by Mark Watson
The telephone in 22 was answered after a single ring.
‘Ms Krohl?’ I said. ‘We have your laptop computer.’
There was a long exhalation at the other end which was quickly dissembled into a clearing of the throat.
‘At reception?’ she said. ‘I’ll be there in—’
‘Not at reception.’ It was rather amusing to be interrupting her, for once, I had to admit. ‘In Room 62.’
‘What?’
‘I have your computer and I am in Room 62.’
The phone clicked, the dialling tone hummed in my ear, and almost at once there was a series of sharp raps at my door. I swung it open. Lara Krohl was standing there with her arms folded over her jacket; her make-up had been reapplied, her hair washed. Without a word she advanced into the room and stopped, thunderstruck, at the sight of her computer sitting on the desk. I had worked out how to get it onto the Internet, and on the screen was a photograph which I had found by searching there. All this Lara Krohl took in with a narrowing of her already small eyes.
‘What the f---,’ she said, ‘have you been doing with it? And how did you get into it?’
‘Oh-five-oh-six. You have said it often enough when you supposed I was not listening.’
She virtually ran to the computer, though it was plainly too late. ‘What is this f---ing picture on my machine,’ she demanded, ‘and what made you think you could just— ’ In the middle of this sentence she seemed at last to grasp the full situation, and she swung round from the desk.
‘Did you take it?’
‘Lord above,’ I said, ‘I thought you would never ask.’
There was a pause.
‘Are you out of your f---ing mind?’ she asked. ‘Are you completely out of your f---ing mind? Do you realize I could set the … the f---ing police onto you like that?’ ‘That’ was a snap of the fingers. My heart was pounding, but I felt no fear: more a sort of exhilaration. Now the game was on. Now we were playing it, all right! Her final words had been at a volume close to a shout, and this unprecedented loss of control – along with the fearful way she now glanced at the computer – confirmed that I had the advantage.
‘I don’t think you will want to call the police,’ I said, keeping my own voice low and calm. ‘For one thing, I could very easily make it seem there had been some misunderstanding, and Howard would undoubtedly take my corner, rather than yours.’
‘You think so, do you?’ Lara Krohl’s mouth curled upwards at the corner in a way I did not like. I had to steel myself against the implication in her words. Of course he would choose me over her, I told myself. I was the best friend he had. I was almost one hundred per cent certain. Besides, this was just a distraction. I had a stronger card still to play.
‘More to the point,’ I said, ‘I think you should be trying to keep on my good side rather than threatening me, because I have had a good poke around in that machine – ’ I nudged my head in the direction of the laptop – ‘and learned quite a number of interesting things.’
The size of the bluff momentarily appalled me. Were she to call it by asking me to name something incriminating on her computer, I would be in difficulty I saw her eyes sweep over my face like metal detectors and forced myself to concentrate on holding her gaze. There were a few thick seconds of tension. I felt sure she would tell me that all those secrets were locked away; or perhaps there really was nothing damaging on her computer. She would screw my power into a little ball and toss it into the wastepaper basket.
Lara Krohl took a long slow breath out, however, and cast a helpless look at the computer. She looked back at me and shook her head, and I knew I had outmanoeuvred her. When she spoke again, her voice was hoarse and brittle, only just audible.
‘What do you want? Money? How much f---ing money?’
As she uttered this, she continued to shake her head. It was preposterous, she must be thinking, that an old plodder like me should outpace an operator like her.
‘Not money.’ I gestured again at the computer. ‘Firstly, I would like you to look at that picture on the screen and tell me if you know who it is.’
While we had been talking, the computer had taken up its doodling, and a number of polygons were now rebounding around the display. Lara Krohl was obliged to go and shake the thing out of its daydream. The photograph from the Internet appeared once more in front of us.
‘I don’t have any f---ing idea who it is,’ she said with a certain relief in her voice. ‘So I think, whatever is going on here … I think you might have got the wrong end of the stick, Graham.’ With the deployment of my name came a shift of her tone into something more wheedling than aggressive. ‘Why don’t you just let me have the computer back and we’ll pretend this never happened.’
‘Yes, you are good at pretending things never happened,’ I said. ‘I shall enlighten you. The reason you have never seen that person is that he is dead. He was shot dead at the age of eighteen. He was in Belfast, with the British army.’
Lara Krohl looked between me and the smiling Winston Richards in absolute bafflement. Her next words were delivered in a tone of careful forbearance as if she were trying to talk a psychopath down from a roof.
‘I’m sorry for this – this man’s death,’ she said, ‘but I’m afraid I don’t understand at all why you are … ’
‘His mother worked here,’ I said. ‘Agatha Richards. She was a friend of mine. She had had to live with the terrible absence of her son – her only child – for a very long time.’
