‘No, no, not at all. My room’s absolutely fine. Um. A friend of mine used to stay here. Lara Finch. With her …’ I struggled to find the right word, and failed. ‘With her friend. Her boyfriend. You know? People have been looking for her.’
‘Oh yes.’ This woman was, I thought, Latin American. She did not look like someone who had time to stand around gossiping. She pushed her trolley a little way down the corridor and I walked with her. ‘I know.’
‘Did you ever see her, when she was here? Do you remember her?’
She shook her head. ‘We see many people.’
‘You might have cleaned her room.’
‘Maybe. How would I know?’ She took a key from her pocket and opened the door to room 413. ‘When we clean the room, no people are there.’
And with that she went inside and closed the door.
The man on the reception desk was not helpful either.
‘We see so many people,’ he explained. ‘I recognised them, sure. But I never paid them any attention. It’s not my business if they’re having an affair or what they’re doing. I mean, this is a hotel. People do what they like. To be honest, I’m just glad she didn’t kill him right here in the hotel.’
‘Do you think there’s anyone here who might have talked to them, or noticed anything about them?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Believe me, we’ve had the police here going over every room they ever stayed in. We’ve had journalists like you wouldn’t believe, and we have nothing to say. If she’s your friend then I’m sorry, but the reason people come to a hotel like this is so they won’t be bothered. We don’t notice the private lives of our guests. We don’t have time to wonder about them. It is not our business.’
He smiled a brightly white toothy smile, and I knew I was dismissed. My vague dreams of finding a member of staff at the hotel who would confide all sorts of inside information were shattered. I had no idea what I’d been expecting.
I called Alex, desperate to hear a friendly voice, to speak to someone who might not scoff at the fact that I was here, chasing ghosts. I had committed fraud that day, filling in the backs of my passport photos with the name and signature of a teacher I had once known. I was going to confess that, when I spoke to him.
However, he did not answer. I left him a stiff little message, feeling stupid. He had liked my skirt, and had drunk wine with me. We had chatted, and it felt as if I had known him for a long time. I was comfortable with him. That meant nothing.
I did not sleep well. I felt her ghost, and Guy’s, all around me. I felt my old life, my London life, pressing in on me, and I did not want to think about it.
chapter twenty
My phone rang at nine the next morning. I was dozing, and I nearly didn’t answer. The London noises outside the window made me wake in a state of unexpected excitement. Engines thrummed non-stop, buses chugged, horns sounded, and occasionally a voice was raised in sweary reproach. Before I came fully through the sleepy curtain into proper consciousness, I was pleased to be home.
Then I woke up properly and shrank away from that thought. The phone was still ringing, blasting away with the tune Laurie had set for me when I first got it: an obscure, lovely song by I Am Kloot, called ‘To The Brink’. It was our special song. I decided to change it as soon as I could.
I answered mainly to stop it ringing, forgetting, in my confused haze, that voicemail would have had the same effect, had I left it a second or two longer. I didn’t look at the screen because I wanted his voice to be a surprise.
‘Hello?’
‘Iris. Are you OK?’
I had wanted a surprise, and I got my wish.
‘Hello.’
‘Sorry. It’s Alex. I didn’t mean to startle you. Sorry.’
‘Alex. That’s OK. I called you last night. You’re calling me back. That’s nice of you. You don’t have to say sorry for something nice.’
I was sitting up in bed, pulling my hair away from my face, remembering that I needed to get it cut. It was tangled and annoying. Maybe I would have it dramatically shorter.
‘How are you, then?’ His voice was warm. ‘How’s Budock?’
‘Oh.’ I got out of bed and unplugged the little kettle, the phone still held between shoulder and ear. ‘I’m not in Budock. Highly unusually for me, I’m in London.’
‘Seriously? I thought you rarely left your house.’
‘I know! And look at me now.’ I turned the bathroom tap on, and water crashed loudly into the kettle. It echoed around the immaculately tiled room, and I cringed because I knew it sounded as if I were weeing. ‘Sorry about the noise,’ I said quickly. ‘That’s me filling the kettle. I’m in a hotel.’
‘Blimey, Iris.’ I laughed.
