B00BCLBHSA EBOK (13 page)

First there was a porter he needed to go and interview, whose papers
were not quite in order. He needed to ensure that everything was sorted, one
way or another, to the satisfaction of the Home Office. It was his duty to know
everything that was going on in the hotel, and to forestall any potential
trouble. When he’d been assistant manager here he’d intervened to stop illegal,
high-stakes gambling meetings, organized prostitution (the disorganized kind
was tolerated, so long as it was discreet) and too much drug taking among staff
(a little bit of cocaine use among chefs was known to help them get through the
long working hours, though too much made them belligerent; and the use of
expensive drugs by lower-grade staff was not a good idea, because they couldn’t
afford it). After he had dealt with the porter, he had to be on hand at the
RWGB press conference, to ensure the hotel was portrayed in the best possible
light. Though if anyone said anything unfavorable, he
was not sure what he was supposed to do. Turn off the lights? Charge to the
front with a roar and threaten everyone? Stay silent and fume? Probably the latter. That’s what he usually did.

Nik walked
purposefully on his way to his office from the Captain Thomas Coram room,
straightening things that didn’t need straightening, nodding to staff, enjoying being in charge. He tried not to eavesdrop when he
went into meeting rooms. But four words repeated by the occupants of the last
one he’d visited had reached his consciousness and now tangled themselves
around his other thoughts: the One Star Club. What was that?

The door of the Captain Thomas Coram room slammed open
and Teena burst in, her jaw pushed slightly forward
in belligerent triumph. Emily saw the ripple of mild panic go round the room.
The members of the committee were trying to assess how it might look to an
outsider that they were sitting there gulping expensive white wine, and eating
an assortment of fancy nuts, in the aftermath of a woman’s death. Not good,
from the guilty-schoolgirl looks on their faces.

“I know what’s happened!” Teena said.

“Yes,” said Morgana soothingly. “Yes, of course.” Clearly she had no
idea what Teena was on about.

“I’ve worked it out.”

Teena wanted the
committee members to ask her what she had worked out, and because they found
her rather annoying, everyone politely resisted.

Cerys folded
first, perhaps because she was a grandmother and used to this sort of thing.
“You want to come in and tell us what’s going on, love?”

Teena came in and
sat down. “I’ll have some of that wine, if you don’t mind. See, in my line of
work—”

“Local council?” asked Polly, sweetly, pouring her a glass.

“Citizen journalist. I’m used to digging
about, finding facts.”

“Of course you are. How wonderful!” Morgana
was at her most soothing again.

“I’ve been up there. I’ve worked it out. She was pushed, wasn’t
she?”

“Winnie? Was she?” The silver bangles
jingled around Morgana’s weak-looking wrists. If Winnie
had been pushed by someone in this room, it was unlikely to have been Morgana.

“Yes.”

“Been up where?” Polly’s patient sweetness would have worked much
better without the scary face paint.

“Teena, darling, have you told the
police?” Morgana asked warily.

“I spoke to that young one. He was very rude.”

Everyone cheered up at this. Zena spoke
for the group. “What’d he say, babes?”

“He said he was thinking of opening an outreach service for amateur
sleuths.”

Dr. Muriel treated
them to a longish, staccato version of her laugh. Emily didn’t even smile.

“Nuts?” said Polly, offering the bowl to Teena.
Emily smiled at that.

“No thanks, Polly. I’m going up there again to have a look.” Teena drained her glass.

“Up where?” Polly persisted.

“The roof garden.”

“Darling, have you talked to anyone else about this?” Morgana was
worried, as always, about how to contain the information and stop it reaching
the press.

“No.”

Polly said, “How did you know about the roof terrace?”

“Well, I asked the hotel manager.”

“So you’ve told the policeman and the hotel manager?”

“And Maggie.”

Polly stood up. “You need to be careful. You might be in danger.
I’ll come with you if you like.”

“I got the idea when we did that writing exercise, Polly. I wrote
about Winnie’s death from the point of view of the
murderer. I could see my hands closing round her throat, and then pushing her
off so she landed several stories below and broke all her bones. It was really
vivid.”

“I’ve missed a bit,” said Cerys. “Who’s
the murderer? Is it Teena?”

“Darling, it’s fiction. Teena’s
so clever she’s imagined it all.” Morgana only hesitated for a moment. “Haven’t
you?”

“Yeah. I don’t know
who killed Winnie. But I know how they did it. If I
go up to the roof garden, can you go and stand underneath, Polly? There’s some bins round by the kitchen. I need to see if
there’s room for you to lie in one of them.”

“Polly’s going to go and lie in a bin?” Zena
looked as though she’d just been told it was Christmas and she was allowed to
open her presents early. “Praps we should all come
and look?”

“Darlings, no.
We’re out of time. We
really
need to
go next door. Polly will look after Teena.”

“Polly, love, if you’re playing nursemaid, you might want to pop to
the loo first.” Cerys made a wiping motion in front
of her face. “Tidy yourself up a bit.”

