An Unwanted Guest(70)

She turns away from the window and looks back at the survivors in the lobby. James has come out of the kitchen at the sound of the plough; the rest remain where they are, as if frozen in place. Sorensen looks at each one of them in turn: James, Beverly, Matthew, Gwen, David, Ian, and Lauren.

Sorensen turns back to look out of the window. She sees then that there’s a truck following behind the snowplough – and she recognizes the crime team. She feels her face break into a relieved smile.

Gwen watches as the forensics team disperses and gets to work. Officers Wilcox and Perez remain in the lobby, as if afraid that someone might try to make a run for it.

Gwen wonders what the crime team will find.

She has spent so much time with these people over this appalling weekend. She has learned their secrets – at least some of them. They have all been scraped raw. And yet, she still feels she knows them hardly at all. She has survived this weekend only to take something ugly away with her – she’s learned that you never really know anyone else. That is terrifying. Because you can’t tell, can you? When she leaves here and goes back out into the world, she will think of everyone she meets as having the potential for evil deep inside.

Sergeant Sorensen gets a call saying that the detective has been delayed. For now, she is still in charge. She watches the techs as they work, quickly and efficiently. No matter how careful someone is, she knows, it’s very hard these days to get away without leaving a trace of evidence of what they’ve done.

She follows the technicians around the hotel as they put out their careful little markers and take their laborious photographs. She hovers over them while they study the bodies, one after the other, and mutter to each other as they work. It will be a while yet before the bodies can be moved, although they are working as quickly as they can.

Now she’s outside, watching them pore over the area in the snow where Bradley died. Bright floodlights have been set up in the late afternoon; the effect is almost blinding.

‘Looks like he was hit once, on the back of the head,’ one of the techs says. ‘The blow was strong enough, and heavy enough, to kill him.’

Now one of the other techs waves her closer. ‘Look at this,’ he says.

She looks closely as he bends over and points at something in the snow. But she can’t see anything. She adjusts her glasses upwards a bit, to get the full effect of her trifocals. ‘I don’t see anything,’ she says.

The tech bends forward again, and using a pair of tweezers, removes something tiny from deeper in the snow and holds it up for her. It’s a small diamond earring. No wonder she couldn’t see it.

‘Are you telling me that that was underneath the body?’ she says.

The technician nods. ‘It was frozen into the snow, so it can’t have been here long. Only since the snowfall on Friday night. And it’s a pierced earring. Ought to be able to get some satisfactory DNA off of that.’

‘So it’s a woman,’ Sorensen says, unable to hide her surprise.

‘Looks like it.’

‘Good work.’

Back inside, Sorensen asks Ian Beeton to come with her into the dining room to answer some more questions. She doesn’t look at him when she asks for him. She notices the others stir in expectation.

Ian, pale and shaken, lurches his way into the dining room.

She asks him to sit, reminds him that he is still under caution, and he drops as if his knees have buckled beneath him.

‘I’ve got a couple of more questions for you, Ian,’ she says.

He looks at her, his eyes wide with fear.

She holds up a little clear plastic evidence bag and places it on the white linen of the dining table. ‘Have you ever seen this earring before?’

He looks down at it, as if struck dumb. Whatever he was expecting, it obviously wasn’t this.

‘Do you recognize it?’ she asks.

He nods slowly. ‘It’s Lauren’s. I mean, it looks like the ones she was wearing …’

‘When was the last time you saw her wearing it?’

He sits back in his chair, aware now of what is being asked of him. ‘Where did you find it?’

She doesn’t answer; she waits.

‘She was wearing that pair yesterday, I think.’

‘You think?’

‘She was wearing them yesterday.’

‘Okay.’ Sorensen made a point of noticing when she came through the lobby that Lauren isn’t wearing any earrings now. But Beverly and Gwen both are. She knows that none of them would have had the opportunity to go back up to their rooms to get another pair, if they’d lost one. ‘Did you happen to notice when she stopped wearing them?’

He shakes his head and whispers, ‘No.’

They all watch warily as Sergeant Sorensen returns to the lobby. They’ve been on tenterhooks since Ian returned, white and silent, to the lobby and sat down, clearly shaken.

Lachlan stands beside Sorensen, ready with a pair of handcuffs.

David notices how still everyone is, how alert. He feels his heartbeat escalate as they come to stand in front of Lauren.

‘Please stand,’ the sergeant says to Lauren.

Lauren rises, visibly trembling.

The sergeant says in a firm voice, ‘Lauren Day, you are under arrest for the murder of Bradley Harwood …’

David tunes out the rest; as they read Lauren her rights, he’s watching her. She opens her mouth to protest but it looks as if she can barely breathe. She throws a panicked glance at Ian, but he’s unresponsive; he seems too shocked to react.