. He stumbled wildly and crashed along the carpet, the impact like a blowtorch on his side. He kicked frantically at the hands clawing him before he realized that what he was fighting was an upturned chair. With a sob of relief he subsided against the footboard.

  What crawled over the carpet then, and over his hand to fasten on his wrist, could by no stretch of the imagination have been furniture. In the marginal light his horrified eyes registered only a pale gleam but his skin reported a flaccid touch like a dead hand. Will yelled and snatched his arm away in terror, and kicked at whatever was groping for him.

  His feet found a target and something heavy rolled away from him. A whine of agony stabbed him with guilt like knives: in fear and darkness he’d found not the assailant but the victim who’d come crawling to him for help. Will got his knees under him and scrambled in pursuit, and immediately his hands brushed the twisted bulk of a man’s body. His fingers found a face, olive smooth rather than craggy; long straight hair spilling over the cheek confirmed it. His fingertips came away wet and sticky. He had no way of knowing if the blood was his doing or not.

  The door banged open and light stabbed into the room. It wasn’t that bright – hearing his cry Richard had grabbed the torch and dived for the door with the others on his heels – but will’s eyes had dilated in the darkness. When they cleared he found himself crouched over Tariq’s head as the man lay, half-conscious and mumbling, under the window. Blood had washed down his left cheek and bore the unmistakable imprint of a shoe.

  ‘What happened?‘ demanded Richard, quartering the room with the weak beam. ‘Where’s Tessa? And Joe?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ stumbled Will. ‘Jesus, you don’t think I did this? I mean, yes, I kicked him. Somebody grabbed me. I didn’t know who. It was dark. I kicked out.’ He heard himself babbling, made an effort to calm down. ‘I knocked on the door but no one answered. There was no light. Then I heard someone groan. When I went to investigate I fell over a chair. Then someone grabbed my arm.’

  ‘So you kicked him in the face?’ Larry’s tone was incredulous.

  ‘I didn’t know what was happening! I thought someone had jumped me.’

  ‘Him?’ Sheelagh was on her knees by the injured man, easing a pillow under his head. The blood came from a jagged wound above his ear.

  Mrs Venables picked her rapid way through the now crowded room, bent over the woman in the bed. ‘Dr Graves? Dr Graves, are you all right? I should never have left you. I knew I shouldn’t have.’ She righted a chair and sat down beside the bed as if nothing less than dynamite would move her again.

  Will shook his head impatiently. ‘Sheelagh, I didn’t have the benefit of a damn great arc light to work by. I didn’t know it was Tariq, and I didn’t know he was hurt. Somebody grabbed me and I lashed out. After all that’s happened, that surprises you? I was scared and I lashed out at the wrong person. But I didn’t do – this.’ He gestured unsteadily at Tariq. ‘You do know that, don’t you? You know that whoever’s doing this, it isn’t me.’

  There was a pause as people tried to remember what they knew and what they only surmised. ‘Yes, of course we do,’ Richard said wearily. ‘Sorry. It looked – bad.’

  ‘It is bad.’ Will accepted his proffered hand: he’d have had trouble getting up without it. ‘We’re being decimated here.’

  With Tessa missing and Mrs Venables preoccupied, Larry turned his hand to first aid, fashioning a passable bandage from the hem of a sheet. When he’d finished Tariq looked like a maharaja after a night on the tiles.

  He was surfacing by then. His eyes still rolled under heavy lids and his hands moved vaguely as if he didn’t quite know where they were, but slowly what he was saying began to make sense.

  ‘I was asleep,’ he said. ‘Near as damn it. In the chair by the door. It was dark. Somebody …’ He was losing it. He stopped a moment, bit his lip and tried to concentrate. ‘Someone was moving around. Tessa had the torch and I wondered why she wasn’t using it. I said – something. Then the beam hit me full in the eyes. I started to my feet but the roof fell on me.’ Tariq braved a tiny smile. ‘I went out like a light.’

  Will didn’t smile. His focus on the big man was absolute. ‘Someone hit you. Who?’

  Tariq didn’t understand. ‘Well – Joe, I suppose.’

  ‘You didn’t see him?’

  ‘I couldn’t see anything. But I had my back to the door. No one could have come in without moving me.’

  Will accepted that. ‘I found broken glass by the bathroom door. Could he have hit you with a bottle?’

  Tariq thought for a moment, nodded. The movement dislodged lumps of pain that tumbled through his head making him wince. ‘There was a lemonade bottle. Would that do?’

  ‘Oh yes. With that he could have taken your stupid head off.’

  Tariq’s eyes dropped at the rebuke. ‘I couldn’t stay awake. It’d been a long day, and I thought it was over – I thought the guy responsible was out for the count and all we had to do was wait to be rescued. When Tessa switched off the torch I nodded off.’ Then his eyes flew wide. ‘Dear God, Tessa! Miriam! What – where—?’

  ‘Miriam’s all right,’ Sheelagh reassured him. She put a blanket off the vacated bed around his shoulders. ‘She seems to be coming round. I don’t think he’s touched her. Tessa’s missing.’

