by Holly Seddon
I should not have let doubt creep in. If she’s going where I think she’s going, she’s one of them. Another link in the chain. They are all connected, these people. Clustered together like a nasty bunch of boils I’ve been tasked with lancing.
I let a Land Rover Defender pull out in front of me, a matted and happy sheepdog hanging its head out of the passenger window. I go slower still.
Let her get ahead. Let her worm her way to the heart of the hotel where she won’t hear my tyres on the gravel or my key in the lock. Let her feel safe.
Marianne
Her 3G cuts out somewhere around Godstone. The village itself is small and pretty. A high street strung with pretty cottages and a cricket green wrapped around a shiny duck pond. The bright grass has been grooved and churned by wholesome fun and welly boots.
She drives out of the village again, continuing out along a road dotted with lonely cottages and farms, until she dutifully follows the sat-nav onto a lane so hidden that she almost drives straight past the turning. Her last bar of phone reception sputters to nothing as Marianne picks her way under a canopy of dark, twisted trees loaded with autumn leaves. The thick hedges on either side grow increasingly untamed, thorns bulging out and scratching at the windscreen as she scrapes around the bends.
The lane thins even more, the next turn so sharp the hedge rears up like a bramble barricade in front of her. Is this really the best way? Perhaps this is the shortest route as the crow flies but it’s certainly not an easy drive. Fucking sat-navs. She imagines a bigger car or delivery truck trying to navigate down here and feels a clench of claustrophobia in her chest. Every hundred metres or so, a pull-in has been scraped out on either side to allow cars to pass each other, but she sees no one. No other guests leaving or arriving to check in.
Marianne licks her lips. They’re dry and rough. She’s smoked too much, and has been breathing heavily through her mouth in concentration. Hasn’t drunk any water in … all day. Maybe she can get some lunch and a drink at the hotel, get a feel for the place and decide whether asking to see the manager is such a good idea after all. There’s comfort and safety in a public place, though, and all she need do is ask David Ross how he knew Greg. She’s mentally prepared a couple of opening gambits.
‘I found your name in my late husband’s paperwork …’
‘I think you knew my husband, Greg Darrow?’
‘My husband had made a list of people he owed money to, and you were on it.’
None of them feel right under closer examination. Of course, there is a chance that David Ross himself is dangerous, but as he’s on a list with a bunch of dead people, it seems unlikely he’s the one trying to hurt her. And really, what does she have to lose?
She rattles over a cattle grid and then follows the curve of the road, a sign appearing on the left with gold lettering on a duck-egg blue background.
The Bluebell Hotel
100 metres
Restaurant. Spa. Carpark.
It has been painted over with a rough white cross but is still legible. Local vandals, presumably. A far cry from the jubilant colours of Hackney graffiti.
Marianne rolls her stiff shoulders. At least she’s going in the right direction. She taps her phone screen awake but there’s still no reception. Fuck the sticks, give her street lights and a reliable data network any day. And broken gas flues and cycling fatalities. She focuses on the present. Just a few more metres to go, surely.
She pulls around a hedge and sees it, a solid building peeking out over the fields.
Marianne follows another blue sign to the carpark but there isn’t a single car here. Just her tiny black Fiat 500, surrounded by gravel and the sporadic stubble of weeds. Marianne tucks into the furthest corner and switches off the engine. She hears the rumble of a car in the distance but nothing appears. In the silence, if she concentrates, she can hear the distant buzz of the A25, usurped by its brother motorway but still busy enough with local traffic.
There is probably a staff carpark around the back but it’s still strange. It’s lunchtime now, surely there are restaurant diners and people checking in? She thinks back to her birthday, the froufrou hotel in the Downs where Noah took her. At this time of day, it was bustling with honeyed blondes and salt-and-pepper sugar daddies mooching between the spa and the rooms in dressing gowns.
The hotel looks positively closed.
