The Alibi Girl. C.J. Skuse

Trevor hands me a white square of cloth. ‘I’d take this in if I were you. Don’t worry, it’s clean.’

      I don’t know whether he means the handkerchief or the stiff, but in I go before I can talk myself out of it. I’m at the bathroom door when I smell her. I bundle the hanky against my nose and mouth. I’d only ever seen one dead body in my life. And it looked nothing like that. She looks asleep. Her sheets are pulled up to her chin.

      ‘Could be natural causes,’ Trevor calls out. ‘I didn’t look too hard. Heart condition perhaps?’ Even Trevor’s pungent body odour can’t mask the smell from the bed. She’s lying there, red hair all spread out on the pillow. Blue eyes open.

      ‘The dead can’t hurt me,’ I whisper. ‘The dead can’t hurt me.’

      Trevor’s still jabbering on. ‘Can you see anything? Anything obvious?’

      I momentarily lift away the hanky to answer him, then shove it straight back. ‘No.’ But when I look closer, I see that there are red spots around one of her eyes, and the white in the other one is all red. Around her neck and under her ears are fingerprint-sized bruises.

      ‘Do you know her name?’ I call out.

      ‘Tessa something,’ says Trevor. ‘She’s here for the teaching conference, so him on Reception said. Maths teacher, I think.’

      I spy Tessa’s open handbag on the chair and I know I shouldn’t but I don the rubber gloves I use for cleaning and pull out her purse. I find her driver’s licence. I slide it out. Tessa Sharpe. Twenty-eight years of age. Red hair. Blue eyes. From Bristol.

      Dread plunges in my chest like a descending elevator.

      When I come out, Trevor’s standing with his back against the wall and his arms folded. I close the door and hand him back his hanky.

      ‘Vanda found one hanging on the back of a door once,’ he sniffs. ‘She’s winning the Stiff Sweepstake, aren’t you V?’

      Vanda appears on her vertiginous heels with a toilet roll in either hand, her cart parked up against the wall, vape sticking out of her apron pocket. ‘I thought he was heavy coat. He was doing sex thing.’ She grimaces. ‘Lot of people die in hotels. Whitney Houston. Jimi Hendrix. That guy from Glee. Coco Chanel. Mainly drugs.’

      ‘I think she was murdered,’ I say.

      ‘Who, Coco Chanel?’

      ‘No, Tessa Sharpe. I think she’s been strangled.’

      There’s a pause, and then Trevor and Vanda look at each other and laugh the kind of laugh that prickles me all over. The kind of laugh that stops the moment I walk into the Staff Office most mornings. The kind of laugh that followed me down the corridors all through school.

      ‘Head in the clouds again, Genevieve,’ says Vanda. ‘So we have a murderer in the hotel now do we? Shall we call Poirot? Or that old lady with the typewriter? Or maybe Kendal Jenner? Didn’t you say you saw her working in Greggs in town? I wonder if she knows how the stiff in Room 29 died.’

      ‘I didn’t see Kendall Jenner,’ I say. ‘The woman just looked like her.’

      ‘You said it was her!’ says Vanda.

      Trevor gives it the slow blink like he’s king of all knowledge. ‘Listen, back to the matter at hand – this isn’t suspicious. There’s no forced entry, the windows were closed, she checked in alone and she was checking out alone today after the second day of the conference. Some people know when they’re gonna die and they check into a hotel to spare their loved ones. Sad but true.’

      ‘She’s been strangled,’ I repeat, more vehemently. ‘Her neck is bruised.’

      ‘What are you, a chambermaid-cum-forensic pathologist now?’ Trevor laughs in my face again.

      ‘She’s got bloodshot eyes as well,’ I say, willing Vanda’s face to soften and believe what I’m saying. They both keep looking at me. ‘I’m telling you, this is murder.’

      Vanda turns to her trolley and counts out four creamers to take them into Room 24 opposite. A couple in flip flops flip flop past the open doorway and she greets them with a pleasant ‘Good morning, have nice day’ as they make their way to the lifts. They don’t answer and she flicks a third finger at their backs. The lift doors bing and they get in. She turns to me.

      ‘And you know this because you used to work in hospital, yes?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘And you’ve seen strangled person before, yes?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Was this before or after you play hockey for England team?’

      ‘Afterwards. And I was in the youth team.’

      She snarls, reeling back from me to grab two fresh hand towels from her stack.

      ‘You must think I came in on last dinghy, darling.’ She nods briefly at Trevor, then retreats back inside 24 with a stack of fresh linen. He stands there guarding Tessa Sharpe’s closed door with his arms folded. They both think I’m lying. But there’s a difference between lying sometimes and lying about everything.

      Two suited men who look like police arrive on the next bing of the lift, flashing their IDs at Trevor before entering Tessa Sharpe’s room. In a flash, Vanda reappears and instructs me to begin cleaning the rooms on the third floor while the forensics swoop in and do their thing. I want to watch them but Vanda is adamant and when Vanda is adamant I have to fall in line, like everybody else.

      From a third floor window, I watch them wheel Tessa Sharpe’s body out to the van parked at the back of the hotel where the deliveries come in. I can’t take my eyes off the body bag. It forced me to remember the last time I saw a body bag being wheeled up the ramp of a van. I’m about to start cleaning Room 42 but before I can knock, I realise it’s now or never and I run downstairs to Floor 2 and see one of the policewomen enter the lift with a plastic bag full of Tessa Sharpe’s belongings.

      ‘Sorry, love, you’ll need to catch the next one.’

      ‘I wanted to know – it’s murder, isn’t it? The lady with the red hair.’

      ‘Well I highly doubt she strangled herself.’

      Briefly, I’m pleased I was right. But when the lift closes, panic sets in.

      I think about Tessa Sharpe my entire shift. Everything I clean or wipe is tainted with the memory of that open-eyed stare, that picture on her driver’s licence. Her red hair. This is a quiet, mundane seaside town. I’ve only been here a couple of months but the only crimes that seem to be committed are drug- or vehicle-related. The odd lawnmower stolen from a garden shed. The odd bit of shoplifting. But this is murder. And it’s too much of a coincidence that she has red hair and blue eyes. And she was my age, almost exactly. And from Bristol.

      I get my bag from the staff office and I’m on my way out again when Vanda shouts my name. Well, not my name.

      ‘Genevieve?’

      ‘Yeah?’ I turn. ‘I was just going.’

      ‘You were right about Miss Dead Woman,’ she says under hooded eyes. ‘Fair play. I take it you saw strangled person before, when you work at hospital?’

      ‘I knew someone who was strangled. I saw what it did to them.’

      Vanda says nothing, looks to my feet and back up to my eyes and then nods and I take that as my cue to leave. She probably thinks I’m lying again. I wish I was.

      The cleaning fluid smell has got into every cavity – my nostrils, my mouth, my eyes. I need fresh air more than ever. I head out through Reception and through the front door and I’m halfway across the front lawn when I hear young voices I recognise.

      ‘Mum, it’s the maid!’ says a voice and the two