The group began to rise. Nothing useful had been decided. Emily had
made lots of notes and yet there was nothing that seemed interesting or
relevant. She thought she really ought to explain that she’d already worked out
some of what had happened to Winnie. “Listen, Teena—”

“That’s all right, Emily. Me and Polly’ve got this.”

Emily let it go. She didn’t want to look as if she was trying to
compete; as if she was jealous that Polly and Teena
were going off together to investigate.

Cerys spoke kindly
to Teena. “She wasn’t found in the bins, love. You do
realize that?”

Before Teena could get a word in, Zena spoke for her: “She could have been moved, Cee. Couple of blokes working together.
They wrap her up in a carpet, bundle her body onto the estate.”

“Ah! Like Cleopatra being delivered to the feet of the great
Antony.” Morgana knew that Zena liked to keep no more
than two steps away from the Cleopatra myth. “Was there a carpet found by the
body?”

There was a tiny pause while Zena thought
about this. “Couple of blokes and no carpet, then.”

Teena looked
pointedly at Cerys and Zena,
standing side by side. Next to fragile Morgana and frail Polly, they looked
beefy. “Could have been a couple of big women.”

Cerys was good-humored about it. “Or one big woman.
Fair play, there’s many a wife has to haul her husband out of the pub
single-handed round my neck of the woods.” Not that Cerys
herself had ever had to do it. “But who would have wanted to push Winnie to her death in the first place? Beats
me.”

Archie spoke softly. “There are dark thoughts in the minds of many
men.”

“And women,” said Teena. In a room of
people used to getting the last word, she had done well to win this one. And,
by the expression on her face, she knew it. She couldn’t have looked any more smug if someone had taken Zena’s
purple lipstick and written SMUG right across her forehead. It was too bad
she wouldn’t live long enough to enjoy it.

Nik
slipped into the chair behind his desk and undid his suit jacket—a few
minutes’ comfort while he was out of the public eye, so long as he remembered
to do it up again—then pressed a button on his computer to take it out of
sleep mode.

There was a scribbled message on the pad on his desk by Jurgen, the head of security, and he read it as his
computer sparked into life.

Need to speak to you URGENTLY, Nik.
Scruffy-looking members of the public wandering about the hotel, saying they’re
here for VIGIL. They’re alarming the paying guests. THE CORAM HOTEL IS NOT A
HOSTEL. J.

Jurgen’s job was
to be suspicious of everyone, and slightly intimidating in a subtle and
superficially courteous way. He certainly intimidated Nik,
though Nik tried not to show it. He put the message
to one side as Henri the porter came to the door.

Nik didn’t ask
Henri to sit down. He said, “Cyril’s been spotted here. Do you know anything
about it?”

“Cyril?” Henri tried to look mystified; he frowned and looked
upward, as though searching his memory for clues. His standard of acting
wouldn’t have got him selected for the part of a tree in a school nativity
play. But Henri wasn’t auditioning. He was playing for time. He knew who Cyril
was. He and Cyril hailed from the same country of origin and they were friends.

“Cyril Loman. He mustn’t come here.
Understand, Henri? There’s police here, investigating that other matter.
Loyalty’s important, yes. Friends help each other. I know that. You know it.
But if Cyril attracts their attention…”

“Cyril visit the ladies of the conference.”

“You
have
seen him, then?”

Henri stared at Nik. This was one of those
interviews where one person holds all the power and already knows the answers
to the questions—and Nik was that person. Nik didn’t want information, he
wanted to make a point. Henri stood still and waited to discover what point Nik wanted to make. Henri had no authority or influence. He
did a job that earned him minimum wage, and he lived quietly, using the money
he earned to support his wife and two small children. He was a long, long way
from his country of origin. But every morning, as he left for work dressed in
his striped waistcoat and smart black trousers, he gave thanks for the mildness
of the British weather and the tolerance of British people, and every now and
then he offered up a little prayer on behalf of the British justice system,
whose close attention he hoped to avoid.

Nik turned the screen
of his computer so that Henri could see it. He tapped a button on his keyboard
a couple of times, quickly, so that it made a satisfying knitting needle
clickety-click. Henri watched a replay of CCTV images of his friend Cyril Loman heaving a black bin bag over the wall between the
hotel and the estate.

“You realize this is stealing?” said Nik.
He sat back in his chair and folded his arms, and did his serious face.

Henri gawped and then, he couldn’t help it, he could feel a smile
lick his expression, and then it burned up his face from cheeks to eyes as
rapidly as if someone had put a match to a photograph. He tried to get a grip
on himself—he literally put his arms around himself and hugged his ribs—but
it was no good. He was struck with mirth, a naughty boy in the headmaster’s
office at school. The memory this prompted, of relatively carefree days as a
schoolboy back home, only made him feel more joyful. He shook with silent
laughter. Stealing? From a rubbish bin? Really? It was the kind of wild story a grandmother would
tell children to illustrate the folly of a rich man. That thought sobered him—he’d heard his grandmother had died a few years ago, but he’d never had the
chance to say goodbye—and the reminder of his lost relatives made him feel
sad…and he was then happy again. He couldn’t help it. Stealing! He giggled unmanfully, unable to stop himself.

