The Lazarus Hotel

by Jo Bannister

  Larry gave a rather phoney laugh. ‘After all, nobody’s going anywhere.’

  Will shook his head obstinately. Like many small men he had a way, when he reached a line he wasn’t prepared to cross, of digging in and looking as immovable as a rock. ‘But that’s not true, is it? We’re hoping to leave here. Tessa’ll be with us. If we’re watching her we’re vulnerable to an attack by Joe if I’m wrong. If we’re watching for Joe, we’re at risk from a killer in our midst if I’m right. We have to resolve this before anyone leaves this room.’

  ‘I agree,’ Tessa said, surprising him. ‘Look, this is my neck too. When we go out there I want everyone concentrating on the real issue, not something dreamt up by a bitter, frustrated and unstable young man. Plus, I don’t want to have to worry who’s behind me on the stairs.’

  Tariq stood up. His head ached, but if he added himself to the growing list of the unfit there wouldn’t be enough strong hands left to do what needed doing. ‘It makes no difference what either of you want,’ he said flatly. ‘We can’t settle it here. But we have a chance to leave before anyone else gets hurt. If that means an armed truce until we can sort out who did what to who, so be it. But it’s coming light and I’m going to have a crack at that door.’

  He got the support he needed because he wasn’t asking anyone to take sides. ‘Good. Then I’ll take Larry and Richard, and the table, and the rest of you stay here. Keep the door shut but stay alert. We really can’t be sure if we’re going to meet any trouble. If you hear us coming back in a hurry it won’t mean we’re missing you.’

  The door was more massive than they remembered, solid as a house. They eyed it uneasily. ‘Remember, we don’t know what to expect,’ said Tariq. ‘Joe may be behind there, or he may be behind us.’

  ‘Or he may be forty storeys below,’ murmured Richard.

  ‘Mm. And the door may go down as soon as we hit it or it may kick back. Can we try not to break any bones?’

  They backed as far as the corner, lined up on the lock. ‘Geronimo?’ suggested Richard.

  ‘Geronimo,’ agreed Tariq.

  ‘Oh, get on with it,’ growled Larry.

  They thundered down the short corridor and the table struck the door like cannon-fire. But it didn’t spring open: the recoil caught Tariq, who was behind, in the midriff and he sat down with a surprised grunt, exactly as if he’d been kicked by a mule. The door suffered no obvious injury.

  ‘We’re doing this wrong,’ opined Richard. ‘If we break one of the panels we can climb through.’

  The rubble would be densest at ground level. They chose the upper panel, on the basis that helping the less agile members of the party through would be easier than clearing a ton of bricks.

  The edge of the table sliced into the door with a splintering sound. When they yanked it back it pulled half the panel away. They tugged the fragments out with their hands.

  But as the hole grew only more rubble came into view. Bricks, blocks, leaning timbers, even a small cement-mixer, but no way through.

  Finally Larry put their burgeoning misgivings into words. He stood back and said with certainty, ‘They never got through here. She lied.’

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Will was like a man with a chipped tooth: he couldn’t leave it alone. The lack of proof only goaded him on. He knew he could have imagined a lot of this. He’d been hit so hard in the emotional solar plexus that all the old certainties had shaken. Had he been reduced to victimizing a woman whose only crime was to love the same girl he had?

  He genuinely didn’t think so. He believed Tessa had done most or all of what he’d accused her of because if she hadn’t the outcome would have been different. Proof lay six hundred feet and perhaps only half an hour away, but he couldn’t leave it alone for even so short a time. He was as obsessed as her father with the fate of Cathy Beacham.

  Tessa was sitting on her mattress, knees held in the compass of her arms, only her tawny head above the folds of the quilt, the slashes down her face tacked with sticking plaster. She watched him speculatively in the strengthening light and Will, standing at the end of the mattress with his arms crossed over his ribs, watched her.

  At length he said, ‘I don’t understand why she had to die. You were finished with her. There was nothing left worth having. All that promise, that vitality, wrecked by the garbage you fed her. She was desperate enough to risk her reputation on a last chance at success, and you helped her, but when it came to nothing you left her to deal with the consequences alone. That was cruel but there was nothing to stop you. Why did you need her dead?’

