Emily Barr - The Sleeper

‘Do you think there’s anyone here who might have talked to them, or noticed anything about them?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Believe me, we’ve had the police here going over every room they ever stayed in. We’ve had journalists like you wouldn’t believe, and we have nothing to say. If she’s your friend then I’m sorry, but the reason people come to a hotel like this is so they won’t be bothered. We don’t notice the private lives of our guests. We don’t have time to wonder about them. It is not our business.’

He smiled a brightly white toothy smile, and I knew I was dismissed. My vague dreams of finding a member of staff at the hotel who would confide all sorts of inside information were shattered. I had no idea what I’d been expecting.

I called Alex, desperate to hear a friendly voice, to speak to someone who might not scoff at the fact that I was here, chasing ghosts. I had committed fraud that day, filling in the backs of my passport photos with the name and signature of a teacher I had once known. I was going to confess that, when I spoke to him.

However, he did not answer. I left him a stiff little message, feeling stupid. He had liked my skirt, and had drunk wine with me. We had chatted, and it felt as if I had known him for a long time. I was comfortable with him. That meant nothing.

I did not sleep well. I felt her ghost, and Guy’s, all around me. I felt my old life, my London life, pressing in on me, and I did not want to think about it.

chapter twenty

My phone rang at nine the next morning. I was dozing, and I nearly didn’t answer. The London noises outside the window made me wake in a state of unexpected excitement. Engines thrummed non-stop, buses chugged, horns sounded, and occasionally a voice was raised in sweary reproach. Before I came fully through the sleepy curtain into proper consciousness, I was pleased to be home.

Then I woke up properly and shrank away from that thought. The phone was still ringing, blasting away with the tune Laurie had set for me when I first got it: an obscure, lovely song by I Am Kloot, called ‘To The Brink’. It was our special song. I decided to change it as soon as I could.

I answered mainly to stop it ringing, forgetting, in my confused haze, that voicemail would have had the same effect, had I left it a second or two longer. I didn’t look at the screen because I wanted his voice to be a surprise.

‘Hello?’

‘Iris. Are you OK?’

I had wanted a surprise, and I got my wish.

‘Hello.’

‘Sorry. It’s Alex. I didn’t mean to startle you. Sorry.’

‘Alex. That’s OK. I called you last night. You’re calling me back. That’s nice of you. You don’t have to say sorry for something nice.’

I was sitting up in bed, pulling my hair away from my face, remembering that I needed to get it cut. It was tangled and annoying. Maybe I would have it dramatically shorter.

‘How are you, then?’ His voice was warm. ‘How’s Budock?’

‘Oh.’ I got out of bed and unplugged the little kettle, the phone still held between shoulder and ear. ‘I’m not in Budock. Highly unusually for me, I’m in London.’

‘Seriously? I thought you rarely left your house.’

‘I know! And look at me now.’ I turned the bathroom tap on, and water crashed loudly into the kettle. It echoed around the immaculately tiled room, and I cringed because I knew it sounded as if I were weeing. ‘Sorry about the noise,’ I said quickly. ‘That’s me filling the kettle. I’m in a hotel.’

‘Blimey, Iris.’ I laughed. Blimey seemed an incongruous thing to say, but in a sweet way. ‘Are you really? What are you doing?’

I tried to explain. It was not easy, because I could not properly explain it to myself.

‘I’m staying in Lara and Guy’s hotel,’ I said, immediately realising it made me sound mad. ‘I’m kind of going to places where they went. I’m so sure she didn’t kill him. I know she didn’t. Someone else did. I want to find out who.’

‘Ah. And is your …’ He hesitated. ‘Is your boyfriend with you?’

‘No,’ I said quickly. ‘No, he’s stayed at home. He’s not really keen on London.’

I could not believe I was talking about Laurie to a policeman. The kettle was making a big fuss of boiling, cranking itself up loudly, demonstrating the effort it was making just so I could have a cup of nasty, UHT-addled tea.

‘And your family? Are they still in London?’

‘Yes. Probably. As far as I know.’

‘You don’t get on with them?’

‘No. But they’re lovely. Long story. How are you?’

‘Oh, you know. I’m fine. Supposed to be doing all sorts of other things, but I’m following the Lara investigation. Not that there’s any change. Guy’s funeral happened yesterday. You know that already, I’m sure. They’re scaling back the search and assuming her body’s somewhere inaccessible near the train track.’

‘They can’t scale it back! They haven’t got a clue.’

‘What do you mean? What don’t they have a clue about?’

‘Lara. She’s …’

The silence hung in the air for the amount of time it would have taken me to tell him about my missing passport. I could feel Alex, too, nearly saying something, hesitating. I decided to tell him, a fraction of a second after he started to tell me.

‘Iris,’ he said suddenly. ‘I’m on leave, starting tomorrow night. I was wondering about making a visit to London myself. I always feel I have to get away when I have a couple of weeks off work. You know? Otherwise it doesn’t feel like a break. If you wouldn’t mind, we could maybe grab a drink or a bite to eat or something. You could tell me about your researches. I’m as intrigued as you are, because in fact all the spots along the train track have been pretty well checked, and unless Lara flung herself out with great abandon, or did it at an odd time in the journey, they would have found her by now. It’s just possible that she could have got off at Reading, as you know, but no one on the CCTV looks remotely like her. When the train stops between stations there’s no CCTV, but if she got off in one of those places she must have gone somewhere. I can’t come up with a theory. Can you?’

I pulled the lid off a little carton of milk. It spurted, inevitably, over my fingers, and I dumped it splashily into the teacup.

‘It would be nice to see you if you’re going to be here,’ I said carefully. ‘And Alex. Let me say this without you thinking I’m mad. Please?’

‘ Mais bien sur ,’ he said.

‘One of the things I’ve done here is go to the passport office and apply for a new passport. I did the thing when you do it quickly, just in case. Bloody hell, it’s expensive. But anyway. I had to apply for a new passport.’ I paused, planning how I could say this to make it sound plausible to a policeman. ‘I had a passport at home. It was in a filing cabinet. It still had three years before it was going to expire. But it vanished. And you remember I told you that Lara came to see me on Christmas Eve?’

I could hear the scepticism, even though he was trying to hide it. ‘Yes?’

‘Well. She asked if she could look around the house. Laurie was away. So I was giving her a tour of the place and she was saying what she’d do to it if we had the money to make it amazing. When we got to the second bedroom upstairs, which is the study, my landline rang. A rare event. I went off to answer it but there was no one there. Then I came back and we carried on as normal. And a couple of weeks later both my passport and Lara have vanished.’

He did not speak for several seconds. I felt intensely stupid, but I did not allow myself to backtrack or back down or qualify everything I had just said with ‘of course it’s probably nothing’, because I was sure that it was, in fact, something.