I paused. I had not expected to make quite such a song and dance of this. Even though she was involved in army recruitment, and in defending the war, it was rather a stretch to connect her with Winston’s death. It was just that Lara Krohl had come to stand for everything that was not right: all the lies, the substitutions of the fake for the real, of machines for men. She had become accountable in my eyes for the fact that Ed’s job had been wiped out by a website; for the fact that Christopher was out of my reach and Pattie was always sitting with her back to me typing messages to someone else. I felt as if I were settling a score with the whole of the world, with everything about it that had disappointed me. However unfair to her, to me it was exhilarating to have a single person serve as a culprit for all of it, and to have her in my clutches now.
All the same, I was only really here – had only really taken the computer – for one reason. With an effort I made myself return to the real business. Lara was leaning against the queen-sized bed and staring at me as if at an apparition. The time since her computer had disappeared must have seemed like a strange dream to her; as indeed it did to me.
‘I want to know something,’ I said. ‘If you tell me, I will give you the laptop computer. I will never breathe a word about anything I may have discovered, and I will not bother you again.’
She prompted me to go on with the slightest twitch of her eyebrows.
‘The mother of this boy was named Agatha Richards,’ I said. ‘She left, along with Ella Flanders – Chas’s tutor – somewhat abruptly.’ If any doubt had remained in my mind that Lara had been concealing something about their disappearances, it vanished now; at the mention of the two names her face drooped. ‘I believe that you might know why,’ I said.
She swallowed. ‘Why are you doing this?’
‘Because I was never told why Agatha left,’ I said. ‘And I miss her, and I want to know what became of her.’
Lara Krohl muttered something I could not hear and went suddenly into the bathroom, drawing the lock across with violence. When she returned, her arms were folded in the usual way but the gesture had lost its command. Her face was sickly even under the soft light that came in from the window. It looked like an overcast day after yesterday’s blazing sun; but it was difficult to engage with the idea that a real world was outside.
‘If you ever repeat a word of this – ’ Lara Krohl began.
She sat down on the edge of the bed again and looked away from me as she spoke.
‘I go
t Howard to fire her,’ said Lara Krohl. ‘I told him she had taken something from my room.’
‘Good God,’ I said, ‘she would never in a hundred years … ’
‘I had no choice.’
‘Because?’
She was turned away from me still, but I had the impression her eyes were closed.
‘I had a, a relationship.’
‘A romantic relationship?’
‘Yah, Jesus Christ, a “romantic relationship”,’ she snapped. ‘A romantic relationship with Ella.’
There was a noise from the corridor, a trolley rattling along, the buzz of a walkie-talkie and Mrs Davey’s curt voice answering it. Lara held her tongue until Mrs Davey had knocked at a door and been admitted.
‘That woman – Agatha,’ she said eventually, ‘she caught us one time. We’d found a room that was unlocked. After a party. Chas’s … his birthday or something.’
It was very strange to think of them in Room 25 together. Lara went on.
‘We would see each other after she came to work sometimes. But I told her, I eventually told her it couldn’t happen any more. After we were seen doing … we were doing some out-there things. I needed to keep my privacy.’
She coughed. ‘Ella was destroyed. She thought it could have worked. But I didn’t want people chattering. And I didn’t want to go on having a secret, either. She begged me. I told her, I’m sorry, we can’t do this. So she left, and she said she was never coming back. And she hasn’t. She never has.’
All this came out in a mumbled torrent, and I began to feel that she was unburdening herself of it as much as I was forcing it from her.
‘So Agatha had to go,’ said Lara. ‘She was the only person who knew the relationship had ever happened. And had seen what we got up to. I persuaded Howard she was up to no good. He said he’d always had his suspicions about her. That she seemed the type.’
These last words filled me with a loathing so strong that I produced a terrible shout. Lara Krohl started and turned to look at me.
‘Seemed the type,’ I said. ‘He said she seemed the type, did he! That woman did not have a bad impulse in her. She would never have dreamed of taking anything. She—’
‘Were you in love with her?’ asked Lara.
‘As a matter of fact,’ I said, ‘I suppose I was.’
As soon as I had said this, out loud for the first time, I felt that I had to walk away. I went into the bathroom and dried my damp palms on a towel, glancing at my lined face in the mirror. When I came back into the bedroom I could see that Lara Krohl was also staring at her reflection. There was a long silence.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘About your friend.’
My anger had taken on a different shape. I could feel it fizzing in my limbs. I had defeated Lara Krohl, perhaps, but that did not mean I myself had won.
‘I don’t suppose … ’
I hated having to ask this, and it took two attempts. ‘I don’t suppose you, or Howard, have any idea where she went to. Where she might have gone.’
Lara looked away again, out of the window, across all the miles, all the strangers. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again.
The signs of remorse had wrong-footed me. She rummaged in her bag, brought out a packet of cigarettes and looked almost imploringly at me. ‘Can I smoke in here? I guess not?’
Though normally I would have been seen dead before I allowed this to happen, I told her that it did not matter. She stayed on the edge of the bed, blowing clouds of smoke into the air. She kept beginning to say something and then breaking off from it. The figures of the clock on the bedside table read 09:12. Lara Krohl and I had been in this room for more than an hour, neither one of us attending to a single one of the tasks that would normally obsess us. Suzie would be wading through the morning rush of check-outs. I could not remember when I had last missed any part of a morning shift. Yet, once more, it did not seem all that important.
