The Lazarus Hotel (15 page)

‘Only a grown woman with a mind of her own wasn't just as cute as a little black kid in pigtails. Was that when you lost interest?' Larry was keeping his hands off the older man but the effort showed in his face. ‘I never coached anyone else whose parents didn't want to see them play. I never met you, never even spoke to you on the phone.
I
knew I was taking care of her but you didn't!'

‘That's a monstrous thing to say!' Joe literally spluttered with anger. ‘Cathy was our girl for most of her life. We loved her, wanted the best for her. When she asked us not to come to matches, reluctantly we agreed. Except sometimes we'd buy our tickets like anybody else and watch from the grandstand. A couple of times she spotted us but mostly she didn't. Why didn't she want us there? Like Will said, she wanted a private life, a place where she wasn't anybody's rising star. And it was easier not having to explain us. The racial awareness lobby made her feel a freak for having white parents.'

Tessa was puzzled by practicalities. ‘You did all this? The hotel, everything? You said you were a printer. But this took serious money.'

‘I was a printer. Cartwright's was a family firm – it ended up mine. I sold up when Martha became ill. One of the things I put the money into was Lazaire's Hotels, and it bought me a favour when I needed it. Miriam explained how I got you all here. It began as a crusade – I wanted you to
know
the harm you'd done. After I'd listened to you for a while, found you weren't what I was expecting, it wasn't that clear-cut any more. But by then I had other reasons to keep going. I was learning things about Cathy – not all of them good. But she was my daughter, I wanted to know everything. Just hearing her name was like having her back for a little while. If I'd confessed you'd have left and I'd have lost her for good.'

‘So you marooned us up here,' gritted Larry. ‘You had them fix the lift so we couldn't leave before you'd gorged on all our sad little memories. What kind of a man would do that – pick over the bones of his dead child?'

A little earlier, staggering under a burden of remorse, Joe had come to bare his soul before these people, willing to accept almost any expression of their fury. But he was not a victim by nature and as he recovered from the initial shock of Will‘s death the urge towards martyrdom diminished. Fisting big artisan's hands in the front of Larry's sweatshirt he slammed the startled athlete against the wall.

‘How dare you say that to me? This is my girl we're talking about – of course I want to know what happened to her. One minute everything was fine; then she says she's going through a sticky patch but she's got her fingers crossed; then she's given it all up and she's making drunken scenes at nightclubs, and before I've got over that they're dragging her car out of the Thames. And I don't know how it happened. I was the only father she ever knew. I nursed her through mumps, I taught her to swim, I held her hand in the sad bits of
Bambi.
I loved her. I thought I knew her.'

He swallowed hard. ‘Then there's people on the doorstep telling me she's killed herself. Cathy? She was a fighter, I'd have said suicide was nowhere in her nature. Something happened to change her profoundly that last year. Maybe if I hadn't been so preoccupied with Martha's illness I'd have seen it coming. But I didn't, and none of those who did picked up the phone to tell me. You didn't. He didn't' – a jerk of his head at Tariq. ‘You both knew she was coming apart but you never thought to discuss it with her parents. So don't you dare criticize me. If I'd known she was in trouble when you did she'd be alive today.'

But the coach had loved her too. Neither man could face the idea that he might have done something more, or something different, to save her. They were ready to fight rather than share the responsibility.

Tessa interrupted icily. ‘If you're going to scrap, don't do it in my sickroom.'

Trading killer looks, the men backed off. Joe cleared his throat. ‘For the record, I didn't tell the builders to put the lift out of commission.'

‘Why should we believe that,' demanded Sheelagh, ‘when you've done nothing but lie to us since before we met?'

‘I think it's true.' It was Mrs Venables, still on sentry go at the bedhead. ‘I'm Dr Graves'housekeeper, when we're not doing this I look after her at home. I was involved from early on. I knew what Mr Lockhead had in mind and how he meant to do it, but the first I knew of the lifts going off was when the builders called up.'

Sheelagh tossed her dark mane angrily. ‘Anyway, it doesn't matter. The man responsible for Will being here is responsible for his death.'