  Tariq moaned as if the hurt was physical. ‘It’s my fault. I was supposed to protect her. All I had to do was stay awake. Now he’s loose and she’s missing, and it’s all my fault!’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Will coldly. ‘It is.’

  ‘All right,’ said Sheelagh sharply, looking up with angry eyes and tight lips, ‘you’ve made your point. He cocked up. And he got his head beat in for it. Now, do you want to rub it in a bit more or can we start looking for Tessa?’

  Chastened, Will nodded. ‘Yes, of course.’ She was right; he’d been wrong to concentrate on what happened anything up to an hour ago when a madman and the woman tending him were both unaccounted for.

  The little torch was growing weak; once he was sure neither of the missing people was secreted anywhere in the room Richard switched it off.

  ‘We’ve got to have light,’ growled Larry. ‘We can’t manage without.’

  ‘If we don’t save it while we can we’ll have to manage without.’

  They had thought the horror was behind them, that all they had to worry about was the cold and the boredom until rescue came on Monday. Discovering their mistake so dramatically shocked them to the core. Nervous and apprehensive, the last thing they wanted now was to split up, but there was no al
ternative. Tariq was too shaky to take part in the search that must be made. They helped him on to the bed, and Will and Mrs Venables stayed with the casualties.

  Will didn’t like being classed along with the injured man, the unconscious woman and the elderly one, but the state of his ribs made him no asset to the search. In the oppressive dark of the sickroom, tracking the progress of the searchers with one ear, he used the time to do what he did best, better than anyone else present. He thought.

  Using the torch as sparingly as they dared, the search-party moved through the penthouse checking bedrooms, bathrooms, wardrobes – anywhere that could accommodate a big man or the body of a tall woman. No one admitted that was what they were looking for, but if she was alive Tessa would be shouting her head off and there was nowhere she could be that they wouldn’t have heard her.

  Sheelagh took the torch to leave the men’s hands free. When they’d finished in the eastern corridor Richard tapped on the sickroom door. ‘Nothing yet.’

  Even as he spoke he became aware that Sheelagh had stopped, that the faint beam was no longer moving ahead of them but had veered off and stopped. He peered, trying to make out what she was looking at.

  She was looking at the lift doors. Unable to see what had stopped her in mid-stride and was continuing to absorb her attention, he stepped closer. So, on the other side of her, did Larry. Then they saw what Sheelagh had seen.

  ‘Dear God.’

  A few, perhaps no more than half a dozen, longish red-brown hairs were held in the closed jaws. Richard wondered how Sheelagh had spotted them, until the fractional air current caused by their passing made the hairs lift and dance slightly, catching the light.

  ‘Quickly,’ snapped Larry, ‘get these doors open!’ He punched at the rubber seal until it gave and the doors opened. Richard pointed the torch down the shaft.

  The battery was weakening steadily so that less light than before reached the stranded lift. It would have been harder to make out Tessa sprawled across the domed top than it had been to see Will. But as Richard’s eyes adjusted he realized something was different, though it took him another moment to be sure what.

  Will’s body had appeared as a roughly man-shaped obscurity failing to reflect the torch beam as the polished acrylic did. Richard looked for the same sort of thing again; but what he saw was half an acrylic dome, the glitter ending abruptly where the other half should have been and was not.

  His voice sounded as hollow as the shaft. ‘I think the lift’s broken up.’

  ‘What?!’ Larry leaned over as far as he dared. ‘My God! You were standing on that – you and Will both.’

  Richard lifted one shoulder helplessly. ‘It felt firm enough then. I don’t know, maybe it didn’t just break up. Maybe something hit it.’

  For a couple of minutes they kept looking, as if something might change. But even by failing torchlight there was no doubt what they were seeing. Half the dome had been torn away, taking with it the clear panel that formed one side of the gondola. Anything that had hit it had gone straight through. What had been a bung in the neck of the bottle was now half a bung at best.

  Sheelagh’s voice was flat, scoured of emotion, as if caring about one another was a weakness they could no longer afford. ‘I don’t think we’re going to find Tessa however hard we look.’

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  They completed the search because even if Tessa was gone none of them believed that Joe, overtaken by remorse, had followed her into the forty-storey abyss. But they found no sign of him.

  ‘Could he have climbed down the shaft?’ Sheelagh asked doubtfully.

  Richard shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t have thought so, but …’ He had managed, with some help; Midge did it without; but a bulky retired printer whose strength-to-weight ratio had been going downhill for thirty years even before illness left him weak and witless? On the other hand, single-minded obsession gets people through all manner of things that no rational assessment of their capabilities would predict. ‘I think he must have done, otherwise we’d have found him.’

  ‘He might have fallen,’ hazarded Larry. ‘While he was …’ He gestured with his head towards the lift, reluctant to say it.

  ‘He might,’ agreed Richard sceptically. ‘But I don’t think we should count on it.’

  They returned to the sickroom and broke the news. Mrs Venables turned away. Tariq shook his sore head in wonder. ‘So he really means to kill us all. In spite of what he said, he blames us for Cathy’s death and he wants to kill us for it. He doesn ‘t care about getting away with it. He just wants us dead.’

