Authors: Minette Walters
Roz wondered if the woman would be so keen to
help once she knew, but there was no point in keeping
it from her. She would learn all the details the minute
the book appeared. ‘Her name’s Olive Martin.’
‘Never heard of her.’
‘She’s serving a life sentence for murdering her
mother and sister.’
‘Good lord! Is she the one who—’ She made chopping
motions with her hands. Roz nodded. ‘Good
Lord!’
‘Do you still want the Belvedere mentioned?’
‘Do I heck!’ She beamed broadly. ‘Of course I do!
A murderess in our hotel. Fancy! We’ll have a plaque
put up in the bedroom. What are you writing exactly?
A book? A magazine article? We’ll provide photographs
of the hotel and the room she stayed in. Well,
well, I must say. How exciting! If only I’d known.’
Roz laughed. It was a cold-bloodedly ghoulish display
of pleasure at another’s misfortune but she
couldn’t find it in her heart to criticize. Only a fool
would look a gift horse in the mouth. ‘Before you get
too excited,’ she warned, ‘the book probably won’t
be published for another year and it will be an exoneration
of Olive, not a further condemnation. You see,
I believe she’s innocent.’
‘Better and better. We’ll have the book on sale in
the foyer. I knew our luck had to turn eventually.’ She
beamed at Roz. ‘Tell Olive she can stay here free of
charge for as long as she likes the minute she gets out
of prison. We always look after our regulars. Now, my
dear, anything else I can help you with?’
‘Do you have a photocopying machine?’
‘We do. Every mod. con. here, you know.’
‘Then may I have a copy of this entry in the register?
And perhaps you could also give me a description
of Mr Lewis.’
She pursed her lips. ‘He wasn’t very memorable.
Early fifties. Blond, always wore a dark suit, a smoker.
Any good?’
‘Maybe. Did his hair look natural? Can you
remember?’
The woman chuckled. ‘There now, I’d forgotten.
It never occurred to me till I took them in some tea
one day and surprised him adjusting his wig in the
mirror. I laughed afterwards, I can tell you. But it was a good one. I wouldn’t have guessed just by looking
at him. You know him then?’
Roz nodded. ‘Would you recognize him from a
photograph?’
‘I’ll try. I can usually remember a face when I see
it.’
‘Visitor for you, Sculptress.’ The officer was in the
room before Olive had time to hide what she was
doing. ‘Come on. Get a move on.’
Olive swept her wax figures into one hand and
crushed them together in her palm. ‘Who is it?’
‘The nun.’ She looked at Olive’s closed fist. ‘What
have you got there?’
‘Just plasticine.’ She uncurled her fingers. The wax
figures, carefully painted and clothed in coloured
scraps, had merged into a multi-coloured mash,
unidentifiable now as the altar candle they had sprung
from.
‘Well, leave it there. The nun’s come to talk to you,
not watch you play with plasticine.’
Hal was asleep at the kitchen table, body rigidly
upright, arms resting on the table, head nodding
towards his chest. Roz watched him for a moment
through the window, then tapped lightly on the glass.
His eyes, red-rimmed with exhaustion, snapped open to look at her and she was shocked by the extent of
his relief when he saw who it was.
He let her in. ‘I hoped you wouldn’t come back,’
he said, his face drawn with fatigue.
‘What are you so frightened of?’ she asked.
He looked at her with something like despair. ‘Go
home,’ he said, ‘this is none of your business.’ He
went to the sink and ran the cold-water tap, dowsing
his head and gasping as the icy stream hit the back
of his neck.
From the floor above came a sudden violent
hammering.
Roz leapt a foot in the air. ‘
Oh, my God!
What was
that?’
He reached out and gripped her arm, pushing her
towards the door. ‘Go home,’ he ordered. ‘Now! I
don’t want to have to force you, Roz.’
But she stood her ground. ‘What’s going on? What
was that noise?’
‘So help me,’ he said grimly, ‘I will do you some
damage if you don’t leave now.’ But in outright contradiction
to the words, he suddenly put his hands on
either side of her face and kissed her. ‘Oh, God!’ he
groaned, smoothing the tumbled hair from her eyes.
‘I do not want you involved, Roz.
I do not want you
involved.
’
She was about to say something when over his
shoulder she saw the door into the restaurant swing open. ‘Too late,’ she said, turning him round. ‘We’ve
got company.’
