by Kim Fleet
He turned onto his side and mumbled a prayer of thanks to the God he’d just begun to know, and was asleep before he could reach amen.
CHAPTER
TEN
Wednesday, 28 October 2015
10:58 hours
‘I’m Eden Grey,’ Eden told the police inspector. ‘I’m a private investigator.’
Detective Inspector Ritter’s eyes narrowed. His suit hadn’t encountered an iron for a long time and creases ran like tramlines across his jacket and trousers. With his greasy blond hair and tired skin, he looked as sharp as a felt hat. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘And what was your relationship to Mr Jordan?’
They were in an empty hotel room at the end of the corridor. Ritter commandeered the desk and chair by the window, the dull light throwing the lines round his eyes into sharp relief. There was nowhere for Eden to sit, so she perched on the ridged box meant for suitcases.
‘He’d hired me to investigate some poison pen letters he’d received,’ said Eden, cringing inside as she said it. Fat lot of use she’d been and now her client lay stiffening and bloody on the floor of his hotel bedroom.
‘What sort of poison pen letters?’ Ritter scrubbed his biro on his notebook, trying to make the ink flow. When he got no joy with that, he tried swirling it on the back of his hand. It wasn’t his day. Eden silently removed a pen from her bag and handed it over.
‘Pretty non-specific threats,’ she said. ‘You don’t deserve to live. Better watch out. That kind of thing.’
‘And he didn’t think to report these to the police, to have them investigated properly?’ Ritter said. He gave a sarky emphasis to ‘properly’.
‘No.’
‘And why might that be?’
‘Who can say?’ Eden said, airily. Don’t upset the local plod, that was the rule when she was undercover. They might be thick as shit but antagonise them and they can be an awkward bunch of sods. And they stick together.
‘So you were investigating these letters?’ Again, a mordant weight to ‘you’.
‘Yes.’
‘And how far had you got?’
‘No shortage of suspects,’ Eden said, with a stab of relish at the dismay on his face.
Ritter grubbed in his pocket for a packet of nicotine gum. He unwrapped three pieces and folded them into his mouth.
‘The door was open when you got here?’
Eden swallowed. This was going to be tricky. ‘No, it was locked. I broke in using a library card.’
Ritter stared at her, his mouth champing at the gum, making a wet, smacking noise. ‘You broke into a room where a man had been murdered?’
‘I didn’t know he’d been murdered,’ Eden said. ‘And to be honest, at this moment in time neither do you. There’s no official cause of death yet, is there?’
Ritter glared. ‘I need your contact details so I can interview you formally. You’ll have to come to the station for that.’
She opened her mouth to object. Unless she was arrested, she was under no obligation to help the police nor to attend the police station, but one look at the expression on Ritter’s face and she closed her mouth again. Seemed the nicotine gum wasn’t helping his mood; she didn’t want to push him into an arrest. Not when she wanted a head start on the investigation.
‘Did you touch anything?’ Ritter asked.
‘No,’ she said, looking away then making eye contact. Nothing like a hard stare to get a copper’s hackles up. It was a great way to overcompensate on the ‘I am totally innocent’ look.
Ritter snapped his notebook shut. She wasn’t fooled. As she headed to the door, the final question came, as she knew it would.
‘One last thing, when did you last see Lewis Jordan alive?’
‘Just before six o’clock yesterday evening,’ Eden said. ‘After he’d finished filming for the day.’
It was almost the truth. She had seen him last at that time, but she’d heard him two hours later.
‘Is that all?’ she asked.
‘For now,’ Ritter said.
‘You can keep the pen,’ she said, and scarpered.
She peeped into Lewis’s hotel room as she went back down the corridor. The room buzzed with white-suited figures and a camera flashed. Eden hurried past to the top of the stairs. Glancing back, she saw Ritter watching her from the end of the corridor. She started down the stairs, waited at the bend, then crept back up again. Ritter had gone.