Sam
I pull into the same derelict barn I used last time and kill the engine. I pull on wellingtons, tug on a waxed jacket and grab my hiking sticks. They and the boots are spotless and I scuff them a little before I set off, but it won’t take long for them to blend in with the dull greens and browns, the thick claggy mud of the area.
I climb over a gate and it rattles in protest. Ahead, poking over the brow of this hilled field, I can see the roof of the hotel. A few more slates missing since last time, the recent storm loosening them like baby teeth.
I check my phone: no reception. Just in case, I try switching the cards. My personal SIM has a tiny bar of reception. I switch off location services, data and Wi-Fi radios, though. I can’t be placed here.
I start off, marching alongside the tall hedges, unseen from the road. Just me and her for miles around. As if Marianne Heywood and I have the only hearts beating in the whole world.
Marianne
The hotel is prettier and bigger than it looked from the road. It’s a red-brick Edwardian building in the shape of an old ink pot with ivy laced along its seams. It sits solid and reassuring on the top of a slope, shuttered windows overlooking acres of nothing. There’s something familiar about it, but she can’t think why.
Marianne stays in the car and watches through the window, waiting for signs of life but there’s no one here. Perhaps they’re doing renovations. Work vans could be parked around the back. In which case, maybe David Ross is here to oversee the work. Hopefully, or she’s wasted a lot of time and petrol.
She checks her phone; still no coverage and not much battery, but Marianne slips it into her bag anyway, then climbs out of the car. Her footsteps on gravel crunch through the silence.
The carpark is at the side of the building, so she turns the corner to find the main entrance. The front of the hotel is rendered and painted the same duck-egg blue as the signs that guided her here.
The air has a chill to it, the breeze rolling up the hill and buffeting the hotel despite the mild day. She’s glad of Noah’s hoodie but wishes she’d worn a jacket, something smarter just in case she does get to meet with the management.
She climbs the five stone steps to the front door and reaches for the big brass handle. It’s freezing cold and jammed solid.
God fucking dammit.
She shivers and wraps Noah’s hoodie more tightly around her. She probably should have left it at his but it feels like a talisman, a little comfort. She’s been smoking in it; she hopes he won’t mind. Perhaps when she gets back to his she could do a machine wash, contribute for her lodgings last night. The idea of that seems alien compared to her current situation.
Marianne presses her face to the cold glass set into the thick wooden door. Inside, the hallway is dimly lit from the lacklustre sunshine and she can make out an unmanned reception desk and an ornate coat rack left naked. No staff, no workmen. No David Ross.
What now?
Out of habit, she reaches into her bag and checks her useless phone again, no reception. Then she looks across at the fields for answers that don’t come. Greg came here every month at least, but even if he could have somehow afforded it, he wasn’t staying the night. He’d not stayed away from home in years, and only then when he was visiting family in Scotland and she’d wriggled out of going.
Marianne leans against the door and tries to imagine how Greg could have got here. He didn’t drive, he surely couldn’t ride his bike all this way and the nearest train station is in Godstone, some miles away. Someone must have picked him up. Perhaps David Ross himself or a hotel car service.
M
arianne peers into the darkness again. If Greg was a paying customer of some kind, perhaps there is a record of these visits, a visitors’ book maybe. Somewhere inside.
*
Marianne walks the perimeter of the building, peering through the windows. It certainly looks like a once-functioning hotel; huge sofas face a dead fireplace and a stack of local leaflets sit on a bureau. One of the tables in the small dining room is even made up for lunch. Silverware and fanned napkins, the rest of the chairs leaning forward onto tables like they’re thinking, head in hands. It’s as if the world froze between meals one day.
