The Lazarus Hotel (2 page)

Long in the doorway, he shrugged. ‘I don't know. The brochure talks about Expanding Personal Horizons – what does that mean?'

‘Staring into one another's navels?' hazarded Fran, watching for his reaction in the mirror.

For a moment, when he grinned, he looked like the man she married. ‘How to make Freud influence people?'

‘Keeping Jung at heart?'

‘Who cares what the others are looking for? I'm going because I need some help, and just maybe three days of personal discovery with Dr Miriam Graves will start shovelling out some of this, garbage that's got into my head. Maybe there's a simple answer – it came from nowhere, there's no reason for it, maybe someone who knows the right mantras can exorcize it. Anyway, I've nothing to lose. And I don't want it on record that our medico came up with something that might help and I turned it down.'

‘Come back talking psychobabble and I'll kill you,' promised Fran. He smiled but her eyes were serious. ‘Richard, don't stake everything on this. I hope it works, I really do. But if it doesn't I don't want you thinking it's you that failed. All right?'

He kissed the top of her head. It was the only part of her he could reach without stooping. ‘All right.'

But she knew even as he said it that, in the nature of his illness, it was a promise he couldn't keep.

The building was so tall that from street level perspective distorted the shape, compressing the upper storeys so that as the eye climbed the walls seemed to curve in. It was like looking through a fish-eye lens: lines which common sense insisted must be straight bulged and narrowed according to rules that had nothing to do with load-bearing.

At first Richard thought an optical illusion also explained why one storey of the building seemed to be missing. He blinked and looked again. The first five hundred feet were complete, the blush-coloured stone rising from its plinth in a confection of steps and chunky Tuscan columns like a particularly durable birthday cake. And the penthouse on top was finished, capped with a pyramidal roof that emphasized how distance could compress solid masonry towards a vanishing-point. Apart from the plaza, which still had piles of building material under plastic sheeting where the plans showed lovers drinking wine under umbrellas, it looked ready to occupy.

Except for one thing. Immediately below the penthouse was a thin slice of nothing, the top floor with its high-pitched roof seeming to float above the building like a cubist helicopter inching in to land. Narrowing his eyes Richard could pick out a filamentary framework of brown girders like denuded ribs, as if the structure were a great animal that some other animal had been disturbed in the process of eating. He knew nothing about civil engineering but he thought it an odd way to build: like writing the headlines and the weather forecast, and trusting to luck for the news to fill the gap.

The letter confirming his reservation gave the venue as Lazaire's Hotel and a functioning hotel was what he'd expected. But the foyer at the top of the pink steps was screened by plywood and there seemed no prospect of finding a receptionist inside.

Richard Speke had regularly found his way to spots so remote they were missing from their own country's maps. Now, assailed by doubt, he studied the letter – irritatingly personalized with a picture of himself in one corner – wondering if he'd come to the wrong place.

Someone else had the same idea. ‘Today's Friday and I think this is the right address. Was it a hoax?' The young man behind him was puzzling over a letter identical, except for the photograph, to Richard's.

‘Personal Discovery?' He said it as if it were a joke. Now he was here he couldn't imagine why he'd ever taken, it seriously. ‘Dear God, where did they get these photos? Yours is worse than mine.'

At least Richard's had been taken by a professional, though he couldn't recall the occasion. He'd been wearing his suit so it must have been something formal. He supposed it came from the station's PR department, wished they'd sent something a bit less pofaced.

The photograph on the other man's letter was never more than a poor snapshot, grainy, out of focus and badly cropped. ‘It's the sort of snap my mother used to have in her album,' he said in a quiet, rather colourless voice that went with the light brown hair that wasn't quite fair and the grey eyes. ‘She'd start off with a family group, then cut off the people she wasn't talking to. I'm Will Furney, by the way.'

‘Richard Speke.'

‘I recognized you.'

‘You've got a good memory,' grunted Richard.

