The Lazarus Hotel

by Jo Bannister

  ‘The lift going off?’

  ‘Could have been accidental. Or Joe could have done it to stop us walking out at half-time. Either way, it doesn’t compare with a violent attack.’

  Richard again. ‘Why would Tessa attack Miriam?’

  Will found this end of a cross-examination less familiar than the other. He would have been happier if he’d known anything, but he didn’t. It was a matter of conjecture, of looking beyond the obvious answers to where others, less convenient but possibly more illuminating, might lie. He’d hoped the group could pursue the exercise on that basis. But they weren’t interested in semantics, they wanted facts. They were afraid and needed to know where the danger lay. Until he started this driverless train rolling they had at least had that consolation, and they resented him for shaking it.

  But the train was rolling now and the only alternative to staying with it was jumping off. He improvised. ‘She came here like the rest of us, in good faith. But when she realized what was going on she knew how serious it could be for her. She needed to find out just how much Miriam knew and what she intended to do with it. Remember, none of us knew about Joe at that point. Tessa thought Miriam was the one she had to deal with.

  ‘She must have meant to kill her – she’d gain nothing by knocking her out. But ask any mugger – it’s difficult to judge how much force it takes. The same blow that’ll kill one person will put another in hospital and make a third angry enough to grab your blackjack and wallop you with it. Even when Miriam was found alive it didn’t seem a major problem. She was deeply unconscious. She wasn’t going to wake up for hours or maybe days. In the meantime she’d be at the mercy of the only doctor present.

  ‘Except that Mrs Venables hardly let her out of her sight. The odd time she was alone Tessa was occupied and couldn’t get away without people noticing. When Tariq persuaded Mrs V to get some sleep it was the only chance Tessa would get. By morning Miriam could be awake and talking. It was now or never, and with Joe unconscious and Tariq unsuspecting it wasn’t difficult. She set about disposing of the people who knew enough to ruin her.’

  Tariq was following the discussion now though his head still sang. ‘What about the lift? What interest had she in making you fall?’

  ‘My fall was nothing to do with her – Midge forced those doors so often that they gave at a touch. I can’t imagine why she’d want either me or Richard dead,’ he added honestly. ‘Miriam and Joe, yes, but she’d nothing to fear from the rest of us. We didn’t even know she was hiding something.’

  ‘No, but we’d have found out; Richard said slowly. ‘You’d have found out. Maybe your fall was an accident but she knew an opportunity when she saw one. It wasn’t me she was after with the butter – it was you.’

  Having Richard take up the theory, no longer having to carry the full weight of it in the teeth of blanket disapproval, was like shedding a physical burden. Will’s face lifted in almost comic relief. On the tail of that came amazement at what Richard had actually said. ‘Me? Why me? I don’t know any more about her than you do.’

  ‘No, but you think better than we do. Before we’d been here half a day that was obvious. When she decided what she had to do she must have worried about you. She could fool the rest of us but you were always going to see that bit deeper. When she decided to dispose of everyone who threatened her, you had to go too.

  ‘For a while it must have seemed fate had done the job for her. We thought you were dead. Then Midge said you were OK and we organized a rescue, so she had to think fast. To be safe she needed the three of you out of her way. The survivors could leave on Monday and never know that one of us was a murderer.’

  ‘We don’t know it now!’ Sheelagh said fiercely. When the torch flicked her way her face was flushed. She’d liked Tessa, was not persuaded by an imaginative fiction dreamt up by people with too much time to kill. To the best of her belief Tessa was another victim of the man who, crazed with grief, wanted to punish them all. She despised the way these clever, articulate men were twisting the facts to serve their argument. ‘You think it – there’s a difference. I’m not even sure you think it so much as like the idea. Neat, hey? – let’s have the broad do it this time.’

  ‘Well, this isn’t Hollywood, it’s the real world. Death here isn’t a dramatic device. It’s tangible and it’s permanent. It’s people getting their skulls caved in. It’s people being thrown down forty-storey shafts. It’s messy and it’s scary, and it isn’t a suitable topic for you two to play boy detectives on. If you’ve got some evidence let’s hear it. If not, keep your mouths off a woman who’d be here to defend herself if she hadn’t made two honest mistakes. She tried to help a man who was sick, and she assumed that the guy who volunteered to protect her would stay awake long enough to do it.’