Blimey
seemed an incongruous thing to say, but in a sweet way. ‘Are you really? What are you doing?’
I tried to explain. It was not easy, because I could not properly explain it to myself.
‘I’m staying in Lara and Guy’s hotel,’ I said, immediately realising it made me sound mad. ‘I’m kind of going to places where they went. I’m so sure she didn’t kill him. I know she didn’t. Someone else did. I want to find out who.’
‘Ah. And is your …’ He hesitated. ‘Is your boyfriend with you?’
‘No,’ I said quickly. ‘No, he’s stayed at home. He’s not really keen on London.’
I could not believe I was talking about Laurie to a policeman. The kettle was making a big fuss of boiling, cranking itself up loudly, demonstrating the effort it was making just so I could have a cup of nasty, UHT-addled tea.
‘And your family? Are they still in London?’
‘Yes. Probably. As far as I know.’
‘You don’t get on with them?’
‘No. But they’re lovely. Long story. How are you?’
‘Oh, you know. I’m fine. Supposed to be doing all sorts of other things, but I’m following the Lara investigation. Not that there’s any change. Guy’s funeral happened yesterday. You know that already, I’m sure. They’re scaling back the search and assuming her body’s somewhere inaccessible near the train track.’
‘They can’t scale it back! They haven’t got a clue.’
‘What do you mean? What don’t they have a clue about?’
‘Lara. She’s …’
The silence hung in the air for the amount of time it would have taken me to tell him about my missing passport. I could feel Alex, too, nearly saying something, hesitating. I decided to tell him, a fraction of a second after he started to tell me.
‘Iris,’ he said suddenly. ‘I’m on leave, starting tomorrow night. I was wondering about making a visit to London myself. I always feel I have to get away when I have a couple of weeks off work. You know? Otherwise it doesn’t feel like a break. If you wouldn’t mind, we could maybe grab a drink or a bite to eat or something. You could tell me about your researches. I’m as intrigued as you are, because in fact all the spots along the train track have been pretty well checked, and unless Lara flung herself out with great abandon, or did it at an odd time in the journey, they would have found her by now. It’s just possible that she could have got off at Reading, as you know, but no one on the CCTV looks remotely like her. When the train stops between stations there’s no CCTV, but if she got off in one of those places she must have gone somewhere. I can’t come up with a theory. Can you?’
I pulled the lid off a little carton of milk. It spurted, inevitably, over my fingers, and I dumped it splashily into the teacup.
‘It would be nice to see you if you’re going to be here,’ I said carefully. ‘And Alex. Let me say this without you thinking I’m mad. Please?’
‘
Mais bien sur
,’ he said.
‘One of the things I’ve done here is go to the passport office and apply for a new passport. I did the thing when you do it quickly, just in case. Bloody hell, it’s expensive. But anyway. I had to apply for a new passport.’ I paused, planning how I could say this to make it sound plausible to a policeman. ‘I had a passport at home. It was in a filing cabinet. It still had three years before it was going to expire. But it vanished. And you remember I told you that Lara came to see me on Christmas Eve?’
I could hear the scepticism, even though he was trying to hide it. ‘Yes?’
‘Well. She asked if she could look around the house. Laurie was away. So I was giving her a tour of the place and she was saying what she’d do to it if we had the money to make it amazing. When we got to the second bedroom upstairs, which is the study, my landline rang. A rare event. I went off to answer it but there was no one there. Then I came back and we carried on as normal. And a couple of weeks later both my passport and Lara have vanished.’
He did not speak for several seconds. I felt intensely stupid, but I did not allow myself to backtrack or back down or qualify everything I had just said with ‘of course it’s probably nothing’, because I was sure that it was, in fact, something.
‘Really?’ he said. ‘Are you telling me this as a police officer, or as a friend?’
I shrank inwardly from that word.
‘I’m telling you as Alex Zielowski. You’re … well, I suppose you’re both of those things. Whichever you would like it to be.’
‘Yes. Well. Look, I’m at work today, and I do actually need to get on with it, and as you know, the whole Lara thing is not remotely within my remit because it’s a Penzance investigation. But what I’ll do is, I’ll see if I can find a way to check out your details. It’s not easy. I should fill in a Data Protection Form. But let’s see. Do you know your passport number, by any chance?’
