Whatever Happened to Harold Absalon? Read online

  Marguerite would only take the lift if the receptionist remained on the phone once the lift had returned to ground. Were the receptionist to have finished on the phone before the lift returned to ground, then Marguerite would take the stairs since, in this latter scenario, he risked being apprehended by the receptionist if he continued waiting for the lift. What prevented him from taking the stairs straight away? Taking the stairs would have meant that he would have been unable to observe which floor Isobel Absalon had travelled to. Given that he wanted to observe this, he continued to wait in front of the lift, glancing at the numerals as they illuminated in turn, the receptionist continuing to murmur behind and to one side of him.

  But he also risked something in his waiting to decide whether to take the lift or the stairs: if he was going to use the end of the receptionist’s telephone conversation as the starting point for running up the stairs, then he would need to concentrate more intently on the sounds coming from the reception desk – he needed to be able to hear the sound of the receiver being replaced in the cradle (if that is what it was called) of the phone, perhaps with a click, and then that would be his pistol shot and he would be off. But it would be a very quiet start, and it might allow the receptionist to have a head start on him, a head start which, high heels or no high heels, could prove crucial in her apprehending him. And those high heels could easily (presumably) be flicked off under the desk towards the end of the call, assuming that they were high heels and that they had not already been flicked off under the desk for comfort, say, or through force of habit, meaning that she would also have that relative advantage, namely stockinged feet compared to high heels in or on which to pursue him.

  Partly it would depend on how the receptionist ended the call. Some people (especially some women) ended calls with ‘Yes . . . thank you . . . thank you . . . OK, thank you . . . sure . . . sure . . . OK . . . yes . . . thanks . . . bye . . . bye . . . bye . . . ’, which was a countdown to a starting pistol if ever he’d heard one, a ‘Take your marks . . . set . . .’ (but in different language). Others were more abrupt in their partings, especially, perhaps, in the more professional environment that he assumed himself to be in, whether they were men or women. But who was to say that the call was a professional call relating to the smooth running of the hotel, or whether the receptionist had received a personal call on this occasion?

  The call was continuing, the number five had just lit up above the lift doors and Marguerite appeared to have plenty of time to really explore what it meant for his investigations that Isobel Absalon, the wife of the missing transport advisor, continued to move up the lift shaft of that hotel in that particular part of that particular city.

  4

  Marguerite reached out and pressed the button beside the lift door. One could tell so much from the presence of this button, he reflected, whilst listening for movement from the desk behind him. What this button conveyed to Marguerite, at least, was that there was only one direction that the lift could travel in: upwards. He did not know if there were lifts that travelled in other directions (aside, of course, from downwards): left, right, or any of the other (would they be called cardinal?) directions in between. By some fortuitous combination of factors, including the effects of gravity (or, possibly, primarily due to the effects of gravity), there was no need to even look into the possibility that Isobel Absalon had travelled diagonally up or down the building. There was a lift shaft and, crudely, a series of pulleys that dragged the moveable room up and down that shaft. The situation would have been very strange indeed for it to have been otherwise; he couldn’t rule it out completely, however: Harold Absalon might have been a spy – he had, after all, worked in government, albeit local government; Marguerite knew that the era of the Soviets had long passed, but he also knew that spies still existed and that, by their very nature, one didn’t know who was a spy and who wasn’t (on the whole). This could have been an intelligence HQ, then, as it would probably be called, just masquerading as a hotel – he couldn’t rule it out completely. If that were the case then any number of almost unimaginable things could have happened to the lift once the doors had closed on Isobel Absalon that afternoon. And that was why he must just hold his nerve, as it is known, keep tailing her and continue his investigation, even though he could sense the receptionist’s telephone conversation slowly coming to a close and what he took to be the crackle of what’s known as a walkie-talkie behind and to one side of him.