  The silence in the dim room was complete enough for them to hear the breath hiss in Tariq’s teeth. As a judgement it was harsh; as a fact it was unarguable. He preferred Will’s theory that he’d been slipped a Mickey Finn, because that way he wasn‘t to blame for what followed. But he didn’t know. He might just have nodded off long enough for the sick man to resume his campaign of terror. If Sheelagh was right about Tessa and Will was wrong, Tariq was more to blame for her death than the madman who killed her.

  Larry had no vested interest. He thought Sheelagh was probably right about Cathy and Tessa; he thought she could have given the girl steroids. But it was too big a leap from there to murder. The stakes weren’t high enough. A lesbian affair might have caused Tessa some embarrassment but nothing more; and supplying banned substances was easy to condemn, harder to deal with. Everyone in sport knew it happened; there were occasional scandals that ended the careers of athletes and their advisers. But the proof was hard to come by when all those involved had too much to lose by talking. It would have been difficult to make a case when Cathy was alive, almost impossible now. Tessa must have known that. She didn’t have to kill anyone. She just had to deny it.

  ‘It all sounds pretty far-fetched to me too,’ he grumbled. ‘It might have been awkward having her name linked with Cathy’s, but it’s like the drugs, isn’t it? – easier to say than to prove when the other party can’t confirm it. Do people commit murder to avoid innuendo? You wouldn’t. It would always be safer to do nothing. A week later the gossips would be dissecting somebody else.’

  For a man with few intellectual pretensions he’d hit precisely the flaw in Will’s reasoning. Tessa had had both means and opportunity, but her motive was too modest for what it was supposed to have driven her to. The same argument could be applied to Joe: what he’d done, if he’d done it, was out of all proportion to the reason for it. But Joe was a man pushed to the edge of sanity by an accumulation of grief. He hadn’t hidden the enmity he felt for the strangers he blamed for his daughter’s lonely death. It was much less of a leap from there to violence.

  ‘Actually,’ murmured Mrs Venables, ‘it doesn’t matter what we decide. We’ll know the truth soon enough.’

  Before he found her with the torch Richard realized what she meant. ‘Oh. Yes.’

  ‘Yeah,’ drawled Larry, uninhibited by tact. ‘On Monday morning we’ll see who’s splattered all over the concourse. The murderer’s the other one.’

  But it was a long time to Monday morning: the sun had yet to rise on Sunday. Richard switched off the torch and an uneasy quiet fell, weariness gaining the upper hand over fear until one by one they yielded to a kind of torpor, resting their bodies and letting their minds slip out of focus. It wasn’t peace so much as disengagement.

  The quiet and the illusion of peace were shattered in the blink of a light-starved eye by a shriek of horror reverberating in the corridor only the thickness of a partition wall away.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Richard, who hadn’t realized he’d been asleep, woke in the grip of icy terror; as if someone had drilled a hole in his skull while he drowsed and filled it with meltwater that poured over the folds of his brain and percolated down thro
ugh his spinal cord. His first half-coherent thought was that he’d dreamed himself back in the Thames, trying to hang on to a woman who must have changed her mind about dying seconds after her car left the dock. She begged for her life – ‘Don’t kill me, don’t let me go’ – but in the end he did. If he could have held on for another ten minutes none of them would have been here now.

  But she never screamed. She never vented anything like that cry of immediate and mortal terror, the shriek of a hunted animal taken by the heels. He hadn’t dreamed that, it was real, and the one thing worse than a nightmare is one that doesn’t go away when you wake up.

  He threw off the quilt, groping frantically for the little torch, his limbs colliding with those of the men and women around him who were also reacting confusedly to what they’d heard.

  ‘What the hell—?’

  ‘Tessa – it had to be.’

  ‘Then why—?’

  ‘Where’s that light?’

  ‘Get the frigging door open!’

  ‘No!’ yelled Will. There was a tramping of feet and a bumping of bodies as he struggled clear of the sleep-befuddled litter. When the weak bulb finally lit it found him with his back to the barricade, clutching his battered ribs.

