The Lazarus Hotel (6 page)

Will looked surprised. ‘Is it?'

‘For a man in your line of work. I expected you to say you hated heights.'

‘Oh yes,' he admitted readily. ‘I'm useless on anything higher than a barstool, but there's no point hating a fact of life. I regret being' – he gave a Puckish smile – ‘elevationally challenged, but I hate injustice precisely because it's not an Act of God: it's the strong profiting at the expense of the weak. Actually, that's a major handicap to a lawyer. You need to be able to absorb the frustration, accept that some you win and some you lose.'

Not an accountant then, thought Richard. Solicitor? – near enough.

‘And generosity?'

Will frowned. ‘What's wrong with that? Oh come on, everyone admires that. Nobody sits grinding his teeth going, “If there's one thing I can't stand it's a
generous
bastard!”‘

‘Sheelagh might.'

She startled at the sound of her name. ‘I opted for cowardice.'

‘You also said you loved strength. Are they compatible, strength and generosity?'

‘Actually I think they are.' In a man, even in a taller woman, that jutting jaw and the clarion note in her voice would have been called pugnacious. Sheelagh got away with being provocative because people who were bigger than her hesitated to seem like bullies. In fact she was as easy to bully as a bobcat. ‘Generosity implies strength – the weak can't afford it.'

‘Fair comment.' Miriam confounded her own argument by being both a strong and generous adversary. ‘So is Will right? Does everyone admire generosity?'

‘I don't,' said Larry bleakly. ‘And I can't see that it's the opposite of injustice. Generosity
is
a form of injustice. It isn't fair putting people in your debt. If they can't pay you back it's patronizing. If they can it's just another investment.'

Tariq gave a soft whistle. ‘Man, you are a sad individual.'

The athlete's pale eyes turned on him like searchlights. ‘I believe in a market economy: pay the price and you get the goods. Generosity is the free lunch there's no such thing as. I haven't a generous bone in my body, but I've never short-changed anyone.'

Joe gave a disbelieving snort. Miriam glanced at him and quickly back. ‘That's quite a boast, Larry. You never let anyone down? A colleague, a friend, a lover? Never delivered less than they were entitled to expect?'

‘I don't believe so.'

Miriam sat back from her lamb chop with eyebrows still elevated. ‘I'm impressed. What about the rest of you? Any more paragons who've never let their halo slip?'

No one claimed a share of the accolade. But nor did they explain why.

Miriam returned to her meal, talking over her cutlery. ‘Two possibilities. Either Larry's a wholly reliable person and the rest of you are not. Or his concept of obligation differs from yours.'

He was too much a competitor to miss that volley. ‘If you mean I don't accept responsibility for those who're old enough to be responsible for themselves, that's right. If I say I'll do something I do it. But I don't consider myself bound by other people's expectations.'

‘Isn't that rather sterile?' Tessa seemed to have no reservations about discussing other people's motivations. ‘It's a tidy arrangement but hardly a humane one.'

‘That's a matter of opinion,' growled the tennis-player. ‘Mine is that you're doing people no favours by protecting them. Life's full of knocks. You have to learn to take your own. You learn to see trouble coming, avoid it if you can, deal with it if you can't. That's what growing up is.'

Miriam nodded somberly. ‘It's a point of view. Richard, you've gone very quiet. Where do you stand on this? Are people essentially responsible for themselves or should we accept duties towards one another? Do you feel badly when you let someone down?'

The professional communicator was a long time answering. Joe saw, because he was looking, that his eyes flinched as if he'd been struck. He forced out the word, ‘Yes.'

At a time when there was some embarrassment about consulting a psychiatrist, which was not very long before it became fashionable, people like Miriam Graves were referred to as trick-cyclists. Though meant as an insult, actually it described what she did quite well: the balancing, the pedalling like mad to stay in the same place, the sudden pirouettes when what seemed like progress suddenly turned volte-face.

