scruples then.’
‘That was different. It was posed. The celebrity agreed to it. Right place, right time. There was none of this cloak and dagger stuff.’
Lucy gave her an incredulous look.
‘Save your guilt, for Pete’s sake. Betsy Warrender plays the press like a maestro. She’ll probably thank you for it, she’ll be coining it in with all the publicity. Let’s face it, she’s in her forties with three husbands behind her. Landing Kip Bevan is like a badge of honour for the older woman.’ She shook her head. ‘Nope, the only person you need to worry about here is the security guy. The good thing for us is that he’s just finding his feet. He wants to run a tight ship but he’s been saddled with the rudderless mess that is the Lavington’s minimum wage staff. He’s in at the deep end and it should be easy to slip under his radar if you’ve got the right insider information.’ She tapped the side of her nose.
Anna narrowed her eyes.
‘I’ve been meaning to ask you. How exactly did you come by this piece of confidential information? If it’s all so cloak and dagger. You’re a waitress-cum-chambermaid. This place should be teeming with press if the waiting staff know about it.’
‘The waiting staff don’t know about it,’ Lucy said in a low voice. That’s why we have an advantage.’ She examined her fingernails. ‘I happen to have a bit of a thing going on with the hotel manager.’
‘For Pete’s sake, you’re sleeping with the management?’ Anna blurted. ‘Are you mad? I’ve seen the guy in charge swanning about in the lobby. He must be twice your age.’
Lucy flapped a dismissive hand in her direction.
‘I’m not mad. It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement.’
‘Excuse me? You mean it’s got nothing to do with actually liking the guy?’
‘It’s not serious. The way I see it, you can invest everything you’ve got in a relationship and it can still bite you on the arse.’
Andrew crossed Anna’s mind, bringing with him the usual surge of resentful regret.
‘He’s fun, he likes to treat me, the sex is great…’ Lucy carried on, counting off a list of benefits on her fingers ‘…I get all the best shifts, I’m first in the queue when it comes to booking time off, and I don’t have to pick up his socks. It’ll end when I want it to. No hassle.’
‘What if he ends it first?’
Lucy shrugged.
‘Then I’ll have some more free time. I really think we’re straying way off-task now. I’ve got the tip and it’s irrelevant how I got it. We both need the money, let’s just get the hell on with it.’
‘And what about the security guy?’
Lucy looked her up and down dubiously.
‘What?’ Anna folded her arms defensively.
‘You just need to blend in a bit more.’ Lucy stood up and crossed to the row of lockers along the side of the room. ‘I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. This is a classy establishment and you’re traipsing the corridors in jeans and a shirt. I’ll lend you my spare uniform, that’ll do the trick. You can use it to blag your way into the Purple Suite. Just don’t blow your cover by hanging out of a sodding window this time.’
Anna stared at Lucy as she opened a locker and pawed through the contents.
‘And what do you think your no-strings management squeeze will do if he finds out you’ve leaked the hotel’s top secret story?’
Lucy shrugged airily.
‘He won’t. And even if he does I won’t care by then because you will have scooped us both a fortune. I can spend a bit more time auditioning and putting myself out there and a bit less time serving coffee to moany tourists. Don’t let me down!’
She clapped an arm around Anna’s shoulders, directed her towards the ladies’ loo and thrust the pink and grey uniform into her hands.
So now she had Lucy’s acting dreams riding on her photographic prowess too. No sodding pressure then.
Joe returned to the lobby half an hour later having done a quick recce of the second floor and finding nothing whatsoever out of place. Still, his mind lingered on the girl from room 214, despite all attempts to just crack on with the day ahead. Make sure you have the measure of every detail of a situation, and if in doubt, check it out. Hadn’t he just gone through that mantra to the shambles otherwise known as staff this morning? This was about effective security protocol. It had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Miss 214 was extremely cute with her green eyes and her freckles and her breezy attitude. Of course, his senses still kicked into action when he encountered attractive women, even nutjobs who hung off window ledges, Rome wasn’t built in a day. His previous life had been so different to this, jetting around the world in the wake of his celebrity boss, a girl in every city. His body was still living in a different sexual time zone, one where he was never in one place long enough to stick out a meaningful relationship, where women lasted a night or two before he moved on and his bed was never empty for too long.
He hadn’t had any female company since he’d flown home to England, which actually amounted to a considerable drought by his standards. Not that it felt like home after all this time. Being told his job with Stan Taylor was no longer a job had been the final push to do what he’d never thought he would. His mother was in a nursing home. He had no roots, owned no property, lived out of a suitcase. A contract in one place for once, near enough to his mother to keep an eye on her care, had seemed a good idea at the time. But he was feeling more and more by the day that he wasn’t cut out to have roots and normality at all. She’d never needed him or anyone in her entire life and he could easily have continued to oversee her care by telephone.
‘Can you give me the guest name for room 214?’ he asked one of the receptionists, glancing around the lobby as she pressed a few buttons on her computer. A group of tourists congregated at one of the tables, a stack of leaflets of the London sights being passed among them.
‘That room’s currently empty,’ she said. ‘Did you resolve the suicide situation at the side of the hotel?’
He snapped his eyes sharply away from the tourists.
‘Empty?’
She nodded.
‘There’s a problem with the ceiling in the ensuite. Maintenance are handling it, it’s on their work schedule for tomorrow…’ She raised her voice to call the last part of that after him as he dashed back across the lobby.
Afternoon tea in the lounge? He immediately checked the room. Miss 214 was nowhere to be seen and there was not a bloody cupcake or teapot in sight.
Operation Betsy, Take Two. Anna tried to take shallow breaths because she was squeezed into Lucy’s slightly-too-small uniform and it threatened to pop a button with the slightest wrong move. The effect was topped off with a rickety linen cart which she trundled into the service lift. She took a deep breath and pressed the button marked 2. As she waited for the lift to rumble into life beneath her feet, her mind wandered to her father. In their back garden, just the two of them and a camera. Endlessly patient,
