Emily Barr - The Sleeper

My room was number 253. It was a door on a corridor, the same as all the others. Lara and Guy might have used this room, but statistically, they probably hadn’t.

I had not been in a hotel for years. The bland room, the rigorously smooth bed, the little kettle and the tiny plastic tubs of non-milk came together to create an environment that was nothing like the last hotel room I’d been in, yet it took my breath away all the same. Superimposed on this one was a room with character, a room with bare floorboards and a colourful bedspread, huge open windows and a breeze blowing in from the sea.

I closed my eyes tightly. If I kept breathing, in and out, it would be all right. That other hotel room was miles from here. It was not in London. It was in Italy. It had no business intruding here.

Laurie was at home. The Laurie who had taken me to Italy was long gone.

My legs were wobbling, but I managed to manoeuvre myself to the bed. Even when I was lying curled up, my big boots transgressive on the covers, it took a few minutes before it all subsided. I did not like it; but I had known that this would happen. In London, little bits of that other world would seep in.

I concentrated hard and thought of Lara, and soon it was all gone and I was back in Lara’s London life. She and her dead lover had lived in rooms like this, all through the week, for weeks and weeks. I imagined their suitcases side by side, their contents spilling out and mingling. Their work clothes would have hung in a wardrobe like this, on the same non-removable hangers. Then one day they caught the train together, and by the time it reached Cornwall, he was dead and she was gone.

I had expected to hide in my room that evening, sheltering from London and its barrage of reminders, but in fact the city was strangely welcoming. I could go anywhere and do anything, and I felt certain that nobody would notice me. I sat in a pub that was busy despite its being a January Monday. There I had a glass of orange juice and a plate of cheerily generic fish and chips, and tried to decide what on earth I should do next. Olivia had spoken to me, and, unexpectedly, I liked her. I was supposed to be investigating, but I had no idea how.

Someone had left a newspaper on the next table, and I grabbed it and flicked through the pages. There was nothing new in the news pages, just speculation and some weak sightings. I flicked past a cobbled-together feature about people working away from their spouses. While it said very little about Lara and Guy, the words ‘they spent their evenings in the bars and clubs of central London, living openly as partners’ jumped off the page. It went on to list a sparse set of unconvincing sightings of them that journalists had assembled.

‘Eyewitnesses report seeing them in a seedy underground cabaret bar in a former toilet in central London, the day before the murder,’ I read. ‘Lara Finch might already have known what she was going to do the very next night.’

I knew about the underground bar, vaguely, but I had not given it much thought. In the absence of much else to go on, and before I worked out a way of talking to Lara’s colleagues, I would retrace their steps. If I could go, alone, to a seedy bar in a converted toilet, I would be able to do anything.

With some relief, I reminded myself that there was no point going to a dodgy bar on a Monday. I would have to wait until the end of the week for that challenge: in fact, I would go on Thursday, as they had. For now, that meant I could put it out of my mind.

I realised slowly that someone was looking at me. People were leaving the pub, and everything felt as if it were winding down. There was only a handful of people left, all of a sudden, one of whom was standing across the room from me, looking at me without even trying to pretend he wasn’t.

I looked up, looked away, and looked back again. For a fraction of a second I wanted to run. My heart struggled in my chest as if, given half a chance, it would escape my rib cage altogether and run away. My legs tensed up, ready to go.

Then it was over. He was just a man in a bar, staring at a woman because she was on her own. That was all. I had mistaken him for someone he could not possibly have been. This man had thick black hair, and he was about the right height, and his skin was the same caramel colour that spoke of a mixed heritage of a similar sort. He was the right kind of age. That was all.

He could not be Laurie, because I had left Laurie in Cornwall. Laurie would not have followed me here and ambushed me with accusations.

I looked back up at him quickly. The man smiled and started to walk towards me. I stood up, grabbed my bag and left, without looking back. I hoped he was not taking that as an invitation, and I started to run, in case he did.

The hotel’s corridors were identical, inevitably. I could have gone straight to my room, but instead I started at the top floor and walked around and down. I passed door after door, many with ‘do not disturb’ signs on them, others with empty trays outside. I was passing every room in which Guy and Lara had ever stayed.

I wished I had known her better. I wished that she had confided in me, even though I had only met her four times. I longed to know whether she was in love with him, whether her time in this hotel was spent in a whirlwind of non-stop talk and sex and obsession, or whether she was bored at home and miserable and seeking solace in destructive behaviour. I hoped it was the first one. I pictured the two of them ripping one another’s clothes off the moment the hotel door clicked shut behind them.

It was bland here. Everything was uniform – it was a place to sleep and that was all – so the entire building became a surreal blank canvas for anything anyone wanted to do. Every few steps took me past another room, with another bed. Anything could have been going on behind those doors.

I walked quickly, trying not to think about the man in the bar. He had done nothing wrong, even though approaching a strange woman in a pub was completely out of character. It was not necessarily out of his character, not out of the real man’s character. It would only have been odd behaviour for the man he looked like.

It would have been odd behaviour for Laurence. Laurie was at home in Cornwall. He was in our home, where we lived.

Finally, on floor four, I found a chambermaid’s trolley. I stood beside it, shifting my weight from one foot to the other, fiddling with my hair, picking at a loose corner of wallpaper, until a woman appeared. She was small, her hair scraped back, and she was wearing a grey and white uniform.

‘Good evening,’ she said, her eyes cast down.

‘Hello.’ I tried to think what would make her talk to me. I needed to get this right. ‘Hi. Um. Do you work here every day?’

She was suspicious. ‘Mostly. Do you have a problem with your room?’

‘No, no, not at all. My room’s absolutely fine. Um. A friend of mine used to stay here. Lara Finch. With her …’ I struggled to find the right word, and failed. ‘With her friend. Her boyfriend. You know? People have been looking for her.’

‘Oh yes.’ This woman was, I thought, Latin American. She did not look like someone who had time to stand around gossiping. She pushed her trolley a little way down the corridor and I walked with her. ‘I know.’

‘Did you ever see her, when she was here? Do you remember her?’

She shook her head. ‘We see many people.’

‘You might have cleaned her room.’

‘Maybe. How would I know?’ She took a key from her pocket and opened the door to room 413. ‘When we clean the room, no people are there.’

And with that she went inside and closed the door.

The man on the reception desk was not helpful either.

‘We see so many people,’ he explained. ‘I recognised them, sure. But I never paid them any attention. It’s not my business if they’re having an affair or what they’re doing. I mean, this is a hotel. People do what they like. To be honest, I’m just glad she didn’t kill him right here in the hotel.’