by Louise Voss
But first, he had to find her.
He took a walk round the back of the hotel. Going in the front wouldn’t do him any good. He imagined some snooty stuck-up fag behind the desk, the kind of person who looked at Jerome and put his guard up higher than a Kennedy tower block.
There was a young woman standing outside the back entrance, the door through which, Jerome guessed, they wheeled laundry and groceries. She was smoking, her free arm clutched tight around her ribcage. She had dark, spiky hair and dark eyes, kind of Eastern European looking. Pretty hot.
He walked up to her just as she flicked her cigarette away.
‘Hey.’
She eyed him suspiciously.
‘You gotta light?’
He pulled out his cigarettes and extracted two from the pack as she searched in her pockets for her lighter. She lit his cigarette for him, leaning in close enough for him to get a whiff of some kind of cleaning product, bleach or something, and he offered her a cigarette.
He smiled at her in that way that always worked. ‘You work here?’
She nodded.
‘You like a receptionist?’
She laughed. ‘No. A cleaner.’ He had been right about her being Eastern European. Her accent was sexy and he thought maybe, when this was done, he’d come back here, flash some cash, see what her voice sounded like when she was moaning his name.
He guessed she was paid minimum wage, probably less. As an expert in the black economy, he knew all about these poor suckers who came over here and did the crap jobs no other fucker wanted even though half of them were doctors and shit.
‘Want to earn some easy money?’
She looked him up and down. He gave her that smile again, one million watts of Jerome Smith charm.
‘What do I have to do?’
‘I’m looking for somebody.’ He took out his phone and showed her the picture Georgia had shared with him. ‘This woman. You recognise her?’
The cleaner hesitated then nodded slowly.
Jerome said, ‘Cool. A guest here, right? I need to know what room she’s in. If you can find that out for me I’ll give you a hundred quid right now.’ He showed her his wallet and counted out the money.
The cleaner licked her lips. ‘Two hundred.’
Jerome beamed. ‘You know what room she’s in?’
‘Yes. I clean her room.’
‘Nice. OK, two hundred.’ He pinched the money between forefinger and thumb and held it up.
The woman snatched it. ‘She’s in the honeymoon suite, top floor.’
‘She in there now?’
‘I don’t know.’ She had already stuffed the cash deep into her pocket. ‘But she was there one hour ago.’
‘Nice one.’
‘You go in that door,’ the cleaner said, ‘and take the stairs to the top.’
Jerome stubbed out his cigarette and winked at the woman. Then he went in through the doors and started to climb the staircase. This was going to be the easiest £100k anyone had ever made.
He reached the top of the staircase, out of breath and sweating, and stuck his head out the door. This wasn’t the freaking honeymoon suite. It was some kind of garden – a roof garden, loads of trees and shrubs and shit, a pretty cool place. He decided he’d like one when he owned his owned penthouse. The parties would be immense.
Trotting back down the stairs he went through another door and found himself standing at the end of a short, cool corridor with springy carpet beneath his Nikes. Cool. This must be it.
He took out his phone. All the way up, he’d been figuring out his plan. He needed to see the kid. He would look pretty damn stupid if he called the cops now and, when they turned up, she wasn’t there. He couldn’t see any way he could eyeball the girl without going into the hotel room.
This was going to be easy, though. The woman in Georgia’s photo was old. It wasn’t like she was going to fight him. All he had to do was get in the room, lock it and call the police. Maybe even make a motherfucking citizen’s arrest. He could imagine the feds’ faces when they rocked up and found out who the big hero was.
He rapped on the door.
From within, a woman said, ‘Who is it?’
This was exactly like being in a movie, one in which he was the star. That was another thing he wanted to do when he was loaded. Make a film, one with loads of guns and cars and money and boobs.
What would he say if this was a movie? ‘Room service.’
‘I didn’t order anything.’
‘I brought you some champagne, madam.’ He suppressed a laugh. ‘Compliments of the manager.’
