The man’s body was skewed awkwardly, twisted and crumpled. Blood seeped from beneath him. A woman behind him gasped and another cried.
‘He jumped!’ someone shouted.
Lee looked up to the atrium and saw no one up there.
Then the man moved.
Lee shot back, along with those standing around him.
The poor bastard was still alive.
The sense of the surreal which had taken hold now eased and noise and life rushed back at Lee and he heard more screaming, running and phone conversations. Somebody shouted that they’d called an ambulance.
Two floors encircled the atrium, and the top one was thirty feet above their heads. The guy had hit the ground like a sack of rocks, headfirst, but he had definitely moved.
Then a gurgle left his lips, and his head shifted, just an inch, but enough for Lee to holler at everyone present to stand back.
His staff scuttled around, some being helpful, others less so. Some cried; others ran away. Humans behaved curiously in a crisis…
The bodyguards put away their weapons and stern words were given by the large Texan VIP in the cream suit. The hawk-like woman with him, the one called Tilda Dent, covered her mouth.
Lee went to grab a tablecloth to cover the man but stopped, questioning if he was contaminating the scene of a suicide. Or something else… His brain whirred and his managerial head made him indecisive. Instead, he held up the sheet to block the view of the body and as he did so, his heel backed into the man’s blood. He slipped backwards and fell over, dragging the sheet on top of him and ending up across the man’s broken body.
The man groaned and Lee desperately scrambled to his feet. But now he struggled to gain traction to get himself up because his hands were in the blood and his knees were soaked in it. It was slippery and Lee was surprised by its warmth. It felt as though the blood itself was more alive than the man.
He saw that the podcaster with the phone was still filming the whole thing and Lee tried his hardest to stand up, holding out his hands to prevent the camera closing in on his face. She continued recording even though he screamed at her to stop. The dreadfulness of the moment seemed like a slow-motion horror show and he saw faces staring at him in bewilderment.
Another member of staff threw serviettes over the blood and helped Lee up. He turned back to assess the mess. There was smeared blood all over the floor of the atrium and the lights of the water feature in the middle illuminated the sheen on the tacky red liquid draining from the man. Behind him, people continued to shout and scream and sob. But nobody did anything.
The man on the floor groaned once more, and Lee went to him.
‘Hang in there, man, an ambulance is on its way,’ he whispered to him. Lee knelt alongside him and humanity, from somewhere deep inside of him, made him hold the guy’s hand. He thought he saw him move his mouth and he leant close to see if he could make out what he was telling him.
As he got closer, the guy whispered something, though it could have been a gurgle of blood as he fought hard for breath. Lee was unsure, but he could have sworn he said something.
He looked up and into the eyes of the two VIPs with whom he’d been liaising for the duration of the conference, and months before that. One was the Texan; the other was the hard-balled woman from New York. Hank Hampton and Tilda Dent. Their bodyguards stood around them protecting them rather than checking if there was an existential danger of anyone else getting hurt. They stood over him as if demanding answers, as if it was his fault.
Funnily enough, he did feel guilty.
Their suits were clean and their cheeks rosy from the champagne cocktails. Their smug faces were framed by the lights above their heads and Lee felt as though he was being judged, as if he was part of the tragedy on the floor. They looked at him as if he was leaching blood too. As if he was a lab rat being experimented on by mad doctors. They seemed more concernedwith the mess than with the suffering of the poor sod who’d fallen.
Still, nobody helped him.
Then the man’s hand slipped out of his and Lee realised he’d stopped moving altogether.
Instinct kicked in and he fingered the man’s neck. There was no pulse at all, and the guy’s face was turning grey and his lips blue. His eyes remained wide open, and Lee reached out to close them.
He looked at the man’s name badge pinned to his yellow T-shirt, now covered in thick, oozing blood, though Lee already knew who he was. The man who’d plunged from the atrium was Jamie Robbins.
And Sandy had disappeared.
Chapter 8
Melvin Stone heard the commotion from outside the hotel, where he’d been walking the dog, and stood still, staring at the entrance, trying to decide what to do about it. Around Rydal Water, whose shores housed a cluster of homes rather than a village to speak of, blood-curdling screams of the sort more at home in a horror film were unheard of. But tonight, across the water from the ancient caves of Rydal, panic reverberated around the tiny lake which was just over a mile long and three hundred feet across. It sounded like somebody had been murdered.
Melvin stood just outside the entrance to the grand hotel, peering in through the glass doors. Acorn was tied to a bench near the pebble beach and she looked over at him patiently, wondering when she could join him. He’d left her for quite some time.
The screaming could be heard across the lake, and it bounced off the water as if they were inside some kind of modern recording studio, famous for its acoustics. Rydal was one of the most picturesque lakes in the whole of the national park. Most of the shore was National Trust property and undeveloped, which was why Melvin liked it. It was remote and untouched by human drama. Here, he could exist without fuss and investigation into his past. The still waters were not accustomed to dramatic events unfolding on her shores, apart from the odd dog barking at a floating stick, or a toddler splashing noisily in the shallow water, perhaps dropping their Marmite sandwich as they did so. But today, it would seem, was different.
