Chapter Twenty-two

TWO DAYS SINCE HE’D GONE, and to the men and women of the Winter Holler Company, it felt like an epoch had passed.

Was it really only two nights since Ansel Albrecht had been found there, at the foot of the guest stairs? Now there was no sign of him ever having been here. No stain on the carpets. No impression in the thick pile. No plaque nor monument to say that here was extinguished one of the best of them. By mid-week, the company would be back dancing in the Grand Ballroom, marching their imperious tangos as if a little piece of them hadn’t been carved away. The dances had to go on.

What was it Maynard sometimes said? The world keeps turning .?.?.

Jonas Holler and Karina Kainz were clasping hands as they lingered at the foot of the stairs. Not a soul had seen them holding one another outside the ballroom in all the days the company had been at the Buckingham, but in the last two days Frank had seen their hands entwined wherever they walked. It was tragedy that brought it out of them – and now, as Frank followed them from the foot of the stairs and into the Grand Ballroom, he saw the way she rested against his shoulder, and wondered that two people could ever be as entwined, heart, body and soul. The good and the bad, the dark and the light, swirling all around him.

He hadn’t realised how much he’d miss Ansel. He’d gone to bed last night, at the Brogan house, with the emotion of it rising up through his gorge. In the end, he’d had to cram his face into the pillow, for fear of upsetting the smaller children sleeping on the other side of the wall.

He longed for the taste of cherry brandy.

He wanted to jive with Ansel, as absurd as it sounded.

Rosa had been so kind. He was going to her later, just to drink tea and eat scones, to sit together in perfect silence. He’d feel better after that; he was certain of it. It was like Jonas and Karina: the grief of it only made the love so much more acute. But first, there was the Grand.

The Winter Holler Company were gathered on the dance floor. Ordinarily the ballroom saw no life on a Sunday afternoon – and yet, here they all were, gathered together while Maximilian Schank took to the stage. Up there, Archie Adams’s grand piano was draped in a dust sheet that put Frank in mind of a funeral shroud. He had to try hard not to be thrown back to the memory of his father’s funeral, a few short years ago – and this was made an even more difficult task when he saw Nancy standing there, with Raymond and the other dancers from the Buckingham troupe. They’d had to carry the show last night. Frank had seen the gravity of it in Raymond’s eyes: the grit, the determination, the honour he took in putting on a good show while, all around him, the world was giving in to grief and desolation. The lords and ladies had left the Buckingham ballroom without any hint of the tragedy that had befallen the dancers only hours before, and that was a testament to Raymond’s courage.

Frank only wished he had a little courage of his own.

He sat in the corner, away from the balustrade where the real dancers were gathered, and listened.

‘My friends,’ Schank began. ‘My dear, dear friends. There is nothing I can say today that will take away the feelings that have set upon us since the tragedy of two nights past. I cannot wave a wand to dispel the heartbreak we are all feeling. Dancing does not bring back the dead. Ansel Albrecht was a young man of the greatest promise. I had known his mother many years, when she came to me and told me her son was a dancer. His father, of course, wanted a different life for him – to follow in his own footsteps, and join the police force in Vienna. But Ansel had inherited his mother’s flair, her passion and love. The dreams of generations were in that boy – not just for his family, who now grieve and will grieve for evermore, but for each of us here. One day, Ansel would, I feel certain, have led this troupe. Now, instead, we must say goodbye to our friend. Mr Charles has made arrangements for his body to be repatriated to the parents who adored him. And, in the emptiness of the ever after, we must dance on, with Ansel in our hearts .?.?.’

There were tears on the dance floor – and, although Schank had not yet finished his eulogy, Frank heard no more. His world, too, had become occluded by tears.

Soon he felt a hand on his shoulder. A little part of him thought it must be Nancy, come to comfort him – but when Frank looked up, it was to see the round, jowly face of Mr Charles looking down at him. The hotel director was down on his haunches and said, softly, ‘I think a day off might be in order, young Nettleton.’

‘I’m all right, sir. I wouldn’t want to let the hotel down.’

‘Then take the time, Frank. This hotel needs you well.’

He was quite certain it wasn’t true, but the kindness of it made Frank feel even weaker.

‘Thank you, M-Mr Charles,’ he stuttered, and took off for the ballroom doors, up towards the reception hall.

He was only halfway there when Nancy caught up with him. Her scent, of blackberries and childhood, enveloped him. She put an arm around him.

‘Oh, Nance,’ he sniffed.

‘It’s all right, Frank. It’s all right.’

Surely Nancy was remembering, too, the days after their father passed on – and how, in all of the chaos of the funeral and their landlord looming, all they had had was each other.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s have a nice pot of tea.’

