‘I’ll take the three-thirty slot, for target practice.’ The words came out quickly. Teresa was still apprehensive about the full scenarios, the extraordinary onslaught of physical sensations, the dislocation from reality. On the other hand, she knew what ExEx target ranges were like and they were regularly used by the Bureau. But she asked, ‘What about the other scenarios?’
‘We have nothing free today. There are a couple of hours available tomorrow.’
Teresa considered, not having expected there would be a delay. She had thought it would be something she could just walk into, as she had done at the Academy.
‘Are you always as busy as this?’ she said.
‘Pretty much. ExEx has recently become much more popular than it was even a year ago. The problem’s worse at some of the bigger centres. There’s a four-month waiting list for membership at our centre in Maidstone, for instance. In London and some of the other big cities you have to wait nearly a year. They’re planning to close membership here soon. We’re running at capacity, just about.’
‘I hadn’t realized ExEx had grown as big as this.’
‘It’s big.’ The young woman’s eyes flicked towards the screen. ‘What shall I do? Book you in provisionally for the three-thirty slot?’
‘Yes. Thanks. After that, I’ll book some other time ahead.’
A printer built into the body of the desk emitted a familiar muted screech, and a curl of paper came jerkily into view. Paula Willson ripped it off, and passed it to Teresa for her signature. It was a credit-card charge slip.
‘I’d better let you have our current price list,’ the receptionist said, and gave Teresa a folded brochure printed on glossy paper. ‘We’ll send the membership folder to you in due course.’
‘You assume they’re going to let me in,’ Teresa said.
‘I don’t expect there’ll be a problem,’ said Paula Willson. ‘I think you’re the first FBI agent they’ve had in this centre.’
CHAPTER 17
‘May I speak with Ms Amy Colwyn, please?’ It was a determined American voice: male, making an effort to be polite.
‘This is she,’ Amy said, but then corrected herself. ‘Speaking.’
‘Ms Colwyn, this is to advise you that we will be checking in at your hotel this evening.’
‘Who is that, please?’
‘This is Ken Mitchell, of the GunHo Corporation. We have some reservations with you, made by our head office in Taiwan?’ His voice rose, as if asking a question, but it was unmistakably a statement. ‘Is this the White Dragon Hotel?’
‘Yes, sir. We are expecting you this evening.’
‘OK. We’ve just landed at London Heathrow and I’ve picked up a file copy of the reservation, and I want to advise you that our company always makes it a condition of reservation that in a small hotel like yours we expect to have sole occupation. I see you have not confirmed this in your letter, although you would have been advised of the condition when the reservation was made.’
‘Sole occupation?’ Amy said.
‘Yeah, I know this would have been discussed. We like the place to ourselves.’
‘I confirmed the reservation myself. I don’t remember this coming up. But all our rooms are completely private—’
‘I’m not getting this across to you, am I? No other people in the place. You got that?’
‘Yes, Mr Mitchell.’
‘OK, we’ll be with you directly.’
‘Do you know how to find the hotel, sir? I can arrange to have someone pick you up from the station—’
‘We don’t go anywhere by train,’ said Mr Ken Mitchell from Taiwan, and put down the phone.
A little later, Amy looked into the bar. Nick was sitting there alone, a newspaper propped up on his knee and spreading untidily across the counter.
‘Have you seen Mrs Simons this afternoon?’ she asked him.
‘No.’ He didn’t look up. ‘I think she went out somewhere. Not in her room?’
‘I’ve had those American people from Taiwan on the phone. They say they don’t want anyone else staying here at the same time as them.’
‘That’s bad luck.’ He put down the newspaper, and took a sip from the glass at his side. ‘Not much we can do about it.’
‘I didn’t like the sound of it,’ Amy said. ‘He seemed pretty certain of what he wanted.’
‘Maybe somewhere else could take them in.’
‘Are you serious? Do you realize how much money these people could make us?’
‘Well, maybe Mrs Simons would like to move to another hotel. You said she wasn’t happy about something.’
‘No, I did ask her,’ Amy said. ‘She told me she had no complaints, and wanted to stay.’
‘Then what are you asking me?’
‘It’s your hotel, Nick! These people from Taiwan are determined to have the place to themselves, or sounded like it. What’s the law? Can they insist on us throwing out another guest?’
‘The only person who can do that is me. And I’m not about to.’
His eyes kept straying towards the newspaper, and Amy felt herself getting irritated with him. She left him there, and went to be by herself in the tiny office.
She sat down behind the desk, staring blankly and distractedly at the mess of papers before noticing the bills that had come in during the last week. Nick had tossed them in a heap on the desk. She leafed through them, then looked around for their latest bank statement. She switched on the computer and after it had booted she put up on the screen the spreadsheet file where she kept the list of cheques they had paid. She looked over them, noted a few differences, and within a few minutes was contentedly occupied by the familiar drudgery of checking her own book-keeping.
‘I’m going upstairs for a bath,’ Nick said from the doorway, and tossed in the newspaper. It landed on the desk, dislodging pieces of paper she had only just sorted out.
‘Anyone in the bar?’ she called after him.
