He was at the top of the hill before he knew it, the ground becoming more uneven and unstable. He looked down to see it was sand.
What he expected. The land cascaded into a beach that stretched as far as the eye could see. The tide was coming in, making the beach narrow, quickly dipping and getting swallowed by the sea. Even in the dingy light, Sheppard didn’t think he’d seen anything more beautiful or ever felt so alive.
The scene was perfect. Until...
There was someone. A small figure standing on the beach. Possibly about a mile away. He knew who it was.
And he knew the figure was waiting for him.
55
Before...
Winter didn’t like them in his house. Eren had obviously been there before, but it was something about him and the girl together. They were sitting around his kitchen table, with documents spread out all over it. In front of Eren, there was a large hand-drawn diagram of the hotel room that he himself had drawn when he had stayed in The Great Hotel.
In front of him and Phillips were fanned-out profiles of people—real people—that were candidates. A couple of them were about to become players in a game they could never hope to understand. Winter had been sorting through the profiles for the last five hours.
“Are we done?” Phillips said, sounding bored.
Eren smiled. “I think so. Simon, you want to run down the list of England’s luckiest?”
There was a bad taste in Winter’s mouth. “I’ll let you do the honors,” he said, and slid the pile over to Eren.
“I was secretly hoping you’d say that.” Eren laughed and picked up the first sheet of paper. He turned it round and showed it to the other two as though he was showcasing it in front of a class. The sheet had a picture of Phillips clipped to it. The rest detailed her backstory—like some crib sheet for a fantasy game.
Phillips smiled.
“Here we have our very own Amanda Phillips, our snake in the rough. Her task is to keep the game going along its intended path. You, Mandy, are the most important piece of the puzzle. You have to become Morgan’s ally, he has to believe you are his friend. He’ll like you—you’re young and pretty. And he’s stupid. As long as you don’t do anything to reveal your position, there’s no way he’ll ever suspect you.”
“I won’t let you down,” Phillips said, and she put a hand on Eren’s arm. Winter had noticed this happening more and more. They had tried to keep it from him but he knew. They had entered a romantic relationship—maybe it had been going on for weeks. He was sure that at the start they had probably been using each other for their own ends. But now it wasn’t hard to see that Phillips had become truthfully infatuated. Eren saw it too.
“Up next,” Eren said, picking up the next piece of paper. “Ryan Quinn. The boy that works at The Great Hotel, so it’s going to be hardest to convince him. But he is an important player—he will provide legitimacy if anyone else starts to question if they are in a hotel. We need to fool Ryan Quinn and if we fool him, we’ve fooled everyone else.
“Next is Constance Ahearn. Me and Simon were on the lookout for someone who could incite some trouble in the room. We might be able to bring out Morgan’s dark side if he’s faced with lunacy. Ahearn will be desperate and that’ll bring everyone in the room down with her. For you Mandy, this will be a tricky one. Ahearn is massively unstable, which means that you should be able to lean on her and make her do things if things get a bit too quiet. One of your priorities is to stick to Ahearn, be the little angel on her shoulder whispering into her ear. Whispering whatever you want. Sheppard doesn’t like instability and he sure as hell doesn’t like dealing with problems himself. If he trusts you, he’ll surely palm off Ahearn to you.”
Eren and Phillips laughed. Winter tried to smile too.
But he couldn’t. This was all becoming very real.
“Next, we have Alan Hughes.” Winter held his breath—he had put Hughes’s name into the mix to throw a spanner in the works. Hughes was a dedicated lawyer, he had seen that through his involvement with the MacArthur case. Hughes could solve the murder, even if Sheppard couldn’t. And that’s what you want now, is it? You want Sheppard to win? He didn’t know anymore. But this was all going too fast, and he was starting to foresee this whole thing spiraling out of control. Yes, it looked like Eren had a handle on it. But...
Go on, think it.
But Eren was insane.
He had seen it too late. The man was a good playactor, maybe even better than Morgan. He was not surprised they had been friends at school. They were two sides of the same coin.
“...Hughes is going to be a pillar of strength in the room. He’s undoubtedly going to be an antagonist to Sheppard. It sounds like a lot of fun.” Eren looked at Winter and beamed. “Good shout, Simon.”
Winter scraped his chair back and got up. “I need to get the land deed documents from upstairs.” A worthless lie as everyone knew why he had to leave the room. The next piece of paper hovering in Eren’s hand. Rhona Michel...its all your fault its all your fault. Why had he told Eren?
“Fair enough, Simon,” Eren said. “You know we have to do it though. She’s the one who’s seen the most. If only you had locked the door, huh? Poor little Rhona...”
“Don’t say her name,” Winter said quickly. “Just don’t.” And he stepped around the table and got out of the kitchen as quickly as possible. Out in the hall, he shut the kitchen door and leaned against it, as silent tears started rolling down his cheeks.
What had he got himself into? What had he got them all into? Those poor people were going to go through hell because of him. What could he do? Did he really have the power to stop this? He was in far too deep to go to the police—he couldn’t reveal Eren’s plan without revealing his own part in it. And he couldn’t go to prison.
