Thursday

by David Ridgway

  “Yes, love,” said the man behind the counter.

  “Oh, just a medium cappuccino please,” she replied.

  The man turned to the machine and set the drip going, while he squirted the steam into the metal milk jug. When it was completely frothy, he banged it twice on the counter, before wiping the steam nozzle. He poured the hot milk into the coffee and, with a teaspoon, put the froth on top. Alice was mesmerised by the process, although she had seen it all too often before.

  “Chocolate on top?” The barista enquired.

  “Er, I don’t know…” she tailed off.

  “Course she does,” said Andy over her shoulder. “And I’ll pay for that.”

  After handing over the cash, Andy picked up the cup and took it to his table, Alice following just behind. He put it down and pulled out a chair for her to sit. He noticed that she sat on the edge of her chair, with her knees firmly together. She was leaning forward, with her hands clasped together in her lap and her shoulders slightly hunched. Altogether, it was a pose of concern, personal protection and timidity.

  “Well, here you are,” said Andy, wondering how to overcome her discomfiture. He leaned back and looked at her. She did not return his look and stared fixedly at her coffee. “Come on, Alice, I’m not going to bite.” He laughed quietly, trying to put her at her ease.

  Without moving her head, she looked up at him, striking a pose of concern mixed with curiosity.

  “I nearly didn’t come,” she said. “In fact, if you hadn’t seen me, I would have gone. I was ready to run, but I saw you waving and I thought to myself that I shouldn’t be that pathetic.” She babbled on, all the while looking at him through her eyelashes, slightly rocking to and fro.

  “But you did and now you’re letting your coffee go cold.”

  She stopped her gentle rocking and reached out her hand to take hold of the handle of the cup. He noticed a slight tremor in her fingers and, to overcome it, she held the cup in two hands, feeling its warmth. She took a small sip, leaving a beguiling deposit of chocolate on her top lip. Andy saw that Alice had a very fine covering of blond hair on her upper lip and wondered if it was the same on her arms. Seeing him looking at her mouth, Alice quickly licked her lip with the tip of her tongue.

  “Is the coffee OK?” he asked.

  “It’s fine. Lovely,” she replied

  “Would you like a piece of cake or a biscuit as well?”

  “Oh no. I’ve got my figure to think about.”

  “Well, yeah,” Andy murmured, “That’s what we’re here for.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Do you want to know what I do?”

  “Yes, please. I mean, it’s not seedy or anything, is it?”

  “Certainly not!” Andy retorted. “Basically, the process is to create a photographic portfolio and when we’ve selected the best pictures, I then place the portfolio in front of various agencies. This could be the start of a modelling career, flying all over the world for photoshoots in the most exotic of places and for any number of products – clothes, shoes, jewellery, food, cosmetics. Anything and everything.”

  “But I’m just an ordinary person,” Alice protested.

  “And so you will remain, unless you grab this opportunity with both hands. Just like you’re holding your coffee!” He laughed again and this time, realising that she was still holding the cup in both hands, she also smiled. She put the cup down, sat back in her chair and looked directly at him.

  “How much do you pay me for my pictures?” she asked.

  “Well, at the start, some girls come to me and actually pay me to create a portfolio for them. They can pay anything between £500 and £1000. But, as I have suggested doing this for you, I am willing to take a chance with your face and take some shots and to start building your portfolio for nothing.”

  “Don’t I get anything from this?”

  “Course you do. But at this stage, right at the start, you have to look at it as an investment. If all goes well, you could be earning thousands, even hundreds of thousands each year. Look at Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss.”

  “But I’m not like them,” said Alice. “They’re beautiful and everyone knows it. I’m just plain old me.”

  “But they still started at the very bottom,” said Andy. “And, anyway, if you don’t try, how are you ever going to know?”

  “What do I have to do?”

  At last! Andy thought. She’s on board and will soon be putty in my hands.

  “I’ve got this little studio in Battersea,” he said. “It’s not much, but it’s at the top of a building and has fantastic views over the river. You can see right up the Thames from Chelsea to the city. I don’t actually live there. My gaff’s in Kennington. But it’s all set up for a photo session right now, if you want to have a go. My cab’s just round the corner and we could be there in less than half an hour. Couple of hours taking photos and I’ll have you back in Richmond in time for tea.”

  “Oh! I didn’t realise that it would be so quick. I’ve not put on my best clothes or anything.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” Andy explained. “It’s your face that I want to capture. You have the most fantastic eyes, especially when you look at me through your eyelashes. I’m sure that there are several makeup companies that can use your eyes, especially if I can capture that specific look.”

  “Oh! OK then.” Alice felt her heartbeat pick up as they left the Costa Coffee and walked around the corner to where the cab was parked. He opened the door for her, saw that she was settled in the nearside seat and then got into the driver’s cab. He checked his mirror, opened the glass panel and asked if she was OK, before driving away.

