Spook's Gold (24 page)

Lemele was just placing the last cleaning implements back on top when the door crashed open and two soldiers burst in one after the after. She screamed in genuine surprise and some of the items went flying as she flung her hands up to her chest in shock. The troopers laughed, hugely amused at the fright that they had given her. “Oh messieurs, vous m’avez donnez une vraie peur bleue!” she shrieked and the soldiers laughed again.

They used their best but very limited French to assure her that there was no danger. One of them remained leering at her whilst the other went to check in the bathroom, in the closet and even taking the time to peer under the bed. Lemele was still certain that they were going to look under the trolley; it seemed such an obvious place to check. To distract the searcher she began to pantomime, fanning her face and ‘ooh-la-la’ing like a music-hall comedienne. The soldier quickly grew bored with her show, which was a limited repertoire she had to admit. To sustain the distraction she asked him if he had a cigarette, miming the action of smoking. He relaxed a little from his attention to duty, fishing in his uniform pocket for a packet and grinning at his colleague, who was still unashamedly enjoying the company of the French miss, all thoughts of military activities forgotten.

A voice barked from along the corridor and they snapped back to reality. The soldier thrust the packet of cigarettes into Lemele’s hand and they bustled backwards out of the door, apologising as they left. Within seconds the activity in the corridor appeared to be finished and she heard the sound of boots and voices receding.

Marner had been at pains to remain very still, aware of the close proximity of the soldiers. Any tiny movement from him, any creak from the straining trolley would have betrayed his hiding place. When he tried to unfold himself from his cramped position he could only tumble clumsily sideways onto the floor, tangled in the sheet, which brought the remaining bottles, brushes and cloths from the trolley crashing down onto him. He rose stiffly to his feet and found her leaning against the wall, looking drained. “You smoke?” he asked in amazement; he could not recall having seen her do so. She looked at him in puzzlement and then remembered the packet in her hand, momentarily forgotten as she wound down from the stress. When she hurled it at him, catching him neatly on the side of the head as he tried to dodge it, he was still confused.

Chapter Twenty Four

The noise of activity in the hotel continued for a further ten minutes as the soldiers checked the floors above and below. Once silence had fallen they decided that it was time to get out of the hotel. Lemele went alone and ascended and descended the back stairway, still wearing her borrowed apron in guise of a hotel employee, to check if there were any soldiers remaining. When she returned, it was to inform Marner that the back stairs and guest floors above and below were free, but that soldiers were stationed inside the lobby and in the yard at the back of the hotel too. This left them with no obvious exit from the building.

Lemele discarded the apron, regained her coat and their bags and they quietly crept up the stairs to the top floor. They emerged into a narrow and dusty corridor, the few windows barely illuminating the grimy bare floors and walls of the employees’ quarters. Lemele waited by the door, listening for anyone ascending as Marner walked to the far end of the corridor, then returned and motioned for Lemele to follow him in the other direction. They arrived at the end of the corridor and the final door and Marner knocked quietly on it. After waiting for thirty seconds and there being no response, he leant his weight against it, gradually increasing the pressure, first digging in his heels to push and then raising one leg against the far wall to maximise leverage. Finally it gave way with a shriek of protesting wood as the screws fixing the lock into the door were torn out, Marner stumbling into the room under the momentum of the force that he had been exerting. Lemele hissed at him and swivelled to look along the corridor, certain that someone must have heard and would come to investigate. Fortunately the staff would be busy working on the breakfast shift in the restaurant and kitchens. Marner explained patiently, “That method makes an amount of noise, but it is far less noisy than the impact of pounding the door in.”

In contrast to the spartan hallway, the room was well decorated with bright colours and fresh flowers in a vase. Marner moved to the window, which looked out onto the rear of the building and carefully and quietly opened it to look out. In the rear yard below where deliveries were made he could see that there were several soldiers talking and smoking, the end of their truck visible where it was tucked into the side of the yard. He concluded that they were probably planning to stay for a while, hoping that he would unsuspectingly return to the hotel at some time.

