‘Thought you’d deserted me,’ protested the Space for Space manager.
‘Never,’ Alice flirted back.
‘Feeling thirsty yet?’
‘You never know. Depends how hard I have to work.’
Her favourite station, the one at the end of the line where there was least chance of her screen being read over her shoulder, was empty. She logged on, dialled the hotel reservation chain, fingers poised to complete her entry with her Trojan Horse password. And was confronted on the screen by the message ‘Remote-Requested Access Refused’. No problem, she told herself: inexplicable glitches happened all the time. But rarely four more times. She tried one more time before quickly disconnecting. Their mainframe could have crashed. Or there could have been a power interruption, although in the past she’d found the English grid system more reliable than American electricity suppliers. The screen glowed at her, invitingly.
From his counter the manager called out: ‘You gotta problem?’
‘No,’ denied Alice.
She used the Google search engine to find that the local newspaper was the Basingstoke Gazette and accessed its website in seconds. Its front page was dominated by a photograph of a fire-blackened shell. Police were treating as murder the deaths of a caretaker and two early-shift cleaners in the arson attack that had totally destroyed the European headquarters of the hotel chain’s reservations site. There had been four different seats of fire, all caused by explosions of what forensic experts had already established to be incendiary material, most likely phosphorous. The possibility of terrorism had not been ruled out, although there was nothing to explain why the building or the hotel corporation had been targeted.
Alice turned off the machine and fumbled for her user’s fee.
The manager said: ‘What’s the problem here?’
‘Something unexpected came up,’ said Alice.
Throughout his journeying up and down town Carver had been unaware of the two men alternating their surveillance, but then they were professionals, both former policemen. It only cost one of them $50 to learn the name of Alice Belling from the janitor at Princes Street. Their instructions were to pursue Carver, which meant neither followed Alice to the cybercafe to get a visual identification.
Twelve
Carver waited two hours and was about to follow Geoffrey Davis and James Parker, the personnel director, out to Janice’s Brooklyn apartment when the lawyer called to say they were on their way back into Manhattan. It was another thirty minutes before they arrived. Davis’s normally florid face was pale. Parker’s was ashen.
As he came into Carver’s office Parker, a thin, bespectacled man, said as if he needed to explain: ‘I’ve never seen a dead body before… not dead like that.’
Davis said: ‘We stayed on to identify the body, to save Janice’s mother. Although it was she who found Janice.’
‘From the beginning…’ insisted Carver.
Parker looked to the older man and Davis said: ‘Janice didn’t come in this morning, as Hilda told you. Hilda kept calling and getting no reply. Then she got a call from Janice’s mother. She’d gone around to Janice’s apartment when she didn’t get a reply either. She let herself in with her own key and found Janice dead…’
‘Dead how?’ broke in Carver.
‘Strangled, according to the medical officer. Although it’s obvious she tried to hang herself, from some loft-bed stairs.’
‘The rope broke,’ said Parker. ‘That’s how she got injured.’
Carver shifted irritably. ‘You think we could get some coherence into this! I want to know what happened and I’m finding it difficult.’
Davis looked surprised. ‘Last night Janice phoned her mother, in tears. She was upset by the funeraclass="underline" said she didn’t know what was going to happen to her…’
‘She knew what was going to happen to her,’ interrupted Carver, again. ‘I told her she was being kept on, working with Hilda… that no one was being let go.’
‘Hilda told me,’ said the lawyer.
‘And I got your memo, with a confirming copy to her,’ said Parker.
‘People get confused in grief,’ said Davis. ‘She’d been with George for a long time: knew his ways.’
Perhaps she knew more than his ways, thought Carver. Her being upset certainly wasn’t because she was frightened of losing her job. ‘The mother gets into Janice’s apartment with her own key? It wasn’t locked… chained… from the inside?’
‘Apparently not,’ said the lawyer. ‘Janice hanged herself from a rope knotted to the topmost rung of the loft ladder. It was there that the rope snapped, quite close to the top. The medical examiner doesn’t think it happened immediately: his sequence is that she kicked away the stool she’d stood on and for a while the rope held: that’s how she strangled herself. He thinks she probably struggled, the moment she did it: according to the medical examiner people do that when they begin to strangle. The rope only broke when she literally became a dead weight.’
‘What injuries?’ prompted Carver.
‘Surprisingly extensive,’ said Davis. ‘She came down awkwardly. Trapped her left arm underneath her, breaking it. And three fingers on that hand. And her left leg. That twisted under her, too.’
‘How high’s the stool?’
Davis looked at Parker, to be reminded. Parker said: ‘Eighteen inches, two feet maybe. I didn’t pay much attention to it.’
‘Neither did I,’ admitted Davis.
‘From a drop of eighteen inches to two feet she breaks an arm, a leg and three fingers?’ queried Carver.
Davis frowned. ‘What are you suggesting, John?’
‘That the extent of her injuries really is surprising.’
‘The doctor says strange things happen sometimes,’ said Parker.
‘It certainly did here!’
‘Janice left a note,’ disclosed Davis. ‘She must have written it soon after she spoke to her mother. She’d been dead for almost twenty hours before she was found. She wrote that she was sorry for what she was doing but that everything was going to be turned upside down by George’s death. She repeated that she didn’t know what was going to happen to her: that everything was over.’
They would have been standing over her: had probably already started the torture, breaking the fingers of her left hand but leaving her right, so that she could write what she was being told. ‘What was the apartment like?’
‘Like?’ Again the lawyer frowned.
Carver stopped just short of using the word trashed. ‘Tidy? Or untidy?’
‘I didn’t pay much attention to that, either. But it seemed pretty together to me,’ said the personnel director. There was some uncomfortable body language.
‘That’s my recollection, too,’ said Davis. Then he said: ‘You implying something different from what the police say it is, the suicide of a mentally upset woman? Which I also believe it to be, having been there and talked with them.’
‘A mentally upset woman who didn’t bolt or chain her door?’ Carver once again felt restricted – physically strait-jacketed – by an impotence far worse, far different, from that he’d felt with Alice after discovering Northcote’s criminality.
There was another expression of surprise from the lawyer. ‘A woman intending to kill herself who knew people would have to get in to find her!’
All so logically, so easily acceptable by police probably working ten – a hundred – more obvious homicide cases. Would Janice, brutalized, bewildered, already grief-stricken, have told them – given them – what they wanted? Had she known it – had it – even? She surely wouldn’t have endured so much torture if she had. It proved, he accepted, that she hadn’t been part of any mob-orchestrated conspiracy. There was a sudden, physical chill. It proved even more positively that they hadn’t found whatever it was – of which the night-stand contents could be a part – when they’d ransacked Northcote’s house in Litchfield. And if Janice hadn’t had it, then they’d go on looking and torturing and killing. The chill became even more physically intense at a sudden new awareness. Would she have told them of the valise he’d brought back from Litchfield, before the burglary? Carver thought he would have done, if his fingers and arms and legs were being broken. Forcing himself on, he said: ‘How old’s the mother?’