‘We’d better take our helmets,’ Lance said, ‘in case somebody drops on us.’
‘And gloves,’ Wayne thought.
‘All I need is my fists,’ Garry said, amused as they went out that they were now protecting Fred as if he was their new-found mascot. ‘I’ll knock the snot back up his nose. A fucking schoolteacher pulling a stunt like this. It don’t bear thinking about. We’ll be dead silent, though, until we spot him. And then it’ll be tally-ho!’
Fred brooded as they went up the stairs that he might lose everything: my whole life — all the work me and Doris put into it. Maybe I won’t even get any insurance, if they don’t pay out for acts of terrorism. I must look at the policy, and if it’s so I’ll be on the dole, not to mention having the rest of the mortgage over my head. I’d have to go back to sea, that’s what, but where would I get a ship, at my age?
After looking everywhere else they went up another staircase and came to a door without a number. ‘This is the junk room, and if he’s not here, he must be out in the snow — which would be good riddance as far as I’m concerned.’
He flicked his torch, and saw that the bulb was missing. He had always been careful about lighting, keeping every socket active to illuminate all corners. If the Duke of Edinburgh came to inspect the hotel (for the winner of The Hostelry of the Year Award) Fred would want the lights shining to good effect on his creditable handiwork. His passion for white-lighting began after staying with his Aunt Liza who lived at the seaside. Farmed out as a child to her guesthouse he had wet his bed, and been locked for two hours in a dark cupboard to remind him that he had better not do it again, a punishment he could never forget. ‘He must have taken the bulb out, the bloody villain. But why would he want to do a thing like that?’
‘We’ll stay by each door till you get another.’
Fred shone the light again, a black spot in the middle surrounded by a ring of illumination. His immaculate brain was an inventory of what he owned to the last splinter or shave of metal. ‘The ladder’s gone, as well. That’s the bloody limit.’ It was only by such limits that he knew himself. They were dear to him, and he was proud of them, because being unique to him they set him apart from everybody else.
‘He just came in here,’ Garry said, ‘and vanished up his own arse. But where did he go after that?’ Fred went to his store for a new bulb and a ladder, while Wayne and Lance set out for one more nip around. In the silence Garry heard a creak in the ceiling, a vagary of the wind perhaps, then something like a knock in the plumbing except that there were no pipes up there.
Fred returned. ‘I’ll need help to lift the ladder, then I can get the bulb in.’
‘What’s in the attic?’
‘Nothing. I couldn’t get planning permission, otherwise I’d have had half a dozen rooms up there. Birds get in now and again.’
‘With shoes on? And what bird weighs ten stone around these parts?’ Fred turned pale in the dim light. ‘Don’t worry, though,’ Garry said, ‘me and the lads will have him down. Is that the only way up?’
Fred beamed the light. ‘It’s the builders’ fault. I told them to make it three feet square, but they left it oblong. I haven’t paid them yet, and I won’t until they come back and make it a lot bigger. It’s too narrow for anyone to get through.’
‘He got up. Then he pulled the lid after him. Not very clever, to box yourself up in a blind alley. Lance can get through. Or we’ll get a sledge-hammer and rip out a decent hole. The three of us could shoot up then.’
Fred wagged his head. ‘I can’t allow that.’
‘The whole fucking hotel’s going to be blown to bits,’ said Garry, exasperated, ‘so what’s the odds? That bloke up there is off his trolley, so it won’t be right to send Lance up alone, will it? And then it’ll be hard enough to batten the looney bleeder down, even with three of us. And when we do, how are we to get him through that little hole if he’s unconscious? Turn him into fucking toothpaste?’
Fred saw some reason in this. He offered his cigarette case, and Garry took one. ‘Even so, it would be a shame to rip the ceiling out unnecessarily.’
‘I don’t like unnecessary work,’ Garry told him. ‘I never did, because generally you don’t get paid for it, and even if you do you don’t get a very good rate. I can spot unnecessary work a mile off, but necessary work I can see coming for a hundred miles, and it strikes me that to enlarge that hole so that the three of us can get up there and storm that madman is like the SAS doing the Iranian Embassy: one isn’t enough, because you need one from the back, one from the front, and another down his neck. So it’s very necessary to enlarge that hole. I’ve been in some tight corners as a plumber, but you wouldn’t see me trying to get my beer-gut through that letter box. I would just end up getting stuck so that the bastard could kick my bonce in.’
‘Maybe he isn’t up there,’ Fred suggested. ‘You hear all sorts of noises in a building like this. Doris, my wife, thought she heard a baby crying once, but I told her it was a ghost, and after a day it stopped. If there is a ghost, though, maybe that’ll get him. It’d save us a bit of trouble. Still, it might only be a squirrel looking for its nuts!’
‘He’s up there,’ Garry told the others when they came back, ‘so watch that trap door while me and old Fred get a ladder. It’s going to be D-Day all over again.’
‘Why don’t we smoke him out?’ Wayne said. ‘Nobody can stand smoke. He won’t know whether it’s poison gas or if the place is on fire. He’d soon come down coughing with his hands on his head.’
Fred knew that Doris had taken to the cook because she had found out about his passion for Nellie, the waitress who had come to work for them from Nottingham. That one thing always led to the next was the simple mechanics of human nature. You sowed what you reaped, and no mistake. When you stood a set of dominoes on edge and in line, and pushed the first one, even if only lightly with your little finger, all the rest in turn fell down.
Likewise, as a result of the blizzard, a group of people had centred on the hotel, one of them a terrorist whose van of explosives was primed to go off and blow the hotel and all who lodged in her to pieces as small as the snowflakes, except that they would be red and wouldn’t melt. That meant him, as well. Was he the last in the line of dominoes whose face would fall flat on the earth and in more than one million pieces? He would give a lot to know whose finger it was that pushed the first domino in this cock-up and got the whole line going of which he was such an insignificant part. But unless someone came up with a very good story there would be nothing he could satisfactorily believe in. The only way to go on was to forget that rippling line of dominoes and decide if anything could be done about it. Everything was certain, but nothing was sure, and in the end you did what you could, no matter how cocksure the grin on God’s face.
Of all the people in the hotel he thought Keith was the one most likely to get them out of trouble. Keith was the right kind of guest, a person who was sure of himself, no doubt well educated, well connected, wealthy, hardworking at the same time: a family man and a man of good family. He looked all of these things, and Fred would trust a man of probity and position who had obviously at some time been a soldier, and had never been in prison or in trouble of any kind with the Law. He might even go to church once or twice a year. The only flaw was that he had picked up this young tart on the road and taken her to bed, but if you thought about it that’s just the sort of thing somebody like him would do, and it only reinforced your views about him rather than otherwise. He would have a good time with her one day — and who wouldn’t want to? She was a lively bit of stuff — and chuck her out of his car on a windy moor the next. The hardness of his features indicated that he was well capable of pulling them through this situation unscathed.