by D K Bohlman
Jenna’s face went from shock to wild amusement in a flash. She laughed out loud.
‘You! It was you!’
‘Great minds think alike. Only I thought faster. Shame it was only by a bit, else I’d have been gone before you got there. The toilets weren’t too comfy though, were they?’
‘Err?’
‘Heard you go in. I was in the gents. At least I could take a pee when I needed.’
Calum dissolved into laughter and stood up. He grabbed a couple of plastic cups from the side of the bed.
‘Think this calls for a Talisker toast.’
She smiled. ‘But … why didn’t you find it?’
‘Well, I could say you were a better looker than me … true in one way,’ he winked.
‘But truth was, Jen, the scary monster arrived, so I hid.’
Jenna rolled her eyes.
‘Anyway, there is some other news I hadn’t mentioned. Peter Kovacs called me yesterday afternoon. Told me he’d heard I’d been asking at the hotel about Sarah McTeer. Told me that whatever I thought I knew, she must have left the Cristal after seeing his father and has never been seen since. What’s more, since the family are in mourning over Marton’s death, and busy with the funeral and estate, he asked that we respect their privacy now.’
‘I see. So … do you think that’s genuine? Should we back off?’
‘No. No, on both counts. I don’t believe Sarah ever left that hotel. We need to stick to the plan. I’m on Beata Sandor’s trail first and foremost.’
Checking in
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Jenna felt nervous as she arrived at the Hotel Cristal. True, no one should know her here, but there had been the cleaner who had seen her briefly when she’d first snooped in Marton Kovacs’ room. She told herself that the cleaner probably saw hundreds of different people for fleeting moments each week and remembered only a tiny fraction of their faces, if that. On the other hand, she’d watched Jenna enter the room for a reason.
She was allocated room number 314 and filled out the reception paperwork with her head down and as little verbal or eye contact as she could manage without appearing odd. She didn’t want them to remember her.
Once unpacked, she set out on what felt like a good first step. Scout the whole hotel. Just to see what was there.
Around an hour later, she returned to her room, none the wiser. The restaurant, lobby, small poorly-equipped gym, and reception didn’t offer any surprises or clues.
Not that she'd expected that on first sight. But Marton Kovacs had lived here and had been the manager-owner. If he was in any way connected to Sarah’s disappearance, she had to find out more about his daily routine and so on, especially around the time of her disappearance. Maybe reception could help in some way, but she'd need to be subtle.
As she walked back to her room from the lift, she peered ahead without purpose, to the end of the corridor. A strip of old-fashioned carpet lay between her and a tall sash window, letting in a grey light from the miserable day outside.
Something looked odd about the scene ahead of her. There was an imbalance of some sort. She felt it rather than saw it.
She took a step back and refocused her thoughts just on the corridor. Then she got it straight away. On her side of the corridor, there were more doors. On the left-hand side, there was more blank wall.
She walked up the corridor slowly, checking the room numbers as she went. Her room 314 was opposite 34. Her next-door neighbour, 313, was opposite 33. Room 312 and room 311 … were opposite a blank wall. She stared at it, then looked back down the corridor. Maybe room 33 was a suite or something. Odd that the number didn't start at 31 though? Or maybe it had been created after the hotel was built, to cater to more affluent guests. Something to check out maybe? And wouldn’t a room 31 or 32 be under room 41, where she'd found the spy-hole?
She paced back to her room and sat down, looked at the phone next to her bed … and had an idea.
She checked out the room-to-room prefix from the small card next to the phone and dialled room 31. Just a continuous drone. Line unavailable. Same for 32. She paused and thought again. Then she dialled room 33. A phone rang. It rang for a long time but no one answered it. She shrugged her shoulders and flopped back down on the bed, wondering what her next move to get closer to Marton Kovacs’ recent activities might be. And also to get into room 31.
As her thoughts drifted, they returned to the subject of Izabella. Now she’d moved hotels, she wasn’t in her face anymore. That felt like a good thing … and also a bad thing.
She found herself missing the anticipation of seeing Izabella in the bar each day. She hadn’t told her she was leaving either … well, why would she if she wasn’t sure she wanted anything to come of it. The trouble was … perhaps she did. Maybe she’d pop over to the bar tonight and see if she was there. Then play it by ear. Whatever that meant.
Calum digs deeper
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It took Calum only a few hours of detailed web searching before he managed to track down two activist groups that had some sort of ideological link to Arrow Cross. Not in name, or by direct reference, but with strong sympathies to the sorts of regime and nationalist policies that Arrow Cross had adopted.
One of them had a more open presence on social media and he quickly tracked down some meetings that were held in the capital, and beyond. By a large slice of luck, there was one in Budapest tonight.
He wondered whether to go further with this. It was still a fairly weak route of investigation. Even if Beata Sandor or Aliz Gal had any kind of ties with these groups, it didn’t mean it had anything to do with Sarah McTeer’s disappearance. But it might, and might often had to be enough, especially when there was no other promising line of investigation at the moment.
There was a registration process to go through before the location of the meeting could be revealed. Even with using Google translate he was worried that his lack of Hungarian might trip him up or alert the organisers to his credibility. So he asked Eszter to help.
