Shadows & Tall Trees (16 page)

Miss Fisher had to prompt her again for a decision.

“Room 34 is available,” Marianne agreed reluctantly. “That will be £60. I will need to see identification, as before.”

“Of course.”

Miss Fisher smiled, but Marianne did not feel able to trust the woman. She recognized her own prejudice against this self-confident older woman, with her heavy make-up and expensive clothes. And she hated herself for agreeing to do as the woman asked. While Miss Fisher took Mr. Fitzpatrick up to his room, Marianne went to put the cash in the till and found that she had, again, been paid £100 in notes. This time she put the difference into the charity box.

As before, Miss Fisher was back down again in less than a couple of minutes. Once the Mercedes had driven away Marianne went upstairs and stood outside the door of number 34, listening, but she could not hear a sound. The young man was probably asleep, or trying to get to sleep, but this time Marianne knocked. She had decided that she would have to be honest and say that she was concerned; worried because he had looked so ill. It might get her into trouble, disturbing a guest, but her conscience insisted that she had to take the risk.

There was no answer. Marianne knocked once more. It was still strangely quiet, so she went down to the office and made a new electronic card key. After knocking again at the door of room 34 and still receiving no reply, she unlocked it and walked inside.

Marianne was immediately hit by an icy cold. Her first thought was that Fisher had left the window open to help the young man sober up, but in the streetlight that flooded into the room Marianne could see the window was closed. The room was empty. Nor was Fitzpatrick in the
en suite
bathroom.

Marianne checked the window, wondering if the young man had climbed out of it, but it was firmly locked from the inside. Anyway, there was quite a drop to the street below, and down on the pavement there were no footprints in the snow.

Fitzpatrick couldn’t have passed Marianne on the stairs, and the lift hadn’t been used. The disconcerted night porter went back down and looked at the security tapes in the office. They showed that the young man had not come back through the lobby at any time; he had simply disappeared.

She couldn’t decide what to do. She considered calling the police, but where was the evidence of foul play? The guest was free to leave whenever and however he chose to, and the fact that she had not seen him go could always have been her mistake.

While she tried to decide what to do, Marianne made sure that her note of the name and address of Miss Stephanie Fisher was recorded legibly, and as an afterthought she made a separate note for herself. She told herself that she was being unreasonably over-careful, but in the office she played back the digital recording from the security camera in the car park and took down the registration number of the silver Mercedes. Just to be sure, she copied the file containing the footage from the front desk camera into a new folder on the computer; she did not want it to be erased after a couple of days.

Marianne found it impossible to get back to her Henning Mankell book. It suddenly grated on her that the novel was set in Sweden during a heat-wave, while in Britain it was snowing. She was also annoyed to discover that she had previously been reading the Mankell books “out of sequence”. But the cause of her discontentment wasn’t really the book.

“I don’t know,” said Mr. Lane simply. “I asked the cleaner and she doesn’t remember having had to do anything in room 34 for weeks. To be honest, I’m not going to worry. Your Miss Fisher has paid the bills and nobody’s done anything wrong. Although we can’t think of an explanation for a disappearing guest, that doesn’t mean there isn’t one.”

“If she comes in again, wanting a room for another young man, I’ll refuse to book them in. And I’ll call the police.”

“If you really think there’s something illegal going on, by all means tell them to try another hotel.”

And that is exactly what Marianne suggested when Miss Fisher arrived the following week. Once more it was a young man she brought with her. They had all been the same kind of pretty-boy that annoyed her; she preferred her men a little more, well, masculine. They had all been under the influence of drink or drugs, and Marianne had read enough crime novels to be able to imagine all manner of reasons for Fisher dumping them at the hotel. They could well have been robbed or abused. Prostitution was possible. The only part of the whole story that Marianne did not understand was how the previous guest had managed to disappear from his room, and why.

“Which hotel do you suggest?” Miss Fisher asked, pleasantly enough.

It was three in the morning and, although it wasn’t snowing this time, it was bitterly cold outside. The man was even younger than the previous two, perhaps even younger than Marianne herself. She was uncomfortable when she realized that she actually felt something maternal or protective towards him, and Marianne asked herself if turning him away was the best thing for his safety. If she booked him in, then at least she would make sure that this time she kept a close eye on him. She would put him into a different room from where the only other way out would be though a window into an inner courtyard.

“Room 18,” she said. “I’ll have to come up with you.”

“There really is no need,” said Fisher. “I can take Mr. Evans up to his room.”

“I need to reset the lock on the door,” Marianne lied. “It will only take a second.”

All three of them went up to the room with Marianne leading the way. She opened the door with her master keycard and explained, as nonchalantly as she could, that it would now be reset. She then made sure that Fisher’s key worked and she handed it over to her. The woman took the young man inside and Marianne used her master key to go into the room opposite, which she knew to be empty.

