Enjoying his little think, he cursed himself for forgetting to flip the catch on the door before climbing into bed. ‘What the bloody hell do you want?’
Daniel looked into his eyes. ‘I’m sorry. It’s the wrong room.’
‘You’d better go out and find the right one, then.’
‘I will.’
Strange chap to be on the loose, but the hotel seems full of ’em. He cooled his face at the sink, but it made no difference to the lava within. He didn’t suppose anything would, not this side of forty-eight hours. He had got pig-drunk, and ruined his life, and didn’t have enough money in his bank to make up for the spending he shouldn’t have done. At least there wouldn’t be new things going into the house which would see them out — and that couldn’t be anything but good.
‘Have you seen that schoolteacher called Daniel?’
‘Don’t anybody ever think to knock around here?’ It was beginning to seem like Billy Ball’s Taproom. ‘He was in a minute ago, but he went along the corridor.’
‘Left or right?’
‘How should I bloody well know?’ he cried, putting a jacket on to go downstairs.
Snow gusted over when he looked out, nothing to see but blue-black haze, Keith forcing the door shut on the steely cut of the cold, unwilling to be refreshed at the cost of frost-bite. Freeing the van and moving it might be more than anyone could do, though he would try because he had the least reason for wanting to live. On the other hand, heroes being old-fashioned, it would be wise and natural to sit in an armchair with a bottle of whisky and wait for the end. But he wasn’t born for such a course, and helping to save the others would give him the pleasure of being as near to himself as he could get before the iron gates closed for what he might just as well look on as for ever.
The large square room was cluttered with tools and benches, a maze of tables, a jumble of barrels, an interlocking of broken chairs, and buckets in which paint had set brick-hard with age. An old motorbike with flat tyres leaned against a wall, and a bicycle minus its saddle lay on a pile of folded sacks. Stacked boxes of lemonade and beer bottles took up a corner near the door he had come in by.
The overall stink of icy damp was reminiscent of the rooms his mother had sometimes rented. But for him the hunt was on, because hadn’t he heard that ageing yuppie lout say what he would do when they caught him? During times of not being pursued or threatened he hadn’t cared about dying, but now that the danger was real he would fight his persecutors to the end.
The room was too perfect to hide in. If they came at both doors they would sense he was there, and close in. There was no benign forest at his back in which he could hide from the world.
From the long ladder by the wall he looked at the ceiling, where a narrow trap door indicated a way into the roof. Noting its position, he took out the light bulb, and climbed the aluminium steps in darkness. Opening the trap, sawdust and grit sprayed down. Only a thinnish person could get through, and to avoid breaking the lath and plaster he had to find two beams inside and pull himself up by his arms. Exercise every morning had prepared him, and the manoeuvre was easily done.
Flat on his stomach, clinging to the beam with one arm, he reached down and drew the ladder through, laying it silently to one side. From bits of broken lath he chose a slender enough piece to wedge into the crack between the trap and the rest of the ceiling, so that no one from below would see that it had been opened. The only clue would be the missing ladder, but it was too late to worry about that.
His Ronson and a few matches would provide light when necessary. Making a way between struts and beams, black cobwebs brushed his face. He trod so that the weight of his feet would not go through the ceiling or be heard from below, measuring the extent of his kingdom which went over the bedrooms. At one corner, if he pressed his ear to the floor, he could make out what was being said in the lounge, because like all frightened people they spoke loudly.
In his dark attic he felt even more to be one of the elect, and if those who did not share his ideals had to suffer the catastrophic fusion of beauty and violence, then so be it. The elect suffered to keep those ideals sacred for the future, so why shouldn’t the mob unknowingly contribute to this stored energy for the good of mankind? God worked in many ways His wonders to perform.
‘You mean’ — Fred put it to him straight — ‘that the whole damned lot is going to go up?’
Keith had looked into the van, and known the contents for what they were. ‘Us as well, unless we can think of some way out.’
Fred regretted that he would not be alive to collect the insurance. ‘We’d better get our thinking caps on, then.’
‘And lateral thinking it may have to be, to be effective.’ Aaron didn’t altogether believe in their predicament. ‘A bit of pro de Bono publico, I should say.’
Sally laughed at his punning. No one was going to die. It was inconceivable, impossible, a piece of instant theatre they had cooked up, sheer genius on somebody’s part, maybe even Daniel’s, after all, who might really be the actor she had thought on first seeing him at the telephone.
‘Are there any cellars here?’ Eileen sipped her coffee as if it might be the last hot drink on earth. ‘We can make an air-raid shelter, stuff it with tinned grub and candles, like in the Blitz. I saw a film about it once. Me and Enid can brew tea and sing “The White Cliffs of Dover”.’
Percy, frail and bewildered at being dragged out of sleep, sat in an armchair with a blanket packed around him. ‘I’ve lived too long to be blown to smithereens. I’ll go and cut myself a hole in the snow, like we did when we was kids. We’ll be as right as rain in the morning if we all do that.’ Maybe he was going crazy at last, Alfred thought, who had never supposed, from the way he often felt himself, that you were ever too old to go off your rocker.
‘Why don’t we set fire to the place?’ Wayne suggested. ‘This dirty old drum would burn a treat. It’d melt the snow for miles around.’
‘Shut your face,’ Fred said bravely, while he longed for the morning. The snow plough couldn’t come soon enough. ‘If we could catch that bugger whose van it is, maybe he could tell us something. He might let us know how to defuse the stuff.’
‘We’ve looked everywhere,’ Garry said.
Lance reached for Jenny’s hand. ‘Maybe he went out in the snow to die from gangrene. I read about somebody called Captain Oates once, at the South Pole.’ His face at times reminded her of Raymond’s when she first met him, though Lance’s didn’t have the same restless untrustworthy intelligence, and there was nothing lacking in his feelings.
‘That’d be the best thing he could do,’ Garry said, smacking one fist into the other.
If he suddenly came among us they would turn into killers. It doesn’t take much, and who would blame them? ‘He’s in the hotel somewhere,’ Keith said, ‘that’s all we know.’
Fred stood. ‘I’ll look. Nobody knows the place better than me. You three lads come as well, though. We’ll start from the top and work down bit by bit.’