She wasn’t too keen at first, but finally, she allowed him to use her address as a reference and guided him through the few questions. He had no intention of attending: his lack of Hungarian would mean he’d be rumbled immediately. The rest of the registration process was smooth and he was sent an address. Now he needed to find somewhere to watch proceedings from.
*
Calum rented a small car, with tinted glass, so he could watch in relative obscurity. As the light faded before the appointed time, though, the darkened glass turned into a hindrance and he cursed himself for his faux cleverness.
The address was a little north of the city centre and he parked twenty yards away; it was a quiet street with a few cars parked along its length, so he didn’t stand out. Around twenty minutes before the scheduled start, he saw the first person ring the bell and be admitted. He couldn’t see inside the house from his line of sight and the door wasn’t opened wide, so he wasn’t able to make out the host.
He counted about twenty or so people filtering into the small house. He noticed there was quite a range of ages, though most were men. There were a couple of women: a youngish girl, dressed in casual clothes that thousands of her generation would wear and a much older … in fact elderly, woman, who was much more smartly dressed.
She stood out by virtue of her sartorial elegance. The thing was, though, he thought he recognised her. Even though he couldn’t quite place her in the twilight and from a side angle, she was familiar to him.
She was the last person to be admitted. No Beata Sandor then. But that nagging familiarity made him stay and wait for the attendees to leave. He fired the ignition and moved the car ten yards closer. He needed a better look.
It was two long hours later, punctuated only by a risky stroll up the street to find a dark place to pee, that he saw figures emerge from the house. He snapped to attention and watched for the woman carefully. Most of those he'd seen enter, left.
A few late stragglers dribbled out. Then, there she was.
As she passed over the threshold and moved a yard or so down the path, she turned to bid goodbye to someone. Her host maybe. It was another woman who started down the path to give her a brief hug and kiss on the cheek. As the elderly woman turned to the house, the light from within illuminated her face. Of course. It was Aliz Gal.
A final plan
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Peter awoke very early the next morning, finding himself unable to go back to sleep. He was filled with a strange mixture of nerves, excitement and a desire to plan it all out and get on with it. He’d always been a doer, eager to act. His grandmother had called him her clockwork boy, because, she said, he always seemed to be wound up and buzzing around. Right now, he needed the emotionless intent of a coil-sprung alligator.
He’d tried, hadn’t he, to settle this more peacefully, he’d asked the investigator to back off? Then Aliz called him late last night to say she’d spotted the Scotsman having a pee near a house hosting a meeting she was attending. Saw him from an upstairs room when she’d opened a window to smoke a cigarette. Hardly a coincidence and it had really riled his temper to hear the investigator hadn’t played ball with his request to stay away.
So it was back to plan A. He needed to murder them all.
He had a way in to the investigator. He’d been looking for the Scots girl, after all. So it would be perfectly reasonable to invite him back to the hotel, with the enticement of more information, wouldn’t it?
As for Aliz, well, he had a little false drama worked out that would require her attention. It would cause her demise too. Which was a shame … he quite liked her old-fashioned ways and stiffness. She reminded him of his mother in some ways. He pushed that thought firmly away.
He would leave it for a day, work his plans through. Then he’d deal with Aliz. Once he’d resolved the situation with her, he could concentrate on the last part of the jigsaw. She’d called him Neuman. It sounded German but Aliz had said he was Scottish. He found himself curiously interested in meeting him before he dealt with the threat this man posed.
Somehow, the idea of murdering all these people had started to seem less difficult to countenance than it had at first. He’d begun to immunise himself against the wrongness of it all. He knew there was a paradox here. He was a doctor, trained to keep people well. Yet here he was, contemplating ending lives, deliberately … and in numbers.
Maybe it was all his experiences of people’s illnesses … and deaths … over the years, which had lent him an emotional shield of some sort, a way to deal with human suffering day in, day out. One way or another, he had begun to deal with the prospect ahead of him. He couldn’t see another way, without losing everything and everyone dear to him.
His heart knew very well, though, that he wouldn’t be feeling quite so detached when the killing began.
Peter entices Aliz
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Peter called Aliz from his room.
‘Hello, Peter. Do you need something? You can call the front desk if you do.’
Peter felt somewhat insulted by her brevity.
‘Of course, Aliz. I know that. But this is not something for the front desk. It is about our secret. Our secrets.’
Now he had her full attention. ‘What is it, Peter?’
He could hear her apprehension … he had to deal with that. He needed her to be calm and do what he asked of her.
‘Aliz, I heard some things going on in the room above me. Our secrets’ room. It’s odd.’
Aliz looked around the office. She was alone.
‘What’s odd? I’m surprised you can hear anything, the ceiling between your room and the one above is very heavily soundproofed.’
‘Yes, but there’s thumping, very low, like a big object being banged on the floor. But it’s not random banging. They’re banging SOS … you know, in Morse code. Three short, three long, three short pauses. It’s faint … very faint, but I can hear it. Also, because of this, I went upstairs to check their return food tray. There was a note on it.’
Peter could almost hear her dread over the line.
