The Lazarus Hotel (27 page)

Richard's scalp crawled. ‘Abroad? That's what you said.' He hadn't believed it then, wouldn't believe it if Will repeated it now.

Will took a deep breath and slowly nodded. ‘I did, didn't I? It wasn't true. I spent four months in a psychiatric unit in Norfolk. A combination of depression and exhaustion, they said. I was off on the Planet Zog when Cathy died. The only papers I saw in that time had inkblot butterflies on them. But my secretary read about it. Cathy was famous once, there was a certain amount of interest in how she died. Linda – my secretary – broke the news once I got home.'

‘But not in much detail?'

His narrow shoulders etched an embarrassed shrug. ‘I didn't want to talk about it. I couldn't deal with it. It was too late to do anything – I tried to put it out of my mind. Not altogether successfully. I don't know how many times I picked up the phone and dialled Norfolk, and put it down again before they could answer. It's funny. I bet
you
think I couldn't wait to leave that place. But if it's what you need, you stop thinking of it as an institution and start seeing it as a sanctuary. Literally, an asylum. The difficult part is breaking away when they tell you you're fit to go. I think that's why I came here – for another taste of sanctuary.'

Richard stared at him, appalled. They'd listened to him. They'd gone along with much of what he'd proposed. They'd seriously considered the possibility that Tessa had killed two people and tried to kill others, on the unsupported suspicions of a man who'd spent four months in a psychiatric institution. They might have left her with Joe in the corridor because of what Will said.

Tariq too was thinking. But he was considering not Will's actions but Tessa's. ‘What could you learn from the post-mortem report that you didn't already know?'

She resented being quizzed but had better reasons for answering than staying silent. She didn't want to leave any suspicion in their minds that she had something to hide. ‘In the event, nothing. Cathy drove into the river and drowned – it was that simple. Suicide.' Her voice hardened. ‘So can we
please
see these wild allegations for what they are? Will's a sad man with a history of mental illness set on punishing someone for his misery. Maybe he has cause to hate me, but he's wrong about me harming Cathy. The only thing I did wrong was fall for someone with no sense of proportion. Cathy spent ten years trying to be the best. When she realized she wasn't going to make it she preferred to crash in flames rather than make a new life for herself out of the spotlight. None of us is responsible for that.'

Trying to decide where the truth lay, Tariq was defeated by the dearth of facts. Neither version of events could be proved or disproved on what they knew for sure. But time alone would deliver a judgement and he saw no alternative to waiting. He didn't even know who he wanted to believe. If Tessa was telling the truth it only meant that Will was mistaken; but if he was right then Tessa had killed two people. He said tiredly, ‘This is getting us nowhere. Can we leave it for now and concentrate on getting out of here?'

There was a general murmur of consent. No one wanted to judge, on ambiguous evidence, whether one of their number was paranoid or the other a murderer. With no facts they weren't prepared, weren't able, to make a choice.

Larry gave a rather phoney laugh. ‘After all, nobody's going anywhere.'

Will shook his head obstinately. Like many small men he had a way, when he reached a line he wasn't prepared to cross, of digging in and looking as immovable as a rock. ‘But that's not true, is it? We're hoping to leave here. Tessa'll be with us. If we're watching her we're vulnerable to an attack by Joe if I'm wrong. If we're watching for Joe, we're at risk from a killer in our midst if I'm right. We have to resolve this before anyone leaves this room.'

‘I agree,' Tessa said, surprising him. ‘Look, this is my neck too. When we go out there I want everyone concentrating on the real issue, not something dreamt up by a bitter, frustrated and unstable young man. Plus, I don't want to have to worry who's behind me on the stairs.'

Tariq stood up. His head ached, but if he added himself to the growing list of the unfit there wouldn't be enough strong hands left to do what needed doing. ‘It makes no difference what either of you want,' he said flatly. ‘We can't settle it here. But we have a chance to leave before anyone else gets hurt. If that means an armed truce until we can sort out who did what to who, so be it. But it's coming light and I'm going to have a crack at that door.'