*

Ruth and Rosa were already in the kitchenette when Nancy led Frank through. Rosa sat with him in the raggedy armchair while Nancy brewed the tea.

‘He wouldn’t have wanted you to cry, Frank.’

Rosa had said it to him before, and he knew it was true, but it did so little to quell these feelings. He had to concentrate just to get on top of them. And the more he recollected the kindness in Maynard Charles’s weathered face, the more the tears threatened to come. How was it that kindness could undo you, just the same as grief?

After a little time, as the other girls in the kitchenette settled in their own corners, playing backgammon or embroidering, Rosa turned to Nancy and said, ‘We have to snap him out of it, Nance. Get him out of here. Take him .?.?. dancing?’

It was the furthest thing from Frank’s mind.

‘I don’t think I can dance.’

‘Not now, Frankie, but .?.?. later this week? Next weekend? We could go back to the Starlight Lounge. You could get Billy, if he dares. Ruth’ll promise to be kind to him this time, won’t you? Maybe she’ll even give him a dance too?’

Ruth, frowning as she leafed through one of the London newspapers, looked up and said, ‘Maybe. If it’ll cheer Frank up.’ She paused. ‘Oh Frank, I’m so sorry.’

Frank nodded. Nancy had brought him a tea tray with a cup and saucer, and half a scone sitting alongside it. She’d brought him some crystallised lemon pieces too. He popped them in his mouth, one after another.

‘I’ve never known a business like it,’ said Ruth, with a sigh.

Frank smiled wanly at her, through a mouth full of crystallised lemon.

‘It doesn’t make sense,’ he said, ‘for a person to be there one minute and gone the next.’

‘The thing I don’t understand,’ Ruth went on, softly, ‘is why your friend Ansel was there at all.’ She lifted the newspaper, flicked through some of the pages, and turned it round to display a poster advertisement for the cinema on Leicester Square. In big white letters across a picture of two figures looming over a bedridden third were the words THE LADY VANISHES. ‘It’s like in these Hitchcock pictures – there’s something that doesn’t make sense about the whole thing.’

‘Oh, Ruth, leave it alone,’ said Rosa. ‘It’s bad enough without us poring over it.’

Ruth flushed crimson. ‘I’m sorry, Frank, I didn’t mean to—’

But Ruth’s words had sparked something in Frank. He swallowed the last of his lemon pieces, lifted himself in his seat and said, ‘No, Ruth, go on.’

‘Well, it’s just .?.?. Lord, you girls will call me a fusspot again, but I’m not meaning to be. I just don’t understand why Ansel would have been coming down the guest stairs. We all know the Winter Hollers are in the staff suites. Suites, they call them, as if they’re anything more than the rooms not good enough for guests to sleep in! So what was Ansel doing, that he took a tumble down the guest stairs? It just doesn’t make sense.’

For a time, there was silence in the kitchenette. Then Rosa said, ‘Ruth, you’ve got your head in the clouds again. You’re incorrigible. Riling up my Frank like that!’

‘Nancy?’ Frank breathed.

Nancy had a faraway look in her eyes. She perched on the arm of Frank’s chair and said, ‘I wonder .?.?.’

‘Oh, not you too!’ Rosa exploded. ‘Can’t we talk about something else? Somebody died. It’s dreadful and it’s sad. It’s not a blooming Hitchcock picture!’

‘He wasn’t dancing that night,’ said Frank. ‘Mr Schank makes him take time off, so his body’s at its best. He was going to meet me in the studio – we were going to rehearse something, Nance, for the wedding day. He ought to have been down in the studio, waiting for me.’

‘Maybe he’d gone for a rest first?’ Nancy suggested.

‘Up the guest stairs?’ asked Ruth.

‘When I saw him that morning, he was off to write a letter to his family. The last letter they’ll ever get, I should think. There was something important he wanted to tell his father.’

‘Well, oughtn’t he to have been in his rooms, then?’ asked Rosa, and immediately clasped her hands over her mouth. She hadn’t meant to join in.

Ruth’s face was starting to pale again, now that the others could see it too.

‘That’s all I meant. If he was up in his own rooms, he wouldn’t have been coming down the guest staircase at all. He’d have been on the service stairs. Or he’d have hopped in the service lift. That’s what I’d have done.’

‘She’s right,’ breathed Frank. Then, letting his cup and saucer fall at his side, he repeated the same: ‘She’s right. Ansel oughtn’t to have been there at all. And if he oughtn’t to have been there, he oughtn’t to have died.’

‘The question is,’ said Ruth, ‘what could Ansel Albrecht have been doing up the guest stairs? Maybe he got lost?’