‘What did it say?’
‘I’ll read it out to you.’
‘The new girl is sick. I think she keeps choking on food and her neck looks puffed up. She has a nose bleed too. She doesn’t know why. She needs some help in case it is serious.’
Peter paused and waited for Aliz to respond.
‘I don’t know, Peter. Do we let her suffer? I don’t want to, but, well it depends on what you are going to do about them. I mean … is it worth helping her?’
Peter hadn’t anticipated this line of thought.
‘Ah, I don’t know for sure yet Aliz. But I think maybe we should take a look at her. I mean, well, we don’t want to limit our options if she is really ill, do we? Has there ever been a doctor called here to the first girl?’
‘Once. Early on. We had to spike the girl’s food to make her sleep so we could get in and look at her without her being aware of the doors blocked up behind the wardrobe. It was an old AC doctor who came. He was sympathetic to the cause, of course. But I think he’s dead now.’
‘OK. So maybe we should take a look. I just think we should check them both out. It might be useful to see them for a number of reasons. I want you to come and pretend to help examine the girl, she will be more relaxed with a woman present. I know you’re thinking that I’m a doctor, but they don’t know that, do they? Anyway, I think we can do this without drugging them this time, well, maybe a little to make them less likely to be aggressive. I’ll give them some Lorazepam crushed up in their next meal. Then we can go in, OK?’
‘Peter, no, I can’t rush this.’ He could hear the panic in her voice. ‘I really don't think it’s a good idea to go in there with two of them. Not at all. You must think what else to do. Anyway, I’m sorry I’m busy, I need to go now.’
She put the phone down on him. It wasn’t something that happened to Peter very often and it pushed up his anger level. He knew he needed to stay calm … calm but insistent. Insistent in a worried way, so she would believe he was concerned about the girl. He’d need to try with Aliz again later, once she’d got used to the possibility of going into the room to investigate.
For now, he’d wait, and sharpen his hook for the Scotsman.
Aliz agrees
____________________________
After a few hours of reflection, Aliz didn’t need any more persuading.
It was just an overwhelming resurgence of the guilt she’d held for so long. Guilt at the knowledge that an innocent girl had been imprisoned. Guilt that the reason for her imprisonment was all based on what Marton had done so many, many years ago. Now there was someone else suffering the same injustice … and she was ill.
She knew she had to help, but she was nervous about how she could do that, really worried it would go wrong and that these young women would turn on her. She was no spring chicken, not strong physically. She needed to be sure she would be safe. The other thing, of course, was her shame. The shame she would feel when she looked in their eyes and they saw a captor. She didn’t want to see how that looked. But she knew she needed to find a way to deal with it … and the only way was to brave it through. She called Peter in his room. To her relief, it seemed he’d thought it through.
‘Yes, but as soon as we can in case it is something serious, Aliz. So this evening when you go off shift?’
‘OK. So seven, then?’
‘Let’s make it eight. Time for the Lorazepam to have worked from their evening meal at six. Come to my room Aliz, we’ll go together from here.’
*
As Peter and Aliz walked out of the lift close to eight o’clock, Peter’s brain was whirring at high speed. But it was operating in a different universe to Aliz’s. One where he would eradicate this threat to his inheritance and family name forever. He felt almost positive; weird and nervous … but positive.
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br /> As they paced slowly up the carpet, a girl came out of a room ahead of them. She turned towards them, heading for the lift. Peter looked at her, then did a double-take. He’d seen her before, he couldn’t pin where from, though. The girl dropped her face down and scurried past them. He thought about turning his head to look back at her … but didn’t. He didn’t want to be remembered himself, walking with Aliz towards this room at eight p.m. He pressed on and quickened his pace to the door of room 33. Aliz put on a spurt and caught up with him at the door. He moved his doctor’s bag to his left hand and opened the door with a key.
He held the door open for Aliz. She looked at him, then stepped through the threshold.
The first thing Peter did was to push the heavy wardrobe that blocked the plastered up doors to room 31, away from the wall. It was on castors, just as well as it contained an immense amount of heavy, sound-deadening material, designed to make sure the boarded over doors weren’t a noise weak spot. That was duplicated on the other side of the wall, as was the thin layer of plaster over the original double doors between the rooms.
Peter pulled a short metal pick out of his doctor’s bag and started to pull the plaster away from the wall. It crumbled easily and it wasn’t long before he had the old doors completely exposed. He reached for the handle and turned it. It moved with a rusty scrape in its barrel, the mechanism clogged with old plaster dust.
Peter held his breath.
The other side …
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They’d been watching television at the specified time after dinner and they’d both wolfed down the bowls of goulash, even though for Katalin it had been a daily staple of her diet for the past eight years. There had been some fruit too, just apples, but the crisp, juicy tang of those little spheres had refreshed their senses, like a walk in the fresh air changes your mood after a day indoors. The coffee helped too. Katalin felt very relaxed tonight for some reason. It was her favourite time, though it normally led to a steep drop in her mood when the television slot ended. It was then that she started to anticipate a long, image-less night, broken only ten to twelve hours later when daylight allowed her to peer out through the crack.