He waited, and for a moment he thought she wasn’t going to buy it. But then she opened the door.
‘You don’t look like—’
He barged past her, pushing her aside and slamming the door behind him. The crazy bitch started yelling at him, asking him who the hell he was, but he ignored her, scanning the huge room. There was a large lump in the bed. A kid-sized lump. He walked over to the bed, ready to pull back the covers.
‘Stop right there.’
He turned around, preparing to grin at her, but his smile was stillborn.
She was holding a gun.
He put his hands up. Shit, he hadn’t been expecting that.
‘Who the hell are you?’ she asked. She had a weird accent, kind of Essex mixed with a bit of Australian. ‘Are you police?’
‘Police? Uh-uh. I’m a friend.’
‘A friend of whose?’
The gun was trained on his face. He said, ‘Hey, I’m no one. This was all a bit mistake, alright? Put that thing down and I’ll walk right back out of here. No drama.’
The woman looked past him at the bed. Jerome stole a look over his shoulder. The lump in the bed wasn’t moving, despite all the noise.
The phone beside the bed rang.
‘Get over there,’ the crazy bitch commanded, jerking the gun towards the far wall. He obeyed, striding over with his hands still aloft, keeping his distance from the gun.
The woman picked up the phone, said, ‘OK, thanks. Tell her I’ll be down in a minute.’
The woman looked down at the phone, thoughtful, taking her eyes off him.
This was his chance. He rushed her, but as he tore across the carpet he realized he’d underestimated the distance and her head came up and with it, the gun.
Pain exploded in his shoulder. Oh my fuckin’ days, I’ve been shot, he thought. I’ve actually been shot. This really was like a movie. Except in a movie, he’d spring to his feet, or roll and trip the woman standing over him now with the gun pointed at his head.
Her face was twisted with anger. ‘You stupid arsehole. You’ve fucked everything up.’
He watched, paralysed, as her finger tightened on the trigger. His last thought, before she blew his head off, was of Rihanna. She was locked in the car, all the windows up, the hot sun rising in the sky. He opened his mouth to plead for the woman to stop, because otherwise who was going to save his dog?
He didn’t even get the first word out.
Chapter 44
Helen – Day 7
Helen pushed open the heavy revolving door leading into Grant’s Hotel. Even before the door had finished the half-revolution necessary to spin her into the interior, she smelled the difference in the air inside: lilies, furniture polish, wood panelling, expensive luggage. This was the hotel where she came to the gym, but she hadn’t stayed in a hotel like this for quite a while. It reminded her of her old, pre-Frankie life, of romantic weekends away with Sean in exotic European capital cities, enormous king-sized beds with nothing comprehensible on the wall-mounted TV except Sky News, going to sleep sated with sex and the monotone lullaby of the air-conditioning. Although she wouldn’t want to do it again, not without Frankie. When they got her back, Helen thought, she would book another of those weekends, and this time they’d take Frankie with them. Vienna, perhaps, or Madrid. It could be just as romantic as when they’d first courted. More so.
Helen sat down on a vast square chocolate-brown suede sofa near the hotel lift. Its seats were too deep for her to be able to lean against the back of it, not without her legs sticking straight ahead of her like a child’s. So she perched on the edge and waited, her palms flat on her knees to try and stop them trembling. She was five minutes early, and still not entirely sure why she was there.
That moment, up in the attic, when she had found the photographs … it had been unreal. Like she had suddenly developed Alzheimer’s or something – just utter, total incomprehension.
She had climbed gingerly across the exposed beams of the loft, yellow loft insulation covering the floor between the beams like mashed potato on a pie – boarding it up had been on Sean’s To Do list for years now – over to the box of Frankie’s paintings that Sean had chucked to the back of the attic next to a baby car seat and another box containing her wedding dress. The boxes bobbed about on the sea of insulation like cargo out of a sinking ship.
She’d crouched down on her haunches and opened the box, flicking through them all, but nothing else had leaped out at her, no more ‘naps’, no more faces peering through windows.