“Is he gone?” Phillips’s voice. Very quiet. Through the door. “I think I heard him go upstairs.”
“He won’t be back for a while.” Eren. “All because of this Michel girl. He can’t deal with the consequences of his actions. I think he’s faltering. We need to deal with it.”
Phillips. “Do we need to remind him why he’s here?”
Eren cleared his throat and lowered his voice even more, so Winter had to strain to hear. “No. He’s working against us now. I’m not sure why he chose this Hughes man as a candidate.”
“So we just take Hughes out the room.”
“I’m afraid we’re a little too far along for that. Besides, we can spin this Hughes situation to our advantage, I think. What we can’t spin...is Simon’s mindset.”
“So what do we do?” Phillips said.
“I think you know really,” Eren said, and Winter could tell he was smiling. “After all, we still haven’t picked a body.”
Winter started uncontrollably shaking, so hard he had to step away from the door. They were going to kill him. His part in the game had changed. He had to get out, he had to leave, he had to be anywhere but here. He was going to die.
But where would he go? They knew where he lived—they were sitting in his kitchen, for God’s sake. The wrath Eren was bringing down upon Morgan—did Winter really think it would be any less for him? Winter had known Eren for years, knew his deepest, darkest secrets. Eren would find Winter wherever he went. And if he couldn’t, he would find Abby. Hell, he already had. He’d already overheard that Phillips had scored a job at Abby’s coffee shop.
Eren had him.
Winter’s silent tears were now ones of fear. How was he going to get out of this? How was he going to stop Eren doing this to these poor people? And then—a thought, an almost impossibly warped thought. He couldn’t do both—but he could help Morgan. Yes, because no matter how much he knew Eren, he knew Morgan more. He could get a message to him somehow.
But that means—Yes. It did. That means you have to die. And maybe that was his sacrifice—no�
�not sacrifice. Maybe that was his reward. For being so consumed by anger. For being molded into something despicable. A monster of his own. Eren and that insipid Mandy Phillips. He wanted to say they used him, but really he had been with them. Running so fast his conscience had to catch up. Maybe this was how it ended.
Abby would be safe. That was the main thing. And, at long last, he would have done the right thing.
But can you do it? Can you go down there knowing you’re going to die. No. But he could go down there knowing it was right.
Winter wiped his eyes with his handkerchief and felt a light finality drape over him like a thin bedsheet on a summer’s night. This was it.
All he needed was a plan.
And by the time he was ready to reenter the kitchen and rejoin the people who were going to kill him, he had one.
* * *
Carver straightened the pad of paper slightly closer to the bedside lamp. Impressions were the most important thing, and anything out of place would ruin the whole thing. That was why he had been extra careful. He had been to The Great Hotel many times, taken thousands upon thousands of photos that would seem dull to even the most enthusiastic photographer. He had even measured everything: the space between the pad and the lamp, the space between the television and the room service menu, banal things that wouldn’t matter to anyone in isolation. But together, they might matter—they might spoil the whole illusion.
Amanda was “outside” positioning one of the screens that would show the center of London out the window. She hadn’t believed it would work, but Carver had convinced her when he’d created a scale model. Now she was back to being skeptical. A large screen curved down around the window creating a sense of depth. Amanda was positioning a screen adjacent to that which would pipe in the exact same image but would create an illusion of depth. It was like those old TV sets—say a kitchen with a window looking out to the garden—you had to account for every possible way an audience member could view that window and create enough garden to accommodate that. It would give the illusion there was a garden beyond the window—just as his creation gave the illusion of the London skyline. It was a live feed and they were piping in the high-quality audio feed from the real room in The Great Hotel so all the faint traffic sounds, airplanes and city hum was there. It was all smoke and mirrors but it looked good—more than passable.
“Are you sure about this?” Mandy said, hopping over the “window” and taking a look at her handiwork. “All I see is a bunch of screens of London. Yes, they all join up and they all look and sound alright. But it’s just screens.”
“You see screens because you know they’re screens,” Carver said. “These people will be stressed, as stressed as they’ve ever been in their lives—their brains will work against them, fill in the blanks. And you’re going to have to pretend.” Carver went over to Mandy and carefully put his hands over her eyes. She giggled like a schoolgirl (it made his skin crawl). “Now think,” he said, before taking his hands away. “What do you see?”
“London,” she said, altogether too triumphantly. She jumped up and kissed Carver on the cheek.
He forced a smile. Of course he wasn’t sure about this—not any of it really. Any part of the plan could fail at any moment. The screens. The body. The knife. The phones. And Mandy. He trusted Mandy—no matter how much he despised her—and he thought she could pull it off. That first night they had met in Brickwork he had known she was the right person for the job—but he would be lying if he said he wasn’t a little worried.
Dr. Winter was hammering a nail into the wall. He picked up a painting he had specifically asked for himself and hooked it on the wall. Carver had signed off on it of course—it appealed to his warped sense of macabre. Dr. Winter had said that the real painting in the room he had visited was one of a peaceful stream on a summer’s day. This one was far more apt.
Mandy looked at it. “Where the hell did you find this?”
