I heard the key turn and the door to the sitting room open. A hurricane of thoughts swirled through my head and for the longest of moments I stood rooted to the spot. The trick was not to panic. If I was to have any hope of extricating myself, it would only be through keeping my head. I forced a deep breath, then turned to the file on the bed. Pocketing the handwritten ledger records and a few of the flyers, I pushed all the other papers back into the file. As I did so, I noticed that its inside flap was covered in a handwritten scrawl: the sort of notes one takes from a telephone conversation. I didn’t have time to decipher it all, but in the middle, the words ‘HAJI ALI, 12 NOON’ stood out in capital letters. The note ended with a telephone number: Bom 2636.
From the adjoining room, I heard the scraping of a chair leg. I closed the file and hurriedly slipped it under the bed. The sound of footsteps tapped across the sitting room, growing louder. Quickly, I pulled at a corner of the bedsheets as inches away, the door opened.
‘What the bloody hell?’
I turned and bowed low, remained with my head down and affected a heavy accent.
‘Turn-down saarvice, saahb.’
‘At this hour?’
‘Two three staffs off sick, saahb. All very late.’ I kept my eyes planted on his feet in mock supplication, but even his shadow was intimidating.
‘Get out,’ he commanded.
‘Hā, saahb,’ I said, touching my forehead, before skirting past him, through the sitting room and out into the corridor where, in my haste to escape, I collided with a man coming the other way.
‘Suren? What the hell? Why are you dressed like a bellboy?’
‘No time to explain,’ I said. ‘Just run.’
Quickly I led him along the corridor and back to the service stairs, reaching it just as we heard a door open behind us and Irani’s voice shout for me to stop.
Not bloody likely, I thought as we ran through the door and down the stairs. Even with Sam in attendance, I didn’t fancy tangling with a man as substantial as Irani. I had hoped to return to the staff changing room and recover my brand-new suit jacket, but alas there was no time for that now.
‘Hurry,’ I said. ‘The car is parked out front.’
‘I know it is,’ said Sam vehemently, from two steps behind. ‘I saw it. How d’you think I knew you were —’
He was interrupted by the sound of a door opening into the stairwell above and the crash of boots on the concrete steps.
‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘Just go!’