‘Not at the moment.’
She glared after him, then surrendered once again to the familiar sensation of being trapped in this hotel. She still hadn’t completely worked out her feelings about Nick, or even about why she had moved back in with him. Running the hotel was displacement activity of a sort, a postponement of decisions about her own life.
A day never passed when she did not think to herself how easy it would be to leave. But inevitably there was another thought that always followed: leave, yes, but in which direction? There was nowhere in Bulverton for her, nowhere in Eastbourne or any of the other resort towns along the coast. She had done all that when she was younger, and she was uncomfortably aware of how long ago that now was. Everything had changed. Jase dead, of course, but all her old friends were married, or had left town. They wouldn’t be a solution, anyway: the discontent was inside herself. If she really wanted to improve her life she would have to make a clean break, head away from Bulverton and Sussex. London, of course, was the obvious place, but that didn’t appeal. Or somewhere abroad? Once again she dreamed of having the guts to take up Gwyneth’s invitation, and give the life in Sydney a try.
But there, or wherever she went, in the end there would be another Nick Surtees.
Nothing appealed. There was only this: a list of cheques recorded in a computer, which she had just about made to agree with the bank statement. They were more broke than she had thought, or maybe remembered. The overdraft was appreciably larger, while takings were continuing to drift down. Only the prospect of guests staying in the hotel gave any hope: the income was erratic, but even when only one person was staying, like Teresa Simons, the place could operate profitably.
Did Nick know this? If he knew, did he care? She remembered his disagreeable expression when he went upstairs, and she listened to the knocking in the plumbing as he ran the water for his bath, as if it were a drumming refrain of why she now regretted her life.
What on earth had brought her back to him? By the time she had realized what she was letting hersel
f in for, she was in for it. She knew you should never blow over old coals; she remembered her mother mystifying her with this saying when she was a child, but it had a meaning after all. It reminded her of how many times her parents had split up after rows, then blown noisily over their own old coals as they tried to put everything right again. But now there was Nick. Their relationship hadn’t worked properly when they were in their teens, and after the recent months with him she knew it probably never would.
Even so, she was trapped by past events. All this would continue.
She heard the outside door to the car park open and close, so she trundled her wheeled office chair back from the desk, and craned her neck so she could see along the corridor. Teresa was heading for the staircase, with a heavy shoulder-bag weighing her down to one side.
‘Mrs Simons! Teresa!’
The American paused, then walked down the corridor towards her.
‘Hi,’ she said, looking tired but cheerful.
‘I was wondering if you planned to be in the hotel for dinner tonight?’
‘I guess I don’t know yet. Yeah, why not? What do you have in mind?’
‘Anything you like.’ Amy pulled down the menu from the top of the filing cabinet and passed it to her. ‘We’ve got most of what’s there in the freezer, but if you would like to decide now, or you want something else, I’ve still got time to buy it fresh for you.’
Teresa scanned the menu, but quickly, obviously with her mind on something else.
‘Maybe I’ll decide later,’ she said in the end and passed the card back. ‘I’m not hungry yet.’
Amy wished she hadn’t brought up the subject. She had really intended to ask Teresa as gently as possible how she would feel about moving to another hotel, but when it came to it she hadn’t been able to find the words. Or even the wish to find the words.
She stared up at Teresa, again putting off the evil moment and wishing Nick was there to do it instead. She wondered what time these Taiwanese with American names and accents were likely to arrive, but also she was wondering how she could find out the law on hotel licensing. Could one guest, or one set of guests, really demand that they be the only people allowed in the building as guests? She supposed film stars, or visiting politicians, might do this sometimes, but she suspected that that would be better or more delicately organized. Anyway film stars would never stay in a place like the White Dragon, so it wouldn’t arise. Maybe money was the way it was done: people who wanted solitude paid for every available room in the hotel and used only the ones they wanted. But what would they do about people who were already staying there?
Teresa said, ‘I’ve got work I need to do upstairs. I’ll be down for a drink a little later.’
‘All right. I think Nick would like to talk to you about something.’
‘Any idea what?’ Teresa said. Amy shook her head, still evading an issue she saw increasingly as Nick’s, not her own. ‘OK, I’ll see you later.’
She lifted and eased the heavy shoulder-bag, then swung round. In a moment, Amy heard her footsteps as she went up the stairs.
Amy took down the bookings ledger, and found the thin file of faxes she had exchanged with Mr A. Li in Taiwan. She carefully checked through what had been written on every scrap of paper she had received. In essence this was that the GunHo Corporation of Taipei required separate rooms with double beds for four adult guests, two men, two women, surnames Kravitz, Mitchell, Wendell and Jensen. All expenses run up by the guests were to be allocated to the corporate account, and at the end of each week one of the four named guests would check and sign the account, after which it should be faxed to Mr Li in the Taipei office. A draft in US dollars or UK pounds, based on this amount, would then be available from the Midland Bank in Bulverton, and would be paid to them on demand. The booking was confirmed initially for two weeks only, but there was an option to extend the arrangement indefinitely. All enquiries would be dealt with by Mr Li.
