The Shadow Walker (24 page)

She shook her head nervously. “No,” she said. “The bed hadn't been slept in. I thought it was a bit strange, as the room was occupied… but you don't know—” She giggled slightly and turned away.

“Thank you,” Nergui said.

The chambermaids giggled again, glancing back at him, then moved off together. Nergui turned to the manager. “Do you know who was on duty last night? On the reception, I mean. After midnight.”

The manager nodded. “We lock the main doors at midnight, so people have to use the intercom to get in. I'll need to check who the night porter was last night.”

“Thanks. And can you make sure that no one goes into 204. I mean, no one. No chambermaids. No one.”

The manager nodded, looking anxious. “I'm sorry,” he said, “but what do you think has happened? I mean, after the last incident, we're all a bit on edge.”

“Trust me,” Nergui said, “I'm as much on edge as any of you. As for what's happened, well, I haven't a clue at the moment. I'm hoping nothing's happened. But I'm fearing—well, I don't even know what I'm fearing, except that it's nothing good.”

Back down in the hotel lobby, Nergui commandeered the manager's office as a makeshift base. The manager himself seemed only too pleased to hand over leadership to someone else.

While the manager was checking on the identity of the night porter, Nergui made another call to the embassy. The ambassador was still busy, as Nergui had expected, so he left a message for him to call back urgently. If anything had happened to Drew, it would
be highly damaging if the ambassador was not advised of the situation immediately. He had also left a message for his own Minister, briefly setting out the current situation. In the circumstances, he recognized that this was probably the least welcome news the Minister could have received. Losing one Westerner might be an accident. Losing two—and one of them a senior policeman at that—might well be construed as criminal negligence. Nergui's was not the only career that was likely to be on the line here.

Oddly, Nergui felt remarkably calm. As soon as he had realized that Drew had not returned to his room the previous evening, his personal anxiety had melted away, replaced by an almost glacial attention to the minutiae of his duties. This was one of his strengths—the capacity to detach himself from personal emotions and lock himself rigorously into the requirements of his job. It was, he suspected, not a particularly attractive personal quality, but it was one of the factors that contributed to his professional effectiveness. In this case, though, he was conscious that his own emotions were buried not far below the surface.

The manager returned a few moments later with the night porter. He was a tall man, dressed in blue overalls. As the night porter sat down at the manager's desk, Nergui could smell alcohol on the man's breath. It was not clear whether he had slept since completing his shift early that morning.

Nergui nodded to him. “I do not need to detain you long,” he said. “Just a few simple questions.”

The night porter looked anxious. Nergui guessed that, in that line of work, there was always temptation to break the rules, or even the law in minor ways—drinking, petty theft. Probably the porter assumed that he had been caught out in some transgression and was about to be sacked, if not arrested. In other instances, Nergui might have been tempted to play that to his advantage, but that did not seem appropriate at the moment.

“You were on duty last night?” he asked.

The man nodded. “Came on at eleven thirty, worked through to seven.”

Nergui paused, as though taking in this information. “Were there any disturbances last night? Anything out of the ordinary?”

The man shook his head. “Nothing. It was a quiet night.” He looked nervously across at the manager. Nergui suspected that the porter had probably spent much of the night asleep.

“I dropped off an English couple after midnight. Did any other guests return after that?”

“Not last night. We don't tend to get many. If tourists go out to eat, they tend to be back before then. There's not a lot of late night entertainment. The bar here's open till one, so if people want to drink they usually stay here.”

“So there was no one else?”

“No one.”

Nergui leaned forward across the table, staring intently at the porter. “You're absolutely sure of that?” he said. “This is very important. I'm not trying to catch you out. I just need to be sure.”

The man nodded, more nervous now, but apparently telling the truth. “I'm sure,” he said. “Nobody can get in without using the intercom. Even if I was—” For a moment, Nergui thought he was going to say “asleep” but he went on: “Even if I was away from the desk for some reason, they'd have to wait till I got back.”

“And it's not possible that someone else might have let anyone in in your absence.”

“Not last night. There was no one around. I was the only one on duty. The bar closed early—before midnight—because no one was in. So, no, I'm sure no one else came in after midnight.”

“Okay, that's fine. That's all. Thank you for your help.”

The porter looked surprised and relieved, as if he'd been reprieved from some major crime. He smiled and nodded, and looked across at the manager. “No problem,” he said. “I'm here on site if you need anything else.” He rose and hurried out of the room before anything more could be said.

“Assiduous chap,” Nergui commented.

“He'd have been asleep most of the night,” the manager said.
“Probably half drunk. Or more. But I'm sure he's right. Even if he was dead to the world, it would just mean that no doors stayed locked. We've got video cameras over the entrance so we can check the tapes to be sure, but I think you can safely assume that nobody else came in here after midnight last night.”

Nergui rose. “We may need to talk to other staff at some point. But if he was the only one on duty, I don't imagine anyone else can tell us much.”

The manager shook his head. “I wouldn't have thought so. I mean, we'll give any help we can. What's this all about?”

Nergui hesitated for a moment. The manager would have no difficulty looking up Drew's name or recognizing that he was a Westerner. He might even have some knowledge of who Drew was. “Look,” he said, “this is all highly confidential. Nothing must leak out. I'm serious, if anything about this appears in the press, I'll be back here before you can open your mouth again. And you're likely to become closely acquainted with the inside of our magnificent prison facilities. So don't say a word to anyone. Not even gossip.”

The manager was wide eyed. “I wouldn't—”

“Of course. But I can't take any risk on this one.”

“You think this guest—this Mr. McLeish—has gone missing?”

Nergui was not surprised that the manager had already checked Drew's name. “We don't know,” he said. “All we know is he didn't come back here last night.”