And like a trick-cyclist, it was vitally important for her to know when to sit still and when to push. They could all see that this was difficult ground for Richard. Miriam said quietly, ‘Give us an example.'

He didn't know why his mind turned to the accident. He might have failed the girl but the situation was not of his making. Mornings when he woke sweating he'd been out of his depth in Bosnia, not the Thames.

Taking his statement afterwards the police wondered why he was strolling beside the river at two in the morning. They searched his sodden clothes for drugs. He explained through chattering teeth that he was a journalist: constant switching between time zones played hell with his body clock and when he couldn't sleep he walked.

Remembering where he'd gone into the water they expressed incredulity. ‘On muggers'mall?'

He shrugged. ‘Last week I was in Sarajevo. When you go for a walk there you put on a flak jacket.'

It wasn't bravado; it was true. Before his present difficulties he'd done things like that. It wasn't that he was unaware of the danger: they all knew they were in danger all the time, dealt with it on a professional level. They were there to do a job; doing it exposed them to risks; they took precautions and then got on with it.

So when he was home and couldn't sleep he had no qualms about driving to the river and walking till the quiet entered his soul. No one bothered him. Perhaps by that time even the muggers had gone home. Or perhaps, seeing how he was dressed, they gave him a wide berth in case he tried to mug them.

He heard the car before he saw it – the sudden roar of power, the change in the engine note as the weight came off the wheels, the great deep splash. By then he was running and he reached the spot before the crown of white water subsided. The pinkish gleam of moonlight through city fumes glinted on the tail-end of a car rearing out of the river. The lights were still on, red bobbing high above the surface, white pointing an eerie trail into the depths. Then they went out.

If he'd thought about it he wouldn't have gone in. It was late autumn and the river was like ice; it was racing after an ebbing tide; it was dark and there was no help at hand. He was more likely to lose his own life than save someone else's. He was a decent swimmer but he knew that decent swimmers are the ones who drown.

But there was no time to think. He hit the bank running and leapt for the car.

Icy waves closing over his head drove the breath from him. But by then his flailing hands had found metal and he surfaced, shaking water out of his eyes.

The weight of the engine had dragged down the front end but the windows were closed, slowing the river's entry. The driver was a dark shape behind the wheel. Richard couldn't open the door. He hammered the glass in vain.

So he gripped the door handle and braced his feet against the pillar, pitching all his strength against the pressure of the river. Finally the door opened. By then the water was over the driver's face.

She was a black woman. He dragged her out by a handful of crisp wet curls. She made no effort to help. He had to reach over her to release her seat-belt but then she came out easily. The car sank under them.

He hadn't realized how far out they'd been carried. Towing her behind him he swam for the bank but could make no headway against the tide.

But for the timely intervention of a buoy they would both have died. He didn't see it coming; he hit it at the speed of the river and it knocked the breath out of him. It was hard and smooth and wet and he couldn't hold on to it, bounced back into the tideway.

For a desperate moment he thought that was it: he'd been given a last chance and he'd blown it. The fingers of his free hand clawed at the thing as he was dragged past but failed to find a purchase. It hardly slowed his journey towards the sea.

By merest luck there was a lighter moored to the buoy, its chain dipping to the water between waves. His fingers closed and he clung to it with the strength of knowing his life depended on it.

Somehow he got one arm over the chain and hung there, water to his chest, holding the woman with the other. It may have been shock or concussion but her senses seemed to come and go. At times she only sobbed and whimpered, a dead weight on his arm. Then she'd rally and cling to him, her fingers clawing at his clothes, whining like a terrified child: ‘Don't let me die. Please, don't let me go.' And of course he said he wouldn't.

But the chill of the river invaded him, and when the waves breaking in his face started to feel warm he knew his core temperature was dropping. Exhaustion enfolded him. He could feel it as a slow fire in his muscles, consuming them fibre by fibre. Every wave, that hit him on its voyage to the Medway tried to take him with it, and the woman too. The constant drag sapped him. His muscles raged and cracked; later the agony dulled, his strength with it.

