Bloodline

7

I sat at home all day Friday and Saturday, moping round the flat feeling sorry for myself and, occasionally, watching the racing on the television.

I should have been at Newmarket presenting the programmes for Channel 4 and RacingTV, not sitting at home watching them.

Two or three times I shouted at my TV set in frustration. I also laughed out loud when Iain Ferguson made a classic mistake, calling the trainer he was interviewing, not once but twice, by the wrong first name. Idiot, I thought. It was a basic rule of presenting to get an interviewee’s name right because the audience at home would have it written across their screen on an Aston. They would all realize your error and think you were foolish, which, indeed, you were.

Perhaps Iain Ferguson wasn’t such a threat to my job after all.

On Saturday, after my tribute to Clare, and shown interspersed with the flat races from Newmarket, were four others from the jumping meeting at Market Rasen.

According to my early-morning-delivered copy of the Racing Post, Mitchell Stacey had three horses running at Market Rasen, one in each of the first three races. I hoped they’d all lose.

I had tried to call Sarah’s mobile four times on Thursday evening to ensure she was all right. The first occasion, the phone had rung a couple of times then gone to voicemail as if someone at the other end had declined the call. Thereafter it went straight to voicemail as if it was switched off.

I sent her a text message. There was no reply.

Finally, in desperation, I’d called the Staceys’ home number but Mitchell himself had answered, so I’d immediately hung up. I didn’t dare call again.

Now I studied the TV coverage from Market Rasen with particular attention to see if I could see Sarah, perhaps accompanying her husband into the parade ring before the first race. As always, the cameraman dwelt on the horses and not the people, and the horses were moving while the people were not. I caught a glimpse of Mitchell Stacey, his weather-beaten reddish face reminding me all too well of our close encounter at Newmarket on Thursday.

I couldn’t spot Sarah but, if Mitchell was definitely at Market Rasen, I could at least try to call her safely on their landline if she was at home.

‘Please, Mark,’ she said, answering after three rings. ‘I said we were not to speak again. Not ever.’

‘I just wanted to make sure you were all right.’

‘I’m fine,’ she said.

‘Are you sure?’ I said. ‘You sound a bit funny.’

There was no reply.

‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘Did he hit you?’

‘It’s nothing,’ she said.

It was as if she was speaking through cotton wool.

‘Did he split your lip?’

‘I told you, I’m fine.’

‘What did you mean yesterday about paying the little shit?’

‘Nothing,’ she said.

‘It must have been something. And why would you pay Mitchell anyway?’

‘Leave it, Mark. Move on. Forget me. I’ve already forgotten you. Goodbye.’

She hung up.

Dammit, I thought. Why did she let him get away with hitting her?

And, to top it all, Mitchell’s bloody horse went on to win the first race at Market Rasen, Mitchell’s horrible red face appearing joyful once again as the horse was led in to unsaddle. Oh, how I would have loved to punch his lights out, to split his lip, and to see how he liked it.

As Saturday afternoon faded into Saturday evening, I lay flat-out on my battered old sofa drinking a can of lager, wondering where my life was going, and what I should do about it.

I looked up at the peeling and cracked ceiling of my sitting room.

If the truth be told, it really was well past the ‘slightly yellowing’ stage and was beginning to resemble the nicotine-stained walls of an East End pub before the smoking ban. Not that I smoked. I didn’t. But the ‘whiteness’ of the paint had been fairly suspect when it had been thinly applied by my landlord in the first place, and the eight years since had not been kind.

I sat up and looked at the whole room with fresh eyes.

I had to admit that it was pretty awful.

It was not just the paintwork that was overdue a change, it was the dilapidated and soiled furniture as well. Not to mention the carpets and the curtains, both of which were unchanged since I’d first moved in twelve years ago, and they hadn’t been new even then.

To think I’d asked Sarah to give up her luxurious East Ilsley mansion to come and live in this squalor. Was it any wonder she’d turned me down?

‘Right,’ I said out loud, ‘it is high time I made a change.’

Past time, in fact.

I quite surprised myself with my decisiveness and, after about three hours of surfing the internet, I had a pretty good idea of how much houses cost in most of the Home Counties.

