‘What?’ Surely I couldn’t have heard him right – but in that case why was Gary standing up and undoing his trousers? Brian had only just left the room. He was only across the hall.
‘You’re going to need to wear my uniform.’ He shucked the pleated black trousers down and started pulling them off over his socks. ‘Then you can use my ID card. It’s fine: they have staff on all through the night to do room service. They’re the best shifts; the tips are ginormous.’ He checked his watch. ‘Besides, it won’t be all that long till the breakfast shift are clocking on.’
‘Right.’ I started undoing my own shirt. ‘Good idea. But aren’t they going to spot that I’m not you?’
He snorted and fished in the pocket of the trousers, pulling out a bit of paper laminated in plastic, about the size of a credit card, and holding it out towards me. There was no photo on it. ‘Not so long as you tell them your name’s Gary Parker. There’s over a hundred of us on the books. They don’t check.’
I turned the pass over in my hand. No photo on the back either, just two signatures: Gary’s own, and another validating it from the Deputy Food and Beverage Manager. ‘That should get you everywhere,’ Gary assured me.
‘Brilliant.’ I tore my shirt off and started pulling down my jeans. Gary disappeared into the flat’s small bathroom and came back with a crisp white shirt on a hanger, in a considerably better state than the crumpled one he was wearing over his stars and stripes boxer shorts.
‘That’s a relief,’ he whispered as he handed it over, jerking his head towards the closed bedroom door. ‘I was worried I was going to have to disturb her indoors to get a clean one.’ As I shrugged it on and did it up he left the room again, rummaging in the pocket of one of the coats hanging in the hallway and returning with a handful of dark material which he held out to me.
‘What’s that?’
‘Bow tie. Don’t worry; it’s on elastic. You don’t have to tie it.’
‘Thanks.’ I took it from him and looped it over my head, smoothing the collars of the shirt down over the flimsy elastic strip. My heart was going nineteen to the dozen. All I could think of was getting to the Grand Hotel and confronting Liam. What exactly happened next I had no idea: I found it impossible to consider anything beyond that moment. My only urge, now that I knew he was nearby, was to be moving, actually doing something after all those weeks of inertia.
Gary reached over and tweaked the bow tie. ‘That’s it. You look like a born waiter. Tuck your shirt in.’
It was lucky neither of us had ballooned since our days on the Dilly: we’d been skinny little chickens then, and I still wore thirty-inch-waist trousers, even if there was a little bit more poking over the top of them these days. ‘Your shoes’ll have to do,’ said Gary, glancing down at my Dr Martens. ‘At least they’re black.’
‘Where am I going?’ I asked him impatiently.
‘It’s on the seafront, the other side of the pier. You can’t miss it. But the staff entrance is round the back, off Russell Road, down the side of the multi-storey. You’ll know when you’re close: they’ve got barriers up right round the block. Just show ’em that card and you’ll be fine.’ He was ushering me to the door, picking up on my sense of panicked urgency. ‘Good luck.’ He pecked me on the cheek and pushed me out into the night.
I hadn’t picked up my jacket. It was freezing now, the wind dashing brine into my face. I forced myself to measure my pace, not to give in to the instinct that was telling me to run all the way towards the hotel, towards Liam. Don’t do anything to arouse suspicions, I told myself. Right now, the most important thing is to go unnoticed. There were a few people still on the streets in Kemptown, a lot less dressed up than the ones I had encountered earlier, but despite a couple of hopeful looks in my direction and a request for a light I ignored them all. As I turned the corner onto the seafront the numbing wind redoubled, but I could see the lights of the pier twinkling ahead of me and, beyond that, the great illuminated wedding cake that was the Grand Hotel. I pushed my frigid hands deep into my pockets and, head down, strode on.
It took me about twenty minutes to get there. Remembering what Gary had said, I turned off ahead of the bollards where I could see policemen stopping cars, and made my way through the back streets to where the car park’s concrete bulk loomed. There was the alleyway down the side of it, just as Gary had told me. Only a crash barrier across it, guarded by a single policeman. This must be the right place. Now I just needed my luck to hold, for once.
‘Morning!’ I tried to keep my voice natural and proffered Gary’s ID card as if I did this every day.
‘Cor. They work you lot almost as hard as they work us,’ he said, grinning, and I managed to rattle back some equally nonsensical response as he shifted the barrier aside. He had a ruddy, friendly face; quite handsome. Not so much older than I was. Probably straight though, with a wife and kids back at home. What the hell was I doing thinking about that right now – could I not switch my libido off for five minutes, even in a situation like this? I was here for one reason, and one reason only. Get in, do what I had come here to do, and hopefully – there was absolutely no guarantee of this – make it out of the building again alive.
For a moment, then, I wondered about telling the copper – just blurting out the whole thing. But the thought of what would happen next – the whole hotel evacuated; Mrs Thatcher and her cabinet woken from their beds – and the appalling outcome if it turned out Gary had been wrong and there was no sign of Liam after all, paralysed me. Just think of the trouble I would be in. Just think of the explaining I would have to do. And so my fear of embarrassment overrode my fear of death; how very, very British of me.
