Snowstop (20 page)

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!'

He's going again. Alfred's face reddened when Enid – the little bag – laughed. I shan't be able to relax till I get him there, if ever I do. If I could get my hands on that bloody maniac in the loft I'd gladly squeeze the life out of him.

‘I've been happy all my life,' Percy said, ‘even when I was unhappy! I've had work I was interested in, a good and loyal wife, fine kids, and a roof over my head. So why shouldn't I be over the rainbow, eh?' he asked Garry, who came in and stood by the fire to light a cigarette.

‘I'll only be over the rainbow when we've got that prick-squeak down from upstairs. It's marvellous what can happen when you come out for a spin. One minute you're free, and the next you're stuck in a place like this and might be blown to bits. When I was twenty everything I did was because I wanted to live, and now that I'm thirty I do it because I don't want to die.'

Keith felt as near happiness as he had any right to be. Various solutions drifted in and out of his mind, but it was hard to avoid the notion that, whatever happened, he couldn't allow himself the luxury of thought.

TWENTY-THREE

Daniel, squatting simian-like between two beams and not caring that his persecutors registered every move on the radar screen of their feeble minds, told himself that he nevertheless had them at his mercy. All my life I've wanted to have a say as to whether people should live or die, but only in order to do them good because that would allow me to call it a victory. Now I have achieved it, but at the sacrifice of my own life, so what kind of a victory is that?

One had to make a choice between good and evil, whatever power you had, any middle way a paralysis of the moral sense. If your opponents considered you evil you could deceive them by simulating good, then engulf them in an evil demise when they weren't expecting it. You opened yourself to certain defeat when you allowed people to pride themselves on being good by assuming you to be evil.

Sun Tzu said it was a mistake to attack at the strongest point, that the weaker party should create uproar in the east so as to strike unexpectedly from the west. Such homespun maxims of senseless violence were only relevant when you believed that your cause was just, but if evil was with the weak (as it was now with him) then the ploy was false, and you became paralysed. Revolutionary cracker mottoes were coined for those without the intelligence and moral subtlety to ponder on the finer strands of good and evil, and needed their convictions reinforcing by slogans fit only for simple minds.