B00BCLBHSA EBOK (10 page)

“A violent sneeze, perhaps?”

“A sneeze?”

“There was someone I was at school with who broke his neck playing
rugby. Thing is, he didn’t realize it; he walked around like that for years.
The doctors found the fracture years later in an X-ray. Said
that he was a walking time bomb. He could have been paralyzed just by a
violent sneeze.” Nik became quite animated,
remembering the story. Emily didn’t doubt that it was true. She just didn’t
think it relevant.

“I was thinking, you see. Could she have been having a crafty
cigarette and fallen out of the window?”

“None of our windows open wide enough for a toddler to slip through, let alone a grown woman. We take the safety of our
guests very seriously—and we’re wise to the wiles of smokers. No. She was
killed by thugs next door on that estate.”

“I just…the idea of her being killed by thugs is
so horrible. So violent.”

“I wouldn’t walk through that estate myself late at night. Couple of
the kitchen porters live there, and they walk together for protection. Tough blokes, too—from war-torn countries. Who’d think it,
eh? Living through a civil war in Africa and then scared of walking alone in
Bloomsbury. It’s the young kids with knives—no respect for human life. They
don’t understand consequences. You see it all the time on the news.”

Emily didn’t believe that the porters were frightened of walking
through the estate. “The policeman I talked to said it looked as though she’d
been picked up and dropped by a giant cat.”

“That’s their theory is it? A giant cat’s responsible for that
woman’s death?”

Nik wanted to be
getting on with his day. He stood and picked up a file at random from his desk,
trying to signal that he had finished talking and that he had work to be
getting on with, without being too rude.

“No, it was…an expression. A way of explaining something
inexplicable.” Emily frowned. Nik wasn’t being
very cooperative. “But it made me think she might have fallen.”

“Be that as it may, this poor lady died elsewhere. There’s no need
to drag her body back over the threshold, so to speak. Let’s leave this
business outside where it belongs. We work hard to create an atmosphere of
calm, here. It’s not just me—there’s a whole network of people, mostly
unseen, who rely on the hotel for their livelihood, and strive to keep it going
to the best of their ability. People who have never worked in a hotel find it
difficult to appreciate, but we function like a family. And it’s not just the
workers that I have to think about, of course. Our guests need to feel that
they’re cosseted and protected once inside our walls. I don’t want to disturb them
by suggesting a stronger link between the hotel and this poor lady’s murder
than the fact that she was planning to stay here. I’m sure you understand.”

Emily did understand. Nik didn’t want Winnie’s death connected to the Coram.

“Is there CCTV in the hotel?”

Nik looked
startled, and then irritated, and then he recovered himself. Emily was really
getting under his skin. She was forcing him to look at her, really look at her
and try and work out why she was bothering him so much, while reappraising his
own sense of himself. It was like a romantic comedy, without the romance or the
comedy. He saw an earnest, inquisitive brunette with a dimpled smile. And he
knew that she saw an evasive, slightly sweaty man with a narrow, angry face and
a cheap suit. He put his left hand up and smoothed a lick of his hair with his
palm. He said, “We’d consider it an invasion of our guests’ privacy to have
CCTV inside the hotel.”

“Outside, though? You must have it outside.”

“We do have security cameras outside. Yes.”

Now they were getting somewhere!

“But the system was undergoing a reboot earlier today.”

“It had been turned off!”

“The system was being reset.”

“So there are no pictures around the time that Winnie
was killed?”

“That’s correct. Though of course it would show
nothing anyway, since she was
killed on
the estate
.” Nik smiled and touched
Emily’s shoulder very lightly. He couldn’t give her a shove, much as he would
like to, so instead, like an angry poltergeist, he used the sheer force of his
will to propel her the three paces to his office door.
She really would have to leave, whether she considered him rude or not.

Outside Nik Kovacevic’s
office, Emily paused to write a few quick notes:
reboot, back over the threshold.
She’d managed to get a look at Nik’s computer before he’d closed the screen. This prompted
her to write:
one-star reviews.

Emily was heading back through the lobby to the Virginia Woolf room
with her trio of chocolates to give to Det. James when she heard a voice
calling her name.