He got the support he needed because he wasn't asking anyone to take sides. ‘Good. Then I'll take Larry and Richard, and the table, and the rest of you stay here. Keep the door shut but stay alert. We really can't be sure if we're going to meet any trouble. If you hear us coming back in a hurry it won't mean we're missing you.'

The door was more massive than they remembered, solid as a house. They eyed it uneasily. ‘Remember, we don't know what to expect,' said Tariq. ‘Joe may be behind there, or he may be behind us.'

‘Or he may be forty storeys below,' murmured Richard.

‘Mm. And the door may go down as soon as we hit it or it may kick back. Can we try not to break any bones?'

They backed as far as the corner, lined up on the lock. ‘Geronimo?' suggested Richard.

‘Geronimo,' agreed Tariq.

‘Oh, get on with it,' growled Larry.

They thundered down the short corridor and the table struck the door like cannon-fire. But it didn't spring open: the recoil caught Tariq, who was behind, in the midriff and he sat down with a surprised grunt, exactly as if he'd been kicked by a mule. The door suffered no obvious injury.

‘We're doing this wrong,' opined Richard. ‘If we break one of the panels we can climb through.'

The rubble would be densest at ground level. They chose the upper panel, on the basis that helping the less agile members of the party through would be easier than clearing a ton of bricks.

The edge of the table sliced into the door with a splintering sound. When they yanked it back it pulled half the panel away. They tugged the fragments out with their hands.

But as the hole grew only more rubble came into view. Bricks, blocks, leaning timbers, even a small cement-mixer, but no way through.

Finally Larry put their burgeoning misgivings into words. He stood back and said with certainty, ‘They never got through here. She lied.'

Will was like a man with a chipped tooth: he couldn't leave it alone. The lack of proof only goaded him on. He knew he could have imagined a lot of this. He'd been hit so hard in the emotional solar plexus that all the old certainties had shaken. Had he been reduced to victimizing a woman whose only crime was to love the same girl he had?

He genuinely didn't think so. He believed Tessa had done most or all of what he'd accused her of because if she hadn't the outcome would have been different. Proof lay six hundred feet and perhaps only half an hour away, but he couldn't leave it alone for even so short a time. He was as obsessed as her father with the fate of Cathy Beacham.

Tessa was sitting on her mattress, knees held in the compass of her arms, only her tawny head above the folds of the quilt, the slashes down her face tacked with sticking plaster. She watched him speculatively in the strengthening light and Will, standing at the end of the mattress with his arms crossed over his ribs, watched her.

At length he said, ‘I don't understand why she had to die. You were finished with her. There was nothing left worth having. All that promise, that vitality, wrecked by the garbage you fed her. She was desperate enough to risk her reputation on a last chance at success, and you helped her, but when it came to nothing you left her to deal with the consequences alone. That was cruel but there was nothing to stop you. Why did you need her dead?'

Tessa regarded him with dislike. For several seconds she said nothing; then she seemed to reach a decision. ‘It's true that Cathy took steroids. I didn't start her on them – I advised against, but winning was all that mattered to her. Later I got them for her because it was safer than trusting a locker-room pusher. If she'd been caught, and if it had come out that she and I had a relationship, I'd have been in trouble anyway. A doctor can't afford to associate with people who abuse drugs.

‘But she never got her form back, and over the next few months the situation deteriorated further. She was mean, unpleasant and manipulative. She started using our friendship against me, saying that if she went down she couldn't guarantee to keep me out of it. Finally I couldn't justify the risk – I had to get out before she ruined my life. We never intended to live together, you know. It may not sound like it but my marriage is important to me. The thing with Cathy was a frivolity, a bit of fun. I never meant to leave my husband. At first that suited her fine. But as her other friends drifted away she became more dependent, more demanding. I was sorry for her but her problems weren't my fault and I wasn't going to sacrifice everything to pay for them. I said goodbye.

‘She wasn't murdered, Will: not by me, not by anyone. But that gives you a problem, doesn't it? She could have had you back any time but chose to die instead.' She chuckled unkindly. ‘That wouldn't do anybody's self-esteem much good. No wonder you ended up milking moo-moos on the funny farm.'