Joe's voice was low. ‘I didn't say I wasn't.'

They weren't getting anywhere now, just piling on the hurts. Tariq broke it up. ‘We'll have to talk some more about this. But Tessa's right, this isn't the place. Let's make some coffee and plan the sleeping arrangements.'

The rooms were all of a size: they moved bedding and belongings into those nearest the lift. It took a sweaty hour to arrange things to everyone's satisfaction but no one complained. It was what they needed: something to occupy their hands and leave their minds free to consider developments. It wasn't just the death of Will Furney, or meeting their tormentor. It was the way fear had crept up all around, barely noticed, like a mist rising out of the earth at evening.

They'd been puzzled; they'd been angry; they'd been horrified by the lightning strikes of mayhem. But somewhere in the recent past all that had been swallowed up by fear. They were afraid of the dark. They were afraid of the emptiness of the great building under them. They were afraid of the boy, afraid of each other, afraid to be alone. Trapped between a bitter man's vendetta and the random violence of a mad child, the millennia peeled away like sunburn and left them craving the comfort of caves, spaces they could fill with their own bodies leaving no dark corners to be colonized by phantoms, narrow entrances they could shut against the unknown and the danger of attack.

But the human mind cannot sustain an unrelenting level of either joy or fear. By the time the last bag had found a home under the last bed the intensity of their feelings had eased. Still afraid, they were learning to handle the fear. Joe remained unforgiven but recriminations would have to wait. A time would come when they would be rehearsed in detail but for now there was a broad acceptance that, whoever was to blame for the situation, they were in it together. Somehow they had to get through the next few difficult days, and putting their grievances on hold made that possible.

The most volatile among them, Sheelagh was also about the most resilient. She locked up deep within her the terrible memory of what she'd witnessed and threw herself into the furniture removals with a passion, even managing a small joke. Lowering the foot of a bed that had Tariq at its head, she grunted, ‘The name of this place – they spelt it wrong.'

He didn't follow. ‘What should it be?'

‘The Lazarus Hotel,' she said, kneading a kink out of her back. ‘Take up your bed and walk.'

Larry put his head round the door, looking for Tariq. ‘Those chairs in front of the lift. Did you put them there?'

Tariq nodded. ‘Just to remind us.' His eyes dropped at how foolish that sounded.

‘Then this is probably a silly question,' said Larry. ‘But you didn't put one of them on its side for some reason?'

‘Maybe one of us knocked it over,' Tariq offered lamely. ‘There's not much room in the corridor for shifting furniture.'

‘Nobody's been shifting furniture past the lift,' said Larry. ‘We've moved it from the outside rooms to the inside ones. Besides, any of us knocking a chair over would have picked it up again.'

‘He's here, isn't he? That murderous bloody boy.' Sheelagh was not a timorous woman. Both professionally and personally she was an aggressive, even ruthless competitor who never shirked a fight. Friends who had known her for years and come through hard times with her had not heard that icy thread of fear lacing her voice.

It was not to be wondered at. Too many things were happening too quickly, all of them bad. Being marooned six hundred feet above the city, surrounded by people they knew nothing good about while a vicious child haunted the corridors waiting a chance to do them harm, chiselled at her nerves as any number of enemies attacking in plain sight would not have done. ‘He's come up the lift shaft into the penthouse, and even though we're awake this time we neither saw nor heard him. How can we stop him if we can't see him? It's like fighting a ghost!'

‘How long is it since you put those chairs out?' Larry asked Tariq. ‘Half an hour? Maybe he's still here. We could look for him.'

‘Damn right we look for him!' snapped Sheelagh. ‘One of us is dead and another badly hurt because of him. You want to leave him at large till there's nobody left?'

‘So we look,' agreed Larry. ‘Only try and remember it's a kid we're looking for, not a division of panzers.'

‘And you try and remember,' she said fiercely, ‘it's a killer we're looking for.'

Tessa and Mrs Venables stayed with Miriam. While the others made a cordon in the corridor, Larry and Tariq set about flushing him out. They began at the dead end beyond the women's quarters and worked towards the lift, searching every room and every cupboard.