She hurried down the corridor to a door marked ‘Staff Only’. The door was unlocked. Slipping inside, she found a chambermaid’s trolley and shelves of towels, cleaning products and bottles of shampoo. She loaded extra towels onto the trolley, unhooked an overall and slipped it on. There was a cotton cap in the pocket. She pasted down her hair with her palms and tugged on the cap, then opened the door and trundled out with the trolley.
At room 203, she tapped on the door and waited.
‘Housekeeping!’ she called, and the door opened. ‘Morning,’ she said, grabbing an armful of towels and going into the room.
‘Morning,’ said a middle-aged man in grey trousers and a pale blue shirt. A laptop was propped open in a moat of papers on the table.
‘Fresh towels for you,’ she said, bustling into the bathroom. ‘Hope you weren’t disturbed last night.’
‘Why?’
She cocked her head towards the wall. ‘Man in the room next to you – had a big fight. People complained. The manager had to go up!’
‘I was out until two this morning,’ he said, yawning. ‘And when I got in I hit that pillow and was dead to the world.’
‘You didn’t hear the fight?’
He rubbed his eyes. ‘Nothing.’
‘That’s good.’ Eden grabbed the dirty towels in the bathroom. ‘Have a nice day.’
She shoved the towels onto the trolley and rattled past Lewis’s room to room 205. The door opened almost immediately to her knock.
‘More tea, coffee, sugar?’ she said.
‘That’d be great, honey.’ An American accent, the owner a barrel-chested bear of a man in his late sixties. A well-upholstered woman with blue hair sat by the window, a set of maps spread before her.
‘Hope you weren’t disturbed last night,’ Eden said. ‘There was a problem in the room next door.’
‘Irwin, I told you I heard something!’ the woman exclaimed.
‘He woke you up?’
‘No, it was only about ten, but I was trying to settle down and it was very inconvenient.’
‘I’m so sorry to hear that,’ Eden said. She fetched a selection of miniatures from the trolley. ‘Can I offer you these to say sorry you were inconvenienced?’
‘Well now, that’s very kind,’ the woman said.
‘What were they fighting about?’ Eden asked casually, rubbing a duster over the chest of drawers.
‘I couldn’t hear clearly,’ the woman said, ‘but it was something about money. And then there was a thump and it all went quiet.’
‘How awful for you,’ Eden said.
‘That’s right,’ the woman squinted at the embroidered name on Eden’s overall, ‘Rose. I’m a very light sleeper and the slightest thing wakes me.’
‘I didn’t hear a thing,’ Irwin announced. ‘Slept like a log until Myrna woke me at midnight.’
‘I heard a scream!’ Myrna exclaimed.
‘A scream?’ Eden made her mouth into a round O. ‘You must’ve been very frightened.’
‘I was! I’d just gotten to sleep and then there was a scream and a door slammed. Just after midnight it was because I had to get up then and fix me a drink to get off to sleep again.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ Eden said, and fetched a few more miniatures from the trolley.
‘Gee, thanks, Rose,’ Irwin said, following her to the door and pressing a twenty pound note into her hand. She slipped it into the pocket in the overall, and her fingers brushed against something cold and metallic. She drew it out: a pass key to every room in the hotel.
‘Have a nic
e day!’ Eden called, and went back to her trolley. She parked it back in the stores room and returned her overall to its hook. Ruffling her hair into its usual style, she slunk from the room and escaped down the stairs.
The hotel car park was to the side of the hotel: a rectangle of tarmac too small for the Bentleys and Mercedes crammed in there. At one end was a cluster of industrial waste bins, colour-coded in red, yellow and brown. A single CCTV camera, positioned above the side door into the hotel, surveyed the car park.
Eden stood underneath the camera and assessed the range of the CCTV, identifying a blind spot just where a sleek BMW was parked. Skirting the range of the camera, she hurried over to the BMW, planted her hands on the door, and rocked it. Within seconds, its lights were flashing and an alarm sounded.
She groped about on the ground until her fingers closed around a half-brick. Steeling herself, she laid her hand flat and smashed the brick down. Clutching her hand to her chest, she ran round the hotel to the main entrance.