She had been folding the flaps of the box back in, and about to swing her legs through the loft hatch to descend the ladder again, when the corner of something unfamiliar had caught her eye. It was a photograph album, one she didn’t recognize, almost completely hidden by the insulation. She pulled it out and opened it up curiously – and thought she was about to have a heart attack.
Sean had always told her that he’d got rid of all the photos of his ex-wife Penny after she died, that it was ‘just too painful’ to keep them. Of course it was possible that he had overlooked this one album, had forgotten he’d stuffed it under the insulation, perhaps to spare Alice from hurt – although no, that was bollocks. Helen herself had heard Alice expressing sorrow to Sean that she didn’t even have any photographs of her mum, and Sean apologising.
No, what was absolutely, blood-drainingly even more inexplicable than the continuing existence of this album of pictures of Sean and a woman who, at the age she was in the photos, bore a startling resemblance to Helen herself, laughing and kissing and then, later, holding the bundle that was baby Alice – was that Sean’s supposedly dead wife was her own friend, Marion. The woman she’d trained and chatted with at the gym, the woman she’d almost confided in about her sex life. She’d only known ‘Marion’ for a few months, but had quickly come to think of her as one of her best friends.
What a mug.
Helen had sat in the stuffy yellow heat of the loft for half an hour, her breathing shallow as though the insulation was asbestos, choking her, gazing at the photographs.
Could she be wrong?
No. It was definitely Marion. What the fuck was going on? Did Sean know she was still alive? Did Alice? Maybe that’s where Alice had disappeared to. Helen remembered how Marion had once acted oddly when Helen told her Sean was picking her up from the gym, how she had suddenly announced that, instead of leaving, she was going to try out the sauna. It had suited Helen to have a friend who didn’t know her husband, but on any occasion when the two of them could have encountered each other, Marion had made herself scarce.
It also explained how Marion’s Facebook profile was so minimalist – no photos, very little background, hardly any friends. Marion had called herself a Luddite and a technophobe, and claimed she only joined Facebook so that she could communicate with her brother in Africa … a brother who probably didn’t even exist.
It seemed inconceivable, but it was true: Marion was her husband’s first wife. Alice’s mother. And yet she hadn’t seemed particularly interested in talking about Alice with her, or expressed any interest in seeing her. She’d encouraged Helen in her moaning about how awful teenagers were. She’d been far more interested in Frankie, cooing over photos on her phone and asking lots of questions.
Back in the hotel, Helen sat for seven minutes, according to the big station clock on the wall across the lobby, her nerves increasing with each slow steady sweep of the big hand. What good would it do, to talk to Marion now – she tried to start thinking of her as Penny, but kept defaulting to Marion – with Frankie and Alice both missing? She bit her lip, and thought about leaving again, going home, to see if there was any news. Frankie was her only priority now. She pulled her phone out of her handbag to check it, but the screen was blank. Damn – she’d forgotten to charge it last night, yet again. Or rather, she’d plugged it in, but not noticed that the switch was off at the wall.
And yet she knew she wasn’t going to wimp out now. She couldn’t. There were questions she had to ask: why had Sean lied to her, and to Alice, all these years? Since Penny wasn’t dead, had they ever even got divorced? Was Sean a bigamist? When the registrar had asked he’d said he’d never been married before, and they hadn’t checked up. Helen twisted her wedding ring around her finger and gulped. If Sean could lie to her about something this important, what else was he hiding? She had to talk to Penny, or Marion, or whatever she was called now, to get the facts before confronting Sean.
As soon as she’d come out of the attic the night before, she’d checked to see what Sean was doing. As she suspected, he was passed out on the sofa. She had stared at him like he was a stranger. Then she’d gone to the computer and sent Marion a message telling her she knew who she was.
She’d sat at the computer until the early hours, awaiting a reply, but none came. But when she’d got up this morning and checked Facebook, there it was, a reply, just a single line asking Helen to meet her here at the hotel.
