‘She lives here. Is that right?’
‘Yes. She lives here.’
David Carpenter nodded thoughtfully. ‘Has she lived here long?’
‘About four years, sir.’
The man frowned. ‘That’s a long time to be a hotel resident.’
It was on the tip of Andre’s tongue to say that far from being a hotel resident, Mrs Hannah Driver actually owned the place. But something stopped him. He’d been in the restaurant trade long enough to be able to weigh people up. In his experience it was always wise not to give too much information. Answer the question. No more.
On going back into the kitchen to fetch the crème brûlée, he told Smudger about their conversation.
Smudger frowned as he thought about it. At last his frown departed.
‘Perhaps he appreciates the personal touch. You can’t get much more personal than an owner living on the premises.’
Andre wasn’t so sure, but he didn’t argue. The dessert was ready – and Smudger had gone overboard. The crème brûlée was presented in a porcelain dish served on a white porcelain plate with soft Virginia amaretti biscuits.
A look of surprised amusement crossed Andre’s face. Chef was determined to get some kind of accolade.
‘Thank you, chef.’ He set off and found he was not alone.
A trio of kitchen staff – including Smudger the chef – followed him out and along the corridor that connected the kitchen with the restaurant.
Andre paused at the door and turned, eyeing them enquiringly.
‘Well go on, man,’ said Smudger, shooing him on with a floury hand. ‘Let us know what he says. We’ll wait here.’
As he crossed the restaurant floor, Andre pondered on chefs he’d known. Basically they were all like Smudger Smith; praise for their cooking meant more than money. Without praise they pined away.
He waited until the hotel inspector had taken three or four mouthfuls before approaching to ask if it was to his liking.
‘Very nice,’ he replied.
Very nice. Truthfully, Andre had wanted him to say more than that. The words ‘very nice’ troubled him all the way back across the restaurant. ‘Very nice’ was too generic to satisfy the kitchen staff.
Just as he’d expected, Smudger and the gang were still gathered there, waiting with goggle-eyed anticipation.
Andre took a deep breath.
‘He said it was wonderful. The best he’d ever tasted in fact.’
Smudger punched the air. His crew were all smiles.
‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’
But something was still niggling Andre.
‘Are you absolutely sure that he’s the hotel inspector?’
‘Trust me, man. And he knows his onions! Know what I mean?’
Andre’s reservations increased along with the hotel inspector’s consumption of alcohol and further questions regarding Mrs Hannah Driver.
If the two businessmen on the next table hadn’t lingered over their coffee and brandies, he would have mentioned his doubts to Lindsey, but it was late and he decided not to bother. His wife and youngster were expecting him home.
Leave it until tomorrow, he said to himself. By the time he came in the man would be gone and it wouldn’t matter. Only the man wasn’t gone in the morning, and it did matter, it mattered very much.
Chapter Fifteen
Dressed in a white towelling robe, a towel wound turban fashion around her head, Honey Driver was lying supposedly relaxed in a treatment room. This particular treatment room had an interconnecting door to Serena’s office. Needles and plumping-up of lips had been mentioned, along with the eradication of facial wrinkles. The plumping-up seemed good. The needles not so good.
‘The things I do in the interests of this city,’ Honey muttered.
‘Did you say something?’
Serena Sarabande was sorting out the items needed for her treatment.
‘Just my teeth rattling. I hate needles.’
‘Nonsense!’
The fact that Serena Sarabande was the one giving her the treatment and the treatment itself involved a hypodermic needle was unnerving.
‘This won’t hurt very much.’
‘Don’t you mean it won’t hurt at all?’ Honey queried in a high-pitched voice.
‘There are no guarantees.’
Serena was her usual coldly proficient self and thus bereft of sympathy.
This wasn’t good.
