Hotel Midnight (28 page)

‘I know what a Tazer is, John. It doesn’t kill people stone dead then resurrect them five minutes later.’

‘Well, what’s your explanation then?’

She grimaced. ‘You best come back to the house. I’ve more to tell you … and it’s no good checking your watch. Your last train left ten minutes ago.’

‘Last train?’ My turn to grimace. ‘You know, Colette, you make the
last train
part sound ominous?’

‘Yeah … what I’m going to tell you is ominous, too.’

I did look at my watch. She was right. My train was long gone. It was thundering northwards back home to Scotland without me.

A thought occurred. ‘We’ll have to stay here until the
ambulance
arrives. I’ll explain that their casualty scarpered.’

She scowled. ‘I haven’t called one. The payphone was
vandalized
.’ Then she added, ‘We might as well go back home.’

Despite my sense of foreboding I walked alongside her as we descended into the pit of shadows that was the staircase.

Colette locked the front door of the house behind us. I noticed she had the edgy manner of someone who’s afraid they are being followed. Then she’d nearly been thrown from the city walls tonight. Who wouldn’t keep looking back over their shoulder?

She switched on the lights. More lights than were necessary. Another sign of her edginess? The city’s many churches struck midnight. Twelve shimmering tolls of the bell that haunted the night before dying away to foreboding silence.

‘We both could use a coffee.’ She led the way through into the kitchen where she switched on every light. ‘You have milk and sugar, don’t you?’

‘Without for me. I’m cutting down.’

‘So you aim to live to a ripe old age?’

There was something strained about the way she voiced it, but all I did was make a quip about preferring around a bucketful of brandy, bearing in mind the kind of night we had.

‘Apart from some old sherry kicking around the bottom of the fridge coffee’s the strongest thing we’ve got.’

‘Coffee’s fine by me, then.’ I leaned back against the worktop. My distorted reflections faced me in the copper pans hanging on the opposite wall. Outside a truck’s horn called through the
darkness
. The kind of sound you suspect lost souls make as they voice their eternal despair.

Colette filled the kettle, then switched on. As she took two big brown mugs from the cupboard I noticed the marks on her face. ‘Let’s take a look at those.’

‘Huh?’

‘You grazed your face when you fell.’

‘Pushed,’ she corrected. ‘The bastard.’

‘Looks as if you’ve brought some of the moss from the wall back with you as well.’

I tore kitchen tissue from the roll, moistened it with warm water, then I shushed her as she started to protest. After she assented with a grudging shrug, she let me dab the grazes clean before wiping away streaks of green moss.

‘Could have been worse.’

‘It very nearly was.’

I grimaced for her. ‘It’s a fair drop from the walkway to the road. The madman needs locking up.’

‘I’m not referring to being thrown from the wall.’ She flinched as I dabbed a bloody scrape on her jawline.

I asked, ‘You mean what happened to Lauren and the woman we saw tonight?’

‘Yup.’

‘But both are alive and well now?’

‘Are they?’

‘As far as I can tell,’ I told her. ‘The woman walked away. Lauren’s acting weird, but if she can stand in the window to watch us running up and down the wall that means she’s with us in the land of the living.’

‘Relatively speaking. You can pass me the coffee … please.’

Her manner irritated me again. I stepped away from her, dropped the tissue with its moss stains, into the pedal bin, then passed her the jar of coffee with a snappish, ‘You said you were going to reveal something
ominous
, as you put it. Are you going to get to the point, or are you going to simply drop mysterious hints all bloody night?’

‘So, John Helvetes, your innate sensitivity hasn’t deserted you after all. Coffee.’

She plonked the mug on the worktop beside me.

‘I’m sorry that bastard nearly threw you off the wall, but—’

‘Thank you for saving my life. Bad mannered of me not to have thanked you.’

‘Bollocks to that, Colette. You don’t have to thank me; in fact, I’d have ripped the sod’s head off if I’d got my hands on him.’

She did a little double-take, as if my anger over the stranger’s attack surprised her, maybe even touched her, too.

‘Right.’ The anger motivated me. ‘We’ll telephone the police. If we can’t report the attack on the woman, we can report the attack on you. OK?’ Then came a whisper of doubt. ‘If they believe us, that is.’

‘Of course they will. I videotaped it all; remember the camera in the attic?’

