Page 31 of The White Octopus Hotel
Eve allowed herself the smallest of smiles, pleased that he hadn’t contradicted her. What use was a compliment about her looks? She’d far rather be thought of as interesting.
“Are you taking part in the scavenger hunt?” she asked.
Max’s expression clouded. “I am not. I didn’t come here for that.”
“What did you come for then?”
“I’m looking for someone.”
Eve was about to ask who when the expression on Max’s face suddenly changed, and he stubbed his cigarette out vigorously in a nearby ashtray.
“Well, well. Don’t look now,” he said, nodding towards the corner of the room, “but our eavesdropping friend has joined us.”
Disregarding his words, Eve twisted to look over her shoulder. And for the first time she noticed the curtain, conspicuously covering one wall on the other side of the bar. A place a curtain had no right to be because there was no window there or anywhere else in the room. The material was a very dark blue, the colour of deep depths in a cold sea. Recalling what people had been saying at the party in the Sunset Room, Eve’s eyes went down to the bottom of the curtain, which stopped just shy of the floor. A pair of men’s shoes were indeed poking out from beneath it.
“This place hosted sick POWs from German camps during the war,” Max remarked suddenly, glancing at the barman before looking back at Eve. “Did you know that?”
“Yes,” she replied. “I think I did read that somewhere.”
“Most of the nurses were Swiss,” Max said, “but there was a British matron from the Red Cross, assisted by a VAD.”
“VAD?”
“Voluntary Aid Detachment.” Max looked over at the curtain again and the pair of shoes poking out from underneath. Then he leaned across the bar, looking right at the barman. “Tell me, Harry,” he said, speaking in a voice that was calm but somehow dangerous too. “Do you know what happened to the VAD who worked here?”
Harry paused in the act of polishing a glass. His eyes flicked just once towards the curtain in the corner before they darted away again.
“No, sir,” he said quietly. “I do not.”
And there it was from behind the curtain—a small, but audible, cough.
Chapter 19
Max kept his eyes fixed on the barman. “I stayed at this hotel for more than six months in 1918,” he said, “and I saw her every day.”
Harry carefully set down his empty glass. “The war is over, Mr. Everly,” he said quietly. “The nurses all left many years ago.”
Eve glanced over at the curtain again. It was impossible not to stare at those feet sticking out from beneath. The shoes looked as if they had once been smart but were now severely scuffed and scratched and wearing thin around the toes. They were completely, perfectly motionless and she might have thought there wasn’t a person behind the curtain at all if it wasn’t for the cough.
The cough, Eve recalled one of the guests saying, that signalled a lie.
“The war’s been over for seventeen years,” the barman added.
“I know when the war ended,” Max said coldly. “You were there, on the station platform that day, weren’t you? You knew her.”
The barman cleared his throat, with another anxious glance towards the curtain and those shabby shoes. “I never said that there weren’t any nurses here, Mr. Everly,” he said. “I’m only trying topoint out that it was a long time ago. The woman you’re speaking of probably returned to her family.”
“She wrote to me a week ago, asking me to meet her at the hotel. So where is she? People don’t vanish into thin air.”
Beside him, Eve winced. Peopledidvanish into thin air. That very thing was going to happen to Max himself. Perhaps she should say something, try to warn him. Harry glanced at the curtain again, then turned back to Max and shook his head.
“I don’t know.” He whispered the words, but the Eavesdropper still heard them.
There was another round of coughing from behind the curtain, much worse than before. It was like no cough that Eve had ever heard. There didn’t seem to be any relief in the act; it was just a hacking, hopeless sound that went on and on and made the hairs on the back of her arms stand up. It almost didn’t sound like a human cough at all. The remaining staff in the room had fallen silent. The only sound came from the unseen person behind the curtain, spluttering and choking in that awful, desperate manner. Eve stood up abruptly and walked straight to the curtain. A single bony finger curled around the edge of the fabric. The gesture that was rumoured to speak of a great lie. A monumental lie. But what? His skin looked grey and there was black dirt wedged beneath his nails.
Behind her, Luca cleared his throat and said, “It’s best to leave well enough alone, miss.”
She ignored him, keeping her eyes fixed on the curtain. There was something very dreadful about the cough, the shabby shoes, and the clutching finger, but she reached out and laid her hand gently against it.