  Larry skidded to a halt in front of him, hands knotted. ‘Shift yourself, sonny.’

  The smaller man stood his ground but his voice soared. ‘It’s Tessa. We can’t let her in.’

  The door thundered to a volley of blows. ‘For Christ’s sake, let me in! Joe’s out here and he’s crazy!’

  Larry’s fists pulsed with muscle as if they had a life of their own. ‘I told you to get out of my way.’

  ‘Don’t you understand?’ cried Will. ‘She’s killed him. If she hadn’t she wouldn’t be here – she’d be at the bottom of the lift shaft. She’s safe out there. But in here she’s lethal.’

  The scant light was enough to show contempt in the athlete’s face. With no light at all it would have been plain in his voice. ‘Will, if she scares you that much, go and sit behind the couch and we won’t tell her you’re there. But I’m not leaving a woman to the mercy of a maniac because of some, crackpot theory.’

  ‘Oh God,’ moaned Will, ‘listen to me, please. She’s lying. Joe isn’t out there. He’s dead. She killed him. She’s the one we have to worry about. Wait and you’ll see I’m right.’

  ‘Wait?’ bellowed Larry. ‘While he rips her head off? Cower behind the furniture while he finishes the job? Jesus, boy, I never took you for anything much but I didn’t realize how deep the yellow went.’ Still talking he reached out, fisted one hand in Will’s clothes and spun him across the room, attacking the barricade with the other.

  Will fetched up in a heap against the wall. He didn’t bother to rise. There was no point: even on peak form he was no match for Larry. ‘Richard,’ he begged, ‘Tariq, stop him. People are going to die here!’

  Richard had been prepared to explore the possibilities when what they were discussing was hypothetical, a sort of grim game with no immediate practical consequences. On that basis he was prepared to accept that will could be right. But asked to translate that into action, to deny sanctuary to a woman who could be in imminent danger from a madman purely because, debating in safety, they’d decided she probably wasn’t, his voice rose incredulously. ‘Will, you don’t know that. What if you’re wrong? You can’t gamble her life on it!’

  ‘I’m not wrong. And he’s going to gamble all our lives.’

  About then, though, the argument became academic because Larry threw the door open and Tessa fell inside.

  ‘The torch!’ Richard tossed it. Larry snatched it out of the air and stepped into the corridor in one fast, fluid movement.

  He saw nothing. But the range of his vision was only a few yards in any direction. He could see that the lift doors were closed, couldn’t make out the door of the nearest bedroom. Joe could have ducked in there, or he could have faded back into the dark. Just because Larry couldn’t see him didn’t mean he couldn’t see Larry. Standing in the corridor, holding a pathetic little torch that did little more than mark his own position, Larry suddenly felt exposed. He retreated into the room and slammed the door, shoving the sofa into place behind it.

  Finally he turned the torch on Tessa. Sheelagh caught her breath. The woman’s face was deeply scored down one side. They weren’t just scratches: the flesh gaped and blood had run down to her jaw. Her eye was puffy and her lip split. She was shaking.

  Larry steered her towards the mattresses. ‘Come and sit down. You’re freezing. Mrs Venables, can we do anything about—?’ He indicated Tessa’s savaged cheek.

  Before surrendering herself to their care Tessa took the torch in a shaky hand, scanning the troubled faces. Richard wondered uneasily if she’d been able to make sense of the argument she must have heard through the shut door, but the beam passed over Will with only a fractional dismissive pause. It settled on Tariq.

  The big man bore its scrutiny for some seconds before he opened his mouth to speak. But with the words still in his throat Tessa slapped his face, hard. ‘You bastard!’ she spat. ‘You useless frigging bastard.’

  Tariq reeled but he kept his feet. ‘Tessa—’

  She hit him again. ‘I trusted you! You said you’d protect me. You said I shouldn’t be alone with him so you’d stay and protect me. And you went to sleep!’

  ‘What happened?’ Larry took the torch, sat her on the mattress and tucked a quilt round her trembling body while Mrs Venables began to work on her face. ‘Will found Tariq out cold and you and Joe gone.’