She reaches the back of the building. No work vans, no staff carpark. Just the stink from the big wheelie bin. A smell so thick it’s almost chewy, clogging in her throat and nose. When was this last emptied? Oil tubs and old catering jars are stacked up along the wall like a house of cards, and to the side sits a surprising shock of yellow: a sharps box for needles. The back of the building has none of the frills of the front. A single plain white fire door sits dirty and scuffed in the centre of the wall. Two windows are framed with peeling paint. One has vanity glass and she can just make out the outline of some stacked toilet rolls. The other window is smeared in grease and dull with old smoke. The kitchen. She tries the door but it’s locked. Just around the corner of the wall, hidden from the other side of the hotel by a small brick extension and an old oak tree, is a metal staircase. She follows it up with her eyes to another fire door, as white and scruffy as the one by the kitchen.
There are no other entrances or exits. She’s as alone as she feels. So Marianne steps up – one, two, three – the noise of the metal sharp in the silence, until she’s at the top.
She reaches for the handle. This door opens.
Sam
I watch the fire door swing closed after her. I didn’t check it when I left last time and I should have, but my error is also my gain. I give her a little time to look around. It will have changed since the last time she came, whenever that was. I don’t know the schedule these people kept but this wasn’t your everyday circle, this was an elite service from what I could tell. Something to savour. David Ross almost said as much as I put him in position, held him until I could stand it no more. ‘It wasn’t that often,’ he’d pleaded. ‘It was a needs-must situation.’
I have a needs-must situation of my own right now.
I make my way around to the front of the hotel and pull out the big metal key.
Marianne
After the hard metal of the staircase, the thick carpet under her feet feels almost alive. The old floorboards whimper with every step. Now she’s in, Marianne can tell from the tides of dust and uncompromising cold that the Bluebell has been closed for some time.
The smell is something like the inside of an old Hoover bag mixed with the contents of one of those wheelie bins. Sour, dusty and contaminated. She steps lightly down the hallway, slowly, guiltily. Is it trespassing if a door is open?
Somewhere in the distance, she can hear something buzzing. A generator perhaps, or an air-conditioning unit. It’s not doing great work if so; the air is cold but dank.
Any customer records would likely be in an office, so Marianne intends to make her way downstairs, but it’s worth looking around for any other hints. She may not get another chance.
She tries the first bedroom – number 18 – and it opens easily. No electric card entry here; there are solid brass keyholes to match the brass numbers on the doors. The room is decorated tastefully, a big sleigh bed stripped down to its striped mattress, flecked with the stains of other people’s romantic breaks. A chest of drawers has a tray on it, offering a mini kettle, a bowl of used tea bags and some torn sugar sachets. Two cups sit stained brown and off their saucers.
Marianne backs out and continues to the next room where the scene is almost identical but for a wrought-iron bed. There’s an abandoned Tupperware lunchbox, wet with mould. In the bathroom, the basin is ringed with soap scum. Old urine coats the toilet.
Somewhere between check-out time and lunch, the plug was pulled here. Foreclosure? An evacuation from a small fire? A bomb threat? According to his diary, Greg was here two days before he died – was he caught up in the panic?
The last room in the corridor has no number. She assumes it’s a supply cupboard and when she tries to open it up, it’s locked. Marianne looks behind her. It feels colder inside the building than out, the air unmoved by anyone but her. She peers around the corner to check the next corridor – it’s identical but with a staircase cascading from the middle of it.
She crouches down in front of the locked door, feeling about as vulnerable as she’s ever felt, and puts her eye cautiously to the keyhole.
At first, the room looks the same as the others, just with twin beds. Wrought iron, bare mattresses. But on the nearest one she can see the bloom of a red stain amongst the fabric stripes and as she stares harder, some kind of strap on each side of the bedstead. She pulls back in shock. Was someone chained up here?
*
She rushes around the corner to the large wooden staircase. A grand thing, almost grotesque in this small hotel.
Marianne takes each carpeted step carefully, treading quietly. If there are ghosts here, they’re not going to be happy ones and she doesn’t want to disturb anything. She arrives in the foyer that she’d seen from outside. An office door sits behind the abandoned reception desk and she is about to step into it when she hears a sound outside. Footsteps on gravel.