Frank was still. He turned on his heels, his eyes agog.

‘I don’t know,’ he uttered, ‘but maybe there’s a way to find out.’

*

Down in the post room, Billy was bored.

He supposed it wasn’t the right thing to be feeling, not with everything that had happened to poor Ansel. Billy had shed tears of his own. Not that he’d ever tell anybody, because he was more courageous than that. But Ansel had been a good friend. He’d tried so hard to make Billy see the simple rudiments of dance. And, when that hadn’t worked, he’d uncorked his bottle of cherry liqueur and shown him a different way. Billy would never forget that.

It had hit Frank harder. Billy had seen them together and he’d known, from the start, the kind of friends they would become. Inseparable, Billy had thought, if they’d been given enough time. Sometimes, people just hit it off.

Well, if Billy ever needed any other excuse to become good at dancing – and he hadn’t given up on dancing with Ruth, perhaps even at Nancy’s wedding – here it was. He’d learn to waltz. He’d learn to jitterbug and jive. He’d do it all in memory of Ansel Albrecht.

If only his feet would do what he asked of them .?.?.

But none of this, no matter how much it cartwheeled and cascaded through his mind, could separate him from the boredom of an out of hours post room. At least, as a concierge, there had always been something with which to occupy his mind. Being a concierge meant looking outwards, broadening his knowledge of the hotel, of Mayfair, of London. But being stuck in a post room, sifting letters from one pile to another, filling sacks and readdressing letters for onward delivery, according to the instructions set down in Mrs Farrier’s book? He was above this. He was a social climber. And right now it felt as if he was at the bottom of a ravine.

He was quite certain that this was how Mrs Farrier wanted him to feel. The look on her face when he’d first turned up for duties was quite incredible. You would have thought him a hired killer, stealing upon her in the night.

‘I’ve been here since the turn of the century, young man, and not once in all that time have I needed an assistant.’

She’d spat the word as if it was some unholy curse, but it hadn’t done any good.

‘Orders from Mr Charles, madam,’ Billy had explained, forcing a smile.

It was that smile, he later realised, that had turned Mrs Farrier’s irritation to righteous fury. There and then she’d given him the responsibility of working the weekends, taking letters and packages from the guests and organising them for the pick-up on Monday morning.

‘And don’t forget, the privacy of our guests is sacrosanct, Mr Brogan. Disrespect it, and the devil’s at your door!’

If only the devil was at the door, thought Billy. At least then he’d have had some company. Six hours he’d been on shift in this subterranean hole, and not a soul had he seen. He’d have gladly made a cup of tea for the devil, if only he’d turned up.

There came a knock at the door.

Better the devil you know, thought Billy – but, when he tramped across the dusty post room floor and opened the door, it wasn’t a demon he saw at all. It was only Frank.

The poor bugger had been crying again.

‘Get in here, Frank,’ said Billy, and draped an arm around him as he bustled him inside.

As soon as the door was slammed shut, he said, ‘I’m glad you got here, Frank. I’m going out of my mind. Look, I’ve got a bottle of something. We can have a quick taste. Just something to raise a toast by. And maybe another to get this day finished. I shouldn’t have been sent down here.’

‘No,’ said Frank, ‘but I’m glad you are. Listen, Billy, there’s something Ruth said. No, not about you!’ He had seen the look on Billy’s face. ‘Something about Ansel. About why he was on the guest stairs, when he’d no reason to be there at all. And it made me think. That day, he couldn’t dance with me, not until the evening, because he was writing a letter. A letter to his father. Wanted to tell him something important. And I thought .?.?.’

Billy’s eyes mirrored Frank’s: each of them, widening in understanding.

‘It’d be here somewhere,’ said Billy. ‘The Royal Mail doesn’t pick up on a weekend. Next pick-up isn’t until tomorrow morning.’

They turned to survey the grey room. The cubbyhole was lined with filing cabinets, crammed full of all the ledgers and records Mrs Farrier had kept over the years. Shelves lined the walls above, filled with yet more boxes and files. And there, against the outer wall, were the seven sacks of letters, packages and parcels bound for the Royal Mail.

‘Mrs Farrier would slaughter me,’ whispered Billy, though he felt the thrill of it too. ‘All that talk about privacy and honour – like she’s a knight of the realm.’

‘Well, she isn’t h-here until m-morning, is she?’

‘Frank, you’re starting to stutter.’

‘I’m n-nervous,’ he said.

‘Well.’ Billy reached for the half bottle of port he had stowed away. ‘Ansel himself taught us how to deal with nerves, didn’t he?’