Hal, horribly unprepared, showed his teeth in a
wolfish grin. ‘I’ve been expecting you,’ he drawled.
With a proprietary arm he eased Roz behind him and
prepared to defend what was his.
There were four of them, large anonymous men in
ski-masks. They said nothing, just weighed in indiscriminately
with baseball bats, using Hal as a human
target. It happened so fast that Roz was a spectator
to their grisly sport almost before she realized it. She,
it seemed, was too insignificant to concern them.
Her first angry impulse was to catch out at a flailing
arm but the battering she had had at the hands of
Rupert two weeks before persuaded her to use her
brain instead. With trembling fingers she opened
her handbag and removed the three-inch hatpin she
had taken to carrying with her, thrusting it upwards
into the buttock of the man nearest her. It drove in
up to its ornate jade head and a soft groan issued
from his mouth as he stood, completely paralysed with
shock, the baseball bat slipping to the floor from his
slackening fingers. No one noticed, except her.
With an exclamation of triumph she dived on it
and brought it up in a swinging arc to smash against
the man’s balls. He sat on the floor and started to
scream.
‘I’ve got one, Hal,’ she panted. ‘I’ve got a bat.’
‘Then use it, for Christ’s sake,’ he bellowed, going
down under a rain of blows.
‘Oh God!’ Legs, she thought. She knelt on one
knee, swiped at the nearest pair of trousers and crowed
with triumph when she made contact. She took
another swipe only to have her head jerked up as a
hand seized her by the hair and started to pull it out
by the roots. Shock and pain flooded her eyes with
stinging tears.
Hal, on his hands and knees on the floor, his head
protected by his shoulders, was only vaguely aware
that the rapidity of the blows beating against his back
had lessened. His brain was concentrated on the high-pitched
screaming which he thought was coming from
Roz. His anger was colossal, triggering such a surge
of adrenalin that he exploded to his feet in an all-consuming
fury and threw himself at the first man he
saw, bearing him back against the gleaming ovens
where a saucepan of fish stock bubbled gently. Oblivious
to the blow which crashed with the force of a bus
between his shoulder blades he bent his victim in an
arc over the rings, grabbed the saucepan and upended
the boiling liquid over the masked head.
He swung round to face the fourth man and fended
off another blow with his forearm before smashing
the cast-iron base of the saucepan into the side of an
unprotected jaw. The eyes behind the mask registered
the briefest glimmer of surprise before rolling helplessly into their sockets. The man was unconscious
before he hit the floor.
Exhausted, Hal looked about for Roz. It was a
moment or two before he found her, so disorientated
was he by the noise of screaming which seemed to be
filling the kitchen from every side. He shook his head
to clear the fog and looked towards the door. He
saw her almost immediately, her neck trapped in the
hooked arm of the only man left with any fight in him.
Her eyes were closed and her head lolled alarmingly to
one side. ‘If you make a move,’ the man told Hal
between jerky breaths, ‘I’ll break her neck.’
A hatred, so primeval that he couldn’t control it,
erupted like hot lava in Hal’s brain. His actions were
instinctive. He lowered his head and charged.
ROZ SWAM UP
to a strange twilight world between
oblivion and consciousness. She knew she was there
in the room but she felt apart from it as if she were
watching what was going on from behind thickened
glass. Sound was muted. She had a vague memory of
fingers clamping round her throat. And afterwards?
She wasn’t sure. It had, she thought, been very
peaceful.
Hal’s face loomed over her. ‘Are you all right?’ he
asked from a great distance.
‘Fine,’ she murmured happily.
He smacked her on the cheek with the flat of his
hand. ‘That’s my girl,’ he told her, his voice muffled
by cotton wool. ‘Come on, now. Snap out of it. I
need some help.’
She glared at him. ‘I’ll be up in a minute,’ she said
with dignity.
He hauled her to her feet. ‘Now,’ he said firmly,
‘or we’ll be back where we started.’ He thrust a baseball bat into her hand. ‘I am going to tie them up
but you’ve got to protect my back while I’m doing
it. I don’t want one of these bastards surprising me.’
He looked into her dazed eyes. ‘Come on, Roz,’ he
said savagely, shaking her. ‘Pull yourself together and
show a bit of character.’
She took a deep breath. ‘Has anyone ever told you
what a complete and utter turd you are? I nearly died.’