  In the middle of Saturday afternoon, Sebastian Fortescue Brown returned from a pleasant lunch. He walked through the swing doors of the Gloucester Palace Hotel, which, following the death of his father, he now owned outright. Seb was 50 years old, tall with a military bearing and always well turned out in a three-piece suit, lace up leather shoes, white shirt and club tie. He often wore a flower in his lapel and invariably carried a rolled-up umbrella. He looked to the very inch a man of property and financial independence.

  The reality, however, was rather different. He did indeed own the hotel, but when he had inherited it, there had been a disappointing level of debt. He had never actually seen military service, but he had spent three years at a minor public school in the Home Counties, before leaving at age 16 with a few very indifferent ‘O’ level results. But, while at school, he had observed how the upper middle classes behaved and he had learnt how to copy them. His father had enrolled him in a sixth form college in the West End, from which he had played truant on a consistent and regular basis. But he wasn’t bunking off to waste his life. Instead, he had started to earn a living, firstly stocking shelves in a supermarket on the Edgware Road, but his real education began when he started to work in Soho.

  Today, his knowledge of the seedier parts of Soho was second to none. He was acquainted with pimps, prostitutes, managers and owners of sex shops and strip clubs, Chinese restaurants, Indian takeaways, for many of whom he had either worked or done favours. He also knew most of the girls who had worked in and left Soho over the years. He had been married, for a short while, to a working girl called Maisie and this had prompted a massive fallout with his father. The marriage didn’t last.

  As the years passed by, Sebastian had earned a reputation as a fixer, often sailing very close to the wind, but always remaining on the right side of the law. However, he had never built up any real capital, always believing that his luck was about to change and that his day was about to dawn.

  When his father died, eighteen months before, being the only son, Sebastian inherited the hotel, along with an ageing Bentley. After the accounts were finalised, his father’s accountant presented them to him and explained that the hotel, although in credit, was not producing sufficient profit. It was suggested that he might consider selling up in order to realise the capital. Real estate in ce
ntral London would, of course, produce a sum beyond his wildest dreams. Tempting though the proposal was, Sebastian finally turned it down.

  Instead, he looked more closely at his new assets. He sold the Bentley and considered how best he could utilise the hotel. It had a pillared central entrance, set up five stone steps from the pavement, with two Georgian windows on either side of the double front door and two bay windows beyond that. Built over five floors, the kitchen and laundry facilities were in the basement. The ground floor was taken up with the dining room, two lounges, the reception area and the hotel offices in the rear. Each of the next four floors accommodated five double bedrooms, all en suite, with an old-fashioned lift connecting each floor, from the basement to the fifth floor. The fifth floor was the accommodation area for the staff. There were eight smaller rooms, with skylights, plus a common bathroom to the rear.

  It had been built during the reign of Queen Victoria, as living accommodation for ‘gentle folk’, who no longer lived in their big country houses, or had returned in retirement from the colonies. Its greatest asset was a large parking area to the rear of the building, with enough room for 20 vehicles.

  In the First World War, the hotel had been used as officers’ quarters and after the Armistice, Seb’s grandfather had taken back the building, sprucing it up with a lick of paint and installing a billiard room in the second lounge. How it survived through the 1930s’ recession had always been shrouded in mystery, but the Second World War witnessed a further revival. Sebastian’s grandfather was able to pass a good, solid business over to his son in the 1960s. In his turn, Sebastian’s father had maintained its profitability through the millennium, before bequeathing it to Sebastian himself.

  With all his connections in the underworld, Sebastian began to realise that this was an opportunity sent by his fairy godmother to make a lot of cash.

  After all, he thought, what a hotel will always have is a regular supply of different people, paying for accommodation, often in cash and what many of his contacts had was cash that needed to be brought back into circulation. Firstly, he made rooms available to people who needed to ‘disappear’ for a short while, but when he began to consider that if any of his new ‘guests’ were followed to the hotel, the finger of suspicion would too easily be pointed at him.

  So he had set up a proper scam where he made the hotel rooms available for ‘names’, who didn’t actually exist. They would be listed in the hotel register and, indeed, they would only ever pay in cash. The cash thus generated was put through the books in the normal way. All the appropriate taxes were meticulously paid. For those guests that were introduced by his underworld contacts he received an additional, separate payment as his personal fee. He banked the hotel takings on a daily basis, in accordance with the register that was carefully maintained.

  The added benefit to this process was that he was able to dispense with the bulk of the staff. When he had inherited the hotel, there were five kitchen staff, three people working on reception and eight chambermaids, one of whom helped in the laundry. There was also a maintenance man. This enabled the hotel to function on a split shift basis. Of the original seventeen employees, only two now remained in reality. These were people he had known from childhood, the cook Betty and her common law husband, the maintenance man, Fred. However, he had retained a number of other names ‘on the books’, even to the extent of paying their tax and National Insurance. At least three of these ‘names’ and their details had been supplied, for a fee of course, by his Soho chums for certain individuals who had, in fact, disappeared.

  The number of real guests was very few and they were carefully selected and vetted. A room could be made available for private assignations and there was a small but growing number of acquaintances taking full advantage of this facility.