‘I wish I did.’
‘I’ll do what I can. I have a meeting I should be in right now, but I’ll call you later, if I may.’
‘Of course. Any time.’
‘Thank you. And Iris?’
‘Yes?’
‘Is your boyfriend all right? At home without you?’
‘He’s fine,’ I said quickly. ‘Don’t worry about him.’
‘Of course. Well, have a good day in London, and I’ll speak to you later.’ His voice suddenly went formal at the end, and I sensed someone in the room with him.
‘Bye.’
I sat on the bed and stared at the phone and sipped my tea. I realised I was smiling. I had called Budock several times, but Laurie never picked up. Today I decided I would not even attempt it. He knew how to get hold of me.
I looked at the phone, knowing I could pick it up and do something radical. I could, for instance, call my mother. My hand stretched towards it. I would only have to say hello.
‘Hello?’ she would say, in that vague-yet-aggressive way of hers. ‘Hello? Iris, darling, is it you? Oh, you ridiculous girl, where have you been?’
That was why I couldn’t do it. They all thought I had overreacted to an absurd extent. Of course they did. The world was crammed with broken hearts, and the proper way of dealing with it was to be sad for a judicious amount of time, then move on. It was not to run away to Cornwall at the age of thirty-two and closet oneself and one’s lover away indefinitely.
Alex’s call made me get on the District Line, even though I didn’t want to. There was something about him that made me want to do the right thing. I sat on the Tube with my mind blank, watching people. A man was asleep, his head leaning back against the window, jerking upright from time to time. An old woman frowned in concentration at the book she was reading, so absorbed that I wondered whether she would miss her stop. Perhaps she already had.
After Earls Court, it thinned out completely. The sleeping man and the reading woman were still on, as was a harried-looking man with a baby in a sling and a young woman with ill-advised patterned leggings and a top that was too short, who was doing something on her phone with furious concentration.
As we approached East Putney, now overground, with rain lashing tightly against the window, I stood up like an automaton and walked to the door.
It was the same as it had always been, and the familiar mundanity kept me going through the station hall, which was the same as every Tube station ticket hall with its stash of free newspapers and sparsely manned ticket office, yet different and particular to itself in its shape, its detail, its very essence.
All my journeys used to start here. I went to school from this station. I met my friends here. I bought my Travelcard and set out into the world from here.
My legs walked me along the road, still busy with cars, buses, vans and taxis, all belching out their fumey clouds, and across the High Street, which was smarter than it used to be, and then picked their way through the affluent streets close to the river. I stepped around the puddles, jumped over a little flood in the gutter.
The houses must have been worth millions by now. They were beautifully tended, with exteriors immaculately cleaned, the brickwork impeccable. Some of them were flats, of course. That had always been the case. Even the flats were magazine-smart these days.
The house on the corner had grass that was so lush and so beautifully tended that every fat blade was the same length. A child’s tricycle, wooden of course, was parked neatly on a honey-stone patio, and a mosaic-topped table with four matching chairs stood stoically in the rain, waiting for spring and the sun.
That house used to belong to the Grimaldis. They were in their seventies, a gay couple, and they had lived there for ever. Bert and Jonno, those were their names. Jon had taken Bert’s surname because, I recalled him saying, ‘Why would you go through life being called Bottomley when you could become a Grimaldi?’
They had moved, or died, since I was last here. I wondered which it was.
Every house I passed assaulted me with memories. I walked on, tramping the street on which I had learned to ride a bike, the road to my nursery school. I remembered racing my sister, Lily, from the corner to our front door, both of us arriving red-cheeked and breathless, laughing, desperate to be the winner.
I was glad it was raining. My hair was bedraggled, down my back, and my clothes were clinging uncomfortably. That felt right.
I passed a woman pushing a huge buggy with two babies in it, side by side. She was probably younger than me, but she was exclusively a mother. Her exhaustion was covered with make-up and, I supposed, expensive creams, yet was impossible to erase. She had the chunky look of someone once slim who had given birth to twins within the past six months. Her clothes were expensive yet practical: jeans, Fly boots, a blue anorak zipped against the elements, and her hair was blond with dark roots, scraped back into something like a bun.