A Foreign Country. Чарльз Камминг

a keycard from the pocket of her dressing-gown. ‘I have the damned thing right here, you see? But of course nowhere does it tell you the number of one’s wretched room.

      Kell had worked quickly. The reservations software was open at a welcome page on the desktop; Pierre was still logged in. With the porter attending to Barbara’s needs, he clicked ‘Current’ and was taken to a grid that gave him access to information on every guest in the hotel. The room numbers appeared in a vertical column on the left-hand side of the grid, the dates of occupancy on a horizontal line at the top of the screen. He found the matching dates for Amelia’s stay, clicked on ‘218’ and was taken to the details for her room.

      It was a measure of Kell’s self-confidence, as well as his conviction in Barbara’s ability to detain Pierre, that he took the risk of printing out a three-page summary of Amelia’s stay, including details of her room service orders, laundry bills and any phone calls she might have made from the landline in her room. He then returned to the welcome page, took the documents from a printer in the office, folded them into his back pocket and walked outside to the reception desk. There was a Magstripe Encoder beside the keyboard. Kell switched it on, followed the read-out to ‘Check-In’, typed in ‘218’, set an expiration date of six days and pressed ‘Create’. There was a small pile of white plastic cards to the right of the machine. He pushed one of them into the slot, listened as the information was written into the strip, then withdrew the card and placed it in the same pocket into which he had folded Amelia’s bill.

      By the time Pierre came back, more than five minutes later, Thomas Kell had removed almost all of the shards of glass that had fallen on to the floor in the lobby and was busy picking petals of potpourri out of the carpet.

      ‘You should not have worried about this, Monsieur Uniacke.’

      ‘I just wanted to help,’ Kell told him. ‘I’m so sorry. I feel terrible about what happened.’

      11

      The second-floor corridor was deserted. Kell walked towards Room 218 with only the hum of the hotel’s air-conditioning for company. He was suddenly extraordinarily tired; the adrenalin of duping Pierre had dissipated from his body, leaving him with the remnants of a late night and a Hackney hangover.

      He put the card key in the slot, watching as the light above the handle clicked to green, then passed into Amelia’s room, closing the door quietly behind him. As he did so, he experienced a sudden flash image of her naked body sprawled across the bed, a nightmare of violence and blood, but it passed from his mind as no more than a brief and absurd hallucination.

      The bed had been made, Amelia’s clothes and personal effects tidied away by a chambermaid. The layout of the room was identical to his own: a television facing the bed, bolted to the wall above a writing desk; a sash window with a narrow balcony looking down on to Boulevard Dubouchage. Kell went into the bathroom and made a detailed assessment of its contents. No toothbrush or toothpaste, but a plastic contact lens case and a bottle of ReNu cleaning fluid. No hairbrush, no glasses, no trace of Hermès Calèche, Amelia’s preferred perfume. She had known that she was going somewhere specific and packed accordingly.

      He looked in the wardrobe. There was a small metal safe on one of the shelves, the door closed. Ordinarily, an officer as experienced as Amelia Levene would never risk securing anything valuable behind a lock that could be opened by a concierge in under thirty seconds, but she would have gambled on zero threat from London. Kell pulled the safe away from the wall and turned it through one hundred and eighty degrees. There was a metal panel on the back with the make and serial number of the safe engraved beneath a film of dust. Kell wiped it clean and called Tech-Ops. He used the clearance code given to him by Marquand and requested a four-digit access pin for a Sentinel II safe, dictating the serial number to a sleepy technician somewhere in the bowels of Vauxhall Cross.

      ‘SMS all right for response?’ he was asked.

      Kell said that would be fine.

      Beneath the shelf was a large suitcase, but no sign of the leather carry-on bag that Amelia habitually took with her on most short-haul flights. A suit jacket and skirt were hanging in the next cupboard, but he knew of no woman who would travel to the south of France with fewer than three outfits; Amelia must have been wearing one of them and packed at least one other. He pulled the suitcase out on to the carpet and flipped it open. There were two crumpled shirts, some underwear and a pair of tights. She was using it as a temporary laundry bag. The lid of the case had a zip-up lining inside which Amelia had left a couple of paperback books, a headset, an unopened packet of cigarettes and a copy of Prospect magazine. Kell felt around the edges of the case, probing for anything that might have been concealed in the lining, but there was nothing there. He put the suitcase back in the cupboard and sat down on the bed.

      It was 2.47 a.m. Somewhere on the street outside a cat screeched. Kell thought of the Knights: Barbara in her room a few doors down the corridor; Bill on his way back to Menton. They had arranged to meet in Vieux Nice for lunch, an appointment Kell would almost certainly cancel. His work with them was done. He experienced an overwhelming desire to stretch out on the bed and to catch a few hours’ sleep, but knew that such a thing was not yet possible. He checked the drawers on either side of the bed but found only an inevitable copy of the Gideon Bible and a couple of pillow chocolates, still in their silver wrappers. He checked under the bed for a laptop, a file, a mobile phone, lifting the mattress clear of the frame, but found only lint and dust. The drawers of the desk contained writing paper, as well as a guide to Nice et Les Alpes-Maritimes and some basic information about the hotel. Apart from the safe, Kell could think of nowhere else that Amelia might plausibly have hidden anything that would throw up a clue as to her whereabouts. His only other lead was the number of a French mobile phone listed on the printout from her room. He had called Marquand’s contact at GCHQ for a trace on it five minutes after saying goodnight to Pierre in the lobby.

      ‘It might take us a few hours,’ a sprightly voice in Cheltenham had informed him. ‘Gets busy this time of night with AF/PAK waking up.’

      Kell wondered who would contact him first. Tech-Ops or GCHQ? It felt like a race to see who could be more indifferent to his circumstances. He returned to the bathroom and checked the toilet cistern as well as the pockets of two dressing-gowns hooked behind the door. On the basis that Amelia might have lifted them in order to conceal a passport or SIM card, he searched for loose tiles and areas of carpeting in both the bathroom and the bedroom. Nothing. He shook out the curtains, he tried to peer behind the television. Finally, he gave up.

      Why the hell hadn’t London called? Was it his clearance code? Tech-Ops might have rung it in, creating a dawn shitstorm for Marquand that would land both of them in trouble.

      Kell was lying on Amelia’s bed, planning to catch a few hours’ rest, when the SMS finally came through. He climbed off the bed, punched the four-digit code into the safe and heard the satisfying grind of the lock pulling out, the door swinging open on a weighted hinge.

      There was a single object inside the safe, positioned dead centre, the cat burglar’s prize. A set of car keys. An Avis sticker on the plastic casing, two remote buttons to activate a central locking system, a metal key that swung out at the push of a button.

      Kell locked the safe, put the keys in his pocket and left the room.

      12

      ‘You cannot sleep, Monsieur Uniacke?’

      Kell was grateful for the ready-made lie. He braced his hands across the counter at reception, summoned a careworn smile, and explained that insomnia had plagued him for years and that a brisk walk around the block usually cured it.

      ‘Of course. Let me get the door for you.’

      He noted the pristine carpet, cleansed of the remaining glass and potpourri, and again thanked Pierre for clearing it up as he followed him down the short flight of steps towards the entrance of the hotel. Five minutes later he was at the coded gate of his underground car park on Place Marshall, working on the