  But how could he be sure that Isobel Absalon was still in the lift, he now wondered? He judged that the lift had not stopped by the fact that each subsequent number continued to light up for about the same amount of time as the preceding one and that this amount of time was not inconsistent with the amount of time he had observed other lift lights to be illuminated when the lift was still ascending rather than being more or less stationary. He had, in short, been in lifts before and had noted the duration of each numeral’s illumination when the lift was travelling upwards or downwards. He hadn’t realised it until that moment, but he had internalised this study so that, now that he was watching the lights above the outer lift door on the ground floor of the hotel, he could judge that the lift had not stopped in its ascent of the building, even though each illuminated number stayed illuminated for a period before moving on to the next.

  But what if Isobel Absalon had entered the lift and immediately exited it, Marguerite wondered, as he watched the lift indicator move through seven? He had watched her enter the lift with her pushchair as he was entering the hotel and could not tell whether there had been another set of doors on the rear wall of the lift. He could not, therefore, conclusively rule out the possibility that she had entered the lift and immediately exited it, ie had remained on the ground floor without ascending the floors as indicated above the front outer door of the lift.

  On reflection, the combination of two points in particular made it unlikely, if not impossible, that Isobel Absalon would have entered and immediately exited the lift on the ground floor. The first point was that there had been insufficient time for Isobel Absalon to have exited before the lift had started to ascend. The reason that Marguerite judged there to have been insufficient time was that he had entered the hotel just as Isobel Absalon was entering the lift with the pushchair. He had managed to get to the lift doors just as they were closing. He thought it unlikely that Isobel Absalon would enter and immediately exit the lift, ie before the doors had fully closed, thereby blowing her cover, as it is known, and, given he’d heard the lift moving immediately after the doors had closed, he judged it unlikely that she had immediately exited the lift in the way described. Besides, he had been monitoring the situation from the start with the aid of the numerical indicator, and the ‘G’ had not remained illuminated for long enough to enable Isobel Absalon to effect an immediate exit, assuming for the time being that the indicator was reliable. Secondly, Marguerite thought it unlikely, now, that Isobel or Harold Absalon (or both) worked for the secret services and that this was an intelligence HQ of some sort where the numbers above the lift doors did not correspond (give or take – never precisely, of course) with the motion (upwards or downwards) of the lift or with those moments when the lift was stationary; or where the lift, or its occupants, could travel in a diagonal, traverse or (what were the other options? – he would look into them) other direction when the numbers simply continued to ascend in a reasonably orderly fashion. He thought it even more unlikely that Isobel Absalon had unwittingly stumbled into an intelligence HQ masquerading as a hotel, where the illuminated floor indicator did not tally with the lift itself, or where the lift itself could travel in all sorts of directions, ie not just up and down. He therefore concluded that Isobel Absalon was very, very likely still to be in the lift and that she was still moving counter-gravitationally with the lift through that core of the building that was called the lift shaft.

  5

  Glancing at the floor numbers above the lift doors, Marguerite was shocke
d to see that he had missed the number at which Isobel Absalon had disembarked. The number illuminated was consistently lower now than the previously illuminated number, whereas previously it had been consistently higher. She must have disembarked, he thought; at least she was very likely to have done so, given the fact that the lift was now descending. How could an agent of his calibre have slipped up in this way, he wondered? Had he become distracted by the soft voice and scent of the receptionist at the desk behind him? It couldn’t be ruled out. Fortunately, he was able to reapply his fine mind to the problem and he came to the following satisfying and surprisingly rapid conclusion. The last time he had noticed the lift indicator it had been at floor seven. It had gone past floor seven – he had also noticed that. He had not noticed at that time that the top floor was floor eight – that was where the numbers ended, at least. He concluded that that was where Isobel Absalon had alighted from the lift. Unsure that the receptionist would remain on the telephone until the lift had returned to the ground floor, he moved past the lift and through the door to the stairwell.

