The Book of Secrets

LXXV

Oberwinter

Nobody disembarked at Oberwinter except Nick and Emily. The boat barely paused: by the time they reached the end of the pier, all they could see were running lights receding up the river. They crossed the empty highway, walked through a culvert under the railway tracks and entered the village through a stone gateway. Crooked houses leaned over them, as if the timbers within still preserved some vestigial memory of the trees they had once been. There were no cars, no people, not even footprints in the snow. If not for the wilting Christmas lights still draped between the houses, they could have been back in the Middle Ages.

They passed several guesthouses along the riverfront walls, but all were shuttered and dark. Paper notices pinned on doors said most wouldn’t reopen until Easter. Nick’s feet ached with the cold; he began to worry they wouldn’t find anywhere, but wander this deserted town until they froze to death.

The high street ended in an irregular town square. A wide three-storey building with a roof like a gingerbread house towered over it, and a legend painted on the plasterwork in tangled Gothic letters announced the Drei Könige Hotel. To Nick’s unbounded relief, the lights were on.

The hotel was almost as cold inside as out. They rang a bell and waited. Nick eyed the rows of keys on hooks behind the desk.

‘Looks like they should be able to give us a room.’

Emily shivered. ‘I’ll take a cupboard as long as it’s got hot water and a duvet.’

The back door opened and a man came out. He was wearing a dressing gown and smoking a filterless cigarette so low Nick worried it would set his moustache on fire. He was the only living soul they’d seen in Oberwinter, but he didn’t seem the least surprised to see them.

He took a key from the wall and pointed upstairs. ‘Room seven, second floor.’

It wasn’t much: a few pieces of heavily varnished furniture marked with cigarette burns, a threadbare rug slung across the floorboards. When Nick touched the desk his finger came away damp from condensation. A freezing draught blew against his shoulder from the open bathroom door. He glanced in. Snow gathered on the sill where one of the windowpanes was missing. Perhaps he could stop it up with a towel.

The moment he stepped inside the bathroom he felt a dizzy wave of recognition. Reality blurred and the room seemed to darken. Instead of a bathroom, he was staring at a pixellated window in a living room thousands of miles away. A scene he had replayed in his head every day since. There was the mirror, the same shower curtain with the Christmas-tree stencils. But the wall was white. In the video it had been brown – he was certain.

He rushed out of the room onto the landing.

‘Where are you going?’ Emily called after him. He ignored her. There were five rooms on this floor, all with their doors cracked ajar in the forlorn hopes of welcoming a guest, and a door marked PRIVAT. One by one, he tiptoed into the rooms and examined the bathrooms. None of them was brown.

He went back out on the landing. On a hunch, he examined the door with the sign more closely. The frame was new, bare wood, while the lock must have been about the shiniest thing in the hotel. In the middle of the door, four dimples showed where screw holes had been filled in with putty. When Nick stepped back, he could see the ghost of the number 14 preserved in the faded paint.

He tried the handle. Locked. He looked back. Emily was standing on the landing outside their room, looking at him in confusion.

‘What are you doing?’

Nick crept down to the lobby and counted the keys behind the desk. Thirteen plus a gap where theirs had come from. He listened a moment. All he heard was the distant roar of a soccer match coming out of a television in the back room.

Heart racing, he darted round and lifted the last key off its hook. There was no number on the fob, but the brass was shiny as a new penny, no scratches on its smooth surface. He palmed it against his leg so it didn’t jangle and tiptoed back up the stairs.

‘If anyone comes, stop them,’ he told a by-now utterly bewildered Emily.

He approached the door. Nightmarish visions taunted his imagination. The key slotted into the lock and turned with a whisper. As the door creaked open he felt a shiver, as if a ghost had just passed through him.

He knew at once it must be the right room. The light from the landing that spilled through the door illuminated a scene of utter destruction. The whole place had been torn apart. Floorboards prised off the joists, wainscoting pulled away from the walls, the bed dismantled and the mattress sliced open. His stomach turned over when he saw that. But there was no trace of blood, and the cuts looked too straight and efficient to have been aimed at someone lying on it.

He flicked the light switch but nothing happened. When he looked up, all he saw was a bundle of wires spilling out of the ceiling where the lamp had been unscrewed and taken away.

‘What happened here?’

Nick almost jumped out of his skin. Emily had come up behind him and was peering over his shoulder at the vandalised room. She looked frightened.

‘You were supposed to be keeping a lookout.’

‘You’re supposed to tell me what’s going on.’

‘When Gillian called me, the day she went missing, she left her webcam on.’

He stepped carefully across the room, balancing on the joists like railway sleepers. The bathroom door stood open, cracked from the impact of heavy blows, while the frame around the latch hung loose in splinters. A glance inside confirmed his suspicions.

‘This is where she was. I remember the brown tiles on the walls. The curtain.’ The side panel of the bath had been ripped off, but the Christmas-tree shower curtain still hung from the ceiling. He pulled it back. A small ledge was set in the tiled wall, about shoulder high, with a window behind overlooking a snowy roof.

‘That must have been where she put the laptop.’

He looked around, trying to silence the scream that was echoing in his memory. The linoleum floor had been rolled back to the skirting board, the mirror unscrewed and leaned against the towel rail. A half-used toilet roll had been placed on top of the radiator, still clipped into the plastic holder that had been removed from the wall. Almost as if someone might need a pit stop amid all the destruction.

‘This isn’t random. They were looking for something.’ Emily surveyed the wreckage. ‘They probably found it. If it was here.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Well there’s no point waiting for them to come back and find us instead.’ Emily headed for the door. ‘Seriously, Nick. Everything’s gone.’

But Nick didn’t hear her. He was staring at the radiator, remembering.

Valentine’s Day. Waking up, Gillian snuggled against him, the best Valentine’s morning he’d ever had. He’d brought her waffles and Bloody Marys in bed, nervous in case she thought it was too cheesy. He suspected she’d have no time for Valentine’s Day; wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d suggested visiting a war memorial or a soup kitchen instead. But she’d smiled and rubbed herself against him like a kitten, though when he tried to kiss her she pulled away, spilling tomato juice on the bedclothes.

‘First you have to find my present to you,’ she told him, with a gleam in her eye that said he’d have his work cut out.

He’d turned the apartment upside down. Even Bret had been shocked by the mess. Gillian watched, goading him with hints that seemed completely arbitrary. The waffles went cold. Several times he begged her to tell him, but she just laughed and said love would find a way. Eventually he got so mad he pulled on his clothes and stormed out to the park.

She never told him.

Bret found it four days later. He was sitting on the toilet reading a dirty magazine when he came to the end of the toilet tissue. He came blundering out of the bathroom with his pants around his ankles, a tiny envelope in one hand and a cardboard tube in the other.

‘I think it’s for you.’

Bret had already opened the envelope. There was a card inside with a plastic gold key on the front, under the legend ‘Key to my heart’. Over the flap Gillian had written three words.

‘You got me.’

‘Gillian used to have a trick.’

He went over to the radiator and pulled the toilet roll off its holder. He slid his finger in the cardboard tube. Don’t expect anything, he told himself.

There was a crack. He squeezed his fingernail into it and teased it apart. The cardboard tube coiled back. Instead of a flimsy wad of toilet tissue, he felt the crisp crackle of writing paper. He pulled it out. Two pages, ragged at the top where they’d been torn from a spiral notebook.

A creak sounded from the stair.