Marianne’s brain hums with panic. She is trespassing, apparently wanted by some unknown killer but still in pursuit of vital answers that may be here. Seconds tick past, filled with feverish internal debate. Should she announce herself or hide? Fight or flight?
It could be David Ross; he was the manager here, after all. And he’d have a key to every room. Even the one she just saw. Especially the one she just saw. No, good god, of course she won’t announce herself. The questions will have to wait.
She rushes further into the belly of the hotel, through to the dining room she spotted from outside. Her spine tingles with an ancient feeling. She feels like prey.
Close up, the dining room is even more eerie. As if a siren rang out and everyone fled. It reminds her of Pompeii, where disaster struck so fast it immortalised the scene in volcanic rock. A snapshot of mass death. Here it’s a snapshot of exodus. On one table, a woman’s purse sits. It is dusty and cold to the touch, not handled by a human hand in months. It’s a small embroidered coin purse, almost childlike. The stitching spells out ‘Lina’. Marianne picks it up as she passes, and puts it in her pocket. She doesn’t know why – some emblem of another life perhaps. A good-luck charm left by someone who got out of here.
Behind her, she hears the metallic click of a chunky key twisting in a lock. Followed by the whoosh of a heavy door being opened.
Marianne considers hiding under one of the tables, pushing herself up to the legs and hoping the tablecloth covers her. But it’s too risky, too obvious. She presses on, heart hammering. The footsteps follow at a calm, steady pace. While Marianne is in the grip of fight or flight, the new arrival is in no rush. They stroll through the foyer, seemingly oblivious. It must be David Ross. Who else could it be?
A swing door with a porthole window sits at the end of the dining room and Marianne pushes it as carefully as she can, arriving in the dark kitchen and steadying the door to stop its movements giving her away. It’s freezing cold in here, the greasy film on the windows holding back the sun and the dead strip-lights on the ceiling coated in bugs and cobwebs. The idea that food was ever prepared here turns her stomach while she casts around madly for somewhere to hide.
A corkscrew lies on the stainless steel worktop and Marianne picks it up slowly, silently. As defensive weapons go, it must be bottom of the charts, but it’s better than nothing.
There is a stack of plates on the side next to a dry, dirty sink filled with bowls. The whole room hums with stink. A vague buzz of electricity rumbles from the power
points and cables, while standby lights dot the equipment. An industrial dishwasher sits open, its door like a tongue lolling from a metal mouth. If it weren’t for the racks inside, and the noise that removing them would generate, she would hide inside it. A metal tomb.
A noise rings out from the dining room, a jingle of cutlery perhaps, the scrape of a chair. A sudden realisation makes her pant with panic. Her car! David Ross, or whoever has let themselves into this hotel in the middle of fucking nowhere, knows very well that someone is here. Another chair leg scrapes on the floor. Marianne swallows. Far from oblivious, it sounds like they’re looking for her.
The footsteps grow closer.
In the corner, a huge refrigerator shakes from the power snaking into it. How long could a person hide in there safely? It’s more of a cool room, about six foot by six foot, but it won’t have a fresh oxygen supply.
Another chair scrape, this one just the other side of the porthole door. Praying, panting, sweating like she’s diseased, Marianne teases the fridge door open. It’s huge and even without the light on, she can make out some food abandoned inside: a block of catering cheese, soured milk, vacuum-sealed chunks of slimy grey meat. She gags at the smell, pleads with her throat to keep everything in and steps inside. As she pulls the door almost closed, Marianne hopes to hell there isn’t an alarm set to go off if the door is left ajar too long. She squats down next to a box of vegetables that have turned to goo and tries to calm her breathing. In the back of the small cold room, something large and bulky is propped against the back corner, wedged in place by the shelves from each side. It’s too dark at first to realise what she sees, the size and shape of it. Its clothes. Its shoes. Its face.
The scream is out of her mouth before she even realises it is forming.
The sour smell rushes into her open mouth and she’s sick, vomiting through her fingers while she tries to stop it and stem the sound of terror rushing from the pit of her belly.