  As he started up the stairs, he wondered why stair lifts did not have floor indicators. Was it because they would only generally traverse one flight of stairs (and notice here that this particular lift does move diagonally, and that such lifts were not generally located in some secret service establishment, but were lifts that mainly old people would have in their homes and care homes, lifts which were used when the primary mode of transportation – walking, with the legs as the primary or (for most) the sole means of locomotion – had stopped functioning sufficiently well to carry them upstairs)? If it was because they generally only traversed one flight of stairs then it (ie the lack of a lift indicator) could be to do with the fact that when the legs gave out and wouldn’t propel one upstairs any longer – as was the case, he thought, with most users of stair lifts – then one would typically have some sort of attendant to look over one, especially when one was undertaking certain manoeuvres such as going upstairs. One would generally have an attendant, he thought, who would know where one was, who would stand at the bottom of the flight of stairs or on the landing, as it was called, and simply watch one ascend or descend. So there would be no need for an indicator in this instance. One person would know where one was at any time.

  He had used the word attendant quite loosely, but it would serve his purpose, he thought. The attendant could, for instance, be the old person’s wife (if he were a man) or husband (if she were a woman) (and notice the shift in the third-person pronoun as the examples shift gender); the wife, or husband, would be very likely to be old folks themselves; this would mean that they would be more likely, in Marguerite’s view, to use the stair lift themselves, when it was finished with; in that case they would attend to their husband (or wife) as they ascended (or descended) (and there is no correlation between male spouse and ascension and female spouse and descension) and then would be attended to in turn by husband or wife as they themselves used the lift to ascend or descend. It is clear, in this case, that no indicator is required – they would simply be able to see the lift itself ascending or descending provided their eyesight was good enough, just as in the case of a glass lift (which implies also a glass lift shaft or a glass façade to the lift shaft).

  If someone were trying to find a relation, say, in this case then they could either: a) look at the stair lift itself to see if it contained the person they were looking for (their husband or wife, mother or father, grandfather or grandmother would be the main dyads); or, b) if they couldn’t see the person in the stair lift, perhaps because it had gone around a corner, they could ask the attendant where the person they were looking for was located. In the case where the attendant was the spouse of the person in the stair lift, not only would they ask where the person they were looking for was located but they may also exchange a few pleasantries, as they are known, with the so-called attendant, or more pleasantries (quantity, not quality) than if they were a mere attendant (and Marguerite did have the utmost respect for the ‘mere’ attendant – he didn’t want to denigrate them in any way). They would exchange pleasantries for longer (shall we say) in the former case than in the latter, ie the case where the attendant were the spouse of the person in the stair lift (and the words chair lift also entered Marguerite’s consciousness now, with the glistening white plains of snow fields, and he remembered that Isobel and Harold Absalon had been on a skiing holiday together before their child was born, a holiday that hadn’t gone altogether smoothly, shall we say). This would be because they would be related to that person, and it is a law of nature that we take more interest in the well being of our blood relations than we do of others3. It is a law of nature, but that doesn’t mean that it is always true. Never mind that for now.

  Marguerite could hear knives and forks on plates, and spoons on bowls, as soon as he rather breathlessly opened the door at the top of the stairwell, that is, on the eighth floor. He realised with contentment that there was a more or less direct correlation between spoon and bowl, at least between dessert/soup spoon and bowl, and teaspoon and cup/mug, or sometimes (in the case of a latte in a tall glass with a handle) glass. He took delight in this correspondence. The reason for it was simple enough – bowls and cups generally contained foodstuffs that tended more to liquid than to solid form and the spoon was the item of cutlery par excellence for transferring such foodstuffs between receptacle and mouth. The fork could be used for the dessert – there was no denying that. All he was asserting in this particular analytical flourish was that the spoon and the bowl (or, more specifically, the dessert spoon and the dessert bowl, or the soup spoon and the soup bowl, or the teaspoon and tea/coffee cup) went together, were natural partners; it was another argument altogether to say that the dessert spoon always went with dessert, or that the knife and fork always went with the main course. Only a rhetorician of the very lowest orders would bring forward such a proposition.

  On moving through the doorway, an attendant of a very different kind to that cited in the stair lift situation immediately approached him. ‘And what can we do for you, my friend?’ he asked sarcastically. Marguerite simply smiled and looked past him at the tables of diners in the bright restaurant. He spotted Isobel Absalon sitting with a female friend at one of the tables, the pushchair, which contained a very young child, to one side of them. The friend, in fact, had her arm around Isobel Absalon, who was smiling painfully. Satisfied, for now, with this observation, Marguerite allowed himself to be escorted by the attendant towards the lift, knowing that he could continue his surveillance of Isobel Absalon, her friend, and what he took to be Isobel and Harold Absalon’s child, from outside the hotel.