Like something breaking, his numb right arm straightened and the river pulled him off the chain. Only for a moment; then panic fuelled a desperate surge of energy and he found it again. All the strength he had left went into fastening his hand around it. He was too weak to do any more and knew he hadn't much time left.

The woman had gone quiet. Perhaps she was dead. She was lower in the water than he was. Perhaps as she grew colder she hadn't been able to keep her face out of the waves. Perhaps he was holding only a corpse. For a corpse he was going to die because he needed two hands to grip this chain and he had only one.

He held on for a minute longer. But when he felt the grasp of his right hand loosen again he let the woman go. Immediately the force dragging at him halved; with his left hand to help he hauled himself back on to the chain.

A few minutes after that, like a dying man's hallucination he saw an immensely powerful light quartering the river. A police launch drew alongside and strong hands pulled him on board. They had to break his grip on the chain first.

Half-coherently he told them about the woman. They searched for twenty minutes before other boats took over. But it was three days before her body was found.

He didn't dress his account of the episode in much detail, said only that a woman had drowned, that he tried to save her but couldn't hold on to her.

When Miriam asked for comments no one offered any. Around the table the faces were preoccupied. She identified compassion and shock and anger depending on where she looked. If all she'd known of the episode was what Richard had chosen to tell, some of those reactions would have surprised her. They didn't, because she knew about Richard, and the rest of them, much more than she had chosen to tell.

Somewhere a phone rang. Tessa caught Sheelagh's eye. ‘We're not quite cut off from civilization, then.' Sheelagh grinned.

Large even teeth, white in the coffee-cream skin, gave Tariq a dashing smile, spoiled only a little by his knowing it. ‘A secret joke?'

Everything about him – his size, his confidence, the way he fawned on women, his blithe assumption of their gratitude – grated on Sheelagh. Understanding why she resented him – because in their male-orientated business he'd strolled across a battlefield she'd had to conquer inch by bloody inch – didn't alter how she felt. Her transition to sweetness and light temporarily on hold, she said snidely, ‘You not knowing something doesn't make it a secret. It just means no one's bothered to tell you. If you must know, I had an escape plan but it needed a phone and I couldn't find one. I'd have brought my own but the Rules for Inmates asked us not to.' She tapped the latter with the despised photograph in the corner.

Miriam wasn't offended. That was beginning to annoy Sheelagh too. ‘The problem with mobile phones is they tend to go off just when somebody's struggling to open up. It undermines the whole purpose of coming up here away from the madding crowd. But you don't need rescuing, you know. You can leave any time you want.' She gave a sly smile. ‘I won't tell on you.'

Mrs Venables brought in the desserts. ‘Actually, she can't. Not for the next hour or so. That was the builders – they've cut power to the lift. I said we shouldn't need it for a while, and they said if we did to phone down and they'd reconnect.'

‘While we're on the subject,' said Richard, ‘why are we sitting on top of a half-built hotel? Are they that far behind schedule?'

‘I don't think so.' Miriam ate with the same relish she brought to her job. It would be easy to poke fun at her appetites but that would be to ignore the fact that she was good at what she did, that the enthusiasm stemmed from a real interest in the human mind and how it could he helped to run smoothly. ‘I think they've just about finished building. There's the viewing gallery to glaze in, but after, that it's just a matter of fitting out. Come back in three months and you won't recognize the place.

‘We're here now because I have a friend on the Lazaire's board. It suits us both. All I need is somewhere we can talk, eat and sleep without being disturbed. In return for minimal outlay – most of our gear's castoffs from their other hotels – Lazaire's earn a bit of rent.'

Tariq nodded his approval. ‘Good thinking. You should go into business.'

She chuckled delightedly. ‘Tariq, I am in business. I'm a service industry. I service people's minds – decoke them, change the oil, polish them up and when they're purring nicely send them back to their satisfied owners. Speaking of which …'