‘You fainted,’ he said unemotionally, but his eyes
were twinkling. ‘Hit anything that moves,’ he
instructed her, ‘except the one with his head under
the tap. He’s in enough agony already.’
Reality came rushing in on wings of sound. Moans
and groans and running water. There
was
a man with
his head under the tap. She caught a movement out
of the corner of her eye and swung the baseball bat
in terrified reaction, ramming home the hatpin that
its unfortunate recipient was gingerly plucking from
his bottom. His screams of reawakened agony were
pitiful.
‘Oh God!’ she cried. ‘I’ve done something awful.’
Tears sprang into her eyes.
Hal finished trussing her putative killer, who had
been knocked cold by his frenzied charge, and moved
on to the other unconscious figure, winding twine
expertly about the wrists and ankles. ‘What’s he yelling
for anyway?’ he demanded, tethering his victim
to the table for good measure.
‘He’s got a pin in his bottom,’ said Roz, her teeth
chattering uncontrollably.
Hal approached the man warily. ‘What sort of pin?’
‘My mother’s hatpin.’ She gagged. ‘I think I’m
going to be sick.’
He saw the green ornamental head protruding
from the man’s Levis and felt a tiny twinge of sympathy.
It didn’t last. He left it there while he bound
the man’s wrists and ankles and tethered him, like his
friend, to the table. It was almost as an afterthought
that he gripped the jade and yanked the hatpin, grinning,
from the quivering buttock. ‘You arsehole,’ he
murmured cheerfully, tucking the pin into the front
of his jumper.
‘I feel ill,’ said Roz.
‘Sit down, then.’ He took a chair and pressed her
into it before moving to the back door and flinging
it open. ‘Out,’ he ordered the man at the sink. ‘Get
yourself to hospital as fast as you can. If your friends
have an ounce of decency they’ll keep your name to
themselves. If they haven’t’ – he shrugged – ‘you’ve
got about half an hour to get yourself admitted before
the police come looking for you.’
The man needed no persuading. He launched himself
into the fresh air of the alleyway and took to his
heels.
With a groan of exhaustion, Hal shut the door and
slithered to the floor. ‘I need a rest. Do me a favour, sweetheart, and take off their masks. Let’s see what
we’ve got.’
Roz’s head was aching intolerably where the roots
of her hair had been loosened. She looked at him
with burning eyes in a pasty white face. ‘For your
information, Hawksley,’ she said icily, ‘I’m just about
out on my feet. It may have escaped your notice,
but if it hadn’t been for me you wouldn’t have
got
anything.’
He gave a mighty yawn and winced as pain seared
around his chest and back. Fractured ribs, he thought
tiredly. ‘I’ll tell you this for free, Roz. As far as I’m
concerned you are the most wonderful woman God
ever made and I’ll marry you if you’ll have me.’ He
smiled sweetly. ‘But at the moment I’m bushed. Be
kind. Get off your high horse and take their ski-masks
off.’
‘ “Words, words, mere words”,’ she murmured,
but she did as he asked. The side of his face was
already thickening where a baseball bat had split the
skin. What the hell sort of state must his back be in?
Covered in weals, probably, like the last time. ‘Do
you know any of them?’ She studied the slack features
of the unconscious man by the door. She had a fleeting
impression she knew him, but his head moved
and the impression vanished.
‘No.’ He’d seen her frown of brief recognition.
‘Do you?’
‘I thought I did,’ she said slowly. ‘Just for a moment.’ She shook her head. ‘No. He probably
reminded me of someone on the telly.’
Hal pushed himself to his feet and padded over to
the sink, his stiffening body protesting at every step.
He filled a bowl with water and sloshed it into the
gaping mouth, watching the eyes flicker open. They
were instantly alert, wary, guarded, all of which told
Hal he wasn’t likely to get anywhere by asking
questions.
With a shrug of resignation, he looked at Roz. ‘I
need a favour.’
She nodded.
‘There’s a phonebox about two hundred yards
down the main road. Take your car to it, dial 999,
tell them the Poacher’s been broken into, and then
go home. Don’t give your name. I’ll call you the
minute I can.’
‘I’d rather stay.’
‘I know.’ His face softened. She was wearing her
lonely look again. He reached out and ran the back
of a finger down the line of her cheek. ‘Trust me. I
will
call.’