Catherine Steadman - Something in the Water - A Novel

“Have you done it?” Mark whispers, urgent. “Erin?”

“Yes, but one more thing. One more…” Then I see it. A filing cabinet across the room. I check the screen. Leila is leaving the restaurant bar, cup and saucer in hand. I’ve got less than a minute. I sprint across the room, dodging chairs. I yank open the R drawer and flick through the files. Roberts. There it is. I reach in and grab our passport photocopies. Our address forms. I hear heels tapping loudly across the marble lobby. Shit. I slam the cabinet shut and sprint back to the VIP room and dive into a chair. I shove the papers down the front of my shorts and Mark sits beside me as Leila opens the door. She enters with a warm smile.

“Here we go. Nice hot tea.” She peers at me, concerned.

I’m breathing pretty erratically now due to the running and the adrenaline. I look terrified and sweaty. In a way I look perfect.

I wobble to my feet.

“I’m so sorry, Leila, but I really need to use the restroom again. Which is the nearest?” I implore breathily.

She puts the peace-offering tea down and instantly gives me an understanding smile. I suppose we’ve all been there.

“Just next to the library, on the right. We’ll be in here when you’re done, if you’re up to it, Mrs. Roberts,” she adds.

What a nice lady. I will leave feedback.

As I stagger out, hand lightly placed on the front of my shorts, I hear them start to duke it out over our imaginary grievances. Well done, Mark. Keep it up.

I waste a good ten minutes in the bathroom soaking the papers, then balling them into mush. I deposit them into separate sanitary disposal bins before heading back to our room.

Eventually Mark bowls back into our suite, full of energy.

“Done.”

He plops down on the sofa next to me. I let my head fall onto his shoulder, exhausted from the waiting, from the tension. I think we’re friends again. Fight-or-flight stress endorphins have healed the rift I made by using the iPhone earlier. We’re a team again. The Robertses versus the world.

“Great work,” I breathe into his shoulder. I kiss it softly through his T-shirt.

“How did you leave it?” I ask. It doesn’t really matter, I just want to hear the sound of his voice, the vibration from his chest. I already know he will have played it flawlessly.

“Very well, thanks. Leila and I are best friends. She’s given us a letter for two free nights in any Four Seasons we choose. And I told her she was a credit to the hotel and we’d be passing that on to the manager. She seemed pretty pleased in the end.” He kisses my temple.

“You did great, Erin,” he says, tilting my head back to look up at him. “Seeing you like that…with the CCTV. I’ve never seen you like that. I can’t believe we managed it. You got our ID’s too, didn’t you? I didn’t even think of that. You did great. So great.” He bends to kiss me.

Those were the only links to us being here. If they come. If they even come for us. The important thing is the hotel no longer has copies of our passports or London address on file. If anyone comes looking, then they won’t be able to find any ID for us. Plus, the footage of who used the computer this morning no longer exists. A ghost took the phone and there will be no way to find the guests who stayed in our room except…it suddenly occurs to me. A terrifying flash out of nowhere.

My eyes flick up to Mark. “I forgot about the computers! Their computer system. We forgot! They’ve almost definitely put our check-in info on their system already, Mark. It doesn’t matter that we took the file; they still have all our info.”

He breaks my gaze, leans away from me. We have to go back. Shit! He knows it. He stands and starts pacing. We have to go back and somehow erase those files. Shit shit shit. And I thought we’d both done so well. I thought I’d been so clever. But in fact all we’ve been doing is making it more obvious. Highlighting who we are, who did it. If someone comes looking. And someone will come looking. They won’t see our missing files, but they will find our details on the hotel database and they will know we tried to cover our tracks. We have flagged ourselves, nothing more. Unless. Unless we go back to that office right now and delete our names from the system completely. Unless one of us does that.

Mark looks down at me again. A thought is solidifying in his mind. He has to go; he has to be the one this time. I can’t go back to reception. I’m supposed to be on my sickbed; that’s the story we’ve sold. I’ve made my sickbed and now I have to lie in it.

Mark slowly paces, thinking. After a few minutes he heads into the bedroom and comes out holding an earring. One of my emerald earrings, a birthday present from the year before. He holds it up.

“You lost an earring. That’s what’s happened. I’ll go and find it, shall I?” He nods. There’s a finality to it. “Yeah, I’ll go.”

—

Forty-three minutes later he’s back in the room.

“It’s done. I changed our names, numbers, emails, and address. All of it. Done.” He looks exhausted but relieved.

God knows how he did it but I knew he would. Thank God. I smile.

“We need to talk about the guy-on-the-phone problem, Mark.” Time to stop congratulating ourselves and get back to the situation at hand. Since he’s been gone I’ve been running it through in my mind.

He nods and sits down next to me on the sofa. He moistens his lips.

“Okay. What do we know? Let’s start there. What do we know about him? Or her?” he asks. We’re going to work it through.

“His phone number is registered in Russia, but his text messages are written in English. All the plane people’s emails were Russian. They must have been Russian. But they wrote to the man in the text messages in English and he replied in English. So I’d hazard a guess he at least is either American or English. We don’t know if he’s the same person as on the American number too. He might just be the same guy with two phones. We don’t know. It sounded like he was arranging the exchange for the plane people with the American number. He wanted the deal to go through. He knows we’re not the plane people, and he knows we pretended to be….” Mark’s eyebrow is raised. I stutter to a stop.

“Huh, okay. He knows I pretended to be—” I correct myself.

Mark nods.

I continue, “—the plane people. He will assume we’ve looked through the phone. He’ll assume we’ve either killed them for whatever reason and kept the bag, or we’ve found it and seen things that we shouldn’t have seen. Either way, we are a threat to him. Or them. And he’ll try to find us.”

Mark leans forward, elbows on knees, frowning. “Can they trace the phone signal? Well, not signal—you weren’t using a signal, were you? Wi-Fi? Can they trace that somehow?” He’s thinking out loud but I answer.

“No. No, they can’t! There’s no iCloud connection on the iPhone. You can only locate via Wi-Fi with a special app or through iCloud. I mean, he can trace the last place the signal was received but that was maybe before the plane people even got on the plane. Sometime before the crash, at any rate. The phone was packed away and turned off when the plane went down. So he may know it’s somewhere near the Pacific but no more than that.” I’m pretty sure that sounds right. Mark nods; he agrees.

“So the only link to here, to this hotel, is the accessing of the email account from the business center?” He’s forming a plan, I can tell.

“Yeah, the IP address will be logged somewhere. It’ll show where the account was accessed. I’m guessing these people probably have a way to find that out. At any rate they can certainly afford to get someone who can,” I say.