I waved at my friendly doorman and went back into the hotel.
I suspect that the lobbies of all the larger London hotels are busy places at eleven o’clock on Sunday mornings, and the one at the Hilton was certainly no exception. There were several lines of guests waiting at the reception desk to check-out after a big Saturday-evening event in the hotel ballroom, while a large group of brightly dressed American tourists hung around aimlessly, desperate to check in and sleep after their overnight red-eye flight across the Atlantic. And there was baggage everywhere, lined up in long snakes like dominoes waiting to be toppled.
I went over to a young woman sitting at a desk marked ‘Guest Relations’ and asked if I could please speak with the hotel’s general manager. To my eyes, she hardly looked old enough to be out of school and she instantly became defensive, asking me what I wanted him for. Perhaps she believed that anyone who wanted to talk to the manager was going to complain about something. I told her that it was a personal matter, but she still refused to pass on my request.
‘Are you sure I can’t help you?’ she asked with an irritating smile.
‘It’s rather delicate,’ I said. ‘Would you please just call the general manager.’
‘I’m sorry, sir, I can’t do that without knowing why you need him.’ She continued to smile at me in her annoying way.
OK, I thought, I had tried but with no result. Now I was getting slightly irked by her attitude. ‘Young lady,’ I said loudly and somewhat condescendingly, ‘my name is Mark Shillingford and I’m trying to discover why my beautiful twin sister fell to a violent death from one of your hotel balconies. Now, can I please talk to the general manager?’
She looked rather shocked, and, in truth, I had also somewhat surprised myself by my own determination and resolve.
‘He’s not here on Sundays,’ she said, the smile now having vanished altogether.
I sighed slightly. ‘Then I will speak to whoever is in charge of the hotel at this very moment.’
She used the telephone on the desk. ‘Someone is coming,’ she said to me, putting down the handset.
I stood and waited, looking around me. A man wearing a suit soon appeared and came over towards us.
‘Mr Shillingford,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘I’m Colin Dilly, duty manager. How can I help?’
He was about the same age as me but shorter and with a slighter build.
‘I notice you have lots of CCTV cameras in this hotel.’ I pointed up at the one positioned above the Guest Relations desk. ‘I would like to see the images for the Friday before last.’
‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible,’ said Mr Dilly. ‘The images are recorded on a rolling seven-day cycle. Those for that Friday will have been overwritten by this past Friday’s.’
Dammit, I thought. I should have come sooner.
‘Didn’t the police make copies?’ I asked in desperation.
‘I believe they did, sir, but you will have to ask them if you want to see them.’ He said it rather dismissively. ‘Now, is there anything else I can help you with?’
‘I’d like to speak with whoever checked in my sister on Friday evening nine days ago.’
He pursed his lips. ‘I’m not sure that will be possible either. It’s not hotel policy to provide that sort of information.’
‘Then I will spend all day, and all night if necessary, asking every member of your staff that I can find, until someone tells me who did check her in. They must know. It’s the sort of thing one might remember, don’t you think, being the last person to see a suicide alive?’
Mr Dilly stood looking at me for a few moments. Perhaps he was deciding whether to have me thrown out.
‘And if you chuck me out,’ I said, ‘I promise you I’ll cause a fuss. I’ll call the newspapers, and the TV companies. I’m quite well known in media circles and I don’t think it would be good publicity on your part.’
‘Perhaps you had better come into the office,’ said Mr Dilly. ‘I am sure we can find the information for you.’
‘Very wise,’ I said.
I followed him through a door that was disguised as a wooden panel and into some offices behind.
‘Please sit down,’ he said, pointing to a chair in front of a desk. ‘I’ll look up the work sheets for last week.’
He sat opposite me, at a computer, and I could hear him tapping the keys. ‘Now, let me see,’ he said. ‘Friday the sixteenth. Evening, wasn’t it.’ He tapped some more keys. ‘Right. I’ve found it.’
I stood up and went and looked over his shoulder. If he didn’t like it, he didn’t say so.
There were six reception staff listed for the period from three o’clock in the afternoon until eleven at night on the sixteenth, with four others for the night shift that had run from eleven on Friday until seven on Saturday morning.
So the staff on duty when Clare had checked in had been different from those present when she’d fallen.
Nothing was ever simple.
Colin Dilly wrote down the names of the reception staff from both the shifts, but he didn’t give me the list. Rather he compared it to the record of the staff currently on duty that he also brought up onto the screen.
‘There is one person who was on duty that night who is also working right now. If you wait here, I’ll go and fetch her.’
Mr Dilly went off to find the woman while I went on studying his computer screen, but there wasn’t much on it of interest.
Presently he returned with a small, neat woman that I took to be in her mid thirties.
‘Mr Shillingford,’ Colin Dilly said, ‘this is Mrs Rieta Dalal. She was working on reception during the evening of Friday the sixteenth and she says she remembers your sister arriving even though it wasn’t her who actually checked her in.’
‘Then how do you know it was my sister?’ I asked.
‘Because my colleague and I talked about her,’ said Mrs Dalal quietly. ‘Because she had no luggage. No bags at all. Not even a handbag or a make-up bag.’ She smiled. ‘It’s very rare indeed for a guest to check in with no luggage, especially a woman with no make-up. I remember her specifically because of that. It was only much later I heard that she had been the poor lady who fell from the balcony.’
‘Was she with anyone when she checked in?’ I asked.
‘No, sir, she was not,’ said Mrs Dalal. ‘But she was talking on the telephone all the time. That is why my colleague mentioned her to me in the first place. My colleague thought it rather rude and she was quite cross about it.’
‘Which colleague was it?’ Mr Dilly asked.
‘Irena.’
‘Irena Zelinska,’ he said, consulting his handwritten list. ‘She’s not working today.’
‘She has gone home to Poland,’ said Mrs Dalal.
It was definitely not going to be simple.
‘Did my sister specifically ask for a room with a balcony?’
‘I don’t know, sir. Have you checked her reservation?’
‘I don’t think she had a reservation.’
She seemed surprised. ‘We were very full that night, we always are when there’s a big event in the ballroom. If she didn’t have a reservation, we must have had a cancellation. She must have just been lucky to get a room with a balcony.’
‘Lucky’ was not the term I would have used.
‘But even then,’ Mrs Dalal went on, ‘she would have had to ask to have the balcony door unlocked. All the balconies are normally kept locked to prevent suicides.’
There was a silence as we all digested what Mrs Dalal had just said.
‘Are you saying that someone had to have gone to her room to open the balcony door?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Dalal. ‘We have to call security if guests request that the balcony door be unlocked. It is a common thing. It happens almost every day.’