  Tessa regarded him with dislike. For several seconds she said nothing; then she seemed to reach a decision. ‘It’s true that Cathy took steroids. I didn’t start her on them – I advised against, but winning was all that mattered to her. Later I got them for her because it was safer than trusting a locker-room pusher. If she’d been caught, and if it had come out that she and I had a relationship, I’d have been in trouble anyway. A doctor can’t afford to associate with people who abuse drugs.

  ‘But she never got her form back, and over the next few months the situation deteriorated further. She was mean, unpleasant and manipulative. She started using our friendship against me, saying that if she went down she couldn’t guarantee to keep me out of it. Finally I couldn’t justify the risk – I had to get out before she ruined my life. We never intended to live together, you know. It may not sound like it but my marriage is important to me. The thing with Cathy was a frivolity, a bit of fun. I never meant to leave my husband. At first that suited her fine. But as her other friends drifted away she became more dependent, more demanding. I was sorry for her but her problems weren’t my fault and I wasn’t going to sacrifice everything to pay for them. I said goodbye.

  ‘She wasn’t murdered, Will: not by me, not by anyone. But that gives you a problem, doesn’t it? She could have had you back any time but chose to die instead.’ She chuckled unkindly. ‘That wouldn’t do anybody’s self-esteem much good. No wonder you ended up milking moo-moos on the funny farm.’

  Outraged, Sheelagh was about to intervene, the armoury of invective springing to her tongue with the oiled ease of regular use. Then she saw Will didn’t need it.

  ‘We used to call it Being Tired and Emotional,’ he said, grinning faintly. ‘As in, As tired and emotional as a fruit cake. As tired and emotional as a brush. A sense of the absurd is valuable in even a minimum security madhouse.’

  Miriam said softly, ‘You ought to go back sometime. They’d be proud of you.’

  Will grimaced. ‘That depends on whether I’m right about all this. If I’m wrong they might want to keep me.’

  She shook her head, cautiously in case it came off. ‘You’re sane enough. Being wrong, even ridiculously wrong, is no measure of lost marbles.’

  ‘What about believing you’re right when everyone else thinks you’re ridiculously wrong?’

  ‘That could be a bit suspect,’ she allowed. ‘Unless you turn out to have been right all along.’

  Tessa rolled her eyes theatrically. ‘Don’t encourage him! For a moment there a bit of common sense nearly reared its head.’

  Sheelagh was watching her critically. ‘Have you no sense of culpability? Of having contributed to Cathy’s death? I have, and I’d hardly seen her for years. You were lovers. Even if that’s the extent of it, don’t you feel any guilt, any regret, about what happened to her?’

  ‘Regret, yes,’ nodded Tessa, ‘but not guilt. I’m not responsible for the mess she made of her life or the way it ended – not how will thinks and not the way you mean. Cathy died because she never grew up, never learned to take responsibility for her own actions. Maybe she drove into the river expecting someone to haul her out, dry her off and sort her out the way they always had. Maybe it really wasn’t suicide so much as a cry for help – well, in Cathy’s case a demand. But she misjudged that as, in the end, she misjudged everything. She thought she could get away with anything on the strengt
h of what she once was.’

  Will seemed hardly to be listening. His gaze turned inward somehow, as if what was in his head was more real, more reliable, than anything Tessa could say. A glint of understanding flickered in the grey irises and his voice was a hiss. ‘She was blackmailing you?’

  The absence of a reply was no more obstacle to his vaulting intuition than the lack of sure facts. His conviction was absolute. It was the missing link, the piece that connected everything else. Cathy a blackmailer? Everyone said she changed. The drugs that made her strong also made her aggressive; but what do you do with aggression when there are no matches left to win? ‘She was, wasn’t she? She was all washed up, she was never going to play tennis again. She couldn’t even get a job from a schoolfriend, and her family had enough problems of their own. She’d cut herself off from everyone she might have turned to. But there was still you. And she had a power over you that she didn’t have over anyone else.’