Outraged, Sheelagh was about to intervene, the armoury of invective springing to her tongue with the oiled ease of regular use. Then she saw Will didn't need it.

‘We used to call it Being Tired and Emotional,' he said, grinning faintly. ‘As in, As tired and emotional as a fruit cake. As tired and emotional as a brush. A sense of the absurd is valuable in even a minimum security madhouse.'

Miriam said softly, ‘You ought to go back sometime. They'd be proud of you.'

Will grimaced. ‘That depends on whether I'm right about all this. If I'm wrong they might want to keep me.'

She shook her head, cautiously in case it came off. ‘You're sane enough. Being wrong, even ridiculously wrong, is no measure of lost marbles.'

‘What about believing you're right when everyone else thinks you're ridiculously wrong?'

‘That could be a bit suspect,' she allowed. ‘Unless you turn out to have been right all along.'

Tessa rolled her eyes theatrically. ‘Don't encourage him! For a moment there a bit of common sense nearly reared its head.'

Sheelagh was watching her critically. ‘Have you
no
sense of culpability? Of having contributed to Cathy's death? I have, and I'd hardly seen her for years. You were lovers. Even if that's the extent of it, don't you feel any guilt, any regret, about what happened to her?'

‘Regret, yes,' nodded Tessa, ‘but not guilt. I'm not responsible for the mess she made of her life or the way it ended – not how will thinks and not the way you mean. Cathy died because she never grew up, never learned to take responsibility for her own actions. Maybe she drove into the river expecting someone to haul her out, dry her off and sort her out the way they always had. Maybe it really wasn't suicide so much as a cry for help – well, in Cathy's case a demand. But she misjudged that as, in the end, she misjudged everything. She thought she could get away with anything on the strength of what she once was.'

Will seemed hardly to be listening. His gaze turned inward somehow, as if what was in his head was more real, more reliable, than anything Tessa could say. A glint of understanding flickered in the grey irises and his voice was a hiss. ‘She was
blackmailing
you?'

The absence of a reply was no more obstacle to his vaulting intuition than the lack of sure facts. His conviction was absolute. It was the missing link, the piece that connected everything else. Cathy a blackmailer? Everyone said she changed. The drugs that made her strong also made her aggressive; but what do you do with aggression when there are no matches left to win? ‘She was, wasn't she? She was all washed up, she was never going to play tennis again. She couldn't even get a job from a schoolfriend, and her family had enough problems of their own. She'd cut herself off from everyone she might have turned to. But there was still you. And she had a power over you that she didn't have over anyone else.'

He thought for a moment then went on, slotting the pieces together. ‘While she thought she could still win she'd have died rather than talk about the drugs and where she got them. But by now even she knew it wasn't going to happen. She was going downhill fast. Sick, broke and alone, she needed help and turned to the one person whose strings she could still pull. You'd risked your career for her, she'd always have that lever against you. The tabloids would love it: Tennis Star in Gay Drugs Shocker with GP. By now she had nothing left to lose. Except her life.

‘She was killing herself anyway – all you had to do was hurry her along. It wasn't difficult. She never guessed how far you'd go to protect yourself. She expected you'd be angry but she thought finally you'd pay. You couldn't afford not to. It didn't occur to her that you'd fight back.'

Again he paused, long enough for the women listening to think he'd finished and remember to breathe. But Will was just ordering his thoughts.

‘You met to discuss it. You said where and when, so you'd already considered Plan B. She wasn't worried – she thought she'd won. She thought you'd pay her off and say that was all she was getting; and she'd say it was all she wanted; and you'd both know that she'd be in touch again whenever she needed some more. That's what blackmailers do. If you don't want to be in their hands for ever, sooner or later you have to deal with them.'

He waited for Tessa to deny it. But she didn't. He held his breath waiting for her to admit it but she didn't do that either. After what seemed a long time she said, carefully, ‘Blackmail is a crime.'