“And is this connected to the previous—incident?”

Nergui was tiring of providing explanations, but he recognized the importance of treating the man with some courtesy. “Probably not. As I say, it may all turn out to be nothing. But, especially given the previous incident, we can't afford to be too careful.”

The manager nodded, with some enthusiasm. “Of course, of course. I understand. As I say, if there is anything more I can do to help—”

“We will be in touch. I am very grateful for your kind assistance
today. I am sorry that I was so peremptory in dealing with your receptionist, but you will appreciate I was in a hurry. Please pass on my apologies.”

Nergui thought that by now he had laid the politeness on quite thickly enough. “But remember,” he said, turning as he opened the door, “say nothing. To anybody.”

Outside, the day was bright but cold. Nergui hurried across Sukh Bataar Square, pulling his coat tightly around him. As he walked he checked his cell phone which he had switched off while interviewing the porter. There were two messages—one from the ambassador's secretary to say that he was now free and could Nergui call back, and, inevitably, one from the Minister. The latter was not a conversation he was looking forward to. He procrastinated briefly by calling the ambassador as he walked.

Eventually, he was put through. “What is it, Nergui? The message sounded urgent.”

“It may be. You haven't seen Chief Inspector McLeish since we left last night?”

“No. I waved you off, saw him start to walk down the street. That's all. Why? Has something happened?”

“It looks as if he never returned to the hotel.”

There was a long pause at the other end of the line. Nergui heard the vague swish of static, the sound of the ambassador's breathing. “How do you know?” he said at last.

“I've been trying to contact him all morning. Left messages. For some reason, I got worried and went over to the hotel. His bed wasn't slept in. The night porter on duty has no recollection of letting him in after midnight.”

“It was—what, about twelve fifteen when you left here? But where can he have gone? It's only five minutes back to the hotel.”

“I know,” Nergui said, feeling an unavoidable sense of personal responsibility. “That's why we let him walk. I mean, there's no doubt some straightforward explanation—”

“I don't know what it could be,” the ambassador said bluntly, echoing Nergui's own thoughts. “I mean, he doesn't know anyone here, so if he didn't come back to the embassy, there's nowhere else he's going to go. He was a little drunk—I mean, is it possible that he ended up going to the wrong hotel or something stupid like that?”

Nergui glanced up at the imposing silhouette of the Chinggis Khaan, black against the clear blue of the sky, dominating the city center skyline. “It doesn't seem likely.”

“He could have collapsed or something.”

“Or slipped and hit his head. I hope that's not it, given the temperatures overnight.”

“Christ, if we don't find him, this is going to be a major incident,” the ambassador said. “How is it possible to lose a senior police officer?”

Nergui had no answer. It was an excellent question, and one he suspected the Minister would also be asking in the next few minutes. In his own mind, he was conscious of the political ramifications of the situation, but was growing more aware of his own personal feelings. He had grown to like Drew in the short time they had spent together. Nergui was more than capable of detaching himself from the emotions involved, but he realized that underneath, for the first time in many years, he was feeling genuinely worried about another human being.

“I'll get back to you as soon as we know anything,” he said. “That's all I can do.”

He delayed calling the Minister till he was back at the office, partly just to buy a few minutes and partly because he wanted to ensure that he was in as much control of the situation as possible. As it turned out, the conversation was easier than he had feared. The Minister's famous panic control mechanisms appeared to have kicked in, and he spoke calmly, even pleasantly.

“If you were anyone else, Nergui, I would have assumed that your message was exaggerated.”

“I'm afraid not, Minister. I set it out as clearly as I could.”

“You did indeed. So all you know is that he never returned to the hotel last night?”

“Well, we're as sure as we can be of that,” Nergui said, trying to remain as objective as he could. “We know he didn't sleep in his room. The night porter on duty has no recollection of him returning after midnight. And it doesn't seem likely that he would have been able to enter the hotel any other way.”

“So when did you last see him?”

“Just after midnight. I gave the others a lift back in the car, and Drew—Chief Inspector McLeish, that is—insisted on walking back to the hotel.”

“Pity you didn't insist on giving him a lift.”

Nergui didn't need to be told this. But then Drew had been adamant about wanting to walk, the hotel had been literally a few minutes away, the streets were deserted. No one could have predicted that anything would happen. But Nergui knew there was no point in going through all this with the Minister.

“Indeed, Minister.”

“So what do you think could have happened to him? I take it that you're treating this as in some way linked with the other incidents?”

This seemed to be everyone's favorite euphemism at the moment, Nergui reflected. “Well, we have to recognize that there could be a link with the killings,” he said. “But there's no way of knowing at the moment.” He paused. “If there is a link, who knows what the implications might be? It hardly bears thinking about. But there could be a host of more straightforward explanations. People do go missing, and sometimes for the oddest of reasons.”

“But they're not usually senior policemen on official visits to overseas countries.”

“True enough.”

“And, unless I'm missing something, it's not easy to come up with an explanation that doesn't have a potentially negative outcome?”

“Well—” Nergui hesitated. But the Minister was right. Even the simplest explanations—that Drew had fallen and hit his head, that he had collapsed, that he had been mugged—did not bode well for Drew's well-being. “I suppose you're right,” he said.

“Which, in turn, doesn't indicate a particularly positive outcome for you or me, Nergui. Do you have any leads on this at all?”

“On the disappearance?”

“On any of it. This whole sorry mess.” Nergui noted that, despite all his own reservations, the Minister had immediately elided everything into a single case.

“Some, but nothing substantive. Everything that happens seems to take us further away.”

“We need to get somewhere on this, Nergui. And quickly. Especially after this. This is going to be a major incident. The British government will be all over us. The Western media will be all over us.”