A fractional lift of one pale eyebrow was will Furney's only comment. He was younger than Richard, smaller and neater, and he looked as much at home among the piles of pipes and cladding as a string quartet in a working men's club. Everything about him said desk job: his weekend clothes, casual only by comparison with a suit, his pale skin and economic movements, as if he worked where a careless gesture could send things flying. Accountant, Richard decided. Wife works in a building society, two point four children, family hatchback, cocker spaniel.

‘I won this in a competition,' offered Will. ‘When it said three days in the penthouse suite of a new luxury hotel, this wasn't how I pictured it.'

Richard pointed. ‘There is a penthouse. The problem's going to be getting there.'

Construction workers wearing hard hats, nonchalant grins and those special drop-waist jeans designed for the building trade rode the front of the tower in cages. Will pursed his lips. ‘If that's the way up they'll have to drug me first.'

‘Excuse me, gentlemen?'

Even without the accent, which was that of a Scottish gentlewoman of a certain age, it may have been the oddest salutation ever heard on a London building site. The men looked round but she wasn't behind them in the boardwalk leading to the road; she wasn't on the steps, or where the entrance would be when they took down the plywood; she wasn't even – Richard checked – riding the façade in a cage.

‘The Lazaire's Hotel banshee,' he decided. ‘It's heard whenever someone's about to make a fool of himself.'

‘Better get used to it then, hadn't we?' Will was regretting his good fortune already.

‘Over here, gentlemen – the side door. Stay on the duckboards and you'll avoid the mud.'

There are few reliable photographs but neither man had heard of a banshee that wore a navy-blue suit and sensible shoes, and brushed its hair into permed corrugations like ripples in concrete. So perhaps she was only a woman of about sixty after all.

She glanced at a list as they picked their way towards her. ‘It's Mr Speke, isn't it? And Mr Furney?'

Will nodded. ‘Dr Graves?'

The woman laughed as if he'd said something witty. ‘I'm Mrs Venables. I'll be looking after you while you're here. Don't mind this.' She gestured at the chaos around them. ‘We'll be comfortable upstairs. Lovely views. Dr Graves is there now. Let me show you to the lift.'

When he saw it the blood drained from Will's face. ‘I'm not going in that!'

But Richard was enchanted. ‘It's beautiful!'

The heart of the building was an atrium arising through twenty storeys. Though the soaring space was as yet unfurnished, the structure was advanced enough to imagine how it would look when the ground-floor mall was open for business, the galleries were filled with bars and restaurants, the spidery escalators arching over the void were carrying people to and from the offices in the mid-section, and the great crystal fountain rising like a stalagmite through the vault was playing, adding the music of falling water to the bustle of people and the cheery babble of money being made.

And the little gilt and glass elevators were rising, and falling in their perspex tubes. That was what worried Will. He could cope, just, with a lift whose doors shut on one level and opened on another. But the idea of sailing through this great space in something as insubstantial as a Victorian birdcage turned him cold.

A glance told Richard the man was genuinely afraid. To Mrs Venables, who already had the door open, he said quietly, ‘Is there another way up?'

She frowned, perplexed. ‘I don't think so. At least, there must be a staircase but, man dear, it's forty storeys! Why, what—?' Then she saw Will's ashy pallor and her tone softened. ‘There's nothing to worry about, I've been up and down a dozen times.'

Richard had too many hags of his own to ridicule anyone else's. ‘I'm sure she's right – lifts have to be pretty foolproof to get approved. On the other hand, this isn't something you have to do. You could go home.'

‘I have a ground-floor flat,' said Will. The strain was audible as a creak in his voice.

Richard nodded. ‘I'm sure that's wise.'

‘My office is in a basement. I don't even travel upstairs on buses.' He shut his eyes. ‘I knew it was going to be high up. But it's a big solid building. I thought I could keep my back to the window and ignore all that sky outside. I never guessed they'd want to get us up there in a bucket!'

Richard was inspecting the little glass gondola. ‘No problem. Just face me and don't look away. I blot out quite a bit of scenery.'

