An Unwanted Guest(36)

Riley hears a sob and turns to see Henry and Beverly standing inside the open doorway, looking at Candice. Beverly is obviously trying to control herself. And now Matthew, tall and dishevelled, appears in the darkness of the doorway, James, out of breath, behind him.

Riley turns her attention back to the body and forces herself to look. Candice is lying on her stomach, her head turned to the left. Her face is bloodless against the dark carpet. Her eyes are open wide in surprise. She is … ghastly. Terrifying.

There’s no coming back from death.

She begins to feel the familiar sensation of panic, and she closes her eyes briefly and breathes deeply, trying not to give in to it. She opens her eyes again. Everyone is in the room now, ignoring David’s command to stay back. She wonders, fleetingly, who is going to keep order now. She knows how quickly things can fall apart; she’s seen it.

Riley looks now at Gwen – Gwen is still standing close to David, and is looking at the dead woman, too. Her face is crumpling like she’s about to cry. She’s too squeamish for this, Riley thinks.

‘We must leave her as she is,’ David says quietly. ‘The police will deal with it when they get here.’

‘When is that going to be?’ Lauren says, her voice tense.

‘I don’t know,’ David says.

‘How can you be so calm?’ Lauren asks, her voice shrill. ‘She’s been murdered! We need to get the police!’

‘How the hell are we going to do that?’ Henry shouts.

‘I don’t know!’ Lauren snaps. ‘But we’d better think of something.’

Henry finds the sight of the body deeply disturbing. He can’t bear to look at it any longer, so instead he studies Matthew, whom he hasn’t seen since Dana’s body was first discovered early that morning. Gwen’s scream has pulled him from the seclusion of his room. Some of them, he thinks, suspect that Matthew pushed his fiancée down the stairs. This changes things. He glances at David. The attorney’s usually calm exterior is definitely ruffled.

The fact that Candice has been murdered – it means that there is definitely a killer here, in the hotel. And the police aren’t coming.

Henry looks around at the rest of the little gathering and can see they are of one mind. The fear is palpable.

He can hear Beverly breathing heavily through her nose beside him. Henry wonders just how much danger they’re in. And suddenly he has a terrible thought. He realizes that if only it had been Beverly who had been strangled, instead of Candice, all his problems would be solved. It’s the first time he’s recognized that he would be free if only his wife were dead. It makes him feel strange, agitated. He has a fleeting fantasy of finding her strangled in their room, but it’s interrupted by David.

‘It might be one of us,’ David says.

There’s an awful silence.

Then Beverly shakes her head in disbelief. ‘Surely not,’ she says. When David doesn’t answer, she begins to protest. ‘You think that one of us is a murderer?’

‘It’s possible,’ David says.

‘But that’s absurd,’ Beverly insists, looking around wildly at the rest of them. ‘You seem to think that almost anybody is capable of murder. Murderers are not normal people.’ She looks desperately around the room at the others.

Henry silently agrees with his wife – the idea that it’s one of them is ludicrous, like something out of a novel. He was willing to credit that Matthew may have, in a fit of anger, killed his fiancée. But he doesn’t think that Matthew also killed Candice, in cold blood.

David has spent too much time with criminals, Henry tells himself now. He can’t picture any of his companions pushing that young woman down the stairs, then smashing her skull against the step. Nor can he imagine any of them strangling Candice. There must be someone else here. He looks around anxiously in the flickering dark.





Saturday, 5:45 PM


‘We should search the hotel,’ David suggests, as they stand above Candice’s corpse.

The others turn his way, startled.

David knows they are all in shock, and probably not thinking clearly. ‘Two people are dead. Murdered. We may not be the only ones here,’ he says bluntly.

Frightened faces look back at him from the shadows.

‘Whoever did this must be insane,’ Lauren whispers.

‘There’s no one else staying at the hotel,’ James stammers.

‘No other staff we don’t know about?’

James shakes his head. ‘No. Just me and Bradley. Because of the storm. The others couldn’t make it in.’

‘Someone might be here without our knowing it,’ David says.

‘No,’ Bradley says, shaking his head. ‘The rooms are kept locked.’

‘This room was locked,’ David says, ‘and there’s a dead body inside. How did that happen?’ They all fall silent for a moment.

‘Maybe she answered the door,’ Matthew suggests, no doubt thinking of his own Dana, inexplicably found dead outside her own room.

‘Possibly,’ David says, thinking aloud. ‘But judging from the position of the body, she was standing at the desk with her back to the door when she was strangled. She either answered the door to someone she knows, and trusts, or at least recognizes – one of us perhaps – and was comfortable enough to let them in and then turn her back on them, or someone unlocked the door without her being aware of it.’