Honey’s breath steadily increased like a nervous wreck on a ghost walk. She followed the needle with her eyes. The fine point was heading for her chin, aiming to discharge a face-rejuvenating filler into the so-called ‘marionette’ lines running downwards from the corners of her mouth. Needles had always scared her. She just didn’t want to go there, but how best to opt out?
Faint! That’s what you have to do. Pick your time and faint away!
The needle was fast approaching. Now seemed as good a time as any.
Her sigh was long and heartfelt. – That’s if Serena Sarabande should ever have a heart – which Honey doubted.
Her eyes closed. Serena would see she was out of it. And stop.
Nothing happened. She felt a slight prick, then another. Was the woman going on with the treatment? Damned right she was. Honey couldn’t believe it. All the same, she’d decided on this course of action and she was damned well sticking to it.
She opened her eyes just a few seconds after feeling fresh air being fanned on to her face.
‘Did I faint?’ she asked weakly, her eyes fluttering open.
‘You did. But I did it anyway. No point in wasting the occasion – or the Westalyn. It costs money.’
Yes, thought Honey, and the Hotels Association – in conjunction with a few other interested parties – were paying for it.
As Serena Sarabande entered details into the laptop computer sat on her desk, Honey felt the sides of her mouth where the needle had gone in.
‘The effect will last for six months minimum, twelve months maximum.’
After a short rest Honey looked in the mirror, which was fixed on to a pedestal at the side of her recliner. The results were quite cheering. It wasn’t all blood and baddies being a Crime Liaison Officer.
It was perfectly true that she hated needles, but there was method in her madness. Serena Sarabande was keeping a close watch on her following her conversation with Karen Pinker, plus the fiasco outside Dr Dexter’s door when she’d caught her bin-bag tunic on the door handle. She wanted to get at those client records. Appearing incapacitated might give her the opportunity.
‘Are you able to get back to your room?’ Serena asked.
Honey made a weak attempt to rise before falling back, her eyes fluttering.
‘Not yet,’ she whimpered.
Serena gave an impatient sigh. ‘Well I suppose you’d better rest here for a while.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘I’ll leave you for now. I’ll send someone along to help you.’
Honey nodded weakly. ‘Thank you.’ She hoped it would be Karen who came along to help her. Another conversation with her could be useful.
Lying back, she closed her eyes and waited for Serena to leave the room.
Pretending to faint had been easy. The worrying thing about it was that Serena had carried on with the procedure of sticking the needles in. It didn’t seem either ethical or safe. Would she have been in any great danger if she’d really fainted?
She wasn’t sure. Medicine was hardly her forte, though she’d once dated a dishy doctor in the days when husband and hotel were all in the future.
Medicine hadn’t come into it. Playing doctors and nurses had. The dishy young doctor had still been in training. He’d declared that nothing beat an intimate body examination. She’d had to agree. His hands-on procedure was second to none.
She listened before moving. Nobody was coming just yet. Wrapping her robe tightly around her, she made her way through the door into the office. It wasn’t locked.
The computer was still on. She we
nt behind the desk to take a closer look. The light from the screen lit up her face. She stared at it, trying to make something of what it was showing. She had to get in there somehow though she wasn’t entirely sure what she was looking for.
‘Abnormalities.’
She’d uttered the word herself, though she couldn’t resist looking over her shoulder.
Yep! It was her that had said it. Abnormalities in record keeping – that’s what she was after. There had to be something not quite right. She had a nose for these things.
The computer was still on; she could tell that much about it. Computers never had been quite her thing. They were a useful tool but she’d never got her head round the logic on which they functioned. It wasn’t her logic. Still, now was a time for seeing what she did know.
Feeling apprehensive and out of her depth, she opened a few unlocked desk drawers just in case the computer files were backed up with good old-fashioned paper ones. They were not.
Perched on the edge of the black leather swivel chair, fingers poised above the keyboard, she stared at the screen.
And stared.
And stared.
‘How the hell do I get into this thing?’ she said out loud.