A middle-aged woman with short gray hair,
wearing a timeless (or, to put it another way, unfashionable) dark-green
corduroy jacket and skirt and a maroon paisley shirt, stood at the checkin
desk and waved her silver-topped cane cheerfully. “Emily!” she called.
“Yoo-hoo! Emily!”

It was Dr. Muriel, Emily’s neighbor. Emily offered to carry her suitcase up to her
room so that they could talk about Winnie’s death. Dr. Muriel was an academic who was used to sifting
information. She could help Emily sift the information she had gathered so far.

By the time they had waited for the elevator, got the key card to
open the door and gone into the room, Emily had just about finished explaining
what she had learned. She put the suitcase on the floor and went to try and
open the windows. None of them moved more than an inch at the top of their
frames. Dr. Muriel neither protested nor expressed
approval of Emily’s apparent fanaticism for fresh air. She sat on on the red velvet chaise longue by the window and put her
feet up.

Emily handed over her notebook apologetically. “It’s just a jumble
at the moment. I thought I’d write down everything and then worry later on
about what’s relevant and what isn’t.”

“Good idea. Very interesting,” said Dr.
Muriel as she scanned the pages.

“Yes, but as you can see, I wrote down some of those things just
because they irritated me. They’re about me, not Winnie.
But then there were other things that were niggling at me and…I don’t know. I
wrote down anything that didn’t make sense in case it might have some bearing
on what happened to Winnie. I’m still sorting it all
out in my mind.”

“Now, if you were an undergraduate I’d suggest using sticky labels
and different categories for your notes. Undergraduates like sticky labels.”

“So do I. I can’t get excited about bags or
shoes. But I really love stationery.”

“So you see, looking at this, you’d have categories like…
Emily
,
Winnie
, hotel staff, smoking,
litter
…”

“I really hate litter.”

“Me too.”

“I think that whatever I was investigating, or whatever notes I was
writing, I’d end up having a category for litter. Trouble is, just because
someone drops litter, it doesn’t necessarily make them a murderer.”

“Indeed not. But perhaps the custodial sentence should be about the
same. It would make a marvelous deterrent, eh?” Dr. Muriel gave a rather vulgar laugh, as if someone had
just told her a dirty joke. “What troubles me most is this business with
Polly.”

“You think she’s in danger?”

“Do you?” Dr. Muriel liked asking
questions. She didn’t much like answering them.

“She could have been targeted because of something she has seen or
heard,” said Emily. “But I’m not sure what.”

“It’s anomalous. A woman dies. Another may have been poisoned. The
poisoning doesn’t fit, does it? It’s too elaborate. As if a
page from one story has got mixed up with another.” She handed back the
notebook to Emily. Emily opened it up and wrote
anomalous
next to the other words, as much because she liked the
sound of it as anything else:
I’ll have
the anomalous, please, with a spoonful of blueberry flummery and a pot of tea.

“I’d say we need to stir things up, don’t you, to find out what’s
going on?” Dr. Muriel picked up her cane and made
poking motions before using it to heave herself up from the chaise longue.

Emily didn’t think that was wise at all and wondered whether she
should say so. She didn’t actually know Dr. Muriel
very well, except to say hello to in the street. While it was true that they
had briefly been imprisoned together in a cellar in a very large house in
Brixton during a fireworks party, they hadn’t spent the time exploring each
other’s foibles and eccentricities. It had seemed more important to look for a
means of escape. But Emily was starting to see that her outwardly staid neighbor was a maverick. If she was set on stirring things
up, Emily doubted that there was any point trying to dissuade her. She followed
Dr. Muriel to the elevator with a sense of
foreboding.

The elevator bell dinged as it reached their floor. The polished
doors opened and an elderly couple got out. Dr.
Muriel and Emily got into the elevator, joined at the last minute—Emily had
to hit the “doors open” button to accommodate him—by a short, skinny
Mediterranean-looking kid of about thirteen.

“Ground floor?”
Emily asked sweetly as she let go of the “doors open” button. He ignored her
and pressed the button for floor number five. “Oh,” she said, as the elevator
began its steady ascent. “We were going down.”