By the time I went to bed at one o’clock in the morning I had a list of eight places where I might be interested in living, and the telephone numbers of six different estate agents to call first thing on Monday morning.

I found it all quite exciting and, if nothing else, it took my mind off Sarah, Clare’s funeral, and the precariousness of my employment.

On Sunday morning I drove into central London, to the Hilton Hotel on Park Lane.

I always knew that I’d have to go there eventually, but I hadn’t before felt mentally ready for the ordeal. But now seemed to be the right time, before the funeral, not that I was especially relishing the trip.

I parked my old Ford in South Audley Street, behind the hotel, and walked through to the grand frontage of the Hilton with its overhanging stainless-steel canopy.

Unsurprisingly, there was nothing to indicate where Clare had fallen to her death nine days previously. No roped-off area, no bouquets of flowers, not even a mark on the pavement to show the spot where half my being had disappeared for ever.

I looked above me at the vertical line of balconies that stretched upwards, and tried to count fifteen floors. Tears filled my eyes and stopped me. Did it matter? Fifteen wasn’t important. Ten would probably have been enough, or even five. According to a telephone call from DS Sharp to my father, the post-mortem had established the cause of death as multiple injuries consistent with Clare having fallen a considerable distance onto a hard surface.

I approached one of the uniformed and top-hatted doormen.

‘Excuse me,’ I said, trying to control my voice. ‘Where did the girl fall?’

‘Never you mind,’ he said somewhat brusquely. ‘Now, move on please, sir.’ He spread his arms and walked straight towards me, forcing me back.

‘She was my sister,’ I said to him quickly, ‘and I need to know where she died.’

‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ he said, stopping and holding up his hands in apology. ‘I thought you were another of those ghoulish creeps we’ve been getting here all week.’ He must have spotted that I was not doing too well as he took me by the arm. I think it was his intervention that may have stopped me collapsing altogether.

He guided me inside the hotel.

‘Would you like to sit down, sir?’ he asked. ‘You don’t look very well.’

I nodded weakly and one of his colleagues pulled up a chair.

‘I’m sorry,’ I croaked.

Someone arrived with a glass of water and I slowly recovered my composure.

‘Sorry,’ I said again to my saviour. ‘I didn’t realize how much it would affect me.’

‘It’s no problem, sir,’ he said. ‘When you’re ready I’ll take you back outside.’

‘Thank you.’

And, in due course, he did just that, showing me exactly where Clare had met her end.

I stood staring at the unremarkable spot on the concrete paving and offered up a silent prayer for Clare’s soul. Then, once more, my eyes were drawn upwards towards the balconies high above me.

She had fallen quite a distance away from the building and I wondered if she had purposely jumped outwards. She must have only just missed the overhanging steel canopy. In a funny sort of way, I was glad. The canopy edges appeared very sharp, although it surely would have made no difference to Clare, or to the outcome.

But why had she done it? Why? Why? Why?

‘Will you be all right now, sir?’ asked my friendly doorman.

‘Yes. Thank you,’ I said. ‘I’ll be fine.’

He nodded at me, then moved away to help some people into a black London taxi. I, meanwhile, remained rooted to the spot for a few moments longer, even bending down to stroke the rough cold surface as if, in doing so, I was somehow offering a final caring touch to my dead sister.

Finally, I stood up and moved away. It had been a necessary journey to see where she had died, but I would always remember Clare as brimming with life. I once again thanked my lucky stars that I hadn’t accompanied James and Nicholas to see her battered and broken body. That was one mental image I could readily live without.

I waved at my friendly doorman and went back into the hotel.

I suspect that the lobbies of all the larger London hotels are busy places at eleven o’clock on Sunday mornings, and the one at the Hilton was certainly no exception. There were several lines of guests waiting at the reception desk to check-out after a big Saturday-evening event in the hotel ballroom, while a large group of brightly dressed American tourists hung around aimlessly, desperate to check in and sleep after their overnight red-eye flight across the Atlantic. And there was baggage everywhere, lined up in long snakes like dominoes waiting to be toppled.