  He thought for a moment then went on, slotting the pieces together. ‘While she thought she could still win she’d have died rather than talk about the drugs and where she got them. But by now even she knew it wasn’t going to happen. She was going downhill fast. Sick, broke and alone, she needed help and turned to the one person whose strings she could still pull. You’d risked your career for her, she’d always have that lever against you. The tabloids would love it: Tennis Star in Gay Drugs Shocker with GP. By now she had nothing left to lose. Except her life.

  ‘She was killing herself anyway – all you had to do was hurry her along. It wasn’t difficult. She never guessed how far you’d go to protect yourself. She expected you’d be angry but she thought finally you’d pay. You couldn’t afford not to. It didn’t occur to her that you’d fight back.’

  Again he paused, long enough for the women listening to think he’d finished and remember to breathe. But Will was just ordering his thoughts.

  ‘You met to discuss it. You said where and when, so you’d already considered Plan B. She wasn’t worried – she thought she’d won. She thought you’d pay her off and say that was all she was getting; and she’d say it was all she wanted; and you’d both know that she’d be in touch again whenever she needed some more. That’s what blackmailers do. If you don’t want to be in their hands for ever, sooner or later you have to deal with them.’

  He waited for Tessa to deny it. But she didn’t. He held his breath waiting for her to admit it but she didn’t do that either. After what seemed a long time she said, carefully, ‘Blackmail is a crime.’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ he agreed. ‘A vicious one. It succeeds because victims don’t know where to turn for help. If they could talk to the police, probably they wouldn’t be worth blackmailing in the first place.’

  There was another gravid pause. Will did nothing to end it, prayed no one else would. At last Tessa said pensively, ‘That much is true. She was trying to blackmail me.’

  Success was so close Will was afraid of frightening it away. He inched up on it. ‘You met by the river?’

  Under the quilt one shoulder lifted. ‘I wasn’t afraid to talk to her. We were good friends once.’

  ‘You parked your car nearby and got in beside her?’ Tessa nodded. ‘She asked for money, you refused, she threatened to ruin you. Then—?’

  ‘Nothing. I left.’

  ‘No.’ Will shook his head. ‘Cathy ended up dead, and it wasn’t suicide. What happened?’

  Stubbornly she repeated it. ‘I left.’

  For a moment he seemed to change the subject. ‘She was a strong girl. She was tall, powerful. You’d never have got the better of her physically. You needed an edge. What did you do – hit her over the head? That would have left a bruise, but the pathologist would expect as much – crash your car into a river and you’re going to bounce your head off the windscreen or the side pillars.’

  The peridot eyes were calm. ‘You talk as if you were there – as if you saw all this. But it never happened. I met her by the river, heard her out, told her to get lost and left. When she realized I wasn’t going to play ball, in despair – or more likely a fit of pique – she drove into the river. Maybe she thought I’d dash back and pull her out. But her timing was shot to hell. I didn’t know what she’d done until I heard it on the news. And I’m not sure I’d have saved her if I could have. You’re right, I was relieved she was dead. But I didn’t kill her.’

  Will had constructed a model in his head of events as he believed they’d transpired. He’d equipped it with every detail, he knew or could extrapolate, and by now it had achieved a virtual reality. He talked as if he’d seen what happened because, in the theatre of his mind, he had.

  But there was a price to pay. What he was describing was the murder of someone he’d cared for, and now the emotional burden of that broke over him, threatening to swamp him. He went to respond but the words caught in his throat.

  Sheelagh laid a hand on his arm. Right or wrong, he was hurting and in need of comfort. The trials of this weekend had disclosed unexpected strengths in all of them, but none more surprising than the tenderness that bloomed when Sheelagh learned to step out from behind the anger that had shielded her so long from the risks of getting close to people.

  It was the same with the others, she thought. Tariq, labelled as mercenary and unfeeling, had emerged as a sensitive and ethical man. Larry the alleged slave-driver had shown a tenacious loyalty that made nonsense of the accusation. Richard, whose courage one night fell short of the inhuman demands on it, had risked his life for a companion. And Will, condemned by himself as well as her father for letting Cathy go without a fight, had fought himself to a standstill on her behalf.

