The Lazarus Hotel

by Jo Bannister

  Larry knelt over him and clapped both hands to the incision. ‘Get something to bandage it with. Lots of something! Even if we can’t stop it we can slow it down.’

  ‘Esme, help me up.’ Short of top form both mentally and physically, Miriam was still a doctor and the wounded man’s best chance. She forced the weakness from her limbs by sheer will-power, made herself turn from the tragedy which had happened to one which might still be averted. ‘Good, Larry, hold it tight. The less blood gets between your fingers, the more there is keeping him alive. Esme, the First Aid box. I’ll suture it though God knows if it’ll hold. Esme! And then bandages – all you can find.’

  Urgent demands on her were what Mrs Venables needed most. There would be time later to reflect on what she’d done, to weep and fall apart if she had to. But the present crisis made self-immolation an unaffordable luxury and she responded like a trouper, striding off to the kitchen and returning with a red box with a white cross on it. While Miriam quickly located the items she’d included in case somebody needed a stitch or two, Mrs Venables – using another pair of scissors – started cutting a sheet into strips.

  Miriam turned to the strongest man present to hold the patient still. But Tariq had held Joe Lockhead while Tessa pumped death into his veins, and he backed away, hollow-eyed, shaking his head. Larry understood if Miriam didn’t. ‘I’ll hold him.’

  In the event Will took very little holding. His senses were fading fast, dulling even the awareness of someone sewing his throat back together. Larry steadied his head; that was all that was necessary.

  ‘I don’t know how well this is going to work,’ Miriam said tersely. Her broad fingers were inserting the stitches deftly enough but there was a lot of damage and not much time: if she was meticulous with every single one he was going to be the neatest corpse in the morgue. ‘I thought I’d left all this behind when I got out of medicine.’ She finished suturing and started clapping dressings over the wound. Blood quickly stained the first; without disturbing it Miriam bandaged firmly over the top. A little blood seeped through. Again she bandaged over it, as firmly as she could without closing Will’s airway. Then she sat back on her heels, eyes glued to his throat, and waited.

  For five minutes no one spoke. Still the bandage held the blood in check. Will’s eyelids flickered, a white line showing under each.

  ‘It’s going to hold,’ whispered Miriam. ‘Dear God, I think it’s going to hold.’ They covered Tessa’s body with a quilt, meaning to leave it where it had fallen. But it was still only Sunday morning, they could be here another twenty-four hours, and no one wanted to share their living-space with the woman who’d tried to kill them. Nor did they wish now to separate and return to their own rooms. Whatever comfort there was lay in one another’s company. So after a while they moved the body into the end bedroom, Tariq taking one end and Richard the other. Neither felt the need to eulogize over her, but it was harder to hate a dead woman than a live one.

  By now the people who had missed the final act of the tragedy had heard all the details. Tariq knew as much about what Tessa had done and why as anyone there. But he didn’t understand, and he needed to. ‘How did it happen?’ he asked, bewildered. ‘How did a woman like that – an intelligent woman, a woman in her profession – come to kill two people and try to kill more?’

  Richard had spent much of his career trying to make sense of atrocities. And there was an answer, of a kind. ‘It’s like boiling a frog.’

  Tariq’s eyes swivelled and lit on him cautiously, as if he might be dangerous. ‘Pardon?’

  Richard grinned. It wasn’t that funny; he was fighting a lunatic sense of relief that started welling up with the realization that it was over and everything was going to be all right. Even the presence of the dead woman under the quilt couldn’t mar that.

  ‘If you drop a live frog into a pan of hot water it’ll jump out demanding to see its lawyer. But if you put it in a pan of cold water and light the gas it’ll sit there looking deeply suspicious until it dies. It seems there’s no precise moment, as the water heats up, when it’s appreciably hotter than it was the moment before, and without that trigger the frog can’t make up its mind to jump.’

  Tariq was struggling to relate a scientific curiosity to events in the penthouse. ‘So?’

  ‘Tessa didn’t set out to kill anybody. Cathy was blackmailing her: when she couldn’t shake her off, to protect herself Tessa killed her. She tried to silence Miriam because she thought she’d found out, and Joe because she thought he knew. In fact neither of them knew Cathy was murdered. But Will would have worked it out, so Tessa tried to kill him, with the butter. In the end she had to kill everyone who knew anything. Nobody’d have been left by Monday if she hadn’t met her match in a sixty-year-old housekeeper armed with a pair of scissors.’

  Tariq still didn’t understand about the frog. Richard made it simple. ‘If we’d stood in a line eighteen months ago, Cathy and her dad and all of us, and someone had given Tessa a Kalashnikov, she wouldn’t have used it. She’d have said nothing could make her murder nine people. But one at a time the murders were easier to commit than to avoid. There was never enough difference between what went before and what came next – between confronting a blackmailer and killing her, between killing a blackmailer and killing people who could expose her, between that and killing anyone who might know anything. There was never a clear enough signal for the frog to jump.’

  ‘She must have been mad. Don’t you think?’

  ‘I doubt it. Not in any clinical sense. She could have stopped any time she was prepared to pay for what she’d done. That was the problem – she thought she could get away with it. That may be immoral but it’s not irrational.’ Richard shrugged. ‘But then, you’re talking sanity to a guy who falls apart if a car backfires. Who am I to judge?’

  Slowly Tariq smiled. ‘I could be wrong, but I wouldn’t put money on that happening again.’

  As they left the room, closing the door quietly behind them, someone was waiting for them in the corridor: Midge, shuffling from foot to foot like a dancing bear in his ragged clothes.

  In the space of about forty-eight hours that boy had filled the roles of both demon and angel. The people stranded in his topless tower had been deeply afraid of him, of an unfathomable mind and unpredictable malice. With Will’s rescue all that turned around: then he seemed a God-sent guide in a hostile wilderness.