And then I was in. As the shabby double doors at the end of the alleyway swung closed behind me, hiding me from the policeman’s view, I let out a great exhalation. The ordinariness of my surroundings felt madly at odds with what was going on in my head: laundry baskets, linoleum, a kitchen store filled with gleaming cooking pots and a battered bare staircase to my left, stretching upwards into darkness.
Less self-conscious now – the only sign of life seemed to be a distant radio – I moved forward and peered through the other doors off the tiled hallway. One led to a vast kitchen, its endless surfaces of stainless steel lit only by the neon blue of a fly-catcher. The sound of the radio seemed to be coming from somewhere beyond that. Another door, which had a sign on it saying DUTY MANAGER, was locked. The third opened on to what was obviously a staff room, its walls crammed with tired-looking armchairs that looked like they might once have been fancy enough to have lived upstairs, noticeboards above them filled with rotas and health and safety notices. There was no one in there.
OK. Where next? I took a few steps into the empty kitchen. Now I could see the far side of the room, where light spilled through a frosted-glass partition. There was someone moving around in there: I guessed it must be some sort of secondary kitchen – god knows how many this place had – taking care of the room service Gary had talked about. It seemed unlikely Liam would be lurking in there, so I was about to tiptoe back out and try the stairs instead, but at that moment, a door on the far wall opened and a bearded man in chef’s whites poked his head through and yelled ‘SERVICE!’
He stopped shouting when he caught sight of me in the semi-darkness. ‘There you are. Get a fuckin’ move on – we’ve got orders piling up in here. No fag breaks unless I say so, all right?’ He spoke with such authority that I had little choice but to hurry across the silent kitchen – it really was enormous, the size of a school hall or gymnasium – to the door he had disappeared back through.
The second kitchen was considerably smaller, brightly lit and humidly warm. There was a deep-fat frier bubbling away and a big gas range on which every burner was roaring. The chef had retreated to a counter in the middle of the room and was making sandwiches, pulling different bits of salad and cheese and chicken out of a set of plastic tubs and slapping them down onto lined-up slices of bread at lightning speed. He didn’t even glance round, just jabbed a finger towards two plates sitting under silver domes on another counter on the far side of the room. ‘Get them up there before the chips go cold.’
‘Yes,’ I said nervously, and added ‘sir.’ I supposed it was as good an excuse for exploring the hotel as any: if no one was going to challenge a man in a waiter’s uniform, they were even less likely to do so when he was carrying plates. It would let me at least get the lie of the land; scope the place out. Work out where Liam might be hiding himself.
I lifted the plates up and looked at the note tucked beneath them: room 323. There was another set of doors on this side of the kitchen, and I was just about to push my way through when I was startled by a yell from behind me.
‘Salvers! Salvers!’ The chef was waving a finger angrily at the shelf below the counter I had just taken the plates off. ‘Fuck’s sake, where are they sending you lot from?’
‘Sorry,’ I muttered, sliding a couple of silver trays from the pile under the counter and moving the domed plates on to them. And with the twin set-ups wobbling slightly at the end of each arm, I bum-pushed my way through the doors, walked through another dingy corridor with trolleys lined up against a wall, through another door and into another world.
The lobby of the hotel was brightly lit, sumptuously-furnished, and enormous. I could feel the deep softness of the carpet even through the soles of my Dr Martens. It had a pattern of intertwining roses in four different colours, their ornate stalks winding in and out of each other for thirty feet or more in either direction, uninterrupted save for a vast polished-wood table at the very centre of the room. On it stood a vase the size of a fat child, filled with a garish arrangement of blooming flowers on a cartoonish scale. The wallpaper was the sort where the pattern actually stands out from the background: it looked to be made of some sort of velvety stuff that I would have liked to run my fingers over if I hadn’t had both hands full and a few other things on my mind. I had emerged from a small door near the bottom of a staircase which swept around all four walls of the cavernous space as it rose, its banisters polished until they gleamed, stretching up and up and up in diminishing squares until they reached what looked like a glass rotunda that must have been a hundred feet above my head. As I moved forward I realised there was a shiny black grand piano with its lid open tucked in beneath the staircase’s first turn: it was presumably only down to the lateness of the hour that there wasn’t someone sat there playing it. This place was incredible. How the other half live.
I was about to start a weary ascent of the stairs – I figured room 323 must be pretty high up in the building – when I realised that there were lifts on the other side of the lobby, beyond a set of extravagant plasterwork pillars. I walked over to them, instinctively trying to make as little noise as I could – it felt a bit like being in a library. That brought me within view of the check-in desk, a huge slab of polished wood with no fewer than three people in uniform – two men and a woman – standing around it. Damn. I’d half-thought I might be able to snatch a look at the guest register. I supposed it was unlikely that Liam would have booked in using his real name, but it would at least tell me which room Mrs Thatcher was staying in. The three of them would take some getting past though. Surely they couldn’t all stay there all night?