  Sheelagh’s cobalt eyes flew wide. Will was so exhausted that he’d missed something. He’d asked the question when there was no means of verifying the answer; now there was. ‘Miriam, you’re a doctor. What are the symptoms of diabetic coma?’

  The psychologist stared at her. ‘Diabetes?’ Her voice cracked with incredulity.

  ‘I know, it sounds crazy, but bear with me. I’ll explain in a moment. How do you distinguish between the two sorts of coma that affect diabetics?’

  Miriam must have decided to answer the question and find out why later. ‘The symptoms are distinctive if you know what to look for. I suppose the easiest guide for the layman is whether or not the patient’s sweating.’

  ‘And if he is?’ Sheelagh’s voice was soft.

  ‘If he is it’s hypoglycaemia and you need to get some sugar into him.’

  ‘You wouldn’t inject insulin.’

  It must have been obvious to her that none of this was academic. The waiting stillness in the big room confirmed it. She may not have known the precise significance of her answer but she knew it was important. Even so she spent no time thinking about it. ‘Christ, no!’

  Sheelagh nodded slowly. ‘We found Joe in a state of collapse. He was barely conscious and sweating. Tessa diagnosed diabetic coma and injected insulin.’

  Her lips parted but for a moment Miriam said nothing. When the words came they were flat, colourless and hard. ‘Is he dead?’

  ‘We don’t know for sure. Tessa says Joe attacked her and is still outside waiting for us.’

  Miriam didn’t believe it. ‘No.’

  ‘Yes!’ Tessa leaned forward over her bent knees, her face flushed with anger. ‘It’s true, I clipped his wings because he was dangerous, and lied in case some bleeding heart stopped me and someone died. When he came round he tried to kill Tariq and me both, and if he hadn’t been disturbed he’d have killed you too. The man was insanely obsessed, and nobody’s more to blame for that than you are, Miriam. You’re a psychologist! – couldn’t you see what he was doing, what was happening to him? Couldn’t you see it was going to end in tragedy?’

  Miriam’s gaze was unyielding. ‘I knew Joe well for a period of months. He was depressed and troubled, but I don’t believe he was capable of violence. And if he wasn’t violent you had some other reason for what you did.’


  Tessa tossed the fox-red hair, impatience merging with despair. ‘I can’t talk to any of you, can I? You’re not interested in anything I say. You’ve decided who’s to blame – you don’t want to hear the facts in case they get in the way. You tell me what happened, then, because I’m sure I don’t know why I’d do the things you say I’ve done!’

  The few moments’respite, the support of allies, gave Will new heart. ‘All right, I’ll tell you what I think happened next. To Cathy, beside the river. You had her helpless in the car beside you, and you weren’t going to let her threaten you again. You started the car and as it headed for the river you jumped clear.’

  He gave a little snort of laughter that had nothing to do with mirth. ‘It must have scared the wits out of you when Richard hurtled past. He didn’t see any of this, of course, never guessed there was someone else there. You kept out of sight and let him get on with it. You didn’t think he could save her and you didn’t care if he died trying. While he was fighting for his life you went home.’

  His forehead creased. ‘What is it you’re so afraid could still come out? Joe didn’t suspect Cathy had been murdered. Even if he had, even if he’d suspected you, what could he possibly have proved?’

  Tessa offered no explanation. But understanding came from somewhere because Will’s brow cleared and he exhaled a soft little sigh. ‘The seat? The driver’s seat was in the wrong place. In order to start the car you had to squeeze between Cathy and the wheel, so you pushed the seat back. The car would have been photographed when it was recovered. If the police reopened the file they’d spot what should have struck them at the time – that the driver’s seat was too far back for Cathy to have reached the pedals.

  ‘That should have rung alarm bells right away. It didn’t because they thought they knew what had happened. But they only had to compare measurements to realize Cathy couldn’t have been driving. And if she wasn’t driving it wasn’t suicide.’