‘You did as well!’ I clapped my hands together with a triumphant whoop. ‘Colette, you’re a genius.’ I playfully grabbed her shoulders before planting a smacking kiss on her forehead.

‘No. I wouldn’t do that.’ She backed away from me, her eyes down.

‘Sorry. I was always a clumsy lummox when it came to personal boundaries. I didn’t mean to …’ I felt awkward now.

‘No … I didn’t mind the kiss … not as such.’ She shrugged her shoulder, tried to make eye contact, flushed then looked down at her coffee. ‘In fact, it’s nice to have human contact again. It’s been a while … somehow I’ve ended up on the shelf … you know … work. It’s easy to get out of the habit of going out. You forget to look for, hmmm … romance I suppose you’d call it.’ She sighed hugely. For some reason this was uncomfortable for her. ‘God, yes, John. You’re right. I keep putting this off. It’s stupid of me but I couldn’t bring myself to tell you.’

I pulled a chair out from the kitchen table. ‘Come on, take the weight off your feet.’

‘Thanks.’

She sat down. I chose the chair opposite. ‘OK, if you want to share anything with a big lummox Scotsman, Colette, now’s your chance.’

The noise she made combined her clearing her throat, a laugh and a single, heart-wrenching sob. ‘OK. I remember crying on your shoulder when I got dumped by Vince at uni so this
shouldn’t
leave me feeling too weird.’

My stomach muscles tightened. I suspected her revelation wasn’t going to make for happy listening. ‘Whenever you want, old pal. No hurry.’

‘OK.’ She took a swallow of coffee. ‘I rented this house with Lauren three years ago. About the time you first started seeing her.’

I nodded. Until the break up twelve months ago I’d made the trip south from Scotland every weekend for nigh on two years. The day they moved in I helped them lug their leather sofa of spine-wrenching dimensions up to the first-floor lounge.

She continued, ‘I’m a numbers woman. I work freelance to assess not only how people behave, but what gender group or age group favours a particular product or activity. Last year, for instance, I sat in a newsagent’s so I could count how many women under the apparent age of thirty bought a particular make of confectionary with their magazines. Then I’d report my findings back to the market research company that had hired me.’ She gave a tired smile. ‘I call myself the Statistic Detective. This year I’ve been studying the age distribution of people visiting York during the evening. It’s to assess whether only a narrow band of people in a particular age group are visiting the pubs and
restaurants
, or whether there’s a wide range of evening visitors. Of course, this means two things, principally. I work at night. Plus I spend hours watching the public – either arriving at the car-parks, or bus or train station, or those walking into the city.’

‘And you can only access the city through the gates in the walls.’

‘Precisely. Because there are only a very small number of access points through the walls it channels people into more
concentrated
streams, which makes life easier for me. So as a people watcher I noticed when they started to change.’

‘Change how?’

‘I noticed over a period of around six months that whereas before it tended to be mainly groups of young people coming into town now there are more people who arrive by themselves.’

‘So?’

‘So, it’s a marked shift in behavioural patterns. I’ve got the facts and figures on file, but just off the top of my head I can
remember
that during a three-hour period on a Friday evening in April just twenty-eight people arrived by themselves. In September it was a hundred and twenty. More than four times as many sole visitors than six months earlier.’

‘The nights were lighter in September?’ The guess was a haphazard one.

‘John, come on, you know sunset and sunrise times are
virtually
the same in September as they are in April.’

‘Correction understood. So what do you make of the fact that more people now walk into the city by themselves than in the company of friends?’

‘It doesn’t seem much on the surface, but that is a radical change in behaviour. I recognize specific individuals, too, that all through the summer would be rolling into town with their friends, they’re laughing, joking, very outgoing. Now they arrive by themselves and, to put it mildly, they look as miserable as sin.’

‘Could be a big employer’s closed down so there’s been mass redundancies. That leads to a big percentage of jobless people; naturally, they are so fed up at being skint they just mooch into the city centre to kill time.’

‘Then there’s the other crucial factor.’

‘Which is?’

‘The stranger on the walls. The one who attacked Lauren a few days ago, and then the girl tonight.’

‘Him? What’s he got to do with a change in social behaviour?’

‘Quite a lot, in fact.’ She bit her lip. ‘I have to tell you this, John. One night I went out onto the section of wall that overlooks the station. I was filming people leave the station, when I felt someone grab me from behind.’