She didn’t know. Not knowing loomed like a twenty-foot high fence at Aintree Racecourse. Even a horse would have trouble jumping as big a fence as that, so what chance did she have?
She didn’t know. No matter how hard she stared at it, getting into the system was beyond her. The damned thing was asking her for a password. She didn’t have one.
A brisk rummage through the desk drawers didn’t unearth anything that might have contained one. In a situation like this there was only one thing she could do – contact an expert.
There was a phone on the desk. At last she had contact with the outside world!
‘ET phone home,’ she muttered and did just that.
Lindsey answered.
‘Green River Hotel, good –’
‘Lindsey! Listen carefully. I don’t have long. I will say this only once …’
Now she was sounding like some old-time French resistance fighter. Was her mind going, isolated for only a few days from the outside world?
‘Mum! I’m so glad you phoned –’
‘Lindsey, I need to break into a computer system.’
Her voice rasped with the effort of keeping it low.
‘I think you need to come home … Gran seems to think –’
‘I can’t. I have to do this.’
‘OK, OK.’ Lindsey sighed. ‘You can’t get into a system just like that. How long have you got?’
‘Five minutes. Perhaps ten.’
‘Forget it. It’s not that easy.’
‘I was afraid of that.’
‘Why do you want to get into this system?’
‘To check some records at a beauty clinic.’
‘Got it! The clinic where the woman was drowned in a mud bath. Doherty put you up to it, I suppose.’
‘She wasn’t drowned in mud. It was the mudpack that did it. Anyway, this is all expenses paid. I’ve had these Botox injections in the lines at the side of my mouth. I pretended to faint, but they went ahead and injected anyway.’
‘Yuck! That doesn’t sound right.’
‘So what do I do – about the computer?’
‘Nothing. Not in five minutes.’
This was not good.
‘That’s a shame.’
While on the phone she had been going to ask how things were at the Green River; the normal everyday things like had Smudger decapitated any grumbling diners or had Mary Jane, their resident professor of the paranormal, frightened away the guests as well as the ghosts with her garish outfits.
She only got the first few words out when the door opened. Serena Sarabande entered, and her stomach turned over.
‘I have to go now, Lindsey. Somebody’s just come in.’ The phone clicked back into place. ‘My daughter,’ she said and chanced a smile.
Serena Sarabande’s face looked as though it were set in cement. Her eyes were unblinking. If she attempted to smile her face would crack.
Serena opened the door wide, an obvious invitation that Honey should pass through it – and quick!
Seeing as Serena gave her the creeps, she went meekly, half expecting the woman, who was taller than her, to give her a clip around the ear as she passed. How scary was that?
She stopped suddenly. Why the hell am I feeling like a frightened school kid? This won’t do for Bath Hotels Association’s Crime Liaison Officer! I’ve an image to maintain, and a life. Number one priority is to get out of here!
Summoning all her courage – it took some to stand up to Serena Sarabande – she said what was in her mind.
‘Much as I love it here, I’m afraid it’s necessary that I check out early. My mother is old and not in the best of health. Unfortunately she’s taken a turn for the worse. It’s not good news, I’m afraid. She’s very fragile. A little senile in fact.’
The thought of her mother ever finding out the damning description she’d just uttered was too scary for words. Far from being senile or decrepit, Gloria Cross was the Cindy Crawford of the Senior Citizens Club. Possessing the firmness and figure of a Barbie doll, she had a designer label wardrobe to die for. Referring to her as ‘old’ was bad enough; referring to her as ‘senile’ was downright dangerous. Normally Honey wouldn’t have dared, but she judged it was time to make a swift exit. Besides, her mother was out of earshot and would never find out. No problem!
Dr Dexter stood behind Serena Sarabande at the window that ran full length from floor to ceiling. Both of them watched Honey getting into her car and driving away. Both of them visibly relaxed once she was safely out of sight.
‘As if we’d want her to stay,’ murmured Serena.