‘Yesterday is, was Ella’s birthday,’ said Lara. ‘For a couple of years after she left, we had this thing where on her birthday we were allowed to send each other a message. Then she stopped. I don’t know where she is now. But every year, the birthday comes, I think maybe I’ll hear from her, I never do. So I get drunk instead.’ She snorted. ‘Oh-five-oh-six. June the fifth.
‘And you see,’ she added, ‘I’ve only got one photo of her. It’s on the laptop. That’s the main reason I was s----ing myself when I thought I’d lost it. I just want the picture. That’s all.’
I made a gesture to say that she should take the computer. She rose from the bed as if she had not moved for ten years. I watched as she closed the computer screen. She put the machine under her arm, where it had spent so much of its time, and it felt momentarily as if none of these extraordinary events had occurred.
At the door, she paused.
‘You could try Friends Reunited,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘There’s a site called Friends Reunited. It’s mostly for school and uni mates or whatever. But, you know. You could try looking for her there. People do use it to get in touch. After a long time.’
As she opened the door, I asked: ‘Have you tried it? With ‘The difference between your situation and mine,’ said Lara in a low, almost threatening tone, much more like her usual voice, ‘is that Ella does not want to be found by me.’
Our eyes met for a final time as she stood there with the door half open. Hers conveyed the acknowledgement of a new respect, even a trace of the mutual fondness that nests secretly in the hearts of rivals. The look also contained the understanding that nothing like this would ever occur again. We were not friends, and never could be. All the same, after what had passed between us, we were not really enemies either. For the real enemy I had to look closer to home.
There were echoing footsteps which could only belong to one person. The Alpha felt empty; it was a quiet midweek night with no late-night blow-ins, no Olympic bigwigs. A week had passed since my confrontation with Lara Krohl. Sarah-Jane had gone down to visit friends on the coast. Chas was busy working, as he ensured he always was these days. And that was why I could hear Howard clumping across the chequered marble like a chessman with no one to play with. He had never known what to do without company.
I was sitting in the dark, only that half-glow of the screens casting my fingers in milky neon. Each time I had typed ‘Agatha Richards’ into one of these devices over the past months and years, it had felt like a foolish exercise. This latest venture, onto the page called Friends Reunited, was in some ways no less so: there was nobody of her name; I established that quickly enough. But the point was that, after this, there would be another website; there would be another lead. I could see why Chas called it the ‘web’, this thing. It was intricate and many-layered. It might lead anywhere. I was only just getting started with it.
The door burst open and, even though I had been expecting him, I jumped a little.
‘Madman!’
‘Good evening, Howard.’
He shambled in and threw his jacket onto one of the rotating chairs. There was a shot glass in his hand and a cigarette poked between two fingers. He blew a lazy draught of smoke into the air between us.
‘Madman!’ he said again. ‘F--- me! Wouldn’t have thought to find you here at this time.’
‘I suppose not,’ I said.
‘Up to anything interesting?’
I hesitated for a moment, but hesitation would serve no purpose. Since the business with Lara, I had known that we were to have this conversation.
‘Looking for Agatha,’ I said. ‘Do you remember her?’
‘Agatha? Of course I do. I never forget a—’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I gather that you allowed Lara to persuade you Agatha was a thief. And then got rid of her on Lara’s advice.’
Howard scratched his head as if this idea were quite unfamiliar to him; as if he were having trouble even understanding what I said. I stayed very still so that he had to turn his face
to look at me. The nearest computer threw a chink of light across half of it; the other half stayed in shadow. I saw him mentally audition some nonchalant remark and then abandon it with a slight deflation of the shoulders. When his voice came, it was flat, without the usual mischief.
‘How the hell did you find that out, mate?’
‘I got it out of Lara,’ I told him.
‘My God,’ Howard muttered. ‘That must have taken some doing.’
‘We came to an understanding.’
Howard’s left-hand fingers drummed on the worktop, but they seemed not to break the silence; not to make any noise at all. He coughed a couple of times and reached out with the stub of his cigarette, but there were – of course – no ashtrays in here any more.
‘I had to go along with it,’ he said in the end. ‘I didn’t want to get on Lara’s bad side. Also, I thought … I thought perhaps … ’
‘You thought perhaps Agatha was a bad sort.’
‘Maybe. But more to the point, I thought she might get to know our secret. From … well, for example, from you.’
‘You were right. I told her.’
Howard nodded slowly. ‘I was scared that if she knew, anyone might find out eventually. I’ve lived with that fear a long time.’
‘Kathleen knows now,’ I informed him.
This, of course, was a much more serious revelation. The cigarette stub dropped from its perch.
‘Agatha, you see, left a note when she went all those years ago. Which Kathleen eventually found.’
Howard lowered his head slowly into his palms.
‘Kathleen must have told Chas,’ he said faintly.
‘She did not,’ I said, ‘because I persuaded her not to. But their relationship ended partly as a consequence, Howard. She just could not take the strain of it.’
He began to reply, and thought better of it.