Snowstop Read online

  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.’

  ‘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.

  ‘Well,’ Keith said, as if Fred was a little dog that had walked in wagging its tail, ‘have you rounded him up yet?’

  ‘Not exactly, sir. But he’s in the attic, and can’t get down. He pulled the ladder through the trap door after him, and we’re getting another in position. The biking lads will be ready to go up any minute.’

  ‘So there’s a desperate man – for all we know – waiting for the first person to show himself? If he doesn’t have a knife he’ll take a running kick at the head. Call them off, except one to keep watch. We’ll go up in our time, not his. It’s only midnight.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I’ll tell them.’

  He threw a credit card on the table. ‘Then you can go on supplying us with coffee and food. Or drinks, if anybody wants them.’

  ‘He’ll charge you double,’ Eileen said when he had gone.

  ‘No, he won’t. If I paid in cash he might short-change me, but not this way.’

  ‘I don’t much like him,’ she said.

  ‘You don’t have to. All he has to do is do as he’s told.’ Any man who couldn’t do that wasn’t worth his salt, because everyone had to do as they were told at some time or other in their lives, and the present situation
demanded it. All the same, he didn’t want her to think he was too harsh. ‘I’m not sure whether I like him either, but there’s only one way to get things done.’

  If he hadn’t been so good as to give her a lift in his nice car she wouldn’t have landed in this hotel with some madman who didn’t know Guy Fawkes Night had already gone. Even if what the man in the attic had said was true, and even if what the woman said he had said to her was true, it either didn’t bear thinking about, or it was going to be the funniest thing that had ever happened to any of them. If Keith hadn’t given her a lift when she was walking across the moor she might have been dead in a drift already, so she still had a lot to thank him for and would only have a bone to pick with him if she got blown to pieces, which would be too late anyway. ‘What would you do if there was no Fred or Enid to make your coffee?’

  He looked surprised. ‘I’d have to make it myself, then, wouldn’t I?’

  ‘And burn your hand like you did on the moor? My dad never made his tea. Other men I’ve known didn’t, either, not if a woman was within a mile. All the men I’ve known were bone idle.’

  He wondered what other men someone like her could have known, but didn’t say it, because she was so young, and could only have been familiar with her own sort. Men are idle when they have no interest in their work, though when they do have they usually get on and out. ‘Your father couldn’t have been idle if he brought up a family.’

  ‘He did as little as he could, and grumbled every time he lifted a finger.’

  ‘I’ll bet he worked hard, all the same,’ Parsons said. ‘Only you didn’t know it. Kids never do. What work have you done, anyway?’

  ‘I worked nearly two months in a knitwear factory. Then I got laid off. There ain’t much work to go round any more. What world are you living in?’

  ‘Everyone lives in their own.’ Keith put a hand on her arm. ‘There isn’t much to be done about that.’

  ‘I’m over the rainbow,’ Percy cried, ‘because I’m on my way to Bognor. Who wouldn’t be? In fact I must be a few miles beyond, because it’s snowing!’