Dr Dexter smiled. ‘That was all rubbish about her mother being ill. I caught most of the conversation. The daughter certainly didn’t mention anything about a sick and senile granny on the phone, which goes to prove that she was as keen to leave us as we were to see her go.’
‘As long as neither of us was mentioned.’
Serena’s voice was as seductive as the movement of her behind against his body.
Roger Dexter gripped her hips, pulling her more tightly against his groin. ‘No. We were not.’
‘Then we can consider the matter closed?’
‘We can.’
Freeing herself from his hands, she turned round to face him. Her smile was just for him. Her eyes said it all. ‘Now, Doctor. What can we find to do between now and the next appointment?’
He smiled back at her. ‘Just a moment and I’ll pop a pill. I’m sure we’ll think of something.’
Chapter Sixteen
The moment she arrived back at the Green River Hotel, Honey knew that something was wrong.
Blue lights flashed from two emergency vehicles; one was a police car, the other an ambulance.
A crowd had gathered. Assumptions and observations were being made, word of what was going on passed from one onlooker to another.
‘Someone’s been found dead.’
‘Murder?’
‘No, natural – so somebody said. Perhaps they were old.’
Oh no! Honey pushed through the crowd with one thought in mind. Please God, I didn’t mean to tempt fate. I just wanted to be out of that place.
There seemed to be more emergency service people than necessary for the body of one old lady.
At first Honey thought that the reception area seemed colder than usual until she realized it was her that was cold, chilled to the bone with the fear of what she had done.
Anna was manning the reception desk. Not that anything was going on there. Guests were hanging around. Usually they’d be out seeing the sights. Honey surmised that they liked the action here; after all, it wasn’t every day you got to see a dead body.
Anna spotted her.
‘Mrs Driver!’
‘Where’s Lindsey?’
/> ‘In the dining room.’
‘Oh my God! She died in there?’
Holding her hand over her mouth she stifled a gasp. Her mother had died in the dining room?
The first sign she had that all was not doom and despair was when she saw Lindsey coming towards her from the direction of the dining room. A pair of medics was following on either end of a stretcher.
Lindsey looked concerned but not desolate. Professionalism. That’s what it is, Honey told herself.
‘Tell me what happened.’
‘You’re back.’
‘What happened?’ she asked again, grasping her daughter’s upper arms, too worried to breathe, too guilty at first to notice that the stretcher was bearing a bulky form that must be at least twice her mother’s weight.
Lindsey gently removed her mother’s digging fingers from her arm. ‘I’m not sure. That’s why they’ve decided to have a post mortem. At first we thought that he’d drowned in his porridge, but the paramedics think he had a heart attack and then drowned in his porridge.’
Honey felt all the tension, the guilt, and the sheer stupidity fall down through her body and rush out of her toes.
‘A man! A man died?’
‘Yes.’ A knowing smile crept across Lindsey’s face. ‘You thought it was Gran, didn’t you.’
‘Well …’ This was awkward. This was embarrassing. ‘We have to accept the fact …’
Lindsey’s smile widened. ‘It’s OK. I won’t tell her.’
Honey was still suffering the after effects of the shock.
‘Phew! Well that’s a relief!’ she said, patting her chest with the flat of her hand in a bid to get her breathing back to normal.
Someone held open the double doors so they could more easily get out.
‘Not for him, Mother.’
The formal use of the word ‘mother’ did not go unnoticed. Honey reined in her sudden exuberance.
‘Poor man. Still. These things happen.’
‘Gran would be livid.’
Honey cleared her throat and looked to where the ambulance doors were being shut on the corpse. ‘That’s about it. So who was it?’
‘The hotel inspector. Or at least we think he was.’
‘What?’
The cold shivers returned with a vengeance along with a list of what ifs, chief among them being what if he hadn’t died from a heart attack? What if it were food poisoning? How would that affect their three star rating?
Murder By Mudpack: A Honey Driver Mystery (Honey Driver Mysteries) Page 8