There was something engaging about Richard Speke. He looked like an overgrown schoolboy: tall, gangly and freckled with wiry ginger hair. Apart from the one suit which he dug out when absolutely necessary, he wore jeans on all occasions. Early in his career editors tried to do something about his appearance. They gave up in despair when they found that, however good the clothes they forced him into, by the time Richard had worn them half an hour they looked as lived-in as his own. After that it was decided that battered jeans were his trademark; like Kate Adie's earrings.

The other thing that made people warm to him was the fact that he was plainly a decent, trustworthy man. Will trusted him now. He might have joined someone else in what all his instincts told him was a death-trap, but he'd have agonized over it a lot longer first.

But nothing could make him enjoy the ride. His first thought was to fix his eyes on the floor and keep them there until the lift either arrived or crashed in a litter of broken glass and broken bones. But to his horror the floor too was transparent. Looking down was worse than looking out.

So he fixed his gaze on Richard's chest, on a broken button on his shirt. He was conscious of the movement as the gondola started up, of the passage of the galleries through his peripheral vision, but he kept his mind on Richard's button. He wondered where he'd broken it. He wondered how. He wondered if he'd no one to sew him a new one on or if he couldn't find one that matched. He wondered whether, if he broke another button, Richard would then consider the shirt done; and if not, how many broken buttons he would tolerate.

Then the gondola left the open space of the atrium and plunged into the mid-section, a bright bullet fired into darkness. That troubled Will less than space around him: Richard heard him breathe out for the first time.

There was one more bad moment when the black tube through the thorax of the building yielded momentarily to a clear tube through the gap below the penthouse. ‘It must be a viewing deck. It'll be glazed in when they've finished, probably for a restaurant. On a clear day you'll be able to see halfway to Birmingham.' Then Richard remembered this wasn't the sort of information Will wanted.

Even as the building closed once more around it, the gondola was slowing to a halt, solid external doors sliding into slots to let the clear curved doors of the gondola swing open. From across the corridor came the hum of voices.

‘We're here,' said Richard. ‘Are you OK?'

Will said thinly, ‘A lot of laundries will replace shirt buttons, you know.'

‘I'm Miriam Graves. I'm glad you could come.'

The psychologist was a substantial woman, both tall and broad, big boned and well covered. Aged about fifty, her large frame was upholstered in tweed suiting and her pepper-and-salt hair styled by reference to a pudding basin. She might have been making the point that she was strong enough to do without props – the diet, the couture, the cosmetics, the expensive hair-do – but Richard suspected that she hadn't realized she needed them. He found that rather endearing.

‘Wouldn't have missed it for worlds, Doctor,' murmured Will Furney.

She shook the pudding-basin crisply. ‘Miriam. The Doctor isn't an affectation – I was a GP before I got interested in this – but it's of more use on the stationery than in this context. I'm not here to diagnose or to treat. My role is that of a moderator: I'll guide, I'll prompt, I'll give you the odd nudge in directions you'd probably sooner not go, but this isn't a patient-doctor thing. Also, first names cut through a lot of mental gymnastics. So call me Miriam, at least for now. Later you'll call me other things.' The unfettered grin transformed her plain round face. ‘Come and meet the others. Sheelagh, let me introduce Richard and Will.'

Sheelagh Cody made little effort to hide her feelings. It wasn't anxiety barbing her voice so much as exasperation. ‘Welcome to the madhouse.'

Miriam's apple-cheeks dimpled. ‘Sheelagh is not one of our more enthusiastic participants.'

‘Sheelagh has better things she could be doing this weekend,' the younger woman retorted acidly.

Richard had heard of power dressing but didn't often see it close up. Women reporters prefer a kind of practical chic, as in parka and pearls. The last time he'd seen something this sharp it was in the hands of an Afghan tribesman and he'd run for his life.

Inside the designer suit – lime-green shoulder-padded jacket, short narrow black skirt – Sheelagh was small but strongly made, well proportioned. Jogger, Richard decided. No, rower: sculls up the Thames from Lime-house every morning to avoid the traffic. Not yet thirty but runs the sort of women's magazine that would sue if you called it a women's magazine. Long black gypsy hair with a powerful curl fell down her back and her eyes were a hard dark blue.