  However, this didn’t mean that the other rooms were not used. There was a steady need for accommodation for a better class of working girl, who would be seeking a rather more luxurious workplace for her clients. Of the hotel’s 20 bedrooms, 10 were currently occupied. The girls were allowed to decorate their rooms as they liked and, if they wished, were able to meet their clients in the lounge of the hotel, where there was a small, but well stocked bar. The rules stipulated that the girls had to be properly dressed at all times and that there would be no unseemly behaviour. For this, they paid a fee direct to Sebastian. These fees were put into the books as ‘Accommodation for Business Meetings’.

  Of the other ten bedrooms, eight could still be used for guests, but more frequently and, for an agreed fee, they were made available for a small but select number of regular customers. With the correct introductions and connections, Seb was building up a list of people that he felt were discreet enough to make use of this service. The last two bedrooms had become bedsits, one for himself and the other for Betty and Fred. They were retained solely and specifically to make up any rooms that might have been used and to deal with any maintenance matters. Betty and Fred had worked with Sebastian’s family for over forty years and were regarded as part of the family. Although unmarried, they had been in a relationship for as many years as they had worked at the Gloucester Palace Hotel.

  Because there was no longer any need for the staff quarters on the fifth floor, Sebastian made these rooms available for storage. For a cash deposit and a monthly fee, the lessee was given a key and, very quickly, there was a wide variety of articles being stored on behalf of an equally wide variety of individuals. There is no doubt that the Police, had they known, would have harboured a particular interest in the Gloucester Palace Hotel.

  Sebastian had enjoyed his lunch with a friend from the Chinese community who was looking to store a quantity of ‘herbs’ for a short while. There were still three rooms available on the top floor and, having been advised that the value of the goods was between £100,000 and £150,000, he had suggested a deposit of £5,000 and a monthly rental of the same, payable in advance. He knew that this would encourage Mr Ying, not only to move his goods quickly, but also to come back at some time in the future. The cash was deposited in the private safe that Seb kept hidden under the floor of his office. Together with the other illegitimate money, it would slowly be fed into the bank’s cash flow in accordance with the number of ‘residents’ staying overnight.

  It is not surprising that the cash flow of the hotel had dramatically improved, making its financial future secure. Sebastian was already building a nest egg of some proportion. But his ship of state had slipped across the wind and was now potentially vulnerable, should the authorities become suspicious in any way.

  And all in the space of 18 months, he thought.

  Chapter 7

  Sunday – Four Days to Go

  Saturday evening was still and cold. While there were two storms building to the west in the Atlantic, the big anti-cyclone over Russia was also expanding, bringing freezing temperatures to northern and Western Europe. Northern France saw the thermometers drop to minus-10 and while the wind stayed calm over the British Isles, the forecast was for icy roads with the possibility of freezing fog in some rural areas. The week’s forecast indicated that the cold weather would be short-lived with a strong southwesterly breeze on Tuesday, building to gale force in southern counties on Wednesday.

  In London, Sunday morning was bright and frosty. The temperature was lower than expected and there was ice over the local ponds. The roads had been salted by the local councils, but drivers were still being surprised by the conditions and there was a rise in minor road traffic accidents.

  Out in the Atlantic, the movement of the southern depression had slowed, but was continuing to deepen. It was now some 400 miles to the south of the Azores. The northern depression had moved southeast from Greenland towards Iceland, increased in intensity and was now just beginning to bring increased rain and snow to the northern Atlantic. Wind speeds were also increasing.

  David woke, after exceedingly pleasant dreams where he had been playing mixed rugby with his Richmond school team and girls
from Jackie’s college. Everyone was naked and there seemed to be a need for a lot of scrums. However pleasurable the dream had been, it faded rapidly as David got out of bed, to go to the bathroom. He could hear his father gently snoring in his parent’s bedroom. He checked the time – quarter past seven and decided to go for a run.

  Quickly dressing in a track suit and trainers, he quietly let himself out of the house and ran towards the local park. His breath came out as vapour just like the steam trains of old. The sun was already bright in the east, making the frost glitter like twinkling Christmas lights. It was a beautiful morning, albeit a little slippery under foot.

  There was no one about, not even any cars on the local roads. David felt that he was the only person left in the world, following some form of international disaster. He ran into Richmond Park via Richmond Gate and decided to do two circuits of the northern half, above Sawyers Hill. When he reached Sheen Lane, where he would normally turn right, he decided to see whether Adam’s Pond was frozen. He carried on down the bridal track, back to Sawyers Hill and so back to Richmond Gate. As he started the second circuit, there were a few more people in the park, a couple walking their dogs and he saw several cars and a couple of buses. London was slowly coming to life, the sun was higher and the frost on the trees was beginning to melt creating a dappled effect on the ground. He ran on, relishing the stiffness leaving his legs following the match. It was good to be alive, fit and young.

  On returning home, his mother was in the kitchen making a cup of tea. She had explained, when David was very young, that no Yorkshire family can start a day properly except with a cup of tea. And, of course, it had to be Yorkshire Tea from Harrogate, although she always maintained that it never tasted as good unless made with Yorkshire Water! London water was a constant disappointment to her.