  She breathed a racked sigh. ‘And Miriam?’

  ‘She’s all right. She started to come round, then she went back to sleep. She isn’t making much sense yet but I think she’s all right. Tessa, what happened?’

  ‘I’m not altogether sure – I was half-asleep myself.’ Her tone hardened. ‘But I was there for my medical skill, not because I was big enough to control the patient if he went ape.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ murmured Tariq. ‘I didn’t – mean—’

  Her swollen lip curled but she said nothing more to him. ‘The first thing I knew he was out of bed, swinging at me with a lemonade bottle.’ She touched beside her eye. ‘I didn’t go out exactly but I lost touch for a minute. By the time I recovered it was too late. He’d stuffed something in my mouth and had my arms halfway up my back. He dragged me to the lift shaft, but as the doors opened we heard movement in here and the handle turning. He hauled me up the corridor out of sight.’

  ‘That was Will,’ said Richard. ‘He had something to ask Tariq. God knows what – it seemed important at the time. But he was out cold and you were gone. When we found some of your hair in the lift doors we assumed the worst.’

  She eyed Will icily – so she had heard the argument – before continuing. ‘The locked door round the corner – Joe has a key. He must have had it all along. He pulled me through the rubble by my hair. Then he pushed me down and told me to keep still. I didn’t dare do anything else. He kept saying, “Don’t think it’s over, don’t think I’m finished.” He’s crazy. I mean, really – I think he’s insane.’

  ‘How did you get away?’

  ‘When everything was quiet he unlocked the door again. I knew we were heading for the lift – I’d nothing to lose. I hit him as hard as I could with fifteen inches of piping I’d found in the rubble and spent half an hour sitting on. He went down. I didn’t wait to see if he went out. I came up that corridor as fast as I could, and when I got his goddamned hanky out of my mouth I yelled to let you know I was coming.

  ‘Only when I got here the door was shut fast.’ Her voice cracked with fury and remembered terror. ‘What he took you so long? I could hear him behind me, I only had a few seconds’lead – and I was hammering at this door and yelling my head off, and still no one opened it. What were you waiting for – a password?’

  There was an awkward pause. Then Larry said negligently, ‘There was a lot of stuff behind it.’


  ‘I’d have moved it fast enough if it had been on my side!’

  Will spoke so softly as to be barely audible. ‘It was my fault. I was afraid of letting a killer in here.’

  ‘So you left me outside with him?’ she cried bitterly. ‘You abject bloody coward! Richard risked his life in a six-hundred-foot drop for you. And you wouldn’t risk opening the door for me?’

  Will said nothing more. Larry had the grace to keep the light off him, but it took no imagination to see him flinch under the lash of her tongue.

  Tariq said slowly, ‘Maybe this changes things. If there’s a way through the rubble, all we have to do is break that door open and we can get out of here.’

  They stared at where they thought he was. ‘How?’

  ‘There has to be a stairway,’ he said. ‘We know that. For emergencies. We thought we couldn’t reach it for the rubble behind the door, but Tessa got through. To the far side?’

  ‘What?’ She wasn’t sure what he was asking.

  ‘Where Joe took you – was it an open corridor? Or just a space in the rubble? What could you see?’

  ‘A corridor. Like the one outside.’

  ‘Not blocked.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘All right,’ said Tariq, his tone quickening. ‘We know the stairs are on that side – the other way there’s a brick wall. If we force the door and crawl through the rubble we’ll find them. We can walk out of here. It’s six hundred feet but it’s downhill all the way.’ They could hear him grin.

  ‘What about Joe?’ Sheelagh didn’t share his confidence. ‘You think he’s going to let us go?’

  ‘I don’t know what he’ll do. We’ll have to watch our backs, be ready to defend ourselves. We’d better wait for daylight.’

  ‘We’ll need something to force the door,’ said Larry. ‘Anybody got a crowbar?’

  ‘How about a battering-ram?’ Richard nodded at the table. ‘That’s pretty solid.’

  ‘Good,’ nodded Tariq. ‘Then as soon as it’s light Richard, Larry and me’ll go beat the door down. The rest of you stay here. When there’s a way through we’ll come back.’