She watched through the squint in the door, and when the Fisher left Marianne waited for her to walk down the corridor before she came out. She listened to the woman going down the stairs, and although she couldn’t hear the woman crossing the hall past the unmanned reception desk, she felt the slight change in pressure as the front door opened and closed.

Marianne risked getting into a great deal of trouble, but, nevertheless, she opened the door to room 18 with her master key and walked in.

“Please excuse me,” she said, immediately noticing how cold it was in the darkened room. “I do apologize, but I . . .”

Her first reaction had been to look towards the window again, to see if it was open, which it wasn’t. But her attention was immediately taken by the young man standing just inside the brightly-lit bathroom. He was wearing only a tee-shirt and his hands were tied to the door handle with what looked like a dirty strip of some white material. He was obviously distressed; he was gagged and the look in his eyes was at first wild, but then suddenly hopeful, pleading. Then he looked from Marianne to somebody else who was inside the bathroom with him.

Suddenly that person pushed past the terrified young man. The first thing that struck Marianne was that the man who appeared was really very, very old. He had a long face and his wrinkles were deep, like the cracks in dried earth. He was also completely bald. He was dressed in a brown suit that, even back-lit from the bathroom and almost entirely in silhouette, appeared dirty and stained. In one hand he carried a hotel towel, and in the other he had a huge hypodermic syringe that looked like it was made of corroded brass.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said with a low, quiet but insistent voice.

“I’m the night porter,” said Marianne, without thinking.

“I know, Night Porter,” the man said. “Can we agree that you have seen nothing here? Would you like to leave and never think about this again? It would be for the best.”

Marianne reasoned that she could be out of the room and downstairs, phoning for the police, long before the old man caught up with her. But the young man was staring at her, trying to scream at her to stay and help him.

“No,” said Marianne, shaking, still considering running. “
You
can leave.”

“I will, when I’ve finished.”

And the man was across the room with an unbelievable speed and agility. Instinctively Marianne flung the door open to run out and it crashed into him.

That should have given Marianne enough time, but as she reached the stairs she could already hear the man coming down the corridor towards her. Marianne vaulted over the banisters between the two sections of the dog-leg stair and managed to get her footing right as she landed. She took another leap into the reception area and ran across to the desk. She immediately picked up the telephone and hit nine three times before looking up.

The man was already standing by her as they both heard the distant, tiny voice asking which emergency service was required.

“Police,” said Marianne, upset by how shaky and thin her voice sounded. How had the man appeared so quickly beside her? What did he intend to do with the syringe he was holding?

But the old man just smiled at Marianne, and walked away, backwards. Although he appeared quite calm, and the movement was effortless, the man seemed to move too quick; he was at the stairs and climbing them backwards, too soon, before he should have done...

“The St. Denis Hotel,” Marianne added into the mouthpiece of the phone. “A guest is in danger, room 18 . . .”

She put the receiver down on the counter and unwillingly returned to the foot of the stairs. She looked up, but the old man was gone; he would already be in the corridor. Marianne followed reluctantly, and when she saw that the first floor corridor was empty, she made herself walk along to the door of room 18.

She hesitated before going back inside, but room 18 was now empty; both the old man and the young man had gone. It took a great deal of courage for Marianne to look around the door into the bathroom, and she wasn’t sure if she really felt any relief in finding nobody there. The only signs that there had ever been anybody in room 18 were the horrible piece of material still attached to the door handle, the towel on the floor, and the state of the sink. There were dark marks on the white porcelain, as though somebody had been washing something very black and oily in it.

The police took seriously the call from Marianne. The security tapes clearly showed Miss Fisher and the young Mr. Evans, leaving the silver Mercedes and entering the hotel lobby. Fisher was traced through the number plate and questioned, but Marianne was told that she could have nothing to do with the disappearance of Evans. Traffic cameras clearly showed her driving away as soon as she had left the hotel. Evans had apparently been acting as Miss Fisher’s “escort” that night, quite legitimately.

The old man with the bald head didn’t appear on the security tapes at all. There was only a partial shot of Marianne herself at the telephone calling the police; unfortunately, the cameras were angled too far towards the front door to show the whole reception desk.

Marianne was given a couple of weeks off work, paid, by Mr. Lane. It was very good of him, thought Marianne, who felt bad taking the money when she didn’t intend going back. How could she return after what had happened? The idea of being alone in the hotel at night was unimaginable. Well, not quite alone; there would be guests, of course, locked away in their rooms. But who else might be behind the closed bedroom doors? The old, bald man?

Marianne continued to keep the hours that she had done when working at the St. Denis. She didn’t admit to her mother that anything had happened at the hotel; instead she would go to The Milky Way until five in the morning, and then walk around the streets, sobering up in the cold dawn until she could go home after seven. She would still go to bed at the same time, although she would now be getting up at more like four in the afternoon.

Not that she could sleep; Miss Fisher and the old man insisted on invading her thoughts as he lay awake in bed, threatening to enter her dreams if she dared to lose consciousness.