She pressed the button and heard the number dial. Two or three seconds passed and then it started ringing. After a few seconds of cheesy lounge music, an automated voice told her that an ‘associate’ would be ready to ‘grant her wishes’ shortly. More dreadful music, and then the call was answered. She’d come through to the reservations line but explained what she wanted and the associate put her through to the hotel’s front desk.
‘Mark Reilly?’ said the receptionist. ‘Please hold.’
Hannah waited, already feeling better. She’d talk to him quickly, tell him she loved him, then get back outside with her mind at rest.
‘Hello?’
‘Hi, yes.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said the receptionist, ‘but we don’t have a guest of that name staying with us currently.’
‘Oh.’ For a moment, Hannah was completely taken aback.
The silence stretched. ‘Is there anything else I can help you with today?’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but would you mind just checking again? I was sure my husband was staying with you this weekend – I spoke to him this morning.’
There was another momentary pause, the click of computer keys. ‘No, I’m sorry,’ the woman said, ‘I’m certain we don’t have a Mr Reilly here. Perhaps he’s at one of our other locations, uptown?’
‘Right, yes, of course. I’ll try them. Thanks.’
She hit ‘End’ and put the phone on the table. She could feel her heart thumping. Mark always used the branch downtown because it was closest to Wall Street, where most of DataPro’s clients were based, and anyway, there was no way he’d stay in Midtown because he hated it there, all the busyness and the tourists. But what if he’d had to? argued a different part of her brain. What if he’d tried to check back in downtown after he’d missed his flight and they’d been fully booked?
Feeling slightly more positive, she opened her laptop again and found the numbers for the other Ws. There were three of them now, at union Square, Times Square and on Lexington. One by one, working her way uptown, she called them all, but every receptionist gave her the same response: no current guest of that name.
Mark called the study his eyrie. He’d had it converted from the old loft space, and the roof sloped steeply on both sides, making it feel like a tent or a tree house. The stairs to it were steep, and its windows looked out over a landscape of chimneys and aerials and old satellite dishes to the spire of the church on Studdridge Street and the tower blocks to the south on the other side of the river. He’d kept the furniture simple: a Lloyd Loom wicker chair that he sat in to read, an antique Turkish rug and his beautiful Georgian desk with its original tooled-leather top.
She yanked open the long drawer that ran above the knee-well, trying not to think about what she was doing. Without any idea what she was looking for, she sifted through the contents: staples, pens, half a roll of Extra Strong Mints with the curl of torn wrapper still attached, a paper poppy from Remembrance Sunday, and then, in a Swan Vesta matchbox, the brittle remains of a four-leafed clover she’d found and given to him for good luck. There was his pass from Ladies’ Day at Royal Ascot in June, where he’d taken some clients on a corporate jaunt; an old cassette, Hendrix written in felt-tip pen on the label; a few Euros in coins, and an anatomically challenged blue dog made in Fimo clay by Dan and Pippa’s son Charlie, baked in the oven and given to Mark a few weeks ago by way of godson tribute.
Bending, she went through the rest of the drawers one by one. Three of them were empty, one had a cigar box full of bulldog clips and Bic biros, and another contained back issues of Prospect and the Economist. She ran her hands round the back of the drawers and into their corners but there was nothing to suggest an illicit affair, no photographs tucked away or handwritten notes, no business cards from hotels she didn’t know he’d been to. In fact, there was nothing suspicious or unsavoury at all, not so much as a furtive copy of Hot Babes. Relieved, she laughed at the idea. She couldn’t imagine Mark buying porn – much too uncouth.
The only thing that surprised her at all was that the drawer on the bottom right was empty. This, she knew, was where he kept the old box-file with his financial paperwork; he’d showed it to her a couple of weeks before they got married, ‘in case I ever get hit by a bus’. Thank God, she’d never had to open it, and she kept her own financial paperwork separately, downstairs in the sitting-room bureau, in the accordion file she’d always used.
She looked round the room but the box-file was nowhere to be seen. He must have taken it out to pay bills or move some of his savings, but where would he have put it? She hadn’t seen it round the house anywhere but that wasn’t surprising: he did all his personal accounting up here at the desk. For a few minutes the voice in her head had been mercifully silent. Now it started whispering again: Where’s the file? Why would he take it out of this room?