‘Oh, God, Colette.’ I stared at her not knowing what to say next.

‘I tried to yell, but he grabbed hold of my mouth and jaw,
actually
grabbed it to hold it shut. I’ve never felt hands as strong as that.’ Her eyes slipped into a glassy stare as she recalled what happened. ‘It was the same man we saw tonight.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘What if I tell you I could smell this almost overpowering odour of spices? Things like frankincense and cinnamon.’

I grunted in something close to shock. ‘That’s what I smelled tonight when I saw him on the wall.’

‘Try this.’ She held her arm out to me. ‘You can smell spices on my sleeve from when he grabbed hold of me tonight, before trying to throw me off the wall.’

I didn’t even have to lean forward much further as the sweet smell of exotic spices reached me. Among them was the piquant breath of frankincense that I remembered so well from that Holy Land Christmas card.

My lips were dry when I licked them. That dryness that comes with nervous tension. ‘It happened to you? You collapsed
unconscious
?’

‘Not bloody likely.’ Colette vented the words with feeling. ‘He was standing behind me. He was whispering: ‘Stand still, be calm’. It was weird. We were standing there in the dark on top of the wall where it overlooks the train station. All these people were
flooding
toward the pubs. I could see them laughing. A group of girls were dressed as nuns but wearing short skirts and high heels. A hen party I suppose. And coming down the street were two men in sailor uniforms; one was blowing a bugle. Everyone was so
carefree
, while I was being held on the wall by a man who smelt like the spice counter in a delicatessen. All the time, he kept
whispering
in this odd, snaky hiss that I should stay calm, not struggle, not call out. When I nodded I felt him loosen his grip on my mouth just a bit. So, you know me, John, like a bull in a china shop at the best of times. Even though I couldn’t see him I jerked my head back as hard as I could. It made my day when I heard something crunch. He gave this massive grunt. It sounded like someone had kicked a buffalo up its backside. Then he shoved me forward so hard against the wall it winded me. By the time I managed to turn round to see who the bastard was, he’d run so far along the wall all I could made out was this shadowy figure. But, my God, I reeked of frankincense and that sharp peppercorn smell, you know? When you smell a pepper mill just after you’ve used it?’

‘Good for you.’ Relief washed through me. ‘At least he didn’t knock you out like the others.’

‘No, I was wide awake. In fact I felt on fire I was so
wide-awake
. Next thing, I started yelling down at the crowds of people for help, and that the man who had attacked me was running along the wall.’

‘And?’

She huffed. ‘Those that heard just waved back.’ She shook her head. ‘They thought I was a drunk celebrating losing my drawers or something.’ A tight smile reached her lips. ‘At least I wasn’t hurt. It was anger more than anything.’ She took a swallow of coffee. ‘Then I came home to tell Lauren what happened. Of course she insisted on checking me over to make sure I hadn’t been hurt. She found blood in the back of my hair. At first she thought I’d cut my scalp but she couldn’t find a wound.’

‘So it was the attacker’s blood.’

‘Yes, and proud of it I was. I was pleased that I’d inflicted some damage on the rat. Anyway, I showered good and hard to make sure I washed the blood out of my hair.’

‘Police?’

‘No, I talked myself out of reporting it. Too much hassle, the police will never catch him, no real harm done. That kind of reasoning. Ridiculous really, but there you go.’

‘So you think this man is preying on young women? That he might have attacked dozens?’

‘It’s more than that. He’s infecting them.’

‘
What?
’

‘Infecting them. Listen.’ She took a deep breath then locked her eyes on mine. ‘To put it bluntly I’ve got the immune system of a mule. I never get colds. My mother’s the same. She worked as a nurse in India for five years when she left college; she never had so much as a stomach bug. Whenever there’s a flu epidemic I know when I’ve got the virus in my system. The glands come up in my neck like golf balls; my temperature rises, but that’s all. My antibodies kill the bug. Within twenty-four hours I’m back to normal. I don’t even get a cough or a runny nose. It was the same after the man attacked me. The following morning my forehead felt hot. My neck was stiff because the glands were enlarged. I knew I had some bug in my system. Though this was the worst I’ve known. My blood must have been a battleground. But a couple of days later my temperature dropped, the glands were back to normal, I was right as rain.’