It wasn't hard except on the nerves. The searchers couldn't know, each time they opened a door, if only dust or a homicidal boy armed with a kitchen implement would fly out. It made them jumpy, and also slow. The more cupboards they searched, the more they expected to find him in the next one. The odds rose with every door they opened.

But they reached the lift without sight of him. ‘Do we do the conference room now or later?'

‘Now,' decided Tariq. ‘Get it out of the way.'

He wasn't there either: not under the table, behind either of the big sofas or in the shuttered alcove that would in the fullness of time become a bar. ‘Kitchen?'

‘Kitchen.'

Sheelagh watched in shivery fascination. If there was anything innately absurd about grown men storming a kitchen like Green Berets entering a Vietnamese village it didn't show in their faces. The cost of carelessness fresh in their minds, they proceeded in deadly earnest, each keenly aware of where the other was and how quickly he could react. They heard each other's breathing rasp as they snatched open the doors, soft curses when one more cupboard proved bare. No one said, If anything moves, blast it, but that was how they felt.

When they were sure the boy wasn't there the cordon moved up past the kitchen door. If he was in the penthouse he was in one of the men's rooms; if he got past the searchers into the corridor it was important to deny him access to knives and forks and skewers.

Joe's room was empty. Larry's room was empty. Tariq's room was empty and so was Richard's. So, finally, was Will Furney's.

They looked at each other in disbelief. Tariq said, ‘He isn't here. He's done it again.' His voice was breathy with the release of pent-up tension.

‘I don't
get
this,' Larry said tersely. ‘I really don't. Where does he go to? And why does he keep coming back?'

‘He's travelling through the lift shaft, that's obvious,' said Tariq. ‘I don't know what he wants from us. To steal – food, clothes? To scare us off? If he thinks of this place as home, maybe he just wants rid of us.'

‘Enough to brain one of us with a rolling-pin and shove another down the lift shaft?'

Tariq scowled. ‘Nobody pushed Will – that was an accident. Don't for pity's sake make things out to be worse than they already are.'

‘All right, it was an accident. But it wouldn't have happened if that boy hadn't been making free with the place. What in hell's a kid like that doing here at all?'

From the corridor Sheelagh said, ‘Tariq?'

He raised his voice. ‘No, no sign of him here either. He's given us the slip again.'

‘Tariq!'

Her tone brought both of them quickly to the door. The little cordon was still stretched across the corridor but now it had turned its back on them. Through a gap between Sheelagh and Joe, Tariq glimpsed a dark, stocky figure in front of the lift. Very softly, advancing a step at a time, he said, ‘Don't anybody move. Don't frighten him off.'

‘Frighten
him?
‘ echoed Sheelagh faintly.

As Tariq edged through the cordon he saw the boy clearly for the first time, and his initial reaction was more pity than anger. He understood now, as he had not before, how Mrs Venables – taken by surprise and seeing only its swift departure – could have thought it was a dog. It was certainly shaggy, but under the pelt of disintegrating woollies there was, as Larry had insisted, a boy of sixteen or seventeen years.

The cocoon of clothing – how did he take it off without it falling apart?
Did
he ever take it off? – gave an impression of bulk reinforced by the well-developed muscles in his hands and forearms. Of course, Tariq thought inanely; all that climbing. But the pale skin and hollow eyes told of hunger and cold and damp places out of the sun. It was like chancing on some subterranean creature and feeling the squirm of primordial distaste; and then seeing the terror in its eyes that said, however little you liked the look of it, it liked the look of you even less.

Tariq saw panic rip through the boy's eyes and, because he was essentially a kind man, for a moment forgot about the damage the boy had done and tried to reassure him. He spread his hands and said quietly, ‘Nobody's going to hurt you. What's your name?'

The answer came in a voice deeper than any of them expected, barred with a fear that trembled. ‘Will.'

Resentment rose like bile in Sheelagh's throat. She didn't believe him. He'd taken the man's life, and now he was stealing his name. Her lip curled in disgust. ‘Liar.'