  Now the drama was over and a return to normality in prospect, Midge appeared before the two men decked in neither horns nor halo, as just himself: a youth on the brink of manhood, a transient, a squatter, a gleaner and scavenger on the periphery of human society. Something more than an idiot, less than a citizen.

  He said, ‘Someone fell.’ He gestured jerkily at the lift.

  Tariq nodded sombrely. ‘Joe. The old man. Tessa killed him – the woman with red hair? She’s dead too. It’s over now.’ He wondered how much explanation was called for, waited for an indication that the bare facts in a few words were insufficient. But Midge nodded, as if knowing who obviated the need to know why. Tessa had lied about almost everything but she’d been right about Midge. A boy of very little brain. Will owed his life to the fact.

  Tariq indicated the conference-room door, closed to conserve the heat. ‘We’re all in there. Are you coming in? We’ll be having breakfast soon.’

  Midge shook his head quickly. ‘No.’ It wasn’t fear; it might have been discomfort. After so long alone he really didn’t enjoy company.

  Tariq took a deep breath. He knew if he didn’t try he’d regret it. ‘Midge, you don’t have to live like this. We can find you something better. Maybe a hostel – a nice room, and friends, and people whose job it is to make sure you’re OK.’

  The forget-me-not eyes widened. ‘’ M OK now!’

  ‘Midge, you’re not! You’re getting by, just. You’re not eating properly, you’ve nowhere warm to sleep, and once this place is in use you’ll have to leave anyway. Won’t you let us help? We
owe you that much.’

  Midge blinked with surprise and a scorn he tried, politely but too late, to disguise. ‘Help Midge? You?’

  Tariq chuckled. ‘You’re right. What do I know? Except I know you deserve better than this. You can’t want to spend your whole life this way?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because – because—’ It was like trying to explain why rain’s wet. Some things are so self-evident that the arguments for them don’t exist. ‘Rats live like this. People shouldn’t have to.’

  ‘Rats do OK!’ Midge retorted hotly. ‘Go where they want, do what they want. Don’t starve, don’t need social workers. Last thing rats need is a chance in life!’

  Richard laughed out loud. ‘Tariq, you’re going to lose this one. Walk away while your dignity’s intact.’

  But Tariq genuinely felt the need to do something. His eyes were unhappy. ‘We can’t just leave him here. God knows what’ll become of him.’

  ‘We can’t kidnap him, either. Look, as near as damn it he’s a grown man. He has the right to live like this if it’s what he wants. Now, you may argue that he’s not competent to make that decision. But then, by the same criteria, neither are half the people living rough in London today. You’ve got two choices: leave him to it, or send in the welfare hit squad. But they’ll have to bring him down with tranquillizer darts, like a monkey.’

  Tariq couldn’t believe he was getting an argument on this. ‘They could find him somewhere to live. They could train him to do a job.’

  ‘Hey, terrif,’ said Richard drily. ‘They can teach him to push a broom, and wash his hands before meals, and get used to being the dimmest member of any gathering. That’s an improvement? Maybe it is, for some people. But whatever you think of it, Midge’s life satisfies him. You could break it up, but you couldn’t guarantee to improve it. My guess is, five years down the road he’ll be where he is now, doing what he’s doing now, only maybe a bit less satisfied because he’s had his expectations raised.’

  With both of them looking at him, Midge approvingly, Tariq in dismay, he sighed. ‘How about this? My station’s got a pretty big building – nothing like this but there’s a lot of corridors and basements and things. If I could fix up some kind of a caretaker’s job, with room and board on the premises, would that suit you both?’

  ‘I suppose it might be a viable compromise,’ Tariq allowed reluctantly. ‘If he’s determined not to have a chance in life.’

  ‘Midge?’

  Midge thought about it. Gradually the suspicion in his eyes abated. ‘Could work nights,’ he shrugged. ‘Wouldn’t have to see people.’

  ‘Can you fix it, do you think?’

  Richard shrugged. ‘Oh, I think so. After this fiasco they owe me. One condition, though.’ He fixed Midge with a steely eye. ‘You want to move around the building, you use the goddamned stairs!’

  They were resigned to another twenty-four hours’incarceration. In the event rescue came mid-afternoon when one of the builders came back to borrow – that was the word he used – some equipment to do up his kitchen and found a man’s body in the bottom of the clear shaft in the atrium.

  Apart from Will, who was taken to hospital though by then he was already mending, the survivors spent the rest of the day talking to policemen. There was at first an understandable reluctance to believe them, but six people talking to six different officers in six different rooms and all coming up with the same answers eventually proved persuasive. By late evening they were allowed to leave their phone numbers and go home.

  So Richard was home for Sunday supper not much later than originally expected. It didn’t occur to Fran to ask what had kept him. She sat him at the table while she brewed some tea. ‘Tell me all about it.’

  He ruminated. ‘It didn’t go exactly to plan.’

  ‘Of course not,’ she said calmly. ‘What ever does when you’re involved?’

  He debated briefly whether to begin the story and have his tea spoil or wait till he’d eaten. Duty prevailed. ‘One of the other crazies murdered the organizer.’

  The look on her face was all the reward he could have wanted; but his egg when he got it tasted like a fellwalker’s inner sole.

  Copyright

  First published in 1996 by Macmillan

  This edition published 2012 by Bello an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR Basingstoke and Oxford Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com/imprints/bello

  ISBN 978-1-4472-3634-4 EPUB

  ISBN 978-1-4472-3633-7 POD

  Copyright © Jo Bannister, 1996

  The right of Jo Bannister to be identified as the

  author of this work has been asserted in accordance

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