They upended each sack in turn, sifting through the letters guests had written, the cards they’d addressed to places in London, all over the British Isles, and further afield. The Buckingham Hotel, it seemed, was the nexus of the world.

‘It’ll be a Vienna address,’ Frank had said. ‘Somewhere in Vienna. I don’t know where.’

‘Here!’ cried Billy – and, whipping one from the landslide, he began to tear it open.

Soon, his eyes were roaming over the pages – though they barely seemed to be taking it in. Frank watched as he stalled, watched as he crammed the letter back into the envelope and looked at the front:

VIENNA MANSIONS

NEW YORK CITY

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Billy muttered an oath beneath his breath.

‘My mistake. It’s not the one,’ he said. ‘Just something Miss Edgerton wrote, some letter to a friend. Put it on the desk, Frank. I’ll have to stitch it up, send it on, or Mrs Farrier will have me for breakfast. If she thinks, for even a second, we’ve been rooting through these bags .?.?.’

‘Got it,’ gasped Frank. Rearing up from the pile of letters, he fell back on to the threadbare carpet. ‘This is it. I know it is.’

Billy snatched the envelope, turned it around. The address on the front wasJOSEF-HASSE GASSE 12, KAISEREBERSDORF, VIENNA. And the name on the front: HERR DAVID ALbrECHT. He gently returned it to Frank’s hands.

‘Are you sure about this?’

‘We have to know, Billy. For Ansel.’

He slid his finger into the envelope and opened it up.

Out slid the letter. Crisp white pages, headed with the copper crown crest of the Buckingham Hotel. He could feel the indentations the ink pen had left on the pages. The last words Ansel Albrecht had ever written.

Perhaps, Frank thought, the last he’d ever thought.

Carefully, he unfolded the letter.

It spread out below him, three leaves of paper – all of it inscribed by a spidery hand, and all of it in a language neither Frank nor Billy could understand.

‘Of course he’d have written it in his own language,’ said Frank. ‘Is it German?’

‘Austro-Bavarian,’ Billy said. Then, on seeing the way Frank looked at him, ‘He isn’t the first Viennese guest we’ve had, you know. I do pick up a thing or two along the way.’ He paused. ‘Just a pity I didn’t pick up how to speak a word of it myself. Well?’

‘We could ask Jonas,’ Frank began. ‘Or Maximilian Schank. Anyone from the company.’

‘And have them know we stole Ansel’s private letter?’ Billy recoiled. ‘Have that get back to Mrs Farrier? I think not, Frank.’

‘Then what?’ The emotion of it was making Frank’s voice tremble again. ‘How, Billy? Because I’ve got to know what’s in this letter. Who knows – maybe we’re wrong. Maybe it’s all just chit-chat about London rain and English breakfasts and Earl Grey tea. But if there’s a chance it isn’t .?.?.’

His face dropped sadly back to the letter as, in vain, he tried to make sense of words he would never understand.

‘I know!’ Billy said, flourishing upwards from the pile of parcels. ‘We don’t need to ask the company at all. We’ll ask Mr Bauer, that refugee Mr Charles has up in the Park Suite. He’s always been a kind old sort, hasn’t he? Just potters about, minding his own business. He’ll help, Frank. I’m sure of it. Why, he’s from Vienna as well.’

Billy folded his arms, as if a victory had already been secured.

‘No, Billy,’ Frank whispered. ‘Billy, we can’t .?.?.’ He scrabbled up, onto his feet, and opened the letter so that Billy, too, could peruse its pages. There, Frank traced each line – until, at last, it stopped, hovering over a single name, scored into the paper in deep, black lines.

BAUER, it said.

HERR TOBIAS BAUER.

Billy looked up. His eyes took in the ruin of the post room.

‘We have to get out of here, Frank. We have to tidy this up.’

One after another, ignoring Frank’s frozen form, he heaved the letters and packages back into the sacks from which they’d come. But Frank did nothing, only stared at the name blinking back at him from the paper.

‘Why would Ansel be writing to his father about Mr Bauer, Billy?’

‘I don’t know.’ Billy trembled. He was as white as a sheet, as cold as if he’d just seen a ghost.

‘Ansel didn’t fall at all, did he?’ Frank whispered.

Billy was silent.

‘Something else happened, didn’t it?’

‘I don’t know, Frank,’ said Billy, snapping out of it at last, forcing Frank bodily to the door and up along the corridor beyond. ‘But we have to get that letter translated. We’ll do it ourselves, if that’s what it takes. Because, whatever happened two nights ago, one thing’s for certain – the truth of it’s in here, or my name’s not Billy Brogan. Ansel’s going to tell us it all, even if he has to do it from the grave.’