Bloodline

‘I believe they did, sir, but you will have to ask them if you want to see them.’ He said it rather dismissively. ‘Now, is there anything else I can help you with?’

‘I’d like to speak with whoever checked in my sister on Friday evening nine days ago.’

He pursed his lips. ‘I’m not sure that will be possible either. It’s not hotel policy to provide that sort of information.’

‘Then I will spend all day, and all night if necessary, asking every member of your staff that I can find, until someone tells me who did check her in. They must know. It’s the sort of thing one might remember, don’t you think, being the last person to see a suicide alive?’

Mr Dilly stood looking at me for a few moments. Perhaps he was deciding whether to have me thrown out.

‘And if you chuck me out,’ I said, ‘I promise you I’ll cause a fuss. I’ll call the newspapers, and the TV companies. I’m quite well known in media circles and I don’t think it would be good publicity on your part.’

‘Perhaps you had better come into the office,’ said Mr Dilly. ‘I am sure we can find the information for you.’

‘Very wise,’ I said.

I followed him through a door that was disguised as a wooden panel and into some offices behind.

‘Please sit down,’ he said, pointing to a chair in front of a desk. ‘I’ll look up the work sheets for last week.’

He sat opposite me, at a computer, and I could hear him tapping the keys. ‘Now, let me see,’ he said. ‘Friday the sixteenth. Evening, wasn’t it.’ He tapped some more keys. ‘Right. I’ve found it.’

I stood up and went and looked over his shoulder. If he didn’t like it, he didn’t say so.

There were six reception staff listed for the period from three o’clock in the afternoon until eleven at night on the sixteenth, with four others for the night shift that had run from eleven on Friday until seven on Saturday morning.

So the staff on duty when Clare had checked in had been different from those present when she’d fallen.

Nothing was ever simple.

Colin Dilly wrote down the names of the reception staff from both the shifts, but he didn’t give me the list. Rather he compared it to the record of the staff currently on duty that he also brought up onto the screen.

‘There is one person who was on duty that night who is also working right now. If you wait here, I’ll go and fetch her.’

Mr Dilly went off to find the woman while I went on studying his computer screen, but there wasn’t much on it of interest.

Presently he returned with a small, neat woman that I took to be in her mid thirties.

‘Mr Shillingford,’ Colin Dilly said, ‘this is Mrs Rieta Dalal. She was working on reception during the evening of Friday the sixteenth and she says she remembers your sister arriving even though it wasn’t her who actually checked her in.’

‘Then how do you know it was my sister?’ I asked.

‘Because my colleague and I talked about her,’ said Mrs Dalal quietly. ‘Because she had no luggage. No bags at all. Not even a handbag or a make-up bag.’ She smiled. ‘It’s very rare indeed for a guest to check in with no luggage, especially a woman with no make-up. I remember her specifically because of that. It was only much later I heard that she had been the poor lady who fell from the balcony.’

‘Was she with anyone when she checked in?’ I asked.

‘No, sir, she was not,’ said Mrs Dalal. ‘But she was talking on the telephone all the time. That is why my colleague mentioned her to me in the first place. My colleague thought it rather rude and she was quite cross about it.’

‘Which colleague was it?’ Mr Dilly asked.

‘Irena.’

‘Irena Zelinska,’ he said, consulting his handwritten list. ‘She’s not working today.’

‘She has gone home to Poland,’ said Mrs Dalal.

It was definitely not going to be simple.

‘Did my sister specifically ask for a room with a balcony?’

‘I don’t know, sir. Have you checked her reservation?’

‘I don’t think she had a reservation.’

She seemed surprised. ‘We were very full that night, we always are when there’s a big event in the ballroom. If she didn’t have a reservation, we must have had a cancellation. She must have just been lucky to get a room with a balcony.’

‘Lucky’ was not the term I would have used.

‘But even then,’ Mrs Dalal went on, ‘she would have had to ask to have the balcony door unlocked. All the balconies are normally kept locked to prevent suicides.’

There was a silence as we all digested what Mrs Dalal had just said.

‘Are you saying that someone had to have gone to her room to open the balcony door?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ said Mrs Dalal. ‘We have to call security if guests request that the balcony door be unlocked. It is a common thing. It happens almost every day.’

‘Why do you keep them locked if you then unlock them on request?’

‘The hotel policy,’ said Mr Dilly, ‘is that there has to be at least two registered guests in a room for the balcony door to be unlocked.’

‘The policy seems to have failed in this case,’ I said rather pointedly.

Neither of them said anything.