Francine Edwards was not a woman you said no to. She had been invited that morning by Serg to meet him at his hotel at nine o’clock to have dinner that evening. It was nine-thirty and there’d been no sign of him at the bar. He wasn’t answering his mobile either. Now she wanted to check his room to make sure he was all right.
She was currently speaking to the manager, equally determined to prevent her.
‘I know you’ve called his room, that’s not the issue here. I want to check his room personally.’ Edwards was used to getting her own way and she could feel her temper beginning to rise.
The manager, Irek Czerwinski, was sensing jealousy issues. He’d had problems like this before. Automatically his eyes dropped to her left hand. No wedding band, probably irate girlfriend then. Twice, when he’d been at the Blenheim Hotel in Oxford, he’d had to deal with this kind of thing, guests subsequently found in flagrante in rooms by partners. He had been left with the noisy, disruptive fallout.
‘I’m sorry, madam, but—’
Francine Edwards produced her trump card. She took her Home Office ID out of her bag. She let Irek study it in detail, let the implications sink in of who he was talking to.
‘You let me in there right now or tomorrow I’m going to make sure that an immigration audit team is in here checking every member of staff who works here, right down to cleaners and the guy who sweeps the car park, and if any non-EU employee here does not have a valid work permit I’m going to come down on you like a ton of bricks.’ She looked closely at his badge. ‘Fines, deportations, financial audits, employee audits, the works, and I’ll also make sure, Mr Czerwinski, your boss and his boss know whose obstructive attitude sparked the whole sorry mess. Have I made myself clear?’
Irek knew when he was beaten. Five minutes later he was opening Serg’s bedroom door. As Francine Edwards switched the light on and her eyes widened with shock, the manager thought to himself, Happy now?
Five minutes after that, a now fully dressed Serg was heading down the M25 London ring road towards the M40 motorway and Oxford.