“Yard sale,” Winter shrugged. “Thought it looked a bit weird.”
Mandy reached up her hand and ran her fingers over the dried paint. “You’re right there, Doc.”
Dr. Winter laughed. “I can’t help but keep looking at it. I’m not sure what I find more horrible—the scarecrow’s smile or the fact there are probably children upstairs in that house, burning alive as the scarecrow just watches.”
Carver raised an eyebrow. Mandy seemed similarly affected. “You know, I might nick that,” she said.
“Be my guest,” Dr. Winter smiled.
Carver cleared his throat. “Simon, can you go into the bathroom and double-check everything again?”
“Eren, I’ve already done that three times over. Everything’s fine. It’s going to be fine.”
“Please, just do it.”
Winter frowned but scuttled off to the bathroom. He heard the door open and close. Winter was not wrong—he had already been in that small bathroom for about six hours. The man had proven himself to be rather adept at plumbing, believe it or not. Carver had always known that he would need a flushing toilet and working sink. The bathtub was fine, as no one was going to want to get in there. But the other luxuries had to be plumbed. Even if no one actually needed the toilet, Sheppard would be suffering from alcohol and drug withdrawal. So, odds said he was going to throw his guts up.
Carver centered the pad of paper and took the pen out of his pocket, resting it next to the pad. Next to the Holy Bible. Because that was the one staple of all hotels, no matter what the star rating. Every hotel presumed Christianity. Carver always thought how disgustingly offensive that was. Hopefully the Bible would at least help trigger Constance Ahearn’s lunacy. Just to help things along.
“It looks like we’re all set,” Mandy said, looking around and checking everything.
“Yes,” Carver said, “just one last thing.”
Silently, he pulled the knife out from under one of the pillows on the bed. He handed it to her—handle out.
“This is it then,” Mandy said. Carver thought she sounded almost excited. “After all we’ve planned.” She took the knife and looked at it in the light.
“You don’t have to be the one who does this, you know. I can do it and make it look like you.” She looked at him and he saw her mistake his concern over the plan going awry as concern for her—just as intended.
“I can do this,” Mandy said. “You believe in me, don’t you?”
“Of course I do,” Carver said, and kissed her.
“Everything seems fine in here,” Dr. Winter’s muffled voice came through the wall.
Mandy and Carver just looked at each other. He nodded. She nodded back.
No more words were needed.
56
Sheppard thought of turning away; walking in the opposite direction. But he knew that he couldn’t. He knew that he had to face the man at the end of the beach—he knew that that was the ending to this story.
He made his way down the dunes onto the beach below. Sand kicked up under his feet and he almost fell, moving faster to get to solid ground. The sand on the beach was firmer and easier to walk on than on the dunes, but it was no less inviting. Exhaustion was lapping at him like the waves on the beach, but he knew he would be able to make it to the figure in the distance.
Sheppard took Winter’s phone out of his pocket—no signal. He swore under his breath—still no signal even though he was finally out of that hole. He dialed 999 anyway—but nothing. Where was he? He needed to find a phone quickly or Ryan was going to die. And the best chance of a working phone was Eren himself—so Sheppard started walking toward him. Because he knew that, in some way, he deserved this. No one else would have to suffer because of him.
He’d hidden Eren away in his mind for so long. Hiding what he did under all the good memories, all the substances, all the late nights and later mornings, all the television episodes. Eren was a ghost in the mac
hine of his mind.
If he survived this, could he recover? Bury the fake hotel room like he buried Eren? Everything that happened on this day was a nightmare, buried deep inside him. The people there—like figments of a troubled imagination, fractures of a subconscious. Did he think that, in time, he would come to believe that? Just like, in some way, he had truly believed he solved Mr. Jefferies’s murder? What life was there left for Morgan Sheppard after this?
Maybe dying here, in the sand, would be a fitting end. A footnote on a life. He dragged his legs along. They seemed to want him to stop—lie down in the sand. Lie there and die. This was it and this was always where it was going to end.
He was just happy to have been able to get out of the room. To come outside and see the sky again. He had always liked to be outside—needing freedom. Most likely because he loved an exit strategy. But now, he wasn’t going to run away. Quite the contrary.
He thought of all the mistakes he made. The parties, the painkillers, the drink and all the bits in between. Every single day was incredibly hazy. The last few years just melded into each other—the same things over and over again. And nothing of any consequence. Not remembering much of anything. And it all began that day he went to the police about Eren’s dad.
But everyone would remember this. The Lying Detective. A hell of a headline—one that would no doubt sell a few copies. The tabloids finally taking him down.
The figure was slightly closer now, yet still far enough for him not to be able to make out any features. A black sliver against the dull yellow sand. The only thing Sheppard knew for certain was that the figure was watching him, and had probably been waiting for him for quite some time.
Just keep on walking.
What would happen at the television studio? Would they all weep for him, or would they cry not really knowing why, mistaking grief for their jobs as grief for him? Someone would probably organize an expensive funeral and wake. It would be high profile—good publicity for the network. An open casket with a side of caviar. Lobster toast. Champagne to toast the great brute off.
Guess Who Page 27