I reached the lifts and leaned over to use my elbow to press the call button, then stood back so that I could keep a casual eye on the trio. One was in a braided uniform and pillbox hat that I recognised from films as that of a bellboy, so presumably he came and went. That still left the man and woman in the smart waistcoats. They looked quite relaxed now – they were chatting quietly away with the bellboy, who had his elbows up on the counter – but it was unlikely they would stay so for long if I marched up to the counter and asked to start looking through the hotel paperwork. I was going to have to think of some sort of excuse, preferably by the time I came back down from room 323. But what?
The arrow was moving above the furthest lift, and I moved across to stand in front of it. My arms were getting tired – the trays were pretty heavy – and I realised I should have taken one of the trolleys from outside the kitchen. Oh well. Too late now: the lift had arrived. With a discreet ping, its doors slid open, and I stepped forward just as a couple came stumbling out of it – a red-faced middle-aged man in a tux and a woman in a flouncy ballgown, holding onto his arm, both of them stopping just short of my trays as the man let out a ‘Whoops!’ and the woman cackled. ‘Watch where you’re going, sonny,’ he barked, even though it was his fault just as much as it was mine, and I was aware that all three faces at the front counter had turned to stare in our direction. ‘Bloody idiot. Might have spilled it all over us.’ The woman snorted with laughter again.
‘Sorry,’ I muttered, and dived into the lift before anyone could say anything more.
The room numbers were written on a sign next to the buttons on the lift. Rooms 301 – 332 were on the third floor of seven. My arms were really hurting now, and I was tempted to put the trays down on the lift floor, but I knew if I did the doors would only open and someone even more obnoxious would get in and say something about it being unhygienic, so I kept on holding them.
Ping! Of course that meant we went straight to the third floor, and the doors slid open on an empty landing. There were a pair of squishy pink armchairs plonked outside the lifts. They looked as if no one had sat on them since the day they were put there.
A gold-lettered sign on the wall told me room 323 was down a corridor on the far side of the landing, through a set of wired-glass fire doors, and I hurried on down there, keen to get this particular palaver over with so I could think what was best to do next. The carpet up here was just as sumptuous – a pale blue with gold cross-hatching that must be a nightmare to keep clean. The walls were a salmon pink, with the same raised velvety stripes. The light came from porcelain sconces shaped like shells, which were placed exactly halfway between the doors to the bedrooms: judging by how much empty wallspace that left to either side of them, the rooms must be enormous.
Room 323 was the second-to-last on the right. My arms were agony now. Still thinking it best not to put the occupants’ food on the floor in case they were quick enough opening the door to catch me, I balanced on one leg and reached out a Dr Marten to thump on the door. There were noises from inside. Another woman giggling. ‘Room service!’ I called out softly.
‘Marvellous, marvellous!’ The man who threw open the door looked vaguely familiar. I think I’d seen him on TV before; I knew that slicked-back hair but, out of a suit, I couldn’t immediately place him. He was wearing a fluffy dressing gown and not much underneath it: I caught a glimpse of thick black curls going all the way down his front as he leaned forward to take the trays from me. ‘I hope you’re hungry, my dear!’ he said back into the room, and then in my direction, but still without actually meeting my eye: ‘wait there.’ The woman giggled again. I couldn’t see her from where I was standing, but I guessed from the exaggerated ‘oho’ noise he made as he disappeared round the corner of the en-suite bathroom towards the bed that she had laid out a bit of a spread of her own.
‘Here we go.’ He was back, offering a folded-up ten-pound note and a leery wink. ‘And not a word about, ah, this, eh?’
‘Thank you very much, sir,’ I said, and actually meant it. The door closed.
Right. Time for action. I tucked the tenner into my sock and strode back up the corridor, trying to shake some life back into my arms. What was my next move? How on earth was I going to persuade the staff on the desk to let me look at the guest register? Could I make something up about forgetting which room I was supposed to be delivering food to, and needing to check? No, that wouldn’t work: the little chits you got in the kitchen didn’t have names on – just numbers. How about the direct approach? Hi, I think a friend of mine might be staying here tonight. Is it OK if I just have a look?… Come on. What sort of a night-shift waiter has friends that can afford to stay in places like this?
I had got back to the lifts. But I needed more time to think. I would take the stairs instead. The cavernous atrium looked even more impressive from this level: as I started to descend, I looked out over the banisters and down at the floral display at the exact centre of the lobby, and the shiny lid of the grand piano. The place was huge. Thirty-two rooms on the floor I had just left; assume the same number on the other six; what did that make? I was no good at maths. Three sevens are twenty-one, so thirty sevens must be two hundred and ten, plus another two sevens; fourteen – no, hang on, I was passing the second floor now, and the signs here went all the way up to room 240, so if some floors had forty rooms, that was even more. There could be as many as three hundred doors Liam might be hiding behind. The chances of my finding him were…
I stepped down on to the next landing and he was standing right there.