Snowstop (19 page)

‘You can trust us,' Garry said. ‘As long as he's a good lad. If he ain't, we'll pull him down in his birthday suit.'

He had to fasten the knot of his tie three times before the two ends were of equal length. In the old days he wore a brass tie-pin, but such things weren't used any more. He only knew that the Cause was lost, or his part in it, if ever it had been found. The light before the mirror wasn't good, and trembling hands didn't help. She had gone down and told them everything, and now he must flee into the snow, curl up in a hollow and never see morning. The experience was so real he seemed to have done it already and come back to life, so now he needn't do it, but he must still save himself, because if they believed what she told them they would kill him, and they would certainly believe such a ‘right sort' of good-looking Englishwoman like her, accept it from her honest and open face as readily as he had been deceived by it. She deserved to be killed, but everyone would die anyway, therefore it didn't matter. He should have begged with all his soul for her to stay the whole night, a decision to be regretted for ever because there was no explanation for it, the sort with which his life had been only too full.

He found himself at the top of another descending staircase in the large and complicated house. Where it led he didn't know, but it must be a safer place than the one he stood in. They were surely out to find him. He hadn't lived a double life not to know when the air was throbbing with danger for him and him alone, so he would get to some place of concealment, and rest until the whole establishment disintegrated, a blinding wave of flame and smoke.

When he was eight and a gang of rough boys from school cried out that they were going to get Daniel and have some fun, he ran into a wood of which he had always been afraid because some said it was haunted and others that it was full of snakes, but the bushes parted for his frantic passage, streams narrowing for the leap, giant elms smoothing their boles to draw him deeper into shadowy gloom till the boys were so far behind he could choose his hiding place. They soon tired of looking, but one boy, stout and cunning, the school bully, was more diligent than the rest. Daniel in his hideaway sharpened a stick to needlepoint with the penknife his mother had given him so that he could cut his daily apple at school, and pushed it with all his scared force into the boy's leg after he had stood for some minutes wondering what direction to go in. Daniel jabbed again and again, like St George's lance at the dragon, then dropped the crimson stick and ran from his howling victim. Before reaching the edge of the wood he was fearful that the boy would bleed to death or get gangrene so that his leg would have to be amputated. Daniel learned that the cunning have their pride and the vicious have their freedom, not knowing which word fitted him, but hoping now that he was both, and able to deal with anyone who was rash enough to get in his way.

‘I'd like to sleep with you for ever,' Lance said. ‘You're all the songs I've ever known rolled into one.'

‘You're lovely as well. But we must get up and see what that racket was all about downstairs.'

He laughed. ‘You mean I'll never see your lovely body again? I love your marvellous tits when you bend over me.'

‘Thank you very much. I'm sure you'll see them whenever you like. And I'll see you as often as I can.' She couldn't be sure of anything, but it was a delight to have someone as young as this, biker or not. She didn't think he'd had many women before, but it was good all the same, making the past with Raymond seem less important which, she thought, was nothing short of brilliant.

‘It sounds like somebody's at the door,' he said. ‘Or is it a dentist's drill for a pterodactyl's toothache?'

She got into slacks and jersey, but Lance had nothing on when he let them in. ‘Oh, it's you two. What's up, then?'

‘It stinks like a Texas whorehouse in here,' Garry said. ‘Have you seen that shitbag of a schoolteacher?'

‘He was downstairs, wasn't he? What are you looking under the bed for?'

Wayne opened the wardrobe. ‘He ain't in here.'

‘We want him,' Garry said, ‘dead or alive.'

‘You've got to be joking.'

‘No fucking way. Did you know that that clapped-out van of his is full of explosives and Christ knows what else? About five thousand tons of it, and if it goes off we'll give the world a bigger fucking show than the Dam Busters, except that we'll be the ones to get busted.'

‘Half of Derbyshire, which includes this hotel, will go to the moon and back,' Wayne said.

‘Old Ferret a terrorist?' Lance stood on the bed to get his underpants on. ‘I can't believe it.'

‘You'd better. He told it to that tart he slept with.'

‘You mean
woman
,' Jenny said.

‘Yes, I suppose I do. We're on the lookout for him. He ain't in the room we were told he was.' He threw Lance's trousers and they snaked around his face. ‘You come with us as well. And you'd better go downstairs, miss. Maybe they'll save you some coffee.'

‘Somebody's having you on. Explosives in that van! We drove it here, didn't we?'

Garry laughed. ‘Yes, and don't expect anybody to thank us for it. Weren't we the world's biggest twits? When we get hold of that schoolteacher we might be able to find out what's what. He's bound to be in the hotel somewhere, and whoever finds him had better sit on him hard till the others get there. You can blind him, if you like, but don't make him dumb. He's got to talk.'

TWENTY-TWO

Parsons' head was a globe of the world, four-fifths water and five continents clonking around – or was it six? Boiling lava was in the middle of it all, and he couldn't lift it from the pillow, try as he might. Beer and champagne never mixed, as he ought to have known, and in spite of having lost count of the buckets he had put into himself his only need was for water to slake those fires in the middle of his globe.

He couldn't even blame Jenny – the baggage. He had loved her since she started working for the office, but naturally she wouldn't have anything to do with an old fartbag like him, though one or two young girls had before her. As for Kitty, his wife – well, she's fifty-five, and acts like an old woman already, saying that the carpet they've just had laid (the best bloody Co-op Axminster) or the new coat he had got her from Griffin and Spalding's in Nottingham, would see her out. I ask you!
See her out!
Who could live with that and not go after a bit of crumpet on the side now and again? At least if he packed her in and took up with a young woman he wouldn't hear things like that. In any case, even if you were young you could be dead in half an hour, but at fifty-odd you don't want to be reminded that a new chair or carpet will
see you out.
At fifty-odd you want to think you're going to live for ever. Nevertheless, he loved his wife and kids, and you couldn't live with a woman all that long and not think the world of her, no matter how mad she drove you now and again.

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.'