I went over to a young woman sitting at a desk marked ‘Guest Relations’ and asked if I could please speak with the hotel’s general manager. To my eyes, she hardly looked old enough to be out of school and she instantly became defensive, asking me what I wanted him for. Perhaps she believed that anyone who wanted to talk to the manager was going to complain about something. I told her that it was a personal matter, but she still refused to pass on my request.

‘Are you sure I can’t help you?’ she asked with an irritating smile.

‘It’s rather delicate,’ I said. ‘Would you please just call the general manager.’

‘I’m sorry, sir, I can’t do that without knowing why you need him.’ She continued to smile at me in her annoying way.

OK, I thought, I had tried but with no result. Now I was getting slightly irked by her attitude. ‘Young lady,’ I said loudly and somewhat condescendingly, ‘my name is Mark Shillingford and I’m trying to discover why my beautiful twin sister fell to a violent death from one of your hotel balconies. Now, can I please talk to the general manager?’

She looked rather shocked, and, in truth, I had also somewhat surprised myself by my own determination and resolve.

‘He’s not here on Sundays,’ she said, the smile now having vanished altogether.

I sighed slightly. ‘Then I will speak to whoever is in charge of the hotel at this very moment.’

She used the telephone on the desk. ‘Someone is coming,’ she said to me, putting down the handset.

I stood and waited, looking around me. A man wearing a suit soon appeared and came over towards us.

‘Mr Shillingford,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘I’m Colin Dilly, duty manager. How can I help?’

He was about the same age as me but shorter and with a slighter build.

‘I notice you have lots of CCTV cameras in this hotel.’ I pointed up at the one positioned above the Guest Relations desk. ‘I would like to see the images for the Friday before last.’

‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible,’ said Mr Dilly. ‘The images are recorded on a rolling seven-day cycle. Those for that Friday will have been overwritten by this past Friday’s.’

Dammit, I thought. I should have come sooner.

‘Didn’t the police make copies?’ I asked in desperation.

‘I believe they did, sir, but you will have to ask them if you want to see them.’ He said it rather dismissively. ‘Now, is there anything else I can help you with?’

‘I’d like to speak with whoever checked in my sister on Friday evening nine days ago.’

He pursed his lips. ‘I’m not sure that will be possible either. It’s not hotel policy to provide that sort of information.’

‘Then I will spend all day, and all night if necessary, asking every member of your staff that I can find, until someone tells me who did check her in. They must know. It’s the sort of thing one might remember, don’t you think, being the last person to see a suicide alive?’

Mr Dilly stood looking at me for a few moments. Perhaps he was deciding whether to have me thrown out.

‘And if you chuck me out,’ I said, ‘I promise you I’ll cause a fuss. I’ll call the newspapers, and the TV companies. I’m quite well known in media circles and I don’t think it would be good publicity on your part.’

‘Perhaps you had better come into the office,’ said Mr Dilly. ‘I am sure we can find the information for you.’

‘Very wise,’ I said.

I followed him through a door that was disguised as a wooden panel and into some offices behind.

‘Please sit down,’ he said, pointing to a chair in front of a desk. ‘I’ll look up the work sheets for last week.’

He sat opposite me, at a computer, and I could hear him tapping the keys. ‘Now, let me see,’ he said. ‘Friday the sixteenth. Evening, wasn’t it.’ He tapped some more keys. ‘Right. I’ve found it.’

I stood up and went and looked over his shoulder. If he didn’t like it, he didn’t say so.

There were six reception staff listed for the period from three o’clock in the afternoon until eleven at night on the sixteenth, with four others for the night shift that had run from eleven on Friday until seven on Saturday morning.

So the staff on duty when Clare had checked in had been different from those present when she’d fallen.

Nothing was ever simple.

Colin Dilly wrote down the names of the reception staff from both the shifts, but he didn’t give me the list. Rather he compared it to the record of the staff currently on duty that he also brought up onto the screen.

‘There is one person who was on duty that night who is also working right now. If you wait here, I’ll go and fetch her.’

Mr Dilly went off to find the woman while I went on studying his computer screen, but there wasn’t much on it of interest.

Presently he returned with a small, neat woman that I took to be in her mid thirties.