‘There are some kids chucking rocks at the cars in the car park,’ she told the receptionist, breathlessly. ‘Better get Security.’
The receptionist jabbed a button on the phone and within seconds a bald-headed man joined them.
‘I’m Security,’ he said. ‘What happened?’
‘Kids throwing stuff at the cars in the car park,’ Eden said. She held out her hand. ‘I yelled at them and they threw a brick at me. Look!’
‘Ooh, that’s nasty,’ the receptionist said.
‘Right, I’ll see what the little buggers are up to,’ said Security, hitching up his trousers and sauntering out to the car park, evidently hoping the little buggers would be long on their way by the time he got there.
‘Can I use your Ladies?’ Eden said, waving her injury. ‘I think this needs cleaning up.’
‘Course you can.’ The receptionist pointed the way.
As soon as she was out of sight, Eden ducked down a side corridor and sprinted to the security office. The door stood wide open. Some security, Eden thought. Inside was the messiest desk she’d ever seen, piled with old coffee cups and teetering piles of paper. A single screen flashed images from a number of different CCTV cameras. In the top right-hand corner, Security ambled round the corner to accost the rock-throwing little buggers. Eden watched him stand with his back to the hotel, hands on his hips and shaking his head.
On a shelf behind the desk was a pile of DVD cases. She pulled out the case from the bottom and the one on the very top. Opening the top case, she found a DVD marked with the previous day’s date. She slipped it from the case and slid it into her bag, replacing it with the DVD from the bottom of the pile. Quickly she shoved the two cases back in place. As she was about to leave, she caught sight of a clipboard hanging from a peg on the wall. The staff roster. She tugged the top sheet free, folded it, and hid it in her bag, then made her way to the bathrooms.
Her hand was swelling and purple, and the skin was grazed but not cut. She ran it under the cold water tap for a while, feeling her finger ends tingle. It looked much worse than it was. Maybe she could kill two birds with one stone? Or at least with one half-brick.
The bar was empty of customers, the barman faffing about with the optics.
‘What can I get you?’ he asked, when she came in. She caught the staccato rattle of consonants. Eastern European, she guessed. He had oiled blue-black hair like a gangster: his comb had left ridge and furrow marks through it.
‘Actually, some ice, please.’ Eden held up her hand. ‘Though if you can do a coffee, that would be nice, too.’
‘Coming up. You been in the wars?’
Eden pulled a face. ‘I saw some kids throwing stuff at the cars outside, and when I shouted at them, they chucked a brick at me. Caught my hand.’
The barman bent over her injured hand, tutting. ‘Lucky it didn’t catch your head.’
‘I know. Don’t know what I was thinking of, shouting at them like that. You hear about kids carrying knives these days, but I just didn’t like what they were doing.’
‘On the house,’ the barman said, setting a cup of coffee down on a white and gold paper coaster in front of her. ‘Ice coming up.’
There was a yellow Marie Curie Cancer Care collecting tin at the end of the bar. Eden fished out the twenty pound note Irwin had given her and stuffed it into the collecting tin. A memory came out of hiding as she did so: a colleague from the old days was diagnosed with breast cancer and asked the team to sponsor her to get her head shaved before chemo. A number of them also got shaved in solidarity, and for weeks they chuntered about prickly scalps because it was easier to talk about that than ask how the chemo was going. Eden’s boss, Miranda, had offered to shave her head, too, but in the end she was testifying in court and so simply paid a donation to Marie Curie.
‘I don’t want anyone to think I’m chickening out,’ she’d said, pushing a hundred pounds in twenties into the collecting tin. How she missed the camaraderie, Eden thought.
‘There you go.’ The barman plonked down a plastic bag filled with ice. Eden flinched as she pressed it on her swollen fingers.
‘Thank you,’ she said. She held her right hand out. ‘I’m Eden.’
He briefly pressed her fingers. ‘Gabor.’
‘You’re a long way from home, Gabor. Where are you from? Poland?’
‘Hungary,’ he said. ‘You know it?’
‘I do, actually. Budapest is beautiful.’
He beamed at her. ‘That is my home city.’
