‘Think very carefully,’ I said. ‘Dodge is telling me that you saw to Chloe’s check-in. Here. Behind the bar. Four o’clock in the afternoon. You gave her one key card to her room, because that was standard procedure. All correct?’
Rob was silent for a good ten seconds, thinking. Then he said, ‘Yes.’
‘You didn’t see her again until she came down for dinner.’
Rob’s tongue unstuck from the roof of his mouth loudly. ‘I don’t think I saw her when she came down. I was in the office.Our internet was out. It was later that I saw her. She was already having dinner out the back.’
‘Did you speak to her?’
‘No.’
‘Not at all? Think carefully.’ I put my hand on a heavy glass jar, half-full of coins, that was sitting on the counter beside me.
‘No. I don’t think I did. Ireallydon’t think I did, and if anyone is saying I did, then … I-I-I was grumpy about the internet being down. And the girls in the bar were being chatty and slacking off. So, I don’t think I’d have been very talkative with the punters.’
‘So you’re telling me that you were in an agitated state last night?’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Grumpy. You used the word “grumpy”. Just now.’
‘Oh, I mean, I was annoyed. About the internet, not about … Internet out here in the valley is rubbish, it’s in and out all the time. That’s part of the reason one of the other guests is here, I think. The guy, uh—’
‘The girls. You were also annoyed at them.’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you noted that in your statement?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Your agitated state.’ I glanced at the notepad in front of him. ‘On the night of the murder. In the hours immediately preceding the murder, in fact.’
‘No.’ Rob touched the notepad. His hands were trembling hard. ‘I mean, I will, though.’
‘Yes, you will,’ I said. ‘Now.’
Rob started writing. He was left-handed, which set off a cooling energy in my chest, a thing that fanned out down my shoulders and arms: the Prick Switch threatening to flip back off. From the blood spatter on Chloe’s hotel room door, the angle of the little droplets and arcs, I was pretty sure the killer was right-handed. But I didn’t let my switch flip all the way off. The reason Rob Winter’s handwriting was so appalling might have been because he was faking the left-handedness. Anything was possible. The silence andawkwardness while I stood there and watched him write made Rob actually drip sweat onto the page in front of him. ‘I didn’t see her go back up.’
‘Why were you the one to find her?’
‘I went up there,’ Rob said, taking a tea towel from a stack on the shelf to his left and wiping his face with it. ‘Every morning I do a round of the whole property. I park and go feed the peacocks. Then I go do the lines and pumps. I unlock the office and answer any emails that have come through overnight. The internet was still down, so that didn’t take very long. Then I always do a walk-through of the accommodation hallway.’ He pointed upwards.
‘Why do you do a walk-through of the hall?’
‘Because sometimes the guests leave little surprises,’ Rob said. ‘So I want to take a look before any of the other guests wake up and find them. Nobody’s usually awake before seven, and that’s when I would have gone up. Seven-fifteen or so.’
‘What kinds of “little surprises” are you talking about?’
‘Look, it’s a hotel above a pub.’ Rob shrugged. ‘People don’t quite make it to their rooms and they vomit or piss in the hallway. A couple has a fight and the guy gets locked out by his missus and he sleeps outside her door. Once a year or so somebody has a birthday party and they book out all the rooms, and everybody gets wrecked, and somebody takes a shit in the hallway.’
‘Once a year that happens?’
‘For the past five, at least,’ the publican sighed. ‘Or they bring home weird things. I found a sheep up there once.’
‘A sheep?’
‘In the hallway, yeah,’ Rob said. ‘So, I just always go up and make sure I find the surprises before other guests do. This morning I went up and I saw the blood on the doorknob. I knocked, and she didn’t answer. That got me worried. I came back down here to get her phone number from the computer, and I called her. Nothing. I stood there at her door, calling her, knocking. I didn’t like how much blood there was, you know? Because there was a bit, the more I looked. Splattered on the door. More than she’d have if she just fell and bonked her head or something.’
