Page 50 of The White Octopus Hotel
Eve shook her head. “I didn’t send it. I couldn’t have. I wasn’t here last week. Someone must be playing a joke on you. Besides, I don’t need any help.”
“What an idiotic statement. Everyone needs help sometimes. It’s…”
He trailed off, frowning at the lake. Eve turned to follow his gaze. Unlike yesterday, there were no pleasure boats out on the water today. In fact, there was only a single boat sailing towards the hotel, about halfway across. There were two men in it, both dressed in black coats and top hats. And lying in the body of the boat was a gleaming dark coffin, stark and incongruous against thesunshine and the blue water. Somewhere downstairs, there had been a death.
“I need to get changed.” Eve gestured at her ink-splattered clothes.
“Wait.” Max followed her to the door. “I spent six months at this hotel in 1918. I know a couple of its secret octopuses and will gladly show them to you. Only a fool would refuse to accept help freely offered, and I know you’re not one of those.”
Eve paused. What harm could it do? Anna hadn’t said anything about working alone. “All right,” she said. “Meet me in the Palm Bar for cocktail hour.”
She took the stairs and managed to slip into her room without anyone seeing her. She knew from experience that octopus ink was difficult to scrub off and it took some while in the bathroom to remove all traces from her skin and hair. Finally, though, she lay in the bath, filled almost to the brim with clean, hot water. The tattoo had returned to its rightful place on her thigh and was innocently motionless, almost as if it were a perfectly normal tattoo on a perfectly normal woman.
She lingered for longer than she’d meant to, her head full of the things Max had said and all those strange paintings hidden behind the wall. She kept thinking of that last painting in particular—the man and woman perched on the edge of the roof, those dark wings of shadow filling the sky. And the keys. Three rooms with sevens in them. Eventually, the water began to cool and Eve got out of the bath and dried herself quickly. She’d tossed her ink-stained outfit, including Max’s coat, back into the wardrobe and when she opened the door now it had all vanished, to be replaced with suitable attire for cocktail hour: a dark blue lace dress with a silk liner and sheer sleeves.
Once she’d dressed, she took the stairs to the floor below and paused outside Room 17, trying to work out whether there mightbe anyone in there. There was no sound from within and no answer when she knocked. The same was true for Room 7.
When Eve arrived at the Palm Bar there were several guests there already, elegant in their gloves and velvet as they enjoyed pre-dinner cocktails. All around, the room buzzed with talk of the scavenger hunt. There was no sign of any Eavesdropper behind the curtain tonight. She joined Max at the bar.
“I was starting to think you weren’t coming,” he said.
“It takes a while to wash away octopus ink.” She glanced over at his drink—a cloudy green concoction served in a crystal coupe and garnished with a single dark rose petal. “What’s that?”
“A Death in the Afternoon,” Max replied. “Champagne and absinthe. Seemed fitting after seeing that undertaker’s boat. I found out who it was, by the way, the person who died. It was Mrs. Roth, the resident historian. Old age, apparently. No hint of foul play, if the staff can be believed. Not a murder weapon in sight.”
Eve thought of the woman she’d had tea with just a few hours ago and felt a little flutter of sadness.
“And you don’t think the cocktail is in poor taste at all?” she asked, glancing towards Harry, who was serving someone on the other side of the bar. Mrs. Roth had been a member of his family, after all.
“What, because of the old dear?” Max shrugged. “Why should she mind? She’s the lucky one, dying peacefully in her sleep in her nineties. No one gets a better result than that.”
Eve supposed he was right, but still, she felt sorry for the remaining Roths. Losing loved ones was hard at whatever point it happened.
Harry came over to them then. “What can I get you, Miss Shaw?” he asked.
“A scotch, please.”
“On the rocks?”
She winced. “Neat. And, listen, I’m sorry to hear about Mrs. Roth.”
The barman inclined his head. “Thank you. We’ve lost too many people in our family lately; my parents both died last year. But the hotel will go on and that’s what matters most, to all of us.”
Only it won’t,Eve thought.The White Octopus Hotel will close its doors for good tomorrow. It’ll fall into ruin beyond repair. It’ll be a shell.
For a brief flicker of a moment, Eve saw the Palm Bar decaying around her. She made out the graffiti and the broken glass and the rotten furniture. Max remained beside her on the bar stool, but he was the old, old man who’d limped into her office. The man who’d died on the steps outside.
“There’s a sort of delicious temptation in it, do you not think?” Max asked now, and suddenly the Palm Bar was back to normal, all black velvet and golden palms. And Max was in his thirties again, dark eyes like magnets as he looked at her. Eve still wasn’t sure that you could call him handsome in the conventional sense, but there was something about him that drew her in. Something that made her hungry to know him better. Something that made her wish they could be normal people meeting under normal circumstances.
“A temptation in what?” she asked, lighting a cigarette of her own.
Max smiled slowly. “Well, if you’re to give up your memories of this place when you leave, then you could be as wicked as you like and wouldn’t have to burden yourself with the memory of it afterwards. No regrets. No nightmares.”
Eve shrugged. “I’d prefer to remember it all.”
I’d prefer to remember you,she added silently.
And yet…there was something a little freeing in the idea that, one way or another, none of this would matter later. Either she would forget about Max once she checked out or, if she wassuccessful, then her past would be rewritten without him in it at all. For a while, they drank and smoked in silence. The other guests were discussing the scavenger hunt and Eve heard little snippets of the conversation filtering through the hubbub.