Amy could not see any mention anywhere of them requiring exclusive use of the hotel.
She glanced at her wristwatch and mentally calculated how long it would take to drive to Bulverton from Heathrow. She reckoned the earliest they could arrive would be within the next hour, but they would certainly be here by the evening. Still she had done nothing.
She went upstairs to find Nick. He was lying on the bed, naked, and smoking a cigarette.
‘It’s the middle of the day, and there’s nothing doing,’ he said. ‘Want to come to bed for a while?’
Her first instinct was to turn round and walk out of the room. She still enjoyed all that with Nick, but these days he seemed to want to spend most afternoons in bed. Instead, she decided to shrug it off.
‘There’s something I need to know,’ she said. ‘It’s pretty urgent. Is that true what you said? That you’re the only one who can make a guest leave the hotel?’
‘What’s bothering you, Amy?’
‘I was trying to tell you earlier.’
‘Don’t worry about it.’
She sat down on the edge of the bed, and in spite of herself she laid a hand on his chest. His skin felt clean and smooth and warm.
‘I don’t want us to lose the money,’ she said. ‘This booking could solve a lot of financial problems for us. Well, for you, but that means me too.’
‘Leave it to me. I’ve brought in an extra double bed for them, and that’ll keep them happy. When are they arriving?’
‘Any minute now. They called from Heathrow an hour or two ago, and said they were going to drive down.’
‘It always takes longer than people think,’ Nick said, rolling towards her. ‘Come on, get your clothes off.’
‘No, I want to stay downstairs in case they arrive.’
He said no more but began pulling determinedly at the buttons down the front of her dress. In his haste he fumbled them, so she pulled away from him and slipped the dress off. She lay down next to him, enjoying the sensation, as always, of him slipping his hands beneath her undies and sliding them down her skin.
Later, they were still lying against each other when they heard the sound of a heavy-engined vehicle pulling into the car park beneath their window. They could hear the gears clanging in and out, as the driver eased to and fro in the confined space.
‘That’s them!’ Amy said. ‘I know it’ll be the Americans.’ She rolled away from Nick and he turned over on to his side in simulated disgust; in fact, Amy knew only too well that once they finished lovemaking during the afternoons he was usually quick to move away from her and either take a short nap or get back to reading his newspaper.
She hurried naked from the bed. Crouching down by the window she peeked into the yard and saw a long truck, painted an unobtrusive dark green, being manoeuvred into the parking bay next to Teresa Simons’ rented car. It had what appeared to be a collapsible satellite dish folded down into a special cavity built into the roof. The number 14 was next to this, painted in a lighter shade of green. Amy wondered briefly why anyone should want to paint an identifying number on the roof of a van, where only a few people would ever be able to see it.
A young woman with short, pale-brown hair climbed down from the passenger door, and went to the back of the van to help guide the driver into the parking bay. She glanced up at Amy’s window, and for a moment their eyes met.
Even though she knew only her head could be seen from the low angle from the yard, Amy backed away and rushed over to retrieve her clothes from the floor beside the bed.
‘They’re here!’ Amy said to Nick. She wrapped her bra round her with the cups at the back, hooked it together beneath her breasts, then twisted it round and pulled the straps into place. She stepped into her pants, and looked around for her dress. Nick had rolled on to his side and was either reading, or pretending to read, yesterday’s copy of the newspaper. ‘It’s all right, Nick,’ she said. ‘I can manage downstairs on my own.’
‘I knew you would.’
But he grinned affably at her, threw
the newspaper on the floor by the side of the bed, and after a quick and furtive glance into the car park began to put on his clothes. She was finished before him, but he grabbed her and gave her a quick kiss.
‘I’ll cook dinner tonight, if you like,’ he said. ‘And do the bar.’
‘You don’t have to.’
‘Maybe I do. It’s been long enough.’
‘Has something happened to you? Good news or something?’
‘No…but I’ll cook the meals tonight anyway. I feel like it.’
She returned his kiss, then pushed him away with both hands flat against his chest.
‘These people will want to check in,’ she said.
Amy was downstairs in the reception area before any of the Americans appeared, and had time to compose herself, making it look as if she had been busy with paperwork for some time. A few seconds later the door from the car park opened and Amy, without looking up, was aware of two figures entering.
‘Good afternoon, ma’am,’ said a polite American voice.
She stood up and turned to the counter. It was a man in his middle thirties, and the young woman she had seen from the upstairs window.
‘Good afternoon,’ she said.
‘We’d like to register, if we may?’ The rising inflection again.
Amy pushed forward the pad of registration cards.
‘If you would fill out four of those, please,’ she said. ‘And may I see your passports?’
‘Of course.’
The formalities went ahead without a hitch. The remaining two people came in behind, and took their turn at filling out the cards.
‘Your reservation was for four single rooms, each with a double bed?’
‘Right.’
‘OK, but we don’t have many rooms in the hotel, and so we have had to split you up. There are two rooms next to each other on the first floor, and two more on the floor above. That’s what you call the second and third floor, I think. Anyway, the rooms are separated only by a staircase.’
The Extremes Page 14
