Читать книгу A Foreign Country - Charles Cumming - Страница 18

Barbara Knight had closed the door of her room, put the sausage bag on the floor outside the bathroom, poured a cognac from the mini-bar and telephoned her husband.

The conversation had gone better than she had expected. It transpired that Bill had begged a cigarette from a passer-by, found himself a seat at a bus stop thirty feet from the entrance to the hotel, and was busy killing time trying to remember the details of a love affair between the French Consul in Lagos and the daughter of an Angolan oil speculator which had been the talk of their three-year residency in Nigeria more than twenty years earlier.

‘Didn’t he eventually have a hand cut off or something?’ Knight asked.

‘Darling, I don’t have time for this now.’ Barbara closed the curtains and switched on one of the bedside lights. ‘I think it was a finger. And I think it was an accident. Look, I’ll have to call you later.’

She had then replied to a Kell text message – Yes. Will be in position from 2. Good luck – removed her blouse and skirt and, wearing only a pair of tights and a white Hotel Gillespie dressing-gown, walked out into the corridor. Less than a minute later, Barbara Knight was standing on a step halfway between the first- and second-floor landings, holding her shoes and listening out for the footsteps of the blond-haired porter with wretched acne who had only recently checked her in.

Pierre duly appeared at 2.04 a.m., jerking back in fright at the white apparition bearing down on him with a mop of wild hair, clutching a pair of shoes.

‘Madame? Are you all right?’

‘Oh, thank goodness you’re here.’ Barbara was shuddering in mock-frustration and had to remind herself not to overcook the act. ‘I’m afraid I’m rather lost. I was on my way downstairs to see you. I was trying to leave my shoes outside to be polished, you see, but I’ve only gone and locked myself out of my room …’

‘Please, madame, do not worry, we can …’

She interrupted him.

‘And now I can’t remember for the life of me which floor I’m supposed to be on. I think you kindly put me in 232, but I can’t seem to find …’

Pierre guided Madame Knight to a safe landing on the first floor. It was to the unanticipated advantage of the Secret Intelligence Service that the night porter’s own grandmother was in the early stages of dementia. Recognizing a kindred spirit, he had put a kindly hand in the small of Barbara’s back and informed her that he would be only too happy to escort Madame Knight to her room.

‘Oh, you’re so kind, such a nice young man,’ said Barbara, brandishing a keycard from the pocket of her dressing-gown. ‘I have the damned thing right here, you see? But of course nowhere does it tell you the number of one’s wretched room.

Kell had worked quickly. The reservations software was open at a welcome page on the desktop; Pierre was still logged in. With the porter attending to Barbara’s needs, he clicked ‘Current’ and was taken to a grid that gave him access to information on every guest in the hotel. The room numbers appeared in a vertical column on the left-hand side of the grid, the dates of occupancy on a horizontal line at the top of the screen. He found the matching dates for Amelia’s stay, clicked on ‘218’ and was taken to the details for her room.

It was a measure of Kell’s self-confidence, as well as his conviction in Barbara’s ability to detain Pierre, that he took the risk of printing out a three-page summary of Amelia’s stay, including details of her room service orders, laundry bills and any phone calls she might have made from the landline in her room. He then returned to the welcome page, took the documents from a printer in the office, folded them into his back pocket and walked outside to the reception desk. There was a Magstripe Encoder beside the keyboard. Kell switched it on, followed the read-out to ‘Check-In’, typed in ‘218’, set an expiration date of six days and pressed ‘Create’. There was a small pile of white plastic cards to the right of the machine. He pushed one of them into the slot, listened as the information was written into the strip, then withdrew the card and placed it in the same pocket into which he had folded Amelia’s bill.

By the time Pierre came back, more than five minutes later, Thomas Kell had removed almost all of the shards of glass that had fallen on to the floor in the lobby and was busy picking petals of potpourri out of the carpet.

‘You should not have worried about this, Monsieur Uniacke.’

‘I just wanted to help,’ Kell told him. ‘I’m so sorry. I feel terrible about what happened.’