But there’s one question that comes into my mind before any other thoughts: Why is she here? She’s meant to be seventy miles away back home in East Grinstead. She was there when I spoke to her this morning. She just doesn’t belong here. It’s like seeing an old friend or work colleague in the same resort on holiday. If they’re out of context, the brain struggles for a few seconds to deal with it. Now imagine that a thousand times worse.
I blink hard and scratch my face. None of this makes any sense. When I last spoke to her she was enjoying lazing in bed on her day off. She was going to get up and watch some TV, then get on the treadmill for a couple of hours. How did she end up in my hotel room in Herne Bay? Had she come to surprise me? That really doesn’t sound like Lisa at all; she’s not a spontaneous sort of person. It wouldn’t even cross her mind. No, I know from the way she sounded when I spoke to her this morning that she had no intention of coming here. I know my wife, and she couldn’t keep a secret if her life depended on it. She even managed to tell me about the surprise birthday party she’d organised for me last year. I pretended it didn’t matter and that it was the thought that counted, but secretly I was gutted. She’s just completely incapable of keeping her mouth shut.
The mark around her neck is what’s freaking me out the most. Knowing that’s what killed her. I hover the back of my hand in front of her nose to feel for any sign of breath. There’s nothing. My hand shakes with fear, and it brushes the tip of her nose as I draw it towards me. It feels cold. She can’t have been dead more than twenty minutes – I left the room barely half an hour ago – but her nose is already cold. It’s possible she was killed before she got to the room, but how on earth would someone drag a dead body through a hotel without anyone noticing? To me, it doesn’t look like she’s been dead long at all, so I can only assume she died here, in this room.
I think back to when I returned to my room. Was the door locked? Yes, I’m sure it was. They lock automatically from the outside anyway, don’t they? I don’t think it even has an actual lock that you can operate without the key card. There wasn’t any sign that anyone had broken in. No broken windows, no damage to the door. So how did she get in here? Who brought her here? Why did she come in the first place?
The realisation suddenly hits me – far later than it should have done – that Lisa died by someone else’s hands. It sounds stupid to say it, seeing as it’s perfectly clear, but it’s something I observed rather than registered and understood. And now it’s hit me. Not only that she’s dead, but that she isn’t coming back. And someone has killed her deliberately. I can feel the tears dropping down my face, the adrenaline pulsing through my limbs. But I know I need to think clearly.
There’s no sign of what she was strangled with, so whatever was used has been taken away. By the person who did it. My wife has been murdered. In my hotel room. Seventy miles away from where she’s meant to be.
It’s like a dream; nothing makes sense and yet I can do nothing but accept that it’s all entirely true. There’s no other option. It’s here, right here in front of me, laid out as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world, yet it seems to be completely and utterly random. It feels like there’s a huge electrical charge going through my brain as it tries to comprehend what’s going on in front of me, trying to find some sort of logic in what’s happened. But it really isn’t working.
I look at Lisa’s body more closely, slumped in the bath like a discarded rag doll. Many times I’ve watched her sleeping late at night when I’ve been unable to relax, but she looks completely different now. There’s something in her hand. Her mobile phone. I pick it up, gently, trying not to come into contact with her body, and I look at the phone. The screen is on. The screen’s never on – it’s set to turn off automatically after thirty seconds. I’ve been here much longer than thirty seconds already, so she must have disabled that setting. Why? She never fiddles with the settings on her phone. She’s a complete technophobe, and she’d be terrified of breaking it. She wouldn’t even take the protective plastic stickers off the front of it for a good four months after she bought it. That all seems so pedestrian now. Now that she’s dead.
The adrenaline is still surging through me and my hands are shaking, trembling as I look at what’s on the screen. It’s a text message.
Come up to room 112. I have something I need to tell you.
My eyes rise to the top of the screen as I look to see who sent it.
It’s from me.
6
I dart into the bedroom and grab my phone from the bedside table. It’s exactly where I left it before I went down to dinner. I always leave it up here. I’m not the sort of person to sit playing on my phone in the middle of a restaurant, no matter how bad it is. It takes me a couple of attempts to unlock my phone, my fingers shaking as I jab in the four-digit pin code.
I go into my Messages app and open up the conversation thread with Lisa. We don’t really text much, so the only messages there are spread out over the past couple of weeks. The message on Lisa’s phone isn’t here on mine, though.
I go back into the bathroom and pick Lisa’s phone up off the floor, where I dropped it. I tap my name at the top. It was definitely sent from my phone number, from my phone. I look at the time the text was sent. I can’t be sure, but I reckon it was only a couple of minutes after I went down for dinner.
The only thing I can be sure of is exactly how this looks. I’m not stupid. My wife’s lying dead in my hotel room, seventy miles away from home and anyone she knows, shortly after a text was sent from my phone to tell her to come up to my room. After I’d spent a good deal of the year working away from home as our marriage slowly broke down. Oh, and I’d been screwing the receptionist.
Again, that mix of emotions flips and turns inside me. Anger, fear, paranoia, desperation. Not only has someone murdered my wife, but they’ve tried to pin it on me.
Everything’s a blur. I can’t have been back in my room a minute, if that. Two, tops. Yet my brain seems to know exactly what to do. Even though this whole situation is confusing the hell out of my conscious mind, my subconscious is right there, dealing with this quickly and instinctively.
What can I do? Call the police? There’s no way I can prove this wasn’t me. I was downstairs in the restaurant for twenty minutes, perhaps half an hour at the most. They can’t be that specific about a time of death, particularly as she will have died at most fifteen minutes apart from me either leaving the room or re-entering it.
I try to think about whether or not the hotel has CCTV. Even if it does, it’ll presumably show Lisa heading to my room, then me doing the same a few minutes later. Around the time she was killed.
The husband is the prime suspect in any murder, I know that much, and this one is going to look like a pretty open-and-shut case for even the laziest police detective.