‘You worked here long?’
‘About seven months. You a guest in the hotel?’
‘No. I’m working for Lewis Jordan, the TV producer.’
‘The flash guy?’
‘That’s him.’
Gabor whistled. ‘Wouldn’t mind being him for a day – all those pretty girls he got round him.’
‘Yeah, he’s popular with the chicks, alright,’ Eden said. ‘Was he in the bar last night?’
‘No,’ Gabor said, thinking for a moment, ‘but maybe he order room service.’ He glanced at her. ‘You need to know?’
‘Yes. I’m in trouble, Gabor. I was supposed to be looking after him and he got attacked last night.’
Gabor held up a forefinger. ‘I check.’ He rootled around under the bar and drew out a blue hardbacked notebook. He licked his forefinger and flicked through the pages. ‘Let me see. What room is he in?’
‘Room 204,’ Eden said, thinking Lewis was probably being slotted into the back of the mortuary van about now.
‘Two glasses of whisky. Ordered at nine forty-five and taken straight up.’
‘Isn’t there whisky in the mini bar?’
Gabor chuckled. ‘If you call that whisky. He ordered from the bar – Laphroaig. Doubles, too.’
Eden mentally reviewed Lewis’s hotel room. Were there two glasses left in the room? She was sure there weren’t. So where were they?
‘What happens to the glasses?’ she asked.
Gabor shrugged. ‘Guests leave them in their rooms for chambermaid to collect. Or they put the tray back outside the door. If they don’t want to be disturbed, eh.’ He gave a wink.
‘Were you working in the bar last night?’
‘Yes. From six.’
‘Was it busy?’
‘No,’ Gabor said. ‘Friday and Saturday are busy times, but not Tuesdays.’ He grabbed a glass and polished it on a cloth. ‘There was a man who waited here for a long time. I think his date didn’t come. He kept ringing her on his phone, was saying “I’m waiting for you!” but she never turned up.’
‘How long did he wait?’
Gabor puffed out his cheeks. ‘Two hours. Long time. Must’ve been a special lady, hey?’
‘And then he went to his hotel room?’
‘He wasn’t a guest. I asked him for his room number but he said he wasn’t staying here, just meeting someone.’ Gabor chuckled. ‘He came here straight from work, I think. He had a briefcase with him. Not so romantic, eh
?’
‘When did he leave?’
‘I had my break at nine thirty. When I come back on duty, he was gone.’
Eden sipped the coffee. It was hot and rich. ‘You make a good cup of coffee, Gabor.’ She leaned her elbows on the bar and smiled at him. ‘Tell me about Budapest.’
Twenty minutes later, her hand was numb and frozen and the swelling was receding. She left the bar and found Lewis’s team huddled together in the hotel lounge. Xanthe had her arm round Jocasta, who was weeping loudly. When she caught sight of Eden, Xanthe whispered something to Jocasta, untangled herself, and ran towards her, her face white with shock.
‘Eden, the police have told us all to wait here. They said Lewis is dead.’ Her mouth worked. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Lewis was attacked last night,’ Eden said. ‘When did you last see him?’
‘You think I did it!’
‘I’m just trying to piece together what happened.’
‘Won’t the police do that?’
‘Humour me.’
Xanthe trembled as she said, ‘Me and Jocasta and the technical crew came back to the hotel together after filming. We were all going out for dinner. Lewis had already gone off somewhere on his own.’
‘Where did he go?’
‘He didn’t tell me.’
‘And when did you get back last night?’
Xanthe puffed out her cheeks as she thought. ‘I don’t know. Pretty late for a school night.’
Eden turned as someone called her name. The hotel manager bustled towards her, his cheeks two deep purple blotches. When he shook her hand, her palm came away wet.
‘Can you come into my office for a moment?’ he said, and led her away.
As she took the seat offered to her, she prayed he hadn’t rumbled her chambermaid impersonation and free hand with the mini bar miniatures.
‘The police say Lewis Jordan was killed,’ the hotel manager said. ‘They think it was a robbery gone wrong.’
‘Oh?’