Page 70 of None of This is True

‘Well, actually it was me that just called you, Mrs Summer. I’m really sorry. I didn’t know what else to do. But Mr Summer was here this weekend and unfortunately, after he failed to check out this morning, we used the master key to let ourselves into his room and found quite a lot of damage? We found his business card in the room and we tried calling him a few times on his mobile but it kept going to voicemail and so I called his office number just now to see if I could get hold of him that way, but they said he hadn’t come into work today and they gave me your number and I hope you don’t mind me calling you like this?’

Alix freezes while scenarios spool wildly through her head. Finally, she says, ‘No. Of course not.’

‘But we will have to charge Mr Summer for the damage to his room, I’m afraid.’

‘Sorry, can you just explain what happened? Blow by blow. Because I’m afraid I don’t really understand.’

‘Oh! Yes! Sure!’ the young woman responds brightly. ‘Mr Summer checked in here on Saturday night. Quite late. His companion told us that she’d paid online for two nights.’

‘Companion?’

‘Yes. The person he was with.’

‘And who was that?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t know. I wasn’t working on Saturday night. But the room had been prepaid for two nights. Mr Summer seems to have left at some point on Sunday without checking out, nobody saw him leave and we have no record of it, and when we went to his room this morning to request that he vacate it, it was empty. No sign of Mr Summer or his companion. And the room, I’m afraid, was trashed.’

‘Trashed?’

‘Yes. And we are going to need to take some sort of payment to cover the costs, I’m afraid. And since his companion’s card is being declined and we are unable to contact Mr Summer, we’d be very grateful if you could help us to sort out this issue.’

‘The room,’ says Alix. ‘My husband’s room. Has it been tidied yet? Has it been cleaned?’

‘No, we’re waiting for management to send over a specialist cleaning team. It hasn’t been touched.’

‘OK. Well, I’d like to see it, please. Because my husband hasn’t come home, he’s disappeared, and maybe there might be something in the room that explains where he is. Where he’s gone. Please? I can be there in half an hour.’

There is a short silence while the young woman goes to ask her manager and then she comes back on the line. ‘Sure. That’ll be fine. We’ll see you in half an hour.’

The receptionist hands Alix the key. ‘It’s room eighteen,’ she says. ‘On the first floor. Down there and up the stairs.’

Alix heads down the corridor and up a narrow staircase. Room 18 is the second door on the left. She touches the card to the panel, and it clicks open.

The curtains are drawn and her eyes take a moment to adjust to the dark before she finds the slot for the key card and activates the lighting and it all comes to full and shocking life.

The room has been ransacked. The bedding has been pulled virtually completely off the bed so that the mattress is visible, and the duvet is hanging half on the floor. The minibar has been drunk dry; there are empties all over the floor. The remains of a McDonald’s takeaway are scattered everywhere: ketchup-smeared paper packaging and greasy bags of cold fries. Alix picks her way gingerly across the chaos and towards the bathroom. Here there are wet towels on the floor, empty mixer cans in the sink, and there – Alix’s stomach turns, violently – women’s underwear, a thong made of cheap lace, removed and left discarded on the floor, blonde curly hairs in the sink, a smear of tinted lip gloss on the rim of a glass, and the smell, just the sheer unmistakable smell of a woman everywhere in the air.

Alix sits on the side of the bath and stares about herself. She stands up slowly and peers into the bin, looking for clues. Back in the bedroom she starts to see more than a drunken, sexual interlude playing out in this room. She sees a picture hanging crooked on the wall, a crack in its glass. She sees a table lamp knocked on to its side. The bedside table is turned at a ninety-degree angle to the wall. And there, she sees, as she crouches lower and lower to the wooden floor, is a small smudge of what looks at first like marmite, maybe, or ketchup from the McDonald’s, but comes away on the tip of her finger as bright scarlet blood.

She winces at the sight of it and stands up so quickly that blood rushes to her head. She turns in a circle, trying to find more answers to the thousand questions that flood her mind from the detail of the room, but there is nothing. A fight. A girl. Food. Drink. A discarded thong.

Alix sits on the edge of the pillaged bed and gets out her phone. She calls Nathan and it goes to voicemail. She goes back down to reception and when she talks to the young woman at the desk, she realises she is crying. ‘Please,’ she says, ‘please. I need to see your records. I need to see your CCTV footage. My husband has disappeared, and I don’t know where he is and I can’t take another day like this. I can’t take another day of this not knowing . Please.’

The receptionist smiles nervously and says, ‘Let me ask my manager. Give me a minute.’

A moment later a glamorous woman with dyed black hair appears from the office behind the front desk. Her name badge says ‘Astrid Pagano’ and she has intricate black tattoos up both her forearms.

‘Please,’ she says in a soft accent, ‘come with me.’ She beckons her into the back office and Alix follows.

It’s a tiny room and they are squashed together in front of the security monitors elbow to elbow. ‘I am sorry,’ says Astrid. ‘So sorry that you are having a difficult time. Let’s see if we can find you some answers.’

It takes a few minutes to find what they’re looking for. The date stamp on the screen says ‘Sunday 1.41 a.m.’ First of all she sees Nathan and a pretty blonde woman approaching the hotel. This must be Katelyn, she assumes, the girl Giovanni told her about. She looks older than Alix had imagined; she has a mass of blonde curly hair tied away from her face in a ponytail, and very soft features. She wears white jeans and white trainers and a loose black halter-neck top and big gold earrings and looks like a goddess. Nathan, bringing up her rear, looks ridiculous in comparison. He can barely put one foot in front of the other and has to clutch the wall as he reaches the front door, to stop himself from falling over. The footage moves to another screen and here Alix watches Nathan stumbling around behind Katelyn as she checks them in. She has seen Nathan drunk many, many times, but never as drunk as he appears to be in this footage. Then they disappear from the screen, heading darkly towards the staircase at the back of the hotel. Astrid forwards through the next couple of hours and then pauses and slows the footage again at around 3 a.m. There is Nathan. He’s dressed and still stumbling. He bangs into the console table opposite the front desk and then pauses for a moment and takes his phone out of his pocket. He switches it on and frowns at it, swaying slightly on the spot as he tries to focus on the screen. Then he puts the phone back in his pocket and heads out of the front door. Now they move to the second monitor and there he is, there’s Nathan out in the dark street, glowing briefly under the direct light of a streetlamp and then turning into shadows again as he moves away. He is lit up by the approaching headlights of a car and he turns, almost losing his footing as he does so. He shields his eyes briefly with the back of his hand and then smiles and waves.

The car pulls up to the left of the hotel, just visible in shot. Nathan weaves his way from the hotel entrance, down the pavement, and then gets to the passenger door of the car. Alix watches him as he goes to open the door and then he stops and stares at the driver, appears to change his mind about getting in the car, but turns back, maybe as the driver says something to him, and a moment later he climbs in. Then the car slowly pulls away, and the street is cast in darkness once more.

‘Recognise the car?’ asks Astrid.

Alix shakes her head. ‘Can we rewind a little bit, to just as it arrives? There,’ she says. ‘Pause it just there.’

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