She was brought out of her reverie by a strange popping sound from somewhere in the building, then sudden movement caught her eye across the lobby. The fixed door to the left of the revolving door was flung open with a bang, and two dark-suited security guards ran, fast, across the lobby, shouting into walkie-talkies. One disappeared straight up the stairs. Everyone’s heads shot up, including Helen’s. The other guard ran over to the reception desk and spoke quietly and urgently to the two receptionists, who both clapped their hands across their mouths in horror. One of them immediately got on the phone, a plump young woman in her early twenties. Helen could see her trying not to cry as she forced the words out. Helen lip-read ‘police’ and ‘gun’ and ‘Grant’s’.
A short bald man who had been standing at the reception desk with a large suitcase next to him, presumably a guest checking in, walked towards her, his eyes wide with shock. Helen jumped up off her sofa and approached him. ‘Excuse me. What’s going on? What did he say?’ She gestured towards the security guard, who had followed his colleague up the stairs, taking them two at a time.
The man leaned towards her as though telling her a secret. ‘Awful. Someone’s got a gun … top floor … The roof … There’s been a shooting. Police are on their way …’
Somehow, Helen knew what he was going to say next before he said it. And she wondered, before he’d said it, how she could have been so stupid as to not make the connection before, when she was sitting in the loft like a bird on an empty nest, staring at those photos and wondering why Penny had come back.
Now she knew why Penny had come back, and why she’d wanted to meet her at the hotel. Why she always asked about Frankie.
‘… it’s a woman. And she’s got a little girl with—’
Helen had run for the stairs too, before the man had even finished the sentence.
‘Come on Frankie,’ I say. ‘Time to wake up.’
Her eyes flicker open for a moment, before she closes them again and tries to slip back into the sleep, the tranquillizer that I emptied into her bedtime drink heavy in her blood. Warm milk with sugar – the same drink Mum always gave me before I went to sleep. My adoptive mother, that is. Not the jackal who gave birth to me.
‘Frankie. Wake up …’
She stirs, opens her eyes, looks confused, probably wondering why we’re outside, why the sky is so close.
I lift her onto the bench, stroke her hai
r. She’s so pretty. She looks so much like Alice when she was three, frozen in time, as if she was waiting for me to return. It’s as if my Alice is here. Three years old. Exactly as I left her. She never turned into the scowling, slutty teenager I’ve seen coming and going from Sean’s house.
‘What are we doing?’ little Frankie asks, looking around. ‘I want Mummy.’
‘I’m your new mummy.’ I try to hug her but she beats at me with her little fists, catches me in the tit, making me gasp. I raise a hand to slap her but restrain myself.
‘We’re waiting,’ I say.
‘What for?’
I could tell her we’re waiting to say goodbye. But I really don’t want to see her cry again. So I sit beside her and think about the past, letting my life flash before my eyes in a way I can control. Starting with The Mistake.
The Mistake changed my life. Reeling from the truth about who I really was, about everything, I fled. I erased myself – the only thing I could do, scorching the earth upon which I stood.
I travelled to the other side of the world, to a nondescript suburb of Brisbane, Australia, where I set about living the most nondescript life possible. I changed my name to Marion, I met a nice man called Howard, who was thirty years older than me, with enough money to compensate for his tubby gut and stubby dick. I told him I was an orphan, that I had no family, that I was all alone in the world. He liked that. He wanted to be my world. Like most men, he had Handsome Prince syndrome.
We got married. Nobody asked about my past, so I didn’t tell them. We moved into his house. It had a pool in its big garden, a succession of state-of-the-art barbecues and, not having to work, I passed a decade swimming and sunbathing, stoned out of my mind on anti-depressants and cannabis, staring at the flat blue surface of the pool, day after day, nothing to do except suck Howard’s stubby dick at night, until it stopped working properly, and prepare meaty dishes for him and open his beer.