The window was set into the black-slated, steeply sloping roof. As he knew, the hotel and the adjoining building were one continuous structure at this end. In theory they could step out onto the ledge outside the window and edge their way along until they were able to gain entry through a corresponding window in the next building. The sloping roof would aid them in this endeavour by enabling them to lean inwards towards it, away from the drop to the yard below. However, the ledge was only fifteen centimetres wide and covered in bird droppings and other grime, as was the roof.

Pushing his head further out of the window, just the minimum necessary to be able to fully survey his planned route, he could see that there was worse. Between the buildings was a stone buttress, which he presumed was the external protrusion of the main supporting wall. This would necessitate a manoeuvre to step around it; not difficult in itself, but not easy if one hand were occupied carrying a bag. So at best they would get dirty, at worst it would be slippery, and to achieve it silently without attracting the attention of the soldiers below would be rather difficult. Lemele’s heeled shoes would be an additional hazard.

“No way,” exclaimed Lemele; she had slipped her head out of the window beside Marner and immediately surmised what he was planning.

Marner turned. “So what do you suggest?  We’re trapped in here like rats in...” But Lemele had already turned away and was bringing a wooden chair to the centre of the room.

“Try using your head instead of your brawn for once,” she retorted, before stepping up onto the chair and reaching up to push against the attic hatch in the ceiling.

“Ahhh!” he murmured approvingly.

Lemele shoved and then had to pound her hand against the hatch to get it to budge upwards, causing him to dash to quickly close the window. She succeeded in pushing the hatch up and aside, but was at full stretch. However, when she reached up to grasp the hatch frame and tried to pull herself up she had insufficient strength to do so, was left hanging there with her legs kicking and whirling whilst Marner chuckled.

“Shut up and help me down!” she snapped, and he stepped forward to grab her flailing ankles and direct them back towards the chair. “Okay, now this time, give me a boost up,” she instructed. He duly formed a sling with his hands, Lemele put one instep in and up she went nearly to waist level, sufficient to place her hands on either side of the hatch opening and so lift fully up on her arms. As she rose and locked out her elbows, a dull thud indicated that her head had found the upper limit of the roof space, or at least a beam. Again Marner set to laughing and she kicked out with her legs, not intending to hit him, just to show her displeasure that he was finding such amusement in her discomfort. “Go try the ledge if you like!” came Lemele’s muffled voice as her legs lifted up and away and disappeared into the gaping black square of the hatch. “But at least I’m doing something to get us out of the mess that you’ve got us into.”

“Me?” laughed Marner, enjoying this moment of companionable jesting and mockery after the recent stress. “What did I do?”

“Find me a lamp or something, I can’t see a thing up here,” was the reply.

The drawers and surfaces yielded nothing that would be of use, not even matches. Then he had the idea to move the small bedside table alongside the chair that Lemele had used, and to place upon it the standard lamp that was in the corner. Fortunately the room was tiny and the wire on the lamp was sufficiently long to permit this. The lamp head was still well below the level of the hatch, but shone more or less directly up into the void. He heard Lemele grunt her approval.

He went back to the window and looked out while he listened to Lemele’s breathing and scuffling as she moved around above. At one point she squealed. Her head reappeared in the space above. “As I hoped, the roof space is open so we can crawl through and get into the adjacent building.”

“How did you even know that it would be feasible?” he asked, openly impressed at this ingenuity.

“I look for missing people. I’ve become very familiar with all of the possible places where they hide.”

Stepping up onto the chair, he pulled himself up sufficiently to be able to peer over the edge of the hatch. Although he was blocking the illumination from the lamp below, as his eyes became accustomed to the darkness he could see that the wall that divided the buildings did not actually extend fully up to the roof. Instead, there was a wide central upright, with beams suspended from this to the edges of the building to support the central roof section and the steeply sloping sides of the mansard roof that they had seen from the window. But the point was that they could crawl either side of the central support and into the roof space of the building next door to the hotel.

