His hand squeezed her throat, tighter, choking her. She felt his fingertips digging into her neck, his thumb pressed against her windpipe.
Was this what had happened to Ruby? Dottie felt a desperate urge to breathe, but she couldn’t. The room was getting darker around the edges.
She stamped down on his foot, as hard as she could. Her heel dug into the leather shoe, felt between the toes. She pushed harder.
He let go of her and leapt backwards with a cry. She turned, but he hit her, hard, a backhand swipe across herface. She felt an explosion of pain, and a gush of warm blood – her nose broken, but at least his hands were gone from around her neck.
She backed away into the toilet cubicle and pushed the door closed, bolting the lock.
He had her bag, and she heard the contents clatter out, into the sink. Everything she owned, along with his wallet. Dottie hoped he’d be satisfied, having got what he’d come for.
The outer door banged, and then it was quiet.
*
Dottie staggered through the crowd. People were staring at her and backing away, but she didn’t care. The band music stopped, as a door opened in front of her, the doorman giving her a quizzical look, but keeping his distance.
The phones in the lobby were all in use. She caught sight of him, shrugging his coat on as he hurried down the steps, heading out.
He knew.
She followed him out, torn between wanting to follow him and needing to keep her distance.
The road was busy with evening traffic, but she couldn’t wait, so she rushed out into the first gap she saw, trusting the driver would see her in time. She got a blare of a horn, but made it across.
*
Margaret stood in the hotel lobby, watching through the revolving door as the young woman staggered across the road. She’d been undecided – wanted to get out, get some air, but had lacked a destination. Then the man with thered hair had pushed past her, and now came the young woman in the red dress, blood streaming down her face, following him out.
Margaret was curious. For all her confidence when she’d laid out the hypothetical story to Bunny – all that guff about stealing pearls from defenceless aristocrats, it turned out she really did want to know what the man was up to. Some kind of confidence trick, no doubt. She would have been content to let him run his game – who was she to judge? – but now she felt a certain connection with the young woman.
*
By the time Dottie got to the other side of Piccadilly, the man was gone, swallowed up by the blackout.
Both of the telephone boxes in Albemarle Street were vacant and Dottie yanked open the door to the first one. She fumbled in her handbag for her purse, but it was gone. He must have taken it.
There was one thing he hadn’t got, though. She pulled his calling card from her bra. Dialled the number. It would ring, and she’d get a few words out before the pips cut her off. It would be enough to warn them he was on his way.
72
‘She’s not here,’ Cook said.
‘Maybe he did her in, dumped the body,’ Reynolds said.
‘She wrote that postcard,’ Cook said.
‘Could have got her to write it, then done her in,’ Reynolds said, looking at the gas mask.
‘We can wait for him. If he’s at the hotel now, he’ll come back at some point. Then we can have a word. Just us, and him.’
Far off in the house, the phone rang. A loud, jarring sound. Loud enough to be heard clearly in the bedroom, the sound echoing up from the console table in the front hall.
Cook and Reynolds stood in the bedroom, listening. It rang, again and again. Cook counted. Ten ... Eleven ... Twelve ... yet still it rang. Cook didn’t use the phone often. He didn’t have a good sense for how long someone would let it ring. Ten felt right. He walked to the top of the stairs. It would stop, he thought, solving his dilemma.
But it didn’t stop.
Cook jogged down the stairs, third floor to second floor. The phone kept ringing.