  ‘Why Tessa?’ asked Will. ‘She hardly knew Cathy.’

  ‘Why any of us?’ countered Richard. ‘Nobody killed his daughter. She committed suicide. Maybe in a perfect world we could have saved her, but God help us, we did our best! Joe knows that. If he still wants us dead it’s because he’s crazy. We’d better accept that we’re dealing with a madman.’

  A tremor vibrated in Sheelagh’s voice. ‘He daren’t leave anyone alive. On Monday morning the builders are going to find bodies and call the police. If there’s anyone left to say what happened Joe’ll end his days in Broadmoor. But if we’re all dead, maybe he thinks he can just slip away. Maybe no one else knows he was here.’

  ‘Of course somebody knows he was here,’ growled Larry impatiently. ‘It was him set this up, remember? However casual it was, even if there’s nothing on paper, somebody must have given him the OK, the keys, even the goddamned furniture. Lazaire’s won’t cover for him when the police ask why their building’s full of corpses.’

  ‘He must have known that,’ mused Richard, ‘and decided it didn’t matter. So if getting away isn’t a priority, why did he kill Tessa?’ He looked at Will as if it were a puzzle to which Will had the solution.

  That wasn’t quite true. Will hadn’t worked out the answers yet but he was getting good at identifying the questions. ‘Because she didn’t tell us the whole truth. She knew Cathy as well as the rest of us. Think about it. Joe wouldn’t have wasted his time and money getting hold of a GP who might have treated Cathy but not often enough to remember her. Hundreds of people must have known her better than that, and any one of them would have had as good a chance of saving her. But Joe wanted Tessa here, and he paid a medical journal to commission the article that would bring her. He must have had a good reason for that.’

  No one spoke. But the quality of the silence changed as they acknowledged the possibility.

  ‘We began by thinking we were a random cross-section of everyday neurotics on a regular course and there was nothing odd about an independent observer. Even when we stumbled on the hidden agenda, it seemed enough that Tessa agreed she could have treated Cathy. But if Joe brought us here not to confront us but to kill us, there had to be more than that. Whatever she said, Tessa knew Cathy too.’

  ‘She might have made a mistake, like she said,’ suggested Richard. ‘Maybe Joe thought that was the beginning of the end – that if she’d been treated appropriately then none of the rest need have followed.’

  It sounded feasible. But Larry shook his head. ‘I can’t say Cathy never consulted Tessa, but she wasn’t her regular doctor. I knew him – he worked with a lot of tennis-players. He was experienced and pragmatic and we both trusted his judgement. That was important.’

  ‘What about when she stopped playing? Could she have gone to Tessa precisely because you didn’t know her?’

  ‘She stopped seeing my man, I know that. I asked him to look out for her when she wouldn’t see me any more, and he said she hadn’t been near him for months.’

  ‘That’s it, then,’ said Richard. ‘She was Cathy’s doctor. Joe blamed her for not seeing the state she was in.’

  ‘But by then Cathy’s problems were already well established,’ said Will. ‘Joe couldn’t have blamed them on Tessa.’

  ‘He couldn’t blame you, either,’ Tariq said reasonably, ‘but he did.’

  ‘I know where Tessa fits in.’ There
was a note of certainty in Sheelagh’s voice that made everyone look at her, and she nodded. ‘She may have treated Cathy professionally, but that’s not why Joe brought her here or why he killed her. Tessa was the missing link, the one who should have been here and wasn’t. She was Cathy’s last lover.’

  Whatever they were expecting it wasn’t that. Silence fell: the sort of lumpen silence that falls from a height and kicks up dust and rocks people with its tremors. None of those closest to her had guessed: not her coach, her agent or her fiancé.

  They thought about it now, eyes flickering in the skimpy light. It solved some of the puzzles. Neither Larry nor Tariq, familiar with the untrumpeted side of professional sport, was surprised or disconcerted when friendships among women who worked, travelled, stayed and socialized together turned to something more. It was a coach’s job to make sure it didn’t affect performance and an agent’s to see it didn’t affect income, that was all. If Cathy Beacham had told them she had a mistress they’d have advised discretion then wished her luck.

  But Will Furney had wanted to marry her, and the idea that he’d been thrown over not for her career, not for another man but for a woman jolted him to his foundations. He didn’t believe it; wouldn’t believe it. Partly it was a streak of prudery running through him – solicitors are natural conservatives: such things happen to clients but he’d never expected to meet them in his own life – but mainly because it made a mockery of his time with Cathy. She’d slept with him, and to Will that meant commitment, but if she preferred women what was it about? He’d thought it was love. But how could she have loved both him and Tessa? If Sheelagh was right the sweetest nights of his life had been a sham. He couldn’t begin to deal with that so he denied it. White-faced, he mumbled, ‘That’s not possible.’

  ‘It is possible,’ Sheelagh said gently, understanding his distress, ‘and the evidence is there. Who’s missing from this route march down memory lane? – the famous Harry. Or it might have been Jerry. Suppose, though, it was Terry. Tessa’s short for Teresa, isn’t it?’