‘Mr Shillingford,’ Colin Dilly said, ‘this is Mrs Rieta Dalal. She was working on reception during the evening of Friday the sixteenth and she says she remembers your sister arriving even though it wasn’t her who actually checked her in.’

‘Then how do you know it was my sister?’ I asked.

‘Because my colleague and I talked about her,’ said Mrs Dalal quietly. ‘Because she had no luggage. No bags at all. Not even a handbag or a make-up bag.’ She smiled. ‘It’s very rare indeed for a guest to check in with no luggage, especially a woman with no make-up. I remember her specifically because of that. It was only much later I heard that she had been the poor lady who fell from the balcony.’

‘Was she with anyone when she checked in?’ I asked.

‘No, sir, she was not,’ said Mrs Dalal. ‘But she was talking on the telephone all the time. That is why my colleague mentioned her to me in the first place. My colleague thought it rather rude and she was quite cross about it.’

‘Which colleague was it?’ Mr Dilly asked.

‘Irena.’

‘Irena Zelinska,’ he said, consulting his handwritten list. ‘She’s not working today.’

‘She has gone home to Poland,’ said Mrs Dalal.

It was definitely not going to be simple.

‘Did my sister specifically ask for a room with a balcony?’

‘I don’t know, sir. Have you checked her reservation?’

‘I don’t think she had a reservation.’

She seemed surprised. ‘We were very full that night, we always are when there’s a big event in the ballroom. If she didn’t have a reservation, we must have had a cancellation. She must have just been lucky to get a room with a balcony.’

‘Lucky’ was not the term I would have used.

‘But even then,’ Mrs Dalal went on, ‘she would have had to ask to have the balcony door unlocked. All the balconies are normally kept locked to prevent suicides.’

There was a silence as we all digested what Mrs Dalal had just said.

‘Are you saying that someone had to have gone to her room to open the balcony door?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ said Mrs Dalal. ‘We have to call security if guests request that the balcony door be unlocked. It is a common thing. It happens almost every day.’

‘Why do you keep them locked if you then unlock them on request?’

‘The hotel policy,’ said Mr Dilly, ‘is that there has to be at least two registered guests in a room for the balcony door to be unlocked.’

‘The policy seems to have failed in this case,’ I said rather pointedly.

Neither of them said anything.

But it had also been the hotel policy not to give me the name of the person who had checked Clare into the hotel, and I’d found a way round that. Clare was infinitely more pushy than I was, and I didn’t doubt that the ‘double-occupancy’ rule would have been as easy for her to circumvent.

Or had there, in fact, been two people in the room?

‘Do you know who my sister was talking to on the telephone while she was checking in?’ I asked Mrs Dalal.

My question made her blush, her olive-brown skin distinctly flushing round her neck. And she looked down as if embarrassed.

‘Sorry, I do not know,’ she replied while still studying the floor.

‘Then why are you unsettled by the question?’ I asked.

‘It is nothing,’ she said, but she still wouldn’t look up at me.

‘It must be something,’ I said. ‘Tell me.’

She looked up at Colin Dilly. ‘Tell him,’ he said.

‘I am so sorry,’ she said to me. ‘We thought your sister was a prostitute. Irena was absolutely sure of it. Irena told me that she must be talking to her next client on her telephone. That is why she had no luggage. Irena said she would only have condoms and they’d be in her pockets.’

‘But she paid for the room with her credit card,’ I said with some degree of anger. ‘A prostitute wouldn’t do that.’

She looked up again at Colin Dilly. ‘Sometimes they do,’ she said. ‘At least we are pretty sure they do. And Carlos then checks.’

‘Carlos?’ I asked.

‘He is one of the bellmen,’ she said. ‘If Irena gives him the nod then he likes to check.’

‘How does he check?’ I asked.

‘When Irena gives Carlos the nod, he goes up ahead of the girl onto the same floor as her room, and then he waits and watches to see if a man comes.’

‘And did she give him the nod on that Friday night?’ It was Colin Dilly who asked the question that I was itching to ask.

‘Of course,’ said Rieta Dalal. ‘Especially after she’d been so rude at reception.’

‘And what did Carlos discover?’ I asked.