Dr. Muriel treated Emily and the boy to
her vulgar laugh. At the top of the panel there was a button labeled “Roof Terrace and Bar.” Dr.
Muriel saw it and nodded toward it for Emily’s benefit, “Our giant cat?”

“You may be right.” Since they were going that way anyway, Emily
pressed the button, but it wouldn’t light up.

“That floor’s closed,” said the boy. He hitched his trousers up and
smirked. “You can’t go up there till six o’clock.” He looked smug, the way boys
of his age do, until hormones suddenly add twelve inches to their height and
they discover rebellion, girls, music and inscrutability.

Emily pressed the button for floor number six, and when they reached
it they got out and looked for a staircase to take them up to the roof terrace
on the next level. They found a staircase marked “Emergency,” and up they went.
The door to the rooftop bar wasn’t locked, and they went inside. The nighttime glamour of the place was lost without uplighters,
candles, music, the murmur of guests and other mood enhancers, though the
picture windows on three sides gave a good 270-degree view of the landmarks of the
surrounding area of London. To the north, a wall blocked out the less-delightful
view of the tower blocks of the neighboring estate.

Emily and Dr. Muriel walked through to the
open-air terrace that adjoined the bar. It was a very pleasant area with a dab
of bright green lawn, some evergreen shrubs in heavy, blue-glazed clay pots,
and a stone fountain that was not currently operational. There were mint-green
parasols sunk into cement in mint-green pots, to anchor them in high winds. The
parasols were closed for now. Everything up here was closed or turned off. But
it was still pretty.

They took a look around. There was a hip-high metal and reinforced
glass fence around the edge of the terrace. Weighted pots containing plants and
decorative shrubs had been placed in front of the fence, to screen out the
sound of the traffic below, or the wind, or both, and presumably to discourage
guests from getting too close to the edge.

If Winnie had fallen, she surely had
fallen from somewhere else on the roof terrace. Behind the aubergine-colored leaves of a Japanese maple
tree in a blue pot, next to the bar, Emily saw a little wooden door. She pushed
it open and found herself in a small, ugly service area with bins. The fence
here was a low metal one. Directly below was the courtyard that led to the
hotel kitchen.

Emily looked over the fence to get a better look. Her foot kicked at
a loose, moss-covered stone which skittered and clattered to the ground below,
making Emily sway slightly as she watched it fall down toward the colored bins in the courtyard below.

“Careful!” said Dr. Muriel.

Emily retreated from the fence. “Let’s say Winnie’s being chased by
someone; she’s frightened and she’s trying to get away. She darts in here,
thinking she might be able to hide. She looks down and sees those big plastic
bins full of bottles and cardboard boxes and whatever. The attacker follows. She
decides to jump, hoping the boxes will break her fall.”

“But she lands awkwardly and breaks her neck?”

“I suppose so.” Emily looked down and saw the trees in Russell
Square across the street, and then, when she went up on tiptoes, leaned forward
and looked to the left, there was the entrance to the hotel running the length
of the building. Ornate black railings demarcated the hotel’s property. These
enclosed narrow, designated strips of pavement where guests could stand and
smoke without mixing with the hoi polloi on the street beyond. There were a few
smokers out there now.

To the other side of where the smokers were standing was the
courtyard with the plastic bins, screened from the hotel entrance by a wall.
Emily walked to the far end of the rooftop bar’s service area and looked down. Below
her was a scrubby playing field, a scruffy children’s playground with a roundabout
and a slide, and the low wall that separated the estate from the hotel.

Dr. Muriel followed. “And why was Winnie up
here?”

They went to the low railings and stood there, looking down. Emily
felt a little bit dizzy. She took one step back. “I don’t know,” she admitted.
“Maybe she wasn’t being chased. What if she was meeting someone? Someone she
trusted.”

“It wouldn’t take much to unbalance someone and give them a shove.
But you’d need to temporarily distract or disable them. A sudden, warlike
scream would be very effective. But not practical, in case someone heard
it…You’d need something—some
thing
…”