“Henri, pull yourself together, mate. You’re a giggling buffoon.”

But it would be three or four minutes before Henri managed to regain
control and explain to Nik Kovacevic
how those conference ladies had insulted his friend Cyril Loman
and besmirched his honor, and how the furious M. Loman had decided to respond.

“No more of this nonsense, you understand? If the police get wind of
any of it…”

Henri’s face snapped back to its default expression. Fear smothered
his mirth. “I help for loyalty. Is OK, Nik? I cannot
danger. I cannot.”

“Yeah, mate. It’s OK. I won’t let anything happen to you. No danger.
If anyone comes sniffing about—police or Home Office or whatever—I should get wind of it. I’ll be able to warn you. Until then, keep
your nose out of trouble. Cyril can help with the papers. He’s all well and
good with the shortcuts and circumventing bureaucracy. But he can’t help at the
other end of it. You can’t just bribe your way out of trouble if you tangle
with the police in this country.”

Henri couldn’t follow all this. Sniffing, wind, nose,
what
? But he followed the important
parts: police, Home Office, trouble, Cyril, papers.

Outside the office, Emily Castles lurked. She knew that Nik would be going to the press conference, and she had
hoped she might be able to go through his office looking for clues—incriminating
CCTV footage, something like that (she only had his word for it that it was
being rebooted earlier that day). But when she arrived, she saw that he was
still in the office and he wasn’t alone. She stood and listened. Her behavior would have got her a warning if she’d been a
member of Nik Kovacevic’s
staff and he’d caught her at it. But she wasn’t and he didn’t. She heard the
tail end of the conversation:

“The upshot, Henri, is that I have CCTV showing you and Cyril
putting something heavy over the wall.”

“CCTV not filming!”

“It wasn’t filming, and now it is. That’s the nature of CCTV. It’s
there to film things. You can’t have it turned off for too long, or it triggers
an alarm. And what do I see when I review this afternoon’s footage? Just about
the most incriminating footage possible, given what happened earlier today, of
two men manhandling what might well be a woman’s body in a bin bag.”

“Cyril honor. Reputation.
He ask me.”

“Well, I gathered that. I don’t intend showing it to anyone. All I’m
saying is, you need to keep quiet about the other
matter. Keep it zipped. Understand?”

Henri didn’t really understand. The only things he generally kept
zipped were his trousers and his tracksuit tops. “Is dangerous?”

“Not if you keep your head. I’m going to press delete on this. See?”
There was a pause in the conversation, suggesting that Nik
and Henri were watching the image disappear from the screen. “Don’t do anything
else silly. Go on, off with you.”

Hearing those words, Emily scarpered and hid behind a
tall, wing-backed chair in a corner of the lobby. She watched as Henri left the
office and went back to work. Even if Emily could have listened inside his
head, she wouldn’t have understood. He was thinking in French, his mother
tongue. He was wondering how he was going to explain to his wife that it didn’t
matter where you went, you always got asked to help someone do something in
order to make their life easier, and sometimes it just made your life much
worse. And how, though he’d repaid a debt to Nik Kovacevic a few hours ago, suddenly he was in his debt all
over again.

Nik Kovacevic picked up the phone and called Jurgen. And then he made his way to the press conference.

Seeing Nik walk by from where she stood
admiring a stopped clock on a mantelpiece, half-hidden by the chair, Emily
doubled back into his office. She had a few minutes, that was
all, and then she’d have to get to the press conference herself. How should she
spend the time? She pulled at the drawers on the filing cabinets in the office,
but they were all locked. She puzzled briefly over the chart on the wall labeled Rubbish Champion, with a blank square under each
month of the year, where a passport-size photo was supposed to go. What was she
looking for? A signed confession? A
bottle of poison?

The computer was still on. Perhaps it would yield his secrets. Emily
opened the CCTV window and looked at nothing much happening outside. She opened
the latest website Nik had looked at: a hotel review
site. She had a fairly good idea what he’d been up to on there. It might prove
he was sneaky, but it didn’t make him a murderer. What should she be looking
for? What should she be doing? A computer is no different from any other
oracle. The answers it gives are only as good as the questions asked.

Emily pulled out her notebook, hoping that something she had written
would prompt her to ask the right question. What did she want to know? She
realized there was something that was bothering her, though perhaps Nik didn’t know the answer. But for a few minutes she had
the world’s finest minds at her fingertips, if she cared to summon them. It
seemed daft to waste the opportunity. She opened the search box on the
computer’s Internet browser and typed:
What
is the antidote to cyanide poisoning?