  3. It was, perhaps, an issue of trust. If your background was so different, how could others know that you shared the same, or similar, values? How could you know that your thinking overlapped, as it were, with theirs? So that was what struck me about him, that he could lord it over the others, even though they were not of his kith and kin. I admired him for it. And I immediately wanted what he wanted.

  6

  Marguerite found himself on his hands and knees on the pavement just outside the lobby. Getting to his feet, as it is known, he realised that he needed to look around the hotel to check whether there were any other means of entry or escape. In other words, he needed to ‘case the joint’; he had heard this term during his training and thought it appropriate here. What he wanted to ensure was that there was no way that Isobel Absalon could exit the hotel without him knowing. The reason he didn’t want her to exit the hotel without him knowing was because he thought that she would inexorably (or not, thereby covering all eventualities) lead him to Harold Absalon – how could she not? It was too hot a trail to turn down, in other words. He would, then, have to ensure that, given that this hotel was not a secret service establishment of some sort, or even an HQ, there was no other way for her to escape his pursuit. He would look for other routes out of the building to ensure that if he st
ood at the appropriate vantage point he would see her, providing of course that at least one of his eyes was open, that he was looking in the right direction and that he had sufficient mental faculties to recognise her and to register the fact that she was leaving the hotel at that moment.

  The hotel building adjoined another building to the south; a narrow side road wound around it to the north. This did not mean that one could define the hotel as ‘semi-detached’ – that term only applied to dwellings, as far as he knew. What it meant, quite simply, was that, as long as the adjoining building did not provide a means of escape from the hotel via, say, a corridor through the wall that connected the two buildings, then he could concentrate his efforts on the façades of the hotel, that is to say, the western façade containing the main entry and exit point from which he had just been ejected, the northern façade fronting the side road that wound its way around the hotel, and the eastern façade at the rear of the hotel. Noting that there was a colonnaded church across from, and with a clear view of, the hotel entrance, he made his way towards the side road to investigate possible exit routes from the side and rear façades.

  As he walked along the pavement closest to the hotel, he reflected that in so many cases that he, at least, had noted, planners of the modern city tried not to leave narrow gaps between buildings but preferred, instead, for buildings that were sufficiently close to each other to share a wall, as in the current case. This was perhaps to do with the fact that such gaps, rather than being called gaps, were called, in fact, alleyways, and bred (or could breed) unlawful activities which, in the absence of talented law enforcement officers such as himself, could become rife. The reason they bred (or could breed) unlawful activities was quite simple – it was because these alleyways were not generally overlooked. The current situation was a case in point: if there had been a gap between the two buildings, a so-called alleyway, then it would have made his job of surveillance close to impossible. To survey a scene, as he was just about to do (he was still casing the joint, remember, the traditional precursor to a covert surveillance operation), one needed not to be seen oneself; at least, one needed not to be seen to be conducting surveillance. People’s behaviour almost always changed if they knew they were being watched. And you didn’t want people’s actions to be changed by the act of surveying. The reason that you wanted people to act naturally in this situation was that you wanted your surveillance, or more specifically the notes or other records, and memories, of your surveillance, to be capable of standing up in court – that was how it was put. If they, that is, your notes, records etc, could not stand up in court, then there was no point in making them, except, perhaps, to satisfy your own personal interest or curiosity, or to confirm (or otherwise) something in your own mind without wanting to convince others of that fact. In a surveillance operation that one was conducting as a means of convincing a jury or judge or both of the guilt or innocence of a suspect, say, or to provide other evidence in that court of law leading directly or indirectly to a conviction, then it was important that the suspect (or other person under surveillance) did not know that they were under surveillance. The reason for this, to summarise, was that if the person under surveillance knew that they were under surveillance then they may change their behaviour – they may refrain from undertaking the unlawful act that they had intended, an act that they would otherwise have performed quite happily, perhaps.