Page 55 of The White Octopus Hotel
Could he force or frighten the truth out of Anna?
The question appeared unbidden and unwelcome in his mind. But, after all, why not? He already knew that he was a violent man; he must be to have killed so many people. He was much bigger and stronger than Anna and they were alone in the room. What other options were there? He’d searched every corner of the hotel,questioned every member of staff, even found Eve herself. Yet still hadn’t found her—not really.
He turned around from the music box. Took a step closer to Anna. “Tell me the truth,” he said in a low voice. “What happened to Eve in this hotel? And why are you lying about it?”
“Maybe it isn’t me who’s lying,” Anna replied, watching him carefully. “Maybe it’s Eve. Maybe that postcard she sent you was a fiction. A ruse to bring you here. Maybe I have done nothing wrong at all.”
He felt it, then, that urge to grab her, to hurt her and scare her and break his way through to the truth, no matter the consequences.
“You’ve got it all wrong, you know,” Anna said softly. She really did look so very much like Eve. They could almost have been sisters.
“I won’t check out,” Max said. “Not until I’ve done what I came here to do.”
Anna smiled, just slightly. “Mr. Everly,” she replied, looking him right in the eye, a hint of sadness in her voice. “You won’t be checking out of the White Octopus at all.”
Behind them, the Lador music box skipped a note; “Auld Lang Syne” stuttered to a halt and was replaced with a different song—one Max knew very well because he was the one who had composed it. In fact, he’d written the song right here, when he was nineteen and recuperating in 1918, a song called “Afternight.”
He turned from Anna, walked over to the box. He’d wound it several times while he’d been here, but it had only ever played “Auld Lang Syne” before, never this tune. He looked into the small mirror at the centre, and with each turn of the doors it suddenly seemed to him that his reflection became a little older and a little older—just a trick of the eye to begin with, but then, no, it was more than that because his hair was thinning and turning white too until there was a very old man staring at him out of the glass with watery eyes. Max jerked back, stumbling into the armchair behind him.
When he looked around at the doorway, he saw that Anna had gone, so she didn’t see the birds when they came out of the music box. Sleek, and black, and glossy, a great flurry of dark wings that filled the room, and when Max put his face in his hands he could feel the icy bite of snow beneath his bare feet, and the warmth of Eve’s fingers as she reached for his on that wall, and the smoothness of the flailing white tentacles that dragged him back from the abyss so roughly that they left bruises on his skin.
Put all the devils into the music. That’s the best place for them….
The music stopped and he heard the soft click of the doors on the box closing. When he looked up, the birds were gone, and the Music Room was just as it had been before. He reached for his handkerchief, wiped away the sweat that had formed at his hairline.
Music can…it can make you feel a lot of things at once,Eve had said that day in the Fountain Room.
That was true anywhere, but Max thought it was nowhere truer than at the White Octopus Hotel. He swept his eyes around the room one final time, looking for beaks and wings and the beady eyes that never stopped watching him, but there wasn’t so much as a feather. He shouldn’t be here, he realised. He should be wherever Eve was. He went out to the corridor and walked quickly through the various reception areas, eventually finding her looking at old photographs in the Reading Room.
Today she wore a bottle-green velvet dress, belted at the waist, with nude stockings and heels. It occurred to Max then that whether she was wearing a silk evening gown or a starched nurse’s uniform, there was something effortlessly elegant about Eve Shaw. In fact, she was elegant even when she wore no clothes at all….
The memory flashed into his mind, unbidden and unwanted, of his hands gliding over her bare skin, her voice low and husky as she whispered his name in his ear.
Max…
He forced the image away, deliberately turned his attention to the walls instead, desperate for anything he might find there that could distract him from that day seventeen years ago. Sometimes, a person did not think of you the way you thought of them. Sometimes you forgot yourself for a while and entertained wild notions about happiness and love and family and home—even though you knew well enough that those simple joys were for other people and not for you.
Eve was currently looking at a photograph on the wall that had been taken of that final dinner in the Gatsby Room. Twenty-year-old Max was there, third from the right, dressed in his lieutenant’s uniform. Also at the table were the other servicemen who’d been interned with him. And, finally, there was Mrs. Jones, the matron. Everyone was there, except for Eve. Everyone was looking at the camera, except for Max. He was staring down at his plate instead, eyes fixed upon the octopus crest on the lavender-grey porcelain as his mind blazed with the memory of what had just happened in the steam baths. He remembered how, throughout the meal, he’d kept glancing at the door, hoping that Eve would appear. But, of course, she never did, and the role of fourteenth guest was assigned to Cleo.
Matron’s voice echoed down the years to him:I can’t think what’s keeping Eve.
It’s my fault,Max wanted to say.I crossed the one line I wasn’t supposed to cross….
He’d glanced at the other men, wondering if they could tell that something had happened, but all anyone wanted to speak of at that dinner was the music box and that melody that spilled from it, the most beautiful song in the world….
“There you are,” Eve said now, looking at him with the different-coloured eyes that he had always found so bewitching. She pointed at the photo. “This is the dinner you talked about, isn’t it?”
Max nodded. “That’s it.”
He turned away from the photos to look at the opposite wall. This, he saw, was occupied by a framed collection of old cigarette cards. He recognised most of them and had many of these same cards back home in his London flat. There was the Famous Escapes series from Carreras. And over there the Ships’ Figureheads from John Player & Sons. On the other wall, he saw Old Inns from Lloyds.
And beside that was the Women at War Work set from Black Cat cigarettes. He recognised the porter, the lift attendant, and the tram conductor from his own collection. Then he spotted the VAD. He’d never managed to find that card himself, although he’d searched for it. The closest he’d come was the Red Cross nurse, but he’d always hoped to find the VAD one day.
Eve joined him. “There’s one missing,” she said, pointing at the single empty square at the bottom of the frame. The label beneath read:The Angel.
Max frowned. “That’s not right,” he said. “There wasn’t an angel. There were fifty cards in this set, not fifty-one. Someone got it wrong.”
“Maybe they did. Well, shall we head to the steam baths?”