Marner dropped back down to the chair, passed their bags up through the hatch and then stepped back up. He had sufficient height to be able to push his arms up through the hatch to their elbows, and by spreading and flattening his forearms he could get enough leverage to get his body moving upwards into the gap, but not fully. “Help me!” he grunted to Lemele and she crawled quickly over to him, grabbed handfuls of the back of his jacket close to the armpits, and pulled. He came slowly upwards, but it was not easy due to the fact that the limited space prevented Lemele from rising up to gain a better position, so she was largely pulling him into her body.

Suddenly there was a rending of stitches as a seam in his expensive jacket let go. His legs flailed in alarm and knocked the lamp, which was sent tumbling across the room. Lemele let go with the hand that was holding the unravelling stitching and made a panic grab further into the middle of his back. This succeeded in arresting his backwards movement. She took a moment to reposition her legs and once again he was making upwards progress into the space. There was an awkward moment when the protruding butt of the pistol that was still in his waistband jammed under and outside the hatchway. He was obliged to roll sideways to ease his hips back to allow the gun butt to come around the edge. Finally folded over the hatchway at the waist, he rearranged his arms to heave himself up into the space. As he did so, his head connected with a hard and sharp edge. “Oh, did that hurt?” Lemele enquired sarcastically in response to his curses.

Now that he was in the roof space and no longer obstructing the hatch opening, it was confirmed that his flailing legs had dispensed with their illumination. “You clumsy buffoon, you’ve knocked the light over.”

“I’ll go back down,” he muttered, but she told him not to bother, that they had sufficient orientation to know which direction to set off in. Now that he was up there and his eyes had become accustomed to the gloom, he could see that there were tiny slits of light scattered here and there from gaps in the roof slates.

Lemele set off on hands and knees but stopped almost immediately to free her bag from some obstruction or catch. In the silence he heard a scratching sound. “What’s that?”

“It seems that we may not be the only rats trapped in this building,” she stated, her matter of fact voice showing that she was not concerned. Marner, however, could feel a rising panic. “Come on, get moving!” he urged, prompted by his desire to get out of this black dusty tunnel, away from unseen scuttling things and his mounting sense of claustrophobic panic.

Lemele moved away again, heaving her bag out in front of her as she went and he followed, keeping a respectful distance from her shoe heels. As they approached closer to the buttress of the roof support the gaps in the tiles became fewer and the weak lighting that they afforded faded out to leave them almost entirely in darkness. Marner’s right hand was reaching forward when it landed on something soft and warm that suddenly darted away from under his palm. He yelped in horror and yanked back his hand, leaving him poorly balanced on his other rearward supporting hand and knees, which resulted in him toppling forward before he could react. His forehead bumped into something soft.

“For goodness sake, behave yourself back there!” implored Lemele. Sheepishly he realised that it had been her leg under his hand, and now this was her bottom.

This time he waited a beat, just enough to assure that he would not be banging into her posterior again, before he shuffled forward once more. The gap was negotiated with no problems and as the level of light rose once more, he could see that Lemele seemed to have accelerated away, worrying less about making noise now that they were in another building.

Lemele began groping around. “I’m trying to find a hatch that will get us back down,” she whispered. “It’s impossible to see, so I will have to feel around for one. Wait there while I look.”

Marner flopped onto his side and tried to calm his ragged breathing. The musty air was thick with dust that had not been disturbed in years until their clumsy passage. The strange odour had no origin that he could define, although he was sure that it had something to do with whatever was living up here. Another scuttling movement only a few metres to his right prompted him to instinctively rise up and back away. Fortunately Lemele’s voice came to him out of the darkness and stopped him from taking full flight. “Over here. I’ve found it.”

Peering into the inky blackness, he was unable to see her, to differentiate her from the many bulky shadows in the gloom. “Come on!” she insisted impatiently and he willed his arms and legs into motion, towards the approximate direction from which her voice emanated. He was not aware that he had reached her until she spoke to him again from just centimetres away. “You can’t see it but there is definitely a hatch. The problem is that the panel is a tight fit into the frame and I cannot get a finger into the gap to lever it up.”