Everyone Believes My Alibi

How it begins

The first stranger thanked Rachel Voss for being somewhere she had never been.

He stopped her outside the hotel lift, smiling with the relief of a man whose small administrative duty was finally complete.

'Friday. The blue room. You stayed until eleven.'

Rachel looked at his conference badge. No name she knew. No company she had designed an exhibition for.

'I think you have the wrong person.'

'No,' he said pleasantly. 'I'm certain.'

He walked away before she could decide whether certainty made it worse.

At reception, Paul Hart put a white envelope beside her key card. The night concierge had a talent for presenting problems as though they might still become ordinary.

'This was left for you.'

Inside lay a restaurant receipt, a taxi invoice and a photograph of Rachel sitting at a table in a room she did not recognize.

The dress was hers. She had sold it six months earlier because it reminded her of someone she no longer wished to resemble.

Paul watched her turn the photograph.

'Bad news?'

'I don't know yet.'

The receipt recorded a meal on Friday evening. Rachel remembered buying soup, going upstairs and falling asleep with the television on. She had been working long hours. There was nothing criminal about being tired.

Then why had somebody assembled proof that she had been awake?

A woman approached the desk to return a borrowed umbrella. She glanced at Rachel and brightened.

'We were together on Friday,' she said. 'If anybody asks.'

Paul's hand stopped above the key rack.

'Who is asking?' he said.

The woman looked surprised. 'Nobody yet.'

Rachel put the photograph back in the envelope. Everyone sounded reassuring. Everyone agreed. It was the agreement that frightened her.

She had spent forty-two years defending ordinary choices nobody questioned. Now strangers were prepared to defend an evening she could not remember, and she wanted to know what they expected her innocence to cost.