‘I do not know that,’ Rieta said. ‘I went home soon after your sister arrived.’ She again glanced at Colin Dilly. ‘I always worked right through my break times so that I could leave early. I don’t like to travel home by myself on the tube after ten o’clock at night. But that was my last late shift and now I’ve been switched to the early one.’ She smiled, clearly much happier with the new arrangement. ‘I have not seen Carlos since that night.’

‘Did you tell any of this to the police?’ I asked.

‘Police?’ she said. ‘No one from the police has asked me anything.’

‘Do you know if the police spoke to Carlos, or to Irena?’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I know nothing more than I’ve told you. Can I go now, please, Mr Dilly?’

‘Yes,’ Colin Dilly said while looking at me with raised eyebrows for confirmation, which I gave by nodding. ‘Thank you, Rieta. You can get back to work now.’

She went out of the office and Colin Dilly closed the door behind her.

‘Surely the police must have interviewed the people who saw or spoke to my sister that night.’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I was off last weekend.’

Why was I not surprised?

‘I’d now like to talk to Carlos,’ I said. ‘And also to the security man who unlocked her balcony door.’

‘What difference will it make?’ Colin Dilly asked, his tone clearly indicating that he thought I was wasting my time, only making things harder for myself.

I looked at him. ‘At nine o’clock that Friday evening my sister told me she was driving straight home to Newmarket from Edenbridge in Kent. Instead, an hour and twenty minutes later, she checked into this hotel without any luggage and without having a reservation. And just over an hour after that she was dead.’ I paused and looked at him.

‘I cannot believe she would have suddenly decided, after leaving me, to drive all the way into central London on the off chance that this hotel might have a free room, and that the room would just happen to have a convenient balcony on a sufficiently high floor, so that she could jump off it to her death.’ I paused again to let what I was saying sink in.

‘I think she had to be coming here to meet someone, someone she must have spoken to after she left me. I also think that committing suicide, if indeed it was suicide, must have been a last-moment decision. If she had been planning to kill herself, she would, at the very least, have made a reservation for a high balcony room.’ I paused once more.

‘So I’d like to talk to Carlos to find out if she did, in fact, meet someone in her room here that night. And, if Carlos didn’t see anything, the security man might have done.’

Colin Dilly sat down once more at his computer and tapped away again on the keyboard.

‘Carlos Luis Sanchez,’ he said. ‘The bellman. He’s working today from three o’clock until eleven.’ I looked at my watch. It was ten minutes to midday. He tapped some more. ‘I can’t find the details of the security men who were working that night.’

‘I’ll come back at three o’clock to see Carlos. Can you find me the details by then?’

‘I doubt it,’ he said, ‘but I’ll try. I don’t have access to the security company’s work sheets, and their office will be shut today. I’m actually off duty at three, but I’ll wait around to hear what Carlos has to say. Ask for me at reception.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘I will. And thank you.’

We shook hands, then I emerged through the secret wood-panel door and back into the bustle of the hotel lobby.

‘Two men,’ Carlos Luis Sanchez said. ‘One follow the other.’ He made no attempt to disguise his disgust.

‘The lady was not a prostitute,’ Colin Dilly assured him.

‘Huh,’ Carlos replied. ‘Then why she have two men in her room?’

It was a good question.

‘How were the men dressed?’ I asked him.

‘Dressed or undressed. It makes no difference.’

‘No,’ I said, realizing that he hadn’t understood the question. ‘What were they wearing when you saw them in the corridor?’

‘Suits,’ he said. ‘You know, black suits with ties.’ He moved his hands back and forth by his neck. Bow ties.

‘Both of them?’ I asked.

‘The first one. Yes. I see. The second...’ He shrugged his shoulders.

‘Did you see the second man?’ I spoke slowly.

‘Mario see him.’

‘Who is Mario?’ I asked.

‘My friend,’ Carlos said. ‘One more of porters. He work nights. He say he see second man coming out later, during all fuss over falling girl.’

‘What?’ I said, suddenly taking in what he was saying. ‘Are you telling us that the second man was in her room when the girl fell?’

‘I not know,’ he said. ‘You ask Mario. But Mario say so to me, yes.’